The Dark Planet (2013)

When the Lost Stories started back in 2009, it was for the purpose of showing us what the lost season of 1986 would have been like if we hadn’t been forced to endure ‘The Trial of a Timelord’. Since then of course we have had other stories that weren’t made for various reasons. This story was originally written by Brian Hayles and adapted by Matt Fitton and for some reason, all the First Doctor stories in this series have been six part adventures. They never seem to find stories of four or less episodes but anyway if anyone was going to make a six part story work then it would be Fitton. Unusually this story is performed by William Russell and Maureen O’Brien who as far as I can recall have never done a story for Big Finish together. The story seems to start off in quite an amusing fashion and it dealing with the troublesome issue of taking a picture. The TARDIS has lots of things that we wouldn’t expect it to but to have a photo lab is so dull in comparison to other things. The thought of the regulars standing around having fun in this manner seems slightly odd when you think of how well behaved they were on TV.

After an interesting opening scene. The story started somewhat confusing. After about 20 minutes I started to feel my interest starting to go. The scene where the smoke seeps into the TARDIS and that instantly grabbed my attention and it coincided with the cliffhanger for episode one. The cliffhangers are well done in this story. When the second episode starts it doesn’t return to the TARDIS but we get to see what’s happened to Vicki. I like this opening scene as Vicki becomes quite petrified which isn’t normally how here character comes across. It’s during the second episode that I thought the story picked up as we got a bit more of an explanation of what was going on. Vicki was dealing with the good guys (light) and the Doctor, Ian and Barbara were dealing with the bad guys (dark). Doing a light versus dark battle might not immediately come across as an interesting story but to be fair its done quite well. I doubt that this would have been worse if it had been reduced to four episodes because during the midway point of the story I think that it did seem like they were padding. The shadows are a good idea and the voice used were well realised thought the light voices did sound a bit like the Menoptra from ‘The Web Planet’. 

The second cliffhanger is also another good ending to the story because it’s just a statement but its quite an important statement when the Doctor announces that due to the strong light, they will go blind quite soon. The third cliffhanger was strong because of the smoke creature. The idea of a smoke creature gave the dark side of this planet some credibility and I thought it worked well.

After a slightly ropey start, the story picked up and for the next hour or so I was rather involved in the story. The problem was that I soon started to drift from it and I don’t think that this story is the sort that can be listened to in one go. In fact that was what I was aiming to do but gave up on this idea just about half way through episode four. I stopped it and started up again a few hours later by this point I got back into the story again. This was a mistake on my part because when my attention moved to something else when I came back to listen to it I had sort of lost track of where everyone was.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record I think that the length is the thing that hurts this story a lot. The last two episodes were a particular effort to listen to because I had lost my attention and so everything that was happening sort of went over my head. I don’t think that it’s better than Farewell Great Macedon (a six parter I know) but I thought that Matt Fitton’s adaption was done well with some good moments but he was hampered by having to fill the time when we all know that he would probably have wanted to do something with a shorter run time. Maureen O’Brien and William Russell do well as a combination and even though I am always a fan of Russell’s I thought that this was one of his strongest performances that he has ever given.