(no subject)

[allpurposescarf]

Most of the details involving the Doctor’s earlier years are unknown, if only because he doesn’t talk about them much (and neither does the show). However, there are a few details that are known. Like all young Gallifreyans seeking entry to the academy, he was taken from his home in the middle of the night at eight years of age, and taken to look into the Untempered Schism - a gap in reality from which all of the Vortex could be seen. Needless to say, this was not precisely the most comfortable of initiations and it was fairly well understood that various young Time Lords would take to it differently - some would run, some would go mad, and some would be inspired (the Doctor would later claim to have been one of the ones to run).

All the same, the Doctor did make it into the academy, although he was not what anyone could call a model student. Enough so that it was only on his second attempt that he actually managed to graduate at all and only just barely even so. But it was enough for him (or at least seemed to be), and so life went on for a time. And then came a day where everything changed. Although accounts vary on the precise details even throughout the various canons of Doctor Who universe, one point is the same: the Doctor, along with his granddaughter, stole an old TARDIS and ran away. In time, they came to land on an unassuming blue planet, and so began one of the longest-running shows inTV history. However, in the earliest days, the Doctor was nowhere near as fond of either humanity or Earth - it was time that would see him develop a fondness for humanity, and between one adventure and another, time did indeed pass. And, in time, so too did the Doctor’s first appearance as the First Doctor regenerated into the Second.

This, like all regenerations, meant a new personality as well as new appearance, but the Doctor’s tendency to find himself in both adventures and trouble by equal measures remained the same. However, when the Doctor called upon his fellow Time Lords for assistance with a particularly difficult enemy he found himself being tried for breaking the Time Lord’s non-interference policy in relatively short order. The end result of that trial was a forced regeneration and exile to earth with a non-functioning TARDIS for the Doctor, while his companions were returned to the native time zones with their memories wiped of everything except their first adventures with him. While the Doctor did eventually get his use of the TARDIS back, he remained more-or-less connected to the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (or UNIT), acting as their scientific advisor. However, all good things must come to an end, and so it was for the Doctor’s third incarnation: after coming down with a nasty case of radiation poisoning, the Third Doctor only just manages to regenerate into the Fourth.

Needless to say, Four’s first few moments were not the easiest and after a lifetime stuck more or less on a single planet his first inclination is run away to wander all of time and space. He very nearly manages it too, and only the instance of the UNIT commander (one Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart) that there is something that will require his assistance that keeps the newly-regenerated Four from running off entirely. One brief wardrobe change later, and Four is off and running.

As it turns out, the problem that the Brigadier had spoken of was that someone has been stealing parts and plans from various high-security facilities. Bits and pieces that can, in fact, be assembled to make a disintegrator gun. More worringly, whoever or whatever has stolen the parts appears to weigh very nearly a quarter of a ton, if the footprints it’s left behind are any indication. With the nature of the responsible party understandably less than clear, Sarah Jane Smith (the Doctor’s current companion) goes to speak to the local scientific think tank, while UNIT and Four go to attempt to protect the last remaining pieces needed to make the gun. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go quite as well as planned, and the last piece is stolen from the one direction UNIT couldn’t have covered - underground.

Over at the think tank, however, Sarah Jane is making somewhat more headway. When her initial exploration of the labs turns up nothing more than a smear of oil left behind by the person to work there previously (one Doctor Kettlewell), she goes to visit Kettlewell at his home. Unfortunately, his explanation is not terribly clear, although Sarah does manage to get something about “robotics research” out of him. With that in mind, she proceeds to sneak back into the think tank, whereupon she’s almost immediately set upon by the very robot in question. After a brief and harrowing encounter wherein the robot is ordered to destroy her in order to prove that it’s incapable of harming anyone, she once again leaves the think tank. Naturally, upon hearing of a giant robot, it’s UNIT’s turn to visit Kettlewell, with Four in tow. Kettlewell, in turn, insists that his robot - which Sarah saw at the think tank - couldn’t possibly be around and most certainly wouldn’t be capable of harming a person. However, he eventually admits that if the robot’s programming were changed so drastically as to allow it to harm people then it would almost certainly go insane.

This, of course, means that in short order, the robot is once again ordered to kill, the disintegrator gun is assembled, and the people currently giving the robot orders are revealed to be working for an organization that’s pretty much evil. To make matters worse, one of the government officials the robot has recently killed held the secret nuclear launch codes for all the nations of the world, and intends to use them if their demands aren’t met. Naturally, UNIT is having absolutely none of this and charges in to the rescue... only to find that their bullets quite naturally don’t do anything to robot and that it’s been armed with the disintegrator gun. With things at a stalemate, Kettlewell tries to talk the robot into not working for the bad guys. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work as intended, as the robot simply shoots Kettlewell and then promptly blue screens in anguish at the realization that it’s just killed its creator.

However, with the robot inactive, UNIT and Four are able to get into the bunker the bad guys had been hiding in and deactivate the nuclear countdown. Crisis averted! ...Except that the robot has recovered from its crisis of conscience and has decided to destroy the world anyway for reasons that... presumably have something to do with it thinking Kettlewell had wanted the world to be destroyed. To that end, it starts up the detonation sequence again - unsuccessfully - and heads out of the bunker whereupon the Brigadier promptly shoots it with the disintegrator gun. Crisis averted! ...Or not, as the robot promptly absorbs the energy of the gun, growing into a giant robot and escaping to cause havoc in the city, kidnapping Sarah Jane in the process.

Someone understandably frustrated by this turn of events, Four hurries back to the UNIT labs, whips a batch of a theoretical anti-metal virus that Kettlewell had previously mentioned as being a counter to the “living metal” his robot had been out and splashes it all over the robot. The robot promptly disintegrates for good, and with the day now properly saved, Four returns to UNIT HQ and his TARDIS before setting out to once more travel time and space, taking not only Sarah Jane with him, but also one Harry Sullivan - one of UNIT’s medical professionals and the doctor who had nominally been in charge of his care shortly after his regeneration.

In short order the TARDIS lands in an unmanned space station. Nerva space station, to be precise and things are not entirely as they should be. To start off, there’s almost no air in the station when Four and his companions arrive. For another thing, it seems to be all but abandoned. To cap things off, once Four manages to get the air working the wires seem to have been bitten through. After a bit of exploring, the truth begins to come out. Nerva station has been turned into a sort of ark to preserve humanity after a series of solar flares, and now that all the systems are working again, the people are coming out of their deep freeze.

