There is an excellence-laced strand of something not quite right running through Marc Platt's Doctor Who output. Ironically, despite (one hazards a guess) being one of the older of the fan scribe elite, and a writer more temporally attached to the cosy, clanking old series that launched New Who when it ended, he seems less inspired by his childhood memories than his own vision of how it should always have been. "Ghost Light" was a proto-New Adventure compacted down to the small screen. And they were quite thick, those books, so there are more witticisms machine-packed in there than Jon Pertwee managed in five years of gentlemanly put-downs.

Meet "Loups Garoux", then, a Doctor Who that JNT would have made had he teamed up with Steven Spielburg and Sting. To criticise Platt for not setting his story in a three-walled studio with some bad eighties CSO and two fashionably homicidal actors would be unfair (though Bert Kwouk does show up). Yet Brazil, the Rainforests and all that business with the cod-American girl and her "Granddaddy spirits" course a filmic vein as far removed from the Doctor Who we know, love and expect as would have been possible. They key, of course, is the Werewolves, except of course that's an offensive term here. Well, naturally. Now you never caught Zargo and Camilla banging on about respect for the feelings of Vampires, they were too busy scaring the crap out of us.

So another irony strikes, as Platt attempts to "do" an old-school Doctor Who property the TV series never got round to claiming ownership of, but in a way that makes it feel more Hollywood than Pinewood. Thrills are few and far between the rabid determination to paint a culture around what once might have been monsters. They are people; cruel, romantic, honourable, misguided. Those monsters have been painted over into that bastion of the genre we prefer less, the People Monster, by a story that seeks far more depth than we are used to. In Piette Stubbe, and the wonderfully played Iliana De Santos, Platt succeeds like a dramatic champion, but with the other hand lets slip our excitement, curiosity and preferred remembrance of Doctor Who. As with his other stories, the series we love is bent to his will, re-shaped and drawn by the rule that if nothing had been out-of-bounds to start with, then the clay is as shapable now. Turlough gets eaten. The TARDIS lands in the middle of a moving train. Bert Kwouk is still crap, but there you go. Some things never change. The action is there less to keep us guessing than to provide a backdrop for the tragedy of these peoples feelings. Because they, Platt's creations, are what matter, not the Doctor, nor Turlough nor us. The writer has more interesting stories to tell. Quite rightly?

As for Rosa Haiman and her jungle-filled head, it must be the first time the Doctor has vanquished his enemy by locking him up inside someone's skull. But then, we sense there is a bloody point at work here again, something about returning the beast to the wild. It's either profound or bollocks, depending on what you think about this kind of thing. Which underlines how it's all about the soul, and not monsters or old-fashioned adventure, or anything else you might have in mind...