Doctor Who: Stranded 2

The low-key story of the Doctor being stranded on Earth continues in this collection. More pieces of the plot arc come together here, but the main distinguishing feature from Stranded 1 is that the TARDIS is once again capable of time travel – but not yet of travelling through space. Still stuck in London, this allows for a heavier emphasis on time travel as a plot device (rather than, say, alien planets), and makes good use of the cast of characters set up in the previous volume.

Dead Time – Starting directly where volume 1 left off, this soon sees the Doctor taking an unusually large number of travelling companions off in the TARDIS, only to arrive on an uninhabited Earth six million years in the future. It's clear that part of the purpose of this is to lay seeds for future episodes; we see the eventual outcome of some major event that has yet to happen. Aside from that, though, the story sees the travellers wandering about in an empty desert, giving them plenty of time to interact with one another and for the show to develop their characters – Tania, especially, being built up as potential companion material. Despite the eventual danger of the setting, it's almost a downtime episode, taking time to show how the different characters react to their predicament. 4 stars.

UNIT Dating – The cheeky title of this episode doesn't refer to what you might think it does (although there are nods to that, too). It sees the Doctor travelling back to the UNIT of his third incarnation's days and ending up causing a temporal anomaly that not only affects him and Andy in the past, but Liv and Helen in the present day. It's a good time travel story, further enlivened by being wound around a couple of UNIT soldiers starting a romantic relationship whose outcome is changed by the shifting events. Plus, of course, we have Jon Culshaw as the Brigadier getting some good scenes with Eight that address issues that the ‘70s show never did. 4.5 stars.

Baker Street Irregulars – With time travel available again, a story set in the past was inevitable, and it feels appropriate that this one is mostly a straight historical. That element of the plot sees the Doctor taking two of his tenants back to 1941 to learn more about their grandmother's work for the SOE. Naturally enough, that soon leads to adventure – albeit with Nazis less directly involved than one might expect – but it is accompanied by an SF side-plot concerning an unexploded bomb that turns out to be anything but. The historical elements, borrowing on a nickname for the SOE when it was, indeed, based on Baker Street, are loosely reminiscent of the real-world story of Noor Inayat Khan... one of those little bits of history that our white-male-dominated vision of WWII era Britain tends to overlook. 4 stars.

The Long Way Round – The concluding story alternates between scenes of the time travellers being interrogated by a mysterious woman holding them captive and The Curator having a friendly chat with a child on a park bench. It's the sort of thing that's ideally suited for audio, since it wouldn't have much in the way of visuals if it were made for TV. Instead, it relies on the personalities of the various characters as each is interviewed one by one and the story, and how it connects to the larger plot, slowly unfolds. I worked out the ‘surprise' reveals early on, but they aren't the beauty of the story, which come from the top-notch acting and dialogue. 5 stars.