For the final release in the third series of Early Adventures, Big Finish turned to Simon Guerrier for a story featuring Steven, Sara, and the Sontarans. Because I hold Guerrier in high esteem, I was expecting a lot from “The Sontarans” – but what I got was a well-written by-the-book war story.
The story features some gorgeous imagery: an asteroid entirely covered in flowers, a subterranean city carved out of the rock itself, and so forth. But the plot surrounding these images is almost threadbare: the TARDIS lands in the middle of a military operation, and the Doctor and companions become inextricably involved. It’s set close enough to Sara’s time that the military personnel are actually members of the Space Security Service, something that enables the TARDIS crew to avoid too much of the usual episode 1 plotting. Guerrier also plays with the implications of the setting, as Sara knows the outcome of the mission but can’t reveal too many details else she risk changing the outcome. We get to know the leader of the squad and a couple of her subordinates – it’s exactly what you’d expect from a story like this, but at least Guerrier is skilled enough to avoid resorting to clichés.
More interesting is that this story features the first chronological appearance of the Sontarans. Guerrier upends the usual Doctor/companion dynamic by making Steven and Sara familiar with the Sontarans and the Doctor unfamiliar – for once, they teach him instead of the other way around. Guerrier also takes the Sontarans very seriously: these are hardened warriors, not bumbling oafs. It is their morality that comes in for the closest examination – one Sontaran actually apologizes to Steven before torturing him, while another willingly allows his opponents to take the first shot, lest anyone accuse him of not fighting honorably. Crucially, the Sontarans don’t even seem to understand that other races aren’t 100% committed to their militaries – and the ending, in which the Doctor basically explains the concept of noncombatants to the Sontaran commander and evokes a merciful response, is brilliant.
Beyond that, though, there isn’t much more to say about the script. Peter Purves takes on the role of the Doctor – I know it’s not a perfect Hartnell impression, but the scenes where he talks to Steven never sound like one actor talking to himself, and that’s fantastic. On the other hand, with the greatest respect to Jean Marsh, she really struggles to capture her character. I understand the limitations of age and health, but in this story she simply does not convince as a commanding security operative. Dan Starkey plays most of the Sontarans, and he’s very much in serious mode and not playing versions of Strax. The production is very good – Ken Bentley always directs well, and I enjoyed some of the military elements of Toby Hrycek-Robinson’s sound design.
Overall, “The Sontarans” is a success, though with the personnel involved I find myself wishing it was something greater. It’s the sort of story that Nicholas Briggs could write on autopilot, so it’s good to hear another voice take a crack at this kind of material – but as good as it is, it’s missing the innovative feel of the Steven and Sara Companion Chronicles or even “An Ordinary Life.” Still, if you want a good Sontaran story set in an unexpected part of Doctor Who’s history, pick “The Sontarans” up – it’ll be well worth your time.
After two decidedly subpar entries, the final installment in this Colin Baker trilogy is Matt Fitton’s “Quicksilver,” a story that unites two separate audio eras and provides a potentially interesting dynamic going forward. As a character piece, it’s very good; unfortunately, the story isn’t very interesting.
We were introduced to Constance Clarke as she wondered what had become of her husband Henry (Matthew Cottle), and then we promptly forgot all about that plot thread while Constance and the Doctor went off and had adventures. Now it’s time to address it again, and while it’s a bit anticlimactic to resolve the entire thing in one story, Matt Fitton does a generally fine job in his writing. While Henry has become involved in an alien conspiracy, that element has surprisingly little to do with his disappearance, which came about when Henry fell in love with a Romanian woman, Ana (Kate Kennedy), on an intelligence mission. And since the story largely takes place a few years after the war, it has been several years since Henry has seen Constance – but only a matter of months since she last saw him. The inevitable confrontation is written well, but feels unsupported: we learn a lot about how they married young, the difficulties of marriage within the service, and so forth, but it would have been much more effective had we learned any of this prior to this story. Instead, what we get feels honest but unearned.
The other significant development in “Quicksilver” is the return of Lisa Greenwood as Flip, last seen plummeting toward Earth at the end of “Scavenger.” An alien race finds Flip’s wedding invitation outside the TARDIS and uses it as a clue to track down the former companion and use her as a bargaining chip against the Doctor. This is one of the best ideas in the story, as it makes Flip’s reintroduction feel organic instead of forced. In previous reviews, I made no secret of my dislike of the character: she’s often presented as genuinely stupid, something I cannot imagine the Doctor would tolerate in a traveling companion. Fortunately, Fitton avoids that problem, showing her as a quick-witted, compassionate person, regardless of her formal education. I also very much enjoyed the pairing of Constance and Flip – one a buttoned-up woman from the 1940s, the other a very modern young woman with only the slightest sense of decorum. As you might expect, they don’t particularly like each other at first, but by the end they are starting to get along – Constance acquiescing to the nickname Connie is an interesting start. I hope that when we return to this pairing in future stories, we actually see their relationship grow and encounter some difficulties – if the next story with this TARDIS crew shows Constance and Flip laughing and carrying on like old friends, it will be a crushing disappointment.
I like the idea of encountering former companions, as it’s something that has barely ever happened on television. Russell T. Davies and Barry Letts were the only Doctor Who producers to create a regular cast outside of the Doctor and companions, but there’s no reason not to explore the idea on audio. The only danger is avoiding the sense of retreading old ground, and here we don’t have that problem, as neither Constance nor Flip starred in a large number of stories before this.
I don’t have much to say about the plot of “Quicksilver,” as it’s a combination of postwar spy intrigue and “aliens bring interstellar war to Earth” without much to distinguish it. Fitton keeps it exciting, but everything interesting about “Quicksilver” happens between the characters. The production is quite good – Jamie Anderson directs and Jamie Robertson provides the sound design, with both working quite well. Overall, “Quicksilver” is an improvement on its immediate predecessors, but it’s not a classic by any means. It wraps up Constance’s outstanding plot, brings an old companion back into the fold, and creates a potentially interesting new dynamic going forward. It’s worth a listen, in other words, something I wish I could say more often about this range.
I haven’t made a secret of my opinion of the “main” Doctor Who audio range – it’s quite low – but as I’m a die-hard fan, and I know Big Finish is capable of greatness, I continue to press on. Unfortunately, my patience has not been rewarded with Jamie Anderson’s “Absolute Power,” which is yet another example of a pointless retread of Doctor Who clichés that offers absolutely no entertainment or, indeed, any reason to listen.
A greedy businessman (because they are all greedy) named Lyam Yce (Paul Reynolds… or is it Payl Reynylds?) (and that’s pronounced Liam Ice, if you’re wondering about the terrible sci-fi naming) is funding an archaeological dig on the planet Teymah to determine what wiped out its ancient civilization. He is working with Professor Aryan Wyke (Neil Edmond) and his assistant Ammar (Arian Nik) to this end, but of course there’s an unseen motive here that’s actually driving the dig, as Yce is working with an alien to help them and, in return, receive more money and power. The Doctor and Constance must step in before unexpected consequences threaten everything, et cetera.
Look, I don’t have anything to say about the plot. You can predict exactly what’s going to happen as the story goes along while at no point does it have anything interesting to say. You mean the American businessman is actually a bad guy! However could I have guessed? (As an aside, are there actors in the UK whose American accents aren’t straight out of Newsies or Foghorn Leghorn? I’m sick to my back teeth of American characters that sound like they grew up in 1930s New York.) There’s only one sympathetic guest character in this story and he’s an uninspiring wet blanket who longs pathetically after Constance. A recent thread on Gallifrey Base encouraged users to post common Big Finish writing clichés, and the Doctor exclaiming “That was unnecessary!” after a supporting character is murdered was the most popular submission. In “Absolute Power,” Anderson gives us not one but two bites at the apple – we get both “There was no need for that” AND “You didn’t have to do that!”
The last episode is particularly irritating. The Doctor and Constance save the day about ten minutes in – so Anderson whips up some utter nonsense that extends the story for another “exciting” fifteen minutes in which the characters run around the TARDIS interior flicking switches. Then, when it’s finally over, Constance suddenly remembers that her husband went missing and demands the Doctor return her home immediately. Evidently we’re supposed to understand that her travels have been a means of avoidance, and that her time with Ammar has reminded her of what’s really important. This would have been easier to understand had this been seeded in any way in the previous stories featuring the character, or indeed if this story involved any foreshadowing prior to the revelation at the end, but of course none of that happened. I’ve advocated time and again for more complex plotting and character development in this range, but perhaps I should give it up – every attempt they make nowadays seems to fail miserably.
What am I supposed to say at this point? This is yet another awful monthly release. Even the production isn’t good – Anderson directs his own script well enough, but Joe Kraemer’s sound design is lacking and his score is deeply irritating. I used to look forward to the Colin Baker stories; now they’re excruciating just like everything else. But you know what? I’m just screaming into the void. Go check out the professional reviews, where every monthly release is a new masterpiece, each story a powerful and challenging piece of drama on par with the finest Doctor Who adventures. I’ll be here, trudging ever on, until entropy takes and subsumes me into the endless gray abyss.
I’ve been critical of Big Finish’s new UNIT series largely because of wasted opportunities: the first two sets were little more than generic action stories that were overlong, had nothing to say, and featured a bunch of interchangeable, uninteresting characters. Finally, with the third set, “UNIT: Silenced,” it seems they’ve figured it out, as it is a great improvement on its predecessors.
“Silenced,” written by Matt Fitton and John Dorney, is another four-hour epic story, but unlike the previous two sets, each of the four episodes takes place at a different time in the larger story. By separating each episode by days or weeks, it keeps the story fresh: the authors can set new challenges to the characters instead of trying to find ways to spread one conflict over four hours. The villains of the story, of course, are the Silents, and their unique nature also means that the characters must constantly find new ways to remember their very existence. “Silenced” never gets boring, in other words – in fact, it’s quite exciting throughout, moving through twists and turns with ease and keeping the listener’s attention to the very end.
“Silenced” is also unafraid to embrace the continuity of the TV series. The Doctor eventually defeated the Silents by imbedding a secret instruction in humanity to attack the Silents on sight, forcing them to go into hiding and stop meddling in human affairs. “Silenced” grabs that and runs with it: the first time the UNIT team encounters the Silents, they’re gripped with a powerful desire to gun them down, and much of the story involves the Silents plotting to undo the Doctor’s actions by imbedding a different message in viral videos and the like. This is a natural extension of the Silents into the modern, digital age, and it feels very much like a plot we might have seen on TV in a Steven Moffat story. I also enjoyed the way the authors got around the problem of the characters forgetting the Silents: designing eyewear that projects an image of a Silent directly into the wearer’s vision. My one complaint is that the ultimate solution is almost exactly the same as what we saw in “Day of the Moon” – a subliminal message instructing the people of Earth not to trust the Silents. There are a few differences, of course, but it’s similar enough to feel repetitive.
In addition to its entertainment value and its skillful use of television continuity, “Silenced” also works because it’s about something. The middle two episodes chronicle the rise of Kenneth LeBlanc (Nicholas Day), a wholly unqualified candidate for Prime Minister whose campaign of obnoxious divisiveness appears to be propelling him toward election. You can judge for yourself which horrible politician he is intended to represent – there are an unfortunately large number of them around right now – but it feels incredibly topical no matter what figure he’s intended to parallel. If anything, it’s still too optimistic – after all, the only way someone like that could get elected is if aliens are working behind the scenes to brainwash us all, right? Also, I know this isn’t a long-term political drama, but getting rid of LeBlanc and putting the government back in the hands of someone competent feels way too easy as a conclusion to that thread.
There isn’t much progression in the characterization, unfortunately, but at least we get to see the entire UNIT team doing their jobs efficiently. I’ve heard this sort of story described as “competence porn” – watching skilled, intelligent people apply their skills and intelligence to solve a complicated problem – and I always enjoy watching that sort of thing. At this point, I think the characters are what they are – Josh’s plastic skeleton only gets one perfunctory mention, and everyone else is exactly what you’d expect. But if they’re solving problems, getting along, and not dragging things to a halt, it’s acceptable.
The sound design is great throughout, with contributions from both Peter Doggart and Howard Carter – this is a story that veers from alien invasion to politics to space adventure and always sounds convincing. The score, also from Carter, is suitably cinematic, and director Ken Bentley holds everything together with his expected skill. Overall, “UNIT: Silenced” is a huge step forward for the new UNIT range. It’s very entertaining, it uses TV continuity quite well, and it actually offers commentary about current events. More sets like this and I’ll be much happier with the range.
Following on from “The Torchwood Archive,” Big Finish presents another Torchwood special release in box set format. But unlike its predecessor, “Outbreak,” by Guy Adams, Emma Reeves, and AK Benedict, is not an anniversary tale – it’s a full-on Torchwood story featuring nearly the entire cast that happens to be about three hours long. And like most other Big Finish box sets that tell a single story, it’s far too long and somehow manages to forget to be about anything other than the plot.
“Outbreak,” as the title implies, is about a deadly virus outbreak in Cardiff. As with most stories of this nature – and real life as well – the virus starts out affecting a few people and rapidly spreads through the population. As things get worse, the government quarantines the entire city, and it’s up to Torchwood, trapped inside, to save the day. The story is divided into three episodes – Incubation, Prodromal (misspelled Prodomal in the track names), and Invasion – that track the outbreak through its various stages. Similarly, the infected go through three stages of the disease: first, they suffer a terrible itching sensation as the virus spreads through their bodies; next, they suffer overpowering hallucinations; finally, they are filled with an unquenchable desire to murder those they love. I think they might die after that but the story is rather inconsistent on that score. It’s inconsistent about the virus in general, to be honest – we only see the true progression of the disease when it’s impacting the regular characters. There’s no sense of the progression of the outbreak in Cardiff – we just go from a few people showing symptoms to a chaotic war zone. It’s also unclear how many people are even infected from the crowd behavior – apparently thousands of people can gather and start chanting things like “We want a cure!” at the authorities?
The story is much stronger when it deals with the regular characters. The best set piece features Ianto and Jack locked in the Hub, with an infected Jack chasing Ianto through the base with murderous intent. This deepens the relationship between the characters, as we see Ianto’s devotion to Jack firsthand, and Jack’s desire to kill Ianto underscores how much he actually loves him. (That’s a very Torchwood perspective, and it’s easily the best thing about the virus.) This scene also reintroduces Norton (Samuel Barnett), who is becoming a recurring adversary. Norton appears as a ghost from the past through the use of time travel technology, and inserts himself right in the middle of Jack’s pursuit of Ianto. We also learn that he and Jack were personally involved in stopping the last time this outbreak occurred, and that something happened between them that permanently soured their relationship. As I said above, this is the best part of “Outbreak,” with the best performances and the best writing.
We spend much of the first episode with Andy, which is a plus – he’s the best character of the bunch to serve as the audience’s viewpoint into the outbreak. By the end of the story, his “everyman” perspective has been largely supplanted by Rhys, who takes a more significant role in the third part after spending the first two driving trucks and sitting in traffic. And then there’s Gwen, who spends the first episode doing nothing, gets infected in the second, then… recovers, I guess, and leads the resistance in the final part. There’s an extended sequence in the middle where she plans to kill Rhys, but the resolution is the easiest sort of “I love you anyway” plotting and isn’t worth discussing.
I’d talk about the supporting cast but I don’t have anything to say. The virus itself springs from some generic “evil corporation” plotting – a pharmaceutical company has designed a similar, much more benign virus that will collect personal data about the infected and send it to a central database. And since it’s based on the original virus, it also serves as an effective vaccine for the uninfected. So clearly everyone in the country must be given it immediately! This is supervillain plotting that wouldn’t be out of place in the Pertwee era – a modern conspiracy would be much more surreptitious, even if it was equally cynical.
