The third release in the Early Adventures range slides slightly further down the programme’s timeline to reunite the TARDIS team of Steven and Vicki.

Set around the start of the third season, with Vicki name-checking Chumblies from ‘Galaxy 4’, ‘The Bounty of Ceres’ finds them arriving in humanity’s near future.

The story begins on board the TARDIS, where the Doctor has chosen to add the dimensional controller he stole from the Monk’s TARDIS in order to unlock some of his craft’s unused capacity. It works initially, but then fails causing different time streams to run within the ship. Forced to exit, the time-travellers find they are stranded.

The ship has deposited them on a dwarf planet within the asteroid belt of the solar system. Ceres is being mined, with the process mostly automatic and overseen by small, weary human crew on a twenty year mission.

Doing all the work is a set of clever, multi-purpose robots called “manitenents”, slaved to a glitching computer. When one of them attempts to attack the Doctor and his friends it is just the start of their troubles, as it appears there may be an alien intelligence at work and that the planet itself is attacking them when they move out of contact with the Earth.

Ian Potter’s tale is a claustrophobic, base under siege story set during humanity’s early space expansion. Pitched very much for its time, it has a slow start and plays cleverly with the listener’s expectations before building to a genuinely surprising end.

While the Doctor’s two future-born companions find the technology relatively unsophisticated, there are some great moments had with artificial gravity and suspended animation pods, as necessitated by the long distances involved. We particularly enjoyed the maintenent robots, with their clever ability of combining to achieve more complex tasks – the ultimate realisation of joined up thinking.

Peter Purves’s earnest Steven Taylor, coupled with his enthusiastic rendition of the William Hartnell’s First Doctor, is paired well with the strong willed Vicki (Maureen O’Brien). Both seem to return easily to their roles and they are ably supported by a strong guest cast comprised of Richard Hope, away from his occasional television Silurian roles, Julia Hills and Peter Forbes.

Extras: This release comes with a seven minute music suite, as well an interview with director Lisa Bowerman plus cast members Peter Purves and Maureen O’Brien, who discuss working together again after all these years.

Released in November 2014 by Big Finish Productions Ltd.

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