I’ve always had a soft spot for Colony in Space.  Malcolm Hulke has always been one of Doctor Who’s most left-wing writers and on one hand this is a serial about a group going out into space to find their ideal life away from the late stage capitalist empire that is Esrth.  Hulke lays the groundwork for how Doctor Who will regularly depict the future from this point forward, catapulting the show properly in terms of alien worlds out of the 1960s.  Every future set serial until the end of Jon Pertwee’s time as the Doctor in particular will attempt this tone for these types of stories.  It’s also the first time Jon Pertwee’s Doctor gets to actually go to space, the first episode being devoted to the sheer joy of getting off Earth (even if he’s on the leash of the Time Lords) and Katy Manning as Jo being frightened of travel.

The conflict of the colonists versus the Interplanetary Mining Corporation is thick with commentary about the current political of the time while the Master’s search for a doomsday weapon in the back half of the serial just adds to the commentary.  So why can’t I rate this higher?  Well Hulke does attempt some allegory on the treatment of indigenous people that leads to an alien race being particularly underdeveloped, they take up the doomsday weapon plot.  It means that there are a couple of messages, largely intersecting and crowding a lot of the serial together, especially with its bookends in particular being quite odd.  That and poor Michael E. Briant, while a director who will return quite a bit, really struggles with the choice of location work.  It’s perhaps the most generic quarry of wetness that could have been chosen and it just drags things down.  Briant tries, and in future serials he’ll even make quarries work, but this one is the example of a great script dragging down quite a bit in execution.  It’s sadly Hulke’s weakest script, but for this to be someone’s weakest that should say something about what their usual quality is.

The Claws of Axos is another of those serials that when not watching it you kind of forget just how good the entire thing is.  It’s the third time this current production team is doing an alien invasion story, bringing in a new writing team of Bob Baker and Dave Martin who had the fantastic idea to do aliens that seem benign and just want our help as stealth for a proper invasion.  Making them gold parodies of humanity gives this otherworldly quality before devolving into spaghetti monsters which is just fantastic.  It also provides a near perfect switch up to have the Master become an unlikely ally of UNIT and later the Doctor, all a trick to defeat him and the Axons.  Plus this one gives a direct middle finger to the Conservative bureaucracy of government from the very beginning with Jon Pertwee getting some great rants about a duty to the world.

Michael Ferguson directs what would be his final serial and while it’s not as technically complex as his other three, he still has that flair for the surreal.  It doesn’t help that Katy Manning while giving a great performance has little to do in the script, Baker and Martin went through several rewrites and I have a feeling they didn’t have a companion in mind during much of the drafting.  Jo gets a pseudo romance with American Bill Filer who is there for the international aspect of UNIT.  That and the third epsiode has always been a bit oddly paced, somehow slightly stretched and compressed to fit into four in this weirdness.  Still this is just a great and creative time.

There is a famous panel of Frobisher the penguin loudly singing in a silly hat while threatening a crouching man with a rifle and never in a million years did I believe that image would have come from Jamie Delano but here we are.  “The Gift” is the second and final strip Delano would provide to Doctor Who Magazine, published in the spring of 1987 once again while Colin Baker had already left the role but still featuring the Sixth Doctor, Peri, and Frobisher.  This is Delano doing outright comedy: Frobisher is bored while the Doctor and Peri are on a holiday and demands to be taken to a party.  The Doctor has several invitations but they choose the birthday party of the Lorduke of Zazz to attend, Zazz being a planet obsessed with early 20^th century Earth.  This means that John Ridgway and Tim Perkins get to have a lot of fun drawing the main characters (bar Frobisher who according to The Holy Terror likes to mesomorph a black and white pair of pants that nobody can really see) in period dress.  The backgrounds are particularly great as Ridgway really gets to flex a lot of the city stuff before eventually the plot takes a diversion to the planet’s moon.  It’s a gorgeous moon complete with crazy robots and mad science.

