On a distant research station, the Time Lords are playing with fire. But it isn’t only mythological creatures from Time Lord legend that are coming back to life. Fighting for their lives against terrifying creatures from the folklore of many worlds, as well as escaping the clutches of more familiar foes, the Doctor, Liv and Helen find themselves making the most unlikely ally.
3.1 Deeptime Frontier by Matt Fitton
Stranded on a desolate world by a dead TARDIS, the Doctor and his friends are trapped, surrounded by creatures from Time Lord nightmares – the Ravenous… Elsewhere, on the edge of the vortex, a Gallifreyan research station takes on board an extremely dangerous artefact. Are the Time Lords sowing the seeds of their own destruction? And if one Ravenous creature rattles the Doctor’s nerves, what will happen when the whole clan is hunting him?
3.2 Companion Piece by John Dorney
When the evil Time Lord known as the Nine comes across a rare and valuable item floating in the space-time vortex, his acquisitive nature means he can’t resist the urge to complete the set. Soon a wicked scheme is underway. Only the Doctor’s friends – past, present and future – will be able to stop him. But without the Doctor around will even the combined skills of Liv, Helen, River Song, Bliss and Charley be enough to save the day?
3.3 L.E.G.E.N.D by Matt Fitton
Over years of study and research, the Brothers Grimm built a compendium of folklore: stories of witches and wizards, magic and morality, strange creatures and treacherous forests… Professor Marathanga does much the same, on a universal scale. But her methods are rather less rigorous, using technological shortcuts to fill her intelligent database – L.E.G.E.N.D. When worlds collide, the TARDIS crew discover that fairy tales can become real. And the Doctor’s latest companion is put to the test. Will the Eleven be an asset, or one more monster to defeat?
3.4 The Odds Against by John Dorney
The Doctor, Liv and Helen have landed near an abbey housing the gateway to the dimension in which the Ravenous were originally imprisoned. But their plans to enlist the inhabitants’ help in defeating their pursuers are disrupted when they stumble over a dead body. Strange creatures roam the corridors and something monstrous may be awakening beneath their feet.
RAVENOUS: DEEPTIME FRONTIER
The third Ravenous set kicks off with “Deeptime Frontier” by Matt Fitton, a story that picks up from where the previous set left off. The Doctor and his companions are trapped and surrounded by the Ravenous – but they escape, and find their way to a Time Lord research station on the edge of the vortex. There, they encounter Rasmus (Damian Lynch), an old friend of the Doctor, and Visteron (Tania Rodrigues), a scientist Rasmus “convinced” to aid him in a mining project. Unfortunately, the Ravenous track them down, and much of the story is simply the various characters menaced through the station. Fitton gives the story a decent horror atmosphere, aided ably by Benji Clifford’s sound design and Jamie Robertson’s music – but this is very much a “base under siege” story with all the usual details. I’m also not particularly scared of the Ravenous, as I think their “evil clown” look is ridiculous and their halting “evil monster” dialogue is cliched in the extreme. Tasked with designing a creature so ancient, so dangerous that it stimulates a primal fear response in the oldest and most powerful race in the universe, and this is what you come up with? Compare to “State of Decay,” a story that communicated Time Lord terror much more effectively. The McGann sets seem to be getting less ambitious as they go along, which is worrying – but the non-arc stories are usually strong so I’m excited for those.
