Project Lazarus : parts 1 and 2

The Doctor finally has a breakthrough with the Twilight virus, and true to his word sets the TARDIS on course to collect young Cassie and hopefully cure her. The ship overshoots and comes to land some months later after Cassie has been forced to once more go on the run from Nimrod, the chief enforcer of the Forge. All is not as it seems, though, and Cassie has become another pawn in the Forge's game to collect alien technology and capture visting species for their own ends. And doesn't the Doctor just happen to be an alien.

Why only episodes 1 and 2? Because the story moves very fast at this point, so fast that the segment concerning the sixth Doctor and Evelyn is resolved by the end of the second episode, leaving the two time travellers somewhat estranged from each other ater the horrors of the Forge. The other two episodes feature the seventh Doctor, and they will be covered later.

This story is very much about the Forge and its evils, and with two Doctors making an appearance at separate instances they are more like guest stars. The Forge have moved on from the Twillight virus and have embarked on the Lazarus project, named for the man who would not die - which is in fact a planned study of the Doctor's ability to regenerate. By forcing him to do so they want to discover the process and use it to imbibe soldiers with immortality in effect, so they set about electrocuting the Doctor. Ah torture. And man can Colin Baker wail when he needs to sell the pain.

The parallels between the Forge and the new series, Torchwood, can't be missed, although it is unlikely one affected or influenced the creation of the other. As far as suspension of disbelief goes, so long as there is UNIT there would be a secret more sinister counterpart organization somewhere, skimming off their secrets and trying to use them to their own advantage. The Forge has something that the Torchwood team do not: they act with no sense of morals and thus killing anyone in their way is not a problem.

The Doctor and Evelyn get out with their lives, but Cassie does not, and the Doctor's almost casual acceptance of her death throws Evelyn into a fit of resentment, making her wonder if maybe it's time to end this association and go home...

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