Because the Lorduke of Zazz has an evil scientist brother in exile, of course the Doctor accidentally falls for the evil brother’s plan to bring a gift of self-replicating robots which wreak havoc.  This is eventually why Frobisher is brandishing the gun against the scientist is because he basically has to be held at gunpoint.  Now Delano does leave Peri a bit in the lurch, mainly she is there to complain about how annoying the party is but Delano does actually capture a decent amount of what the Doctor and Peri’s banter would become with further developments to the characters.  Delano also loves just creating a bunch of science fiction sounding names which are particularly fun even if the Lorduke is particularly outrageous.  The entire plotting of “The Gift” is outrageous, Delano is smart enough to fill four issues so there’s actually a sense of things moving forward and the cliffhangers being particularly exciting.  There’s also an addition of pre-credits pages like a more traditional, full 25 page comic book, something that while the strip doesn’t ever transition to, does eventually become more modern in terms of comics.  It’s clear editorial knew that the Sixth Doctor was on his way out and were trying to fill out the pages before the Seventh Doctor made his debut in the autumn.

Overall, “The Gift” could easily have ended up as a simple bit of fun stretched to bursting, but because it’s Jamie Delano writing there’s this sense of snappy dialogue and immediate wit.  Outside of the panel of Frobisher with the gun there are other Frobisher panels that genuinely deserve to be among those memed and remembered panels.  It’s a great little yarn that is slowly winding down the Sixth Doctor’s time on the strip.  8/10.

Short Trips ends with Paul Leonard essentially writing a novelette.  It’s a 50 page Eighth Doctor and Sam story called “The People’s Temple”.  Like “The Last Day”, “The People’s Temple” is a short story tributing The Aztecs for Sam Jones.  Sam as a character at this point is in an especially messy place, she’s one that Leonard excelled at writing in Genocide and that level of detail is done here.  Leonard likes to play around with the mysticism surrounding Stonehenge and Sam attempts to cause a slave uprising.  Again Leonard is generally tributing The Aztecs in particular because that is seen as the don’t change history story in Doctor Who’s history.  It does struggle with the ending, something Leonard generally does, but the Eighth Doctor and Sam are great, the supporting characters feel like actual characters and it has room to breathe.  7/10.

Mike Tucker and Robert Perry had another shot at a Seventh Doctor short story and made it a charming little piece following up on the trauma Kathleen Dudman underwent in The Curse of Fenric, the use of the playing card is a bit silly though.  7/10.

“Wish You Were Here” is a story that wants to deconstruct the abusive and sexist aspects of the early Sixth Doctor’s characters, those being the reasons that in the fandom at large in 1998.  It’s from the perspective of an alien agent called Janis who the Doctor charms in a way that is basically the opposite of the brash nature of the Sixth Doctor.  Guy Clapperton is having a lot of fun in writing the Sixth Doctor who comes across as lively.  8/10.

Stephen Cole decides that he needs to do a story about authoritarianism.  It’s uncomfortably bad because this is the third story he’s written to fill pages.  3/10.

“The Parliament of Rats” by Daniel O’Mahony is the short story that really blows the rest of the Short Trips collection right out of the water.  It’s the only Fifth Doctor story in the collection and it’s clear that O’Mahony understands really how to deconstruct who this version of the Doctor actually is.  He is travelling with Nyssa post Time-Flight and the weight of the universe weighs quite heavily on him.  This is through a story that is metafictionally aware that it is a short story so leads to a particularly surreal adventure.  The characterization is wonderfully done, really making the Fifth Doctor feel like an old man who is slowly becoming tired with the universe as he faces an Eldritch horror.  It hits exactly the right boxes for me.  9/10.

It's surprising to me that Matthew Jones came over to write an installment for Short Trips, but then “Mother’s Little Helper” is another little character piece from the perspective of an unnamed protagonist that has more interesting things to say than half of this book’s installments.  It’s a Second Doctor story set post-The War Games because the BBC Books were slowly going all in on the Season 6B idea, with the Doctor having to essentially make a choice to sacrifice a boy which has the ability to take away pain.  The obvious central idea is that we have to live with out pain, though will find ourselves surrounded with people who can dull the pain and make life worth living.  8/10.

Sam Lester may also be a pseudonym for Stephen Cole, but there isn’t evidence either way.  “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden” is a short story about the First Doctor and Dodo that does absolutely nothing.  After a streak of solid character pieces, Lester clearly doesn’t really understand how to even characterize Dodo, something that only Daniel O’Mahony knew how to do  at this point in his controversial The Man in the Velvet Mask, and David Bishop in Who Killed Kennedy?.  This is a short story that seems to want to be a First Doctor/Dodo story in earnest but doesn’t actually have much of a story to tell.  Despite being short it also just drags with amateur prose and no real sense of anything going on.  5/10.