Planet of Giants

Emergency sirens go off in the TARDIS as it is attempting to materialize; part of the console overheats and then the doors open before the ship can make proper planetfall. The crew emerge from the ship apparently unharmed but then make the startling discovery that they have been reduced in size to about an inch in height and are among the flagstones of a walkway to a house. While dodging massive insects and a prowling cat, the Doctor, Barbara, Ian and Susan are unaware that in the house itself is a ruthless businessman intent on selling a lethal pesticide which could not only kill them but eventually everything in the world.

A very ambitious story from a production point of view, requiring some of the sets to be made into massive affairs as to keep the travellers looking tiny. This includes not only the garden pathway but some very detailed giant insects such as a giant ant and a huge animatronic house fly. The design department made a great effort to keep things in proportion and succeeded, right down to the plug chain that the cast have to climb to get in and out of a sink. The only real clunker with the effects is Ian coming face to HUGE face with a dead man in the garden. And the close up of the cat, too, lacks something.

As storytelling goes there are two things going on here; Mr Forrester is trying to get his new pesticide DN6 on the market but his moves are being thwarted by Mr Farrow of the ministry, and the TARDIS crew are trying to survive. Forrester is very much the slimy businessman we all see on TV shows; his ethics are right in the dumper and all he cares about is money. Who cares if DN6 is lethal to all life so long as he gets rich? Down on the ground, though, the Doctor and company are not only at risk from the goings on above them with giant people milling about, but also from the dangers of the pesticide itself. This is where the story is very much Barbara's; exposed to the poison she tries to keep the truth from the rest of the crew out of what - shame for being poisoned in the first place? Or is she just intent on keeping them focussed on escaping without worrying about her? Her sly attempts to get the Doctor and Ian to see if there's a cure for the poison only meet with frustration when they tell her it's not important to them - and why would it be if they don't know that she is quietly dying from it? And Susan loses her shit again. I had forgotten about that while listening to the audios - Big Finish thoughtfully keep the screaming to a minimum when it's audio only.

Thematically this is really the first time Doctor Who goes green, or even slightly political. The story is set in modern times (which must annoy Ian and Barbara to no end as here they may be home and they're too small to actually return to normal lives) and the villain may be Forrester, but his evil doomsday weapon is a chemical substance. We're obviously talking about DDT here in a roundabout way without actually naming it. And as we are in a modern setting there is no historical element to make the tale slightly educational, but science steps in and fills that gap neatly with the reality of the nature of chemical pesticides and the damage they do on ecosystems, as well as some minor league stuff like how acoustics work when shouting in a sink.

Planet of Giants was intended to be a four part story but due to production problems was cut down to a three part tale. There would not be another three part story until 1987. The DVD release of the story contains not only the broadcast version of the story but a bonus re-cut of episode three with the missing scenes that would extend it into a fourth episode. Where the visuals are concerned the episode is cut with recycled closeups and some CGI shots with voice overs provided by Carole Ann Ford and William Russell as the only surviving members of the original cast with voice doubles picking up the other roles. John Guilor does such an excellent job doing a Hartnell voice one might really think it's actually him. Why Big Finish have not snapped him up for their audios I have no idea; William Russell does a good job there but this guy... wow. The voices do not always match with the way the characters' mouths are moving but it was intended as a representation of what might have been, not a full on recreation.

None of this extra material, unfortunately, was available or considered useful when Terrance Dicks put the novelized version of the story together years ago, so it was pretty much a line by line translation of what was seen on screen without much embellishment. This would have been a great way to present the story which might have been, but it was not to be. Terrance Dicks is one of the most prolific authors out there when it comes to the Target range of novels and he has done great things for the series with his own scripts and his work as script editor, but his novels rarely took the televised episodes anywhere beyond what was seen on tv. Oh if only.

NEXT EPISODE: THE TIME TRAVELLERS

The Flywheel Revolution

In a junkyard somewhere else in space, robots and household machines are casually dumped when they start to malfunction, or if they were made defective. While most of the junk is just piles of twisted dead metal, a community of sentient machines has formed. One of them, a machine named Frankie, happens upon a monster living in the scrapheap - a monster that takes the bodies of his friends and tinkers with them in a hut.  And this monster calls itself "the Doctor".

