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Having suffered damage, the TARDIS needs time to repair her
systems. The Doctor thinks that he and Ace have landed on
20th-century Earth, but the instruments cannot be more precise.
They soon realise they are stranded in Colditz, the most secure
prison camp in the whole of Nazi Germany...
So
the Seventh Doctor and Ace face Nazis... again! They previously
battled them in Remembrance of the Daleks, Silver
Nemesis and the novels Timewyrm: Exodus and Illegal
Alien. It does seem that writers cannot resist pitting
the Machiavellian McCoy Doctor and the hate-crime-hating Ms
McShane against such iconic bad guys.
Yes,
that's right: Ace's surname is reiterated as being "McShane",
as originally set down by Virgin's New Adventures novels.
(Have you got that, Mike Tucker? Let's have no more of that
"Dorothy Gale" nonsense!) However, this brief victory to NA
mythology is potentially snatched away again at the end of
the tale, when Dorothy McShane reaches a particular decision
about the use of her nickname that does not sit too comfortably
alongside Virgin continuity. Maybe it's just a phase she's
going through - you'll see what I mean when you hear the ending.
But
back to the Nazis and, more specifically, to Colditz Castle.
As with his previous Big Finish script, The Fires of Vulcan,
writer Steve Lyons has selected an enduringly fascinating
historical setting in which to entrap the TARDIS crew. The
appeal of vintage war movies is captured (no pun intended)
by the presence of a particularly zealous German officer,
Feldwebel Kurtz (David Tennant), and an especially stiff-upper-lipped
British prisoner, Flying Officer Bill Gower (Nicholas Young).
However, the writer offsets such clichés by also including
German and British officers who do not conform to these stereotypes.
As
with his Fires of Vulcan - in fact, in common with
the majority of this writer's work - a tricky temporal complication
presents itself to the Doctor, thus ensuring that this adventure
becomes more than your average prison-break story. There seems
to be no limit to Lyons' ability to concoct new and intriguing
time-travel paradoxes with which to challenge our brains.
A
variation on familiar themes this may be, but there are far
worse places to be than inside, out of the cold, listening
to Colditz.
Richard
McGinlay
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