Time shift comedies and dramas are fairly commonplace these days. But the successful ones usually have something in common - the time shifting has a point to it. Coupling regularly distorts time - sometimes we intersperse a conversation with a previous conversation, other times we see things repeated but from different perspectives. Sometimes we see the punchline, which isn't very apparently funny, only to go back and see it in the context of events prior to it. Memento was a movie which was more or less told backwards. Each scene set up your expectations only to destroy them with the preceding events. I've yet to watch Memento "forwards" so I don't know if the plot holds together but it certainly makes for an excellent film backwards. Creatures of Beauty gives us a non-linear adventure but not for any obvious purpose. Aside from keeping until the end the earliest chronological event - that it was the Tardis which caused the Koteem ship to crash and pollute Veln - Briggs doesn't really make any use of the gimmick. We aren't persuaded to believe anything that isn't true. Right from the start we have pretty accurate pictures of the main characters and those sketches are as true at the end of part 4 as they were in the early minutes of part 1. I suppose one of the drawbacks is that we know that the Doctor and Nyssa are innocent of any wrongdoing. That rather limits the potential for surprises but there were still areas which could've been twisted.

David Daker is superb as Gilbrook. His voice is well suited to audio coming across as distinctive and expressive. His character is weary, bitter and unpleasant. But aside from his torturing of Brodlik he doesn't really do anything "evil". He may be misguided but he has plenty of reason to be misguided. That said, he's never sympathetic. Even though his cynical police captain character - a bastion of American cop shows - is entitled to his rage and prejudice Daker never lets him become at all likable. That's to his credit as all the "big" bads in this story were done by accident, we still need a baddie.

Creatures of Beauty - the title presumably being a deliberate contradiction - could only work on audio. People’s ideas of "beauty" and "ugly" are subjective but the extremes on Veln would tax even the most well funded makeup department. This is genetic distortion rather than mere damage. They talk of bone structure being out of place. Better to let the mind paint its pictures than give us rubber masks. All of which would have to be different as beauty so often gets defined by a person's closeness to an idealised "norm" of society. Four generations of chemically produced ugliness would be long enough for a new concept of beauty to at least partially emerge. Unless there was no norm and the defects were random.

Take away the time displacement - even keeping the final/first revelation until last by some other means - and it would be a story of arrival, mistaken arrest, escape, meet the aliens, listen to explanation, leave. A routine run-around even by Briggs's standards. Even though the time shifting isn't used to anything like full effect it still helps to make a routine story less tedious. We hear Nyssa in prison, we hear her after her liberation, we even hear how they forced Brodlik to help them. But we don't have to actually hear the escape. That would be an "Invasion" style cop out in a linear story but perfectly acceptable here. So it cuts down on a lot of standard scenes but the lack of surprises leaves one a little disappointed.