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Since they are both tired of backbiting politics and intrigue,
Romana persuades Leela to accompany her to the protected paradise
of Davidia. Then an anomalous time ship arrives, carrying
a hideously injured passenger. Is this broken man a victim
of some terrible crime or part of a trap now primed and ready
to spring...?
I
wonder whether the folks at Big Finish are at all annoyed
with Russell T Davies. It could be argued that his new version
of Doctor Who has effectively invalidated not one but
two of the company's spin-off series. First of all, the episode
The End of the World revealed that Gallifrey had been
destroyed, then the two-part Aliens of London/World War
Three put paid to UNIT.
Still,
we didn't see the entire staff of UNIT get killed by the Slitheen,
so Emily Chaudhry and/or Robert Dalton may well have been
elsewhere and survived the attack. As for the Gallifrey
series, we must of course assume that these adventures are
set before the planet's destruction, just as readers of the
BBC's Eighth Doctor novels have been assuming for years.
Romana
(Lalla Ward) tries to get to know Leela (Louise Jameson) better
in this instalment, during which they both learn to strike
a balance between their respective extreme views. Romana's
"superior" technical knowledge and cynical denial of the spiritual
is contrasted with Leela's "primitive" worldview.
Writer
Stephen Cole also throws in a neat explanation for why Leela
hasn't aged much over the last 25 years. However, some fans
would argue that centuries should have passed since The
Invasion of Time, based on the Doctor's stated age in
various stories. I theorise that Andred and Leela must have
done a bit of TARDIS travelling during their marriage and
accidentally skipped forward a few centuries after one particular
trip.
What
starts out as a seemingly leisurely change-of-pace episode
becomes something more sinister with the arrival of the "broken
man". His features burned, his tongue torn out, his hands
crushed and his mind destroyed, there is no way to identify
who this victim is. Since he appears to have travelled back
from Gallifrey's future, he could even be a character that
we already know. I am reminded of the classic 2000AD
comic strip The Dead Man, in which a burned and amnesiac
victim turned out to be someone very familiar indeed.
The
question of the broken man's identity is not resolved here,
so this CD does not function as an individual story in its
own right, but it does promise intrigue for instalments yet
to come.
Richard
McGinlay
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