N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

Shada, Doctor Who‘s third webcast of the early twenty-first century (these days also known as The Return to Shada), takes the as-then-unfinished Douglas Adams tale and repurposes it for the Eighth Doctor.

“It’s a very strange way for a book to behave.”

The Doctor, Shada, Episode Two

Perhaps it down to Paul McGann being a fellow Liverpudlian, but he slots into Tom Baker’s role fairly easily, with a cold open that sees the Eighth Doctor paying the now-President Romana a visit and imploring her to accompany him to Cambridge in 1979 to visit old Professor Chronotis.

I hadn’t actually watched the animated version before (having listened to the Big Finish CD version many moons ago) but the animation seems to be a bit of a step up from Death Comes to Time and Real Time. It’s still fairly rudimentary, of course, and the difference in my impression might simply be because I was watching it on Blu-ray on a big screen (and as such am easily pleased). Lee Sullivan’s illustrative style remains excellent, though, and there’s definitely more depth to the visuals here, even if I was a bit disappointed there was no flamboyant hat for Skagra in this version.

All-in-all, it works surprisingly well substituting the Fourth for the Eighth Doctor in Shada, although how we can reconcile the multiple versions that now exist in one same fictional universe is a task for a more capable mind than mine!