The Reaping

While visiting a lunar history archive, Peri discovers that a childhood friend's father has passed away, and she begs the Doctor to take her to the funeral in Baltimore. Their arrival on Earth in 1984 is not the happy homecoming Peri had hoped for; her mother, Janine Foster, has split with Peri's stepfather Howard over Peri's disappearance on Lanzarote, and a lingering anger between mother and daughter remains. The Doctor undertakes an investigation into the dead man's past and discovers that he had come into contact with the Cybermen in another of their attempts to repopulate their species before they vanish from the universe, and the graves of the recently departed may contain a threat to the future of humanity...

I was a bit thrown by the decision to make The Reaping as a 2-part story instead of a 4-parter as was the arrangement for the previous discs following Revelation of the Daleks, but it made for good storytelling regardless, building to one big climax point as opposed to breaking the story up into smaller ones. The strength of the adventure lies not in the pace, though, but in the tension created from Peri's sudden return to her normal life after no explaination of her absence - indeed, her mother thought she was dead as did her friends. There's a fun flashback at the start of the adventure to Lanzarote the morning of Peri's fateful meeting with the Doctor and Turlough; Nicola Bryant manages to perk up her voice a bit and sound like the teenager she was back then. And speaking of voices, Peri's mother, Janine, is played by the incredible Claudia Christian who sci fi geeks will know best as Ivanova from Babylon 5.

This play is the prequel to the earlier-reviewed The Gathering, wherein the fifth Doctor meets Tegan again in Australia. The surviving members of The Reaping appear in it as well, bringing a Cyber-conversion unit with them as spoils of the adventure, as it promises to cure cancer if used properly. I'm not a huge fan of the intertwining storyline when it operates like this; a similar experiment was done with the novels Blood Harvest and Goth Opera in theVirgin Books range and it worked okay, there was always the problem, though, of keeping continuity straight. I'll say this much though; I don't like the ending.

NEXT EPISODE : I, DAVROS - GUILT