The Master is back! Okay, so I might complaining about things from the show’s past, but the return of the Master is something I can get behind. Geoffrey Beevers hasn’t appeared as the Master in nine years now, so one can hardly accuse Big Finish of overusing him — and that’s a shame, since a man with the voice of Geoffrey Beevers deserves to be overused.

The Trail of the White Worm brings the Doctor and Leela to 1970s England again, where Alan Barnes’s script puts them almost immediately on, well, the trail of the white worm. It seems that some kind of giant worm has been eating local cattle, and now it’s taken a girl. But what does all this have to do with Colonel Hugh Spindleton, an ex-Army officer with his own personal tank, helicopter, and a mysterious scarred manservant?

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Alan Barnes has rarely disappointed me, and I'm glad to report that in his double story that ends this season, Trail of the White Worm/The Oseidon Adventure, he is on top form. Geoffrey Beevers returns as the Keeper of Traken Master, the idea being that he absorbed enough energy in The Deadly Assassin to become a bit less putrescent as the Doctor puts it. (There's nothing in The Keeper of Traken to contradict an earlier meeting between the Fourth Doctor and the Beevers Master.) In fact the standourt performance in Trail of the White Worm is Rachael Sterling, daughter of Diana Rigg who is to appear with her mother in a Mark Gatiss episode of the coming New Who season, playing a posh woman with more to her than meets the eye. The two stories are more separate than one normally gets in two-parters, though each still has both the Master (Beevers has good rapport with Baker, but isn't quite as evil as most Masters) and a wonderful demented colonel played by Michael Cochrane (who appeared twice in Old Who, as Charles Cranleigh in Black Orchid and Redvers Fenn-Cooper in Ghost Light). The Oseidon Adventure, not surprisingly given its title, is to a large extent a remake of The Android Invasion, with a lot of the same plot elements but doing it much better - particularly the confusion of identity of working out if you yourself may not unwittingly be your own android double. ( )

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