The production outshines the script – Scott Handcock directs, and impressively the story never drags over its three-hour run time. The sound design from Martin Montague is suitably epic and convincing, while the music from Blair Mowat and Steve Wright is quite appropriate for the material. Overall, though, “Outbreak” is a mixed bag. The performances are generally great, and the time we spend actually fleshing out the characters is very worthwhile. But the plot is nearly incomprehensible in its inconsistencies, and the script spends much more time on the plot than it does on the characters. This is a story that would make a very good two-part episode of a TV series; quite why it needed to be three hours long is beyond me.
When we think of great Doctor Who historicals, we generally think of the serious ones: “Marco Polo,” “The Aztecs,” “The Crusade” – even the nonexistent “The Massacre” draws attention. We don’t often think of “The Romans” or “The Myth Makers,” and that’s a shame, because the historical comedy is a deeply underappreciated part of Doctor Who history. Fortunately, the latest Early Adventure, “The Ravelli Conspiracy” from Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky, embraces that format and tells a genuinely entertaining tale of conspiracy in 16th century Florence.
The Italy of the time was a complicated group of republics and territories run by different families with the Catholic Church positioned at the center. Set in 1514, this story sees the Doctor, Vicki, and Steven involved with Pope Leo X (Robert Hands), née Giovanni de Medici, as his brother Guiliano (Jamie Ballard) attempts to consolidate family power in Florence. Guiliano suspects an assassination attempt on the Pope will be carried out by members of the Ravelli family, the Pope thinks his brother is overreacting, and the famous Niccolo Machiavelli (Mark Frost) is running around in the middle trying to manipulate events to his own ends. This sounds like the perfect setup for a dark, serious story full of murder and intrigue, but Khan and Salinsky go in the other direction, using over the top characterization to make the story quite funny without letting it descend into farce.
The only overtly silly character is the Guard Captain (Joe Bor), a man who is so put-upon and jaded that he lacks any outward appearance of emotion. Despite this, he steals basically all of his scenes – the moment when he realizes he has to carry the TARDIS right back up the stairs he just descended had me laughing out loud. Apart from him, the other characters stay within themselves when it comes to humor. The Pope is largely a sensible man, but he’s also a hedonist, and he only cares so much about any one problem. The authors also play around with the historical rumors of Leo X being gay but never mock his sexuality in the process, which is refreshing. Guiliano, on the other hand, is a murderous maniac; he’s the sort of person who thinks the best solution to any problem is found at the pointy end of a sword. Whenever anything goes wrong, he proposes torturing and killing the people responsible – so it’s fortunate that his brother is usually around to overrule his violent impulses. This, too, is played largely for laughs – he remains threatening because the authors take his power seriously, but as an individual he’s quite funny.
Since Machiavelli is involved, the story naturally involves a massive conspiracy featuring double-crosses and manipulation. But the Doctor is generally a step ahead of the famous schemer, and the authors are quite aware of the potential of stories like this to get out of hand. Perhaps the best moment is at the end, when Machiavelli’s plan is exposed and foiled, only for him to dramatically reveal that his plan being foiled was actually part of an even bigger plan. The Doctor laughs in disbelief, but he can’t actually disprove such a claim, and that’s basically how we end things. As for the TARDIS crew, Vicki takes center stage in this one, building rapport with the Pope and driving most of the plot with some direction from the Doctor. Steven does less well, spending most of the story being captured in various ways – but Purves’ take on Hartnell continues to delight, and you can absolutely picture Hartnell giggling his way through such a fun script.
The production is impressive as ever – Lisa Bowerman has a good handle on historical stories like this, while Toby Hrycek-Robinson’s design is effective. Overall, “The Ravelli Conspiracy” is a success. It’s entertaining, it’s quite funny, it features some effective historical guest characters, and it doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s fun, in other words, and that’s as good a reason as any to pick it up.
I’m starting to think we’re simply running out of Doctor Who stories to tell. The latest installment in the increasingly pointless monthly range, “Order of the Daleks” comes from Mike Tucker, which should have been my first warning. It manages to be composed entirely of clichés, doing absolutely nothing interesting or compelling for its entire two-hour running time. I grew up watching Doctor Who. I love Doctor Who. But I’ve never found myself so consistently checking my watch during Doctor Who stories than I have over the past few years of Big Finish releases. What is going on here?
There isn’t a single element of “Order of the Daleks” that even a casual Doctor Who fan hasn’t seen before. A small, damaged group of Daleks infiltrates the local society where they crash-landed in order to rebuild themselves? How many times have we done that? Not as many times as we’ve had stories with “Dalek” in the title close the first episode with the stunning revelation that the Daleks are involved, and that horrible cliché is here too! Gee, I wonder who this mysterious alien race, hidden in the monastery, could be? I’m sure the first cliffhanger will shock the hell out of me with that revelation! Oh, the Daleks are possessing people? Cue at least one scene of the Doctor urging someone to break their possession by yelling “Fight it!” and so forth at them. Lots of running around being captured and recaptured? But of course. An officious bureaucrat who is there largely to irritate the Doctor? The bureaucrat’s lackey, who turns out to be the smarter of the two? Naturally! How about a needless, heroic sacrifice of a guest character to save the Doctor or his companion? How about more than one! I don’t think I need to continue.
I don’t normally talk about this, but as I have almost nothing to say about this comically unimaginative Doctor Who story, I’ll jump in: the review copy on the “Order of the Daleks” product page boggles my mind. Look, I understand that for many people, all they want out of a Doctor Who audio is a bit of nostalgia to fire their memories. And that’s fine – it’s not what I look for in a piece of drama, but people can like what they want. And there’s nothing particularly wrong with “Order of the Daleks” – there is literally nothing fresh or imaginative about it, but it’s put together well enough and the cast give enthusiastic performances. I’ll be awarding an average score at the end, in fact, for whatever that’s worth. But I cannot understand glowing, over-the-top praise of a story like this. I suppose it’s fitting that one of the quotes pulled says that the story “ticks all the boxes” – to me, an exercise in box-ticking is not worth a high score, but as that appears to be the entire raison d’être of the monthly range right now, I see why it was offered and accepted as a compliment.
I like Constance Clarke, at any rate – she’s a strong, self-reliant female character from an era that could easily have turned her into a cliché. I’d never describe her as one of my favorites, because we simply haven’t learned enough about her, but she’s an entertaining listen. It’s a shame, then, that she’s almost entirely wasted on this story. Tucker gives her a couple of moments that seem great, as she devises plans to help save the day. The problem is that these plans fail and make the situation worse in the process, so she ends up looking useless instead of ingenious. And this isn’t some sort of smart commentary on the role of the companion; it’s just bad characterization.
While the guest cast turns in good performances across the board, “Order of the Daleks” comes across like the money ran out. Robbie Stevens, Sam Fletcher, and Nicholas Briggs all play multiple roles and it’s quite obvious that they’re doing so. There are also a number of scenes in which characters listen in on things happening at a distance, and this is communicated either by turning down the levels or muffling the dialogue. This is, needless to say, incomprehensible, and I’m not sure if the decision was down to director Jamie Anderson or sound designer Robert Harvey, but it was a mistake. Apart from that, the story is paced quite well, something Anderson achieves in spite of the script, and the sound effects, as well as the score from Jamie Robertson, are quite effective.
Overall, what more is there to say about “Order of the Daleks?” It’s a giant pile of clichés from start to finish. If you’re looking for a warm glow of nostalgia to wash over you, I suppose this story will do that as well as any other. If you want anything other than that, look somewhere else. But that’s the monthly range for you: a vast, empty, uninspiring gray sea, occasionally spoiled by something interesting.
By contrast to “The Transcendence of Ephros,” “The Hidden Realm,” from David Llewellyn, is a traditional Pertwee-on-Earth story in the vein of “The Dæmons” but without the UNIT trappings. It’s a well-presented story that passes the time well, but it lacks the characterization and thoughtfulness of its predecessor.
There’s only one Jon Pertwee story set on present-day Earth that doesn’t feature UNIT: “The Sea Devils,” which features a massive guest appearance from the Royal Navy instead. So that makes “The Hidden Realm” unique, and frankly I’m surprised that Yates isn’t along for the ride. But the Doctor and Jo find a close ally in DS Joseph (Alex Lanipekun), which makes me wonder if a Pertwee story can function on Earth without an establishment authority figure around. The story takes it for granted that the police are honorable men, and plays off the characters’ trust in the police to construct dramatic surprises. I wouldn’t find that remarkable except in this context – while the Pertwee era routinely featured ignorant or selfish individuals in the corridors of power, it never questioned the importance of those corridors, and even in the small town of Bramfield the same holds true.
Unfortunately, I find that diversion much more interesting than the actual story, which has compelling trappings but feels rather empty. A small town haunted by decades of mysterious disappearances? A flock of robotic magpies presaging the arrival of an interdimensional portal? A body-swapping alien race seeding humanity with spies for profit? All of these are neat ideas, but none are used in inventive ways. The story takes forever to establish just what’s going on, and the mystery plotting feels more like treading water than building suspense. Part of this is down to my taste, of course, as I’ve never really found much appeal in the “mysterious happenings in a local village” stories, perhaps because I’m an American and we don’t have villages like this where I live. The story does touch briefly on gentrification and modernization, but Llewellyn doesn’t take the opportunity to parallel the changes in the town with the alien threat.
There is an attempt to give the characters some depth. We meet Jo’s cousin Stephanie (Clare Buckfield) and we learn that she’s a famously brave woman who won’t let her tough façade crack for anyone. But we don’t really see that personality come out, and by the end of the story she’s reunited with her husband (Robert Whitelock) and sounding like any of a million other generic guest characters. DCI Finch (Richard Earl) is great – he’s a fairly predictable grizzled-cop-with-a-heart-of-gold but Earl really sells it – but I hated his ending. I’m growing quite tired of the heroic guest character sacrifice trope – it’s just a crutch at this point to have the Doctor concoct a solution that will result in his death and then have another character step in at the last minute to take the hit in his place.
The production is solid, although some of the sound effects, particularly the sonic screwdriver, sound oddly out of place. Nicholas Briggs directs again – for all the (often justified) stick he gets as a writer, his performance in the director’s chair is usually unassailable. Overall, “The Hidden Realm” doesn’t really go anywhere unexpected, but it does its thing convincingly and with minimal fuss. Buy the set for “Ephros,” but stick around for “The Hidden Realm,” which is worth a listen.
After the success of The Third Doctor Adventures, and Tim Treloar’s impression of Jon Pertwee, it was only a matter of time before Big Finish produced a second volume. Volume 2 features two more four-part stories, the first of which is “The Transcendence of Ephros” from Guy Adams. It’s a very traditional Pertwee-in-space tale, but the streamlined length and the sheer amount of incident, coupled with an unexpected twist, make it a compelling listen.
I like the ways in which Adams unwraps the layers of his script. The initial mystery that draws the Doctor and Jo to explore Ephros is the geometric pattern of the stars in the night sky. But they discover that those stars are actually lights, and that the planet has been completely surrounded by a massive superstructure. Why? The planet is going to explode, and the Galactux Power Corporation intends to collect resources from the rubble. Simultaneously, Adams introduces multiple guest characters, including members of a local religion who believe that the planet’s destruction will lead to their transcendence into newer physical forms. This gives the Doctor a mystery to investigate and then a dilemma to solve: once he knows what’s going on, he has to find out if the planet’s destruction is a natural process, and debate whether he has the right to stop it. After all, if the religious adherents choose to stay on a dying planet, isn’t that their right? But does that right extend to their children?
A good Star Trek episode would have made that dilemma the centerpiece of the episode. But this is Doctor Who, and so of course the Doctor uncovers a nefarious scheme to destroy the planet and must rush to save everyone. Without getting into too many details, the scheme involves ancient technology and the influence of the Time Lords. I do want to discuss a particularly big spoiler, though – in the TV series, the Master was as much a part of the “UNIT family” as the Doctor, Jo, or the Brigadier. But Roger Delgado is long since passed away, and without resorting to another impersonation, there’s no good way to get his Master into one of these stories. Adams wisely sidesteps the issue, presenting us instead with a former companion of the Master. This gives the story a villain with a classically, unnecessarily convoluted scheme, yes, but it also allows Adams to parallel the Doctor/Jo relationship. While the Doctor inspires his companions to be better people and to stand up for what’s right, the Master inspires his to look for advantages wherever they can while looking out only for themselves. There’s a particularly great line, something like “Of course, eventually he grew tired of me and tried to kill me” – and the companion not holding that against the Master at all is a wonderful bit of characterization.
“The Transcendence of Ephros” is a very good story, and the production is equally strong. Treloar’s Doctor is still a caricature of Pertwee, but it’s a particularly good caricature so I don’t mind. Katy Manning is one of the best companion actors at recreating how she sounded on television, and she and Treloar have a fine chemistry. I can’t tell from the credits who provided the sound design for what story, but it’s quite believable here, and Nicholas Briggs provided his usual assured direction. This is only the third Third Doctor Adventure, but it’s the best of the lot by far.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Torchwood, Big Finish commissioned a special two-hour release: “The Torchwood Archive,” which sort of wraps up the Committee arc and gives time to almost all of the memorable Torchwood characters. Like most other anniversary tales in the Doctor Who universe, James Goss’s script has too much going on to properly tie everything together, but it’s an entertaining way to pass the time nonetheless.
While this is an anniversary story, and while it is full of continuity references, this isn’t a “celebration” in any meaningful sense. Set thousands of years in the future, when humanity is locked in a war with a nameless Enemy, “The Torchwood Archive” describes the visit of Jeremiah Bash Henderson (Richie Campbell) to the titular Archive, a repository of alien technology located on a remote asteroid. Jeremiah is there to destroy the Archive, but to do so he must navigate a long series of holographic guest appearances and flashbacks.
For whatever reason, the Archive is operated by a series of holograms of the Torchwood team we know from television, with Andy guiding Jeremiah more than any other character. We learn of the mysterious Object One – the first alien artifact ever catalogued by Torchwood – and how it seems to be cursed, turning up like a bad penny and bringing misfortune in its wake. The Archive tells the story of Object One through a series of flashbacks to various moments in Torchwood history. There are a ton of them: we go back to Torchwood’s founding and Queen Victoria (Rowena Cooper); we see Jack in the past, present, and future; we spend some time with Yvonne, Ianto, and others at Torchwood One; we get a repeat appearance from David Warner playing the Committee; we get individual scenes with Jack, Gwen, Ianto, Tosh, Rhys, Andy, and Suzie. In keeping with the tone of the series, most of these scenes feature downbeat moments or characters making mistakes – the problem is that while this captures the feeling of Torchwood, it’s far too disjointed to make for an appealing story.
The other, more serious problem is involved with the story taking place thousands of years in the future. The Torchwood we know has been firmly grounded on Earth and largely in the present day; removing us to a remote asteroid disconnects us from the series in a way that damages our ability to relate. The revelations about the Committee aren’t that interesting, either: learning that they were created by Torchwood to provide an enemy to fight is a big twist, but “we did it ourselves!” is one of the oldest twists in the sci-fi book. I think it’s also a mistake to reveal how the Committee is finally brought down: that should be something we experience with the characters we know, not something related to us after the fact. There are still many answers to be discovered, and I’m sure they’ll come up in future Torchwood plays, but we now know the endpoint of the Committee and it’s far too disconnected from the Torchwood we know to have any emotional impact. The construction of “The Torchwood Archive” reminds me of “These Are the Voyages…,” the ill-fated final episode of Star Trek: Enterprise that everyone hated. While this isn’t nearly as bad – for one thing, we have more Torchwood stories coming – it fails to succeed for similar reasons.
