Doctor Who: Zaltys

The TARDIS crew arrive on a planet where the inhabitants have all mysteriously disappeared in a story that comes across as more of a “filler” episode than anything else. Having said which, there are still a number of good points to recommend it.

For a start, the characterisation of the leads is good with, for example, some well-written sparring between Tegan and Adric. In fact, Tegan is on her own for much of the story, isolated in a different setting than the others, and she manages to carry her plot thread effectively, coming across as a strong character without exaggerating her usual skills and talents.

There are also a number of call-backs to TV episodes, and some minor foreshadowing of future ones (most surprisingly, perhaps, The Name of the Doctor). In fact, the story is partly written as if it's a sequel to a non-existent story in which the Third Doctor faces an earlier version of the same villain - this, unfortunately, came across as a little confusing, since I wondered if there was some previous audio I hadn't listened to and if, as a result, I was missing some nuance to what was going on.

Other call-backs to the era include a fair amount of running through corridors and the old standby of spending much of an episode crawling through a ventilation duct. Something you wouldn't have seen back then are the LGBT references, although these are reduced to a couple of throw-away lines and the implication that Rebecca Root's character is, like the actor, trans.

Yet, despite all this, the story didn't really grab me. It certainly isn't bad, and it's worth listening to if you're a particular fan of season 19 (it's likely set immediately before Black Orchid) but there wasn't anything special enough about it to grab me.