This one has a great beginning, a great end, and a middle that wobbles around a lot due to its story structure. It’s supposed to be a Barbara story, although that middle muddies the waters about that. I placed it right after ‘Keys of Marinus’ because it directly references ‘The Daleks,’ and portrays a Doctor that definitely softening, but not yet the ‘Hooty Owl’ version we see fully formed in ‘The Aztecs.’
Barbara is feeling a little discontented. She’s finding it hard to keep track of time--she thinks it’s a Sunday, a day she used to spend with her mother--and she’s tired due to the Doctor’s latest ‘experiment.’ Seems the old time lord has been dragging them all across the universe in search of a very specific plant that’s very hard to come by...until they land on a rocky, inhospitable world where, in the shadow of a cliff face, there’s a lawn with a single tree standing in the middle of it. The tree is sacred to the tribe that lives near it, and they’re not keen on the Doctor and Ian taking a branch from it. They kidnap Barbara and Susan and threaten the Doctor and Ian with death. But when the Doctor promises to tell them why they’re guarding that tree, a deal can be made.
This story is written by Paul Phipps, and it starts out strong. I really got a sense of the Barbara I have come to enjoy in his writing, even though he has this annoying habit of writing everything in the present tense (a habit that gets really bad when he’s dealing with multiple characters). It was not-so-fairly obvious where this story was going, and the character arc plays on the respectful relationship the Doctor has with Barbara. Looking at it in the abstract, it’s a nice character piece that emphasizes the deep regard between the two characters.
But that middle section...oy. Up until the discovery of the tree, Phipps has been clear that Barbara is our POV character. But once the Doctor and Ian go down to investigate, Phipps begins to spread the POV around. There’s a long stretch where, after establishing that Barbara is the central character, we’re inside the Doctor’s head, then Ian’s, then (for less than a minute) the main villain’s! Couple that with Phipps’ insistence on using the present tense, and it’s disorienting at best. By the time we get back to Barbara, the story thread is briefly lost. I found it difficult to get back into the main story with this unconventional tense and sudden multiple jumps in POV.
Thankfully, Phipps pulls everything back together for the finale, although said finale is a little drawn out. If we just got the beginning and ending, or had Phipps keep the POV together (Surely the bad guy could give his expository information to Barbara, and reveal his intentions once the Doctor surrenders the ‘secret’ of the tree....although his intentions are very obvious to Doctor Who fans like myself?) this would be an unqualified recommend. I like when these short trips do small, character-based things where the threat is secondary, like here, the Third Doctor story ‘Damascus,’the Seventh Doctor story ‘Forever Fallen’ (available for free here) and the two-parter ‘The Jago and Lightfoot Revival.’ As it is, I can recommended it guardly, as long as you’re really into the First Doctor and are prepared to be a little narratively confused.
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