They are, however, not the only ones taking an interest in things. The beings that had bitten through the wires are still present. Wirrn, to be precise, and they want to transform the humans into more Wirrn - the station’s captain has already begun the transformation thanks to earlier events. Eventually Four and the few humans who are awake manage to lure the Wirrn into the station’s shuttle and blast them into space. Once the Wirrn are away from the space station, the captain - now mostly a Wirrn - uses the last of his humanity to blow the shuttle up. However, with the shuttle out of commission, they’ll have to use the transmat beams to get back to Earth. Naturally, Four offers to take himself and his companions down to make sure things are working as they should be.

As it turns out, the transmat receptors on the other end are working... more or less. It’s not an easy ride, and the receptors will need some tuning, but they’re mostly working. Better still, the earth has, in fact, recovered with all manner of plant life thriving. Not wanting to be bothered while he’s working Four (who insists they’re in the middle of what would have once been London, despite any real evidence to suggest so) shoos Sarah and Harry off for a bit of sightseeing.

Of course, things almost immediately go a little pear-shaped. Harry manages to fall down a pit whose edges had been covered with branches, and when Sarah - who quite correctly assumes this means the planet isn’t so abandoned after all - returns to find Four, he’s gone.

In fact, he’s been captured by a group of astronauts who are none too friendly - which is understandable given they’d answered a distress call only to have their ship destroyed and several of their crewmates go mysteriously missing. Naturally, their suspicion lands on Four, as the sole oddity in the whole affair. Sarah, on the other hand, sets about returning to the pit trap Harry had fallen down only to run into one of said mysteriously missing crewmates. The trap, he explains, was his, meant to trap the robot roaming about - it’s working for some alien that has torturing his fellow crewmates, one of which is now working for said alien, or so he explains. Sarah isn’t entirely certain how much of his story to believe but he does manage to show Sarah where his crewmates are, and manages to create enough a distraction to allow Sarah to rescue Four. With the party thus more-or-less reassembled, they go off to look for Harry - and this time it’s Four’s turn to fall down the pit. At very nearly the same time, Sarah and her new friend are captured by the robot from earlier and are brought to the alien in question - a Sontaran, as Sarah quickly realizes.

Not that the realization does her much good. In fact, the Sontaran appears all too happy to have a female of the species to test, and after shooting the wayward crewman, takes Sarah off to be experimented on. Fortunately, Harry has found his way out to the testing grounds, and attempts to rescue her - and fails on account of a rather nasty forcefield. However, Harry isn’t alone for long. Four has found his own way out of the pit and manages to rescue both Harry and Sarah. From there, it doesn’t take him long to realize the Sontaran is collecting scientific data in order that a Sontaran battle fleet can come and invade Earth. In order to keep him from doing so, Four takes full advantage of the Sontaran warrior nature and challenges him to a sword fight, which the Sontaran doesn’t refuse. And just as well too, since that in turn always Harry to go and fetch something out of the Sontaran’s space ship, on Four’s orders. The exact details of what the something is never really gets mentioned, but either way, when the Sontaran returns to his ship to rest he instead melts away into nothing, and with him gone it’s only the work of a moment for Four to scare off the invasion fleet that had been hanging around on Earth before hopping back into the transmat beam.

They don’t make it back to Nerva. Instead, the transmat beam drops them neatly off in what looks almost distressingly like a quarry and probably was one. Nor are they alone. Or rather Four isn’t. Having been separated slightly from his companions (possibly as a result of the transmat beam), he almost immediately proceeds to run into another Time Lord, who’s come to ask that Four do something for them. Fed up with the Time Lords interfering with his life, Four naturally refuses until the other Time Lord mentions a single word: “Dalek.” The mission, as laid out, is thus: having foreseen a time when the Daleks would have destroyed all other life forms, they want Four to return to a time before the Daleks were first created and to either avert their creation, affect their genetic structure so they become less aggressive, or discover some inherent weakness of theirs. After some consideration, Four agrees to go along with it just the once and asks for the coordinates to Skaro (the home planet of the Daleks). The Time Lord, however, mentions that they are already on Skaro - the Time Lords had figured that it would be easier if they assumed the Doctor’s cooperation - and gives him a Time Ring so he can get back to the TARDIS when everything is done, whereupon he promptly vanishes again.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. At this point in Skaro’s history the Kaleds - the race that would eventually become the Daleks - are in the middle of a long and drawn out war with the Thals, who are also natives of the planet. Needless to say, things don’t exactly go well, and after making their way past minefields and various sorts of mutants, Four and his companions are captured be the Kaleds and are shortly introduced to Davros, the chief scientist of the Kaleds. Davros also has brought with him what he terms a “Mark III travel machine” which will eventually house what the Kaleds will mutate into. The Doctor, however, identifies it as a Dalek - and before Davros can announce that this is going to be the new name for the devices. This, in turn, gets him communicating with one of the other Kaled scientists, who admits that not everyone in the scientific department agrees with Davros’ experiments and that there is something of a resistance brewing to get Davros’ work shut down. This is, however, the last good news that any of the three of them have for a while. While Four and his companions have been trying to stop Davros’ plans, the Thals have been intending to blow up the Kaled city-dome. Worse still, since Davros has been playing both sides in order to be able to swear “revenge” against the Thals, their attempt to blow up the Kaled dome actually works.

Luckily, when Four arrives at the Thal dome, he manages to convince the Thal leader that the Kaled bunker needs to be destroyed. That there are already several Daleks destroying anyone left in the Thal dome by this point probably doesn’t hurt. Less fortunately, on the way back he and his companions are once again captured by the Kaleds. This, in turn, shortly lands them in an interrogation cell courtesy of Davros who wants to know what Four knows about the future of the Daleks, and promises that his friends will suffer unimaginable pain if he doesn’t cooperate. Not wanting to see his friends tortured, Four grudgingly tells Davros about all the times the Daleks will be defeated in the future. That done, and with the recording of session somewhat unfortunately removed and put in a safe place, Four attempts to get Davros to halt work on the Daleks.

