Doctor Who: 1001 Nights

The Doctor is imprisoned by an unnamed Sultan, to whom Nyssa is forced to recount her adventures in exchange for his release. While ostensibly a historical setting, quite where or when this takes place is never stated, and it's clearly intended to be “generic fantasy Arabia”, rather than anywhere in particular. (As, to be fair, is the setting of the story collection from which it takes its name).

The story cuts back and forth between the Doctor's efforts to escape and Nyssa telling stories, three of which are presented as plays-within-a-play. The first of these, set in a space prison built for a single prisoner, suffers from being greatly curtailed in length (having to also fit a large portion of the framing narrative into the 30-minute ‘episode' allotment), and has to rely on the Doctor suddenly working out what's going on on the basis of information he couldn't plausibly know.

That's followed by what's essentially a pastiche of The Exorcist; a supernatural tale about demonic possession here dressed up in the language of SF. Despite which, it's probably the strongest of the three stories, and makes the most sense. The third story concerns a world in which stories are a form of currency, and suffers from the premise being too absurd to take all that seriously.

The final 30-minute slot is taken up by resolving the frame story. There are some good moments here from the character that the Doctor meets in the dungeons, and, indeed, the Doctor's section of the frame story is the best part of 1001 Nights taken as a whole. Despite a good guest performance from Alexander Siddig (of Deep Space Nine and Game of Thrones) as the Sultan, though, the story is too bitty to really click, and ends up reasonable, but not truly satisfying.