Voyager (part two)

The story so far.

The Doctor sends Frobisher back to the TARDIS and orders him to stay there while he ascends the lighthouse and looks through the keyhole of a locked door.

He sees the old manny studying the charts he took from the ship. The Doctor picks the lock and sneaks in, and then he picks up the manny's gun and tries to capture him.

The old manny has an idiosyncratic turn of phrase.

"So! You win again, Professor Moriarty! Curse you for the fiend you are!
Go on, then... shoot! Scatter these old bones far and wide! Parbleu! I've had a good innings... now do your worst... Send a poor, frail old man back to the pavilion..."

You can tell Eric Saward isn't writing this, because the Doctor doesn't shoot him. Instead, his bluff called, he lowers the gun. The old manny then produces a pistol of his own.

"Mon dieu! The world is full of pacifists these days!
As for me... you may find I am made of sterner stuff!"

And he shoots the Doctor!

...Except the pistol just fires a dart that sticks to the Doctor's forehead with a "Plop!" The old manny then runs out of the door and locks the Doctor in. The Doctor decides to shoot the lock with the gun he took earlier,  but it also turns out to be a toy gun and goes "BANG" (with a flag). The Doctor thinks

"Oh, I see..."

He gets the door open and then decides to nearly fall off the lighthouse, although this makes a bit more sense than when a similar situation occurs at the end of part one of Dragonfire. The old manny appears again and he tries to make the Doctor fall off until the Doctor says

"You can't do this to me! I'm a Time Lord!!"

The Doctor did like gratuitously throwing around that he's a Time Lord during this era, so this seems in character for him. Here it causes the old manny to change his approach, and for the story to start taking an even stranger turn. He clicks his fingers (show off, mew!) and says

"You are in mortal peril, Time Lord. Voyager has seen you and he wants your soul...
You've met him, haven't you?"

The Doctor tells him of his dream and finds that he is not dangling over the edge of the lighthouse any more, but is instead back in the room. The old manny says "You have arrived at the ends of the earth..." and the Doctor, in order to set up the next line, says

"That's illogical. The world has no end..."

"Logic tells us the world is round.
But logic is a new toy."

I've heard worse catchphrases, mew. The Doctor demands to know who the old manny is, so he tells him.

"I? I am Astrolabus, the star taker... I am the sandman, the jester, the conjurer and the clown. I am the fool... I am...
El Diablo! Zorro! Robin Hood! I am a willow wand in the diviner's hand...
I am the last man, the flame-keeper, the light at the edge of the world. I am Santa Claus. I have charted the secret places of the earth. I have journeyed to the stars...
I am the fairy at the bottom of your garden.
I am the spring in the well... the story-teller, the star-spanner. I am the goblin, the imp and the ace of wands. I am magic... I am myth...
I am legend..."

Most of these sound like the sort of grandiose titles given to the Doctor himself in the new TV series! I think the first of these actually answered the question though.

Astrolabus tells the Doctor his backstory, although it is probably meant to be taken allegorically. He built the lighthouse and lit it using "fire from the sun and the stars" until "skyships came, bearing travellers from beyond the stars" who stole his charts and escaped "into the abyss of time and tide..."

The artwork for this section is particularly impressive, and reminds me at times of the style of Bryan Talbot as used in The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Astrolabus finishes his tale but the Doctor doesn't believe him because he has remembered who Astrolabus is really.

He accuses Astrolabus of being "a plunderer, a pirate, and a thief!" and it would seem he is another renegade Time Lord and the lighthouse is his TARDIS.

When it is clear the Doctor is not going to team up with him, Astrolabus runs away and the Doctor chases him down the steps and through

A door into the dark.

But there are more illusions that are working for Astrolabus and the Doctor ends up in the water outside the lighthouse. Oh noes he will get wet! Frobisher sees the Doctor on the TARDIS scanner.

Lol! After wrestling with his conscience, Frobisher decides to disobey the Doctor and runs out to try to rescue him.

Voyager's ship materialises upon the sea, and Astrolabus's ship takes off from under and inside the lighthouse. The Doctor finds himself drawn back onto the ship like in his dream at the beginning of the story, and again it is sailing towards the giant waterfall.

Voyager says

"Gaze upon the void, Time-Lord... the universe ends here!"
"It cannot end here! The universe has no end!"

replies the Doctor, once again acting as the feed line for

"Logic tells you the world is round.
But logic is a new toy."

It has to be significant that Voyager uses almost exactly the same words as Astrolabus used earlier. Are they connected somehow - maybe Voyager is to Astrolabus as the Master is to the Doctor... or the Valeyard? (Except the Valeyard didn't exist yet when Voyager was written.) Just like in the dream the ship goes over the edge, and then the Doctor finds himself on a rock having been rescued by Frobisher.

The Doctor sees a giant Voyager, who demands the Doctor returns

"The charts stolen from me by the Time-Lords!"

and he isn't prepared to accept the Doctor's perfectly reasonable response that it was Astrolabus who took them, not him. Voyager continues to make non-specific threats to the Doctor as the TARDIS dematerialises.

"And remember...
There is no escape..."

That is the end of the story for now, although it is clear that we have not heard the last of Astrolabus and Voyager.

This story uses the comic format to best effect, and it would have been impossible to realise on the TV show of the time. The plot is very melodramatic (as the number of exclamation marks used indicates!) but is acting as a vehicle to allow the artwork to really impress - everything from the character design of Voyager, to the lighthouse setting, to the epic sweep of the Astrolabus backstory flashbacks.

As the first story to feature penguin Frobisher, he takes a back seat to the Doctor-Astrolabus confrontation for much of it, but still gets some good moments of comic relief and he is already developing into a great Companion character.