The Highlanders [3.0]

Landing in Scotland in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, the Doctor, Ben and Polly are immediately caught up in the conflict. Meeting a party of fleeing Highlanders, Ben teams up with a young piper called Jamie, Polly is (quite literally) thrown together with 'dour Scottish lassie' Kirsty, and the Doctor wanders about the place, adopting a sequence of outrageous personas and disguises.

Enter Solicitor Gray – a greedy lawyer. In cahoots with the notorious pirate Trask and his hopelessly incompetent secretary Perkins, Gray hopes to make a swift profit by exporting the Jacobite prisoners to the colonial plantations in the West Indies. The Doctor will have to outwit him before Ben and Jamie are taken too.

The Majesty

The history of the Jacobite rebellion traditionally suffers from an overabundance of romanticism, and “The Highlanders” manages to tread a delicate line between dreamy sentimentality and cold-blooded brutality. It helps that the villain is a common crook rather than a political figure like the Duke of Cumberland or Prince Charlie. It's also the first time we meet Jamie McCrimmon, a brilliant character.

The Misery

It's perhaps unfair to mark the story down for being missing, but it loses a vast amount of interest. We are still trying to get used to the new Doctor and we haven't seen an episode with him yet. Meanwhile, this rather dull runaround is neither particularly comic, nor particularly high stakes, nor particularly fast moving. It sort of plods along and although we get there in the end, we feel we had no real fun along the way.

Magical Moments

• The Doctor impersonates a German Doctor. (-“Doctor von Wehr!” -“Who?” -“That's what I said!”)
• Kirsty tries to rescue Polly from a pit, only to fall in herself with a girly scream. So much for feminism.
• The Doctor in prison: -“Down with King George!” -“So you are for the Prince?” -“No I just like the echo!”
• There's a nice little moment when Jamie is wondering why the Doctor hasn't bled the Laird and Ben is going on about germs. The Doctor comes up with a bunch of astrological mumbo-jumbo about doing the bleed when Taurus aligns with Mars, or whatever. It may be seen as a tad patronising, or it may show how much the Doctor talks at a level that the humans around him understand.
• There's a great teasing relationship between Polly and Lieutenant Ffinch. (“Fi-finch!” as Polly calls him.) I particularly like that this gets a pay off at the end, with Ffinch being the one to arrest Gray, and getting a kiss from Polly before she goes.
• Another fun scene involves the Doctor trapping Gray in a cupboard, and convincing Perkins that the knocking and shouting are only inside his own head. - “You suffer from headaches, ja?” -“No”. -*thumps his head off the desk*... “No headaches?”
• The Doctor dresses up as an old Highland lady – a cailleach, to use the correct term.
• The Doctor dresses up as a Redcoat too.

In Summary

This is one of these stories which has lost a lot of entertainment value. There's only so much we can get from the audio. Unable to see the sets, the costumes or the performances, we are left relying on our own imaginations. And disappointingly, the plot isn't particularly exciting. In many ways it feels very similar to The Smugglers in its setting; in it's array of various crooks and criminals, and in its long drawn out climactic sword fight in episode four.

Overall: 3.0