Doctor Who: The Trouble With Drax

For various reasons, The Armageddon Factor is not one of the great stories of the classic TV era. I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly wouldn't qualify the appearance of Time Lord and dodgy cockney geezer Drax as one of its saving graces. Quite the reverse, really. So the idea of a story based around him didn't sound promising.

Taken on its own, the first half of this audio is nothing special. Drax comes across a “map” that tells him how to reach a city mysteriously isolated from the rest of the timestream, and tries to get the Doctor to help him reach it and recover a maguffin. It's clear that there's a lot he's hiding about what's going on, but even so, this seems fairly straightforward as DW plots go.

It turns out, however, that this is merely essential scene-setting for the second half. Here, things get increasingly crazy as the details of Drax's plan unfolds. Dorney has devised a big, fun, scheme here, that puts the title character centre stage and plays with some of the premises of the wider TV show. (Some of which, as it happens, were contradicted in the new series, but they were current during Four's era).

There's a strong element of comedy here, but it's played straight, coming more from the details of the plot than from one-liners or the like (unless you find cockney slang inherently amusing, I guess). It's more the Doctor's story than Romana's, but she does get a fair bit of agency, and there's assistance from K9 as well. At heart, this is a crime caper in space, and it's a good one.