Speed of Flight

The Doctor takes Jo and Mike Yates on board the TARDIS promising them a trip to the planet Karfel, but instead they arrive on a strange world with a strange life cycle; children are born in the forest and evolve to men on land who then evolve up to flying creatures called Naieen, and below march the armies of the Dead. The crew are separated and the TARDIS is lost in the forest; while Jo tries to reunite with the Doctor and Mike they fall in with a group of men who are on a mission to steal the sun and poison the sky.

Confused? I was for a while.  Paul Leonard created this entire new world and decided the best way to describe it would be through the thoughts of the locals, so there's this strange shift and use of capitalization to describe the Sky, the Land, the Dead and what have you. There's not a lot of explaining done when our regulars arrive either; when they do not know what is going on they are dismissed as "from another Land" and no clear answers are given to them. The Doctor does suss out that the whole place has been engineered as there's very little chance of anything evolving to this level of complexity. The men have managed to create some kind of steam powered technology to fly - in fact the whole technological side of things does take inspiration from steampunk it seems - but they never really say what they use for fuel. And the men have this strange affliction where they will suddenly get inflated muscles and start fighting to the death, and whoever wins will be Promoted. Whoever loses will be Dead.

Dead doesn't seem to be too bad a deal, though; they keep coming back to life. But they are Dead.

I couldn't visualize some of it very well, but for me I had the hardest time with the Naieen; I kept imagining Menoptera and for a while wondered if this was actually another visit to Vortis. But it's not. But if you look at the cover there's an actual physical link between the Land and the Sky, but the narrative suggests that they are much further apart than that.

Adding Mike Yates to the TARDIS crew this time was an interesting touch; aside from the Brigadier he's been the one UNIT member who has gotten the best treatment in the expanded universe of Doctor Who but it keeps coming back to this stop and go attempt to get him and Jo together as a couple. And Leonard makes sure to mention the events of the previous story, Dancing the Code, to create that link between events, and even addressing that concern I had before about the state of UNIT HQ by the end of it.

One more down, but not time to go back to the TV set just yet...

NEXT EPISODE: CATASTROPHEA