After The Lair of Zarbi Supremo and The Sons of the Crab, I didn't think the annual stories could get any odder.  But along comes The Lost Ones.

The Doctor arrives on Vortis and it is made evident he has never been here before.  This is his first visit (in The Lair of Zarbi Supremo he is heading for Vortis and knows the planet by name even if he is unfamiliar with the inhabitants).  The Doctor of the previous Vortis-set story steers closer to the TV characterisation of curiosity and an openness to alien species.  The Doctor of this story is a xenophobic, insect-hating bigot!  In Lair, he reacts with calmness and curiosity when encountering Zarbi and Menoptera.  Here he only meets the Menoptera and they literally make his skin crawl.  A huge amount of the word count is given over to describing their insect-related appearance and how horrid the Doctor considers this.  The Menoptera are also written as cold, unwelcoming aliens intent on dissecting the Doctor to find out why he is different to them.  This isn't how aliens were ever presented in Doctor Who, let alone the Menoptera.  When stories in those first two seasons went out of there way to depict alien races as people whether the Sensorites, the Menoptera or the Aridians.  These are not the Menoptera of the The Web Planet and one wonders if the writer had even seen the story before writing this.  It feels as if these characters could be any random alien race especially as the story then takes a massive left turn when the Doctor is rescued from the Menoptera by an 8 foot tall white-faced, red-haired giant and taken back to a gleaming spaceship buried under the planet.

And this is when it gets really weird.

The giant is a member of a crew from a spaceship which set off from Atlantis.  Yes, this giants are Atlanteans on a mission to colonise the galaxy.  They have already left colonists on various planets but crash-landed on Vortis and having lost their Master Scientist to illness are in desperate need of the Doctor's help.

In trying to determine whether he is human or a weird insect mutation, they do something which I'm not sure is a visual image of the 1st Doctor I ever needed - they strip him naked.

After spending six days trying to help them repair their ship, the Doctor then changes his mind and makes a bolt for it, finding himself in the middle of a pitched battle between Menoptera and Zarbi!  The pursuing Atlanteans are killed by the Zarbi and the Doctor escapes.

The entire Atlantean element seems like an entirely separate story squeezed into a Web Planet prequel and the two parts just don't gel.  It's not helped by the bizarre characterisation of the Doctor.  In a way it follows on from the version of the Doctor from The Sons of the Crab - where he is also treated like a laboratory specimen to be poked, prodded and experimented upon - but here he is written even more extremely than in the previous story.

Oddly, beyond the off-kilter characterisation of the Menoptera, the aspects of Menoptera/Zarbi relations actually tie in pretty well with the TV story.  The Zarbi are/were the Menoptera's 'cattle' but fell under the control of a malign influence (here it is Zarbi queens rather than the Animus).  The battle scene at the end is reminiscent of the battle scenes in The Web Planet.

Sadly, this isn't a very enjoyable story, mainly because the Doctor is so horrid throughout the entire thing.  It's as if the writer saw one scene of the Doctor being an irritable jerk in An Unearthly Child and nothing beyond it.  Hard to recommend.