The Seventh Doctor is known for being manipulative and cunning, but this story has him unhinged - I suppose that the New Adventures in the 90s were for adults and could get away with epic, mortifyingly dark stories like this - However, we're looking at the Fifth Doctor and his team in this review, and I'll talk about 7, Roz and Chris when I get round to him.

Despite there being two Doctors, I think that the Fifth Doctor is the lead here - With the Seventh Doctor being enigmatic and dark, hiding in the shadows and manipulating the events, the Fifth Doctor takes the role of the hero. His interactions with Patience are so beautiful, despite the manipulation of events being rather confusing to follow. My favourite moments in the first act are definitely with Tegan, Nyssa and Chris - the dialogue throughout those scenes are top tier and always amusing. Tegan's definitely shaping up to be one of the most iconic companions of Classic Who. I'm still really confused as to what to say about Nyssa. She's not a bad character by any means, her writing is good, but I just don't know what to say about her. Her interactions are fun, but she really only acts as someone to exposit to. In this story, the same can be said of Adric. It's difficult, especially with such a large core cast - two doctors and five companions is extremely unmanageable, so they end up being relegated, which is a disappointment. I found it very funny that even the cast found it particularly complicated too!

This is a very strong story, but I think that the plot itself is very drawn out - for a novel, that's to be expected, but since this is an audio adaptation, I think there's lots that could've been cut out, and it could've easily been four parts. The Ferutu don't even show up until the final episode, and a lot of it is just build up for a forty minute conclusion. Like I say, because it's definitely a Seventh Doctor story, you've got to put all your efforts into following it, because it can be very confusing. That's not to say it's bad, though. I thoroughly enjoyed it in the opening half, because it's an interesting mystery, with excellent writing and plot developments, but it just took too long to get to those points and my attention started to weaken a little bit by the end.

This world is so beautifully realised - The environment appears like a nice holiday at first, but there's an underlying hostility with the adjudicators and the hidden conspiracy developing. There's so many settings that help to build up this society and they're always so interesting - it's a shame that there's no visuals to accompany this story, because I'm sure it would be fantastic to look at, but such a vivid picture is painted in my mind, with a very magical arctic village, but an air of fear constantly surrounding it.

Patience is an odd inclusion - I feel like her featuring is a lot of padding - I'm not exactly sure if her contribution to the story is very important because there's so much to consider with this story, but her chemistry with Five is so fantastic. There's also everything with the adjudicators which is rather boring, in my opinion. The best moments are amongst the core cast rather than the side characters because all these new people are very unengaging and bland, unfortunately.

The music and sound design, once again, is phenomenal - It sounds so much like the Classic Series, but not as wacky and feels a lot more atmospheric. They've really perfected the way that this era works, and I'm so excited to explore more of it!

This is my first exploration into the 90s New Adventures, and it's so epic - the scale is enormous, the dialogue is astoundingly well written, and the cast are having so much fun. There's quite a bit of padding and it definitely didn't need 6 parts - since it is an audio adaptation, there's quite a bit that they'd need to make it fit to the audio format, so there's no point in making it follow exactly the same beats as the story, fitting six parts.