The strength of the Torchwood releases has been their strong focus on characters. Whether we get into a regular’s head or whether we’re presented with a nuanced guest character, the best Torchwood audios have taken deep dives into character-focused storytelling. “The Torchwood Archive” is absolutely not that. It relies on a superficial similarity with its bevy of characters and doesn’t let us learn things about any of them. The final twist about Jeremiah would have been more effective if we had spent any meaningful time with him; instead, we got a brief flashback to his journey to the Archive and a series of scenes in which he reacts to holograms. The performances are strong across the board, which helps tremendously, and the production is equally strong. Scott Handcock has proven to be an excellent Torchwood director. Blair Mowat provides a particularly interesting score, especially in the story’s final minutes. It also features something for everyone – unless you were hoping for the return of Owen, every other significant character is here. I don’t want to be too hard on “The Torchwood Archive” because it’s an anniversary story, but it’s also an essential part of the ongoing plot arc so it must be judged on those terms. And as such it’s quite possibly the weakest Torchwood story yet released by Big Finish. I’m confident things will rebound going forward, but this was a bit of a misstep.
The second Early Adventure in the third series is “The Fifth Traveller” from Philip Lawrence, a story that attempts to put an interesting twist on the Hartnell era. The marketing materials mention a new companion named Jospa (James Joyce), and it sounds like he’s been around for a while. Unfortunately, while the story is competently written and performed, it has very little of interest to say or do.
Jospa is part of the TARDIS crew. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Vicki all seem to know him, and they even remember how they met him: picking the Doctor’s pocket in the slums of 30th century Earth. There’s some interesting potential here – imagine introducing a new companion in medias res, jumping in to his or her tenure and then relating their origin in flashback. We haven’t seen that before, and I’d be interested to see how it would work. The problem is that between the title and the story’s focus on misleading memory, it’s screamingly obvious from the start that Jospa is an imposter. We don’t know specifically what he wants until the final episode, but there’s no mystery here, no reason to trust him. It puts the story in a holding pattern until his treachery can be revealed – and that means that we spend three episodes with a character with no apparent history or raison d’être. This is boring, basically.
Fortunately, there’s a significant subplot; unfortunately, that subplot isn’t much more interesting than the Jospa plot. The TARDIS lands on an unnamed jungle planet inhabited by the Arunde, telepathic apes with four arms, no legs, and a powerful fear of the ground. Their society faces conflict: their old Matriar fell to her death, and now her inexperienced daughter Sharna (Kate Byers) is forced to lead the tribe in the face of resistance from Gark (Elliot Cowan). This plays out exactly as you might expect, with lots of theatrical confrontations, appeals to the voiceless members of the tribe who are always just out of shot, and so forth. The death of the old Matriar is presented as a mystery, and the responsible party is exactly the one you’re expecting. It’s reminiscent of the final three episodes of “An Unearthly Child,” honestly – but it’s 53 years later and we know how that story goes by now.
Don’t get me wrong: “The Fifth Traveller” is not badly written or badly made. Lawrence has a strong grasp of the Hartnell era and accurately captures each of the regular characters. The structure of the story is evocative of the early days of Doctor Who, and it’s easy to picture the ambitious, failed attempts the production team would have made to bring this script to life. William Russell’s Doctor is sounding more and more similar to Ian, but the performance is still effective. Maureen O’Brien shines – Vicki is deeply involved with the story and she gives a compelling, enthusiastic performance. And Jemma Powell is fine as Barbara, though the story doesn’t give her a great deal to do. Joyce does a good job as Jospa, and Byers and Cowan are stagey but believable as Sharna and Gark.
The production is strong as well. Toby Hrycek-Robinson’s sound design is effective, while his score is one of the best in this range, capturing the essential weirdness of early Doctor Who music. Lisa Bowerman directs with her usual skill. Overall, whether you like “The Fifth Traveller” depends on what you want from it. If you’re looking for a skillful recreation of the Hartnell era, in terms of the storytelling, performances, and design, this is the story for you. If you’re looking for something interesting, unpredictable, or innovative, look elsewhere.
2016’s anthology release is “The Memory Bank and Other Stories,” and the first story in the anthology, as the title implies, is Chris Chapman’s “The Memory Bank.” It’s an interesting, high-concept tale about a planet where being forgotten means an end to your very existence. To combat this, the planet employs an Archivist who relives the memories of its citizens to ensure they are never completely forgotten, and of course there are monsters lurking in the memory gaps. This is a smart, efficient story that effectively uses its running time to deliver both plot and theme. I like how thoughtful it is, how Chapman dwells upon the importance of memory and how the memories we create help define us. And he doesn’t sledgehammer in a reference to “A man is the sum of his memories, a Time Lord even more so” which is surprising. “The Memory Bank” is a great start to the collection – we need more like this.
8/10
THE LAST FAIRY TALE
The second story, Paul Magrs’ “The Last Fairy Tale,” isn’t as successful, and is probably the weakest entry of the four. There is some great material in here about how the stories we tell influence our perceptions of the world, and how the same action can seem both praiseworthy and deplorable depending upon the perspective from which it is viewed. Magrs, an experienced writer and scholar, understands the importance of storytellers to society, and that comes across strongly in his script. The problem is that it’s almost entirely undramatic. The Doctor and Turlough arrive in a small village and the people mistake the Doctor for their storyteller of legend. After the briefest conflict generated by this mistaken identity, the real storyteller shows up and then the Doctor and Turlough leave. I think the story would have been better had it not been framed as a traditional Doctor Who story – by pegging the start to the TARDIS’s arrival and the end to its departure, the scope of the story is limited in ways that weaken the message Magrs wants to communicate. Still, if this is the weakest story in the collection, you’re looking at a very good collection.
6/10
REPEAT OFFENDER
The third story, Eddie Robson’s “Repeat Offender,” is the best of the four. To begin with, it actually makes use of having Turlough along in the TARDIS – in the other three stories, he’s mostly distinguished by complaining a lot; here, he’s an active participant. It’s a four-hand story with Peter Davison, Mark Strickson, Mandi Symonds, and an uncredited actor, and Robson uses the one-room setting to drive up the tension while simultaneously peeling back layers of the plot. What starts as a simple story about the Doctor and Turlough trying to prevent an alien influence from threatening humanity becomes something much more complex involving the Doctor’s future selves and the paradoxical nature of time travel. Even the alien possession points work well, because Turlough is untrustworthy enough that it’s hard to know whether he’s in control. I also enjoyed the Doctor’s arguments with the police inspector (Symonds), which ask questions about civil liberties and the prospect of where technology is taking our justice systems. Thumbs way up for this one.
9/10
THE BECOMING
Lastly, we have Ian Potter’s “The Becoming,” another high-concept story involving the Doctor and Turlough encountering an alien society and navigating its customs while helping determine its future. The encounter with Waywalker (Kae Alexander) is interesting, and Potter’s script does a fine job of delivering exposition through dialogue without it ever sounding forced. There is some fine material here about adaptation and how both societies and species adapt to their surroundings. However, as with many high-concept stories along these lines, “The Becoming” often feels too clinical – and the point near the end where the Doctor figures out what’s going on and rushes back to the settlement doesn’t earn its urgency. I’m generally a fan of Potter’s work, and I’m not sure if this anthology format plays to his strengths. But that’s a minor complaint – this is the sort of story that makes the listener think, and I consider that very high praise.
7/10
Overall, “The Memory Bank and Other Stories” is one of Big Finish’s most successful anthology releases. When the weakest story is a typically intelligent Paul Magrs entry, you know you’re listening to something good. Long-time Big Finish repertory player Helen Goldwyn directs, doing fine work, and the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is up to their usual standards.
Recommended.
I keep coming back to this question: what is the point of these War Doctor stories? Is Big Finish actually making any sort of effort to tell new, unique stories set in a previously unexplored (and, in fact, forbidden) part of Doctor Who history, or are they just pumping out a bunch of generic action epics, sticking John Hurt on the cover, and hoping the sales roll in? I hope it’s the former, but I only see evidence of the latter, and the conclusion of the third set, “Eye of Harmony” by Ken Bentley, does nothing to change my mind.
The problem can be summed up via plot summary: the Daleks have a scheme to win the Time War by blowing up the Eye of Harmony using dark matter bombs. Evidently, this will disrupt all of Time Lord history and remove them from the Daleks’ path to universal domination. Fine, but won’t that erase the Time War itself? Wasn’t the Doctor’s interference in Dalek history ironically crucial to their evolution? That’s the problem with throwing concepts like this around in generic action stories: the script necessarily avoids engaging with anything interesting in lieu of presenting things exploding. Worse, though, is the second half of their plan. How will they access the Eye of Harmony, you ask? That’s where Heleyna (Honeysuckle Weeks, absolutely terrible) comes in: she’s a disillusioned Time Lord whose grandfather died opposing Gallifreyan entry into the Time War. So if the Daleks succeed, the Time War will be averted, and her grandfather will still be alive! I’m a mere human, and it took me less than half a second to see multiple obvious flaws in that thinking. I understand she’s dealing with emotional trauma, but isn’t she also a member of the most ancient and powerful race in the entire universe? Maybe she’s just a really, really stupid Time Lord? So you’ve got a boring, obvious plan that turns around a character being utterly idiotic. Why should I care about this?
There’s nothing interesting here. The Doctor, ostensibly the focal point of these stories, is kept away from the main action for far too much of the story. The Daleks’ plan is nonsensical. The story suggests infighting among the Time Lords over the Time War but doesn’t show us any examples of that apart from the aforementioned awful Heleyna plot. The Doctor is flying around in a “battle TARDIS” that doesn’t seem to do anything that his normal TARDIS doesn’t. We spend much of the story with Ollistra and observe her in a great deal of distress – and learn almost nothing about her in the process. She’s a determined military leader who’s willing to put her personal qualms aside in favor of what she sees as the greater good, and this leads to conflict with the Doctor from time to time. That’s not an interesting character, that’s a pile of clichés. Speaking of Ollistra, what’s going on with the end of the story? “Oh, Doctor, you’re all hearts?” So now they get along well enough to trade quips like that?
I don’t want to keep talking about this story. Much like “The Eternity Cage,” it’s boring, the characters are flat, and the acting isn’t even good. The production values throughout the set are generally okay, but there aren’t any memorable instances of sound design or memorable parts of the score. I don’t know if RTD was right that it’s impossible to dramatize the Time War, but this is not how you do it. The fourth War Doctor set should be the last one. There’s no point to doing more.
You can tell when Big Finish is in need of ideas: when they start rolling out “x meets y” stories. K-9 meets the Daleks! Leela meets the Cybermen! Well, we’re at the eighth War Doctor story, Andrew Smith’s “The Eternity Cage,” and we’re already here: the War Doctor meets the Sontarans! That it also isn’t very good is almost beside the point.
First of all, didn’t Andrew Smith already write this story? Wasn’t “The Sontaran Ordeal” a story about the Time War and how the Sontarans are desperate to get involved? Wasn’t it also about an unrelated planet and how it suffers collateral damage from the War? Because that’s exactly what we get here, with the difference being that “The Sontaran Ordeal” was intelligently written and “The Eternity Cage” is little more than a generic action epic. In this story, we learn absolutely nothing of value about the Sontarans. Yes, they’re warlike. Yes, they want to join the greatest war of all time. So they steal some Time Lord technology and use it to blackmail the Time Lords and the Daleks into allowing them into the war. Not a bad idea – at least until Smith completely undercuts it by revealing that the Sontarans never understood how to use the Time Lord technology in the first place. It’s a little disconcerting to have every character dismiss the Sontarans out of hand and then turn out to be right; shouldn’t they accomplish something on their own if you want this to be perceived as anything other than a distraction? But no, I guess they’re just stupid; so much for the intriguing culture on display in “The Sontaran Ordeal.”
This story also introduces the Dalek Time Strategist, a character that is apparently different from the Dalek Time Controller but in ways I have yet to notice. It’s voiced by Nick Briggs, and for possibly the first time ever he gets a Dalek voice wrong. This doesn’t sound like a Dalek; it sounds like Briggs whispering into a voice filter. Talk about a breach of the suspension of disbelief! Fortunately, his other Dalek voices are excellent as usual, but this was a bad route to take. As for the Time Strategist itself, there’s not much to say. It claims to see the future and has apparently been engineering events from behind the scenes. Can we not just stipulate at this point that there are smart Daleks and spare ourselves this litany of wheezing, growling Dalek geniuses working behind the scenes? In this story, the Sontarans capture the Time Strategist, it yells a lot about exterminating everything, and it eventually escapes. Perhaps it was part of the master plan? Who knows? There’s a brief conversation between Ollistra and the Time Strategist where she tries to level with the Dalek and converse with it as an equal… and it lasts for about 20 seconds before the Dalek starts ranting and raving again. If you’re not going to do anything interesting, why bother?
The whole plot with the Eternity Cage is dragged out beyond the bounds of reason. There’s a Time Lord trapped in it, being used as a power source by the Sontarans – but he’s actually running things himself and the Sontarans don’t know! See how easy that was to explain? The story didn’t, because it spelled out this Time Lord’s story in excruciating detail, at one point even having the Doctor narrate his memories over sounds of him grunting in pain.
Speaking of the Doctor, the War Doctor is unconvincing at best in this story. It’s not John Hurt’s fault, but at this point he’s just playing another cuddly, friendly incarnation of the Doctor. There’s a moment in which the War Doctor holds off on delivering the winning blow because he wants to give the Sontarans a chance to do the right thing. The Doctor didn’t do this “must give them a chance” thing in the classic series, but he started doing it in the new series. Why? What changed in his life to make him insist upon something like that? Oh, right, it was the giant Time War he fought in that he ended by not giving anyone a chance but just blowing both sides up. So why is the War Doctor, the one who’s supposed to be accruing blood on his hands, acting just like his future post-trauma incarnations? This is a dreadful misunderstanding of the character on Smith’s part, and a major reason why the story doesn’t work.
Even the production isn’t great. The direction and sound design are confusing in places, and some of the performances boggle the mind. I love Jacqueline Pearce, but she sounds like she has no idea what she’s saying. Josh Bolt’s turn as Kalan can be charitably described as wooden, and the less said about Honeysuckle Weeks’ dreadful performance as Heleyna, the better. And they’re all back in the finale! Hooray! This is a low point for the series. I hope it’s the lowest.
I was encouraged when the second War Doctor set concluded with “The Neverwhen,” a story that finally embraced the potential of telling stories in this unexplored era of Doctor Who history. I was therefore hopeful for the third set, Agents of Chaos, to see where things would go. But the first story in the set, David Llewellyn’s “The Shadow Vortex,” disappointed me again.
This story brings the Time War to Earth. We learn that certain planets, including Earth, are protected from the War by Time Lord “quantum shields,” and then the shield is immediately taken down to render that plot point largely irrelevant. But it allows us to journey to East Berlin in 1961, where the Doctor is pursuing a Dalek agent in an attempt to avert disaster. While there, he befriends a Stasi officer (Timothy Speyer), and they team up to prevent the Dalek agent from destroying the planet. It’s incredibly straightforward; there isn’t a surprising or interesting moment in the entire running time.
You might find it odd that the Doctor would run around with a Stasi officer, but don’t worry, he’s a good guy, deep down. Still, there’s potential here for conflict: would their values conflict? Could the Doctor really trust him? Would their relationship reveal crucial ways in which the War Doctor differs from his predecessors? Unfortunately, the answer to all of those questions is “no.” And what about the Earth angle? Surely the story focuses heavily on the implications of drawing Earth into the Time War, and how that planet’s important history cannot risk changing? With the proximity to recent historical events, obviously the story draws parallels between the Cold War and the Time War, right? How about the Daleks themselves? The obvious opportunity to compare and contrast them to the East German secret police must have been taken, right? Again: none of those ideas are explored at all.
