A modulated frequency wave cancellation signal isn’t something that the Doctor and Romana expect to detect in 1960s London. But then they don’t expect to find Professor Lanchester, the man who invented it, lying unconscious. Or MI5 investigating.
With the help of MI5 Agent Miller, Lanchester’s daughter Jill, and his nephew a pirate radio DJ called Mark, the Doctor, Romana and K-9 investigate. They soon discover that there is more at risk than they imagined, and an alien invasion is about to begin.
Can the Doctor identify and defeat the aliens in time? Will Romana manage to find a recombinant transducer before it’s too late? And how will K-9 cope with his new job?
WAVE OF DESTRUCTION
The fourth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures was a bit better than its predecessors, but for the most part the range continues to plod along, uninterested in anything but the most basic appeals to fan nostalgia. For the fifth series, we head into season 17, famous for being script-edited by Douglas Adams, and we get Tom Baker and Lalla Ward paired up. It opens with “Wave of Destruction” by Justin Richards, and it’s… a plodding, uninteresting story. Imagine that.
It seems like a lot of Doctor Who fans think that the defining characteristic of season 17 was silliness, with Tom Baker wandering around mocking everything in front of him. While that certainly happened, the storytelling was quite ambitious, even if (in usual Doctor Who fashion) the production couldn’t carry it off. “Wave of Destruction” is not ambitious at all. It’s a very basic “return of the Vardans” story that does absolutely nothing new or inventive with anything. The Vardans plan to hijack a radio transmission to gain access to Earth; the Doctor and Romana execute a fairly straightforward plan and stop them. But this is set in the 1960s, so it’s a pirate radio station located offshore! Is anything interesting done with that idea? You know the answer. The Vardans want to conquer the Earth and enslave its people, ha-ha-ha, and Richards doesn’t even try to do something original with them. This would be, by far, the worst episode in season 17. Hell, even “The Horns of Nimon” had more going on than this, and nobody took that even a little bit seriously.
At least it’s funny. There’s a fun scene of Romana going shopping, and Lalla Ward’s exasperation is almost worth the price of admission, despite the predictable humor. There’s another good scene with Romana and K9 running the pirate radio station. Tom Baker clearly enjoys getting an endless supply of witty comebacks, and it’s great in general to hear him “together” with Ward. I don’t know if they ever shared a studio, but that’s the magic of audio if they didn’t. But even the humor lacks the breezy elegance of Adams’ scripts, and often comes across as a pale imitation. It’s admittedly unfair to hold these stories up to the standards of one of the best writers of his generation, but if that’s the feeling they’re trying to recapture, what else am I supposed to do?
Look, you know what this is: it’s a Fourth Doctor Adventure, so it’s a plodding, rote imitation of the Tom Baker era. It’s disappointing to hear something like this from Justin Richards, who’s usually good for some inspiring ideas, but here we are. Baker is good, Ward is good, John Leeson is there for a bit and he’s good as K9, and everyone else is entirely forgettable. It’s funny, so I suppose it’s recognizable as season 17, but that’s about as far as it goes.
Big Finish’s worst range rolls on.
4/10