Mission to Magnus

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1287541.html#cutid3

It will be interesting to see what Big Finish manages to make of this story, because on the page it is a confused and confusing mess. We start with the Doctor being uncharacteristically terrified by a fellow Time Lord, who we are told was the class bully in Gallifrey, and who is in any case dispatched before we are a third of the way through. We have a planet populated by women and boys, all the men having died off, but not much is done with this interesting setup. It's a Philip Martin script, so we also have Sil just being generally villainous. For some reason we also have the Ice Warriors, who appear at the half-way point, keep changing their minds about shooting people, and try and blow the planet into a new orbit for their own inexplicable motivations. The Doctor and Peri get to run around between all these elements. Despite this rather rich menu of happenings, the 120-page novel still feels padded in places. For completists only. ( )