This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: Leviathan

I'm not sure what to think of this one if I'm being honest. For a so-called "lost story" it's surprisingly experimental in a way that I feel like Season 22 was not. It still feels like a Season 22 script but it plays with concepts that feel a lot more modern to me. It's definitely one of those stories that would have been fascinating to see on TV, especially since it's such a visual story. In general though I'm really mixed on this story, it has all the hallmarks of a mediocre 80s story but it has the vibe of early 2000s Big Finish.

In a twist nobody was expecting, this story is a sequel to Frontios. Now I love Frontios, I'm not entirely sure why, I just know that I really enjoy it. If I had to guess though I'd say that the Tractators are not what I enjoyed about Frontios because they're really dull and painfully generic here. They feel quite out of place and contribute very little to the actual plot. This story ends up feeling like an excuse for Bidmead to bring back a monster he made.

I'm glad that after using what seemed to be genuine child actors for Mission to Magnus, Big Finish have opted to have the young boy here played by an adult woman which means Simon ends up being a fairly likeable character. This story has a lot of references to Bletchley, somewhere not too far from me so it was really odd hearing the Doctor talk about it so much. I understand why, and the historical significance/relevance it has but it will never not be weird hearing the name of a small place you know so well in something like Doctor Who.

Overall, I enjoyed this story, but I can't say I liked it. At most I respect what it tries to do, especially considering when this would have been originally written.

Next Story: Paradise 5

Doctor Who – The Lost Stories

#1.04. The Hollows of Time ~ 1/10

◆ An Introduction

Have you ever encountered a script so incomprehensible that it makes you beg for a darkened room and some double-strength paracetamol? This range has been a near total washout up until this point, but things are about to get a whole lot worse.

Many people have been critical of the JNT/Bidmead era for grounding their scripts in real science, myself included, because it just sucked the fun out of so many stories. It wasn’t until I listened to the sixth series of ‘Fourth Doctor Adventures’ that I realised you could make something half-decent with this approach.

Bidmead still made the occasional contribution after being replaced by Saward, including a fan-favourite adventure featuring a race of giant snails who all appeared to be suffering from severe conjunctivitis! I genuinely couldn’t give less of a damn about ‘Frontios’, but someone thought we desperately needed a sequel.

This is going to be horrendous.

◆ Publisher’s Summary

The Doctor and Peri have been on holiday, visiting old friend Reverend Foxwell in the sleepy English village of Hollowdean. But why are their memories so hazy?

Piecing together events they recall a mysterious chauffeur, who is not what he seems, and Foxwell's experiments that could alter the nature of reality. Huge sand creatures have been sighted on the dunes, and many of the locals are devoted to a leader known as 'Professor Stream'.

But who is Stream? And what lies within the Hollows of Time?

The Doctor will discover that not every question has a definitive answer…

◆ The Sixth Doctor

Listening to the interviews for this release was a real treat, because absolutely nobody could work out what was happening! ‘The Hollows of Time’ was going to be a very visual story, but most of these scenes have been replaced in this adaptation with reams of exposition for the Doctor to spout. If that wasn’t bad enough, he occasionally gets dialogue that sounds like incoherent gibberish – “a grasshopper mind let loose on the universe” means what exactly, Bidmead?

Colin Baker described this script as “labyrinthine” during the interviews, which is giving it far more credit than it deserves. It would be more accurate to call it deep fried elephant dung rammed through a letterbox, because the writing stinks. His performance was honestly painful.

They were there, but they have absolutely no idea what happened – feels like an accurate description of listening to this story! Discretion is the better part of travel, which would explain why they took the bus and the train to Hollowdean. The Doctor once had a mechanical dog, in another life: a loyal friend. According to Simon, he knows a lot of long words. If he knew what he was talking about, he would tell Peri.

◆ Peri Brown

Christopher Bidmead should look up the word “entertaining” in a dictionary, because having Peri lumbered with a spoilt brat and wandering through caves full of rotting Tractators is by no means entertaining.

Nicola Bryant appears to be the only member of the cast enjoying themselves. Her performance in ‘The Hollows of Time’ was half-decent, but she really deserved better material than this.

She can’t say that was much of a holiday. The Doctor has warned her about little green creatures lurking in the dark. Her name’s Peri, it means fairy: she turns up in crossword puzzles, not her personally, but her name.