Yep, it's another line from Big Finish, this one called Short Trips. The essence of the storytelling is that it is indeed a short one, told in just under 40 minutes by a single narrator; in this case Peter Purves provides the voice, lending his own impressions of William Hartnell to the dialogue where needed. It used to be that the Short Trips tales were done in volumes of eight stories, one for each Doctor under Big Finish's license (and look for that to change as they have the rights to everything up to 2014), but now Big Finish have made them available as standalone downloads from their site. Am I starting to suspect that Big Finish are after my wallet? Maybe. But I don't care, their stuff is good and a lot of fun.

This time the Doctor is an unknown to the narrating character; they do not travel together, and what the Doctor is doing in his hut - which is trying to escape from this place - is nothing but pure macabre as far as Frankie is concerned. Frankie sees the bodies of other machines, people he knew, being pulled apart and stuck back together again as the Doctor attempts to create a device to aid his escape. He is just as much of a prisoner as the machines, but in his haste to get away from the scrapyard he has not noticed that the machines are effectively living, feeling entities, not until Frankie makes him aware of it. And if he is going to escape, he will need to think of something else. When he does realize what he has done, though, he changes his views on his environment and reacts with compassion and a bit of humility; this only goes to show how far he has come as a character for in the early days he wouldn't have shown much emotion at all and just gotten on with it.

As far as timeline goes it has been suggested that the Doctor has been separated from Susan, Barbara and Ian, although he does not mention them by name, nor does he seem to be in a great hurry to get back to them. Exactly what circumstances brought him to this place are not known either; The Flywheel Revolution is very much a joined in progress kind of tale. For now it serves as a finale to season "1A" as it were, or at least it will until the next batch of Early Adventures arrives later this year and The Age of Endurance slips into this spot with a re-cast Barbara Wright filling out the cast further. But now, seven adventures later, it's time to rejoin the televised episodes.

NEXT EPISODE: PLANET OF GIANTS

Domian of the Voord

The TARDIS comes to rest on the planet Hydra, specifically on board a ship at sea. The ship is one of a flotilla, and they are all the survivors of an invasion of their planet by a merciless enemy. The refugee fleet comes under attack and the Doctor and Barbara are separated from Susan and Ian, and the TARDIS itself is feared lost as the ship is is on sinks. The invaders are revealed to be the Voord, and unlike with their ill fated campaign on Marinus this time they are winning this war, conquering Hydra with relative ease and slowly mopping up the resistance. But Ian and Susan have helped defeat the Voord before, and if they can reunite with the Doctor and Barbara they can do so again, provided they are all still alive.

So the Voord are back, last seen in The Keys of Marinus in 1964. As far as blog continuity goes it's only been a month since that episode was reviewed but this audio drama was only released in 2014, a half century after the Voord were first seen on television. Do William Russell and Carole Ann Ford sound 50 years older on audio? Well maybe a bit in the supplemental parts of the disc but as far as their performances go they blend well with the televised series. I still find it amazing that here are these actors of advanced age now - William Russell is 91 - still playing the same characters they did all those years ago, and enjoying it. To listen to the show it doesn't sound as if they are just doing this for a paycheque, you can tell that in many ways they still *are* the characters they played back then, and even when they are playing the roles once held by their late cast members their passion for the work remains. William Russell can do a great William Hartnell impression but in the interview section of the disc he fondly says that there was only ever one Doctor for him, that being Hartnell. I really don't think that there's any other program out there that has this kind of ongoing involvement with the actors who have come before and put it on the map in its formative years - but then it's the simple fact that there is no other program like Doctor Who anyway that makes it so.

