Stone Cold

Fourth Doctor Adventures #12.5

Released: 21 June 2023

Listened: 7/22/23

This is one where if you can manage to avoid the spoilers right on the cover (and the hint in the title), you’ll be much better off. The Doctor is trying to take Margaret somewhere pleasant, but the nice forest planet he’s aiming for turns out to be a barren rock with some active volcanism. It’s just rocks and more rocks…until they find the grave. And then the crashed spaceship. Which is bad, because there weren’t supposed to be any people here, ever. We do the usual runaround with the travelers being accused of murder before the crew start trusting them. The tension builds all throughout the first half of the story, before the monster is revealed. And as I said, if you don’t know, it’s a fairly effective reveal as the hints pile up. At least, it worked that way for me. The rest of the story is tight and claustrophobic, which is appropriate for these particular monsters, and writer Roland Moore uses what we know about them to great effect. There’s also a Bob Holmesian double-act in the form of a couple of tourists from the ship, who bicker and snipe most of the time. It might be a shade long, but I think it’s well-executed.