The Anachronauts

Steven remembers how shortly after he, Sara and the Doctor toasted Christmas Day together their momentary respite from the Daleks came to a crashing halt; another time travelling ship collided with the TARDIS and dropped both crews on a strange world's beach. The two crews combine forces to survive in the alien environment but there is never a complete bond of trust; the Doctor is wary of the strange crew and their attempts to master the realm that his own people view as exclusively theirs, and the leader of the other crew, Natalie, eyes the Doctor with equal suspicion and some envy when she realizes what the TARDIS could represent. Steven and Sara soon find themselves in Berlin on the wrong side of the wall as captives, and they have to make some terrible choices in order to survive.

The was the first Companion Chronicle where Steven and Sara were paired up to provide the narrative and dialogue to tell the tale, with Peter Purves and Jean Marsh doing such a good job you can't help but wish they'd done this sort of thing back in the sixties. Sara is still hard edged as a Space Security agent even if her beliefs in the system have been shaken to the core by Mavic Chen's betrayal. Steven is still young and impatient and looks back upon Sara with something akin to regret, wondering if things could have been different between them. The Doctor certainly seems to think that there could be, and advises Sara at one point to spend time with Steven and talk to him, and make the most of their time together. The sly old fox. And in the face of possibly losing the TARDIS forever, he is surprisingly coy when it comes to Steven and Sara, perhaps as a means to avoid thinking too much about the loss of his ship. Finding the food machine sitting on its own on the island would seem to confirm that the skip was lost forever, although the absence of other debris leaves the point open.

Despite having owned this audio for quite some time I had not listened to it until now, and when I got to the closing moments of episode 2 I thought that the story was over and that the second disc was just going to be a heap of interviews and extras. Not so! Suddenly it's somewhere else and Steven and Sara are on their own without the Doctor or Natalie and her crew, leaving me wondering if this was going to take the story to a bad disjointed place. As it turns out I need to learn to have more faith in the style of Simon Guerrier - there was nothing to worry about, and the air of menace which had permeated the first two episodes was back.

Placing the tale in the middle of The Daleks' Master Plan was a bit of a gamble given that I wasn't sure if it might give away the ending of that adventure (even though I already knew it), but the fates of everyone were left alone so a first time listener if they were to pursue the series the way I am doing would not have the end spoiled for them. Steven's point of perspective is not revealed, either, so it's not as if this story needs to be placed in sequence after he leaves the TARDIS in future. There were, however, a couple elements of the story that are obviously borrows from the future of the series... the Doctor makes reference to how horrific it would be for a war to be fought across time (which happens in the new series of 2005) and the actual physical destruction of the TARDIS comes from not only the broadcast episode Frontios but owes a lot to the novel Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible. But when it comes to the more immediate future of the Doctor and company, Sara is forbidden to know the fate of Mavic Chen and the outcome of the Dalek plan to conquer the solar system. Tidy, that.

So far so good for the expanded universe adventures of the Doctor, Steven and Sara.

NEXT EPISODE: AN ORDINARY LIFE