The Voord in Domain are much different than the ones we saw on Marinus. Yartek's expedition to conquer that world is explained to have been a smaller force, whereas Hydra is fully occupied. Writer Andrew Smith has taken the Voord and given them a fuller backstory which was probably not in Terry Nation's original drafts, and it's not a bad one, although the revelation of their true nature makes them seem like pseudo Cybermen. In fact there was a comic strip called The World Shapers in the old Doctor Who Magazine which tried to suggest that the Voord were actually Cybermen at some point but he has craftily dodged going there. To be Voord is now a more personalized experience, more like posession by the Shadows of Babylon 5 than being made a Cyberman, or, worse, Borg. The Voord of Keys of Marinus, Yartek in particular, were not treated to any voice modulation and had to speak around their masks but here they have a more processed sound to them, more menacing than Yartek's crazed screaming when he is intimidating Sabetha. And the interest they take in Susan as a potential convert to the Voord way of life is downright... different. They are confident enough in their ways that they believe she will willingly join them and give them the secret of the TARDIS. But this is set one hundred years after Marinus so they may well have evolved somewhat. The name of the Voord homeworld is not given but it is categorically not Marinus, so odds are Big Finish are going to trot these guys out again at some point to do battle with one of the Doctors again in one of the other series lines they produce.

Domian is a bit more than the previous Lost Stories in that it's original material now, and it is set apart a bit from Big Finish's Companion Chronicles line because it is a full cast and not one original actor telling the story from their perspective. Under the banner of The Early Adventures there will be much more of this sort of thing to come, and the news that Barbara has been re-cast for the next series of four stories is welcome to say the least, even if I won't get them in time to include in this blog. After hearing Fragile Arc of Fragrance, Farewell Great Macedon, Masters of Luxor and now Domain with less than the full original cast I am starting to get antsy to get back to the televised series and have everyone together on screen again.

But not just yet.

NEXT EPISODE: THE FLYWHEEL REVOLUTION

The Masters of Luxor

A mysterious signal lures the TARDIS to a barren world whose only feature is a massive pyramid structure. Barbara is instinctively wary of the place and her intuition proves to be accurate as the ship is shortly drained of power, leaving them helpless. The Doctor does not understand what could have overcome his ship and is determined to find a solution, knowing that the back-up power systems will not last. Ian
and Susan explore outside the ship and discover that this place is populated not by people but by robots intent on serving them; once the Doctor and Barbara join them they discover that the robots are diverse in design and structure, with most work being done by simple versions, more complicated tasks being handled by the Derivitrons, higher tasks delegated to the Proto model, and all of them reporting to and serving the Perfect One. The Perfect One is a robot evolved up to human form, but unlike those beneath him he is not dedicated to serving; having achieved his own state of perfection he has his own sinister agenda which will cost the TARDIS crew their lives if allowed to proceed.

Luxor is another of those Lost Stories plucked from the distant past of the series and made real by Big Finish with the participation of William Russell and Carole Ann Ford, both serving as narrators and as the voices of their on screen characters and their missing co-stars. The production is enhanced by the usual sound effects including the period version of the TARDIS console room and the doors opening, and a tension-building orchestral-sounding score which punctuates some of the more atmospheric scenes. The script was originally submitted to be the second serial produced but was dropped in favour of The Daleks, and it's hard to say if this script would have ignited the imaginations of the British public to the same extent and propelled Doctor Who into the spotlight as successfully. Luxor is a bit more cerebral than The Daleks and featured a lot of scenes of confrontation between the regular cast and the Perfect One, and while the robots are menacing in their right in audio, one has to wonder how well they would have been realized on screen. The Daleks, although mutants inside machines, were still credible monsters and a race of robots would have just looked like men in robot suits... and there would probably just have been three or four of them whereas on audio there can be vast numbers implied and realized through overlapping clunking footsteps.

