This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK broadcast of the episode. 

Doctor Who isn’t specially made for those of us who go online and watch multiple trailers multiple times or devour previews, but it is concerned with those who catch trailers between other programmes or might occasionally view online previews. The audience for The Rings of Akhaten was carefully primed to expect a story set in space with multiple alien species and a child-threatening monster. This is of course what they received, but to get there they took the public footpath rather than the motorway. There the themes of the season were restated and the moral of the episode prepared for, and the background of our new heroine explored further.

The Rings of Akhaten unexpectedly proved to be the first of this series’ visits to the recent past, with the central narrative being framed by the Doctor’s research expedition to establish Clara’s personal history. That history so far appears unencumbered by otherworldly or extradimensional intervention beyond the Doctor’s periodic sampling of her life, but the episode does raise the puzzle of the TARDIS’s unwillingness to open its doors to her, and provoke expectations surrounding the early death of Clara’s mother. On the one hand the loss of Ellie and the refusal of the TARDIS doors to open are both perfectly regular occurrences. People die, sometimes early; and Clara does not have the TARDIS key. Still, the idea that the TARDIS doesn’t like Clara is expressed in the shadow of the personalisation of the ship in The Doctor’s Wife and the affinity it displays with Melody/River in Let’s Kill Hitler. We are given many reasons to admire Clara in this episode, but there are unsettling notes in the background.

Those unsettling notes are not provided by Murray Gold, whose music moves back into being part of the narrative rather than a commentary upon it. His soundtrack to this story recalls his earlier choral works, especially those in Journey’s End and The End of Time, both in implying doomsday and in offering salvation from it. There were moments where one felt one was listening to a bland contribution to a fashionable modern hymnal, but there had to be contrast with the ritual hymn and subtlety of mood is difficult when a composer has so few minutes to work within, and so many other elements within the episode to underwrite. Overall, Gold continues to recognise and project the tone of the series: peril is interpreted in a less self-indulgently sinister manner than Dudley Simpson might have managed in the mid-1970s, but Gold’s scoring is intelligent and poignant, working with the emotions of the characters rather than trying to impose a mood on the viewer.

Doctor Who makes selective use of popular music, but a willingness to use it at all was one of the refreshing points of the revived series in 2005. ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials is used to signify 1981, juxtaposed with the Doctor reading The Beano Summer Special of that year, but the use of the song has further implications. It plays over the first meeting of Ellie and Dave, Clara’s parents; does this somehow prefigure apocalypse? More specifically for the episode’s plot, ‘Ghost Town’ concerns collective memory and experience. In terms of The Rings of Akhaten this is the history taught in song to Merry so she can feed her people’s god, and also Clara’s remembrance of her dead mother and the stories she passed on to her. ‘Ghost Town’ also echoes the Doctor’s long life and the memories which he rarely discusses but which he is willing to offer to the god to be devoured. If these ghosts are reflections of the past they can be confronted and digested. It’s the reflections on what might have been which can’t be faced, because they were never realised in the first place. As such, their form is unfixed and insubstantial and it’s appropriate that they give the Old God of Akhaten indigestion.

