Prisoners of the Lake

Third Doctor Adventures #1.1

Released: 2 September 2015

Listened: 6/17/21

Here’s the very first experiment with Tim Treloar’s version of the Third Doctor. Katy Manning is there for backup, and just in case, they’ve got Richard Franklin as Mike Yates, too. To Justin Richards’ credit, Mike isn’t just a stand-in for the Brig, but has a more active role than you would expect from a UNIT Captain. The story is told partially narrated, not quite as much as a Companion Chronicle would be, but it’s clear Big Finish is hedging their bets, and possibly positioning this as an Early Adventures kind of story. The story is a very typical Season 9 story as well. There’s something strange at the bottom of a lake, and UNIT gets called in to investigate, because guess what, it’s aliens. For a change, it isn’t an energy or mining company that discovered the aliens, but rather an archaeological expedition, which means that for once, they’re mostly inclined to listen to the Doctor, except for the project director, but there’s more going on there. Also unusually, the expedition has some serious equipment, in this case an armored exo-suit made for diving, which is probably rather advanced for the time period, but it’s crucial to the plot. The pace is kind of pokey, with lots of scuba diving and opening and closing of airlocks, but that’s fairly typical of the era as well. The key question is: How is Tim Treloar? The answer is, pretty good. He’s not leaning too hard into a Pertwee impersonation, but he definitely captures the flavor. He doesn’t sound quite as confident with it as he will in later stories. Treloar also provides the narration, and his normal voice is close enough to his Pertwee that there’s a bit of confusion there, but one can get used to it easily enough. It’s not the strongest story, and doesn’t really break any ground, but it does what it sets out to do successfully, which is what’s needed to kick off this range.