Hello everybody! We're back! It’s time for a new series of adventures in time and space, with the 16th season of Lady Penelope’s Odyssey! Allons-y!
Episode 1: Making Prehistory
Lady
Penelope welcomes a new (if familiar) travelling companion on board of the
TARDIS: the young tech wiz, temporal refugee and budding ethnologist Xara
Anderson, whose family she brought to Avalon (see season 15). And for her first
expedition as a fully-fledged time traveller, Xara has chosen to visit the Pleistocene,
when Neanderthal Men walk the Earth…
Episode 2: Ziggurat!
Mesopotamia,
March 1930. After a failed reunion with Agatha Christie, who has forgotten everything
about their encounter in the Land of Fiction, Penelope goes all archaeological,
uncovering the true purpose of the Sumerian ziggurats before preventing fanatical
agents of the nefarious Vril Society from usurping their dormant power. Watch
and learn, Indy!
Since Xara’s desire to
become a real time-traveller had been mentioned several times during the
previous season, making her a fully-fledged companion seemed like the perfect way to
start this new season… As for the plot of this episode, it was (very loosely)
inspired by some elements of the DW novel “Only Human” by Gareth Roberts –
without the Osterbergers and the Hy-Bractors (which change pretty much
everything). After a memorable encounter with a friendly (if awed) tribe of
Neanderthals, Penelope and Xara met a trio of very self-righteous,
scientifically-inclined and morally-blinkered aliens known as the Progenitors
of Klern, devoted to the One Great Task of accelerating the natural
evolutionary process of the sentient species they deemed worthy of becoming
fully Advanced Cultures.
In the end, Lady Penelope ended up taking up yet another new passenger on board of the TARDIS: an unnaturally “Advanced” Neanderthal man (shades of Nimrod from “Ghost Light” here) called Kido, who could not be allowed to stay among his people without running the risk of derailing the whole (pre)history of mankind… But as we’ll soon see (spoilers!), Kido will soon find a unique destiny somewhere (else) in time…
While Kido was recovering from his cognitive overload in the peaceful environment of the TARDIS, the second episode saw Lady Penelope seek out Agatha Christie in 1930 Iraq – only to discover that the writer had completely forgotten their first encounter, which took place in the Land of Fiction (see HERE for the whole story) so the scenario quickly took an unexpected turn, with Penelope making some fascinating discoveries about Mesopotamian Ziggurats and telluric energy – the “power of the Earth” which has played an important role in our Penelope-verse since our very first season and to which our Time Lady’s seventh incarnation is particularly attuned, since her last regeneration…
Next stop: The Sumerian city of Uruk… in the time of the great hero-king Gilgamesh!
