His Watch Won't End Thanks to Time Travel

The season of Game of Thrones might be over but I was treated to an extra dose of Owen Teale--Ser Alliser Thorne of the Night's Watch--courtesy of the 2007 Doctor Who audio play The Mind's Eye. A very short story accompanied by another short called Mission of the Viyrans, both are written by Colin Brake and both use some very Star Trekish concepts. Or stories that I first encountered on Star Trek, who knows if Star Trek found them somewhere else. Mission of the Viyrans is the superior story of the two but neither or bad.

The Minds Eye finds the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and his companions Peri (Nicola Bryant) and Erimem (Caroline Morris) falling prey to plants on a tropical world that give them each detailed hallucinatory dreams, alternate versions of their lives. The Doctor recovers quickly to find a survey team led by Hayton (Teale) who are trying to turn some kind of profit from the insidious plants. Peri dreams she's the girlfriend of a divorced single dad and Erimem dreams she's the queen of a new version of Cairo on an alien world. The story has the pretty standard stuff about how they'll die in real life if they die in the dream and the Doctor has to go into their dreams to somehow save them. But it's entertaining enough.

Mission of the Viyrans turns out to have a basic premise from one particular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation--this isn't revealed until the end of the audio play so I won't spoil it for you. Featuring only the Fifth Doctor and Peri--Erimem is absent for some reason--it's mostly told from Peri's perspective as she has increasingly disturbing experiences where the people she's talking to turn into copies of herself. That's the cool part of the story. As for what it took from Star Trek, I still feel like Doctor Who has license to take as much as it likes from Star Trek from the debt owed by the Borg being basically wholesale copies of the Cybermen.

Twitter Sonnet #887

A solemn chalk dissolves in carbon assault.
The edge attained in points reverts to crumbs.
In paces slow and wet the boots default.
In muddy strips of plaster walls are sums.
A green's more vivid for its lack of hue.
A man was old at six, his hair an axe.
Tipped o'er pits of coal and caps he grew.
The gloves in boxer's church now stripe their backs.
In threes, the eyes recurse beneath the dome.
A launch in green expensive dough begins.
The carbs can hope to find in us a home.
But broken up the molecule descends.
In shouldered fur the vapour thought emerged.
A set of porc'lain joints unseen converged.