The Rings of Akhaten has been promoted as another instalment of cinematic Doctor Who, but it seems more at home within the confines of the small screen than many of its predecessors. The bazaar set is crowded and claustrophobic, and while this was set up in Roath Lock, one can imagine something similar being realised in Television Centre or with ingenuity and still narrower camera angles in Lime Grove or Riverside. The CGI is limited and relatively static compared with recent episodes and there is one space exterior very visibly realised using that age-old standby, the black cloth with lights shining through it. The great exception is the sense of distance suggested by the cuts between the Mummy’s temple and the open theatre where Merry sings her lullaby before her audience. Nevertheless, the concentration on a series of undynamic images mostly works to the episode’s advantage. The episode is substantially the story of Clara and Merry and the sets and effects function largely as background to a series of portrait shots rather than as features in their own right. They do register as a series of references to a cinematic heritage. The Rings of Akhaten suggests Ancient Egypt in its title (though misleading some fans, and journalists, to expect a connection to the natives of Phaester Osiris and Pyramids of Mars). The design of the sets is placed in the broad western tradition of Orientalism (and ‘Ghost Town’ too contains musical references to middle-eastern music or at least a twentieth-century Euramerican theatrical idea of what middle-eastern music was). Set designs which recall depictions of Egypt, Arabia or India in film are joined with a script inspired by Chinese or Japanese orthography. The plot, too, has echoes of various generations of The Mummy, and the Indiana Jones series. The episode could be construed as cinematic in its referencing rather than in its execution; though it’s also been seen as a literary episode, one more familiar with literary SF than me having noted links with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books. It’s the influence of cinema, and the depiction of Islamic, south and east Asian societies in adventure films, which lingers the most; perhaps it is appropriate then that the Old God is depicted both as Ancient Egyptian sun god and American Halloween pumpkin.

In performance, the episode demands most of Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman, with special mentions for Michael Dixon and Nicola Sian as Clara’s parents, who had to carry much of the pre-credits sequence, and for Emilia Jones as Merry. The latter’s role at first seems to have clear analogies with a schoolchild wanting to avoid embarrassment before peers and parents when faced with a solo song or reading. Emilia Jones conveys Merry’s predicament as the Queen of Years as if it is nothing extraordinary, the better for Jenna-Louise Coleman to reinforce Clara’s affinity with children, and later displays a fierce determination to fulfil her destiny. In contrast to the Clara of The Snowmen, this Clara seems more like the folk image of a Blue Peter presenter than Mary Poppins; she is compassionate, brave, willing to take risks as extreme as driving a space vehicle she’s only known briefly as a passenger, and able to think laterally at times of crisis. Matt Smith’s Doctor continues to evolve, becoming yet more attached to Amy’s glasses (does looking through them, perhaps, remind him of the human perspective?) and in doing so coming more to resemble Harold Lloyd than Norman Wisdom or Michael Crawford-as-Frank Spencer; this comparison seems also fitting for his Doctor’s greater physical self-control and proactivity.

The Rings of Akhaten furthers Doctor Who’s attitude to religion. The Doctor won’t disassociate himself from the beliefs of the inhabitants of the Akhaten system completely. His description of their faith as a ‘story’ is not a dismissal in a series so self-aware of its own storytelling. He gives a rationalist, empirical, cosmologist’s account of the making of the universe and what individuals are made of in order to convince Merry of her worth in her own right, not as the Queen of Years. Souls, the Doctor says, are stories; the roots and merits of this idea in the context of various religions should be left to those with more skill in comparative theology, but it’s an appropriate foundation for a belief system in Doctor Who. More frivolously, red is still the colour for religious orders in Doctor Who, five years from The Fires of Pompeii, but just over three from The End of Time.

Though the Old God is defeated and extinguished at the end of the episode, the return of the ring which Clara gave to Dor’een indicates that the best of the faith, a respect for lived experience and giving of oneself, survives. The Doctor gives that ring to Clara in a gesture which recalls the way in which he gave her Victorian counterpart the TARDIS key. For Clara this restores what she surrendered to the Old God with the leaf from 101 Places to See and confirms her integrity, which the Doctor’s mention of “someone who died” then seems to undermine. A viewer remembering The Snowmen might see the ring as a provisional commitment, short of the TARDIS key which marks the Doctor’s whole trust and performs a quasi-sacramental role within what The Myth Makers would remind us is the Doctor’s own ‘temple’. The Doctor is still no closer to finding out who or what Clara is at the end of the story; together with his mistaken identification of the Mummy as the Old God, this episode places unusual emphasis on his fallibility.

