Nightdreamers

The TARDIS makes an unexpected landing on the moon of Verd on Periheilion night. There's a wedding in planning and a play to celebrate it is being rehearsed in the forest. But the wedding has been planned against the wishes of the bride, Ria, and she wants to run away with her cousin, Tonio. The gravity of the moon is experiencing localized failures throwing the whole place into chaos. The locals live in fear of the Nighdreamers, and the Doctor is set for a confrontation with the Nightdreamer King himself.

So it's another of the Telos novellas here, originally published in 2002 to slip in right after Planet of the Daleks with Jo still hemming and hawing over her decision to stay with the Doctor or to have gone to live on Skaro with young Latep. I don't know what version of Planet author Tom Arden was watching, but I don't really remember the fleeting friendship between Jo and Latep turning into some burning love desire over the two episodes they were in each other's company. Indeed, Jo's rather casual dismissal of him on screen didn't indicate that she was taking his sudden proposal seriously, but now as Jo meets two lovers who are forced apart by an arranged marriage she is all wondering what could have been with Latep.

Nightdreamers is pretty much Tom Arden trying to go Shakespearean comedy, drawing heavily on A Midsummer Night's Dream for it's plot paralles. This may actually be the shortest of the Telos Novella range at 104 pages (and a price tag on the back of $49.95 which I really hope I did not actually pay) and I found it didn't really entertain so much as annoy. Maybe it was supposed to be taken as genre and I missed that point - I'm not against the tone of a story going against the grain of what's been established on screen during respective eras, but Nightdreamers just felt a bit... silly. Or maybe fairy stories and magic elves aren't really my thing.

NEXT EPISODE: STORM OF THE HOROFAX