Poor Colin Baker.

For someone who had such enthusiasm for being a part of Doctor Who, he certainly got the short end of the stick when it came to the quality of scripts for his era.

And while many may agree that "Timelash" is a bit of nadir for the era, I can't help but wonder if "Mission to Magnus" had made it onto our screens if it might have competed for that dubious honor of the worst sixth Doctor story -- and possibly one of the worst stories in the show's long history.

On paper, these elements should have added up to a stronger story - the return of the Ice Warriors, meeting the Doctor's childhood bully. One of my big issues with Eric Saward's script-editing during the 45-minute episode of Doctor Who era is that the scripts showed no sense of pacing. A large portion of episode one would involve some distraction to keep the Doctor and Peri from joining the main action of the story for an extended period of time. That continues here with the Doctor's childhood bully serving as nothing more than a distraction to keep the TARDIS from arriving on the scene too early.

But there are larger flaws with this story that just the pacing. I can't help but think that giving us a story about a female-rule society written by a man isn't going to necessarily pay huge dividends. (See also TNG's "Angel One" that aired about the time this was written). Instead of exploring the idea and really delving into it, it's played off for laughs and ends up feeling something taken from the original Star Trek's "The Apple."

Then there's the horrifically poor pseudo-science and a complete lack of dramatic tension. I listened to this one while jogging and it made my run feel longer.

And yet, there in the midst of all this is Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant giving it their all. Thanks to Big Finish, we've seen just how tragically underserved this Doctor/companion team was by their on-screen stories. Maybe by adpating this one for thier Lost Stories range, they wanted to remind us of how good other entries from Big Finish really are. big-finish doctor-who4 s Wendy518 12

Well, I can't say I wasn't warned. I went into this story with low expectations and it mostly met them.

The first and most obvious defect is the tired "Planet of the Women"/"Battle of the Sexes" setup. I'm not entirely sure what writer Philip Martin was driving at with this - I think he's actually trying to send up both male chauvinists and radical feminists by creating obnoxious straw-man versions of both, but it just doesn't work. (Even a line that I rather d, where Peri remarks that she comes from a world where women have almost achieved equality with men, loses some of its satirical bite from the fact that it refers to our world a generation ago.)

Having been warned about the obnoxious gender issues upfront, I tried to look beyond them to see what else the story had to offer. Sadly, there isn't much.

Let's start with Anzor, a Time Lord envoy whom the Magnusians hope to persuade to help them in their war against the neighboring planet Salvak. Apparently, Anzor used to bully the Doctor when they were at school together, and so the Doctor spends a lot of time cowering and cringing in his presence. Yeah, the Doctor, who can face Daleks and Cybermen without blinking, is afraid of a pompous and not very bright Time Lord. Okay. This might actually be interesting, if we actually ever learned something about Anzor or his relationship with the Doctor that makes him so uniquely terrifying, but he's actually packed off pretty quickly.

Before I pack him off for purposes of this review, I'd to note two more things about Anzor. 1. He's a raging sexist, and makes no secret of it, which really makes you wonder how dumb the Time Lords must have been to send him to Magnus. (Speaking of this, isn't Flavia possibly still President of Gallifrey at this moment? I don't see Anzor as getting on well under her administration.) 2. Why is Anzor even there, anyway? There really doesn't seem to be anything about the conflict between Magnus and Salvak that would interest non-interfering Gallifrey. I get the impression that even the agents of the Celestial Intervention Agency don't get out of bed for anything short of a major disruption to the Web of Time.

Moving on from that, there's a laundry list of smaller complaints, the absurd science. The script seems to be a little vague on whether the Ice Warriors are setting off nuclear bombs to change Magnus's orbit or it's axial tilt, which kind of makes a difference. Either way, even if we grant that the changes could be made with a bunch of carefully placed nuclear explosions, there's no way that they would happen as fast as is portrayed in the audio. Nor would the Doctor be able to neatly reverse them by setting off a second set of bombs, unless the Ice Warriors had carefully placed them so as to reverse the effects of their first set of bombs.

I could go on, but I think I've made the point. There are some bright spots: Nabil Shaban as Sil may be largely extraneous to the plot, but he still makes me smile with every line of dialogue. Once again, I love the 80s style soundtrack.

Just about everyone involved in this story has clearly given it their all and really tried to meticulously recreate a piece of 1980s Doctor Who. I wish I could find more to praise in this particular effort, but I really can't. audio big-finish doctorwho ...more2 s Vincent DarlageAuthor 24 books56

The Lost Stories Adventures were originally written for the Doctor Who television series but never made. I have this one in an old Target book form, but went ahead and got the audio version too because I hearing the voices. It's nice that the 6th Doctor, Peri, and Sil all returned for this. It's not so nice that the script was really sub-par. In this case, it should never have been made. It's terribly sexist, even for the 80s (when it was written) and the science is really terrible. It threw too much into the script (much Chris Chibnall does with modern Dr. Who) and tried to have a morale to the story at the end... but wow. It gets zero stars from me for the story, and two stars for the 6th Doctor and Peri. doctor-who1 Duncan Wilson470 5

This is a hard one to review. On one hand it is a perfect encapsulation of the sixth Doctor's era and one the other hand... it is a perfect encapsulation of the sixth Doctor's era. Great acting and music/sound design but my goodness the ice warriors feel shoe horned in (as they were added on producer JNTs request) and the misogyny is shocking especially near the end
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