Circular Time

Big Finish Productions audio play
Circular Time
Series	Doctor Who
Release number	91
Featuring	Fifth Doctor Nyssa
Writer	Paul Cornell & Mike Maddox
Director	John Ainsworth
Producer(s)	N/A
Executive producer(s)	N/A
Set between	"Spring", "Summer" and "Autumn": The Game and Renaissance of the Daleks "Winter": during The Caves of Androzani
Length	2 hr
Release date	January 2007

Circular Time is a British audio drama based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It is produced by Big Finish Productions.

Circular Time

The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa experience four different adventures across time and space as the seasons change.

• The Doctor — Peter Davison
• Nyssa — Sarah Sutton

Spring

Spring sees them become embroiled in Time Lord politics on an alien world ruled by intelligent but flightless birds, beings with an especially severe way of meting out justice.

• Zero — Hugh Fraser
• Hoodeye — Jamie Sandford
• Redklaw — Toby Longworth
• Carrion — Lois Baxter
• Snowfire — Teresa Gallagher

Summer

Summer has them avoiding the wrath of Sir Isaac Newton. The Doctor and Nyssa are arrested for possessing counterfeit coins; they are, in fact, genuine coins from Earth's future. One of them, an American Eisenhower silver dollar, depicts an eagle soaring over the lunar surface. Other coins hint at a future united Europe.

• Sir Isaac Newton — David Warner
• Guard — Jeremy James
• Jailer — Trevor Littledale
• Molly — Sunny Ormonde

Autumn

Autumn has the Doctor settling down in an English village to play cricket while Nyssa tries her hand at writing a novel. Instead, she catches the attention of a local boy who pesters her about her unwritten book. Uneasily, Nyssa falls in love, and contemplates life on Earth, left behind by the Doctor, where she will age and face her own Autumn.

• Andrew — Jamie Sandford
• Jack — Toby Longworth
• Anton — Jeremy James
• Don — John Benfield

Winter

Winter sees the pair meet up years after their last encounter in the strangest of circumstances. Long after the events of Terminus, Nyssa has settled down with Lasarti and is now the mother of an infant daughter. Recurring psychic visions of the Doctor, and another figure who may either be her father or The Master, convince her to use a special machine to allow her to examine her dreams while conscious. Instead, she finds herself entering the Doctor's dream, one in which he's a normal man, a father and husband weathering a brutal winter, and not a traveller of time and space. The Doctor does not remember Nyssa, although he soon realizes that his understanding of his life is incomplete.

• Lasarti — Jeremy James
• Anima — Sunny Ormonde

See also

• List of Doctor Who audio plays by Big Finish

Notes

• The Seasons represent the span of the Doctor's relationship with Nyssa. First, by getting to know each other in the Spring, flourishing in the Summer, falling away from each other in the Autumn and reminiscing about the past in the Winter.

• The four stories are not directly connected and therefore can be listened to in any order (although "Winter" takes place long after the other stories). A similar idea has been tried before by Big Finish in the Seventh Doctor adventure Flip-Flop.

Summer

• David Warner has appeared as an Unbound version of the Doctor in the play Sympathy for the Devil, and returns to play the character again in Masters of War. He also plays Steel in the audio version of Sapphire & Steel for Big Finish.

• In the TV story Pirate Planet the Fourth Doctor claims to have already met Newton, as well as being directly responsible for the apple incident. Summer confirms this meeting happened and implies that it took place just a week earlier, in Newton's relative time line.

• When Newton says the apples hit him hard, the Doctor explains he's a fast bowler. This references both the Doctor's claim from Pirate Planet that he dropped apples on Newton's head and it also references the Fifth Doctor story Black Orchid where he claims to be a fast bowler.

Autumn

• The town of Stockbridge, somewhere in the depths of Gloucestershire, was often seen in the Doctor Who Magazine comics, starting with their first Fifth Doctor story The Tides of Time. This is the first time it has been used in a Big Finish play. The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa return in a trilogy of audio stories, starting with Castle of Fear.

• This is not the first Doctor Who audio to feature a companion having intercourse. Turlough sleeps with a woman in Loups-Garoux and Tegan sleeps with a man in The Gathering.

Winter

• The Winter section of this play involves the Doctor reaching out to Nyssa telepathically during his regeneration at the end of The Caves of Androzani. In it, Nyssa is older and married.

• The laughter at the end that is meant to be The Master is performed by Toby Longworth, uncredited.

• This is the only Big Finish play to feature Kamelion, who first appeared in The King's Demons and died in Planet of Fire.

External links

• Big Finish Productions - Circular Time
• Circular Time at the Doctor Who Reference Guide