Season 11, Episodes 9-10

Episode 9: Facing the Dragon

Can the bonds of love and destiny survive and transcend regenerations? This question brings Lady Penelope back to the Otherworld of the Tanu to stand before her royal lover (and former enemy) King Fenn – only to find that the tormented monarch is about to face a mortal ordeal of his own, with the future of his kingdom hanging in the balance…

Episode 10: The Lost Abbey

Suffolk, 1911. Lady Penelope teams up with psychic detective Everett Blake to investigate the ruins of a medieval abbey where two Cambridge men have mysteriously disappeared. What sinister pact did the Last Abbot of St-Waldred seal with forces better left undisturbed?  A not-so-classic ghost story featuring Weeping Angels, Reapers and Montague Rhodes James… 

Notes on Episode 9: This episode was entirely based on Sylvie's wish to have the newly-regenerated Penelope return to the character of King Fenn, who had played a major role in her previous incarnation. We had no preconceived idea of what would happen when they'd meet again face to face: would it result in a painful or friendly separation? In a continued or renewed relationship? In a somewhat unresolved situation?  In the end, their bond was renewed yet changed - "regenerated" if you will and Penelope decided to spend three (unplayed) years without travelling in time - taking the "long path" for a short while... 

Notes on Episode 10: I've been wanting to do a scenario with the great Montague Rhodes James as a NPC for AGES but could never quite find the proper way to do it, since involving MRJ in explicitly fantastic events (i.e. like Shakespeare in "The Shakespeare Code" or Charles Dickens in "The Unquiet Dead") would not have felt right, considering this author's well-known "reticence", to use a typically Jamesian term... But this episode gave me the perfect opportunity, since it was also the first one involving a new (occasional) player-character (the Edwardian psychic detective Everett Blake, played by our longtime friend Cyrille): this 'teamp-up' focus allowed me to use MRJ as a source of precious scholary information and (yes) "warnings to the curious", without actually confronting him to the menace (and then some) of the Weeping Angels - not to mention the Reapers and the decaying, half-immortal Last Abbot of St-Waldred. I also peppered the story with all sorts of Jamesian references - Cambridge academia, scholarly bits of church history, lonely ruins in the Suffolk landscape and a central villain bearing some deliberate resemblance to the typically Jamesian evils practitioners of the dark arts found in stories like "Number 13", "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" or "Lost Hearts".