Eight slash Q Panenka, a craggy comet with a 13km circumference, has an elliptical orbit that takes it between Earth and Jupiter. Which, in the year 2329, makes it a cheap means of space freight – the second class postal service of the solar system.
But when the TARDIS lands on Panenka, the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough and Nyssa discover a community falling apart at the seams – plagued by thefts, and mysterious disappearances among the ‘piggybackers’ who eke out a desperate existence on the comet.
While Tegan and Nyssa suit up for a dangerous excursion into the comet’s Unstable Zone, the Doctor and Turlough find themselves pawns in a game that could lead to tragedy for both Earth and Jupiter alike…
THE JUPITER CONJUNCTION
After two relatively uninspiring trilogies, the third featuring the fifth Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, and Nyssa continues its roaring success with Eddie Robson’s “The Jupiter Conjunction,” a traditional space sci-fi story with an impressive raft of detail. Perhaps it took this long to truly strike gold with this crowded TARDIS? Time will tell, but this marks two home runs in a row.
“The Jupiter Conjunction” features a host of ideas, each seemingly more compelling than the last. The setting itself is inspired: a comet traveling between Jupiter and Earth using the relative positions of the planets to establish travel times. But since this is naturally a slow process, a community is constructed atop the comet itself – and Robson writes this community as surviving largely on their own. They’re not in immediate danger, so they’re not skilled colonists, and so their solutions to problems are hasty and slapdash. This sort of small detail elevates the story above what would otherwise be a standard tale of space merchants or colonists. And as the story unfolds, these details progressively deepen: the hapless administrator proves anything but, the lost boyfriend isn’t, the villainous aliens aren’t. Every single character on display from the regulars to the guests has depth – even the ones that aren’t even solid.
The regulars are simply fantastic in this story. Peter Davison is largely sidelined in the first two parts before taking his place at the forefront for the conclusion. It’s perhaps a bit repetitive to have him grieving over the false death of Nyssa when he did the same for Tegan in the previous story, but I suspect they’re laying the groundwork for something more significant, especially given the none-too-subtle reference to the death of Adric. Robson doesn’t make much of Nyssa’s rejuvenation – which is fine, since nobody else made much of her age before this – but she’s quite proactive in this, strapping into a spacesuit to help a complete stranger mere minutes into the story. There’s another Richter’s Syndrome mention – are we still talking about this, eight stories and two years later? Big Finish has a tendency to slow-play plot arcs way too much, and this seems like more of the same. Tegan, meanwhile, is delightful: she’s been reduced to a bit of a quip machine in some of the other stories, but here Janet Fielding gets an actual range of emotions to portray and largely nails them. And of course there’s Turlough, whose inevitable “betrayal” is naturally false – but I love it when writers recognize the fierce intelligence that stands alongside his cowardice. The Doctor even admits to forgetting about it, though, so perhaps others doing the same is forgivable.
Robson’s work with the Jovians is also first-rate. They’re presented as Doctor Who monsters to begin with: sentient clouds of gas that can envelop, transport, and (presumably) kill humans. Clearly these are nefarious villains – and yet they’re not, they’re actually largely peaceful and innocent of wrongdoing, being manipulated to appear villainous. The skill here is playing off audience expectations: we’re easily taken in because this is exactly how we expect Doctor Who bad guys to appear.
If I have a complaint, it’s on the production front – the sound design and score from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason are effective and Ken Bentley provides his usual steady director’s hand. The problem is in the editing: the credits “sting” takes an awkwardly long time to crash in, characters occasionally take slightly too long to acknowledge one another, and so forth. It doesn’t damage the quality of the play but it did puzzle my ears from time to time.
Overall, “The Jupiter Conjunction” is another strong success from Eddie Robson and the second excellent entry in this trilogy. It’s not especially groundbreaking, it doesn’t push any boundaries, but it’s a smart, subtle, exciting Doctor Who story, and that makes for a great listen.
Highly recommended.
8/10