What links financial dealings on a galactic level and a London family haunted by a poltergeist….?

The Lost Stories have always been something of a mixed bag – there are some that have been recreated that were deservedly lost in the mists of time, others have been gems that we’d otherwise know little about. In some cases, there have been full scripts or synopses, but sometimes they’ve been made pretty much of whole cloth. Mind of the Hodiac, which falls firmly into the “gems we’d know little about” category, is Russell T Davies’ first Doctor Who script, penned in the mid 1980s and rediscovered during the Lockdown Who preparations (for the full story, check out our interview with Davies, Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford here). There’s a complete script for episode 1 – which has been mildly tweaked for this production – and a detailed synopsis for episode 2 from which Scott Handcock has completed the final version.

The first thing to note is that the writing styles blend extremely well – it doesn’t feel as if Davies finishes and Handcock begins, even given that the actual story style changes between episodes to an extent. Part 1 throws us back into that era of Doctor Who storytelling where the openers kept the Doctor and his companion away from the main action, and built up various threads, before the Time Lord appears and things start happening. However, whereas on screen the TARDIS scenes tended to devolve into arguments all too often, here Davies gives us a pair of travellers who know each other’s foibles and simply enjoy being together.

Meanwhile, there’s lots else going on, involving financial chicanery (and this was penned over a decade before trade dealings in SF films got a bad name in The Phantom Menace), and an alien who has some quite horrific powers (we’re at Saward  levels of graphic sound effects at times). Plus, more importantly, we’re getting to know a family whose lives have been touched by the extraordinary – in ways that we get hints of initially but which become increasingly more important to the story – and a Mysterious Government Agency who are investigating. And then Part 2 brings all these threads together. Explosively, at times.

Producer Emily Cook and director Handcock have gathered a very high powered cast alongside Baker and Langford, and it pays off – the scenes with the family need to convince on so many different levels and everyone, from youngest to oldest, does so and Annette Badland’s Mrs Chinn is one of my favourite Doctor Who guest characters of recent years. Rob Harvey’s sound design and score help sell the various different backgrounds and Handcock paces the story so that you are appropriately breathless at the right time.

Having re-read RTD’s Damaged Goods (his New Adventure) recently, and rewatched parts of Series 1, this feels like an “issue 0”, a prelude or even an overture introducing some of the themes that would be developed in the Doctor Who to come…

Verdict: A fascinating step back to an alternate mid-1980s and a season 24 we might have had. 9/10

Paul Simpson

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