Season 18 of Doctor Who is one of my favourites. It’s the first season run by producer John Nathan Turner (aka JNT) and he brought with him script editor Christopher H Bidmead. Bidmead comes up with this crazy idea – let’s treat Doctor Who like proper sci-fi, that adults can enjoy and that’s full of proper science.
Look through season 18 and you’ll find the likes of The Keeper of Traken, Warrior’s Gate and Logopolis – excellent stories that put science and sci-fi ideas front and centre.
Tragically, season 18 was also very dull and very hard to understand. Even to this day, grown men and women stand around trying to work out what the hell Warrior’s Gate was all about.
Bidmead didn’t hang around forever, but he did return briefly to write the Peter Davison story Frontios, which was another of those science type stories. He also came back to write a story for Colin Baker, The Hollows of Time, but that was never made.
Now Big Finish has got Bidmead to brush the script off, spruce it up, give it a humungous edit because it was 30% too long, convert it to audio since it was always intended as a very visual play and hand it over to them for their ‘Lost Stories’ season.
And you know what? Like most of season 18, it’s absolutely incomprehensible and not very enjoyable, but I still really liked it.
One slight hitch: there were two returning enemies of the Doctor in the original script, but Big Finish couldn’t get the rights to one of them, so he’s been replaced by AN Other enemy of vague origins and identity. Who is it? Well, the clues are there if you can do anagrams…
Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – The Lost Stories – 04 – The Hollows of Time”