The Rings of Akhaten is a change in setting and tone from the expansive ebullience of The Bells of Saint John. The jumps in character progression which enable the telling of this story in forty-four minutes place a little strain on credibility but they are sustained by convincing performance and assertive editing. It’s an intimate story which could do with a little more breathing space in order to develop its themes of learning to explore and appreciate lives lived as a basis for future actions and discoveries. The fact that Clara has lived the life which enables her to understand and deploy her own story and the stories of others which influenced her against the Old God becomes not just a character strength and crisis resolution, but for Doctor and viewer, a frustrating and engaging narrative problem.

This review is based on the MP3 download from Big Finish, and contains spoilers.

Following on directly from The Sands of Life and its cliffhanger, this two part story continues the Conglomerate’s scheming, as led by their CEO Cuthbert (David Warner). Warner revels in his megalomaniacal role, with Cuthbert buying whatever scientific expertise he needs while going head-to-head against the Doctor and testing the mettle of Earth’s newly elected President, Sheridan Moorkurk (Hayley Atwell).

The Sands of Life configured an intriguing dilemma: respecting the Laan’s life cycle could mean all of humanity facing extinction. War Against the Laan picks up this puzzle, but the titular struggle is not one readily engaged in by the Doctor and Romana. Unlike the ruthless Cuthbert, our heroes are instead seeking a peaceful way to resolve the situation; it’s jaw-jaw not war-war for this TARDIS team, especially given that the scenario they’re up against is not at all an archetypal ‘invasion’.

Nick Briggs’ script gives both Warner and Atwell more to do this time round, and Tom Baker lavishes actorly attention on a number of his anti-Cuthbert expostulations, as well as sneaking a mention of badgers into his performance (I refuse to believe that moment was penned by Briggs, unless and until I see evidence to the contrary!). K-9 basically vanishes from proceedings  – having not been well utilized in this adventure – and Cuthbert also disappears at the very end, leaving the President to tie up a few (but not all) loose ends and bid the Doctor and Romana adieu. A closing scene between the Doctor and Cuthbert would have been more dramatically satisfying and less conventional, but this possibility is instead displaced by a slightly run-of-the-mill goodbye scene.

Combined with The Sands of Life, War Against the Laan ends up feeling like a strangely cosy four-parter despite some of its hard-hitting subject matter. It resists emulating the new series or “doing a Moffat” and shifting its second half to a wholly different time zone, setting or subgenre, and even finds time to revisit Genesis of the Daleks again, after its dialogue had already been referenced in the preceding release. I felt slightly let down by the resolution of the Laan conundrum, though. Having defined a brilliant, epic problem for the fourth Doctor and Romana to tackle, one with a real emotional and moral kick to it, things are clarified here until the main issue is pretty much sandpapered way. Tough questions are posed; easier answers are supplied. Likewise, a scientist whose services are bought and paid for by Cuthbert is called upon to wield his “auto dissect tools” on a child-bearing Laan, and although the emotional darkness of this is gestured at, any moral grey areas are fairly rapidly done away with. War Against the Laan tends to retreat into pulp fiction certainties or dodges, despite depicting a complex world of real politik and rampant commercialism.

There’s a mystery left dangling: Cuthbert’s thwarted experiment in the Proxima Four System evidently concerns some sort of time-space manipulation, but beyond that we learn little of the specifics. Presumably this will be returned to later in the current run of fourth Doctor tales, though the villain who wants time travel is itself a fairly well-worn Who theme. Perhaps Cuthbert wants total brand domination across all temporalities as well as all territories… less the Master, and more the evil Merchandiser. If so, Cuthbert’s moment as a zeitgeist baddie may well have arrived; initially an Audio Visuals’ creation of the Thatcher years, it is striking that he's been reimagined both as Doctor Who itself enters a peak of (anniversary) commercial activity, and as the UK simultaneously faces a resurgence in free market rhetoric and privatization. It seems fitting that the fourth Doctor's contemporary Moriarty figure should be a corporate celebrity, operating outside the law and above the government.  

