The Basics - Issue 173, 15 May 1991. The front cover has a photo of Jon Pertwee from the recording of the Era Tapes, which are previewed inside.

Indicia - Exterminator guns courtesy of ACME (Skaro division).

News And Views - The earliest any new series could start transmission would be in 1993. There has been a proposed video release of Shada, with the Seventh Doctor relating the story to Ace. Galaxy 4 : Trap of Steel has resurfaced on audio tape, having been previously thought missing. Being the issue released in April, the letters page title reverts to Pick of the Penguin for this issue only.

New Fiction - There is a text story, Pathfinders, featuring the Fourth Doctor, Romana, Adric and K9. The complete comic strip Party Animals features a future Doctor and companion as well as the Seventh Doctor and Ace.

Reviews - Off The Shelf reviews the videos of Planet of the Spiders ("over long; awful dialogue; a real downer") and City of Death ("four rather silly and tedious episodes; overrated").

Boxpops - BBC Radio 1 begins 24 hour broadcasting on 1st May. Top of the pop charts throughout May 91 was The Shoop Shoop Song by Cher.

Skaro Says - Si Hunt found Party Animals to be dull, and in general didn't like the text stories. In hindsight he finds it odd that they didn't have certain stories on audio as they were available at the time on the fan network. Given his review of City of Death, Andrew Curnow wonders what stories Gary Russell does like! He recalls that the Pathfinders text story was too "arty" for the magazine, with awful artwork. Sidesk thinks that this is a wonderful issue, with a nice cover, an excellent article about spoofs and a fantastic Comic Assassins piece on The Dominators.

Critique - After a particularly strong run of recent issues, this one fails to be particularly memorable for me, with the inclusion of a couple of interviews and a text story that to this day I've never bothered reading, and which contains simply some of the worst Who artwork I've ever seen! Being released in April means that we get the obligatory silliness on the letters page with the return of Frobisher hosting them, plus an offbeat comic strip which at least provides some fun in spotting various characters in the crowd scenes - including Sapphire and Steel no less! Ace looks all wrong in dreadlocks though. To be fair, the items going behind the scenes on the production of The Years Tapes and the feature on fandom spoofs/April Fools are good enough, albeit on the brief side. I forgot to mention last time around that I shall be including the various Indicia that still appear to this day - they're the usually funny bits hidden in the production details usually on the contents page, though these first few were rather dull!