Hot on the heels of their defeat of the Daleks on Spiridon, the Doctor and Jo become embroiled in another Skarosian scheme…

We are now, quite rightly, at the point with reviews of Big Finish’s Third Doctor Adventures where discussion of Tim Treloar’s performance as the Time Lord risks repeating the compliments from previous occasions. If his recreation of Jon Pertwee’s time at the TARDIS helm wasn’t as strong as it is, it would have been an extremely risky move to recreate the final scene of Planet of the Daleks before starting this adventure – instead it feels like that morph that we’ve got used to seeing advertising David Bradley’s recreation of William Hartnell for this Christmas’ special. We know it’s not quite the same person, but the resemblance is so acute that any minor differences can be overlooked.

Treloar has been massively helped by some of Katy Manning’s best work recreating Jo Grant, with the give and take between the Doctor and Jo feeling exactly as it did back in the early 1970s. There are times during this four-part story that it seems as if an old audio from those days has resurfaced.

That, of course, is also helped by writer/director Nick Briggs’ love of the period, and its Dalek stories in particular. This feels like a Terry Nation story (with its inevitable character named Del!) with elements of old war films factored in – The Guns of Navarone in particular coming to mind in the final episode – but with a certain amount of 21st century filtering. The relationship between Del and his wife is central to the piece and its themes, but never feels pushed too far into the spotlight,

Briggs has brought together a strong ensemble, with some doubling up on characters that I admit I didn’t realise until listening to the extras. Some of the vocal choices are rather different from those you might expect, and add an edge to the characters that a more straightforward performance might have missed. David Nagel’s sound design and Jamie Robertson’s sometimes very-Dudley Simpson-esque score mesh well.

Verdict: The Dalek story we didn’t realise we’d missed till now. 9/10

Paul Simpson