Before listening to this Companion Chronicle, I had wondered about the title and the reason behind it. The blurb made it clear that this was a story set in pre-war Berlin with the 1st Doctor and Susan experiencing the beginnings of the facist regime which would give rise to the Second World War.

Where did alchemy fit into this? I’ll admit, I would often misremember the title and conflate it both with ‘the Anarchists’ and with the other Companion Chronicle: The Anachronauts.

But it is all to do with gold. Gold to fund power and bring about the reparation that Germany so desperately desires in a time of immense hardship and bitterness resulting from the Treaty of Versailles.

I’m pretty well-versed in what Germany was made to do as a result of the First World War due to teaching it to 10 and 11 year olds on a yearly basis. We start our lessons on the Second World War looking at what happened at the end of the First World War and thinking about how a man like Hitler came to power and the promises he made in light of Germany’s punishment.

The Alchemists clearly depicts this period of German history and presents a country on an inevitable path. With ‘brown shirts’ (proto-Nazi/SS types) patrolling the streets; barely-concealed contempt and outright racism towards Jews and an almost obsessive desire to learn a way to extract gold from anywhere, it’s a horrible place that Susan finds herself in.

The Doctor very much disappears into the background of the story. A desire to visit a scientific conference – echoes of The Mark of the Rani – leads him to being kidnapped and Susan left abandoned in a foreign land. A simple conceit allows her to have plenty of local currency to pay her way but it is the people she meets along the way that decide her fate and lead to some unpleasant situations where she is interrogated.

It’s quite a linear story. The Doctor and Susan arrive, visit the science conference, the Doctor is kidnapped, Susan meets a British artists , is drugged, ends up in the company of the brown shirts, finds the Doctor and they leave.

There is a little time spent on considering whether history can be changed and it directly addresses the Doctor’s stance in The Aztecs (with the conceit that Susan is writing this story as a letter to Barbara and Ian) but apart from that I didn’t feel there was a huge amount of depth to the story.

It does touch upon how the evil of Nazism is creeping into the society and Susan does reflect on the fate of a child she meets who she suspects will be old enough to fight in the war when it arrive in a few years time but I do feel a little more could have been done with it. Maybe it’s the choice of narrator for this story. Susan’s naivety doesn’t really allow for it and there is a sense that Carole Ann Ford is fighting the script a little. There’s a sense that the actress wants to imbue Susan with more outrage at the society she finds herself than the script actually portrays. Carole Ann was born in 1940 so her relationship with the Second World War will be extremely personal I imagine.

Of course WW2 and the events which caused it were not something the TV series was ever likely to tackle during her time on the show with it being far too recent an event and far too personal to the people involved in making the show. Indeed, it took until 1989 before there was a story actually set during WW2. Even the War Games shied away from that period, only managing to dip its toes into WW1.

With this being a pre-Unearthly Child story there is a rather nice scene where the TARDIS materialises in Berlin and has disguised itself as a continental cylindrical advertising pillar. There is a lovely touch where the posters ‘pasted’ on it are blurred and out-of-focus. It’s a brilliant image and a clever way of playing with a concept from the TV series that we never actually saw (aside from Attack of the Cybermen).

Overall, The Alchemists is quite a matter-of-fact approach to the events occuring in Germany during this time which would lead them along the path to war. It will be interesting to see how other stories set in this pre-war period deal with the upcoming events. I expect a lot of foreshadowing in those focussed on the countries involved but possibly, as with World War One, a number of stories for which the world events barely get mentioned.

The story has some interesting elements, good performances from Carole Ann Ford and supporting artist, Wayne Forester (in a dual role) and a sense of history playing out but I didn’t feel this was an essential Companion Chronicle meeting the high standard often set by this range.