The plot isn’t anything to write home about. Everything concludes with a showdown on a rooftop, with the titular Shadow Vortex opening a path for the Daleks to invade Earth. There doesn’t appear to be any way for the Doctor to win, as he has no way to drive millions of Daleks off the planet once they’ve arrived. But there’s one way to win – go back in time a few minutes and change history so the Shadow Vortex doesn’t open! Of course, the rules of Doctor Who specifically prohibit doing that, because if the Doctor can change his own history then every single story can be solved with the TARDIS. But when confronted with these rules, the Doctor just hand-waves them away, saying there are no rules in the Time War. Fine – so why doesn’t he do this in every story?
There’s not much to say about “The Shadow Vortex.” It’s a straightforward Doctor Who action story with a historical setting. The acting is largely good, though Speyer’s German accent verges on comedic, and the production is fine. John Hurt is great, though he’s wasted on stories like this. We’re only getting 12 of these, can we at least try to do something new with them?
I’m struggling a bit with this Doom Coalition set. On the one hand, it’s easily the best written of the three; on the other, it still isn’t pointing in a direction that’s particularly interesting. Both of these factors come into play in the final story of the set, John Dorney’s “The Crucible of Souls,” which finally gives us a look at the Doom Coalition and their plans but doesn’t particularly interest me in them.
My biggest issue with the villains in the Doom Coalition series is that they’ve all had good to great “hooks” but haven’t done anything interesting with them. The Eleven is a great idea – a renegade Time Lord plagued by the voices of all his prior selves! – but all he does is rant and rave and yell “Silence, all of you!” as he attempts to take over and/or destroy the universe. He’s back in this story, though he’s in his ninth incarnation (John Heffernan) (so I guess he’s the Nine?), and Dorney does some fantastic things with him. Helen and Liv think he’s the Doctor, and he covers his erratic behavior under the guise of post-regenerative trauma, but he ultimately reveals himself as utterly self-centered, interested only in acquiring things and furthering his own goals. He’s completely dismissive of his companions, gladly offering them up to die if it will afford him a slight advantage. So he’s not the thoroughly evil madman that he will later become, and that makes him more interesting.
But once his scenes with Helen and Liv stop and he becomes involved in the greater plot, the interest declines rapidly. In one of the least surprising revelations, we learn that Padrac (Robert Bathurst) is in league with the Doom Coalition. (You mean that one of the Doctor’s old Time Lord friends that we’d never heard of before this series started turned out to be a bad guy? How shocking!) After being elected Lord President, he looked into the future with the Matrix and foresaw the destruction of Gallifrey, presumably in the Time War. The only possible future in which the Time Lords survive is one in which they preemptively kill every other race in the universe; so of course that’s the Dalek-like quest he embarks upon, teaming up with the rest of the Doom Coalition. Perhaps the fact that all of your teammates are utterly insane should be a clue that you’re doing something stupid? So they’re going to use a combination of the Doomsday Chronometer and something called the Crucible of Souls to kill everything in the universe at a certain time and then convert the dead into life energy to allow the Time Lords to survive forever.
This is ridiculous lunacy. The Daleks just about get away with plots like that because killing everything is the logical extension of their ethos; an apparently sane Time Lord pursuing the same goal is unbelievable. And the team of villains we’re apparently getting only has insanity in common: we’ve seen how the Eleven and the Sonomancer act, and the Clocksmith was similarly crazy but is now apparently dead. Come to think of it, why is the Doctor even involved in this? Is it because the Eleven is unhinged? It makes no sense to incorporate his death into the plan given his long history of defeating villainy like this. I’m curious to see if Dorney (or whoever writes Doom Coalition 4) provides a time-travel explanation for this apparent inconsistency – is this why “The Crucible of Souls” deals with the Nine instead of the Eleven?
I do like River’s involvement in the story. She steps in as the Doctor’s companion in the absence of his two usual partners, and she’s exactly what you’d expect. The “psychic wimple” is still in place, which allows her to interact with the Doctor without changing history, but they can’t keep meeting without him learning more, can they? Thus far he’s only encountered her in the middle of dangerous crises but eventually he has to start digging to find out who this mysterious stranger is, right? I’m interested to see where this goes.
I’m rambling a bit because I’m still not sure what I think of this story. As I said, I enjoy the character work – the dialogue sounds great and the actors all spark off one another effectively. But I’m still not convinced by the arc, and I’m wondering why it’s so hard to construct an effective story arc in Doctor Who. Doom Coalition 3 is the best of the Doom Coalition sets and features one of the best Paul McGann stories Big Finish has ever produced, but I still can’t say that it’s pointing toward a promising conclusion. Nonetheless, “The Crucible of Souls” is an enjoyable listen.
DOOM COALITION: THE EIGHTH PIECE / THE DOOMSDAY CHRONOMETER
After the brilliant, mostly standalone “Absent Friends,” the third Doom Coalition set jumps into its arc with both feet in a two-part story by Matt Fitton called “The Eighth Piece” and then “The Doomsday Chronometer.” It finally seems to push the plot forward – we actually hear the word “coalition!” – but it feels cluttered and disorganized, not working as well as it perhaps should.
The story is set over three different time periods, as the Doctor and his companions split up to find and reassemble the Doomsday Chronometer, a device that indicates the precise moment at which the universe will come to an end. While the Doctor is in the England of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Liv is in the 15th century in Prague while Helen is in 21st century Rome. (Though wouldn’t it make more sense to put the doctor from the future in the more modern era and the professional historian in the past?) In their respective times, they each encounter the Clocksmith, another renegade Time Lord who evidently wants to see the end of everything. We don’t find out in this story who the Clocksmith is working with, though since he refers to a “coalition” it’s safe to assume he’s in league with the Eleven and the Sonomancer.
The characterization is disappointingly one-note. Yes, Fitton tries to flesh out the Clocksmith by having him relate everything to his love of art, but he’s ultimately another lunatic in single-minded pursuit of a devastating goal. Cromwell (John Shrapnel) is another example: the only thing he cares about is asserting royal authority over any potential Catholic influence. He gladly accepts the Doctor’s alien nature, but loses all interest in him the moment the Doctor’s actions no longer affect the crown. We do spend quite a bit of time in England, and Fitton does a fine job of building the world – the Abbot (Glen McCready) is a good character, for example – but the other two threads are barely explored. It’s almost impossible to get a sense of Prague or Rome from Liv and Helen’s story threads, which is disappointing.
Fortunately, when River Song is introduced into the story, things take a turn for the better. Her time jumping with Helen is quite entertaining and gives the story a much-needed jolt of energy. I also enjoyed the concept of the psychic wimple because it finally allows Paul McGann and Alex Kingston to share scenes together without the contrivance of communicators. It does sort of defy belief that future Doctors never put the pieces together, but I’m not too worried about things like that. I’m still wondering about how River is involved in this Doctor’s life at all, though. At one point she comments about how she’s gone from believing there’s only one living Time Lord to encountering new ones around every corner – so what is she doing in this pre-War environment? How did she get there? While I’m not obsessed with answering continuity questions, this seems to throw some of the series’ fundamental principles into question. Complaints aside, it’s great to have the character in the story, and with a writer that understands her to boot.
I like how Fitton continues to repeat the puzzle-solving imagery, though it starts to get repetitive by the end. I also loved the revelation about the mad prophet Octavian (Tim McMullan), whose name is a huge clue about his true identity. And I like the ending, which feels genuinely dangerous to Liv and Helen and had me scrambling to get to the final episode. Overall, “The Eighth Piece” and “The Doomsday Chronometer” are solid, entertaining entries in the Doom Coalition saga, featuring a lot of interesting material. They don’t hang together as cohesive wholes, and the characterization isn’t always the best, but they’re still worth hearing, especially as part of the ongoing story.
No. It’s still only one choice as it’s one or the other, because you can’t choose both and you can’t choose more than once. To be absolutely precise it’s one choice with two options.
But then you could say that about almost anything, and it therefore becomes meaningless. You may only be able to pick one, but there are definitely n>1 choices. And it there is only one, it isn’t a choice – I don’t choose to eventually die, yet it will happen.
I agree with you that when a choice is presented that is not really a choice at all then it is as ridiculous as thinking you can have a choice over ultimately dying. Pretending you have a choice when you have none is obviously not a choice at all.
Resist or surrender is a choice though and, more to the point, can be done while still alive. Either outcome can be chosen and as long as both work the choice is genuine.
However, in this case it is ironically the setup of the story itself and the way it left things at the end of series 1 – not the wording of the play’s description by Big Finish 🙂 – that has almost eliminated the very choice it presents, as Styre points out.
Still, not the first time a story didn’t match the headline.
An overwhelming force of Cybermen doesn’t give the story any choice or anywhere to go, it’s just a silly idea. Army invades, army wins, everyone else dies or get turned into Cybermen. The end.
It’s an unsatisfying way to do things because it declares an ultimatum as if it is inescapable, then immediately has to backpedal because otherwise there is no story. They did the same with the Divergent Universe, wrote themselves up a blind alley then had to frantically try and dig themselves out of the hole they had made for themselves.
Things don’t have to be the ultimate end of everything to be a threat. It’s overused. You don’t have to constantly try to out do yourself with sensationalist annihilation threat after sensationalist annihilation threat to create either a genuine threat or a good story, but sadly BF have followed this lamentable trend of overstatement for effect. Mass murder isn’t emotive enough so use genocide even if that means using the word incorrectly because the desire to over emote takes precedence over unimportant little things like what words actually mean. It gets tiresome fast.
It’s also not what the Cybermen are about. The Cybermen are a threat because they are always on the point of extinction and that is what makes them so dangerous, not because they are destined to be the ultimate force in the universe, a point which I believe Styre has made elsewhere and with which I agree. Like the Daleks they were never meant to be an overwhelming force but a warning about the damage such a force would do if it ever dominated. Dalek Empire 3 did the best job of showing us what a Dalek dominated universe would be like and ultimately ground to a halt as a story because of it.
Anyway, rather than getting hung up on absurd reductionism and endless sophistry about definitions I would prefer it if people kept their comments relevant to the actual play itself, to the actual concepts in them, to any differences of opinion they may have with any reviews so far and where they wish to share ideas or reviews of their own. And to keep it constructive, always. Thanks.
I’ve criticized the direction of the Doom Coalition series over the first two sets. Specifically, it’s more than a little odd to call a series “Doom Coalition” and then get halfway through and eight hours in without either saying the words “Doom Coalition” or show anything resembling a coalition of doom coming together. The series has been at its best when it doesn’t pay attention to whatever its plot arc actually is – and that is borne out in John Dorney’s “Absent Friends,” which has almost nothing to do with the arc and is simultaneously the best Paul McGann release since the eighth Doctor was taken out of the monthly range.
“Absent Friends” doesn’t appear to have much to do with the arc plot. In fact, it doesn’t have much of a plot of its own. The Doctor investigates a mysterious temporal phenomenon that causes people to receive phone calls from dead friends or relatives from their pasts. A suspicious telecom company has erected a new cellular tower in a small village, and it seems obvious that the company is behind the calls, which are coming through exclusively on the cellphones they distributed throughout the village. Even the employees of the company are suspicious, with clammy skin and perfectly sculpted hair. But it’s all a red herring: apart from some potential insider trading, everything here is above-board.
This story is about Helen, and her journey to meet her brother, over three decades after she left her old life in the TARDIS. It’s about what her family thought of her for leaving, and about her desperate, futile attempts to earn some sort of reconciliation. It’s about Liv and her father, about the relationship they had and the relationship she wished they had. And it’s about the Doctor, how he’s more alien than we think, how he only understands his human companions to a certain extent. This is a story that would fit in well on the modern TV series: it treats the TARDIS crew as distinct characters, developing them and allowing them to experience emotions other than fear or exhaustion from their travels.
The acting in this story is first-rate – Paul McGann, Nicola Walker, and Hattie Morahan all turn in excellent performances, as does Jeremy Clyde as Helen’s brother George. The production is great, as expected. But it’s the writing that particularly shines. This is a script that unashamedly tries to put a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye, and Dorney succeeds because he has such a keen understanding of the characters and how difficult relationships sound. Yes, there’s also stuff in here about a clock that I’m sure will tie into the broader arc, but I don’t care about that right now. Frankly, you could dispense with the whole Doom Coalition thing and just tell stories like this and everything would be great. The rest of this set has just been held to a particularly high standard.
The third series of Early Adventures kicks off with Nick Wallace’s “The Age of Endurance,” a story very much in the traditional vein of 1960s science fiction. While it has some redeeming elements, it mostly lives up to its title, in that it lasts an age and takes significant endurance to make it to the end.
There is some interesting material on display here. Wallace, who wrote a thoughtful, meditative tale in the Companion Chronicle “The Dying Light,” here writes a story about the relationships between parents and children, best exemplified in the twice-repeated adage that children are responsible for their own successes while their parents are responsible for their failures. The story also deliberately blurs the line between synthetic and organic life while simultaneously presenting a villain that is believable and at times sympathetic. It’s a smart story, in other words – so why did it have to be so crushingly dull?
“The Age of Endurance” is written in the style of a Doctor Who story from the first season, for good and for bad. I’m reminded of “The Daleks,” a story that very thoughtfully looks at hatred and prejudice when left to fester in the dark. But “The Daleks” also has a scene that depicts, in excruciating detail, a group of people jumping one-by-one over a short gap. While no scene in “Endurance” is quite that bad, the general effect is the same: everything is spelled out in careful detail, with very little left to the imagination. Much of the story involves one warship trying to escape the attentions of another, which leads to scenes of Ian, a 1960s science teacher, lecturing an experienced crew on military tactics. This is the sort of heroic thing Ian did all the time back in the actual Hartnell era, but the lack of realism coupled with the glacial pace makes it a very challenging listen.
In less significant news, “The Age of Endurance” marks the audio debut of Jemma Powell as Barbara in another example of recasting. Powell, who played Jacqueline Hill in “An Adventure in Space and Time,” was cast in that film due to her resemblance to Hill. Unfortunately, her voice doesn’t sound much like her predecessor’s, something that’s a bit more important on audio. Fortunately, I don’t care about that – I’d rather have the new actors provide their own takes on characters rather than attempting slavish impressions of the original actors. But it’s impossible to judge Powell’s performance on those grounds, because Barbara is barely in this story. William Russell and Carole Ann Ford are both great, of course, though Russell’s impression of William Hartnell is becoming less and less distinct from his portrayal of Ian. Still, given that the man is 91 years old, I’m not going to complain, especially since he’s still an excellent narrator.
I enjoyed the production. Ken Bentley directs, drawing some great performances from his cast, while Toby Hrycek-Robinson provides excellent sound design, incorporating some of the unusual effects that marked the early days of the program. Overall, though, “The Age of Endurance” is simply too dull to be enjoyable. There’s nothing wrong with a story with a slow pace, but the material needs to be delivered in an interesting fashion when it comes. This story doesn’t do that, even if its script is undeniably intelligent.
The 2016 Sylvester McCoy trilogy closes with “Maker of Demons” from Matthew J. Elliott, a story that attempts to answer the question of what happens when the Doctor leaves abruptly at the conclusion of an adventure. It doesn’t answer this question particularly well, and throws in a bunch of empty Shakespeare references and overwritten dialogue to boot. In short: not good.
