The Elixir of Doom

Jo Grant is travelling with Iris Wildthyme and the pair arrive in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Tinsel town is all about monster movies, and the travellers know all about monsters having met enough in their time. But the monsters in the films are a bit too convincing, and upon a closer look are proven to be real aliens working under duress. But the question of how they got here and why they are working for a sadistic studio exec remains. Jo and Iris are not alone in their investigations; it looks as if a future incarnation of the Doctor is here too.

It's double duty for Katy Manning once more as both Jo and Iris. How she's not gone nuts from doing this is a good question. But this is the last of the Companion Chronicles with Jo Grant in them; it was released in 2011 and everything after has been the acclaimed Third Doctor Adventures box sets. And it doesn't get old at all; Jo and Iris actually make a good team but it's strange that Jo doesn't seem too concerned about getting back home to her family. When this adventure started for this pair it was at the end of Find and Replace when Jo was taken away from Earth during her Christmas shopping, but you wouldn't know it as she seems to be fine with wandering space and time again.

Enter the Doctor, albeit a future version of him, his eighth self who doesn't come into being until 1996 on an ill-fated television movie. He's there looking into the same thing that Jo and Iris have discovered: there are real aliens held captive in Hollywood and they are being used in films against their will. Iris has met this Doctor before, and oddly author Paul Magrs has left that bit of continuity alone (a BBC Books novel called The Scarlet Empress) when he just ignored other Iris adventures with Jo and the third Doctor to re-introduce her in Find and Replace. As for meeting up with this future Doctor, Jo will also meet another future Doctor in years to come, but as the chronometer flies it would have been the same year this was released and no mention made here of that incident (that being an episode of a spin-off series). Big Finish usually try to keep in step with the TV series and all its aspects and spin-offs just to keep things clean but Paul Magrs seems to want to march to his own drum sometimes.

But that's it for Jo Grant. For now. Of course we'll see her again in the future - is anyone really truly gone in a time travel series? But to date that's all the material there is in this line of continuity. We leave Jo wandering in time and space with a different Time Lord, and rejoin her previous alien friend as he continues without her.

NEXT EPISODE: THE TIME WARRIOR