The Warkeeper’s Crown

Now this is truly brilliant. Shaking off the regular TARDIS team is always an opportunity to get loose and fun, and Alan Barnes is reveling in this opportunity to take the Brigadier out of time to lead the military might of an alien army. Great respect is paid to the character and I can’t fault a single choice they’ve made. But it isn’t just that they’ve brought back a character, they are genuinely doing something with him. His opining on a crazy alien battle, his conversing with a new Doctor, he is sleuthing the new doctor’s relationship with the situation. His mind is very busy.

Poor Mike Yates doesn’t quite get picked in the same way. A Faragean MP nightmare who shares the same name gets picked up in his stead adds an excellent flavour, showing us what a great and a useless leader looks like side by side. This isn’t a random flourish though, as the MP pompously talks to the aliens at dinner about his fight against the “PC Brigade” it’s made to sound like a war that they are very interested in. We are transported from this never ending battle ground - to Upper Wardleswick!

The sense of scale and imagination is immense, and even more unusually it all pays off by the end without any of the usual last minute convenience that often swoops in the latter moments of a Doctor Who story.