As one might expect, this doesn’t go over well, mostly because Davros is really not interested in being any less terrible. With two out of the three options originally presented to him by the Time Lords thus out of reach, Four turns to the last option left - genocide. As such, he, Harry, and Sarah head out to where the Dalek mutants are being kept until they can be put into the Dalek machines. After a bit of work - and nearly getting strangled by one of the mutants - Four manages to rig the room to explode. All he has to do is touch two wires together, and the Daleks will never even have been... but he hesitates. It’s a simple thing, but a hard choice, and one that he isn’t sure he has the right to make. Not if it would mean becoming no better than the Daleks. Fortunately, he’s spared the choice by the timely arrival of one of the scientists in the resistance - Davros has agreed to let the future of the Kaled race be discussed. Less fortunately, Davros is mostly using this to find out who is no longer loyal and get his Daleks to exterminate thing. However, the meeting does allow Four to recover the Time Ring as well as recover and then destroy the tape of all the ways the Daleks had been defeated in the future.

At the same time, the Thals have finally managed to make it to Kaled dome and fully intend to blow it up and entomb the Daleks forever as one of their allies inform Four and company. However, there is still one loose end to be tied up, and so Four sends Harry and Sarah back to the Thals. He, meanwhile, heads back to where the proto-Daleks were being kept, and reconnects the wires - this time he does mean to do what he’d hesitated at before. He is, however, interrupted by the arrival of a Dalek... which rolls over the dropped wires, blowing the nursery up anyway; in the aftermath, Four only just manages to get out of the dome before the Thals blow it up. However, he admits to the fact that he’s probably only delayed things by a thousand years or so even with the nursery gone, but even this seems to be enough as he, Harry, and Sarah are whisked away into time by the Time Ring and (presumably) back to Nerva.

Showing more locational accuracy then the TARDIS, the Time Ring does get them back to Nerva. However, it also drops them off entirely too early - thousands of years early, in fact, meaning that they’ll simply have to wait for the TARDIS to drift back across the years until she reaches them. Fortunately, they’ve once again managed to land themselves in exactly the right sort of trouble to keep themselves busy until the TARDIS returns - the station is being manned by a skeleton crew, after some kind of alien plague has struck the station. Naturally, Four and company are almost immediately suspected to have something do with it, and are shortly brought before the commander.

As luck would have it, being taken to the commander also means that Four and company get introduced to a man who has just recently contracted the plague - between the symptoms being passingly familiar and the pair of puncture wounds in his neck, Four promptly claims that whatever the ship has it’s certainly not a plague. Especially given that whatever it is that’s transmitting the “plague” has been leaving scratch marks all over the floor. In the end, it’s Sarah who ends up finding out what’s been carrying the “plague” - after she, Harry and Four go their separate ways she finds herself attacked by something that looks like nothing so much as a large metallic worm. A Cybermat, to be precise, and while Four arrives in time to immobilize the Cybermat, he is unfortunately not in time to keep her from being bitten.

With no other cure presenting itself, Four sends Harry and Sarah down to the planetoid, since the transmat process will strip out anything that isn’t part of them, and thus remove the poison from Sarah’s system. While it does get the job done, Harry and Sarah barely have enough time to notice that the ground is all but littered with gold, before the find themselves captured by the native Vogans and chained up in a cell. Meanwhile, back on the beacon, Four isn’t having much better luck. Cybermats don’t simply spontaneously appear on ships and with the transmat having been more-or-less inoperative before Four had gotten his hands on it seems obvious that someone on the ship must be working for the Cybermen.

Fortunately, Four manages to figure out who. Less fortunately, he doesn’t manage to do so before the Cybermen arrive and promptly take over the beacon. Given that the Cybermen wish to destroy Voga (by blowing up its core, Four and the surviving members of the crew are sent down to Voga with bombs strapped to their back. The bombs will also explode if they should attempt to remove them, and so Four and the crewmen are sent down to Voga, with a pair of Cybermen acting as guards. Meanwhile, the Vogans are preparing to launch a missile at the beacon and destroy it - the man that Four had earlier pegged as a Cyberman mole is actually a double agent. However, Harry and Sarah, who have escaped their prison cell (no one told the Vogans that gold makes a terrible thing to use for manacles) believe that Four is still there and so Harry sends Sarah back up to the beacon.

Back down on the planetoid Four manages to disarm the countdown device, enabling him to safely take the bomb off. With that handled, there’s only the small matter of the Vogan rocket to deal with, and the very last minute, he manages to convince the Vogans to steer it towards the Cybership. With that taken care of and the Cybermen thus defeated, it’s time for them to leave - and by narrative convenience the TARDIS has only just then arrived... bearing a most unusual message - one from the Brigadier back on Earth, courtesy of a space-time telegraph the Doctor had given him previously.

Naturally, the TARDIS promptly lands on the Scottish moor. However, this isn’t all that far from where UNIT and the Brigadier (now in a kilt) have made their home base. As for emergency that was dire enough for the Brig to call Four back, that turns out to be a series of oil-rigs that have been destroyed without any real explanation. Naturally, Four isn’t really certain this constitutes an emergency, but once he manages to get his hands on a bit of rubble, he finds out that the marks left behind are, in fact, tooth marks - and that of something very large. However, by the time Four manages to make said discovery, Harry has been shot in the course of his own explorations. Unfortunately, he isn’t being terribly coherent when Sarah goes to see him at the hospital, and in short order, Sarah is first captured and then imprisoned in the decompression chamber. When Four comes to pick her up, he finds himself joining her as their mysterious captor starts removing the air. With no real sign of rescue coming anytime soon, Four hypnotizes Sarah into not needing to breathe and then puts himself into a trance as well.

Harry, meanwhile, has been taken to an alien spaceship, whereupon he’s treated to some much needed explanation. Namely: that the aliens are called the Zygons, and what’s been destroying the oil rigs is a creature under their control - the Skarasen. However, the Zygons are also shapeshifters and in short order they have Harry under lock and key and have taken on his form, in an attempt to get at the Doctor.

Elsewhere, help has finally arrived for Four and Sarah, as one of UNIT’s men arrives on the scene and lets them out. Conveniently, between Sarah’s hypnotism and Four’s trance, neither of them has suffered any harm. Better still, UNIT has found the device the Zygons had been using to control the Skarasen. Naturally, the Zygons send someone to recover it, and between one thing and another, eventually Four ends up being chased across the moors by the Skarasen. Not that this solves the root problem, and eventually, Sarah stumbles across the secret tunnel to the Zygon ship, and manages to rescue Harry. Four, meanwhile, voluntarily goes into the spaceship and promptly gets himself captured. This in turn puts Four exactly where he wants, and after UNIT chases the Zygon ship to yet another quarry, Four manages to free all the people that the Zygons had previously captured, and cause the Zygon ship to self-destruct. Thus bereft of any kind of control signal, the Skarasen returns to the only home it’s ever known - Loch Ness - while UNIT and the others also prepare to return home.

