The 16th century: playwright Kit Marlowe is attempting to write Doctor Faustus when a darkness descends on his life, in the cadaverous form of a Spaniard called Velez. The monstrosity is in search of a stone blade that was brought from South America. After a near-disastrous collision with an asteroid in space, the TARDIS makes an emergency landing, bringing the Doctor and Peri to Elizabethan England. These two events are connected. The Omnim are ready, and the point of entry approaches...

If Point of Entry had been produced for television during the Colin Baker era, David Tennant’s time as the Doctor might have panned out a little differently. In this parallel universe, there might not have been an episode entitled The Shakespeare Code, featuring a famous Elizabethan playwright being inspired by seemingly magical forces for the purposes of summoning vast hordes of aliens to materialise on Earth - because Point of Entry would already have been there and done that. (Then again, the fact that Robots of Death was produced during the Tom Baker era didn’t prevent Tennant’s production team from featuring similarly handsome killer robot servants in Voyage of the Damned, so perhaps The Shakespeare Code would have gone ahead regardless!)

Queen Elizabeth herself doesn’t appear in this adventure (well, not quite), though there is a celebrity historical guest appearance by her “spymaster”, Sir Francis Walsingham (played to chilling effect by Ian Brooker).

Unlike previous Lost Stories, Point of Entry never reached the stage of full scripts until now. It was one of several ideas that writer Barbara Clegg submitted to the production team during the 1980s, though only Enlightenment was taken up at the time. The writer declined to develop her one-and-a-half-page storyline into full scripts for Big Finish, so Marc Platt has fleshed out the tale instead, with Clegg’s approval. It’s not easy to see which ideas in the finished product are Clegg’s and which are Platt’s, which is a good thing, as it suggests that Platt has successfully interpreted Clegg’s intentions. Of the characters, only the villainous Velez (Luis Soto) and his unflatteringly named dwarf underling Iguano (Sean Connolly) exhibit Platt’s trademark eccentricities. There is a distinct element of goriness in the audio production (especially in the decaying form of Velez), which could be Platt’s invention, but then again Clegg could have been influenced by the gruesome tendencies of Season 22.

Point of Entry isn’t up to the standards of Enlightenment, but it’s still a worthy entry into the series.

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Richard McGinlay