Return to Telos

Fourth Doctor Adventures #4.8

Released: 11 August 2015

Listened: 4/10/22

This story follows on directly from the previous, but it’s a little more traditional. A little, anyway. K-9 has been suborned by the Cybermen, unfortunately in one of their Borg-like phases where a single touch can cause complete conversion. But the Doctor does a clever thing that accidentally drops them into “The Tomb of the Cybermen,” except in a way where the Doctors never meet, and the original story is undisturbed. So it’s not really a multi-Doctor crossover. In fact, there’s a lot of time spent on the timey-wimeyness of it all, with the Doctor’s moral dilemma from the last story brushed aside because the Cybermen cheated first. Unfortunately, a 60s-era Cyberplanner and Cybercontroller talking to one another, while probably fun for Nick Briggs, is a ring-modulated slow-speed assault on the ears, and tough to enjoy. I get what Briggs was going for here, but I don’t think that either story really succeeds fully.