A more casual adventure for the Doctor. The cosmic coordinates from the note lead the Doctor and Josie to a war zone between a race of cat people and living crystals who want to take over their planet.

If you exhaled heavily and thought: ‘Now the Doctor will be outraged by the war and talk about other ways to resolve the conflict,’ you're right! (This remark is significant for Ukrainian readers. Right now, we are in a war against Russia, where we are fighting for survival as a country and a nation, so any remarks like ‘we just need to stop shooting and negotiate’ are perceived negatively.) As if someone expected something else. But to be fair, other solutions do make sense in this story. Because the whole massacre started because of a misunderstanding in the style: there have been no living crystals on the planet for a thousand years; meanwhile, cat people colonise the planet; the living crystals return, don't know that the cat people are an advanced nation, and start to mess up the planet, because that's how they reproduce.

Like... In this context, I don't even mind the Doctor's calls that there is another way besides war, because well... in this situation there really is... the barrier to understanding was the language barrier, which could not be overcome, because the crystals communicate purely through sound frequencies without any resemblance to words, unlike the cat people, who have ‘normal’ language.The Doctor was able to talk to the crystals and simply transferred them to another, already uninhabited planet. I can't even criticise the anti-war message in this story.

Basically, it's a nice, pleasant story. It's not a star-studded affair, but it's very smooth and doesn't ruin the series.

This review is a translation of a part of my Ukrainian-language text, the original can be found here: https://www.mzut-podcast.com/post/stari-doktory-novi-pryhody