Doctor Who: The Bounty of Ceres

The third in this series of partly narrated retro stories moves on to the show's third season, and so replaces William Russell with Peter Purves (Steven) as Maureen O'Brien (Vicki)'s co-narrator.

Here, the Doctor and his companions arrive at a mining base on the asteroid Ceres as its automated systems are slowly succumbing to failure. This echoes some of the attempts by the '60s series to do relatively hard sci-fi (more noticeable, perhaps, in the 2nd Doctor's run than the 1st). That's helped by the near future setting, with technology that both Steven and Vicki actually find primitive - most obviously, the ‘magic' artificial gravity we normally see in such stories hasn't been invented yet, and most of this tale therefore takes place in 0.03g.

The story itself is a base-under-siege, with the slow buildup so typical of the Hartnell era, detailing the setting before we even get a hint as to what the real foe might be. Having only two companions proves an advantage over the previous two releases, with there no longer being any need to sideline the one who doesn't have a narrator. As a result, both Steven and Vicki have plenty to do and have a significant part to play in the final resolution. An interesting touch is that the setting is historical for them, yet futuristic for us, with Vicki at times forgetting how “low tech” the late 21st century is.

The action only really builds up in the last 30 minutes, although there is peril before that, caused by both the dangerous setting of a failing base on an airless asteroid and the apparently unhinged nature of some of the base crew. I found this worked well, evoking the pacing of the stories it is imitating, although the maintenance robots would have been tricky on a '60s budget (and the gravity hard even on a modern TV one). I also liked the explanation for what was causing the problems, which seemed very fitting for what else we saw of the setting.