The Doctor gets recruited by the ultimate cosmic busybody and lands in the middle of a medieval con job gone wrong.
Short Synopsis
The White Guardian (basically “God, but with more smugness and patio furniture”) sends the Doctor on a quest to collect the six segments of the Key to Time, a cosmic doohickey that holds the universe together. His first stop: the snowy planet Ribos, where two interstellar con artists are trying to sell the place to a deposed tyrant. Somewhere in the middle of all the scams, politics, and snowdrifts lies Segment One.
Extended Storyline
The adventure begins with the Doctor being forcibly yanked out of time and space to a sort of celestial tea party. Here he meets the White Guardian, a powerful being who looks suspiciously like a retired civil servant in a deck chair. The Guardian explains that the Key to Time — a device that keeps the entire universe in balance — has been split into six segments. Naturally, he wants the Doctor to fetch them, because nothing says “cosmic destiny” like a glorified scavenger hunt.
To sweeten the deal (or complicate it), the Guardian assigns the Doctor a new assistant: Romana, a young Time Lady fresh out of the Academy. She’s brainy, logical, and unimpressed with the Doctor’s chaotic approach to, well, everything. Their dynamic is basically “grumpy genius meets smug honor student,” which immediately sets sparks flying.
Their first mission takes them to Ribos, a medieval-style world with endless snow, fur hats, and enough candlelit corridors to drive the BBC lighting crew to despair. The Doctor and Romana, with K-9 in tow, discover that Ribos is currently the stage for a delightfully silly scam. Two conmen, Garron and Unstoffe, are trying to sell the planet to the exiled tyrant Graff Vynda-K.
The Graff, by the way, is a proper space despot: loud, violent, perpetually angry, and with fashion choices that scream “galactic warlord chic.” He’s desperate to buy Ribos, thinking it’s rich in the rare mineral jethrik. Of course, Garron and Unstoffe have planted a piece of jethrik in a local relic to sweeten the deal. It’s the ultimate “used planet salesman” trick.
Complications abound. The Doctor realizes that the lump of jethrik isn’t just a convenient con prop — it’s actually the first segment of the Key to Time, disguised by its chameleon properties. Cue a frantic race between the Graff, the conmen, and our heroes to nab the rock before everyone kills each other.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of comic business with Ribos’s superstitious guards, a fortune-teller who takes bribes in candle wax, and poor Unstoffe, who hides in an ice cave while befriending a lonely old man. It’s very much a story of small, character-driven moments, wrapped in con artistry and cosmic stakes.
Eventually, the Graff Vynda-K goes full berserker, screaming, killing, and charging into the catacombs like a maniac with trust issues. In the chaos, the Doctor and Romana recover the jethrik — sorry, Segment One — and slip away, leaving Garron and Unstoffe to survive on their wits (and possibly try to sell more dodgy planets). The Graff, fittingly, meets his end by triggering his own bomb, which is what happens when you mix greed, paranoia, and a refusal to read the instruction manual.
With Segment One secured, Romana smugly reminds the Doctor that she’s already proving her worth. The Doctor grumbles, but secretly knows she’s probably going to outsmart him at least half the time. And so, the great Key to Time adventure begins.