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 | Reviews for The Fifth Traveller |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 27 August 2025 |
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| Rating: |   7 |
The Fifth Traveller reunites William Russell (as Ian Chesterton) and Maureen O'Brien (as Vicki) in an adventure that is, for my taste, too close to 1965 Doctor Who. The TARDIS crew escape a world of industrial nightmare and arrive on a jungle planet. However, a new companion, Jospa, seemingly is just there from nowhere. As the TARDIS crew proceed on what seems like a standard situation for them, separated from each other, jungle occupied by primitive ape-people with rudimentary telepathic abilities and an aggressive distrust of anything from outside their little world, dangers from the elements (low light, acid rain, bogs, precipitous drops, etc.), strange things are happening to their minds. They seem to forget each other in odd ways, and to place Jospa in adventures that the audience knows he was never a part of. The story has many characteristics of the first two seasons of Doctor Who. How many jungles planets were there? How many distrustful, easily mislead primitives? Almost all the elements are recognizably drawn from DW TV adventures. The primitives are too much like the Tribe of Gum, down to the fight over who gets to be leader. The sketchy one, Gark, is an awful lot like other such figures such as Tegana from Marco Polo. There is quite a bit of mind-stuff, telepathy especially, what was very common for the early adventures. The one novum in the whole arrangement, Jospa, turns out to be a cartoon villain as well. So, the story gets high marks for nostalgia, but middle marks for originality and plausibility.
