Spoilers

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find a society where death should simply mean a new body…

Will Hadcroft’s tale for the Season 6 TARDIS team is read by Frazer Hines, who delivers his usual distinctive take on Patrick Troughton’s Doctor as well as a Scots accent for Jamie and a softer rendition for Zoe – as well as the other characters. It’s a fairly traditional story in terms of its set up and resolution – the Doctor’s arrival coincides with something going seriously wrong with a society, and he and his friends have to deal with both the immediate consequences as well as finding and sorting the roots of the problem.

Where the spoilers come in (and stop reading now if you’ve not guessed it from the description or the image on the cover!) is that the people responsible for the situation are Time Lords, and although there’s an attempt initially to disguise this with talk of the “ruling classes” of the planet, and “those on the outside”… there then comes the sound of a staser, which we all know from The Deadly Assassin onwards (and of course multiple Big Finish productions). Which is then referred to as a Gallifreyan weapon…

Credit to Hadcroft for ensuring that Jamie and Zoe are kept out of the way from any direct mention of the Time Lords (although Zoe comes across as rather daft for not cottoning on to the correlations between TARDISes) but for me, one of the lovely things about this period is that – with the exception of the Meddling Monk – between An Unearthly Child and The War Games, we don’t have lots of other Time Lords. Big Finish muddied this water with their introduction of an early Master (although really I guess David McIntee’s use of the Master in The Dark Path was one of the earliest culprits) but I do like the stories that maintain that true-to-TV element.

There are some well written and played scenes where the Doctor and others communicate with an inadvertently created gestalt, and I’d have much preferred more of that than getting into the Time Lords’ involvement, with perhaps the Doctor wondering if it’s linked to his own people, rather than being so on the nose with it.

Verdict: An enjoyable story but one which incorporates elements from out of its era perhaps unnecessarily. 7/10

Paul Simpson

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