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!