Audio Catchup: Doctor Who: The Lost Stories: The Fourth Doctor Box Set

written by Robert Banks Stewart & John Dorney
and Philip Hinchcliffe & Jonathan Morris
directed by Ken Bentley
released January 2012

starring
Tom Baker as the Doctor
Louise Jameson as Leela

Doctor Who: The Lost Stories: The Fourth Doctor Box Set

The third season of Doctor Who: The Lost Stories takes a breather for The Fourth Doctor Box Set, which contains two unmade Tom Baker adventures: Robert Banks Stewart’s The Foe from the Future, completed by John Dorney, and Philip Hinchcliffe’s The Valley of Death, completed by Jonathan Morris. With a six-parter and a four-parter, that’s a whopping ten episodes across six discs! (There is, of course, the traditional egregious disc of extras.)

I’m not the biggest fan of Robert Banks Stewart’s televised Doctor Who stories. Terror of the Zygons left me cold, and though I thought the first two episodes of The Seeds of Doom were terrific, some of the best base-under-siege the show has ever done, then they go to England and it all gets a bit silly. The Foe from the Future is a storyline that Stewart submitted, but it ended up not being made and the seminal The Talons of Weng-Chiang was made instead. The only real similarity The Foe from the Future has to Talons is the one in its title: the bad guy is from the future. It’s set in 1977, and the Doctor and Leela discover that people are disappearing near a mysterious mansion…

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