Doctor Who: The Movellan Grave

On TV, the Movellans have two main drawbacks: their only proper appearance was in a story that's generally regarded as middling to weak, and while their design was good at the time, it now jumps up and down and shouts ‘1970s!' at you. These reasons, especially the first one, probably explain why it's taken this long for the audio series to get around to featuring them in a story (I mean, good grief, both the Voord and the Nucleus of the Swarm beat them to it).

This is a “contemporary” story, which is to say it's set in 1980, when the season it's emulating would have aired. That seems to be season 18, with the story taking the serious tone of the early JNT era than the more light-hearted one of its predecessor. For instance, there's relatively little banter between the Doctor and Romana and none of the quips for which Four is often known.

What we're left with is a story about a crashed Movellan spaceship placing the world in peril. It moves from the initial mystery into a more action-oriented tale that nonetheless features the Doctor trying to find non-violent solutions to the situation. Along the way, there are some nice references to the era - and this is the second time in this ‘season' of 4th Doctor audios that the story has been set a few miles from where I live...

As for the Movellans, the audio removes the obvious weakness that they had in Destiny of the Daleks, and does quite a good job of portraying them. In some ways, it builds on that, having them present a new threat that's related to one of the main themes of their debut story. Having said which, they remain rather one-note, obsessed with their war against the Daleks, with no real hint that there's any more to them than that. The story works well as what it's intended to be, but I can't help feeling that there's more potential to be explored here that might not have suited a one-hour audio so well.