Doctor Who: The Night Witches

The Early Adventures series moves on to season four of the original show again, with Anneke Wills providing the third-person narration. (Honestly, I'm not sure why; the cast is large enough not to require narration, and it doesn't add anything to the story). It's a good team, with Wills and Hines showing their age less than some of the other actors from the era, and Elliott Chapman effective in re-voicing Ben.

The story is a straight historical, which sees the TARDIS landing in the countryside outside of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942. There, the team encounters the eponymous Night Witches, a (historically real) group of all-female Soviet bomber pilots whose survival is now under threat from the advancing panzers. The result is an adventure story, that also takes the time to show some of the desperate situation that the Night Witches are in.

Ben and Polly are the primary focus here, with Jamie and the Doctor (both, of course, voiced by Hines) entirely absent for one lengthy chunk of the narrative. The key plot point around which much of the action hinges is one that is, to be fair, a bit of a stretch... but it's a plot device used quite a few times during the classic run of the TV series (including once in Troughton's era) and so entirely in-genre.

Other than that, the lack of any science fiction elements adds verisimilitude to the tale, and the portrayal of the different personalities among the Night Witches is also well done. Yes, one is the villain (the Nazis are almost entirely an off-screen threat), but another is shown as heroic and a third as somewhat more ambiguous. Sure, if you were wanting a straight good v. evil war story, this isn't it, but it's a good evocation of the historical stories of the era and a particularly fine showpiece for Ben and Polly as characters, giving them more depth than they often had on TV.