Lords of the Red Planet and Lepidoptery for Beginners

The TARDIS makes a landing on Mars in the distant past. Jamie is understandably nervous about this choice of location; he knows that this is the home of the Ice Warriors, but the Doctor assures him that this is well before their time. Zoe is fascinated and they discover that the planet is not as barren as the Doctor and company expected - there is a major city populated by a race of reptilian creatures on the planet, but genetic experiments have resulted in the creation of the Ice Warriors. The Martians, however, are not a warlike race at this time, but their leader, Zaduur, has ideas of the future and is planning an apocalyptic nightmare for Mars, with her new warrior army ready to conquer.

It was inevitable that there would be an Ice Warriors origin story somewhere, but as this is another of the Lost Stories based on a proposed script from the sixties I'm not sure if it was planned in such depth at the time it was submitted. Origin stories seem to be more of a thing for the current era, so I think a lot of what is in this script is influenced by recent trends. Still, the Daleks got an origin story back in the seventies, and it is quite similar to what was done here with genetic manipulation being at the heart of the rise of this monster species. So the original Martians are not actually the Ice Warriors, they are a less aggressive species with more of an interest in science than in warfare.

At six episodes long it feels a bit on the epic side of things, with the Doctor and company falling afoul of the madwoman Zaduur and spending time running away from Ice Warriors. This is the dawn of the Ice Lord, though, and Zoe manages to befriend him and call upon him for help when she needs it. It seems a little bit too Beauty and the Beast with Zoe able to summon and order about this huge hulk of an alien. But this is one of the times when Wendy Padbury manages to sound a bit more like her younger self (not that she sounds like a senior citizen other times), with Fraser Hines doing double duty as the Doctor and as Jamie.

How about continuity here? Obviously this is after Seeds of Death for Zoe to be familiar with the Ice Warriors, but from an actual Ice Warrior perspective this is far before their original appearance, before Varga and company crash on Earth. There was a moment where I feared we were going to see that crew depart for Earth, but thankfully no, the Big Finish folks avoided that temptation. Interesting though that the main baddie here is a female Martian - and a few years later (this was released in 2013) along comes the new series 2017 episode Empress of Mars with - surprise surprise - a female Martian leader. But that one is a ways off from here.

And that's the last of the Lost Stories for Patrick Troughton's second Doctor. But this crew's run has still not come to an end; there are still some audio episodes left to enjoy.

LEPIDOPTERY FOR BEGINNINGS

The TARDIS lands in what is called a Predicticon, a machine created by a young man named Iolas Blue to predict the future and allow him to rule it. But Iolas forsees the Doctor and company stopping him, so he starts putting things in motion to bring them under his power and eliminate the threat they pose to his plans.

So here's an interesting one in the form of a Big Finish Short Trips story. In less than an hour it tells the story fantastically, making Iolas one of the most smug and insufferable enemies the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe have ever faced. The concept of predicting the future through a complicated series of cause and effect sequences is not something we've never seen before on the new series; in fact entire seasons of the new show have been saved because the Doctor goes to great lengths to explain how time doesn't function that way, and utters that nonsensically idiotic "timey-wimey" bullshit phrase as he does so. Here, however, a much better argument for how cause and effect works is presented without anyone on screen hyperventilating or the audience wanting to either switch off or strangle the script writer. Iolas hitches his plans to the "butterfly effect" theory (hence that really clever title) and even manages to influence events by using a mater transmitter to drop items off in the past which will cause small things to happen and reult in big changes. And of course, as with all self assured villains, Iolas is ultimately too smart for his own good.

No real hints as to what has come before, although Iolas mentions the Ice Lord, Slaar, from The Seeds of Death - but not as a recent enough event to mean it happened right before this one. So this is as good a place as any to put it.

NEXT EPISODE: THE INTEGRAL