As the producers of the audio wanted to stay as true to the original script as possible they only added a few things to it, like some dialogue to place this serial directly after Farewell Great Macedon and effectively structure a "season 1A" kind of continuity between the end of Reign of Terror and the start of the second season. Other bits of dialogue were left as they were, including Susan still addressing her schoolteachers as Mr Chesterton and Miss Wright, whereas in the other episodes she has been calling them Ian and Barbara for quite some time. The tension between the crew, though, is not there as it was in The Daleks ,so either the plan was to have things mellow out after the escape from the Tribe of Gum or Big Finish tweaked that as well. Titan Books released the script version of the story back in 1992 as part of their script book range, but I only got the first four of the ten they produced (file under: nice idea but doomed) and Luxor wasn't one of them. Big Finish picked up the rights to it twenty years later in 2012 but I held off on listening to it until now for this project. Hearing it fresh and attempting to put it into perspective with the other episodes of various media lends it an air of the familiar yet unknown, like finding a lost televised episode one only heard about forever.

Not much is really known about the planet Luxor, though; the story is not set there, just on a place the people of that world built for their own purposes. If this is a prison and execution centre, then the people of Luxor have a desire to treat everyone well right up to their last days. The Perfect One is a physically perfect looking humanoid but has not been made flesh, he is still an android at best but a self aware one looking to become perfect. He's calm and cold and sees what he is doing to people for his own ends as necessary, making him a true sociopath. At heart, though, he is still a robot, and subject to the same vulnerabilities as any other logic-driven machine.

As I was listening I picked up on a few of the elements that were used in other serials which followed; the mega city complex was much like the one the Daleks inhabited on Skaro, mysterious power drains putting the TARDIS out of action would crop up here and there in the series, and the notion of effectively a madman striving for perfection through a race of robots... well, yeah, we'll see that one eventually, too. But with the constant upgrading of the robots to a more perfect state, this feels less like a replacement for the Daleks and more of a seed for the notion of the Cybermen. But not for a while.

NEXT EPISODE: DOMAIN OF THE VOORD

Farewell, Great Macedon!

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and company into the Hanging Gardens of Babylon where they encounter and are befriended by the legendary Alexander the Great. While the travellers enjoy the hospitality of the King of the World, treachery is afoot within his very court as conspirators plot to commit regicide for their own ends. A prophecy of doom is cast should Alexander linger too long at Babylon, and as events being to unfold and the body count begins to rise, suspicion begins to fall upon the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan until they are eventually accused to murder and forced to prove their innocence in trials.

Macedon is another of the Lost Stories brought to life by Big Finish. It was originally submitted for production during the first season of the show but was not picked up for broadcast; some reasons offered include budget complications projected for the sheer scale of the production, others say the serial was set aside in favour of Marco Polo for historical content. I had a cast about the internet after I finished the story but didn't immediately find out the truth. I'm not too bothered, anyways; we have it now as an audio and in all likelihood if it had been produced it would have been truly lost along with Marco Polo and others from the era anyways. The production on audio stays very true to the series of the time, and despite the fact that it is being told with the voices of only two of the original cast it is still a very entertaining adventure. As with Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance William Russell skillfully handles the lines for both the Doctor and Ian, but also for several of the Greek generals who surround Alexander. Carole Ann Ford is both Susan and Barbara and provides a great deal of narration given that there are not a lot of other female roles for her to pick up.

Susan, however, is a bit off in the first episode of this one. Normally I get annoyed when she loses her shit and screams and panics like a teenage girl in a subway train when it stops in a tunnel (I've been on that train and wanted to kill) and this time she gets... weird; for some reason because the TARDIS scanner isn't providing any sound when they land she thinks they have all died and gone to heaven. Just a couple stories back in The Witch Hunters she was all about rationality and not believing in any religion or gods, and now this. The Doctor has his own moment as well, saying that he doesn't know the way to heaven yet but one day when he meets the Almighty he will. I found strange that this was left in the adaptation when reportedly a big continuity hiccup - that of a machine which would teach the travellers how to speak Greek instantly - was dropped because it was at odds with the "official" version in the series (not to be revealed until The Masque of Mandragora in 1976 although hinted at in 1972's The Time Monster, and then really spelled out in 2005's The End of the World). 