The Laan are also an interesting creation, pregnant with possibilities, and represented almost as a kind of time-vortex salmon (though they’re actually described and visualized as giant seacows) instinctively returning to a particular space-time to spawn. I realize their massification is part of the story’s bid for scope and scale, but I still would have liked a greater sense of Laan culture or individuation. There are implications and hints – they refer to “sisters”, and there are “elders” who lead the birthing – but when Romana communicates empathetically with them we don’t get much in the way of Laan personality, quirks or differences. Instead, they seem to be a resolute collective; a big society of seven billion or so.

War Against the Laan does an excellent job of building Cuthbert's villainy and character, as well as seeding plot points which are sure to return. As a complete story alongside its predecessor, however, it promises more than it quite delivers. But there's real storytelling ambition on show here, and I'm already looking forward to Cuthbert's reappearance, not to mention the next full-on performance skirmish between David Warner and Tom Baker.            

This review is based on the MP3 download from Big Finish, and contains minor spoilers.

“You must change the channel – even if it’s Space: 1999! Just this once, it’s worth it! The Scorchies are evil!”
Jo Grant

I first met Katy Manning at a convention over a decade ago in my (and back then her) native Australia. The first thing that struck me about her is how extroverted and mischievous she is in comparison to her softly spoken alter ego Josephine Grant. The second thing that struck me was what a talented voice artist she is. She kept her audience thoroughly entertained for an hour by breaking into an assortment of voices belonging to characters she had portrayed in animation and children’s programmes at the time.

The Scorchies, her latest contribution to Big Finish’s Doctor Who Companion Chronicles, is right up Katy’s alley. It gives her the chance to not just reprise her role as Jo but to also voice some of the wacky characters that infest this oddball tale.

In the context of the story, the Scorchies are a bunch of madcap, homicidal extraterrestrials masquerading as children’s TV show puppets! Author James Goss, director Ken Bentley and sound designers Richard Fox and Lauren Yason bring to life a narrative in the guise of a fictional 1970s TV programme that can only be best described as The Muppets, The Teletubbies, Play School, Romper Room and Basil Brush on acid, complete with crazy, juvenile songs – and Jo Grant as a hostage on live TV! Jo is at one point trying to make a psychic anti-Scorchies gun out of cardboard tubes, sticky backed plastic, a pipe cleaner and a mind control crystal. Then there’s the Scorchie (TV) scanner, the sort of thing you might have seen on Play School or Romper Room in your tweens! The story also has a very pantomime feel which is, of course, very deliberate, especially when Jo herself ends up breaking into rhyme with some of the characters!

Like most Companion Chronicles, The Scorchies is a two-person affair. However, unlike previous titles, in which the story is told from the perspective of a narrator, assisted by some additional dialogue from a guest performer, the story is very much carried by the interplay between Manning and guest star Melvyn Hayes who clearly relishes the opportunity to play the villainous Scorchies, led by their leader Grizz Fizzle. Hayes, of course, is the ex-husband of former Who companion Wendy Padbury and father to their daughter Charlie Hayes (who has also appeared in other Who audios). Like Manning, Hayes has also done his fair share of voice work in children’s programmes, including Pongwiffy (in which he also voiced a character called Grizz), a TV adaptation of Jack & The Beanstalk and Super Ted (which, of course, starred the late, great Jon Pertwee). Clearly, Hayes is also in his element, playing other off the wall characters like Cool Cat and Professor Baffle.

I haven’t listened to too many Companion Chronicles so this is the first time I’ve heard Katy Manning as Jo on audio. Although you can sometimes detect the more seasoned tone to her voice, for the most part Katy captures Jo’s naïveté and youth perfectly – impressive when you consider that (her recent appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures aside) she hasn’t played the part for the best part of 40 years. Even the token Jo piece of dialogue – “But the Doctor can’t be dead! He just can’t be! You’re lying!” – is delivered with the same teary inflection and emotion that Katy was so famous for delivering on-screen all those decades ago.

