We have one of the latest releases in the Third Doctor Adventures in the single-story box set, The Quintessence. As you may have noticed from the cover art, Jo looks somewhat older than she normally is when pictured alongside the Third Doctor. That’s cos in 2023, Big Finish decided to begin a new line of continuity with the Third Doctor by having him reunite with Jo decades after her travels and having recently become a widow, to help with her grieving the Doctor offers her one last round of adventures to which she accepts. Now I’m not gonna lie, I hated this idea in principle, Jo’s goodbye with the Third Doctor is one of the best companion departures in Doctor Who, so for the Doctor to drive off solemnly into the sunset having lost one of his dearest friends only to turn around and almost immediately resume travels with her just feels cheap. Nowadays having had time to properly think on it and especially after having listened to this story, I still if it were up to me would never have gone along with this idea to begin with but I do understand why. If anything it allows Katy Manning to relax and use her actual voice, Katy Manning’s almost 80 now and it just seems ridiculous having her at this point trying to put on the same voice she had in her late 20s so I’m sure she’s very thankful for that. But the stories they’ve done with her years older having lived a full life, becoming a mother and a grandmother, the stories do take all that experience and wisdom into account, this is not the same Jo the Doctor initially travelled with and nowhere is that better demonstrated than The Quintessence.

Jo wakes up from an unusual dream where a little girl in an old Victorian house gives her a set of coordinates. Following her hunch, the Doctor uses those coordinates to take them to a desolate world bombarded by endless storms and winds, but at the centre of all this chaos sits the same Victorian house from Jo’s dream. Inside they find a seemingly normal yet highly unusual family who don’t seem aware of the inhospitable world outside. The owners of the house have a daughter who is ill and dying, but they’ve managed to keep her alive through the guidance of their angels who regularly communicate with them. The angels plan to eventually descend and save their daughter but the Doctor discovers very quickly that these are no angels and while they may save the little girl from dying, it would come at the cost of her emotions and everything that makes her who she is. Or at least that’s what the Doctor assumes as what the “angels” from a far off distant and dead world called Mondas have planned is something far more horrifying.

You’ve likely missed it on the cover art but they are featured on it so it’s not exactly a spoiler, but this is in fact a Cyberman story, the second time in the Third Doctor Adventures and Big Finish’s fourth with the Third Doctor in general. A glaring omission of the Third Doctor era was the absence of the Cybermen, while by this point the novelty of the Third Doctor encountering the Cybermen had worn off with the previous audios making up for those lost opportunities, stories like this just make it all the more tragic just how big of a lost opportunity it was that Pertwee never got to work with the Cybermen.

The Quintessence is a rare case of Doctor Who going the horror route with the Cybermen, but I don’t mean horror as in trying scare the crap out of you, I mean horror as in creating this uncomfortable atmosphere full of dread and despair. The imagery it evokes is just so chilling, and that’s just in the Victorian house to begin with, I wasn’t fully prepared once our journey took us to the planet Mondas itself, a world where by this point the last of it’s human inhabitants had long been converted, with Cybermen so primitive that they appear more like ghosts or zombies rather than the battle-hardened shiny warriors we’re used to seeing. The Quintessence doesn’t pull its punches in really delving into the horrors of what it means to become a Cyberman, how you lose yourself forever and that there’s no way back, or at least not to how you would wish to be. There’s a beautifully messed up scene in the middle portion where the Doctor and Jo encounter a Cyberman that’s had it’s emotional suppressor deactivated and all they can do is hear its cries of pain and wondering if its family has also been “saved”. And it just gets worse and worse as the story progresses and we come to find out the fates of the family from the house. And it way it plays into Jo as she is in her old age is a mixture of ingenious, beautiful and utterly harrowing! This is one of the few stories and the first Cyberman story I’ve ever come across where once it was over I just sat there in silence for a good few minutes taking slow deep breaths and just really processing what I’d experienced.

This is probably in my top 5 Cybermen stories I’ve ever come across and I 100% recommend it, but I give you fair warning, it’s not a pleasant listen, it absolutely succeeds as a Cyberman horror story in just leaving you completely shaken by the end of it.