In the final episode, the cliff-hanger from The Havoc of Empires, part 3 is resolved when it turns out that the dangerous carnivorous deadly alien eels can be thwarted by hiding behind a cargo box.

THE THIRD DOCTOR ADVENTURES, VOL. 1

Jo rescues the Doctor from his guards and they each take a gun to shepherd the eels back to the cargo area, which they seal.

The Chalnoth groom and Teklarn bride remain trapped in their escape capsule.

Jo, the Doctor, and Mike determine that all of the explosions have taken place at unpopulated areas of the station, as if to cause the least possible harm.  They deduce from this that the culprits must be the missing security consultant, Alex Filton, and the negotiator that was apparently killed in the first explosion.  They determine that both are alive and well.

Figuring this out triggers a sub-routine in the station’s A.I. which turns off life support.  Fortunately, the A.I. is able to delay this but it cannot fix the programming.  Although the Doctor is better suited to reprogramming futuristic computers, the A.I. will only let Jo do it.

The Doctor and the wedding organiser use the Atto-Eels like hunting dogs to track down the hidden villains as it turns out that they weren’t so dangerous after all.

The episode and story ends with the wedding, at which the Doctor officiates, in the presence of the Chalnoth, the Teklarn, and the Delphon.  Although how the Delphon know what’s going on or what’s being said, and how anyone told them where to sit, or what to do, is not addressed.

This mostly splendid third Doctor story is often distracted by what appears to be the writer’s goal of unnecessarily giving all key roles in the story to the female characters, most notably Jo.  From the very beginning where Jo takes the place of “Alex”, which relies on the highly dubious conceit that no one (except, it turns out, the female A.I.) is aware that the security consultant is a man, to the A.I. only allowing Jo to fix the sub-routine, even though the Doctor is clearly more qualified to do it.  Fortunately, fixing this sub-routine doesn’t actually involve hacking through millions of lines of code – it just involves crawling inside a hatch and removing crystal blocks, something that’s done so quickly within the limited time frame that the drama and terror of life support being shut down is ignored as quickly as it is introduced.  It’s almost as though the entire scene was written for no other reason that to give Jo yet another important role to perform, whilst side-lining the Doctor once again, which it probably was given that, having established that the villains had gone through so much effort to not hurt anyone, this fail-safe turns out to be one that kills everyone.

As a result, like the previous story in this set, the presence of the Doctor isn’t much required.  Even when the deadly carnivorous Atto-Eels turn out to be little more than sheepdogs to track down the villains, it’s the (female) wedding organiser issues the commands – the Doctor is just along for the ride.

In short, The Havoc of Empires is another story that you enjoy for it (mostly) recapturing the era of the 70s (I say “mostly” because it fails to do this where it unnecessarily side-lines the Doctor in favour of Jo), and not because the Doctor actually has much to do in it.