The Yes Men

In an attempt to return Polly and Ben to 1966 the Doctor manages to send the TARDIS into the far future to New Houston, a planet he has visited before. Taking advantage of this luck, the Doctor sets out to visit an old friend only to find that she had been murdered and the crime has been covered up. The well ordered society mourns its loss of a prominent citizen with a public funeral procession but the robotic servants carry on in their normal pattern of life. If robots could be said to have a life. But these robots, the Yes Men as Ben calls them, not only have a life, but an agenda.

So here we have something I have been waiting for a long time: a full cast audio from the Troughton era with Elliot Chapman cast as able seaman Ben Jackson. It's been fun to enjoy Fraser Hines doubling as Jamie and the Doctor in the Big Finish audios but now to have a dead ringer for Ben on the cast is just a sheer joy to behold; I couldn't help but gasp "Holy crap that's BEN!" when I heard him speak. With Ben successfully brought back to the family, that leaves just a few companions left who have not featured in a Big Finish story (Dodo, Harry Sullivan and Kamelion are all who are left out - Sarah Jane Smith even has her own audio series ahead). I have commented before how the expanded universe of Doctor Who (mainly through Big Finish) has really added a lot to the early second Doctor era, given how many huge gaps there are in the television archives, and having the full crew together for an adventure on audio really is the icing on the cake. (It is also worth noting in this line of thought that the current Doctor, Peter Capaldi, has announced his departure from the TV series at the end of 2017 and the great cry among fans is not "Please don't go!" but "Please Big Finish do right by him on audio!")

The setting of this one is interesting on a few levels. First I spot the name of the planet - New Houston. The new TV series had a couple episodes set on New Earth far far in the future, but the novel Ten Little Aliens was also set in a time period where future Earth colonies were named after old Earth countries and cities. No precise dates are given but it could all be in the same time period. The notion that the Doctor had been there previously in his earlier incarnation with Dodo is a fun one as well, and this gives him the first opportunity to explain his regeneration to a more casual acquaintance outside the TARDIS crew. And to further nail down the actual time period, the events surrounding the Doctor's previous visit are paralleled in a Bernice Summerfield spin off audio, The Tub Full of Cats. (Spin off overlap is going to become a real thing by the time I reach the new series episodes)

And then there are the robots as well. Science fiction loves a society with robots all around, especially when the robots don't seem to have the best of intentions towards the people they serve. These ones are not anything seen before anywhere else in the series, their closest equivalent being the obsequious Voc class robots from The Robots of Death or the ones from The Masters of Luxor. The people of New Houston treat the robots with a certain amount of disdain - the malicious Harriet Quilp is no exception and proves just how she sees them by bashing one with her walking stick to prove their harmlessness to Ben and Jamie. With treatment like that, it's no wonder things don't exactly go well.

As the first of the second Doctor's Early Adventures stories, The Yes Men is a great start to this portion of their range. The next series with the second Doctor and company is set to be released in September of 2017 which unfortunately will be too late to be part of my adventure here, but if it's anything like this... it's going to be worth the wait.

NEXT EPISODE: THE FORSAKEN