Nyssa is cycling through the French lanes; Tegan is running a bar… and the Doctor is nowhere to be found…

Jonathan Barnes pens the second story in the Conflicts of Interest box set for the season 20 TARDIS team, and it’s a suitably labyrinthine tale that reminded me of some of Marc Platt’s early work on the New Adventures in terms of things feeling familiar, yet wrong. The first episode takes its time to establish that wrongness, focusing firstly on Nyssa and her encounter with the inhabitant of a small French locale that’s near some “fortifications”, and then gradually bringing Tegan into her orbit – but do the two know each other or not? Things are left murky even by the time we reach the first cliffhanger (which, suitably unusually, is pretty much the same as the second!) but Barnes is expert at putting the pieces of a puzzle in front of an audience and letting them make educated guesses – in the same way the Doctor does – which might not turn out to be right.

Ken Bentley has assembled a strong cast for this story, and also draws some excellent performances from the three leads. I’m hoping this is the start of a run of adventures for this team set at this point, given the nature of the final scene between the three – I commented on the artificiality of the conflict in the first story of the set, and it’d be a shame if that undercut the rift that’s established here, which isn’t something that the key character involved would shake off that easily. There’s an increasing danger with the number of stories that are being interpolated into “gaps” in the broadcast run that any emotional development will be forced to be short-lived to get us back to the status quo of the 1980s, but there’s strong potential here.

Verdict: A puzzle that takes its time over the solution, setting up some interesting potential developments for this TARDIS team. 8/10

Paul Simpson

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