Macedon is a long story, too. It's presented in six episodes but they are not six standard length episodes of approximately 23 minutes, they vary in range from 30 minutes at the shortest to 44 at the longest. This is probably the original draft without any editing (aside from the above bit) as it feels very much like it should have been in the first season line up with its dialogue between the characters and the scale of the adventure with the regular cast staying with Alexander and his army for weeks. And once again the TARDIS crew are caught in history and learn another lesson about how it cannot be changed, no matter how much they try; this time the Doctor is the one facing the temptation despite previous dire warnings he himself gave to Barbara and Susan in Aztecs and Witch Hunters. Barbara and Susan then become the voices of reason, believing absolutely that there is no chance for them to make a difference as events begin to unfold.

By the time the tale is ended the crafty folks at Big Finish drop in a little nugget foreshadowing one of their own original pieces ahead, referencing a library to be built at Alexandria. That's still a ways ahead, but for now there is still one more "lost" story to take in.

NEXT EPISODE; THE MASTERS OF LUXOR

The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance

The TARDIS is on the paradise planet Fragrance, and has been for some time as the story opens. The Doctor is working on repairing the machine's directional circuit in an effort to get Ian and Barbara home, but while time has passed on Fragrance the travellers have made friends with the locals. A young man named Rhythm has taken a particular interest in Barbara and he wants her to stay, but her insistence upon leaving is going to do more than just break his heart..

Arc is a simple short tale by comparison to some of the others in the time period it is set in; mammoth length stories of 7 episodes (The Daleks, Marco Polo) are accepted as the norm but this one is told in just one episode. The episode goes by very quickly as a result and once it's over it feels more like a simple scene than a full on adventure, but given the nature of the story that it tells it would be anticlimactic to tell it otherwise. For me I found it just too... simple. No twist, no turn of events, just the story and the end. I did feel that we don't get much of a sense of who the natives of Fragrance are, aside from the names of Rhythm's family. They're obviously advanced enough people to be able to provide the Doctor with a means to work on the TARDIS but they seem to have this stretch of paradise all to themselves. I think we're meant to just take their closeness with the TARDIS crew for granted at the outset.

Arc is part of Big Finish's range of "lost stories", which is to say they're stories which were never made for the screen for whatever reason at the time. The original run of lost stories was made to dramatize the "lost" season 23 from 1986, when an entire series of scripts were put aside for a whole new angle for the series, but once they proved popular it was just a matter of time before other scripts were brought to light. Arc was from the second foray into the lost story territories and came in a boxed set with another adventure starring the first Doctor and his original three companions. Given that only two of the original four cast members (William Russell and  Carole Ann Ford) are still with us the duty of narration and performance falls to them, with Russell doing his own take on the Doctor's voice and coming off quite good. I remember thinking that this might be a bit awkward to listen to but it comes off very well told when backed up with effects sounds and some incidental music. There's an interesting almost bridge between Arc and The Witch Hunters as the former story ends with Ian and Barbara talking on a beach somewhere, and were it not for the narration mentioning a specific date it could very well have been the planet Fragrance. Other than that there is no real way to place the story in continuity, it is just easy to assume it fits between the break between the first two seasons along with a few more stories...

NEXT EPISODE: FAREWELL GREAT MACEDON!

The Witch Hunters

It's New England in 1692, and the TARDIS has put down just outside Salem village. The Doctor wants to make a few repairs to the machine and bids Ian, Barbara and Susan to explore and adopt the guise of a family travelling together so as not to arouse suspicion, for strangers are easily spotted. In these superstitious times the people of the Colonies have the odds against them as it is, not having seen much more of the Americas than the east coast, and for four strangers to come among them when there are whispered tales of witches and sorcery and public trials for straying from God's word can only lead to trouble.

