Season 17, Episodes 9-10

Episode 9: Deus Ex Machina

Rome, 1958. It’s not all vespas, cinecitta and dolce vita… On the trail of a mysterious temporal anomaly, Lady Penelope and Indira uncover the Vatican’s greatest secret (forget about the Code, the Grail, the Tomb, the Shroud or the Spear): Father Ernetti’s chronovisor, a miracle machine that sees into the past – and is also about to shatter History as we know it…

Episode 10: Foretold

Having rebooted 2000 years of History to save the continuum from the ravages of Father Ernetti’s machine, Penelope must now track down the dissonances and divergences resulting from the temporal shockwave – starting with the French Royal Court in 1555, at the time of Queen Catherine de Medici, the poet Ronsard and the prophet Nostradamus. Intrigue ensues.

This season (season 17!) is divided into two main arcs or half-seasons. Episode 8, with its climactic confrontation in Carcosa, marked the conclusion of the first sequence, which focused on Penelope’s old enemies the Porphyrs, their fearsome Three Mothers and the use of opium as a gateway to their nightmarish city…

Episode 9 kickstarted the second sequence, which will take Penelope and her current traveling companion Indira at various “weak points” in History as-we-know-it, in the wake of a wave of temporal chaos created by Father Ernetti’s time-viewing machine – and yes, this is actually based on real, historical events (or, to put it more correctly, on a real, historical hoax). I had never heard of Ernetti’s chronovisor before reading about it in Kenneth Hite’s excellent Suppressed Transmission 2 sourcebook – and my reaction, as you can imagine, was: “Oh no, it’s too good to be true”. 

After having absorbed as much background data as possible on Father Ernetti’s story (including a very readable French novel, from which I pilfered quite a few ideas), I decided that this stuff would not only make a great episode but would provide me with the perfect “continuum-impacting event” to build a series of interconnected pseudo-historical episodes!

Episode 10 involved Queen Catherine of Medici, the illustrious French poet Pierre de Ronsard and the ‘prophet’ Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus. I tried to depict this famous (but quite mysterious) personage as a complex character, borrowing some weird concepts from Valerio Evangelisti’s trilogy of novels Le Roman de Nostradamus and giving them a Whovian spin – the basic idea was that Nostradamus had no real precognitive power… but suddenly found himself assailed by real, powerful and terrifying visions of what the Future had in store for France!  Penelope’s objective was to unravel the mystery of these unprecedented premonitions and keep History on the right track, while navigating Queen Catherine de Medici’s intrigue-laden entourage… 

Precognitive stuff aside, the scenario played out like a pure historical episode, focusing on psychology, interactions and cultural savvy. In the end, the "1555 weak point" was fixed, leaving Penelope with some unanswered questions about a mysterious entity (or place?) called Abraxas... and more "weak points" scattered throughout the continuum to investigate BIITL (Before It Is Too Late). To be continued!