Books: Doctor Who: Josephine and the Argonauts By Paul Magrs (2023)

“Everyone knows the Doctor loves museums (it's his way of keeping score). But when Jo Grant and the Doctor visit the British Museum in London, they might have got more than they bargained for. A mysterious object is revealed, which grants those who touch it strange visions of Greek Myths. Gods, warriors and monsters are contained within this device, which its discover calls the MythoScope. But there is something sinister at play. A powerful influence seems to be controlling the MythoScope,  mastering it. Jo and the Doctor must enter the MythoScope to face an old and terrible enemy - bargaining with Zeus, battling dragons and journeying into the underworld. As dangers beset them on all sides, only an object of wondrous power can save them from total destruction.”

Josephine and the Argonauts is the fourth in the Puffin Classics Crossovers series that features various Doctor’s interacting public domain literature characters and situations. After dealing with the Wizard of Oz (13^th Doctor), Camelot (10^th Doctor), and Robin Hood (4^th Doctor), this one takes on Greek Myths and features the 3^rd Doctor and companion Jo Grant (which takes place after the events the 1973 serial Planet of the Daleks and just before her departure serial The Green Death).

It’s a cute, often funny tale that takes all the Greek Myths we’ve grown up with in books, TV, and movies and then takes on a adventure with the most well known, like the story of the titular Argonauts, of course, but we also see Medusa, Prometheus and the eagle, Peruses and Pegasus, and many others which all leads the reader to the Garden at the End of the World. The plot itself is actually fairly light, as it was designed for kids, but as I noted, it’s very entertaining, humorous, and fits perfectly within the Third Doctor’s era.

Noted above, the, story is set in Jon Pertwee’s fourth year as the Doctor, which author Paul Magrs further muddles the UNIT timeline by giving the date of 1973 (too long of a story to get into), but the Doctor also mentions Gallifrey, which the viewing audience in the 1970s would not learn about until the Pertwee’s fifth season opener. Also, for long time Who fans, Magrs gives us a non-canon explanation of why The Master vanishes from the series after the serial Frontier in Space. Of course, sadly, Roger Delgado died in a car accident while on location in Istanbul in June of 1973, but here he is escorted into Hades by Prometheus. When The Master returned three years later in the Tom Baker serial The Deadly Assassin, his desiccated look can be explained by his time in Hell.