Doctor Who: The Yes Men

The series of partly narrated retro-stories reaches the fourth season of the original TV show and thus the Second Doctor. Anneke Wills (Polly) takes over narrating duties, while Hines does his usual excellent job of voicing the Doctor. In a move that was (and remains) somewhat controversial, a wholly new actor was brought in to voice Ben; to my mind, he does a good job and feels as if he fits right in.

The story is set on a colony world where humans have built a utopian society, partly with the assistance of servitor robots. This set-up is immediately reminiscent of The Robots of Death, but the story itself is really very different. To begin with, it is quite slow moving, with a limited cast of guest characters, as the Doctor and his companions investigate a mysterious death. Things do, however, pick up in the second half as the disparate threads come together.

In a side-plot to the central mystery, there's also some nice (albeit not stunningly original) social commentary as we see what robots designed to imitate humans do when given their freedom. The setting itself has a number of early 21st-century touches, all of which are obviously ‘futuristic' from the perspective of Ben and Polly, let alone Jamie, as well as some genuinely SF elements such as artificial reality.

Both Jamie and Polly get a fair amount to do, although they are apart for most of the story. Ben is rather more in the background, presumably in deference to the absence of his original actor, while, of course, the Doctor is far more present than he was in the majority of the Companion Chronicles that preceded this series. In that respect, it's truly a Second Doctor story, and one that brings some of his personality traits to the fore.

In the end, I found it just a little bit too slow to get started to really award it 4 stars, despite a number of good elements. It could be that Guerrier is better with one-hour stories than he is with the longer sort here, but, either way, while it isn't one of his strongest, it's far from meritless.