The Doctor is arrested while trying to thwart the schemes of the Nine…

The second part of the solo adventures for Tom Baker’s Doctor from summer 2022 begins with a story whose title quite deliberately hides the nature of the antagonist – only for it to be contained within a box set that’s named after him! (OK, John Heffernan is on the cover, but even so…) It’s huge fun, and a great romp, with both Baker and Heffernan sounding like they’re having the time of their lives – and the rest of the cast throwing themselves into it as well. It’s another of those stories where you hear the castlist at the end and marvel at the number of actors involved – it’s considerably fewer than you’d anticipate.

The Nine isn’t a character that everyone can write well: the balance between his own personality and the earlier personas has to be maintained so that they have a degree of credibility (particularly given that we hear them embodied by other actors in stories set later down the Nine’s timeline). Guy Adams gets it spot on with a story that picks up on various bits of continuity within the TV show but never makes it feel like they’re being evoked unnecessarily. The Nine’s plans start off grandiosely, but then become even wilder – and Adams takes both him and the Doctor (along with a very unwilling assistant, in the form of Richard Dixon’s Inspector Probert) into a highly unusual environment, which Jamie Robertson’s sound design brings to life very well.

Verdict: To an extent, it feels like a Douglas Adams-era tale set in the middle of the Holmes/Hinchcliffe time, but that unexpected element adds to its power – one of the best Tom Baker tales of recent times. 9/10

Paul Simpson

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