While the new series has dealt extensively with the Doctor’s habit of fleeing the consequences of his actions, it’s very rare for a story to make him face up to them. The classic series took a swing at it all the way back in “The Ark,” and then not again until “Timelash,” which is better left unmentioned. So I appreciate the effort by Elliott to write a sequel to an unseen adventure in which the Doctor and Mel saved the colonists of the ship The Duke of Milan by helping them set up a colony on the planet Prosper. Now, when the Doctor and Mel return along with Ace, they find a planet torn apart by a century of war. It turns out that the Doctor overestimated the availability of supplies, rendering the colony unsustainable in the long term without draconian measures to cull the population. As a result, a small group of humans calling themselves the Milanese artificially engineer a war between the humans and the native Mogera to keep the populations in check. The biggest problem with this setup is how the story presents the Milanese: as a bunch of cackling megalomaniacs. Between that and the brief scene at the start where the human-Mogeran peace treaty is torn up the moment the Doctor leaves, it’s hard to tell whether the Doctor actually is responsible for this or not, and the humans-against-monsters drama that takes up much of the running time obscures any attempt at subtlety. The Companion Chronicle “The War To End All Wars” dealt with a similar idea, but by making a dispassionate computer responsible for the conflict it removed any clumsy “evil villain” plotting like we get here.
If you didn’t notice from basically every single character and place name, “Maker of Demons” is also a massive homage to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Prosper, the Duke of Milan, Caliban, Alonso, Gonzalo, Miranda, and so forth. The dialogue is peppered with quotes from the play, right up to the final line. (I’m shocked that the Sycorax didn’t turn up.) And yet, if you’re looking for any of the play’s thematic significance to turn up here, you’ll be quite disappointed. I suppose, at a stretch, you could compare the Doctor facing the consequences of his actions with Prospero learning to accept his nature, but that’s about it. If anything, this reminds me of “Zagreus” – and that is never a good sign – in how it quotes heavily from famous source material but forgets to engage with that material in any meaningful sense. As soon as I figured out what was going on, I started waiting for someone to say “What’s past is prologue,” and of course it was the final thing the Doctor says before disappearing into the TARDIS. Never mind that it doesn’t really make sense for him to say that, because even if it did, it’s so labored and obvious that it ruins the end of the story.
Also, if we’re talking about things being labored and obvious, let’s discuss the dialogue. “Maker of Demons” has some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard in a Big Finish release, with almost every line sounding drawn-out and overwritten. Characters frequently spell out their entire thought processes, while almost every attempt at witty interaction falls flat due to taking too long. This is particularly obvious with Mel, who frequently sounds less like a human being and more like what a computer program thinks a human being sounds like. And speaking of Mel, remember how she rejoined the TARDIS after spending time traveling with Sabalom Glitz? It’ll be mentioned once or twice, but never once are we given the impression that this character is any different from the one we saw in season 24. Nor indeed does Ace seem any different from her TV persona, and now that I know that these stories are supposed to be set after Hex, I’m wondering why Big Finish seeks to insult my intelligence by completely disregarding years of character development in lieu of generic, uninspiring writing. They know they can make stories accessible to new listeners while maintaining their own continuity, right? Or will the average Big Finish listener snap the CD in half upon learning that Ace doesn’t sound exactly the same as she did in 1988? At least McCoy is good in this, if you’re looking for a redeeming quality.
The production is generally quite good. Ken Bentley offers his usual accomplished direction, but the music from Nigel Fairs is a standout as it actually employs some vocals. But this isn’t enough to save “Maker of Demons,” which is disappointing even for the monthly range. It’s a shame, because along with the quality production is a great idea for a Doctor Who story – but the execution simply isn’t good enough. I’m predisposed to like Doctor Who stories, and this one was a struggle even to finish.
Evidently, the Philip Hinchcliffe Presents box set was successful enough, despite its comically high price point, to prompt a new series of Big Finish audios. I’m not sure what, exactly, Philip Hinchcliffe is Presenting here – it seems as though these are simply his story ideas adapted to script form by Marc Platt. So what makes these functionally different from Lost Stories, and why are they so expensive? And, more to the point, is this story, “The Genesis Chamber,” worth it? Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the answer is “no.”
There are a ton of good ideas on display in “The Genesis Chamber.” There’s a colony of people terrified to venture into the outside world, and a group of outsiders who ventured out there and never returned, with all the requisite prejudice and mistrust. There’s a computer at the heart of the city with the capability to terraform the entire planet or reprogram the human genome. There’s economic drama and crime drama, and an alien race with motives ranging from merely evil to ridiculously evil. None of this is surprising coming from Marc Platt, who has always been one of the strongest world-builders in the BF stable, but unfortunately the story doesn’t do much of anything with these ideas.
One of the major problems is with the characterization employed in the story. Almost all of the supporting characters are derived from various archetypes, and all are played to the hilt, from the star-crossed young lovers to the blinkered president to the kindly old grandfather to the sadistic security chief. Platt makes it work through some particularly pleasant dialogue, but nothing especially interesting or surprising happens to any of them. You can predict the various angles of character development almost from the moment each character is introduced. That’s apart from the few of them that die, of course, and that brings me to another strange element of the story: multiple characters turn unexpectedly murderous whenever it’s time to show things getting serious. Grillo (Dan Li), for example, goes from a disagreeable person who embraces prejudice to a sadistic, violent psychopath at the drop of a hat. Similar things happen with Volor (Gyuri Sarossy) and the rest of his people. I don’t mind an unexpected death being used to increase the dramatic stakes, but when it happens multiple times within one story I question the necessity of the device.
Of course, part of the reason it happens multiple times in this story is that the story is six episodes long. I like classic Doctor Who as much as the next person, but there were very few six-part stories that couldn’t have been told in four, and “The Genesis Chamber” is no example. Fans like to insist that a three-hour running time gives the story “room to breathe” and allows for complex world- and character-building, but it usually just leads to additional capture-and-escape plots. Guess what happens in “The Genesis Chamber?” We see the Doctor and Leela variously captured by the colonists, the outsiders, and the aliens – and often changing places with changing partners from the supporting cast. There’s not enough here to justify the running time, and while this is certainly a well-written, interesting world to spend time in, the story nonetheless starts to drag.
Perhaps most surprising is the story’s treatment of the fourth Doctor. With Leela constantly under threat, and at one point thought dead, the Doctor is unusually emotional, both vengeful and regretful. We’ve seen the fourth Doctor angry before, of course, but the gentleness he exhibits when comforting and complimenting his companion is unexpected. Tom Baker nails it, too; it’s great to have the occasional reminder that underneath the “Tom Baker” OTT performances one can still find a talented actor.
Overall, I did not enjoy “The Genesis Chamber.” There are some solid ideas on display, but the story seems resolutely uninterested in exploring any of them, content instead to spend time with generic, boring characters. The production, from director Ken Bentley and designer Andy Hardwick, is capable but unmemorable. It’s not a terrible story by any means – it’s pleasant enough, even if it’s far too long – but if this were in the actual Hinchcliffe era, it’d be down at the bottom with “Revenge of the Cybermen.”
The fourth and final story in the Second Doctor Companion Chronicles box set, as well as the final Companion Chronicle to date, is “The Edge” by Rob Nisbet. Much like the preceding story, it’s about the differences between Jamie’s intelligence and the intelligence of people in the future, and while it’s a more fluid story, it still doesn’t have much to say.
The plot, typical of the Troughton era, is quite simple. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe land at a research facility set on an asteroid in the middle of a nebula, and once there they discover the machinations of a mad scientist trying to bend physics to his will. When the Doctor and Zoe are captured, it’s up to Jamie to save them by… bashing every control panel in his vicinity into broken pieces with a fire extinguisher. That’s about the extent of the plot, which isn’t very rewarding, but fortunately that’s not what the story is about.
Instead, the story is about Jamie himself. Oddly, this is the only story in the box set with one companion actor – Frazer Hines – and the story spends its time with Jamie while the Doctor and Zoe go off and get into trouble. I like the setup where the three travelers are presented with a series of logic puzzles to test their readiness to enter the secret research facility, and Jamie doesn’t even bother attempting the tests because he knows it would be futile. But he doesn’t stay bored for very long, as his natural inquisitiveness draws him to follow a suspicious waiter and gets him into trouble right alongside his companions. This all works very well and demonstrates that Nisbet has a strong grasp of Jamie as a character, ably supported by Hines’ own narration.
The problem comes in the sections following that, in which Curtis (Robert Whitelock), the director of the facility, cannot tear his attention away from Jamie, so baffled is he by Jamie’s different thought processes. In Curtis’s world, logic governs all: if something is logically impossible, it should not be attempted, no matter the stakes. So when Jamie struggles to free his friends against impossible odds, Curtis merely watches, fascinated, to see what happens next. The problem is that the story doesn’t do enough to show why Jamie’s reactions are so unusual. We don’t see enough of any other characters for Jamie to feel truly out of place – and if Curtis is just a megalomaniac, it robs the story of its meaning. Also, the scene where Curtis watches Jamie’s violence just feels odd: Curtis says that there’s nothing Jamie can do that will stop his project, only delay it. Yet mere moments later, Jamie is threatening to tear out the dimensional stabilizer from the wreck of a machine and Curtis suddenly feels threatened. Was he bluffing before? It certainly didn’t sound like it. Did he forget where the stabilizer was?
“The Edge” is the most reminiscent of a “traditional” Companion Chronicle of any story in this box. One companion actor, one guest star, and a large amount of narration coupled with real-time dialogue scenes. There’s no experimentation with a framing device, just Frazer Hines narrating from the start. Nisbet has a good ear for narration, and he gives Hines some good prose to recite that never sounds strange coming from the mouth of a man from the 18th century. Hines is fantastic as ever, and Whitelock provides a fine guest turn. The production is solid throughout: Lisa Bowerman directs all four stories in the box set, while the sound design is handled variously by James Callaghan and Richard Fox and Lauren Yason, and the music comes from Benji Clifford. Overall, “The Edge” is a solid conclusion to a solid box set. The first two stories are clearly superior to the last two, but all four are quite listenable. It’s not up to the standard of the First Doctor set but that would be difficult to do. Hopefully this isn’t the end of the Companion Chronicles, but if it is, “The Edge” and its surrounding box set is a pretty good way to go out.
The third story in the Second Doctor Companion Chronicles box set is “The Integral” from David Bartlett, a story that attempts to draw a contrast between the Doctor’s companions and only partially succeeds. While I appreciate what the author was going for, I think the final result was more than a bit patronizing.
The idea driving “The Integral” is a great one. Constant exposure to a violent, immersive video game has damaged the minds of players, leaving them in a confused, erratic, and anger-driven state. The company behind the game has funded a treatment facility to control the victims’ emotions using a combination of a pacifying machine and an alien race, the Integral, who can help control emotions. Add the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe, and you have a base-under-siege tale: when the emotional suppressant fails, a horde of angry, uncontrollable people start rampaging through the facility.
Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t measure up to the concept. The story contrasts Jamie’s thought processes with Zoe’s, demonstrating Jamie’s close-mindedness by giving him the belief that every single alien race in the entire universe is out for blood and conquest. This is supported by the statement that every single alien race he has encountered on his travels has been hostile; this might be a satire on the sameness of Troughton-era plotting but I’m not sure that comes across if so. But is this actually believable? This can’t be set too long after “The Dominators” – did he already forget about the Dulcians? It’s also patronizing: the plot turns around the idea that Jamie, being from the 18th century, lacks the capacity for nuance and understanding different points of view, especially from the perspective of someone like Zoe, who sees nothing but. There’s a way to do this idea carefully and subtly, but this is not it. Of course, there’s an attempt to balance the scales: Jamie knows how to harness his raw emotions and direct them toward a productive goal. Rather than eliminating anger entirely, he argues, inspire people to channel it. While this is certainly true, there’s no reason why Zoe shouldn’t also know it – and as a result it comes across as the sort of story where the primitive person doesn’t understand the modern world but has a much better grasp of the human spirit than we modern folk.
The other problem is that the story isn’t written particularly well. This is a much more traditional, narrative-driven Companion Chronicle, but there’s almost too much narration. It seems as though Wendy Padbury never stops talking. She does a fine job, of course, but she had to be exhausted by the end. Perspectives also switch throughout the story, with some parts in first person and others in third person, and it comes across as a mistake rather than a deliberate stylistic choice. The themes also come and go: unlike the preceding story, nothing is carefully woven into the script. Instead, the story veers wildly between obvious lecturing and traditional plotting.
Overall, “The Integral” is a letdown after the first two stories of the set. “Jamie learns that not all aliens are evil conquerors” isn’t much of a hook, it doesn’t treat the characters with much respect, and the idea behind the plot is wasted. It’s not a reason to avoid the box set or anything like that, but it’s not a reason to buy it, either.
The second story in the Second Doctor Companion Chronicles box is “The Story of Extinction” by Ian Atkins, a tale about the power of storytelling and how it impacts lives and relationships. While it occasionally drifts toward being too obvious, some deft character work helps rescue it from any issues.
We’re back to a more traditional Companion Chronicle format, with Victoria, now elderly and residing in what sounds like a retirement home, suffering a burglary – but unable to report the crime to the police because the only thing taken was a piece of alien technology. Instead, she tells the tale of how she came to possess the alien paper in the first place, and that’s your framing device. I should say from the outset that Deborah Watling’s performance is much better than we’ve heard in her earlier appearances in the range: yes, her voice has aged considerably, but here you can actually hear the echoes of Victoria from season 5. The story also incorporates Frazer Hines as a secondary narrator: Watling sets up scenes as though introducing a flashback, while any narration taking place “within” the broader narrative is handled by Hines. After close to ninety Companion Chronicles, it’s refreshing to know they’re still finding new ways to narrate stories.
This is a deep story, with a lot going on, but it’s essentially about the power of storytelling. Some of the material engages with this on a literal level: we see creatures made out of paper, who generate words on their surfaces and fold themselves into other forms in order to attack. But we spend considerably more time with the idea that words can have consequences, dealing with everything from disappearances to conflicts as the result of linguistic manipulation. I often bemoan the huge focus on traditional storytelling in Big Finish Doctor Who; “The Story of Extinction,” on the other hand, would be wildly out of place in season 5. It’s thematically powerful and almost defiantly introspective; there’s very little in the way of outright action and to describe it as “base under siege” would be a significant misrepresentation.
I also love how Atkins seeds the scenes of Victoria teaching Jamie to read throughout the story. The thematic links are obvious, and even without that these are sweet scenes that let us see the softer side of the recurring characters. Some of the aforementioned obviousness comes through by the end, though, as Jamie’s letter is the first thing he’s written on his own and it ends with Victoria declaring that words can be the most powerful things of all. This had me shaking my head – a largely subtle story doesn’t need to end by whacking you over the head – but it’s a minor complaint in the grand scheme. Apart from all of that, I appreciated the appearance from the seventh Doctor in the beginning; of course he would be the one who would eventually come back and finish cleaning up a mess.
I want to listen to this story again, as I believe it would reward multiple listenings, and I rarely say that about anything. Atkins has crafted a strong, intelligent, and unique Doctor Who tale, one that takes the elements of its era and uses them to do something completely new. If the Companion Chronicles continue beyond this box set, I hope Atkins gets another one of them.
A year after the impressive William Hartnell box set, the Companion Chronicles returned for another round, this time featuring the Patrick Troughton era in the equally imaginatively titled “The Second Doctor Volume One.” The first story in the set is “The Mouthless Dead” from John Pritchard, and it’s a good, if labored exploration of post-war grief.
The first thing that jumped out at me about “The Mouthless Dead” is that it’s much more like an Early Adventure than a Companion Chronicle. Every main role is cast: Frazer Hines voices the Doctor and Jamie, Anneke Wills returns as Polly, and Elliot Chapman, last seen in the Early Adventures, plays Ben. There’s a minimum of narration, usually only to bridge the gap between scenes. And there’s no narrative frame at all – it’s a “real time” story for all intents and purposes. Fortunately, it’s also a very thoughtful story, one that rejects the embrace of traditionalism and nostalgia in order to tell its own unique tale.