Indeed, this style of storytelling literally pivots on the back of emotion. In an interview with Big Finish’s Vortex newsletter (which is available as a downloadable PDF file on this release), Katy discusses her approach to mixing her own portrayal of Jo with her other character voices (including the Magic Mice – “Would it help if we ate her a little bit?” - and Amble the ugly doll) on The Scorchies. She says the key to getting all the characters right is by “being in the moment ... with all the emotions that are happening at that time”. With the exception of the songs, which were recorded separately, Katy and Melvyn Hayes effectively performed the story “live”, effortlessly jumping between voices rather than recording the dialogue of each of the different characters separately. As a result, you as the listener get carried along rather convincingly, just as Jo, the hostage to this bizarre collection of aliens, is also powerless to influence the events of the story-cum-children’s programme.

The extras at the end of this release feature an interview with sound designers Richard Fox and Lauren Yason. They discuss the songs they had to compose for the story – Jo is Making a Thing and We killed the Doctor Dead – along with untreated performances of the songs before they were delivered to Katy Manning and Melvyn Hayes and treated electronically. This is actually quite refreshing, as we don’t often hear enough about the actual sound design work on a Big Finish audio, as opposed to the usual interviews with some members of the cast and production crew. What it does underline, though, is how important an aural experience The Scorchies is and how much it exploits the medium.

The Scorchies is an entertaining hour of childish mayhem, almost as if you really were watching a puppets’ TV show – and not listening to a Doctor Who audio. From that perspective, the story succeeds in parodying 1970s children’s programmes. If you’re not a regular listener of The Companion Chronicles, I urge you to try a few of the more conventional plays first. You won’t pick up on the nuances and emotion that Katy Manning refers to if you come to this cold.

Polly finds herself in a literal race against time after the TARDIS brings her, Jamie, the Doctor and Ben to a futuristic casino with a strict ‘no time travellers’ policy.

In the CD extras which accompany House of Cards, writer Steve Lyons and producer David Richardson discuss how they were “channelling” Season Four of Doctor Who in this release. While this may have been their intention, the finished product is reminiscent of a more recent sub-genre of Doctor Who. With its simple storyline, cartoonish villains and broadly drawn supporting characters the adventure feels closest in style to the BBC books/audios produced for younger audiences since 2005 (notably The Stone Rose with which it shares a similar structure). It’s an odd approach for a Companion Chronicle, given that they are geared to a more sophisticated, adult fan audience.

Once you accept that House of Cards is a more straightforward adventure than a typical Companion Chronicle there is much to enjoy here. Anneke Wills gives a typically spirited performance as Polly, with able support from Frazer Hines as the story’s secondary voice. A highlight comes in the first episode when Polly is confronted by Fortune, the mastermind behind the casino. Here Lyons capitalises on Polly’s strong sense of morality, calling to mind similar scenes with the Cybermen in The Tenth Planet.

While the first half of the play is a fairly standard set up, manoeuvring the regulars into varying degrees of peril, things get more complicated as we move into episode two. Here, Polly travels in time back to an earlier point in the narrative, and Lyons has a few clever tricks up his sleeve to stop things getting predictable. The identity of the lady in the china mask, who appears at key points in episode one, is central to this. Lyons deliberately wrong-foots the listener a number of times, making what first appears an obvious ruse a lot more fun than you’d expect. It’s in episode two that Jamie’s role as secondary narrator clicks into place. His present is Polly’s past, allowing us to see the impact her journey in time has had.

You would think that a casino would be a perfect setting for the mischievous Second Doctor but he takes a surprisingly small role in House of Cards. When he resurfaces towards the end of the story he is given a wonderfully ‘Doctorish’ moment (which I won’t spoil here, but concerns the game he picks to play to decide his fate) and it’s a shame there couldn’t have been more of these throughout the play. With Polly’s story neatly wrapped up, it falls to the Doctor to defeat Fortune. However, after being built up as a sinister, formidable foe her swift dispatch is something of a disappointment.

