Doctor Who: The First Doctor Adventures, Volume 4

Two more unconnected stories set between the first and second seasons of the TV series. As usual, one is set in space, and the other is a straight historical.

Return to Skaro – Given its placing, this story has to be set between the original Daleks story and The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which obviously no actual Dalek story does. This necessarily means that it can't add anything new, which might be a limitation, but here produces a story that's surprisingly good. It achieves this by feeling as if it is a sequel to the original TV story as if that had existed in isolation and its titular villains had, perhaps, never appeared again.

The basic idea is that the time travellers arrive on Skaro four generations after their previous visit to discover that the Thals have rebuilt and now live happily in a world entirely free from their former enemies. I can't imagine it's much of a spoiler to say that that doesn't last...

There's a great '60s TV atmosphere in here in terms of the music and sound effects, evoking the creepy feel of much of the original and of us seeing Daleks still limited by their need for static electricity and stuck on a single planet. Indeed, despite them having multiple opportunities to do so, they hardly ever use the word ‘exterminate', and never as a battle cry – at the time in the TV series that this is supposedly set that part of their lore had not yet been developed.

Yes, significant elements of the plot are driven by some of the characters doing remarkably stupid things. Barbara is also underused; she does get to shine a little towards the end but is very much playing second fiddle to the other three. And, at times, it's hard to tell some of the Thals apart, not aided by the fact that only one of the speaking parts is a woman. But as a piece of nostalgia, evoking a very early feel of the Dalek race, before the show developed them as star-spanning conquerors, it's an interesting and enjoyable take. 4 stars.

Last of the Romanovs – The TARDIS arrives in Yekatarinburg on the day that Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks. So you know right from the setup that this isn't going to be one with a lot of laughs (and it's not as if there weren't historicals with a sense of fun, such as The Romans, although admittedly, they were rare). Inevitably, of course, some liberty has to be taken with historical events but it's surprisingly little, all things considered.

All but one of the named characters, for instance, are real historical people. Of these, the Romanovs themselves are reduced to just two, the Tsar himself and Princess Anastasia, to cut down on what would otherwise be an impossibly large cast. Anastasia, of course, was picked because of the rumours around her real fate. While those were disproven in our world in 2009, there's naturally a subplot that leaves us wondering whether the same will turn out to be true in the Whoniverse.

For the other characters, most of them are portrayed with some complexity. Nobody is entirely good, and only Nikulin lacks any saving graces at all (in real life, he said that he was proud of helping to carry out the murders in an interview in the 1960s... so, yeah, probably not a nice guy). It all adds up to a tense and grim story that forces the Doctor to question his own “not one line” philosophy and there's more reflection than usual of the emotional fallout on the travellers.

On the downside, there are a couple of weaknesses in the story. The one character who isn't (that I know of) historical doesn't seem to make any sense and part of the resolution is essentially deus ex machina, in that there's no hint it's going to happen, and it's merely lampshaded after the fact. But these are minor flaws in a story laden with menace and foreboding. 5 stars.