The Doctor returns to Ribos – where icetime has failed to end…

There’s quite a bit to discuss about Jonathan Barnes’ tale for the 7th Doctor and Mel, but it needs a spoiler tag. Suffice it to say, if you’re looking for further adventures of Melanie Bush prior to her return in Series 14, that she shows an agency that was less obvious in her TV adventures, and she’s much more than just a computer programmer from Pease Pottage.

Spoilers follow.

This story, it is implied by the Doctor’s final line, leads into Dragonfire and Mel’s departure with Glitz – an encounter that the Time Lord had engineered in order to get Fenric’s wolf into his TARDIS. OK, we know from the number of stories shoehorned between The Smugglers and The Tenth Planet that mentions of cold, real or otherwise, can be reworked, but there’s more to it than this. In a strong scene between Bonnie Langford and Sylvester McCoy – nicely underplayed by both and well directed by Samuel Clemens – Mel has grave reservations about the way the Doctor treated a character towards the end of this adventure, and wonders if this is what the future holds. It’s a character trait that we hear McCoy building towards in the story and while the play is perfectly standalone, there’s just enough here to give it a serial feel.

It also plays into an idea created by, I think, Steve Lyons in the New Adventures, that the Seventh Doctor had effectively elbowed the Sixth out of the way because he didn’t consider his predecessor had the necessary skills (and flexible morality) to do what needed to be done.

Aside from that final scene, Barnes gives us a look at Ribos that extrapolates well from the 1978 story, and brings the return of Garron, with David Rintoul giving plenty of the feel of Iain Cuthbertson’s performance, but flavoured with his own interpretation, which, coupled with the two-decades-later setting, means he’s as credible as such a character can be. The assorted Ribosians are a varied group and all benefit from the production team’s decision not to pull their punches – rebellions lead to deaths, and that’s not glossed over here. We’re not in Red Wedding territory, but nor are we in a twee environment. I do wonder, though, what happened to Binro the Heretic…

Verdict: An engaging tale with a character twist that puts some TV episodes in further context. 8/10

Paul Simpson

Click here to order from Big Finish