Doctor Who: Voyage to Venus

One of two individual episodes released between the fourth and fifth seasons of Jago and Litefoot, this sees the Victorian duo accompanying the Sixth Doctor in the TARDIS for the titular voyage.

A large part of the joy of Jago and Litefoot is the Victorian setting, and seeing the pair here as fish-out-of-water is a little incongruous, even if the characters themselves are played as well as ever. Having said that, the story is clearly reminiscent of the “planetary romance” genre, of the likes of H.G. Wells, or, perhaps even more so, Edgar Rice Burroughs. The latter may not be quite the Victorian era, but it has a similar feel, and it seems fair to say that, if you're going to take Jago and Litefoot ouf out their usual milieu, this is likely the best way to do it.

The Venus we see here (apparently earlier than the Doctor's visit to learn aikido) lies in the far future, after the world has been terraformed to look much like the Victorians thought that it actually did look, with added Amazonian warrior women. How this has happened is a key part of the plot, in which the merciless Empress of Venus tries to hide a terrible secret.

It's fun adventure stuff, not perhaps making the best use of its lead characters, although with lots of little references to mentions of Venus in earlier stories. The atmosphere, the sense of fun and that turn-of-the-last century SF feel manage to pull it just enough above the average for a 3.5, which I'll round up to 4.