STORY PLOTLINE

What if...the Doctor had not been UNIT's scientific advisor?

1997… and a lone exile arrives on Earth, years later than planned. On the eve of the Handover, an advanced Chinese stealth bomber crashes in the hills above Hong Kong. The discredited United Nations Intelligence Taskforce has just 24 hours to steal the technology, rescue the passenger and flee to international waters.

Down by the harbour, there's big trouble in Little England - a bar owned by an old soldier, who simply wants to forget the past. But an ancient evil is stirring in a place of peace. The Doctor finds a world on the brink of terror. A world that has lived without him for years.

A world that is frighteningly like our own…

COMMENT 

The problem with this story is that DOCTOR WHO gets in the way.

Let me rephrase that.

The problem with this story is that it's so tied up with paying homage to Jon Pertwee's Doctor that the new Doctor and scenarios never get a chance to flourish. Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart has been left to fight a series of alien invasions on his own and is now regarded as a bit of a joke; the Master has effectively been waiting for the Doctor all this time and has had to fill in for him as a matter of pragmatism and the handover of Hong Kong is in the mix somewhere or other, as are a load more UNIT soldiers.

Of course, Jon Pertwee is no longer with us so it would not have been possible to have the third Doctor, or indeed the Delgado Master, stumbling into this alternative history. That might have made sense. Instead, we get David Warner (colossal in the 1960s at the National) as a proto-third Doctor, complete with over-earnestness and comparatively few quirks. That was OK for Pertwee - he looked the part and we grew up with him. This time around the effect is for Warner to be completely overshadowed by his predecessor. Possibly after another story or theee he could grow into a striking Doctor but without the aid of visibly flamboyant clothing he comes out as a little, well, rent-a-Doctor.

That said, the tale is an entertaining runaround as were many of the Pertwee's, but I can't help but wish this had been more of a Warner story.

At this stage in the series I started worrying seriously that instead of individual Doctors we were simply going to get watered down originals and imitators. How wrong that would prove to be...