The Romans

On sabbatical in an appropriated villa some miles outside of Rome, the Doctor and company are content and relaxed. Sort of. Vicki is bored with all the idle resting. The Doctor is getting irritable and decides to go to Rome and takes her with him, but while they are gone Ian and Barbara are set upon by slave traders and sold. A case of mistaken identity lands the Doctor and Vicki in the middle of intrigue at the court of Caesar Nero himself. All roads, they say, lead to Rome, and no matter which road the regulars are taking, all are dangerous and deadly.

Back to a televised episode now. The show starts with the TARDIS slipping off a cliff as it did at the end of The Rescue but the "cliff" doesn't appear to be as high as it did in that shot, leaving the TARDIS on a bit of an angle but nothing more. When we see the regulars again they are established in their lives and dressed in period costumes; Vicki states that they have been there a month now and a fabric merchant in the village market observes that they have been staying at a villa while the owner is away, and they have been there long enough to sell the garden produce in the market to keep some money coming in. It's not unusual for the Doctor to choose to stay in one place and time for a while as he and Susan had been in hiding on Earth in 1963 for quite some time - long enough for Susan to attend Coal Hill School. Ian and Barbara do not mind the break, they're content to laze around as long as possible - until they are made into slaves, that is.

The tone of the story is definitely a comedy, with slapstick humour and misunderstanding serving up most of the funny moments despite the horrible events going on around the regulars. The Doctor is attacked by an assassin who has been hired to do away with lyre player Maximus Petullian, for whom the Doctor has been mistaken, and he fights him off with a laugh. Barbara is chased around the bedroom and much of the palace by a randy Nero despite the jealous wrath of his wife, the Empress Poppea. Vicki makes friends with the palace poisoner, Locasta, who serves up death as casually as one might put the kettle on. Ian's story doesn't really get many laughs, though, having escaped from a sinking ship where he has been forced to row for days with fellow escapee Delos and now in Rome in search of Barbara. Barbara, however, believes she is alone but is always within mere meters of the Doctor and Vicki while in the palace and none of them are any the wiser.

When it came to the novelization of the story for Target books, though, the tale was approached quite differently and was told not in strict third person narrative as is the norm, but in a series of collected letters, diary entries and scrolls penned by the characters themselves. An interesting notion, and it works well, retaining all the humour of the original and creating a bit of its own. Most notable is it gives the mute assassin, Ascaris, a voice as he contemplates his life choices and even in a letter to his parents asks why he was named after a parasitic worm.

As far as how well Byzantium fits in with this tale... well, the tone is the same, the time period stays the same but if Vicki states that they have been in the villa for four weeks but the events of Byzantium take place over two weeks, and the travellers had to walk from the city of Byzantium to where the TARDIS was supposedly taken, their time on Earth in the Roman era would be more like months in the end. The fact that the TARDIS is seen still wedged in a gully on its side at the end of the episode pretty much shoots the whole Byzantium side plot in the foot, unless it can be argued that whoever found and moved the TARDIS thought that it needed to be kept on its side.

However it plays out, at the end of The Romans the TARDIS is
caught by some external force and is slowly dragged down. "Dragged down to where?" Ian demands.

NEXT EPISODE: THE WEB PLANET