Harry, however, opts to take a more normal way to return to London, despite Four’s insistence that he can get them back to London “five minutes ago.” Sarah, on the other hand, is willing to get back into the TARDIS for one last trip. Naturally, the TARDIS doesn’t take them London. Instead, they land at the very edge of the universe - or rather on a planet very near to - whereupon they stumble across the remains Morestran geological survey; whatever has happened, only the leader now survives. Given that a distress signal had been sent out moments before Four and Sarah had arrived on the planet, a Morestran ship shortly arrives and it’s not long at all before both he and Sarah have been captured by the Morestran military; they manage to escape due to improperly locked windows... and find themselves face to face with a strange creature.

The arrival of the dawn chases it away for a time, and bit by bit, the truth begins to be revealed - the survey had come to find another power source and have, thanks to an ore found around a pit deep in the interior of the planet. The pit in turn is not only a portal to the realm of anti-matter (...somehow) but is also where the creature is from. Four, in turn, tells the Morestrans that they’ll have to leave the samples behind or they’ll never leave the planet - a claim that is largely met by derision. Eventually, he leaves to go speak to the creature, and it’s just about then that things begin to go pear-shaped.

With the Morestrans more than ready to leave, the one remaining scientist takes one of the containers of anti-matter ore with him, and in due time, is possessed by the same. The Morestrans, meanwhile, attempt to take off, but with one container of ore still on board the ship, they indeed prove unable to leave and all that they manage to accomplish is to rank up an impressive body count, courtesy of the possessed man. In the end, the Doctor manages to stun the poor possessed scientist and drags him off to the TARDIS - which he takes back to the pit... which he throws the scientist and the remaining ore into. This action allows the Morestran ship to finally start pulling away from the planet: the Doctor has kept the promise he made to the Creature, which has even given back the scientist, no longer possessed. Since the danger has passed, he returns the scientist to the Morestrans and picks up Sarah once again. They still technically have that appointment in London to make, after all and with the coordinates set, they’re on the way again. But not even that is entirely normal. On the way to their destination, Sarah briefly spots a horrifying goat-like face appearing out of thin air in the middle of the TARDIS console room. Other than that, however, all proceeds as normal and the TARDIS gently sets them down... in the middle of an old house that seems to be all full of Egyptian relics.

As it turns out, the TARDIS has landed them in the right place, but the wrong time - instead of the UNIT headquarters,they’ve landed in what will be the UNIT headquarters: an old priory that eventually burned down. More to the point, Four has a sneaking suspicion that something is wrong and they begin to explore the housewhich results in them being chased out by mummies. In their flight through the surrounding grounds, they manage to stumble across a small hunting lodge and take refuge. Conveniently, the scientist who appears to be the only person in residence has just recently managed to make a crude sort of radio telescope and has just received a message from Mars, which Four translates as “beware Sutekh”.

Since this is one of the few cases where Four actually knows what’s going on beforehand, he explains. Sutekh, is the last of a powerful alien race known as the Osirians, imprisoned under one of the pyramids by his bother Horus for attempting to destroy all life. Sarah, meanwhile, decides this is a good time to ask a question that must plague every time traveler. Namely, that since she comes from the future, the world can’t have possibly been destroyed and so they may as well just leave. For once, Four acquiesces and promptly takes her to what the future Earth will be if Sutekh is allowed to remain unchecked - a lifeless rock circling a dead sun. This is one historical event they’re going to have to get involved in.

Sutekh, however, has not been idle. Since his imprisonment has left him unable to so much as lift a finger, he’s sent his servant to do his work, using a time/space tunnel the connects the priory and his prison. With the help of some robots cleverly disguised as mummies, his servant has built a rocket to destroy the signal device keeping Sutekh trapped. By luck or fate, Four and Sarah manage to get their hands on some explosives, which Four places next to the rocket by disguising himself as one of the mummybots before Sarah ignites the explosives shooting them with a rifle. Unfortunately, the explosion doesn’t go off. Or rather, it does, but Sutekh manages to keep it contained by the sheer force of his mental powers; in order to force the point, Four uses the space-time tunnel to travel to Sutekh’s prison and distract him.

It works, and the explosion goes off, displeasing Sutekh enough he simply mind controls the Doctor and uses the TARDIS to get his servant to Mars. However, while the Doctor recovers from being strangled by Sutekh’s servant once they arrive thanks to a convenient quirk of Time Lord biology, he doesn’t manage to keep the device holding Sutekh holding prisoner from being destroyed. In fact, it’s only at the last moment that he realizes that the signal will need time to get from Mars to Earth and he and Sarah scurry back to the TARDIS, arriving just in time for him to reset the end-point of Sutekh’s space-time tunnel to the far future - Sutekh dies of old age before he can ever escape the tunnel. However, Four has forgotten to remember to correct the thermal imbalance and as he and Sarah are making to leave, it catches fire, and the pair beat a hasty retreat into the TARDIS as the prior burns to the ground as history said it had.

When the TARDIS once again materializes, it’s in what looks for all the world like a bit of English countryside. In fact, it doesn’t take long at all before Sarah identifies it as Devesham. Since they haven’t really anything better to, and still probably should check back in with UNIT, they decide to explore. However, in short order they find that things are not really as they seem. For one thing, Four has picked up on a strange energy reading. For another, there are a strange men in white masks shooting at them, and when they manage to get into the city proper not only are the streets quite entirely empty, but all the pages of the calendars are the same date.

Nor does the city remain empty. After a while, the strange white-masked strangers bring in what is quite literally a truckful of inhabitants, all of whom only start moving once the local clock strikes eight. Looking for some answers, Four heads off to the local UNIT base, largely on the assumption that the Brigadier might be there. He isn’t, and instead, Four finds himself not only shot at but also very nearly captured and imprisoned. After a not insignificant amount of running around and Sarah getting captured by aliens besides, the truth finally comes out - the inhabitants of the town are androids, which the aliens intend to use to take over Earth. Worse, the Sarah that had been with the Doctor is also an android, and in comparatively short order the aliens have managed to capture Four and tie him up in the center of town - they mean to use a matter-dissolving bomb to destroy the fake town and then move on to Earth. In the end, it’s the real Sarah who unties Four and gets him into the alien bunker/ship just in time.

