Colony in Space

The Time Lords reactivate the TARDIS and send the Doctor along with Jo Grant to the planet Exarius in 2472. There they find a group of struggling colonists trying to make a go of the planet, but their efforts are being hampered by withering crops and sightings of giant monsters, and then a pair of colonists are killed. Exarius has a small population of primitives but they are not known to be violent unless provoked. Not knowing why he has been sent here the Doctor investigates and discovers that IMC have arrived on the planet as well, convinced that they have full rights to set up an operation to strip the planet of resources, and they are behind the monster sightings. An Adjudicator is contacted and asked to decide the fate of the planet, but when he arrives he is revealed to be the Master on his own mission to Exarius: to find an ancient doomsday weapon and use it for his own schemes.

So things have changed for the Doctor now; instead of being left in exile to stew he has now been put on a short leash to do Time Lord work for them. The Doctor is excited to be free of Earth and on another planet again but the realization that it was only allowed as a one-off by the Time Lords sours the whole experience for him; it will be back to work on the TARDIS again once this little jaunt is over. The Master loves it, though; it's humiliation enough to see the Doctor grounded but to be see him made into a patsy is even better. The Master himself seems able to come and go on the Time Lord's home planet as well, slipping in and stealing information and then running off with it to raise hell across the universe.

As far as other continuity goes here there's the interesting Interplanetary Mining Corporation, or IMC, which was referenced in The Wheel of Ice as having grown out of the Issigri Mining Corporation seen in The Space Pirates. It's not longer a mom and pop kind of organization now, though; it's grown into a vast capitalist machine with a tendency to strip planets bare and move on without the slightest bit of consequence to itself. The arrogance of the company itself can be seen in how its top men operate, with Captain Dent being tremendously matter-of-fact about things even though he is a muderer. It's not hard to sere that we're dealing with one of those moments where the script is making a social statement, this time about capitalism at the expense of the people.

What is that thing?

And this is Jo Grant's first time inside the TARDIS. When she does see what's inside the police box she is astonished and says that all the tales of time and space must be true... so was she just humouring the Doctor all this time? She saw the TARDIS materialize in front of her at the end of The Claws of Axos so it should have been a clue, but now here she is inside. The console room was seen in the previous story as well and it's a much smaller version of what it was in the Hartnell era. And less cluttered, save for a large.... metal.... barrel? And the walls have been altered as well, with one still an obvious photographic blow up. Maybe it's wallpaper. The console is the original but the column as in Axos has been switched up.

When it came to Target books publishing the story as a novel it benefited from having Malcolm Hulke write it himself; he's not the best novelist himself but his prose style adds a bit more description to it than his buddy Terrance Dicks. He certainly did add a bit more meat to the details though, in particular the colonists' accounts of Earth when they left it as being overcrowded and people with blue hair living there.  The title must have sounded too blase for the folks at Target, though, and like a few others it was changed into something more... interesting, more dynamic, more sensational... it became Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon. At the time it was published as well there was no indication that all the novels of the series would be published so the book has an intro for Jo Grant as if this is her first time meeting the Doctor instead of just her first time inside the TARDIS. There is also an intro to the Master worked in as Terror of the Autons had not been published as a novel yet, and a bit of a re-telling of the Doctor's adventures and trial.

Seeing as it's a one-off to go into space again, the Doctor is returned to Earth to keep trying to escape. The Master, however, is still out there doing what he wants. And he will be back.

NEXT EPISODE: THE DAEMONS