Doctor Who: Zygon Hunt

The Doctor and Leela arrive on an uninhabited jungle planet at some unspecified point in the future, only to run into a group of rowdy soldiers on a hunting expedition. We're almost at the half-way point before the Zygons properly turn up, although there are hints of their presence before that, and the big cliffhanger reveal, while hardly surprising by that stage of the story, at least doesn't make the assumption that you haven't bothered to read the title of the play.

The story is fairly straightforward, with the Zygons following up on their unsuccessful plan to conquer the Earth in their sole appearance in the classic TV series. Interestingly, they are portrayed here in a way that's closer to the way they appear in the new series - and the reason that that's notable is because this would have been written (and, indeed, recorded) before anyone involved knew the plot of The Day of the Doctor, the Zygons' NuWho debut story. This doesn't have the brilliance of that, or, indeed, of The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion that followed, and the setting is obviously different, but there are some distinct parallels.

The fact that the human soldiers are (intentionally, one assumes) no more sympathetic than the alien invaders does at least raise the question of whether we really want the Doctor to be helping them, although this isn't really addressed head on. One flaw in the play is that their leader is somewhat over-acted, leaving one, as a minimum, to question why Earth's government trusted the safe-keeping of a crucial maguffin to such a complete arse.

So, yes, there are some good bits in here, but it's a story that's been told better elsewhere, and, indeed, Zygons have been dealt with better by BF themselves before (in The Zygon Who Fell to Earth and Death in Blackpool). While it's possible that it might have felt more significant had we not had The Day of the Doctor before we had this, it ends up as a decent bit of filler, but not much more than that.