Overall House of Cards is one of the weaker instalments of the Companion Chronicles, but if you’re a fan of Polly and Jamie there are plenty of moments to enjoy. The disc’s extras confirm that Lyon’s will be penning a further adventure for this TARDIS team in the near future. This is welcome news as he captures them all very well, but it would be nice to see him return to the more nuanced, complex storytelling he is widely praised for (stories like Resistance, Colditz and The Crooked World).It would also be good to see more experimentation with the ‘second voice’ in Polly’s Companion Chronicles, as this is the third release in a row that has seen her paired with Frazer Hines as Jamie. One of the most successful aspects of the range as been the pairing of companion actors with co-performers/characters who bring out new and interesting sides of them, and it would be good to see Wills benefit from this, especially as it worked very well in her first Companion Chronicle (the previously mentioned Resistance).

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK broadcast of the episode. 

‘A new series and a new companion,’ announced BBC One shortly before its stream of consciousness was interrupted by something outside the accepted norms of out-of-vision continuity. Doctor Who has on and off promoted itself as an interruption, an Adventure in Space and Time outside a schedule it implicitly paints as mundane and workaday. Forty-odd years ago, when it was ‘the children’s own programme which adults adore’, tucked away early on a Saturday evening amidst sport, light entertainment and imported series or TV movies, it was perhaps easier to indulge Doctor’s adventures. In the Doctor’s fiftieth year, television programmes compete in a much wider field and Doctor Who has to interrupt the evening of a much wider cross-section of the audience than its ancient niche to justify its continued appearance on our screens. Happily The Bells of Saint John did so with the sort of precision engineering which qualified the Doctor’s bike for the anti-grav Olympics, and which will hopefully have a similar effect in the television ratings.

The Bells of Saint John worked hard. While there was much for the seasoned viewer to recognise and enjoy because their foreknowledge was anticipated, the episode functioned more than perfectly well as an embarkation point for new viewers. Travel in time and space was presented in a series of short settings ranging from the domestic to different blends of action-adventure, with more than a twist of the surreal. The ordinary was turned inside out to become unsettling and events and characters depicted with a lightness which was deceptive. The paranoia of the individual in a connected world was ruthlessly exploited. It’s never been fashionable to embrace the Doctor as fundamentally an Everyman, as Christopher H Bidmead once argued he was, but the Doctor’s experience in the rooftop café by St Paul’s must have disturbed everyone who even for a few seconds has imagined that a roomful of strangers is talking to them. Like much of the best Doctor Who of recent years, such as Blink or Midnight, it develops a threat from memories of the nastier examples of childhood interaction. Even the broad strokes with which the villainy of Miss Kizlet is defined ultimately suggest a childhood interaction which went badly wrong, though this is an area in which her client has previous and (within the ongoing narrative of the programme) recent experience.

Each time Doctor Who has returned to television, the worldwide promotion of the series launch has increased. More than any episode since the 2005 series, The Bells of Saint John seemed self-consciously to advertise Doctor Who’s status as a standard bearer for a particular export variety of Britain. As in Rose eight years ago, London was presented as a series of familiar landmarks juxtaposed with a threat associated with a new addition to the skyline, in this case the Shard. Repetition worked, not just because Doctor Who’s worldwide audience has expanded since 2005, but because it reassures those familiar with the use of major new London buildings as headquarters of sinister forces in the series (a history stretching back to 1966 and The War Machines) while at the same time amplifying their anticipation of developments within the story. The programme’s identity is confirmed to those who know it. London is presented to newcomers as somewhere continually remade: exotic, dangerous, but ultimately made safe for time and space travellers, and inhabited by friendly (if occasionally possessed) folk liable to interpret the arrival of a time and space machine as a remarkable piece of busking.

