Here it is-- the "monster season." After a successful outing with the Ice Warriors in Season 3's The Dance of the Dead, in Season 4 of Professor Bernice Summerfield, all four plays star a monster that previously appeared in televised Doctor Who. The first of these, Mike Tucker's Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Bellotron Incident, brings back the Rutans, the oft-mentioned but little-seen enemies of the Sontarans-- they've only actually popped up once, in Horror of Fang Rock.

The Bellotron Incident has a potentially interesting premise, but goes about introducing it in a completely uninteresting way. It opens with a native fellow on Bellotron running around and shouting about something uninteresting, then it goes to the crew of the Earth Empire battlecruiser Rites of Passage having a long debate about the Prime Directive, then the captain of the Rites of Passage calls Braxiatel, and finally, 20 minutes in, Bernice Summerfield shows up in the audio drama that bears her name in the title.

Thankfully, things get better at this point, though The Bellotron Incident is mostly the exploring-an-ancient-tomb kind of story than can be kinda tricky to pull off on audio, when the audience can't see the traps that the protagonists are cleverly defusing. The sections are aided, though, by a typically strong musical score by David Darlington. The music is simple, but Darlington puts this pulsing bell beneath much of the action that maintains a sense of tension and foreboding throughout.

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

I have enjoyed all of Mike Tucker's previous audios (The Genocide Machine, which brought back the Daleks; Dust Breeding, which brought back the Master and Caroline John; and The Stone's Lament, which was the best of the second Benny series), so it's disappointing to report a relative dud. Bringing Benny to a small world caught between Sontaran and Rutan lines is intrinsically a good idea, but I personally got lost between the real people and Rutans pretending to be Benny and Bev, and also between the various factions of Rutans. A good idea wasted. ( )