Secrets of Telos

Forty #1.1

Released: 4 January 2022

Listened: 1/6/22

This story, from the boxed set celebrating the Fifth Doctor’s 40th anniversary, is a little hard to place. For the Doctor, it takes place right after “Four to Doomsday,” but the Doctor is immediately bounced through his own timeline, taking the place of the Doctor right after “Arc of Infinity.” Which means he doesn’t know Tegan had left and come back, or that he’d spent a long time with just Nyssa…or what happened to Adric. If that wasn’t timey-wimey enough, the TARDIS lands on a ship containing the surviving characters from “Tomb of the Cybermen,” who’ve just left Telos following that story. The Doctor does a rather poor job of convincing them of who he is, worse than usual, but he’s a bit time-lagged himself. Tegan and Nyssa, on their part, do OK with keeping quiet about the Doctor’s personal history. It would be interesting if the Doctor behaved a bit differently here, acting more tentative because he’s younger, or wondering why he doesn’t have his sonic screwdriver, but none of that happens. The only change is on the part of Nyssa and Tegan, who are both more experienced travelers than they were when this Doctor met them. The plot itself is mostly just fine, very much fitting with “Tomb of the Cybermen,” as most of the humans have ulterior motives for getting involved with the Cybermen, and that goes as well as you might expect. The Doctor spends a lot of time trying to figure out how the Cybermen relate to his time-hopping, but it doesn’t come together, so that feels like a dangling plot thread.