The Doom of Aseti V is a story within a story. The Eighth Doctor tells it while sitting in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco with his old friend, Grace Holloway. Having written it, I really wished I had done something different. The Tea Garden is such a fantastic setting, it would have been good to write a story entirely set within it, perhaps involving an alien hunt with Grace at his side as she was in their first and only adventure. However, all is not lost on that front. Although I didn’t return to the Tea Garden, I have completed a story in which Grace and the Eighth Doctor visit Kyoto and are embroiled in some rich Japanese culture. In that light it doesn’t seem so bad not to have got the most out of the San Francisco Japanese Tea Garden.

Aseti V was partially inspired by a computer game called Myst that I played so many years ago that the disc no longer works as it isn’t XP compatible. It used to be the best selling game ever until Sims took it over in 2002, so I probably don’t have to describe it in too much detail. But two things stand out in my memory. One is a scenario involving an old fashioned tall ship. The other is a creepy bedroom that, depending on what dials have been turned is either beautifully turned out or decaying.

The first scene in this story, in which The Doctor finds Professor Marcus Halligan dying in his laboratory/bedroom is my take on the decaying bedroom of Myst. I don’t think I quite captured the creepiness of the Myst scenario, but I wasn’t in any way trying to copy the game. I just used it as a jumping off point for this story.

The ship, of course, also started as a Myst scene, but again this story went a different direction. Time jumping back and forwards with people getting rapidly old or regressed so far back that they become unviable embryos is a theme that has been done before in science fiction. I’ve used it myself before in a Theta Sigma story, The Rejuvenator and a New Lords of Time instalment, Two Weddings and a Security Lockdown. This is another variation on the theme. This time, The Doctor does manage to save some of the victims using his zero cabinet. There’s a happy ending for some.

The real point to this story is to show The Doctor feeling a sense of failure because he was unable to save the vast majority of victims of the uncontrolled time anomalies on Aseti V. He knows his best wasn’t good enough this time and it hurts him.

But the TARDIS brought him to the one person in the universe who could help him come to terms with that hurt. Grace Holloway, a cardiologist, is somebody who knows what it is like to lose patients. She has been there and done it, and she fully understands what The Doctor is going through. She can help him mend his broken hearts. Perhaps they might even take up where they left off the last time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst

http://www.inetours.com/Pages/SFNbrhds/Japanese_Tea_Garden.html
http://www.deaflion.com/entertainment/golden-gate-park/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Tea_Garden_(San_Francisco,_California)