Things don’t improve much once everyone lands on Earth. UNIT hardly believes Four, for one, and with android versions of him, key UNIT officials, and Sarah all running around things get very complicated and very silly very quickly. In the end, Four manages to jam the signals controlled the androids and then reprograms his own android copy, before going to speak to the last of the aliens in charge - who ends up falling prey to the virus that he’d been meaning to wipe out the entirety of humanity with. With that done, and Four’s own android duplicate taken care of, he and Sarah return to the TARDIS and depart for slightly less android-infested climes.

From there, it’s off to Karn, sister planet to Gallifrey and home of the Sisterhood of Karn. Four, however, is not terribly interested in exploring - he’s of the opinion that the Time Lords have once again hauled him off course. Whether or not this is actually the case is never mentioned, but after yelling at the sky for a good long moment, Four sits himself down and absolutely refuse to move... at least until Sarah starts exploring. In short order, then, they find themselves enjoying the hospitality of one Mehendri Solon, who seems to have an almost morbid fascination with heads... including the Doctor’s.

(This, as it turns out later, is for the purposes of reviving his master, Morbius - a Time Lord criminal who is now reduced to just a brain in a jar, and for whom Solon is creating a new body - he intends to use Four’s head as the final piece.)

Solon’s plans don’t go quite as well as planned, and although he does manage to drug Four easily enough, Four is then kidnapped by the Sisterhood of Karn who think he actually has been sent by the Time Lords, in order to claim the last of the Elixir of Life their order safeguards - the sacred flame responsible for it’s creation is dying. Naturally, this means that he’s sentenced to be burnt at the stake. Sarah manages to intervene just in time, but is blinded in the process. Upon returning to Solon, he convinces Four the condition is permanent, and he takes it on himself to go back to the Sisterhood to ask for their help after first clearing up their problem with the flame by the simple application of a firework - centuries of soot had been clogging the natural chimney in the rockface.

Unfortunately, by that point, Solon has managed to complete Morbius’ new body (with the addition of a plastic fishbowl by way of brain case) and Four and Sarah end up trapped in Solon’s cellar with Morbius. Thinking quickly, the Doctor challenges Morbius to what is essentially a mental wrestling match. Unfortunately, while the challenges weakens Morbius enough to reduce him to a shambling zombie which the Sisters push off a cliff, it also very nearly kills Four to the point that only Sarah’s quick thinking in taking him to the Sisters saves him - they use some of the last of their Elixir of Life to heal him, in thanks for saving their Eternal Flame.

When they land again, it’s in England, although they’re quickly sent out to Antartica courtesy of UNIT, as a research team has found a pair of strange seed pods buried in the permafrost. Once they’ve arrived, Four wastes no time in identifying them as Krynoids - a sort of alien kudzu that will eliminate all animal life on the planet if it’s allowed to germinate. There’s just one problem: the first pod has already “hatched” and infected one of the scientists on board and is slowly turning into a Krynoid himself. The other pod, is shortly taken by a pair of mercenaries who promptly deliver it to their employer, Harrison Chase, who is... something of plant nut. Conveniently, the bomb planted by the mercenaries destroys the first Krynoid.

Less fortunately, the second pod is forced to hatch by Chase and is all but forced into rapid growth once the seeds find a host (one of mercs). Unfortunately, this very nearly spells doom not only for our heroes, but also the Earth itself, and after any number of failed attempts, Chase manages to fall into to his own composter, and the RAF manages to bomb the now-giant Krynoid to death just before it can release its spores and so doom the entire world. With everything well in hand, Four and Sarah are once again off to their travels.

In this case, they promptly land in Renaissance Italy, after a brief encounter with a strange glowing ball of what Four has identified as “the Mandragora Helix.” Unfortunately, he’s unknowingly brought it along and it begins taking over and/or killing the locals. Naturally, then, this leads Four first to exploring the goings on, and then eventually to the local cult... which happens to be worshipping Mandragora, after Mandragora convinced them it was their patron deity, Demnos. And on the upcoming solstice, the cult will manage to fully summon Mandragora into being and take over the duchy.

In the midst of the resultant political intrigue (not helped by the the duke’s astronomer is the leader of the Cult of Demnos), Sarah manages to get herself kidnapped and hypnotised by the cult, who want her to kill Four, who has rather understandably been interfering with their plans. Fortunately, it doesn’t work and Four manages to snap Sarah out of it. Less fortunately, the cult’s invasion of the masquerade to celebrate the coronation of the former duke’s son is a good deal more successful and more than a few people end up dead as result.

Four, meanwhile, is having a confrontation with the cult leader back at the cultist’s HQ - and has brought along some local armor and a goodly amount of wire to “ground” the Mandragora energy, thus foiling pretty much any of the plans that the cult leader might have had. With no further extraterrestrial threats on the new duke’s life, and the Mandagora energy dealt with, it’s back to the TARDIS with Four and Sarah Jane as they once again continue on.

Given that this is Classic Who and certain tropes recur fairly regularly, they promptly land in a quarry. An actual quarry for a change, and one that they find hard to talk in, mostly because of the siren in the background. By the time they catch on to what it actually means it’s too late - the scheduled explosion goes off, and Sarah is trapped under the rubble. Fortunately, she isn’t hurt. Less fortunately, she has also found what appears to be a fossilized hand in amongst the rubble and is promptly possessed by the spirit residing in the ring the hand had been wearing. As this renders her unconscious, she’s brought to the local hospital, but doesn’t stay long before she wakes up, breaks out, and sets off to the local nuclear power plant, bringing the fossilized hand along with her; she uses the ring the hand had been wearing to knock out the various guards that try to block her entry.

Four and a few others arrive moment later only to find Sarah happily ensconced next to the main reactor core and... surprisingly not terribly irradiated. This, as it turns out is because the “fossilized” hand is very much alive and the organism it belongs to is capable of using radiation to regenerate itself. Needless to say, it’s not long at all before the being (who promptly identifies herself as Eldrad) is back to normal, especially after the RAF is convinced to try and nuke the nuclear reactor. Eldrad, however, is more interested in getting home and demands that Four take her back in time to her home. Four declines to take Eldrad back in time but does agree to take her back, as long as it’s to the “now” of her planet. This turns out to be a rather terrible plan, as it’s now a withered husk of a planet complete with a recorded message mocking Eldrad for being the ruler of absolutely nothing at all. Understandably furious, Eldrad promptly demands that Four take her back to Earth so she can rule over that instead. Four refuses, and after a bit of work, manages to trip Eldrad down a deep crevasse, shattering her (since she’d been a silicon based lifeform).

