Doctor Who: Legend of the Cybermen

It's no surprise who the villains are here, given the title and the fact that they're rather obviously on the cover. However, the fact that it's a sequel to the Troughton story The Mind Robber does give away the ending of part two of the trilogy, so I'll try to avoid further mention of that in the review.

I didn't feel that this story was quite so good as its immediate predecessor, lacking the sense of gradually increasing oddity that that had, and many of the twists being rather obvious in advance (or so it seemed to me... maybe I just got ‘lucky'). However, it does have a similarly great sense of fun, playing about with a slew of guest characters along the way.

In fact, the story has a good mix of pathos and humour, and some interesting twists on the setting. Some parts provide some lovely mental imagery - the cyberwhale fitted with torpedo launchers, for instance - while others very much take advantage of the audio format to do things that would never work on screen. Whether you're going to like this kind of thing is very much a matter of taste; the story is very meta-fictional, and some won't like that. Nor, one suspects, does it give the kind of closure many might be looking for on the Jamie/Doctor relationship.

Personally, while I didn't find it perfect (as noted above), I did find it very enjoyable. The meta-fictional elements, for instance, are, at times, laugh-out-loud funny, yet they don't overshadow the whole story and make perfect sense in context.