Witch Hunters was actually the first PDA with the first Doctor and company, this time penned by Steve Lyons. Having read some of his other contributions to the Doctor Who series, particularly in the Virgin New Adventures range, I was not sure how this was going to play out, given there has been a certain comedy element to some of his work. This is not a comedy, though, not by a long shot; this story is about fear, terror and death. This is also a story about how absolute faith and belief in something can create monsters out of people, most notably out of the people of Salem who are scared stiff by religious doctrines telling them that witches must die, and even the slightest accusation of witchcraft can result in someone being presumed guilty and their life ruined or ended. Ian at one point rationalizes the frenzy as an opportunity for some to settle old scores and have a neighbour persecuted and ridiculed by the slightest suggestion that they practice the black arts. Most notable in all this is the Reverend Paris, who believes one hundred percent that he is doing the right thing to protect the good people of Salem by presiding over the local witch trials and condemning accused men and women to death; his convictions from a modern standpoint make him appear a monster, and there is no real attempt to humanize him beyond his role as religious fanatic. It's hard to say if showing him in a less fanatical light would have made much difference; would he have seemed just a convinced man of belief or would he have come across as a psychopath? Runner up to him is Abagail Parsons, one of a group of teenage girls with whom Susan joins, and who secretly practice some witchcraft of their own, just to see what happens, and end up causing heaps of trouble. Abagail then becomes one of the nastiest little you-know-whats ever, manipulating events through suggestions and outright lies to see people put on trial and eventually hanged for their alleged sins.

Witch Hunters jumps about a bit in time over the narrative. The local date is cited to mark the passage of time here and there but when the Doctor first arrives in the story he has actually come from the future, the narrative stating that his ability to return here is a favour owned to him from "the Death Zone business". It's more retcon at work, drawing from the events of an episode from 1983, which from this perspective has not happened yet, and will be explained (of course) later. But there is still regular continuity at work as well, featuring mention of the fast return switch from The Edge of Destruction and references back to The Aztecs and The Sensorites.

The danger that eventually befalls the TARDIS crew is all Susan's fault. All of it. It's not often that one can be so definite, but this time she is the one to blame. Her teenage angst issues lead her to consort with the local girls and thus stir things up, and there are two times where they are able to be free and clear of the troubles of Salem but both times she acts out and drops everyone back into danger. Her growing telepathic abilities are bound to lead her into trouble in a society living in fear of the unusual, but it's her mouth that really does her in on occasion; she may be an alien like the Doctor, but she doesn't have his ability to command attention and sway people with words, and when she tries to it is never good. Her motivation is not out of some need to be noticed or anything - she genuinely wants to help and this time it is Susan who is fighting against the inevitability of history and wanting to change things. Barbara learned this lesson the hard way and reminds Susan of the ordeal they suffered in Mexico when she impersonated a god to do the same thing. The Doctor implies that they can perhaps make changes but would end up becoming embroiled in history altogether if they stay, and he alludes to there being laws about this sort of thing and breaking them comes with even more severe consequences. Ian later muses that they may already be trapped in history, that they were already fated to their parts before he and Barbara were even born and before they made that fateful journey to Totter's Lane in the first place. Destiny perhaps? Thankfully Lyons knows better than to try and pursue this point too far.

I originally read The Witch Hunters when it was published in 1998, but it has since been reissued under the banner of The History Collection along with a story from each following Doctor where an adventure in the past is featured. The reissues have taken an extra leap and not only draw from the BBC Books PDAs but in some instances are a reprint of a Virgin or a Target title which may not have seen the light of day for some time. And to go further, the new editions are starting to receive the audio book treatment with an actor providing a mildly dramatized reading of the story with incidental music, minimal sound effects (is this case crowd sounds, the TARDIS interior and flight sounds, water on the beach) and a bit of characterization to the lines. David Collings provides the voice for The Witch Hunters and does it very well, capturing the characterizations of the regular TARDIS crew so well I more than once found myself thinking I was listening to William Russell reprising his role as Ian. Collings even gets Barbara's occasional stammmer and the Doctor's penchant to flub his words down well, he just sounds a bit off trying to do Susan's teenage squeaking.

Given that there is going to be a lot of material to cover in the series I will go with an audio book along these lines where I can to mix things up, and if they're all as well done as The Witch Hunters I will enjoy it all the more. The dipping into the Virgin lines does remove a few novels from Big Finish's potential to draw from when they get their shot at adapting a novel to a full cast audio so hopefully BBC Audio sticks to stories where the lead actors are no longer with us to reprise their roles, and Big Finish is allowed to do what they do best and dramatize with a full original cast.

