Island of Death

Jeremy Fitzoliver has decided to chuck it all and has left Metropolitan magazine to join a new group all about brotherhood and a new way of life. Sarah knows a cult when she sees one and sets about investigating what they are all about, not buying the spiritual well being line for a second. Sarah discovers that the figure at the heart of this is an insectoid creature named the Skang; a creature that the Doctor recognizes as not being of this world. The cult picks up and leaves to join members from around the world, with the Doctor, Sarah and the Brigadier following behind to delve into the mystery, and in doing so they uncover an alien menace set to take over the world.

I get the feeling that Barry Letts might have submitted this idea for BBC Radio as he did previously with The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N Space, or maybe he was just on a roll when he picked up the pen again. All the elements are there from the previous stories; Sarah not exactly being a full time companion for the Doctor yet, a reduced UNIT presence with the Brigadier operating away from his usual support base, and Jeremy Fitzoliver being generally frustrating (although this time we don't actually have to listen to his wheedling). The Doctor is still maintaining his link with UNIT as well even though he has the TARDIS back (sort of; there's a waste of time chapter where it doesn't function) and could leave Earth anytime, and as with the other stories he is found engrossed in his own experiments when the action starts to move.

But another cult story! Actually this was written before the Big Finish audio Transcendence of Ephros where the Doctor and Jo tried to make a suicide cult change their ways, and here the cult is borne of the human fascination with enlightenment through spiritual well being. All they have to do to get the ball rolling is to enjoy some of the dangerous Kool Aid on offer and then Mother Hilda will show them the way. The way, is, mind you, to surrender your human identity and become a Skang yourself if you are into insects. The picture is pretty enough on the island - it's literally a paradise but is it all just an elaborate fraud? Just as with Paradise of Death there's a strong reliance on illusion, and an easy way to see through it.

You know what I don't like most about this one? It feels so.... damn.... long. The journey by sea to the Island from Bombay crawls on for pages and pages with Sarah treating it like a luxury cruise and sunbathing in her bikini and the Brigadier annoyed that he's not in control of the situation. I could only take it a chapter at a time and for that reason it took me a while to get through the book. I suppose, though, that as most of the episodes produced for television under Letts were six part adventures he wouldn't have been too concerned about the length of the sequences; he may have been going for epic status on this one. But I kinda doubt it. And he just couldn't help but drop another of the old foreshadowing references to the Doctor's eventual regeneration.

And that's next.

NEXT EPISODE: PLANET OF THE SPIDERS