Excelis Dawns is not a bad start. I love the framing narrative by Anthony Stewart Head's warlord Grayvorn ("Mortifiying for me, a warlord of the highest self-appointed order, having his horse drawn by some foreign sandy-haired devil in striped trousers, who wore some sort of vegetable pinned to his lapel"). Iris Wildthyme is a bit of a one-joke character, but I did like her line about being transported to the Death Zone to do battle with Mechanoids, the Voord and the Zarbi before confronting Morbius (this was my first, though not my last, encounter with her; I haven't read any of the books in which she features). And Peter Davison delivers rather a good meditation on being the Fifth Doctor and the nature of the hero. The comedy aspects of the whole thing threaten at times to overwhelm the plot (such as it is), and the final bathos of the relic being a gold lamé handbag made me wince, but on the whole it is enjoyable. ( )

2,5 ( )