Have just read this novel by Wally K Daly, from the lost Season 23 and I believe the only story from that season Big Finish couldn't get the rights to dramatise. Thought it would have made a decent Sixth Doctor story, not terribly special but not one of the worst. Would have been expensive to make it look good so they'd probably have sacrificed the looking-good bit. Certainly JNT was up to the challenge of putting the Doctor in a brilliantly lit white room and then opening a door to reveal an even more blindingly bright light.

As a novel I think it fails terribly because it's only barely adapted from the script (he even leaves one descriptive paragraph in the present tense), but I think the idea was mainly to get the story out there rather than to create great literature.

Anyone have thoughts on this story?

I read the novel when it was published (25yrs ago?!?!) and have no real memory of it, so you have inspired me to dust it off and give it a whirl. My main recollection is that the baddie is very similar to Sil.

Has Big Finish done the "Missing Season 23" stories? I didn't know. Did they do the Rani/Autons/Singapore one?

I recall feeling that this and The Nightmare Fair (and Shada, for that matter) really weren't much cop. The only reason anyone remembers them is that they never got made.

Ah, I see I was mistaken, as that one with the Rani was not done nor was Children of January. But Big Finish have done The Nightmare Fair, Mission to Magnus and The Hollows of Time.

As I say, Ultimate Evil is not what I'd call a lost classic but it would have been good enough, and the parallel of the two continents finding different ways to suppress their inner evil, which in the end both involve helmets, is at least dully interesting.

If I remember rightly the Rani/Auton/Singapore story, (working title 'Yellow Fever & How To Cure it') was little more than a rough draft or synopsis by Bob Holmes.

I enjoyed this novel and it was a shame these stories were never televised
A sequel Celestial Toymaker story would have made me happy

Maybe what I was remembering was Ultimate Evil was the only completed script Big Finish couldn't get the rights to.