However that is not the end of things, although it’s certainly an end to the problems of the episode. On the way back to Earth with Sarah, Four receives a telepathic call from Gallifrey. Realizing that he most certainly can’t take Sarah there, he tells her she’ll have to leave. Since she’d already been planning to leave, it doesn’t take too much convincing, although things are still bittersweet as he leaves her in what he is... not actually her hometown before heading off to Gallifrey all alone.

On the way there, he’s suddenly interrupted by a terrible premonition of the future - the Lord President of Gallifrey, being assassinated. Unfortunately, almost everything proceeds to go wrong after he lands, and in short order he finds himself arrested for assassinating the Lord President, largely on account of having been holding something that looked an awful lot like the murder weapon at the time. In the end, he manages to abuse a legal loophole to avoid execution ... by declaring himself as a candidate for Presidency, much to the irritation of everyone else, including Chancellor Goth, the only other candidate.

Unfortunately, the Doctor’s old enemy - The Master - is also hanging around, now at the very end of his regeneration cycle. Not that anyone believes that the Master is hanging around, especially as there don’t seem to be any records of his presence. Eventually, Four manages to convince a few sympathetic Time Lord’s to hook his brain up to the Matrix - a repository of all Time Lord knowledge - in the hopes that the answers might be there. Unfortunately, he promptly lands himself in a virtual reality and promptly spends the next episode and half being chased around by a strange masked man, and getting variably shot at, nearly run over, and just generally run through the wringer. In the end, he comes out triumphant, revealing his opponent as none other than Chancellor Goth (who’s working for the Master). However, by the time he makes it back to the real world, the Master has already gotten his hands on what he’d wanted - the presidential regalia.

With those in hand, he proceeds to open the Eye of Harmony - the core of a black hole, tamed by Rassilon himself - with the intent of using the power of same to kickstart a new regenerative process (and probably blow up Gallifrey and most of the associated star systems, which he doesn’t seem to much care about). After a a bit of a struggle, Four manages to overpower the Master and re-harness everything properly. Gallifrey is saved, and rather than stay on as President-elect, Four decides he’d much rather leave and hurries off again, not noticing that the Master has also escaped in his own TARDIS.

When he lands again, it’s only to land himself in the middle of some very strange goings on. Not only does the first person he meets - a young girl by the name of Leela - promptly identify him as “The Evil One,” when he ends up captured by the rest of her tribe (the Sevateem), they do too. Given that Four has never so much as set foot on the planet before, he’s not entirely sure what to make of it. Especially when Leela finally manages to show him the great effigy of the Evil One carved into a local cliff - he face staring back at them is his. Somewhere in the process of being captured and recaptured a few times over he also tries to convince the Sevateem that they’re all distant survivors of of a spaceship crash, and their religious artifacts are just debris from same, but that goes over about as well as one might expect, which is mostly to say: not at all.

Either way, Four and Leela decide to explore further, in this case by going quite literally through the mouth of the effigy, whereupon they find not only the spaceship Four had been implying was around somewhere and that Xoanan, the god of Leela’s tribe is actually the ship’s supercomputer. Which is quite thoroughly insane. As it turns out, a long time ago (locally speaking) Four had tried to fix the ships computer when it went haywire by linking up his own brain to the systems. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so much broken as actually just developing sentience, and when Four forgot to erase his mental patterns back out again, Xoanan developed two distinct personalities - one of its own and one of the Doctor’s. With both of them fighting for dominance, it crashed on the planet, and set up what was effectively a long-term eugenics project - the Survey Team became the Sevateem, focusing on strength and courage, while the Tech Team became the Tesh, granted cold reason and psychic ability.

With some help from the few remaining Sevateem, Four manages to access Xoanan’s memory banks and erase his memory data, leaving Xoanon once again sane thus... more or less ending hostilities between the Tesh and the Sevateem. Since they’ll need a new leader - one to lead both tribes - Leela is promptly elected. She, however, is having absolutely none of this, and runs off to travel with Four, ignoring his protests in the process.

Thanks to Leela’s unintentional meddling with the TARDIS controls, she and Four end up on a sandminer. As there’s just been a murder followed by a round of “pass the blame” among the crew, no one really trusts them, much less after they break out of the room they’d been held in and promptly stumble across the second and third bodies. When they’re rescued from their second round of imprisonment by a crew member who believes they actually are innocent, Four’s suggestion that it might be robots killing everyone, the idea is laughed off - everyone knows that robots are programmed to not kill!

The bodies, meanwhile, are beginning to stack up with two more added in short order. Eventually, it turns out that the robots are being reprogrammed to kill, courtesy of one Taren Capel - a mad scientist who’d been raised by robots and who may or may not actually think of himself as a robot. Either way, he orders the robots to kill all the remaining humans, while Four gathers together the few remaining crew members and sets about canceling the robot apocalypse. Since all of the robots are being controlled by a single robot, he puts a deactivation device together out of some ex-robots and heads off to Capel’s lab. In the end, it’s a non-murderous robot that blows itself up to deactivate the commanding robot, and on Four’s orders, Leela uses helium gas to change Capel’s voice to the point that the remaining robots won’t recognize it - one of them ends up killing him before being killed itself. With all the killer robots dealt with, Four and Leela head off to yet another adventure.

Given that the Sevateem and the Tesh had originated from an Earth ship, Four decides that there’s no better time than the present to show Leela her history. Accordingly, they promptly land in Victorian London, complete with period-appropriate garb for the both of them. Thanks to narrative convenience, they promptly land themselves in a (roughly) Holmesian mystery - the pathologist working for the local police department (Professor George Litefoot) has been examining a body that had been found floating in the Thames. Normal enough, really, except for the hairs that Four finds on the body. Hairs, in fact, that look like the hairs of a giant rat. (There’s also been a minor rash of young woman going missing off the streets but people mostly don’t seem to think much of that.)

In any case, a brief exploration into the sewers turns up some very giant rats - and the trail ends up leading Four and Leela to the Palace theatre... and to one Li H’sen Chiang. A stage magician by trade, he’s been stealing the young girls off the streets so that his Master - the great god Weng-Chiang - can feed off their lifeforce. This being Doctor Who, however, “Weng-Chiang” is not actually a god. Instead, he’s a war criminal from the 51st century by the name of Magnus Greel, who’s escaped via a primitive time travel device.

