The Bounty of Ceres by: Ian Potter directed by: Lisa Bowerman: Jump At The Point of Asphyxiation

The Bounty of Ceres stars Maureen O’Brien as Vicki, and Peter Purves as Steven and the Doctor with Richard Hope as Moreland, Julia Hills as Qureshi, and Peter Forbes as Thorn.  It was written by Ian Potter, directed by Lisa Bowerman, and released in November 2014 by Big Finish Productions.

 

The base under siege style of storytelling for Doctor Who, while introduced at the tail end of the William Hartnell era with The Tenth Planet, was popular in the Patrick Troughton era.  It feels just a bit odd that for the third release in The Early Adventures, Ian Potter wrote The Bounty of Ceres which takes the base under siege formula and applies it to a story that could never have been produced for the television series, the effects would have been laughable if attempted, Hartnell wouldn’t have done any of these stunts for John Wiles, the villain would have been a disembodied voice, and some of the sets would be models with black curtains to emulate space.  Yet with this breaking the idea that the Early Adventures being a continuation of the Lost Stories, but the story is just so good.

 

The basic premise of the story starts sometime after The Time Meddler with the Doctor fiddling with that part from the Monk’s TARDIS, which causes it to crash into a spaceship which is failing.  The TARDIS is lost and the Doctor, Steven, and Vicki have to try and save the crew, uncovering conspiracy and a villain that is an abstract concept.  Now I’m going to go a bit into the villain who only gets maybe twenty to thirty lines.  Lisa Bowerman goes uncredited as the villain and while the voice is obviously her voice in the role, the presence of the villain is felt as you almost feel the cold of space as there are scenes where it breaks into the ship.  The villain is a real threat much like the alien in Midnight, one of the best episodes of the New Series.  This is what you need to evoke when it comes to telling a story as Midnight is a story famous for claustrophobic atmosphere and fear, while that isn’t always a scary sense coming from the story, the tense atmosphere just oozes from each scene.  It’s actually Lisa Bowerman who is directing this story that allows the story to have just a tense atmosphere overall which mixes with Potter’s excellent script to make a good story.

 

Peter Purves as Steven and the First Doctor steals the show in this outing.  Purves admits in the interviews at the end that he isn’t really impersonating William Hartnell, but doing what Richard Hurndall did in The Five Doctors.  What he does is emulate the spirit of the character to create a performance of nostalgia for the 1960s and something fresh and new for the character.  It even puts the always wonderful performances from William Russell to shame.  The Doctor in this script is embodied by Purves and Potter as that mischievous character we saw in The Time Meddler and The Myth Makers, my favorite Hartnell stories mainly because of his characterization.  Steven is also really interesting in this one as while he isn’t getting some crazy background but is self-sufficient as he understands the guiding principles of the science of the story.  He’s the man of action in the story when one of the cliffhangers sees him almost asphyxiated.  Maureen O’Brien as Vicki is also great as while there is an age difference between her and the other characters, she is on equal footing in comparison with the Doctor and Steven.

 

To summarize, The Bounty of Ceres is a nice mixing of styles when it comes to the old and the new.  It perfectly encapsulates the old 1960s base under siege style of story with a budget and scope of a modern day story.  Purves and O’Brien steal the show in this one for their characters and I could hear them narrate all day.  The problems come in the fact that it is a bit too formulaic for my liking and on the whole the supporting cast really is nothing to write home about but for what it is it’s enjoyable.  85/100.