Landbound and Damascus

The Doctor meets a disgraced former sea captain and shares a tale with him about their relative woes. The Doctor is intregued by what his companion tells him: he saw an alien at sea which destroyed his ship and crew but no-one believes him. No-one except the Doctor.

This one from the Big Finish Short Trips range was actually a freebie, and who doesn't like free Doctor Who? And despite the fact that it is free it is still a high calibre story told across three intervals in the Doctor's life on Earth: the start of his exile just after The Silurians, then once he is free again, and then further on when he finds himself alone and starting out on a new adventure. The parallels are there for all to see: his friend is going through the same phases of his life at the same time. There's no offer to come and join the TARDIS crew though, even though Big Finish could have easily given the third Doctor a new friend to travel with at this time.

Good quick story and an interesting way to span the third Doctor's time on Earth. Superb breakfast adventure.

In Damascus, the Doctor is still very much exiled to Earth and working with UNIT and Jo, although

the Prime Minister thinks he could be doing more. In fact he wants the Doctor to do anything at all; there's a UFO hovering overhead but the Doctor is uncharacteristically cool about it and has said that the humans can look after things themselves for a change.

Unlike most of the Big Finish tales from Short Trips or Companion Chronicles, Damascus isn't told from the perspective of any series regular, it's all from the point of view of the Prime Minister, whom the Doctor calls "Jeremy". There was never a Prime Minister in the UK at the time with that name, although a passage about the closeness of Jeremy and his PA  lend themselves more to the carrying-on of Jeremy Thorpe, Liberal leader but never PM. Doctor Who doesn't entirely root itself in the real world as far as politics go, not unless it's something tremendously historical (Churchill) or the new series is kissing American fan arse (Nixon), so maybe in the flux-state 70s/80s era that UNIT and the Doctor's exile are set in, Thorpe did become PM.

But it's not a happy relationship between the Doctor and Jeremy as they are thrown together to take care of this alien spaceship business. With half of the UK asleep under the influence of an alien device they are the only ones who can do anything about it. And while Jeremy may not like the Doctor's ways, the day does get saved.

NEXT EPISODE: THE THREE DOCTORS

Verdigris

The Doctor and Jo receive a visit from an old friend of the Doctor's: another Time Lord, one who has fashioned her TARDIS into a red London bus and has crossed paths with the Doctor more times than he cares to remember - Iris Wildthyme. And as Iris and her companion Tom arrive, so does a train carriage load of characters from literary works of fiction in the middle of a field where there are no train tracks. The Doctor is immediately intrigued but he finds that his normal support mechanism - the Brigadier and UNIT - are gone. And in the face of what appears to be a bizarre alien invasion he finds that there are forces working against him to paint him as a fraud, so when he tries to alert the world of the invasion no one will listen, and no one will help.

It's a bit of a comedy this one, or at least it reads like one. Paul Magrs has a thing for the surreal with a slight touch of real horror underneath, but the absurdity of some of the situations he creates take the really scary edge off. He's written a few novels for the series and a few audios as well, some with Iris and some without, and I'm still not exactly sold on her as a concept. She's a Time Lady, yes, so the Doctor has himself a contemporary that for once is not trying to kill him, but her flirty ways where he is concerned are a bit tiresome after a while. Iris is also a big one on spoilers (this was written before people were doing the whole "Shhh - spoilers!" thing by the by) and keeps dropping things about the Doctor's future that she shouldn't - for his sake and certainly for the sake of anyone who might be taking the series on like this in sequence.

Sequence gets a bit thrown off, though; Iris at one point refers to the time when the TARDIS fell off a cliff on Peladon and the Doctor tells her that hasn't happened yet, but this story is set decidedly after the Master has escaped from Earth post Sea Devils but the BBC Novels themselves have the Master still in prison parallel to The Curse of Peladon. Editors might have been napping somewhere when that slipped through. But there's no mistaking when this takes place; the Doctor's TARDIS is still grounded and when the prospect of getting his hands on Iris' comes along he gets a bit taken away with the notion for a few moments. It's not surprising, really; he's been on Earth for a few years now without the option to escape so when he sees it he's going to get a bit crazy. And Iris is willing to take him with her but he's not that crazy as to agree to shack up to escape.

