The first story here, Prison in Space, depicts the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe stumbling into a future Earth run by women (usually just called "superiors"), where men ("inferiors") are completely subjugated. Anyone who ever saw Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Angel One" knows that there's no way this can end well, and it doesn't. It's awful. Simon Guerrier says in the extras that when he adapted Sharples's original scripts for audio, he shifted a lot of sexist dialogue from the Doctor to Jamie to keep things a little more tolerable, but that's not really the problem.

The problem is that the narrative itself is sexist. Not only do the women wear skimpy outfits, the narration mentions it quite a bit. Why would they, if gender values truly were reversed? (There's also a "hilarious" bit where Jamie sees some naked women.) All the women in the story are solely characterized by their appearances-- one is "high-strung looking," another is "butch," and Chairman Babs, the ruler of the planet, looks like a toad, a fact we’re told at least three times. (And I lost count of how many times Sergeant Alice-- the butch one-- did something "bullishly.") These women have absolutely no personality beyond these physical appearances, and indeed very little will of their own. As soon as the men start fighting back, the women just give up and lose. Zoe is reconditioned by Chairman Babs to be part of her new society... and then promptly stands around for two episodes. She's saved by Jamie spanking her. Really, you can't make this crap up.

After how much I enjoyed The First Doctor Box Set, this most recent release was a return to the type of stuff we saw in the first series of The Lost Stories. If it wasn't for finally getting to see what Terry Nation's Dalek series would have been like, this would be yet another release that was better off lost...

You can read a longer version of this review on Unreality SF.

The Prison in Space was a Second Doctor script, rightly dropped from Season 6. The author was comedy writer Dick Sharples, and it concerns a future Earth where women have taken over. (Like the Two Ronnies' The Worm that Turned, but not as good, if you can imagine that.) Zoe is brainwashed into thinking that women are superior, until - and I am not making this up - Jamie spanks her. (As he threatened on their first meeting.) The eponymous prison is called the OSCE, here meaning the Outer Space Correctional Establishment though I am more familiar with a different interpretation. It would not have been a tragedy if this had stayed in Fraser Hines' attic.

The Destroyers, starring Jean Marsh as Sara Kingdom fighting the Daleks, was Terry Nation's attempt to market a Dalek show to the US. I thought it was basically pretty good, though sorry that the Sara Kingdom character wasn't as tough as she later became in The Daleks' Master Plan and also sorry that it ends on a cliff-hanger which presumably will never now be resolved. A lot of later Dalek stories have done this same sort of thing but it's interesting to see what the first attempt might have sounded like. ( )