Doctor Who: The Anachronauts

A First Doctor story told from the perspectives of Steven and Sara Kingdom, who alternate as narrators across the four 30-minute episodes.

In the first half of the story, an accident on the TARDIS finds the crew marooned on an alien desert island with another group of time travellers. The focus is largely on survival and exploring their surroundings, quite a familiar theme from the First Doctor's run on TV, although a ghostly monster does eventually turn up to cause consternation (if not much else).

In the second half, Steven and Sara are trapped in East Berlin during the height of the Cold War, facing the entirely human threats of the Volkspolizei and the Stasi. The Doctor is almost entirely absent for this segment, apparently being, with the TARDIS, on the other side of the Berlin Wall.

The tone, especially in the second half, is rather bleak, despite some scenes of derring do in the style of more traditional action adventures or spy stories. However, a significant focus in both halves is the relationship between Steven and Sara, where it's revealed that the former had romantic feelings that he never had the chance to act on (and that probably weren't reciprocated). Since the characters also risk changing history in their attempts to escape, creating a moral dilemma in the process, this makes the story unusually multi-layered.

At times, it's easy to forget that there are only two actors, but, while Purves does his usual good job of imitating Hartnell, sooner or later you're always brought back by the need for narration or for other characters to speak. It's also obvious that the actors are no longer as young-sounding as they once were, something that is more apparent in a largely present-tense story like this one than in it is in those that are more obviously the recounting of past events.

Of course, that's unavoidable given the format, and the splitting of the story into two separate, but closely linked, parts prevents it from dragging. Guerrier has previously written excellent Companion Chronicles for Steven and Sara individually, and bringing the two together here for a double-length story does not disappoint.