Full Circle

The Time Lords want Romana back.

Technically, Romana has departed Gallifrey illegally at the behest of the White Guardian to assist the Doctor with finding the Key to Time, but now with that mission fulfilled it is time for her to go home. Trouble is, now she has regenerated and experienced life out in the universe with the Doctor, she doesn't want to go. She is saved the trouble, though, when the TARDIS flies through a space-time distortion and ends up on a marshy forest planet, despite the scanner showing that they are on Gallifrey. The Doctor has a theory about negative space time co-ordinates, but it would suggest that the TARDIS has left normal time and space altogether. The TARDIS has landed on the planet Alzarius, bringing the Doctor, Romana and K9 into contact with a young orphan named Adric. Adric's people are preparing for a ritual retreat into their crashed starliner, something they do every so many years when the planet's air supposedly becomes toxic. The truth, however, is that when the mists come to Alzarius, creatures known as Marshmen rise from the swamps and walk the planet, and the governing Deciders keep the citizens of the Starliner in willful ignorance, despite the terrible truth about their own links to the planet.

Some of the location work for Full Circle is incredible, with a riverbank location dressed up with massive amounts of cobwebs and exotic fruits to make it look like some foreign land. This sort of terrain is of course difficult for K9 to traverse and the odd cable can be spotted tugging the robot along. The use of the river itself is very good, even if the costumes of some of the extras become see through when they are swimming, but the visual of the Marshmen rising from the swamp at the climax of part one is something truly chilling. Too bad the Starliner looks like it was chunked together with old bits of Capsela.

The Doctor gets to see something of himself in Romana and her rejection of the summons back to Gallifrey, but has himself accepted that it isn't exactly easy to fight the Time Lords, having done so once before and lost; his freedom is hard-gained. It seems, though, that the Doctor's enthusiasm for travel and adventure is contagious even amongst his own people, with Susan obviously a willing partaker at the outset of his adventures way back in the beginning.

And then there is Adric. Orphaned, rejecting the rules of his own society, too smart for his own good yet so naive at the same time ... you just know he's going to find a way off Alzarius with the Doctor and company

The truth of what has happened is finally figures out at the close of the adventure; the TARDIS has actually passed through a sort of wormhole between universes, into a region known as E-Space, or the exo space-time continuum. They shouldn't be there at all, but now they are, and they're stranded.

NEXT EPISODE : THE STATE OF DECAY