In contrast, northern England (and by extension all parts of the United Kingdom which are not London) is remote and best experienced as a representation of the past, though the all-male monastic retreat where anachronistic ideas like telephones and communicative women are greeted with alarm is a dysfunctional extreme. For the Doctor, withdrawal into such a place is of limited use. His choice and his natural abode is the new. Both he and Clara are voices on the other end of a phone helpline: Clara has called for help but the Doctor is also seeking answers from her. Both collapse time zones as much as BBC Worldwide’s sales force seek to do with increasing success. For the first time a BBC One broadcast of a new Doctor Who episode ended with the BBC Worldwide animation familiar from DVD releases, confirming the placing of the programme as global BBC brand suggested by the narrative’s flirtation with tourist-video quirkiness.

The use of imagery is not alone in recalling Rose. Some of Clara’s exchanges with the Doctor echoed Rose’s initial questions word-for-word, though she has been more successful than Rose at putting an opinionated parent at a distance. There are several retroactive references which are rendered unobtrusive by having other functions in the plot, but which court speculation. Is it accidental that Clara has a book written by Amy? Recent precedent suggests not. Who was the woman in the shop who gave Clara the Doctor’s number? Given the casting announcement for the fiftieth anniversary episode made (by accident) earlier in the day, the comparisons possible between Miss Kizlet in The Bells of Saint John and Miss Foster in Partners in Crime must have led several fan viewers to expect another parallel between the two.

The Clara of The Bells of Saint John is a less preternaturally self-possessed character than either Oswin in Asylum of the Daleks or Clara in The Snowmen. Given that this Clara doesn’t have any computer expertise until she is uploaded to and then downloaded from the Cloud, it’s possible that this is the first Clara, from which the others are in some way spun off; this may be grasping at a straw. Her dialogue may echo Rose but her rapid-fire delivery and some turns of phrase recall the early David Tennant Doctor (‘That’s weird’): but this is another straw, over which half-formed red herrings leap in the fan mind.

The Bells of Saint John furthers the mission statement of series seven to provide a cinematic experience. Several scenes seemed made with HD and a large screen in mind, from the defiantly comedic but enthralling motorbike ride up the Shard, to the detail in the maps, the threading of this particular web of fear across the computer-simulated globe, and the patterns of light which danced and fluttered within the Spoonheads. Cinematic Doctor Who is less afraid of contrast on screen and where a few years ago townscapes were narrowly shot and underlit, the London of The Bells of Saint John rejoices both in the pinhead lights shining from the distant city at night, and the sunshine of early morning. It’s still a series which won’t linger on most effects shots. Doctor Who was never about effects shots, but in an entertainment world where CG is regarded by many as a performer in its own right it is probably the done thing to look bothered about them for a fraction of a second at a time before the episode is furiously driven onwards.

Matt Smith remains in great command of the Doctor, and increasingly so, his physicality seeming less intrusive this year than previously. The Doctor’s enjoyment of his anonymity, overstressed in the first segment of this season, seems to be reined in here, perhaps because of the less exuberant Doctor seen since the loss of the Ponds but also because the point for long-term viewers has been made. As a character, the Doctor is still too complacent about the question ‘Doctor Who?’ UNIT will not have forgotten, and the Great Intelligence certainly has not. If the Doctor is again the principal viewpoint character of Doctor Who, then the programme’s apparently implausible insistence on the effectiveness of the erasure of the Doctor from history might be an expression of the Doctor’s own insouciance. This situation will not last for ever.

The confusion of computer skills with knowledge of internet culture, and of the information transmitted through wi-fi with the technology itself, will have annoyed many fans of a technical bent, and were Sydney Newman here he would probably agree. The idea that human identity and personality can be rendered as easily digitised signals will raise eyebrows among psychologists, physiologists and philosophers to name but three, but it recognises that in the age of Facebook and Twitter more people are representing themselves more frequently and more widely as abbreviated biographical data than was ever possible before. The images of human faces on screens, asking for help, no longer sure of their location, were major narrative devices in The Idiot’s Lantern seven years ago, but they seem more effective in the age of Skype and personal mobile webcams than in the days of Alexandra Palace and 405-line broadcasting. The Bells of Saint John might appear as frothy as the top of Clara’s breakfast smoothie, but it’s a deft blend of bright colours and pan-generational anxieties which proved a seductively sinister reintroduction to Doctor Who.

