Doctor Who: The Silurian Candidate

This story is a sequel to the TV story Warriors of the Deep but is thankfully entirely Myrka-less. It's set just a year after that story and, as one might expect from the title, it shares some plot elements with The Manchurian Candidate.

The Doctor is being at his most mysterious in this, obviously planning something that will benefit the Silurians, but refusing to tell Ace or Mel what it is until we're almost at the end. A lot of trouble could have been saved if he'd bothered and he doesn't really have much reason for not doing so, since, as plots go, it's far from his most involved. This, one suspects, might put a number of listeners off and one has to say that is an overall weakness, given that we know the Doctor's real plan can't be anything bad and one would have thought that Ace would realise this, too. It's perhaps a case of Elliott writing for a version of Seven, and a stage in his relationship with Ace, that's set much, much earlier than it actually is.

But, if we leave that aside, it's a good story. The main guest character, Professor Drexler, is a complicated character whose own motives are also unclear, at least to begin with. There's some good interplay between the Silurian characters that brings to mind the intraspecies conflicts we see in the original Silurians story. These are, of course, clearly the subspecies we see in the classic TV series, not the more humanoid version represented by Madam Vastra, and there's some use made of the powers of that early version. Obviously, we're also building on the theme of Cold War paranoia in Warriors of the Deep, with a somewhat wider look at the world of 2085/

Mainly, though I just found it fun. There are, for instance, some good one-liners here and there, even though the story itself is serious. The feminine security robots (“very Fritz Lang”, apparently) with their emotionless delivery make for some good moments, as do some of the limitations of their late 21st-century technology - they've obviously not achieved full AI yet. The leader of the Western world, once he turns up with his terrible toupee, does have some resemblance to a certain leader of the free world in our time without being a blunt caricature, although I grant you that that too might be a matter of taste.

The upshot is that I liked this more than the previous two releases in this trilogy, which seems to be the opposite of most other listeners' experiences. I found those rather dull, but this is actually quite fun. Much will depend on whether you can get past that inconsistent characterisation, and treat it as a more standalone story than, realistically, it probably should be.