A New Life

Another adventure with the Doctor and Sarah. They go off in the TARDIS leaving the Brigadier and Harry behind. The Doctor leaves the Brigadier a note.

"The Brigadier picked it up gingerly, as though half expecting it to detonate in his hand. "Gone on holiday," he read. "Gone on holiday Lieutenant Sullivan! Do you know anything about this?" He turned to Harry, his face red with anger.
Harry gulped. "Er no, no. Nothing at all, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. I've only just returned from a spot of leave myself.""

There is a picture of the Brigadier to go with this scene, but he isn't in the rest of this story.

The Doctor and Sarah go to a planet that the Doctor had visited before. Sarah asks him how long ago that was.

""Oh, only one hundred and two years ago, my dear," Doctor Who brushed the question aside. Time for him held no mystery; one hundred and two years on earth could feel like one hundred and two minutes to other beings on another planet."

They go looking for an old friend of the Doctor's. His house is "beautiful, ultra-modern by earth standards and, according to Doctor Who, it wasn't any different than it had been on his last visit."
Sarah is impressed by a house that hasn't changed in over 100 years. The Doctor tells her:
""The Lexopterans are an intelligent people and more important, for people with such a high standard of technological knowledge, they are peace-loving too, totally against any sort of violence.""

I thought that the Doctor was saying that Lexopterans are "more important" but when I read it again I realised it is just the way the sentence is broken up with commas. He's really saying it is "more important" that they are "peace-loving" than that they are "intelligent." I definitely didn't ask Professor Cat for help understanding that grammar by the way. Well, maybe a bit.

Anyway, they have found the Doctor's friend's house but they can't find the Doctor's friend, or any other mannys, even after they search for an hour.

"The Doctor rubbed his chin thoughtfully."

This sentence, along with calling Sarah "my dear" earlier, is making the Doctor sound more like Jon Pertwee's Doctor than Tom Baker's Doctor. But at this point there is a picture to let us know which Doctor is in this story.

Hang on, this looks familiar to me.

The Brigadier in the picture at the start of the story and the Doctor in the picture just before both look like they do in this picture.

Sarah thinks they are being watched. The Doctor takes her to a large building to search for traps and secret doors.

"He flicked a switch under the seat and almost immediately a large panel at the opposite end of the room slid open to reveal... nothing!"

The Doctor is sad at finding nothing.

"Miranon, that's my friend, said it has been built in case of attack. As you could see before I opened it, it is completely invisible and, according to Miranon, proof against explosions, that sort of thing..."

But the secret panel revealing "nothing" is a fake-out, because they have also revealed some stairs, which Sarah goes down and finds a dead body. The Doctor sees it is Miranon's body, "slumped over the computer panel." But then they are stuck about what to do next and decide to go back to the TARDIS to think about it.

Sarah starts talking about the plants, and the Doctor suddenly realises that they were not on the planet during his last visit, so they may be important. Maybe they are the Verdants, doing the opposite of what they did in Mission for Duh?

They search for clues for another hour, before the Doctor goes back to investigate the "computer panel" where Miranon died. While he does this, Sarah looks at some books.

"Suddenly, her eye fell on a book which by its title promised to show the many species of planet life to be found on Lexoptera. Eagerly, she reached up to the shelf and took the book down. As she did so, something fluttered out from between its pages."

It must be a clue; we're nearly at the end of the story.

""What do you make of this, Doctor?" she asked. "It's complete Double Dutch to me. Looks like some sort of equation, but a sort of Biological equation. I've never seen anything like it before....""

The "equation" is the solution to the mystery. The Doctor programmes it into the computer and it makes all the mannys appear again.

"Suddenly, where there'd been only emptiness and silence, there was people... people laughing and talking, and walking and looking straight at them. One or two ran forward to shake the Doctor's hand, obviously remembering him from his previous visit."

To illustrate this there is a picture of two mannys shaking hands in front of a ladder.

"Sarah still looked more than a little puzzled.

Finally the Doctor took pity on her. "Let me explain, my dear."

The Doctor is a terrible troll sometimes. I couldn't find a picture of the Doctor making a troll face, so here is a picture of Doctor Who making a troll face:

The Doctor explains to Sarah that the Lexopterans were all turned into plants by the computer to hide from an attack, except for Miranon who had to programme it to change them back when the attack was over. He was hidden but the attackers obviously found him and killed him, so nobody was able to change the rest of the mannys back until the Doctor came.

This is quite a clever solution to the mystery. I like this story on the whole, though the last picture was very random.