A mixed bag of Companion Chronicle style stories here, though with a strong finish. Released in 2017.
It may just have been the mood I was in when listening to it (generally out of sorts and distracted) but John Pritchard’s “Fields of Terror” failed to click for me. As drama, it is purely Maureen O’Brien wandering the Vendée in the company of a French revolutionary officer played by Robert Hands. I didn’t get into it and the plot didn’t seem to resolve.
The other three are a different matter. “Across the Darkened City” by David Bartlett is a two-hander between Peter Purves as Steven and Nick Briggs as a renegade Dalek. It’s an Enemy Mine situation, with several wrinkles and an unpleasant but shapeless alien menace. It brought me back into the sequence.
And then the third story, “The Bonfires of the Vanities”, with Anneke Wills as Polly and Elliot Chapman as Ben, made me sit up sharply. The TARDIS lands in Lewes on Bonfire Night some time in the 1950s, but it seems that there are dark human forces afoot in the town and dark alien forces out to disrupt the Doctor’s timeline. This was the best of the four for me. I let out a gasp of surprise in the commentary when I discovered that it is by my good friend Una McCormack.
Finally, the same cast are in “The Plague of Dreams”, by Guy Adams, a pre-regeneration story for the First Doctor which invokes Shakespeare in unexpected ways and also brings in a new and unexpected renegade Time Lord, tying in loosely but effectively with the previous story. I felt the second half of this box set generally worked very nicely as a unit.
