I will confess, it is only a love for the ICMG that has brought me here. But what fun I have had! Ian with a comical beard! Allison smacking someone on the head with a wrench! Rachel working on a turbofan engine! All that was missing was Sir Toby up to something (and yes, this completely flies in the face of the audios canon, but it is what it is).

The actual story is relatively simple - an alien race has infiltrated humanity with a plan for domination, and the ICMG get mixed up in stopping it. The side characters were relatively uninspiring, but they served their purpose well. If anything, I thought the story itself wrapped up a little too fast, a little too conveniently. But I had fun, so I don't mind that much.

Ace and the Doctor were well served too - Ace especially has a large role in figuring out the alien plan and how to stop it which is nice. There is always a danger in ICMG stories that Allison gets a little overlooked due to her status as an 'assistant', and though she does spend much of the time here as a wall for Rachel to bounce ideas off, I will be thinking about her violent tendecies with fondnes in days to come.

You know, I can even praise Operation Volcano. Yes, Jones's art is still flat and lacks shadow, but Cartmel's script... Cartmel's script really saves the story. Andrew does a great job with the Seventh Doctor and his mith, which is not surprising because he was the script editor for his era.

So in this mini-series, Andrew returns to his native land again, and brings back some unexpected characters - Ian Gilmore and the ICMG, or The Intrusion Counter-Measures Group. And why do I call this return unexpected? It's simple - this organisation has appeared on TV only once, in the story Remembrance of the Daleks.

The plot revolves around a spaceship that ICMG agents find in the deserts of Australia, but it quickly starts to turn into a hermetic sci-fi thriller like Carpenter's Creature, and then into aliens who somehow rule the world with a focus on nuclear weapons. It's an absolutely gorgeous story where Cartmel masterfully juggles twists, characters, and reader expectations.

I would strongly advise you to read it.

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