World War I was an epochal event, one that forever changed how war was both fought and viewed in Western society. Setting a story in postwar England, one of the nations most affected by that conflict, provides a wealth of material for a story rooted in the emotions of the survivors. “The Mouthless Dead” is centered around the train carrying the remains of the Unknown Warrior to his final resting place in Westminster. Along the route, a signalman stops the train because of something on the tracks: ghosts of long-dead soldiers. This could be a simple story of a haunting, but Pritchard introduces two interesting concepts: first, the viewer determines the form the ghosts take. Jamie sees fallen men from a Highland regiment; Ben sees burned and drowned sailors; and so forth. Second, we learn that the ghosts are a physical manifestation of national grief amplified by the damaged TARDIS, symbolized by a young woman who believes she lost her fiancé on a battlefield in France. It’s unusual for a Doctor Who story to deal this directly in metaphor – we don’t get the usual attempt at a scientific explanation, as Pritchard simply lets the impact of the story speak for itself.
I really like the characterization in this story. Ben and Jamie bond over their shared experiences in the military, and there’s a great moment when Jamie asks the Doctor how he perceived the ghosts and the Doctor completely dodges the question. Polly gets a lot to do as well, though it’s a bit eye-rolling to have so much of the story turn around a woman pining over her lost love and then have Polly be the one left to comfort her. The production is fantastic as well, capturing the eerie, haunting feeling of the script. Overall, “The Mouthless Dead” is a solid start to the box set. While the metaphor is definitely on the nose, it’s still rewarding to hear a story confident enough that it doesn’t need to rely on played-out characters and tropes and instead blazes its own trail. This is what we listen to the Companion Chronicles for, after all.
And so, with the final story in the First Doctor Volume 1 box of Companion Chronicles, “The Locked Room,” Simon Guerrier closes another trilogy starring Peter Purves and does so in a way that measures up to some of his best efforts in the range. Given the “Volume 1” prominently featured on the cover, it’s safe to assume we’ll eventually get more Hartnell-era Companion Chronicles, but if this turns out to be the end, it’s a great way to go out.
There’s no framing device in “The Locked Room” – indeed, there’s barely any narrative at all. It’s a few years after the events of “The Founding Fathers,” and Steven’s granddaughter Sida has been president of their world for some time. She’s trained in both politics and survival, and her days are consumed with meetings and public appearances. Steven lives in the mountains, obsessed with building a radio telescope and a lead-lined room within which he can receive the telescope’s transmissions. In order to prevent signal loss and ensure privacy, when the door is locked in the evening it cannot be opened again until morning. Steven tricks Sida into the locked room, and it is within its walls that most of the story takes place.
I like “bottle” episodes like this, because they enable the listener to explore deep into the characters’ heads. The Doctor is in most of the story – Guerrier contrives a means to extract his consciousness from “The Tenth Planet” and have it appear with Steven and Sida. (This explains the Doctor’s sudden incapacity in episode 3, if you’re concerned about that sort of thing.) This enables Guerrier to contrast the Doctor’s morality against Steven’s, something that resonates especially well after similar themes were explored in the previous story. Interestingly, Sida is the narrator of this story, so it’s her thinking we see the most – and it’s good to see how Steven has influenced her as well as the ways in which she’s forged her own path. The story even touches on the effects of traveling with the Doctor: Steven is willing to kill to save the lives of his people, but the Doctor talks him down, something he may not have done in earlier days.
Back in “The First Wave,” we saw the “ghost” of Oliver Harper appear to the Doctor in his final moments before collapsing in the TARDIS to regenerate. As the Doctor in this story is lifted from a moment reasonably close to that, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that one of the Vardans from that story reappears here, but nonetheless it’s unexpected. Guerrier rehabilitated the Vardans as a threat in “The First Wave,” and here he continues that work, showing how one Vardan can annihilate an entire society by invading their data and causing problems. The way that Sida eventually saves the day is another callback to “The Founding Fathers,” and it’s elegant and intelligent.
I hope this isn’t the final Companion Chronicle for Peter Purves, but if it is, he’s definitely ending on a high. Most of the story feels like a full-cast drama, with Purves playing both Steven and the Doctor, and yet I frequently found myself forgetting that the same actor was playing both parts. The Doctor’s knowledge of his own impending death is surprising, as we so rarely saw real vulnerability from this incarnation. Lisa Bowerman directs all four stories in the box set and Toby Hrycek-Robinson handles the sound design and music in all cases. The sound design in “The Locked Room” is notably good, though all four stories are well produced. Overall, “The Locked Room” is an excellent example both of Doctor Who generally and the Companion Chronicles specifically. It’s disheartening to know that this series was limited due to poor sales while a rampaging wave of innovation-free nostalgia continues to drown Big Finish’s output, but here we are.
“The War to End All Wars” from the final series of Companion Chronicles had an odd cliffhanger ending that seemed clearly intended to set up a new arc – but with the series virtually at an end, when would that arc ever be completed? The answer is “in this box set,” as Simon Guerrier writes the last two stories, the first of which is “The Founding Fathers.”
As with its predecessor, the most interesting thing about “The Founding Fathers” is the framing story. Steven, the former king of the planet from “The Savages,” is told by his granddaughter Sida that the ersatz Doctor-in-a-jar intends to run for election to replace Steven’s incompetent daughters. But Steven knows that this Doctor isn’t the same as the real thing, and that there are crucial moral differences between the two that will lead this Doctor to do terrible things if elected. This leads to a lot of real-time interaction between “the Doctor” and Steven, meaning a lot of Peter Purves taking to himself, but his impression is fantastic so it’s fun to hear. Guerrier’s big revelation about this Doctor is uncharacteristically clunky: after the entire story is completed, intended to show the differences between the jar-Doctor and the real Doctor, Steven casually reveals that the jar-Doctor murdered someone in an attempt to escape. Wouldn’t you start with that information? “And so, as the past hour has demonstrated, the attitudes of this copy are just different enough from the original that he must not be allowed into office. Oh, and also he’s a murderer.” Fortunately this is followed by some moral ambiguity, where we discover that Steven helped him cover up the crime. Guerrier wants us to remember that there are no perfect leaders, and we’re also supposed to question how much better the actual Doctor would be than his copy.
The story here is a fairly straightforward historical. In 1762, the TARDIS lands in London, and the Doctor accidentally locks his key in the Ship! (Has this device ever been used before? It’s surprisingly brilliant.) To get the doors open again, the Doctor, Steven, and Vicki seek the aid of Benjamin Franklin and his pioneering experiments with lightning. But is Franklin’s mistress a time traveler trying to alter the course of history? No, she’s just a spy for a wealthy family opposed to Franklin. Furthermore, in a humorous and fitting twist, the Doctor doesn’t even need Franklin’s help to get the doors open – he just wants to meet him and pick his brain. The scene in which Franklin is inside the TARDIS is wonderful, and Guerrier expertly captures how the Doctor would react in that situation.
I’ve already mentioned that Purves is great as always, and Alice Haig continues her strong work as Steven’s granddaughter. Ultimately, “The Founding Fathers” is about two men: Steven Taylor and Benjamin Franklin, both “founding fathers” of their governments. The execution is a bit clumsy, but overall it’s an intriguing story with rich characterization and marks yet another great Companion Chronicle from Simon Guerrier.
The second story in the box set, Ian Potter’s “The Unwinding World,” does some unique things with the Companion Chronicles format and is all the stronger for it. It features an oddly proactive TARDIS crew, but even explains that in a period-appropriate fashion. Simply put, it’s a very good story.
We’ve seen the “police interrogation” frame in other Companion Chronicles, but “The Unwinding World” takes it to new places by setting the entire story in “real time” and making frequent use of unreliable narrative. Vicki tells the story of how the TARDIS landed and how the crew got themselves involved in the local society, but as the story progresses she retells parts of the story multiple times, each time drawing closer to the actual truth. And then we discover that the narrative has been taking place during the climax to the story: while Vicki distracts and manipulates the security service, the Doctor, Ian, and Barbara put their plan into action to take down the government. I love this device, even if it leads to an awkward series of scenes where a character describes the Doctor’s actions in real time.
The characterization is a bit bizarre for the era, though. It starts out with the TARDIS crew simply trying to get the Ship back and leave, which is the driving idea behind many stories of the time – but the longer they are forced to stay, the more they learn about the society and the more they resolve to take down the oppressive government. This isn’t that unusual either, but the elaborate plan they employ certainly is. Ian sabotages machinery at his job, Barbara researches planetary history to enlighten the population about what’s happening, Vicki distracts security by reprogramming the computer systems over time, and the Doctor coordinates everything while recovering the TARDIS. This, combined with the gleeful way that Vicki reveals her treachery to security, comes across as something straight out of the McCoy era, not something the earnest, forthright TARDIS crew of 1964 would employ! But that’s not a problem, as Potter presents it very well and very believably – it’s just a bit disconcerting.
In any case, the story is quite good. Potter describes a society driven by guilt: ashamed of an atrocity, they engineer memory-altering chemicals that remove all memory of that incident and all related feelings from the population. It sounds like a typical evil government story until the revelation that the people requested the treatment, which makes the story much stronger. Potter exhibited a good feel for the Companion Chronicles range near the end; it’s great to see his ideas on display once again in this box set.
It’s no surprise that Maureen O’Brien’s narration is excellent, but in this story Vicki controls a great deal of the action and O’Brien makes every unexpected moment believable. Alix Dunmore is the featured player, and she is a great foil to Vicki as control shifts inexorably from security to prisoner. Overall, “The Unwinding World” is a strong Companion Chronicle, with an interesting story, intriguing narration, and unusual but believable characterization. It’s great to know that the Companion Chronicles are pushing boundaries even in this new format.
With the end of the Companion Chronicles as a monthly series in 2014, the range was revived in box set form. The first of these – the imaginatively titled “The First Doctor Volume One” – features four new Companion Chronicles from across the William Hartnell era. The first story in the set is “The Sleeping Blood” from Martin Day, a story set in the pre-Unearthly Child era.
The Companion Chronicles have gone back to this pre-TV era a few times, and I’ve never been able to figure out why. “The Sleeping Blood” is a solid story with some interesting developments, but it does virtually nothing with its unusual placement. The Doctor spends the vast majority of the story incapacitated, so we don’t see much of him at all, while Susan behaves just like she does after Ian and Barbara show up. I like how Susan casually mentions all the strange worlds she has explored with her grandfather, but here it seems we ignore that sense of exploration and instead tell a fairly straightforward Doctor Who story.
As for the story itself, I like the setting a lot more than I like the plot. Much of the first episode involves Susan caring for the Doctor and then searching a deserted building in search of medicine; these parts are very well done, rich with emotion and frightening atmosphere. I also like the idea of a society dependent upon nanotechnology for medical care, which comes across as a natural solution to antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics on display in museums are a nice touch, too. The story, though, doesn’t inspire. A hacker code-named “the Butcher” has discovered a way to remotely reprogram nanobots, giving him the ability to kill anyone he likes from afar. He uses this ability to threaten the government, and so a hit squad has been sent into the building to kill him before he can hurt anyone else. They invade; he remotely kills one of them as a demonstration of his power; the rest of them continue the invasion and he doesn’t bother to kill anyone else for some reason.
The story tries to introduce some moral ambiguity, but it’s so forthright it doesn’t work. The Butcher is actually crusading to get medical care available to all citizens instead of only the wealthy who can afford it. (Did Martin Day spend time in America before writing this?) But despite his noble cause, he’s a murderer. The soldiers pursuing him are ruthless, but then again they’re pursuing a violent terrorist. The Butcher’s final message is so on-the-nose it hurts, and the rest of the story isn’t much more subtle than that. Susan is along for the ride and doesn’t contribute as much as she should to the resolution. Ultimately, it doesn’t work as well as it should have.
Carole Ann Ford, in her final Companion Chronicle to date, does an expectedly fantastic job as narrator, and Darren Strange is an able supporting voice. There’s no framing device, which is a shame. The production is good, though the clunking robot suit footsteps are a bit much. Overall, “The Sleeping Blood” is a mediocre first entry in the box set. It’s a pleasant way to pass the time but it doesn’t make you think as hard as it wants to.
The odds that I would actually enjoy “Casualties of Time,” the final story in the fifth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, were incredibly low, and those odds came through, because I hated it. That wasn’t surprising – but honestly, is it too much to ask for one complete Nick Briggs story in this range to be good?
“Casualties of Time” is clearly intended to be a large-scale season finale, the sort of thing that brings together a number of disparate plot threads into a final, conclusive whole. It draws on Briggs’ own mythology: the central concept of the plot is that the Conglomerate is such a large and influential corporation that it is inextricably linked to the health of the timelines. When the Doctor discovers that Cuthbert is a paradoxical construct, and that the Conglomerate’s time engines are maintaining the paradox that keeps the company existing, he has to keep those engines running. If he doesn’t, the Conglomerate will cease to exist, and the stability of history will collapse. This is all great if you care at all about the Conglomerate, but the problem here is that we haven’t seen the Conglomerate for three years and we’ve never been given a good sense of the extent of their powers. From what I know of the Audio Visuals plays, the Conglomerate was seeded throughout the run as recurring villains. Here, they’re represented almost entirely by Cuthbert and his assistant Dorrick (Toby Hadoke), and the characters have to tell us how important they are.
Remember that recurring element with the parrot in the TARDIS? No? I don’t blame you, because I’d forgotten it existed before I heard these stories again. Anyway, it saves the Doctor’s life at the end when all hope seems lost. But rather than feeling like the rewarding solution to an ongoing puzzle, it comes almost completely out of nowhere. Oh, the parrot has learned everything in the Doctor’s mind? How convenient! It sure would have been nice if this had been mentioned at any point in any of the preceding stories. I know some fans weren’t too thrilled with the Russell T. Davies strategy of seeding particular words like “Bad Wolf” or “Mr. Saxon” through a season, but those worked so much better than this the comparison is hardly fair.
Oh, and the Black Guardian is in this. He might as well not be, as he makes almost no difference to the plot, but he’s there, ranting and raving about chaos and how the universe will soon be his. Here is an actual Black Guardian quote that I transcribed from a second listen because I hate myself: “Bravo, Doctor, bravo! My work here is done! You have stopped Cuthbert! The spaceship will never crash! The tritonium will never be found by the Victorians! Cuthbert will never be able to irradiate it and create the tritonium AIs that will make the Conglomerate into an intergalactic corporation!” That is laughably, staggeringly bad writing. David Troughton can barely get the words out in a comprehensible manner. And it’s entirely representative of the quality of the script.
The performances aren’t that great, either. Tom Baker sounds drunk, which is at the very least entertaining, while Lalla Ward goes over the top to a noticeable, uncharacteristic extent. The sheer number of times she is forced to gasp out things like “Doctor! What have we done?!” is embarrassing enough, and sadly her performance doesn’t help matters. David Warner and Toby Hadoke are great until the end, when Cuthbert is transformed, Scrooge-like, into a generous, kind man – and now Cuthbert is boring and Dorrick is a stammering idiot. Well played!
This story is awful. It goes nowhere, it has nothing to say, it starts badly and it ends terribly. The script is poor, the performances aren’t up to snuff, and the production isn’t anything special. I’d say it’s a disappointing end to its arc, except a) what arc? and b) you can’t be disappointed by this any longer. At this point, if you’re buying Fourth Doctor Adventures with “by Nicholas Briggs” on the cover, you have only yourself to blame – and I include myself in that advice. The best part of this story is the knowledge that there won’t be any more until 2017.
