The Doctor, Turlough, Tegan and Nyssa discover that there is a way out of E-Space… but it comes at a cost….
Jonny Morris’ script for the concluding part of this trilogy continues the homage to the original E-Space stories with a tale set on the boundary between E-Space and N-Space, as seen in Warriors’ Gate. This isn’t a tale of Tharils and Gundans, although there are winds and forces which are just as deadly to the touch, and there are other parallels which become clear as you listen.
The story has quite a strong focus on Nyssa. There’s a real twist at the start of part four that had me wondering if I’d misheard everything up to that point just for a second, but by the end things work out in the way that they need to – and there’s some nice mirroring of another TV story in the last episode. Sarah Sutton gives a terrific performance, and her final soliloquy of the story is beautifully written and delivered.
The format is rather different from normal: each episode is narrated by one of the TARDIS crew, which gives the story an unusual feel, and allows Morris to play with chronology without getting into questions of time loops etc. The world of Apollyon is also a rather out of the ordinary place for the TARDIS to arrive, with Morris coming up with some ingenious (and occasionally gruesome) ideas to explain how it functions without electricity. The “mad scientist” and the “pirate captain” might feel a bit over the top in another story, but against this backdrop they work well.
Verdict: Nothing is won without sacrifice, and this is an appropriately bittersweet ending to the trilogy. 8/10
Paul Simpson
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