◆ The All-Flowing Stream

Bidmead spent this entire script just waffling absolute horse [REDACTED]. Trying to fathom what actually happened was like attempting to do quadratic equations whilst blackout drunk! There was something about a time traveller attempting to create a quantum gravity engine – another piece of technobabble that means diddly squat – by utilising the Tractators, but that’s about all I could understand. There’s also a random classic Citroën that somehow managed to merge with the TARDIS… are you sure I’m not blackout drunk, because this sounds like the ramblings of a lunatic!

Speaking of the aforementioned time traveller, he was supposed to be the villain of this adventure. Can someone please explain to me then why he only makes a handful of appearances? I understand that Professor Stream was meant to be the Tremas Master – and that BigFinish weren’t allowed to confirm this because of conditions in their contract back then – but he generally does nothing! The real main antagonist should’ve been his android chauffeur, Steel Specs… that’s either the coolest name for a villain or the most melodramatic, I still haven’t decided which.

◆ Sound Design

‘The Hollows of Time’ features many scenes that would’ve blown a season long budget in minutes, so you can clearly see why this one got rejected. An effort has been made to bring these scenes to life on audio, like a 1930s Citroën flying through the time vortex, but this is generally a bland soundscape.

Feet squelching through muddy ground, as a bus comes to a stop near the TARDIS. The train rumbles along the tracks towards Hollowdean. Followers of the “All-Flowing Stream” gather outside of the church hall, the bell chiming in the background. The Doctor falls backwards into some rose bushes, rustling away as he tries to free himself. Foxwell’s robotic turtle whirrs around his workshop. The TARDIS morphs into a Citroën Traction Avant and begins driving through the time vortex. The Tractors make this disgusting squelching noise. Steel Specs activates the remote destruction device, causing the Citroën to disintegrate in the vortex… with the Doctor still inside! What remains of the Citroën comes crashing through Professor Stream’s garage.

◆ Music

Nigel Fairs’ use of woodwind instruments in the score feels like a deliberate callback to ‘Frontios’.

◆ Conclusion

“Goodbye to my faithful old car, and goodbye, less reluctantly to you, Doctor.”

Writing this review genuinely gave me motivation to start daytime drinking; necking copious amounts of Disaronno also makes my head spin, but at least I can have a fun time doing it! Bidmead spent this entire script just waffling arrant nonsense, meaning I hadn’t a clue what was going on half the time.

The performances are dire across the board, the soundscape is intensely boring, and the antagonist barely appears. Seriously, what was the point in having David Garfield turn up for about five scenes throughout the adventure when he does the square root of diddly squat?

I recently discovered that some people actually enjoyed ‘The Hollows of Time’. Clearly, they were handing out free lobotomies with the CD when they bought it!

👍🏼MCCOY! → GOOD!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

This story is told as a slowly unfolding mystery, with Six and Peri suffering from memory loss and having to piece together exactly why they’ve been visiting the village of Hollowdean. The original script was penned by Christopher H. Bidmead, who’s now adapted it for the Lost Stories range.

The opening episode slowly eases us into the story as we meet the people of Hollowdean and learn about the mysterious Professor Stream, the Doctor’s buddy Reverend Foxwell, and the titular Hollows of Time. The tail end begins to raise the stakes a bit but also turns the narrative a bit more muddled.

Part 2 amps up the tension nicely and keeps moving through its twists and dangers (including the very obvious but pretty exciting twist surrounding Professor “Stream”). But then it turns a bit more muddled again for the second half of the episode.

Considering the types of stories this range has presented so far, this one is surprisingly straightforward and formulaic. It feels like an adventure that could very well have worked on TV. We have a man designing impossible technologies, backed up by a mysterious financier, before everything goes awry. The music, performances, and general vibes feel like something from the late 1980s.

Some of the dialogue is pretty fun and takes advantage of Sixie’s fondness for language. I also rather like the story structure, where the entire adventure is technically a flashback, as the Doctor and Peri sit inside the TARDIS trying to remember exactly what they’ve been through. There’s a Tales of the TARDIS vibe throughout the entire story.

Baker and Bryant are great together, and Trevor Litteldale is as wonderful as Foxwell. The real treat is David Garfield (from The War Games and The Face of Evil) as Stream.

The Tractatros and the Gravis, first seen in Frontios, are back for this story, but they are never anything more than afterthoughts and pawns in the bigger game.

There’s another annoying child character in this one (Simon). It is not Mission to Magnus levels of bad, but close.

We also get a lot of sand. There are sand creatures that make me think of Dune and characters hating sand with a passion akin to Anakin Skywalker.