It’s August, it’s the second installment of this year’s Sylvester McCoy main range trilogy, it’s “Fiesta of the Damned” by Guy Adams. It’s well produced, it features an evocative historical setting, and it does absolutely nothing interesting with any of its elements. It’s another dreary entry in the monthly range, in other words, and it’s another in a long line of stories that are increasingly difficult to critique.
This is the first time Big Finish has taken Doctor Who to the Spanish Civil War, and to their credit they do a remarkable job of recreating 1930s Spain. Martin Montague’s sound design is excellent, from insect noises to alien technology, making the story a pleasure to hear. Juan Romero (Enzo Squillino, Jr.) is an interesting and sympathetic character, doomed to keep fighting what he knows is a losing battle for the Republican forces. And the local color is interesting, from the people of Farissa to the nearby leper colony and beyond. This is, in short, one of the best jobs Big Finish has recently done of building a believable, lived-in historical setting. So what went wrong?
The biggest problem here is that there is virtually no conflict on display. Yes, it’s set in the Spanish Civil War, but aside from a couple of airplane bombing runs, we never catch a glimpse of the Nationalist forces. Farissa is a town sympathetic to the Republican cause, but nobody there supports the other side or even questions their involvement in the conflict. When Luis (Tom Alexander) visits from the leper colony, he is shunned, but by the end of the story he is welcomed with open arms and offered a simple apology for his mistreatment, which he gladly accepts. Juan makes the difficult decision to abandon his wounded men in an attempt to save his healthy soldiers, but this decision has no serious consequences by story’s end. And this lack of conflict doesn’t just extend to the guest characters: there was some tension between the Doctor and Mel in “A Life of Crime” that is completely ignored here. Everything is back to normal between them; in fact, if it wasn’t for the presence of Ace, this story could easily be set in season 24 for all the differences in their relationship.
Yeah, there are aliens – or at least an alien computer that transforms humans into aliens – but everyone gets changed back by the end and everything is fine. Adams tries to draw some significance out of the alien conflict by having Juan remark on how they’re trying to force people to adopt their perspective – just like the Nationalists, get it??? – but it’s so tortured and obvious that it doesn’t work. There’s an English journalist, George (Christopher Hatherall), whom Ace correctly diagnoses as an “adrenaline junkie” – but his reckless, impulsive nature leads to precisely no lasting problems.
This is the problem with “Fiesta of the Damned,” in a nutshell: nothing really happens. There’s an alien invasion, until there isn’t; there are relationships between the characters, until there aren’t; the Doctor’s plan isn’t going to work, until it does. The sound design is great. I liked Jamie Robertson’s score. Ken Bentley directs well. The performances are solid across the board. But I was bored throughout. Big Finish’s relentless drive to make the monthly range “accessible” has resulted in nothing more than meaningless story after meaningless story. Sure, some of them are still very good or even great, but I very much doubt if we’ll ever hear a story like “A Death in the Family” from Big Finish ever again. Instead, we get “Fiesta of the Damned:” pleasant yet utterly disposable.
CLASSIC DOCTORS, NEW MONSTERS: THE SONTARAN ORDEAL
For the final entry in the Classic Doctors, New Monsters set, Big Finish turned to old hand Andrew Smith to bring another foe from the new series into the classic era. And for this, the final story, they chose a totally unique monster to face off with Paul McGann’s eighth Doctor, a monster so unique to the new series that it’s hard to even think of it facing off with a classic-era Doctor. That monster, of course… wait, it’s the Sontarans?
Despite my sarcasm, I actually enjoyed this story quite a lot. Smith’s script is set firmly in the Time War, showing us a Doctor coming to the end of his rope as he tries to prevent the atrocities of the war from reaching any more innocent planets. But in the blink of an eye, a war lasting millennia is fought on the planet Drakkis, and that planet’s history – past and future – is irrevocably changed. I like how Smith doesn’t show us any of the actual war – there are no other Time Lords or Daleks running around – but simply shows the collateral damage, specifically on a planet now doomed to perpetual conflict. And the Doctor is trapped by all of it, trying to do the things he always does but weighed down by his own identity: people hate him because he’s a Time Lord, and why not?
The Sontarans are introduced into this situation with an interesting if predictable motive: as the most warlike race in the universe, they are desperate to join in the Time War, seeing it as the ultimate battle and therefore the most honorable war that can be fought. Smith spends a lot of time exploring Sontaran culture: he shows how disgraced Sontarans are put to an Ordeal, in which they are allowed to regain their honor in death by fighting their enemies alone and unharmed. He also shows the strict moral code of the Sontarans: Jask (Dan Starkey) is quick to point out that while he would gladly sacrifice thousands of troops to achieve a meaningful victory, their deaths must bring glory to the Sontaran Empire. General Stenk’s (Christopher Ryan) pursuit of his own glory is contrary to their purpose. Furthermore, Sontarans are not supposed to kill other Sontarans, so Stenk’s dispatch of an assassin (Sean Connolly) is an even greater crime. This is how one should write recurring monsters: flesh them out and let us learn more about them, don’t just rehash the same beats we’ve seen already on television.
McGann is great in this – his performance is pitched similarly to “The Night of the Doctor” and it works incredibly well. I haven’t mentioned Josette Simon, who plays dressmaker-turned-paladin Sarana Teel, and that’s a mistake on my part because she brings real emotion to a believable character. Starkey and Ryan could read the phone book in Sontaran voices and I’d buy it, so it’s no surprise that they’re great here. So why are the Sontarans in a “new monsters” box set? Because there’s a great Sontaran story to be told, and that should be the raison d’être for any Doctor Who story.
For the box set, Barnaby Edwards directs all four stories while the sound design comes from Howard Carter, Iain Meadows, and Martin Montague, and the score on all four stories is from Carter as well. As a whole, the set has a 50% success rate, but I think the two good stories are good enough that it’s worth a purchase.
CLASSIC DOCTORS, NEW MONSTERS: HARVEST OF THE SYCORAX
The third entry in the Classic Doctors, New Monsters set is “Harvest of the Sycorax” from James Goss, which takes the alien race from “The Christmas Invasion” and pits them against the seventh Doctor. Unusually for a Goss script, absolutely nothing interesting is done with the Sycorax, and the story around them is rote and boring.
More than any other story in this set, “Harvest of the Sycorax” is a deliberate pastiche of the Russell T. Davies era. It’s set in the future but uses familiar technology to exaggerate a particular element of modern society, in this case an overreliance upon medication. It uses character names that further satirize our society, in this case Zanzibar Hashtag (Nisha Nayar). It features an unremarked-upon same-sex relationship. And it has a Doctor that takes a dim view of the lesser elements of human society even while maintaining an abiding love of humanity in general. There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing this, but Davies is one of the best and most influential television writers of the past few decades, and unfortunately this pastiche comes across as overwrought and clichéd, failing to properly straddle the line between subtlety and outright comedy like the best Davies scripts. The wrist-mounted medical computers are supposed to be parodies of Fitbits and similar devices, but the constant intrusive suggestions of medications rapidly go from humorous to irritation.
The other major problem is the Sycorax. They weren’t the focal point of “The Christmas Invasion” – they were there as a foil to the new Doctor, to illustrate how important his presence can be. Here, they take center stage as the villains, and yet we hit all the familiar beats: the language changing mid-sentence when the Doctor shows up, the blood control, the hidden cowardice, and so forth. Goss does very little to develop them as characters, instead leaving them as cackling, megalomaniacal villains. The blood control technique is a central element of the plot – they’re trying to steal human blood samples so they can use blood control on individuals, not just on everyone with a certain blood type – but again, nothing new is done with the concept.
Even the characterization seems off. Zanzibar is fine, if generic, but I’m not sure what Goss is doing with the Doctor. I like how he uses McCoy as a semi-mythical figure who appears when needed and disappears when his work is done, but his commentary on humanity and his general attitude is straight out of the Eccleston era. The cynicism sounds wrong from this – or indeed any classic series – Doctor’s mouth. There’s also some clumsy expository dialogue scattered throughout. Overall, “Harvest of the Sycorax” doesn’t have a lot going for it. There’s nothing particularly terrible about it but it has no ambition. If you really liked the Sycorax and want another hour of exactly the same thing, give this a listen. Otherwise, don’t bother.
The second entry in the Classic Doctors, New Monsters set, “Judoon in Chains” by Simon Barnard and Paul Morris, pairs up the sixth Doctor with the Judoon. And while this sounds like the recipe for another rote, uninteresting story, Barnard and Morris provide us with a smart, character-based story that only trips up at the end.
A fair portion of this story is devoted to a series of scenes where the Doctor and Judoon captain Kybo (Nicholas Briggs), held captive in separate cages, educate Kybo on an appreciation of English language and literature. That sums up the story in general, honestly: it’s not really about the trial or the action sequences, it’s about a Judoon learning to step outside of its limited perspective and gain an appreciation of the universe at large. And this is fantastic material, especially when Kybo starts to compose his own poetry. Scenes like that are tricky because they compel the authors to write good poetry for their characters to recite, and Barnard and Morris are definitely up to the challenge. The Doctor’s mild critiques lend realism as well.
I like what this story does with the Judoon in general. Barnard and Morris show that their hidebound, rule-oriented ways from TV are an essential part of their culture because their small brains are unable to deal with nuance. This leads to a great idea: sometimes they appropriate judicial systems from other worlds to try their cases. So we have the unusual setting of a Victorian English court trying a Judoon soldier for desertion. Justice Burrows (Tony Millan) is a fun, smart character: he has no idea what’s going on, but he knows the law and he applies it to the facts as he sees them. And of course the Doctor serves as Kybo’s attorney, drawing on his own recent trial for reference.
The problem with “Judoon in Chains” comes at the end. The story is about Kybo and how a villainous, profiteering intergalactic corporation uses the unquestioning Judoon to engage in illegal terraforming. Through this conflict, we watch as Kybo develops a true intelligence and evolves as a three-dimensional character – and once we’ve seen a logical end to that story, his fellow Judoon acquit him of his crimes. Story over, job well done? Not really – now it’s time to spend an additional fifteen minutes pursuing and prosecuting the evil corporate overlord! While this does a good job of tying up all the loose ends, it doesn’t fit thematically with the rest of the story and feels like it’s there just to pad out the running time. It also lacks the nuance of the main story: the evil CEO is a one-note cackling villain who values money above all other things. And Kybo doesn’t have much to do with his conviction, either – he indicts himself over an unsecured communications channel.
Overall, though, “Judoon in Chains” is a strong success, one that works because it breaks the mold of its predecessors and tries something new. Doctor Who works best when it pushes at its own boundaries, and this is a great example of why that strategy works.
It’s no secret that Big Finish relies heavily on nostalgia: many of their releases attempt to recreate a certain era, or bring together two recurring characters that have never met, or address obscure points of continuity. But the new Classic Doctors, New Monsters set turns this nostalgia on its head by bringing new monsters back into the classic era. The first of these, “Fallen Angels” by Phil Mulryne, brings the Weeping Angels together with the fifth Doctor.
Wait a minute, the Weeping Angels? The almost purely visual creations first seen in “Blink?” How on earth are they going to translate that to audio, you ask? By having characters awkwardly describe what’s happening in front of them, of course! Mulryne does the best he can to make these dialogue sequences sound natural, but it’s impossible not to look out for the technique and it’s incredibly distracting as a result. Evidently people in Renaissance Italy like to express verbose incredulity, which helps. Much like in the TV series, there’s a musical sting whenever one of the Weeping Angels moves – unfortunately this leads to some rather comical overuse of the sting whenever the Angels move multiple times in one scene. I’ve seen a lot of praise for how the Angels were converted to audio, but I cannot agree: I think their representation in “Fallen Angels” is clunky, obvious, and forced.
Mulryne also makes a conscious effort to make this story more like one from the new series, so to that end we’ve got a celebrity historical figure in Michelangelo (Matthew Kelly), his servant Piero (Joe Jameson), and two pseudo-companions in Joel (Sacha Dhawan) and Gabby (Diane Morgan). They’re all entertaining enough but they’re all remarkably generic: Michelangelo is little more than a cantankerous artist and Joel and Gabby never really distinguish themselves. Piero, at least, gets some development, but the Doctor’s throwaway line about not seeing the age, only the person, is more interesting than any of it. I also enjoyed the scene where the newlyweds kiss in front of the Doctor, who stands around awkwardly commenting that people don’t normally do this when he’s around.
The plot turns around fairly complicated time travel mechanics involving the Angels changing history by “eating” historical figures like Michelangelo and the Doctor, Joel, and Gabby being the only ones to recognize it. The cult that follows the Angels, attempting to free them, is an interesting idea that is wasted on one-dimensional cackling. The revelation at the end that Joel and Gabby cannot return to their own time also feels mishandled: the Doctor’s explanation is barely coherent and the cute reference to “timey-wimey” doesn’t work as effectively as the original. No wonder Gabby thinks it’s all nonsense. And it’s a good thing neither one of them freaks out at all when they learn they have to spend the rest of their lives in the 16th century.
It’s not that I think “Fallen Angels” is bad, I just think it’s perfunctory. It feels like it was written purely to fulfill a brief, not because it has anything new to say. Not only do we not learn anything new about the Angels, the story defeats them in exactly the same way as “Blink.” It would work better on television because it could incorporate the visual element, but it would still be a decidedly mediocre episode.
Scriptwriter Austen Atkinson was drafted to write the first Peter Davison release of the fortieth anniversary season, and the reception of the result, Nekromanteia, was lukewarm at best. Though it makes a valiant attempt at capturing the grim mood of season 21, and succeeds in places, Nekromanteia ultimately fails as a production, falling down due to obvious, boring plotting, poor acting, and some questionable sound work.
It shouldn’t be particularly surprising that the main objection to Nekromanteia since its release has been over the content. This is not a forgiving play, featuring as it does cannibalism, beheadings, attempted rape, nudity, and a million other elements that couldn’t be seen on the BBC at 5:25 on a Saturday. I do not, however, join with those that question the inclusion of these elements: it is my firm belief that Doctor Who can accommodate any subject matter that does not alter the essential character of the regulars, and as such there is nothing in Nekromanteia that offends me on its face.
Furthermore, Atkinson is plainly familiar with the latter days of the Peter Davison era on television. Yes, the Doctor is ineffectual in this play, but for once this is appropriate: that is *exactly* how the fifth Doctor was portrayed on television in his final episodes. Yes, terrible things happen to the companions, but Resurrection and Androzani weren’t exactly kind. However, Atkinson misses two key elements of season 21: first, this is not a precisely fatalistic fifth Doctor like we saw in that year, and secondly the characters are forced to reset themselves at the play’s conclusion. I admit I haven’t heard the next Peri/Erimem story but if they were to come off this audio unchanged it would sadly be inappropriate.
Unfortunately, the plot doesn’t support these embellishments. Sure, there’s a whole clash-of-cultures thing going on, plus an evil corporation and a hard-bitten starship crew, but the actual plot is nothing more than a group of people pursuing one thing. And as none of the characters (save perhaps the regulars) are sympathetic, it’s impossible to care about who gets there first, since as far as I was concerned the whole group of supporting characters could have accidentally fallen into the sun.
Peter Davison bravely recaptures his season 21 persona in this play, and, as stated above, the ineffectual nature of his character in the script is entirely acceptable. Davison is at his best when he is allowed to play the character with a hint (or more) of desperation, and that is certainly the case in Nekromanteia. He is, of course, perfectly situated at the fictional cricket match, and his interactions with Shara are, from his perspective, fun to hear.
