6×10 March 1, 2002
Shangri-La (Serial 83)
Setting: Tibet, 1930
Regular Cast: Hugh Laurie (The Doctor), Lee Thompson Young (Leo), Katherine Heigl (Ruth)
Guest Cast: Julian Richings (The Toymaker), Jerry Rector (Ken Horace), Ping Wu (Abbot), Terry Chen (Lobsang), Koji Kataoka (Lama)
Plot: High in the Himalayas, a mountaineer’s camp is attacked by a monstrous creature. Only the leader, Sir Ken Horace, survives, fleeing in terror. In the dark, he slides down a mountain slope, ending up in a snow drift at the edge of a gorge. Injured and freezing, he is found by a monk. Aboard the TARDIS, the Doctor tries to take Leo and Ruth back to their own time to visit Leo’s mother. However, the orbital drift compensator malfunctions, causing the TARDIS to materialize on the wrong side of the planet. The Doctor is delighted, though, to discover that they have landed in the hidden monastery at Shangri-La. The Doctor had visited some years earlier in an unseen adventure involving a vampire. The travelers are greeted with some suspicion by the warrior monk Lobsang, who is troubled by so many visitors in a short time. The monks have been helping Horace recover after what he claims was a Yeti attack, though his memories are blocked by trauma. Horace’s expedition had been attempting to summit Everest, more than 20 years early. The abbot has tried to teach Horace meditation techniques to free his memories. There have been other Yeti attacks outside Shangri-La in recent months. Horace is granted an audience with the high lama, hoping he can restore his memory. He returns acting strangely, and claims to have remembered seeing the Doctor when he was attacked. Though the abbot does not believe the Doctor guilty, when another monk is killed by a Yeti, Lobsang demands the Doctor face trial by combat. During the Doctor’s “trial”, he refuses to harm Lobsang, and instead deflects an attack into a tapestry, which falls from the wall revealing an ancient mosaic of the Doctor defeating the vampire. The abbot calls off the fight and asks Horace to recant his accusation, but the Doctor discovers a winding key embedded in Horace’s neck. The lama reveals himself as the Toymaker, who has turned the mountaineer into an automaton. Their last battle had left the Toymaker weakened. He had come to Shangri-La to recover his powers, but the monks’ training left them ill-suited to his games. He orders the yeti, actually giant wind-up toys, to destroy Shangri-La unless the Doctor consents to a game: a race against his automaton to the summit of Everest with the Yeti in pursuit. The Doctor agrees, taking Ruth with him as Leo remains to help protect the monastery. As a seasoned mountaineer, Horace takes an early lead, laying traps to delay the Doctor. Before Horace can reach the summit, he is attacked by Lobsang, who sacrifices himself to push Horace from the mountain. The Doctor nears the summit but refuses to finish the climb and calls for the Toymaker, threatening to end the game in a draw. Below, the Yeti breach Shangri-La, cornering Leo and the abbot. The Toymaker tries to goad the Doctor into continuing to the top, offering to change the terms of the game, but this is a trick: Ruth is also an automaton, allowing the Toymaker to claim victory whichever team won. The Doctor accuses the Toymaker of being an impostor, since the true Toymaker would not change the rules or transform Ruth and Horace without beating them at a game first. A second Toymaker appears, chastising the lama. The story told by the fake Toymaker was largely true, but had occurred sixty years earlier. The lama had found the Toymaker’s offer of enlightenment too tempting and had lost a game to him. In his haste to leave after restoring his powers, the Toymaker left a fragment of himself within the lama, changing him into an ersatz duplicate. Too proud to allow a duplicate to defeat the Doctor, especially by cheating, the Toymaker restores the lama, Ruth, and Horace, and turns the Yeti into ordinary children’s toys. Horrified by his failures and in spite of the Doctor’s pleading, the lama surrenders himself to be turned into a toy, which the Toymaker gives to the Doctor as a reward for his “assistance”. On returning to Shangri-La, Horace elects to join the monastery in honor of Lobsang, forsaking his chance at fame for summiting Everest.