Cirrus@Austlit

'Everybody knows that Medea killed her own sons to avenge herself against her faithless husband, Jason. Moments before she can do so, however, Iris Wildthyme shows up and offers her a way out. Torn between conflicting emotions, Medea allows Iris to transport her into the future, where she watches a number of plays telling the story of her life from different angles, and realises that the lines from the performances have been echoing in her mind all day, even before Iris showed up. Iris claims that the emotional pressure of the famous tragedy is reaching back through Time, influencing the real Medea's actions and driving her towards an inevitable outcome; if she goes through with it, she will become an archetypal character, freed from the bounds of real history but forced to re-enact her own tragedy from the perspectives of everyone with something to say about it. Iris offers her a chance to escape all that -- but Medea demands to know whether Jason's story has survived as well, and is infuriated to learn that he's regarded as a great hero, the star of a story in which she barely appears. Wanting her husband to suffer for what he's done, Medea demands that Iris take her back home, but Tom, furious, points out that her sons don't even get names in the play; they're just innocent bystanders in Medea's tragedy. Iris admits that she has tried once before to intervene in an archetypal tragedy, but young Juliet Capulet just wouldn't listen to her. Medea returns home, but rather than kill her children, she fakes their deaths and escapes with them on the bus. Jason still suffers in the belief that his children have been murdered, but they are alive and well, living anonymously with their mother in Athens in a different era. However, since the real Medea chose not to become the archetype, the archetypal Medea has sprung into existence on the bus, manifested by the Universe itself. Iris explains to the archetypal Medea that she's tired of having fluffy, small adventures; she wants to do big things, and she needs a big Character by her side if she's to do so. Medea thus agrees to go out into the Universe with her new companions and raise a little hell.'

Source: drwhoguide.com (http://www.drwhoguide.com/nw_n01.htm). Sighted 20/5/11