NEXT EPISODE: THE FRAGILE YELLOW ARC OF FRAGRANCE


  

City At World's End

The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara to Arkhaven, a city on the planet Sarath. Within minutes of their arrival there the travellers realize that there is something amiss: there are no people around, the inside of the office tower they have landed atop is hollow and drone cars with dummies at the wheel are making their way along the streets. Before this mystery can be investigated the city is bombarded by a meteor storm, the building is destroyed, Susan is in hospital, Barbara and the TARDIS are lost and Ian and the Doctor are sent off to a refugee camp for outsiders. Sarath is facing its final days as its moon is falling. The population are patiently waiting for Zero Day, the day when their great Ship, under construction for years, will lift off and carry them away. But it's not going to end well for everyone as the ship can only hold so many of the inhabitants, and if you're not a devout follower of the Church or one of Arkhaven's elite members your odds of securing a ride to salvation are mighty slim. They're even slimmer given that there are hostile survivors from other parts of the planet converging on the Ship, and there's something outside Arkhaven's walls called a "Creeper" which makes short work of whatever crosses its path.

It's Christopher Bulis at the helm again, this time under the banner of the BBC Books novels' "Past Doctor Adventures" or in simple terms, PDAs. Whereas his Virgin novel, Sorcerer's Apprentice, focussed on the fanciful and fictional (for the most part), City goes to a far flung futuristic society with technology aplenty starting with the massive Ship being built in the centre of the city and going through the gamut of robot cars, robot construction machines, and even the polite HAL-like AI called Monitor. Arkhaven doesn't really stand out as the most futuristic city ever to be in Doctor Who of any genre, though - it feels very modern day Earth circa a few years ago with shops, social clubs and an accurate predication from when it was written in 1999 about how future societies will see everyone with a personal pocket phone. Arkhaven does, however, have a pretty fierce defense battery system which blasts almost all the falling moon rock out of the sky before it can hit the city.

How's our regular cast doing this time around in print? Same as always it seems - Bulis doesn't do too bad a job of bringing the Doctor to life on page; one can almost hear William Hartnell's voice sometimes when reading the Doctor's lines. He goes back and forth from deep concern when it comes to Susan's well-being to classic impatience and fury when dealing with the self centred small mindedness of the Elite ruling class and the pompous religious zealots. As has happened before, the Doctor gets in good with the leaders of the city and while he is attempting to help them improve their plans to escape their doomed world Ian goes looking for Barbara at the accident site, his feelings for her becoming more and more pronounced as they spend more time together in the TARDIS. It's hard to get a proper grasp on Susan in this one, but that's probably due to the fact that she seems to be at two places at the same time. She does have a good retcon moment, though; when she realizes she is injured and needs to heal she does contemplate a "drastic measure" but knows it might be risky at such a young age. In series lore it will be some time before this measure actually happens so it is carefully not pursued. Bulis allows Susan to pay a bit of homage to Apprentice as well, when she references her experiences in that tale. Barbara really gets the least to do this time; clambering through sewers, supposedly made into an agent of another Sarathian nation, and then... well being found again.

The other species on Sarath, the Taldarians, don't really impact the story much. Between the rivalries and deceptions of the Elites, the Church and the city's Mayor they don't seem to be a real threat, and their backstory is only briefly sketched out. City could have very easily been told without them, or their plight could have been a story all its own, but with the menace of the moon overhead falling to bits their presence when they do finally make it felt is a bit of an anticlimx. Not so much of an anticlimax as the REAL one which comes along later, but an anticlimax nonetheless. I don't know if Bulis found himself running short of his page count and had to create a last minute crisis to fill the book's 281 pages or if this is just what happens when the editor of the series takes a nap but City falters a bit at the end. The layers of deception start to peel back at the climax but the final resolution struck me not as the plot elements merging but a few cop outs glued together before a type of happily ever after epilogue.

From the fate of an entire planet to the fate of one person we move to a new setting in Earth's past...

NEXT EPISODE: THE WITCH HUNTERS