“When do you know it’s time to move on?”, that’s the question Steven Taylor asks himself when the TARDIS arrives in a time he’s all too familiar with. On a remote frontier planet colonists are being attacked by a sadistic band of outlaws known as the Rocket Men, and Steven might be their only hope for survival...

Steven’s abrupt departure from Doctor Who in The Savages is the starting point for Return of the Rocket Men. It takes this disappointing exit and attempts to give it context and emotional resonance, two things that companion exits were often lacking during this period of the show, when characters were frequently and unceremoniously dumped.

One of the most successful previous attempts at fleshing out the emotional side of 60s companions was John Dorney’s The Rocket Men, which this story is a sequel to. That story is one of the most structurally complex and emotionally rewarding plays in The Companion Chronicles range. In invoking that previous work, writer Matt Fitton has given himself a lot to live up to.

In The Rocket Men Dorney focused on Ian’s love for Barbara, something that was never really addressed in the series, but has been a long-favourite fan theory about the characters. In writing a sequel Matt Fitton not only takes on that play’s titular villains (more on them later), but also it’s commitment to strong, character-based drama, using Steven’s departure in the same way as Ian’s feelings for Barbara. The problem is that the emotional hook of Steven’s decision to leave is far less engaging than Ian’s love for Barbara. As the first companions Ian and Barbara have an iconic status that Steven does not. While it’s nice to have Steven’s departure given more context, it’s just not as interesting.

Despite having a weaker starting point than The Rocket Men, the play does manage to give a satisfying level of depth to Steven’s exit. No mean feat given that his departure was so vapid and perfunctory. In doing so Fitton returns to Steven’s origins as a pilot and the character development we have already seen in The Companion Chronicles (notably in the Oliver Trilogy). While this was probably intended to feel like a culmination of threads from previous plays it does feels a little repetitive. The Cold Equations also had Steven’s piloting experience as the crux of the story, and it (along with the stories either side of it) also had him reflecting on the deaths of Katarina, Sara and Oliver. This isn’t to say that it isn’t engaging and well written, it’s just that it doesn’t give the character or The Companion Chronicles anything new.

One of the things that made The Rocket Men work so well was the clever way it used narrative perspective, telling the story non-chronologically, with flashes in the past and future slowly revealing more about how the situation in the present would be resolved. While Return of the Rocket Men does have a certain ‘timey-wimeyness’ (as the new series would put it), the play’s structure is disappointingly straightforward. This isn’t to say that every play in the range needs to be wildly experimental, but it does beg the question of why you would chose to invoke one of the most complex and well received plays in something which shows such little ambition.

There is also the question of why Fitton decided to use the titular villains in this story at all. In their first story they were clearly intended as a pastiche, both of 1940s sci-fi serials and the kind of pulp-inspired villains which often appeared in the early years of Doctor Who. Here however, they are presented as violent, thuggish mercenaries, their roots all but forgotten. The main genre being played with here is the Western, with the ‘pioneer’ colonist staving off an attack by bandits, and the Rocket Men don’t really fit with this setting terribly well. One of them is even given a bizarre fondness for archaic hand-guns in a clumsy attempt to tie the Rocket Men better to the setting. An original creation might have worked better.

All this may make it sound like I didn’t like this play, but that isn’t true. It’s a very solid piece from a strong writer. It’s just that it pales in comparison to it’s predecessor, The Rocket Men, and would undoubtedly work better as a play in it’s own right, rather than being a sequel. The comparison just draws attention to its shortcomings and lack of originality. With the recent announcement that The Companion Chronicles will be coming to an end after Series 8, it would be nice if they could find ways to use the characters in new ways and push the actors in new directions, rather than going over old ground in solid, but underwhelming releases like this.