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