This book is so desperate to show you how 70s it is, that it can't stop ramming it down your throat. Between a bunch of poorly executed references to various 70s prog rock
bands, and shoehorned in drug use (of hallucinogens, naturally), the book loses any sense of being a 3rd Doctor story. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1835481.html

This was the first of the BBC Past Doctor Adventure novels, from 1997, featuring the Third Doctor and Liz Shaw with the core UNIT team of the Brigadier, Benton and Mike Yates. It has its moments, particularly in injecting a past history to the Brigadier and Benton and attributing (separate) sex lives to Liz and Yates. But there's a lot of Stuff here, some of which works OK - Chancellor Goth was responsible for sending the Doctor to Peladon, apparently - and some of which doesn't - the convoluted international back-story to UNIT, the fifth Beatle, the aliens of the title. I suppose it catches the spirit of the very early Pertwee shows quite well, but this isn't necessarily an entirely good thing. ( )

In this Third Doctor adventure the Doctor and Liz travel to the Soviet Union to investigate an alien threat in Siberia, while UNIT business takes the Brigadier to Geneva, and Captain Yates and Sergeant Benton are left home to investigate hippies who saw lights in the sky. ( )