MAY "The Lady of Mercia"The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough and Nyssa to the University of Frodsham, close to where the warrior queen thelfrid fought a desperate and bloody rearguard action against the savage Danes. Over a thousand years later, in 1983, battle is still being raged, with student activists taking on savage funding cuts and disrupting a conference about thelfrid convened by history professor John Bleak. Meanwhile, over in the Physics Department, Dr Philippa Stone is working night and day on a top-secret project but can her theoretical time machine really be the solution to the university's problems? Present and past are about to collide and the results, as the TARDIS crew is about to discover, will be far from academic!
This is one of those rarest of Doctor Who stories. No, not one where Rose is actually tolerable, but rather a historical adventure. Theres no aliens or anything like that. In fact, other than the element of time travel, there isnt even any science fiction. This story was all about Tegan, and Janet Fielding once again showed what an asset she is to the Doctor Who cast. She did an excellent job not just playing Tegan, but also playing Tegan pretending to be the daughter of thelfrid (played by Rachel Atkins, who does a very good job). As to the story, it worked quite well, and sent me to Wikipedia to read up on the various principles involved, which is, after all, what the stated goal of Doctor Who originally was. Well, not the Wikipedia part, but the learning part. I dont know much about pre-Conquest England, but thanks to this audio, I do at least know a bit more than I used to.