6/10
RAVENOUS: COMPANION PIECE
The second story in this set is “Companion Piece” by John Dorney, a fannish conceit to end all other fannish conceits: the Nine goes through history and attempts to kidnap every single one of the Doctor’s companions! They’re all trapped in an inescapable prison, separated out by incarnation of the Doctor, which means we get cameos from Frazer Hines to Katy Manning to Matthew Waterhouse (and beyond) of companions demanding their release. But since it’s a McGann story at heart, we spend most of our time with Liv, Helen, River Song, a version of Bliss from before the Time War, and the returning Charlotte Pollard. As River knows the Doctor better than anyone, the Nine is using her to learn his next targets – but she’s working against him, secretly assembling a group of companions ideally suited to escape his prison. Obviously, the appeal here is listening to this diverse group of companions finally coming together to solve a problem. Dorney skillfully blends nostalgia with plot: Bliss, for example, has never met the Doctor, while Charley is exactly how we remember her. There are also a lot of fun little nods to continuity: Charley occasionally gets shuttled from wing to wing, and while she thinks it’s because she’s a temporal anomaly, it’s probably actually because the Nine can’t decide whether to put her in the Colin Baker or Paul McGann sections. So it’s definitely fun, but the problem is that there isn’t much to it. We don’t really learn much of anything about these companions, nor do they spend any time comparing experiences. The theme seems to be that the Doctor’s companions are all capable people who are good in a crisis and not just wastes of space who ask “What is it, Doctor?” every five seconds – which is fine, but if you know who any of these people are then you know that already. The end completely took me out of the story, though – River recovered Katarina’s dead body from space and put it in a special coffin?! Her residual mental energies lead to the Nine’s defeat? This is, put simply, silly – the holy reverence fandom holds for Katarina, a character that appeared in five whole episodes of Doctor Who, never made sense to me, and to give her this significant a role in a story in which she otherwise doesn’t appear is illogical and doesn’t work. Oh, and she’s obviously played by a new actor (Ajjaz Awad), so you don’t even recognize her voice. Overall, this is a fun story with a lot of nostalgia that hangs together reasonably well but doesn’t hold up under close inspection. It’s refreshing after the intensity of the first story.
7/10
RAVENOUS: L.E.G.E.N.D.
I’m growing quite tired of a particular type of Doctor Who story, of which “L.E.G.E.N.D” by Matt Fitton is an example: the Doctor and his companions encounter a famous writer and the story revolves around that writer’s works. It always comes across as an effort by the author to demonstrate just how much they know about the writer in question. This time, the celebrity writers are the Brothers Grimm, and we have fables and fantasy coming to life thanks to an alien supercomputer. We also have the Eleven in a companion role and both Helen and Liv repeatedly saying how bad that idea is. Perhaps Fitton should have listened to his characters, because the Eleven is entirely pointless if he doesn’t pose a threat. At least they’ve toned down the “Silence, all of you!” outbursts but his dialogue follows a pattern: there are only so many times you can hear the Six scream about murder and mayhem before you get sick of it. The larger problem is that the Ravenous are now on the loose, and so a story like this feels superfluous: there’s no real justification for why the characters are here solving this problem when they are supposedly being pursued to the death by an army of ancient, slavering beasts. Nothing interesting or important happens, the story isn’t particularly compelling, and the performances are largely desperate and in search of substance. It’s not an actively terrible story or anything like that but there’s absolutely no reason for it to exist. At least the ridiculous fan-pleasing scripts like “Companion Piece” are entertaining.
4/10
RAVENOUS: THE ODDS AGAINST
The third Ravenous set wraps up with “The Odds Against” by John Dorney, a bizarre story that doesn’t accomplish much and seems to exist purely as a setup for the fourth and final set. It’s a small-scale production, with only the regular cast, the Nine, the Eleven, and the Ravenous in attendance, and yet it’s set on top of the dimensional gateway that separates the Ravenous from our universe. The first half of the story is little more than stalling for time, as the Doctor and companions encounter the mysterious Abbot – but since he’s the only other character in the story you know something is up with him, and sure enough he’s actually the Nine in disguise. The Nine discovered that the Ravenous cannot eat him – they consume regeneration energy and his regenerations don’t work properly – and thus he’s working together with them to lay a trap for the Doctor. When the Eleven discovers this, he is appalled at the Nine’s selfishness: he’s immune to the Ravenous and the only think he can think to do is take revenge on the Doctor? It’s fantastic to hear the Nine and the Eleven talking to each other, especially when different incarnations talk to themselves – though it really underscores how good John Heffernan’s take on the character is compared to Mark Bonnar’s increasingly tired performance. It’s also increasingly clear that the Eleven is not an interesting villain: strip away the multiple personalities and the Eleven is just another megalomaniac. And while this story is fast-paced and entertaining, it’s all setting up for the final scene, in which the Eleven declares that he’s… going to be even more evil, I guess? This entire box set feels superfluous: you could lop off the middle two stories and not affect the plot in any meaningful way, and you could easily condense the other two stories into one. The words “treading water” come to mind.
6/10