Iris does have the big crush on the Doctor, though; she fawns over him incessantly and constantly implies that he is the one with the crush on her. She's modelled a lot of her own lifestyle on him though with the eccentric TARDIS exterior (another stolen machine, older but more reliable than the Doctor's) and travelling with companions although the one she is with here, Tom, has more or less been kidnapped and really wants to go home. Iris even laments somewhat enviously that the Doctor's companions enjoy being with him and all hers want to do is leave. It's not surprising though; Iris and the Doctor are both lonely people but her loneliness is out of desperation not to be alone, which is really unattractive. I found I went back and forth about Iris; liked her mostly but other times she was just a nuisance.

The last chapter of the book manages to blow a few future events

NEXT EPISODES: LANDBOUND and DAMASCUS

The Mega

The Doctor is furious. The British military have developed a new weapon: a gas that will target enemies down to their chromosomes and make killing easier. But the Doctor is not the only one; the public know and are protesting like mad. And there is one more voice in the chorus: that of an alien race known as the Mega. They demand that Britain disarm unilaterally or else face destruction by their hand. The Doctor and Jo fake defecting to the other side of the Iron Curtain to get to the bottom of things and find the Prince of a small nation with the Mega on his side; they have supplied them with their own weapon to ensure the demands for peace are met, but while the Prince may want the world to be at peace, exactly what is in it for the Mega?

The Mega is an oddity for the Big Finish Lost Stories range: it is the single contribution to feature the third Doctor from the UNIT era, and the last one that was released. Originally written by Bill Strutton it was declined as a script for television, possibly because it was too touchy a subject with the civil unrest that runs through it, with UNIT trying to contain riots and protests for peace. And then there's the murder of the British Prime Minister as well - that might not have gone over well. The PM's death, though, is an important plot twist and can't be cut out no matter how edgy it might have been, so censors might have had trouble with reworking the script. Maybe. It's a bit different from the other stories of the era, a bit grittier and nastier but never dull. On the other hand the real stopper of the show was probably the Mega themselves; they are beings with swirling vortexes of energy for heads and they can destroy with electrical blasts, which would probably have been tough for the effects department to realize.

As far as fitting in with the stories around it, as it was written for the era it fits in quite well, it's just a bit out of place as far as my project here is concerned - Corporal Bell is still on the Brigadier's staff and she was not seen again after Day of the Daleks (a plot thread tied off in David A. McIntee's The Face of the Enemy) so as far as maintaining that continuity goes this would have to be placed somewhere before The Curse of Peladon. 

The Mega is realized very well given that Katy Manning and Richard Franklin are not only reprising their old roles as Jo and Mike Yates but they are also providing vocal approximations of the Doctor (Manning) and the Brigadier and Benton (Franklin). They are also giving a bit more of the old chemistry that existed between Jo and Yates which had viewers wondering if they were going to be the next couple of Who in the same vein as Ian and Barbara or Ben and Polly. After all these years they can still make it happen as far as the scripts allow them to - this would be the first time they worked together since they departed the series.

Only thing this one has against it is its length; at six episodes it's a long listen and has to be taken episode by episode just like the longer episodes on television. It doesn't, however, follow the same pattern of a lot of the six parters where it feels like the real story ended in episode four and there is something new happening in five and six - it holds up the whole way through and would have made some fascinating television. Big Finish deserves a lot of thanks for adding this to the Lost Stories range.

And there are still some Big Finish episodes to enjoy before returning to the televised series, but a BBC Novel is next...

NEXT EPISODE: VERDIGRIS