As it turns out, the device is in Litefoot’s house. Greel, in turn, steals it and very nearly manages to get away before the Doctor throws a wrench into his plans and ends up knocking Greel into his own lifeforce extractor (rendering the time machine inoperative). With things handled, Four treats everyone involved in saving the day to a round of muffins before he and Leela are off again, this time to... a lighthouse. In a slightly more modern era, although Leela is still in period-appropriate clothes. Naturally, narrative convenience has once again ensured that something interesting is just starting - in this case, a thick fog has come up out of literally nowhere after a strange light fell to land. There’s also the matter of one of the lighthouse keepers having just been electrocuted.

As one does, Four and Leela and Four set about exploring although one of the remaining keepers doesn’t seem to like them. Nor are matters helped any when a privately owned ship founders on the rocks nearby. The survivors are brought into the lighthouse, but this only makes things worse, especially when Four accidentally locks the cause of all the trouble in with them - a Rutan, which are basically electric jellyfish and also locked in eternal war with the Sontarans. One by one everyone in the lighthouse except Four, Leela and the Rutan die - mostly on account of the Rutan being an electric jellyfish and thus not at all safe to touch.

Eventually, Four manages to rig up first a makeshift explosive to destroy the Rutan and then converts the lighthouse itself into a a sort of laser beam that destroys the incoming Rutan mothership. Now well and truly alone on a godforsaken spit of rocky land, the pair decide that it’s best to make for other climes and return to the TARDIS. However, their travels are not entirely smooth - while the TARDIS is in flight, she runs afoul a virus lurking in deep space, which decides that the Doctor’s brain is the perfect host for its nucleus. Elsewhere, a similar thing is happening to the crew of a space shuttle making for Titan; the infected crewmen kill the workers they’re meant to relieve, and when Four picks up the ensuing distress signal he too makes for Titan, not knowing that he’s been affected.

Given the virus tries to make him kill Leela (who happens to be immune), he catches on pretty quickly, and puts himself into a self-induced coma to prevent the virus from taking over completely. Meanwhile, Leela and one of the crew members rush him to the nearby space hospital, where it’s hoped that the local specialist - Professor Marius - will be able to help him. Unfortunately, the crewmember is also infected, and sets about infecting the various hospital staff. Meanwhile, with Marius’ help Four has himself and Leela cloned, shrunk down to microscopic size, and injected into his brain to do battle with the viral nucleus. In order to keep Four safe, Leela takes the Professor’s robot dog (K-9) and works to fight off the infected people.

Sadly, the clones don’t manage to live long enough to defeat the virus, which escapes out from Four’s mind and is brought up to real size. However, the death of the Leela-clone grants Four her immunity and he, Marius, and K-9 manage to synthesize a cure; Marius sets about distributing the cure to the hospital staff, while Leela and Four take K-9 to Titan to fix things there. Needless to say, things don’t go entirely well, to the point that Four has to blow up Titan to fix everything. In the aftermath, Marius lets Four take K-9 with him, since Marius will be returning to Earth shortly and will be unable to take him.

Naturally, K-9 promptly breaks down just as the TARDIS picks up a strange signal on Earth. Someone, it seems, is using a time scanner and with good reason, since they’ve just found a human skull that is far older than it can conceivably be, namely, in the ballpark of 12 million years old. Once he arrives on the scene, Four quickly comes to the conclusion that the skull is actual a relic of the Fendahl - creatures from an ancient Time Lord legend. The scientists who had found the skull in the first place don’t believe him as is par for the course, which results in one of them being turned into the Fendahl Core. Conveniently, as slug-type creatures, the Fendahleen made by the Core turn out to be rather weak to salt, and Four’s allies use that to good effect while he rigs up something that will basically implode the manor house the scientists were using.

In the process, he manages to explain that it’s entirely possible that the habit of throwing salt over ones shoulder came about more or less because of the Fendahl, and he takes the skull that had caused the whole mess with him before destroying the manor house. The skull he drops into the nearest supernova, before getting down to the important business of repairing K-9. With that done, the TARDIS promptly lands them on Pluto. Oddly, it seems to have not only a breathable atmosphere but also six suns. Explanations, however, are not far away, courtesy of a factory worker Four and Leela manage to talk out of committing suicide. As it turns out, Pluto is owned by “The Company” which imposes ridiculous taxes on just about anything; the worker had been trying to commit suicide because he couldn’t pay his debts.

Instead, Leela and Four take him into the undercity, whereupon they’re either captured by the Resistance, who offers one other critical piece of information - the populace is kept in check by a gas that induces a sort of calmness - and then promptly send Four back up to the surface to engage in some petty thievery for them. As is the way of things, Four ends up captured, released in short order, and then very nearly branded with a hot iron for his troubles when he returns to the Resistance. He does, however, eventually convince them to... actually start resisting.

The first order of business is turning off the gas keeping people calm, and with that gone and the right prompting people turn on the Tax Gatherer more than a little violently. Four and Leela, meanwhile, go to speak with the “Collector” running the place, and with a little bit of poking, Four convinces the computer running everything that bankruptcy is inevitable, where upon the Collector has something of a breakdown and reverts to his natural Usurian form - a simple fungus. With things now firmly in the hands of the people, Four and Leela again take their leave - their job is done.

When the TARDIS rematerializes, it’s on a spaceship crewed by Minyans - a race that sees Time Lords as gods, thanks to the one and only Time Lords as a whole bothered to interfere with another race’s development. Needless to say, the crew are more than a little surprised to be in the presence of god, but explain that they’ve been on a quest for the last hundred thousand years - to find the lost “race banks” of their species and the ship carrying. Eventually, and with the Doctor’s help, they find the ship buried in a planet so new that the surface has yet to solidify.

From there, the plot basically turns into “the quest for the Golden Fleece IN SPACE”, right down to fire breathing dragons (lasers guarding the trunk of the “Tree of Life”) and mad oracles (the ship’s computer, which tries to trick the Minyans into making off with fission bombs as opposed the actual banks). In the end, both the living inhabitants of the planet ruled by the oracle/computer and the race banks are brought on board the Minyan spaceship, and the explosion from the bombs is used to help the ship reach escape velocity. With everything proceeding as well as can be expected, Four and Leela sneak quietly away. They land on what is presumably another alien spaceship, although the camera angles hide who or what these aliens are and Four has insisted that Leela stays on the TARDIS and has locked the doors and viewports besides. After a moment of discussion further with the unseen aliens, Four signs his name to a contract granting him “complete control” over the Time Lords and then proceeds to rush into the TARDIS and make for Gallifrey with all due haste.

