Quick! Name two famous inventors from the turn of the Twentieth Century.
If you picked Thomas Edison and Guglielmo Marconi, you are right! However, in this episode, Simon and Eugene talk about Nikola Tesla’s Night or Terror.
Episode Synopsis:
The Twentieth Century is dawning and Nikolas Tesla is having a bad day. He’s trying to find investors but it’s a hard sell. Things go from bad to worse when a man is found dead, probably by electrocution, at Tesla’s Niagara Falls facility, Wardenclyffe.
That night Tesla discovers it wasn’t his equipment at fault, someone stole some of the equipment. He also finds a mysterious floating orb and pockets it – just as the Doctor arrives and a cloaked man tries to kill them with a gun repurposed from the props department.
Uncloaked, the man appears to be the walking corpse of the man killed earlier.
They escape, along with Tesla’s secretary, Miss Skerritt, on a conveniently passing train, which also happens to have Graham, Ryan and Yaz, in period costume, on board. They go to New York City, or thereabouts.
Here Tesla is greeted with protests. The public is up in arms about his deadly Alternating Current work. A public outcry flamed by Thomas Edison, who champions the alternative current, Direct Current.
Studying the orb, the Doctor recognizes it as an Orb of Thassor, but it’s been repurposed to be something else. About that time, they spy a spy spying on them. He’s Edison’s man, so the Doctor, Graham and Ryan rush to confront Edison.
Edison, it turns out, is a nasty man, but he’s not guilty of the attempts on Tesla’s life. How do they know this? Because Edison’s spy is also a dead man and arrives and instantly kills everyone working at Edison’s Invention Factory for no obvious reason and then, less successfully, attacks Edison and our heroes.
(Note to self: remember to ask “why did the dead guy show up at Edison’s Factory and try to kill them after the later reveal of what they’re really trying to accomplish with their plan?)
Our heroes, and Edison, flee and escape, warning Yaz by mobile phone that dead people might show up… oops, too late. Dead people show up and whisk Tesla and Yaz away before the Doctor can arrive in the TARDIS.
Tesla and Yaz find themselves on a spaceship above New York. It is the ship of the Skithra, a scorpion-like, colony species and their queen – who is most definitely NOT the Racnoss queen – they have been searching to capture Tesla because he is smart and he can make things go. The Skithra are a scavenger species, stealing technology where they can find it and making it their own.
The Doctor takes Edison and fetches Miss Skerritt in the TARDIS. Skerritt reveals that Tesla had received signals from what he thought was Mars, so they go to Tesla’s Niagara Falls lab, study the readings, find the spaceship and then, for reasons not explained, the Doctor announces she cannot take the TARDIS to retrieve them, so she uses some dodgy teleport technology she picked up at a bazaar to pop up the ship, confront the Skithra Queen with some harsh words and narrowly escape with Tesla and Yaz.
Back at Niagara Falls, the Skithra threaten to destroy the entire population of the Earth if Tesla doesn’t surrender, so he agrees, but the Doctor doesn’t. They turn Tesla’s wireless power transmitter into a powerful weapon by connecting it to the TARDIS. They also use the TARDIS to generate a force field.
There’s just one catch, for reasons not adequately explained, the TARDIS, a device powered by the immense power of a captive black hole cannot power both a grotty little force field and an electric lightning generator at the same time. This means the force field has to be turned off for 30 second before they can blast the Skithra ship into smithereens. Destroying the ship will kill the queen, and the others of the colony will be… probably dead, too. Maybe. Or perhaps just angry giant scorpions.
One more catch, the queen isn’t on the ship, she led the battle. But the Doctor gives her another stern lecture about how she’d given her a chance and she was too stupid to take it and now the universe will not mourn them once she’s killed them. She then tricks her back onto the ship, and Tesla blasts it. But instead of destroying it, it just flies away. Making us all wonder why it didn’t just fly away a long time ago and search for a planet with better technology than primitive little early-twentieth century earth.
Things are looking up for Tesla now that he’s saved the world, right? Asks Yaz.
Oh no, says the Doctor, he dies penniless and mostly forgotten. But the things he thought of were later thought of by other people and made real and revolutionized the world. So, yeah, happy endings all around.
Premium
Plus
Comentarios