In its long and patchy history, Shada has gone from being not important enough to finish to being too coveted to leave unfinished. Abandoned part way through production in 1979, it wasn’t auspicious enough for the BBC to remount the following year. If it had been the end of a season arc like The Armageddon Factoror a Doctoral farewell like Logopolis, it would surely have been finished as soon as possible. Instead, it was deemed no more special than any other Doctor Who story and everyone moved on.

In the years since, as its mystique rose in proportion to the fortunes of its brilliant author, Shada has proved too tempting a property to leave on the shelf. It’s been released in more formats and more regularly than many extant stories. That’s partly because our appetite for Doctor Who isn’t sated by the hundreds of complete episodes we have. We want to see every scrap of the show, from the rejected pilot episode to orphaned clips of missing episodes to blooper reels and unused scenes. Given such hunger, of course an unseen Tom Baker story, even one only 50% complete, is going to get offered up for sale. And so it does, periodically and usually towards the end of releasing the marathon catalogue of Doctor Who on any given format.

It also gets a run because even 50% of a Douglas Adams story is worth a bob or two. I wonder though if we would have seen the panoply of Shadas – the VHS reconstruction, its DVD release, the webcast, the audio drama, the novelisation and now this live action/animation hybrid – if Adams hadn’t died so early. The 1992 VHS release was, famously, only green lit after Adams absent mindedly signed a release form he wouldn’t have had a bar of, had he been paying more attention. When he spoke about the story itself, he was always critical of it, downplaying its appeal. You got the sense he was happy for it to remain unfinished and unexamined.

I can see why has was so cautious. Adams’ media output, which spawned from, but is not restricted to, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is big business. It’s not something to be blithely jeopardised and the release of an early, unfinished work, shot on a budget of a quarter of what it needed and later cannibalised for other, better-formed works, could have undermined the whole operation. It’s generally good creative practice to not show works in progress, and certainly not ones you were a bit iffy on to start with.

If Adams was with us today, would he have revisited Shada? Perhaps the success of Doctor Who’s revival might have prompted him to do so. If so, I think he would have started from scratch, rather than reheat the leftovers from 1979. Perhaps it could have become a David Tennant Christmas special, rewritten by or co-written with Russell T Davies. Or perhaps he may have finally been persuaded to novelise the story, once the show had the commercial heft to deal with an author of his earning capacity. With no disrespect to any of the contributors to the 2017 Shada, I doubt Adams would have sanctioned this jigsaw of existing footage, animation and new FX shots. In part because I don’t think the jarring collision of formats would have appealed to him.

Also, I think he’d have wanted to do more work on the script. The story’s first half is a whimsical adventure through the picturesque sites of Cambridge, full of wit and verve. Had it made it to broadcast, it would have been a visual tonic to the tacky aesthetics of the rest of Season 17 (its Parisian sojourn excluded). But the second half is much more standard late 70s Who; a leapfrogging chase from spaceship to spaceship to sci-fi prison, with a grandiose villain and some shambling monsters. It takes a long time to get to a fairly pedestrian climax: a battle of minds between the Doctor and Skagra (Christopher Neame) with some explosions thrown in.

The role of kindly old Professor (finally! From an actual university!) Chronotis (Denis Carey) needs some clarification too. He is killed mid story, then resurrected without adequate explanation and his eventual reveal as notorious Time Lord criminal Salyavin has no impact on the story. His crimes remain undetailed so we get no sense of why the Doctor shouldn’t lock him back up in Shada at the story’s end. Perhaps if he actually played some part in Skagra’s defeat, he’d have a redemptive story which would justify his slinking back to Cambridge to serve tea and crackers. If he really is a badass, we get no proof of it.

Without Adams to tighten up Shada, what approach does this new version – a conflation of elements old and new – take to his scripts? The answer is, from what I can tell by a quick comparison, a pragmatic one. Scenes are kept, cut or edited to minimise the need to impersonate deceased members of the cast and to reduce the total number of minutes needed to animate. It’s a completely reasonable approach, although it means we miss a few of Adams’ zingers.

Less understandable is the decision to remount the show’s final scene, in the TARDIS control room with Tom Baker, now an octogenarian. Churlish as it is to argue against the great Baker’s return to his most glorious role, his scene’s an awkward, unnecessary addition. Making the scene work requires contrivance upon contrivance: it needs a body double (face hidden), a voiceless K9 and an unseen Romana (Lalla Ward) allegedly delivering her lines from the TARDIS loo, or something. (It reminds me of that episode of Blake’s 7, where the actor playing bad guy Travis injured himself before shooting, and the whole episode is concocted around his absence: dialogue delivered off-screen, gloved hands thumping on tables and so on.) It’s also narratively nonsensical. Just because that last scene contains an arbitrary line about the Doctor as an old man, there’s no reason for him to suddenly turn into one. It’s the sort of liberty taken with Adams’ work that reminds you why he was so protective of it.

With the inclusion of an onscreen return for Baker, it becomes clear that completing Shada is not the only aim here. It’s also to reignite a particularly middle-aged nostalgia and play at making Doctor Who ala 1979. It’s a self-knowing acknowledgement that this whole exercise is for us fans; fans who are so desperate to relive the show’s glory days that we’ll call an old Doctor back in from retirement and build a painstakingly correct control room around him, just to hear him talk to himself and smile down the camera, one more time. We don’t just want to finish Shada, we want to twist it and reshape it, until it provides the maximum fangasm possible.

There’s nothing wrong with that. As Adams might have said, it’s mostly harmless. But I can’t help find myself experiencing Shada fatigue, hoping that we’ve reached its ultimate iteration.

On the other hand, I note the impending release of Tom Baker’s first season as a blu-ray box set. If it turns into an ongoing range, what happens when they get around to Season 17? Will there be yet another Shada variant to absorb? Maybe, we’ll never be done finishing it.

NEXT TIME… normal service is resumed with The King’s Demons.