He’s barely been landed ten minutes, when he begins acting quite entirely unlike himself - he still insists that Leela stay in the TARDIS, promptly claims the Presidency of High Council, and demands that the coronation take place at once. He also demands that the presidential chambers be redecorated to his design, redecoration to take place immediately. In any case, he is duly crowned Lord President of Gallifrey with all the attendant privileges it grants. ...Not that he starts in act any more himself. Instead, he banishes Leela to the wilderness outside of the Capitol, spends an inordinate amount of time either sneaking about or yelling at people and generally seems to be quite a proper tyrant of a president. He also takes down the transduction barriers that had been shielding Gallifrey from attack, and lets the aliens he’d been speaking to earlier invade and take over Gallifrey - and seems fairly unapologetic about it too.

As it shortly turns out, there has been reason for the madness. Gallifrey’s new overlords are the Vardans - a species that can overhear and travel along any sort of broadcast wavelength, up to and including thought itself. Only the presidential office - now lead-lined thanks to the Doctor’s recommended redecoration - and the TARDIS herself are safe, and the Doctor needs the Vardans to come out of their immaterial travel forms before he can banish them back to their home planet. In the end, he manages to gain their trust enough for them to do so, and with two episodes left in the serial he does something terribly clever and sends the Vardans home. Cheers abound! But then the cheers abruptly stop as a new threat appears - the Sontarans, who have pretty much just used the Vardans as a key to get into Gallifrey so they can conquer all of time!

Four and Leela - who has just recently returned from her earlier exile - promptly run into the TARDIS and merry chase ensues. Eventually, Four manages to get away just long enough to build a piece of forbidden Time Lord technology - the demat gun - and uses it to destroy the Sontarans. In the process however, the gun destroys itself as well and also wipes Four’s mind of all of the events of the serial. He doesn’t even remember having been Lord President! Leela, meanwhile, decides she wants to stay on Gallifrey since she’s fallen in love with one of the chancellory guards and K-9 decides to stay with Leela. Alone, Four returns to the TARDIS... only to haul out a box marked K-9 Mk II. He’s only just finished getting the new K-9 in working order and decided that what the two of them really need is vacation when, life, as it is wont to, intervenes.

This particular intervention comes courtesy of the White Guardian - a godlike being who happens to be more or less the personification of order and good. As it turns out, he wants Four to go out and collect the six pieces of the Key to Time. What it does and why he happens to need isn’t mentioned, but there is, apparently, a deadline by which the pieces have to be collected (although the White Guardian doesn’t specific when exactly it needs to be assembled by.) In any case, Four grudgingly agrees to look for the Key to Time and even more grudgingly agrees to be given an assistant as well before returning to the TARDIS. The White Guardian’s last words before he leaves are to tell him that there is also a Black Guardian, who will be after the pieces of the Key as well.

Once inside the TARDIS, Four promptly runs into his new assistant - a young Time Lady, fresh out academy and burdened with the exceedingly unfortunate name of Romanadvoratrelundar. Needless to say, she and the Doctor don’t get along at all, mostly because she can not only out-smug Four, but because she got better grades then he did at the Academy. However, she has also been given the core to the Key of Time by the the White Guardian which can track down the location of the pieces to the Key. Putting the core to good use, they promptly arrive on the planet Ribos - a remote and icy planet - and track the piece to the local repository of royal treasure, where the Key has disguised as a lump of jethrik - a rare and valuable mineral.

Things, however are not entirely as it seems. The jethrik has been planted there by a conman who, along with his accomplice, is trying to sell an allegedly jethrik-rich planet to one Graff Vynda-K, a former dictator who wants to restore his own glory. As luck would have it, the scam succeeds - the conmen manage to acquire a “down payment” from the Graff; come morning, both it and the jethrik are gone. Unfortunately, the Graff catches onto the scam and both the conmen as well as Four and Romana are forced to make a run for it. All of them end up in the local catacombs, followed shortly thereafter by the Graff, his loyal bodyguards, and the local prophetess - the latter of which has been predicting that only one of them will make it out alive. She seems to have spoken truly, too, as one by one the guards die, followed by the prophetess herself and the Graff’s second in command at which point the Graff promptly jumps off slippery slope, and gives his last remaining guard a bomb primed to explode before charging off into the caves. He’s only just made it off-screen when there’s an explosion - the guard turns had been none other than Four in a conveniently face-hiding helmet and had used slight of hand to switch the jethrik for the bomb.

Back outside, he and Romana finally return to the TARDIS, and use the core to convert the jethrik into the the first segment to the Key to Time.

From there, the next stop is Calufrax. But here too there are problems. For one thing, the planet is far too warm to be Calufrax (yet another ice planet) and for another, the tracer is picking up the signal of the next segment everywhere. Eventally Four and Romana manage to figure out that this is the planet Zanak, which has been hollowed out and had engines fitted to it. At the hands of the captain - who happens to be a cyborg - Zanak materializes itself around smaller planet and mines all the material wealth out of it. The captain then mounts the shriveled remains of the planets in a bizarre sort of trophy room.

As it eventually turns out, the actual brains behind the operation is the captain’s nursemaid, who in turn, turns out to be nothing but a holographic projection of Zanak’s former Queen who has been using time dams and the forces generated in the trophy room to stay forever young. However, with Calufrax now drained and shrunk the Captain declares it’s time to move on... to Earth. Four, naturally, is having absolutely none of this and with the help of the local resistance - a telepathic gestalt known collectively as the Mentiads - manages to very literally throw a spanner into the works. Not long thereafter, the Captain rebels, and is killed by Xanxia, who is herself killed by one of the locals.

Once everyone’s clear, the bridge is duly blown up, whereupon Romana and Four return to the TARDIS and thanks to the clever application of technobabble manage to fling the now-shrunken Calufrax into the time vortex for them to pick up - the whole planet itself had been the segment to the Key all along, and it’s now a much more manageable size thanks to the captain’s work. It’s at some point after he and Romana have picked up the second segment to the Key that Four finds himself in the Realm of Dreams.