The Selachian Gambit

The TARDIS has arrived on a bank in space where the wealthiest of the wealthy keep their treasures. While visiting, though, the Doctor, Ben, Jamie and Polly find themselves locked out of the ship by a force field, and that force field can only be removed by paying a hefty parking fine. Before anything can be done, though, the station is raided by a group of Selachians; they want access to the bank's temporal vault and they are prepared to kill for it.

This one comes off as a bit of a bank heist comedy episode, and given that Steve Lyons wrote it I'm pretty sure that's exactly what he intended. It's clever as well with the bank vault effectively working like a TARDIS with vast interior dimensions and secure access as a security measure. And I think the Selachians come off a bit better than they did when I read them in The Murder Game; it could be that hearing them makes them a bit more real, or just having them make a return so soon is fun. I know I was not entirely in love with them the first time and I wasn't keen on them being set up as Lyons' own legacy monster but you know what... maybe I'll change my mind on that.

As this is a Companion Chronicle release it's got a smaller cast but the narration and dialogue are equally split between Fraser Hines and Anneke Wills reprising their own roles as Jamie and Polly and subbing dialogue for their absent colleagues Michael Craze and Patrick Troughton. Hines' impression of Troughton is amazing, getting all of his inflections right and sounding I'd say 99% accurate, with that last fraction just because we *know* it's not Troughton speaking. Wills for her part doesn't manage to do a voice impression of Craze to the same extent but she does nail his penchant for Cockney slang perfectly. Oh hey, though, Polly gets sent off to make everyone tea!

Were it not for this addition to the range, along with the next five titles, the team of the Doctor, Polly, Ben and Jamie would be over a lot sooner, but this way we get to see more of them as a proper team given that they really only got written properly as such for the last two episodes of The Moonbase and all of Macra Terror; their finale episode together, The Faceless Ones, would have been next and then pow, team dispersed, but this way there's more of a sense of them as a proper TARDIS "family" like we had with Ian, Barbara and Susan which will make their eventual separation much more poignant.

Until that time, though...

NEXT EPISODE: HOUSE OF CARDS