The one where the Doctor ditches Peri for a new companion mid-trial, plays space Agatha Christie on a cruise ship, and discovers that houseplants are out for blood.
Short Synopsis
On a luxury space liner, the Doctor and new companion Mel stumble into a murder mystery where the culprits aren’t shady guests but homicidal garden weeds with a grudge.
Extended Storyline
The story jumps forward in the Doctor’s timeline, where he’s suddenly traveling with Mel — a carrot-juice-obsessed computer programmer with boundless optimism and a voice that could shatter glass. Poor Peri isn’t even mentioned, which is either merciful or callous depending on how you felt about her last outing.
The setting? The Hyperion III, a space cruise liner that looks suspiciously like the QE2 with some glitter stuck on. The Doctor and Mel arrive just in time for things to go completely Agatha Christie: mysterious murders, shifty passengers, and an atmosphere of paranoia. Only instead of a polite Belgian detective with a moustache, the ship has the Sixth Doctor in a technicolor explosion of an outfit.
The guest list includes:
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Professor Lasky, a botanist with a guilty secret.
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Bruchner, her jittery assistant, who clearly knows more than he should.
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Commodore Travers, a space-captain-turned-grumpy-principal, whose main hobby is being annoyed at the Doctor.
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And a whole bunch of doomed crew members who might as well be wearing red shirts.
The murders start piling up, and suspicion flies around faster than the ship’s shuttles. But eventually the truth sprouts: the real killers are the Vervoids, genetically engineered plant creatures created by Lasky’s team. Originally intended as a new slave race (because what could possibly go wrong with that?), the Vervoids have other ideas. Namely: wiping out all animal life. They’re basically triffids on steroids, with faces like shriveled bell peppers and a tendency to strangle anything that moves.
The Doctor and Mel rush around the ship trying to keep order, solve the murders, and not get strangled by the horticultural mafia. Mel screams a lot, the Doctor chews scenery with speeches, and the Commodore wishes he’d called in sick. Bruchner panics, hijacks the ship, and promptly crashes — proving yet again that nervous assistants make terrible pilots.
In the end, the Doctor realizes the only way to stop the Vervoids is genocide. He floods the ship’s hydroponic decks with a chemical that accelerates their life cycle, aging them into piles of dead mulch. Problem solved… but also morally horrifying, because he just wiped out an entire species. Cue the Valeyard gleefully popping back up in the courtroom to accuse him of genocide, proving that using your own defense evidence can backfire spectacularly.