Okay surprise villain I keep forgetting about

This Short Trip finds the 2nd Doctor, Jamie and Zoe visiting the Festival of Britain in 1951 and discovering an alien plan to harness British patriotism for their own ends.

This is a good little tale with a number of nice details, although some which maybe don’t go as far as they could to be satisfying.

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe meet a scientist called Imogen who is trying to get a radio wave transmitter working – an exhibit the Doctor had been excited to try out. It turns out that Imogen has been possessed by a Vardan. The scene where the Vardan reveals itself is vividly depicted and it’s quite a horrible end for poor Imogen.

The Doctor’s plan to trap the Vardan builds neatly on some historical details shared earlier in the story and there’s a good use of the difference betwen Jamie and Zoe which subverts what initially just seems to be a joke about Jamie’s lack of intelligence.

There are also a couple of fun references to other appearances of the Vardans in Doctor Who. It always amuses me how fandom – now involved in so much of the expanded universe – likes to take singularly unimpressive ‘monsters’ from the show and turn them into valid threats with a developed back story. The development of the Vardans here is clever, tweaking them as a race which absorbs the characteristics of the races they team up with – the militaristic tendencies of the Sontarans or the deviousness of the Monk. Here, they want to team up with the human race, the British in particular, who have a renewed sense of hope and patriotism in the aftermath of World War Two, channelled through the Festival of Britain. It’s a clever little idea which presents the Vardans in a different light.

There’s also a nice little character beat for Jamie, although this is one I would have liked more of and does seem to get a bit forgotten as the story moves to its climax. It dawns on Jamie that the King George he and his kin were fighting when he first met the Doctor was one in a line of Georges who continued on the throne right up to 1951. He realises that the Jacobites are forgotten combatants – and ulimately losers – of the battle he was part of. Sadly, the only real consequence of this realisation is that he goes off in a bit of a mood. It really is something that deserves further exploration (although I know similar themes are explored in the Companion Chronicle, The Glorious Revolution).

Not a ground breaking story but an interesting use of an often derided classic Who alien and all well-read by Wendy Padbury.