The Planet of Dust (part two)

The story so far.

This page also has two pictures on it. Neither of them make much sense.

The plants speak to the Doctor telepathically and give him exposition that Beshi wants to stay on this planet and nom the walking plants that he plans to make. Beshi can only nom things that have blood and flesh (so cats made from socks would be safe) and the last thing he ate was his colleague who is now a skeleton.

The Doctor offers to help Beshi repair his spaceship. Beshi agrees and gives him two days (forty-eight hours and then he's off the case) but he keeps Leela as a hostage.

The Doctor looks at Beshi's spaceship.

The ship seemed to be in perfect working order except for one thing - the vital Mechordinate Stellaprime was missing.

With less than two pages left, the plants hurry things up by telepathically filling the Doctor in on what happened. Beshi's colleague removed the "Mechordinate Stellaprime."

He took out the Stellaprime before they crashed. We read it in his mind before he died. He wanted to kill Beshi for something he had done on Larkal - something involving a female. Beshi killed him first, but he never found the Stellaprime. He did not even know it was missing.

It turns out that the plants can move around even without Beshi's mad science, so they help the Doctor look for the missing MacGuffin.

This is quite a good picture but is wasted in this tedious story.

Leela waits patiently for the Doctor to rescue her, because having her act in-character might go a tiny way towards redeeming this story and we can't have that. The plants find the MacGuffin and the Doctor repairs the spaceship in the nick of time.

Hours later, with Beshi gone to wrestle with whatever violent fate was in store for him, the Doctor and Leela said farewell to the plants.

I am not at all surprised by the lack of any kind of satisfying resolution to the story - Beshi just leaves, never to be seen or heard from again. Maybe that's for the best really. Fortunately we have now nearly reached the end, with only the feeble attempt at a humorous, everybody-laugh-at-Mr-Spock style last paragraph to go.

They watched the waving plants disappear from view and then they sat down and drank seven cups of tea each before they even spoke.

'Mmmmm,' said Leela, looking down at the leaves in her cup, 'that's one plant I'd walk miles for.' 

Well that was as rubbish as I expected it to be.

This is a terrible story. It is boring, confusing to the point of nonsensical, and has characters in it called the Doctor and Leela who bear no resemblance (pictures of Tom Baker aside) to characters of the same names in Doctor Who.

With only one short story to go in Adventures in Time and Space I feel confident in saying that Planet of Dust is by far the worst story in the whole book.