Mission To Magnus is a historical oddity in Doctor Who terms. It’s a relic of a season of Classic Who that never came to be filmed – the ill-fated original Season 23, which was canned when the BBC decided to put the show on hiatus after Colin Baker’s first season in the Tardis.

From what we know, the original plans for Season 23 would have delivered a cornucopia of returning villains both old and new, and some hardcore writing talent to steer their stories. Graham Williams’ The Nightmare Fair would have brought back the Toymaker (remember him?), while Robert Holmes’ preposterously-titled Yellow Fever And How To Cure It would have brought back Anthony Ainley’s Master, Kate O’Mara’s recent smash hit of Season 22, the Rani, and the more or less always-reliable Autons, making plastic scary again in a decade where almost everything was plastic, even the smiles.

In among those stories, Mission To Magnus would have brought back the Ice Warriors (unseen on screen since 1974), and allied them, albeit loosely, with the other standout creation of Season 22, Sil, the sluglike Thoros-Betan who was Thatcherism personified, played with a legendarily disturbing aplomb by Nabil Shaban. 

We will of course never know for certain, but objectively, it was shaping up to be a hell of a season, that could have allowed Colin Baker’s Doctor to shrug off his critics and stamp his powerful presence on the part, and on the imaginations of fans everywhere.

Creaky Novelisations

That said, the novelisations of both The Nightmare Fair and Mission To Magnus, each by their original writers, feel distinctly like pieces of their time, and their time was some forty years ago. Read or listened to as audiobooks in 2025, they tend to creak under the weight of their premises, and the conveniences that are deployed to make them work.

Mission To Magnus in particular feels very much like it’s trying too hard to make some points, with additional running about in tunnels to fill in the gaps.

There’s a whole starting sequence in which the Doctor encounters his Time Lord school bully, for instance, and while the character of Anzor could be interesting, in Philip Martin’s novelization, he simply isn’t – he’s a bog-standard grown-up school bully with a pain-stick, and it feels inherently wrong when the Sixth Doctor in particular, as one of the more pugnacious of the Classic incarnations, is reduced to a snivelling coward (Martin’s words), cowering under the console and doing his bully’s bidding.

The story as a whole does not stand up to a whole lot of examination, either. Magnus is a planet ruled by a matriarchy, with an underclass of small, young slave males living underground because, apparently, Magnus’ sun causes them to blister and die if they are hit with it. 

While there’s room in Doctor Who for all sorts of storytelling, and while of course, in 1986, the UK was under the increasingly tight grip of arch political matriarch Margaret Thatcher, the notion of a rebellion by a class of relatively weak men against an all-powerful idea of female empowerment now reads as a touch toxic and focused in the wrong direction.

Invasion of the Hairy-Arsed Men

In fact, masculinity is not treated at all well in the story. As the antidote to the males of Magnus, there’s a threatened invasion by a bunch of hairy-arsed men from a neighbouring world, who are also imprisoned and enslaved by the Magnusian women. The contrast is presented starkly between the native weakling men of Magnus, and the aggressive invader-men, the relative “Beta” and “Alpha” men, the latter of whom are on the planet for conquest in both the interplanetary and the interpersonal senses, ending the story by vowing to teach the Magnusian matriarchs what “being a wife means.” 

Again, in 2025 – much ick.

There are other issues with the story, too, not least the fact that a few of the major players, including Sil and Anzor, are hiccupped out of the ongoing storyline halfway through by an escapade in the Doctor’s Tardis, and so miss the playing out of the Ice Warriors’ plot to turn Magnus into a world more suited to their particular biology (and that hiccup distances the listener from the immensity of the Ice Warriors’ scheme and its potential consequences for everyone on the planet). 

Lord of the Thermal Long-Johns

And then there’s Sil’s master plan, which is apparently – we kid you not – to corner the market on winter woollies for the Magnusians after the Ice Warriors have done their work, despite those warriors having orders to leave only a small number of natives alive to work as a slave force. The likelihood of arch-capitalism working well enough within a small slave population feels small, which weakens the logic of Sil’s motivation in spending time and energy on the Magnusian mission. 

You can get around that by assuming that Sil is that particular brand of capitalist who would sell absolutely anything for any degree of profit, from the video nasties of Varos to the thermal long-johns of Magnus, eventually to the mind-transfer technology of Mindwarp, but still, his motivation here feels distinctly… meh.

Peri-fection Personified

So is the audiobook of Mission To Magnus a dead loss, then?

Actually, no – and the salvation of the piece is all down to Nicola Bryant on reading duties. The disjointed plot, the lunatic motivations, the dodgy sexual politics, it all flows reasonably well when put into the hands (and the vocal dexterity) of 2025 Nicola Bryant, to the point where you begin to imagine the on-screen version being significantly better than the sum of its dubious parts.

Bryant can still recall her girlish American as companion Peri from forty years ago perfectly well, but as a narrator, she has a deeper gravitas when using her natural voice, and is able to shape character performances across the range of everyone necessary here, from a brash Sixth Doctor (NB – not to cause a ruckus, but Bryant’s Colin Baker is historically better than Baker’s Bryant) to a sneery Anzor, a clique of powerful matriarchs, a bunch of hairy-arsed invaders, and a clutch of quivering Magnusian males. 

But in a story featuring both the hissing reptilian voices of the Ice Warriors and the frankly unnerving gurgling of Sil’s signature vocalisations, it’s those two notes on which the audiobook will stand or fall.

And Bryant knocks it out of the park.

With the Ice Warriors, there’s a chance any decent actor could at least have a go – make it hissing and sibilant and you’re halfway there, though there’s a subtlety to the breathing you need to nail during an Ice Warrior’s dialogue that can trip up the less attentive would-be warriors. 

An Impressive Gurgle

But Sil became a signature villain thanks in large part to an outstandingly creepy performance by Nabil Shaban. And people who try to recreate that performance are entering a dark-enchanted forest of potential failure. Again, not to knock a favourite Doctor, but Colin Baker’s reading of the abridged Vengeance On Varos audiobook is enough to prove that point – and so is that of veteran voice acting genius Martin Jarvis, who read the unabridged version. Both of them do something interesting with their interpretation of Sil, but neither quite get the creepy gurgling quality that helped make Shaban’s Sil so utterly repugnant.

Nicola Bryant? #NailedIt.

Which is not to say Bryant is in any sense repugnant, naturally, but to say that she understands the assignment here implicitly, and goes above and beyond to deliver a deeply important part of the audiobook in a performance second only to its originator. 

Should you get the audiobook of Mission To Magnus?

Yes and no. The story is at best half-baked, and at worst, it’s demented in the extreme – but it does give an insight into the potential of the now forever-lost original Season 23. 

And the canny move of giving reading duties to the ever-game Nicola Bryant lifts the audio above the potential workaday blandness of the source material. Bryant delivers an entertaining if grim tale with an appropriate vocal versatility that will keep you listening, sometimes in spite of the bonkers elements of the plot. Tony Fyler

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