Big Finish Doctor Who/Recap/134 The Wreck of the Titan
In an attempt to give Jamie a nice vacation on one of history's finest cruise ships, the Doctor accidentally lands them on the Titanic shortly before its fateful crash-- but something immediately proves just a bit off about the ship, which seems to have no lower deck and only two real passengers. The Doctor and Jamie begin to investigate, but when the whole ship suddenly transforms into another ship entirely, they realize the mystery goes deeper than they ever expected.
This audio play is the second in the trilogy which began with City of Spires and ends with Legend of the Cybermen, and the second to feature an older Jamie McCrimmon traveling with the Sixth Doctor.
The Wreck of the Titan contains examples of:
- Blank Book: The books on the Titanic.
- Fictional Document: Tess of the Titanic, and a series of other alliteratively-named books about Edwardian adventuresses on famous ships that the Doctor comes across on both the Titanic and the Titan. They are apparently of dubious quality.
- Inside a Computer System: The Doctor realizes at the end that they must have traveled into a computer simulation game that is glitching and incorporating aspects of other games. It's another red herring.
- Lady of Adventure: Tess.
- Ontological Mystery: Much of the plot revolves around the Doctor and Jamie trying to figure out where exactly they are, as the idea that they are on the real Titanic is thrown out almost immediately after the start of the play.
- Public Domain Character: John Rowland and Myra Selfridge from Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan. Also, Captain Nemo.
- Red Herring: The Doctor at first believes that he and Jamie have stumbled into a theme-park re-creation of the Titanic, then suspects they are caught up in a time distortion, and finally concludes that they must have somehow become trapped in a glitching computer simulation. None of these guesses are right-- they're in the Land of Fiction.
- The Reveal: The Doctor realizes at the end of the play that he and Jamie have been in the Land of Fiction the whole time.
- Teach Her Anger: Jamie calls Myra a weak, helpless woman in order to anger her and motivate her to save herself from falling to her death.
- Whole-Plot Reference: To Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan by Morgan Robertson, a novella published in 1898 which proved eerily prescient of the sinking of the Titanic fourteen years later.