Peri, on the other hand, is dealt with in somewhat questionable fashion. She is given realistic lines (the famous “I was born with the word trouble tattooed on my ass” comes to mind) that would probably work coming from the mouth of a believable American character, but unfortunately Nicola Bryant isn’t American and Peri isn’t believable. Bryant does what she can with the material, but this is a poorly-characterized version of Peri and it doesn’t really hold up.
Erimem, meanwhile, might have developed in an entirely different direction had this been her second story as originally intended. Here she’s almost raped, fighting Harlon off to avoid it — and her reaction afterward is believable. Her reaction to Rom’s death is fascinating as well, though between that and her threats of violence Atkinson draws dangerously close to transforming her into Leela II. Fortunately this extra step never takes place and the character remains believable.
The supporting cast, for the first time in a long time, has its faults. Glyn Owen is awful as Harlon, failing to convince in any measurable sense, especially when trying to be evil. Ivor Danvers is okay as Marr, though the character is the worst type of cliche, and Simon Williams is decent as Addison, but someone needs to check up on Gilly Cohen right now to make sure she’s stopped cackling. Ugh. Gary Russell, though, is really quite good as Thesanius at the play’s open.
David Darlington’s score is reminiscent of his Excelis work, and it is accomplished — it’s not what I would have conceived of as the score for this script, but it works quite well. The sound design is solid as well, though unfortunately the recording failed in at least one area: during the latter half of the play, especially in episode three, there are several occasions in which Bryant’s levels clip — this is especially noticeable when she is yelling with clipping and someone else is yelling back without it. John Ainsworth’s direction is a bit obvious in places but works rather well despite the source material — but wow, that cover looks great!
Overall, Nekromanteia is a disappointment. With a few rewrites and some different casting decisions, it might have been much better, but as it stands it’s a failed attempt to do something darker with the fifth Doctor. It has its redeeming moments, but overall it’s hard to recommend.
The Torchwood series has been one of the most consistently impressive Big Finish ranges, and the second series closes with yet another impressive story, Guy Adams’ “Made You Look.” Gwen investigates a seaside town where a creature is killing off the population, the gimmick being that the creature kills you the third time you see it. Naturally, Gwen teams up with a blind woman to combat this menace. Because she can’t see, get it? The script spells this out in a clunky scene that gives the audience no credit whatsoever. Fortunately, the story is generally quite effective: the creature is creepy as hell, and Eve Myles really sells her terrified acting – you can tell she’s scared but she’s fighting the fearful impulses through her training. “Made You Look” has no apparent connection to the Committee arc, nor does it do much to flesh out Gwen as a character, so it’s basically just a straight-up horror story. Nothing wrong with that, especially when it’s this good. My only complaint is with the ending, which comes out of nowhere and doesn’t resolve anything. They just leave! What about the horrible murder-monster they’re leaving behind? “Oh, we’ll come back and lock it in a box.” Oh, you will? How’s that? I get the point Adams is making about bullying, but this stretches credulity to breaking point. Still, I’m not down on “Made You Look.” It’s quality audio drama with some great performances and sound design. No masterpiece, but they don’t all have to be like that. I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming box set.
The eightieth and final Companion Chronicle in the monthly range is John Dorney’s “Second Chances,” a story which finally concludes the arc about Zoe’s memory started back in series five’s “Echoes of Grey.” It provides satisfying closure to the arc, and is a good way for the Companion Chronicles to go out – it’s just not the most thematically rewarding story, which is disappointing.
This arc has followed a similar pattern throughout: Zoe is questioned about her past, which she cannot remember due to the Time Lord memory block. Machines are used to probe into her memories, and she remembers an adventure with the Doctor and Jamie – until the machines are shut off and her memory returns to its addled state. That’s basically what happens in the first episode of “Second Chances” – this time she’s interrogated by Kym (Emily Pithon), an even more skilled memory engineer. But Dorney has a spectacular twist coming: we realize that the tale Zoe is telling happens only a couple of days in the future from her current time, meaning that the framing device suddenly dovetails with the narrative and the second episode becomes a “real time” story. I don’t think we’ve seen this before in this range, and if not it’s wonderful that the final Companion Chronicle is still pushing the boat out.
The problem is that the story doesn’t really go anywhere. It follows the Moffat-era philosophy about time travel, so when Zoe interacts with her own past she realizes she was always there. We get the obligatory scene where a disguised older Zoe encounters her younger self, and a great scene where she obliquely pleads with the Doctor and Jamie not to forget her. The message here is “no second chances” – she can’t change her past, and she realizes too late that a shooting star she saw in her younger days was actually a burning shuttle with her as a passenger. Everything leads inexorably to her death, and when it finally happens it’s a bleak, emotional moment. But then she wakes up and reveals she didn’t die after all. I suppose it’s still not technically a second chance, but why spend an entire story building up to something and then decide at the last minute not to do it? It feels empty and unrewarding.
Wendy Padbury has been growing increasingly good at these stories, and this is her best turn yet as a narrator. You can really hear the differences in how she pitches her performance as the older and younger versions of her character, and her impressions of Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines are good enough to entertain. There are also some great lines in this, like a decision to skip over the capture-and-escape material in the interest of saving time. Lisa Bowerman, the range’s most reliable director, turns in one more fine effort, and the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is some of their best work. Overall, there’s a lot to like about “Second Chances” and it is absolutely worth hearing. I just wish the ending had stuck the landing.
Over the eight series of Companion Chronicles, we’ve seen some of the best material in Big Finish’s long history. We’ve gotten inside the heads of characters that were often paper-thin on television, and seen traditional Doctor Who stories from innovative perspectives. We’ve seen brilliant framing devices and even more brilliant toying with the nature of first-person narrative itself. We’ve even seen a few “full-cast” Companion Chronicles despite only two actors. But the monthly release schedule was crippled by poor sales, and from here the range shifts into box sets. Which is a shame: among Big Finish’s Doctor Who ranges, this was the one you would turn to if you wanted ambitious, intelligent, character-driven storytelling. I’ve loved my journey through all eighty of these, and I’m looking forward to what the box sets have to offer.
The penultimate Companion Chronicle of the monthly range is Paul Magrs’ “The Elixir of Doom,” a story that follows on from the largely excellent “Find and Replace” to tell of Jo and Iris having an adventure together in the classic era of Hollywood. While that sounds amusingly entertaining – and it is, generally – it’s let down by a significant problem: absolutely nothing interesting happens.
I should point out right off the bat that I haven’t listened to or read any Iris Wildthyme material outside of her appearances in Doctor Who media. No Big Finish audios, nothing from Obverse Books, etc. I like the character and how she functions as a walking metafictional Doctor Who parody, but I don’t know much of her backstory. So when she says, for example, that she is incapable of regeneration, I don’t know what she’s talking about. We’ve seen at least one other incarnation in “The Wormery,” for example, so is she lying about this? If so, why? Is she somehow unaware? If so, why? Is this supposed to be something I noticed? This is how I felt throughout the story: that there was some other story I hadn’t been told running just behind the scenes, but that story never came to the surface.
And that wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that nothing of importance seems to happen in this story, either. Jo and Iris go to a few Hollywood parties and get embroiled in a misguided actor’s plot to use the titular elixir, and that’s about it. The Doctor is there, too, so it’s like they’re running around as secondary characters in a Doctor Who story – but the story doesn’t do anything with this idea. Or maybe the Doctor is the secondary character in their story? It’s hard to say. It’s Paul McGann instead of Jon Pertwee, too, for no particular reason, though there’s a great subplot where Iris tries to keep Jo away from the Doctor out of fear that she’ll feel compelled to go off on adventures with this dashing Doctor and leave Iris alone.
Magrs also plays with narrative, though not nearly to the extent seen in “Ringpullworld” or “Find and Replace.” Here, it’s limited to Jo and Iris exchanging the narrative duties, and Iris occasionally saying things like “Oh, is it my turn to narrate?” Again, as amusing as this is, the story doesn’t do anything with it: there aren’t any metafictional elements apart from the presence of Iris herself. It feels as though Magrs is hitting all the notes he’s expected to hit but doesn’t have anything in mind to do with those notes. Actually, that’s a good description of “The Elixir of Doom:” it feels perfunctory, as though it was done to have one more Iris story before the character retired from Big Finish.
I enjoyed listening to “The Elixir of Doom,” of course. I love the idea of a Hollywood actor turning her succession of husbands into the monsters in her horror films. Katy Manning is fantastic as ever, both as Jo and Iris, and most of the supporting cast to boot. They didn’t really need Derek Fowlds but I suppose Manning can’t do every single voice in the story. Lisa Bowerman directs well, and the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is fine, though it doesn’t really evoke a Hollywood setting. Overall, “The Elixir of Doom” is fun but disposable. It’s good for what it is, but as one of the final releases in a series known for weighty, experimental material, it feels oddly out of place. But I suppose now, two years down the line, that doesn’t matter as much.
The final William Hartnell-era story in the monthly series of Companion Chronicles — and the final story in that series by Simon Guerrier before the range moved to box sets – is “The War to End All Wars,” a story that uses a masterful framing device to set itself apart as one of the best in a strong range.
The aforementioned framing device features Steven, years after leaving the TARDIS, on the unnamed planet last seen in “The Savages.” Evidently, despite initially staying behind as a mediator, Steven was made king of this society – and then, even later, was deposed. We spend a good deal of time in this framing device, learning about Steven’s family, about the rivalry between his daughters, and how they contributed to his deposition. It’s hard to discuss how this relates to the TV story, as “The Savages” is one of the least-known Doctor Who stories, but Steven’s conversations with his granddaughter Sida (Alice Haig) flesh out the society even as they tell a story.
The actual story of “The War to End All Wars” takes us to another world, one consumed by a seemingly eternal war, where everyone is drafted into service and sorted into different fighting groups based on their individual fitness and ability. Naturally the TARDIS crew is immediately embroiled in this conflict, and Steven and Dodo are taken away and drafted into the war. What follows is a recreation of World War I, complete with trench warfare, machine guns, futile attacks across no-man’s-land, and so forth. While Steven’s military background enables him to blend in, Guerrier does a masterful job of showing Steven increasingly consumed by hopelessness, culminating in a suicidal nighttime walk toward the opposing trench that turns the entire story on its side.
The twist is fairly predictable, but that doesn’t really matter as the implications of the twist drive the rest of the story. The idea of a central computer using the same population to operate both sides of a war is a straightforward science fiction idea, but Guerrier makes it something special by winding Steven’s personality through the tale. It’s amazing how Doctor-ish he acts, realizing the only way to stop the war is to work his way to the top and immediately deciding to win a civic election to get there. There’s also quite a bit of time spent on his relationship with Dodo, one of the least-explored characters from the classic series, and how evidently they were close enough that she inspired the name of his youngest daughter.
Honestly, the story doesn’t even matter that much. It’s basically resolved off camera, with the Doctor doing what he usually does. (There’s a great moment where the Doctor is offended that Steven even questions how he was able to escape execution.) This story is all about Steven, about his growth while in the TARDIS and how he employed the lessons he learned there after he left. When things circle back around to the framing device, we learn that there’s still an ersatz Doctor running around, and Steven knows he must be stopped. It’s a final exam of sorts, and the story ends just as he resolves to take it on. I’m not sure if this will be resolved in the box sets, but it doesn’t need to be – it’s an abrupt ending but an entirely appropriate one.
The production is first-rate, from director Lisa Bowerman to sound designer Simon Robinson. Peter Purves is magnificent as always, and Alice Haig is an able supporting performer. Overall, “The War to End All Wars” is another fantastic example of the Companion Chronicles at their best. Intelligent, character-driven drama will never get old.
Jacqueline Rayner has always been one of my favorite Doctor Who writers, and with “Starborn” she manages to sneak another gem into the Companion Chronicles before the range concludes. It’s not without its faults but on the whole it is quite worthwhile, making for an interesting companion piece to “The Sleeping City,” even if it is a bit on the slight side.
Vicki played a fairly significant role in “The Sleeping City” despite Ian being the feature character, so it’s good to have Maureen O’Brien back in the role for a star turn (heh) of her own. “Starborn” makes use of a framing device that is perhaps the most involved one yet in the range: Vicki is warned by a medium that if she continues her travels in the TARDIS, she will die. Much of the first episode is spent in the “present,” as Vicki questions the science behind psychic channeling and Madam Violet (Jacqueline King) challenges her preconceptions. While this does go in circles to some extent, it’s nice to hear Vicki take center stage – she’s definitely a teenager but she’s also highly intelligent, and it’s not easy to prey on her insecurities. Sadly, we don’t learn as much about Vicki as we perhaps could, but Rayner takes pains to hint at Vicki’s past and her emotions regarding her family. I’d ask for more of this if the range wasn’t coming to an end.
Much like its predecessor, “Starborn” involves some wonderful classic sci-fi ideas. We’re shown an alien society on a planet surrounded by hundreds of stars, existing in a symbiotic relationship with the population: when stars die, their energy is reborn on the planet, and when people die, they become part of the stars. The narration from Vicki on the planet is fascinating: the story has an almost elegiac quality, coming from a society with such a close relationship with death and rebirth. I also enjoyed the innocent friendship between Vicki and one of the “star-born” – it’s fun to watch this TARDIS crew get involved and this story is no different.
My only issue with “Starborn” is that it’s entirely predictable: much of the story is predicated on the eventual twist about who’s narrating, and that twist is quite obvious from very early in the story. Rayner makes an attempt to obfuscate by demonstrating that Violet is actually hearing disembodied voices and not just making things up, but the central conceit that Vicki is speaking from beyond the grave is ridiculous on its face and remains that way throughout. That doesn’t make “Starborn” a bad story, and it does allow Rayner to play around a little with unreliable narration, but the clues she introduces into the dialogue are sledgehammer-obvious even without Vicki carefully pointing them all out.
Still, we spend a lot of time with Maureen O’Brien, and she once again demonstrates her incredible skill as a narrator. She recaptures her younger voice with very little effort, and her performance as the “dead” Vicki is just distinctive enough to let the listener know something has changed. Once the narration starts, Jacqueline King is barely in this, but she’s quite effective in the early going. Lisa Bowerman directs, Matthew Cochrane provides some very minimalist sound design, and Howard Carter provides an effective score. Overall, “Starborn” isn’t the most complex story the Companion Chronicles have ever released, but it’s thought provoking, entertaining work.
With only five stories left after the anniversary trilogy, the monthly Companion Chronicles releases start to wind down with Ian Potter’s “The Sleeping City,” the final Companion Chronicle to feature William Russell. And like almost all the other Russell-led Companion Chronicles, it’s a very worthwhile listen.
“The Sleeping City” is science fiction in classical mode, full of big, sweeping ideas, alien cultures, and very little action. It fits in perfectly with its chosen era, in other words, and Potter does a great job of evoking that era in his script. Hisk is a fascinating place, one that embraces the Star Trek socialist future – they don’t use money except when trading with outsiders, for example – and the TARDIS crew embraces this with open minds and without judgment.
The big feature is the Limbus, a massive neural network constructed by the people of Hisk to link their sleeping minds together. The “sleeping city” of the title is the one inside the Limbus machine, where people come together to realize their dreams in a collective environment. The idea here is the shared experience binds the people of Hisk closely together, building trust between them – by seeing someone’s subconscious desires, it’s easy to understand them. It also helps reduce crime, as those that have done wrong will manifest their guilt in the dream world, and the collective fear of disappointment keeps them from breaking the law. Outsiders are also welcome, as Ian, Barbara, and Vicki all take their turns experiencing the Limbus world. (The Doctor does not, and it’s probably for the best that we don’t see how a Time Lord dreams.)
But any science fiction utopia must have a dark secret at its heart, and the same is true here: a creature called the Harbinger stalks the dream world, and anyone touched by this creature is doomed to die at their own hand within a few days. As this only happens to about fifty people per year in a society of countless thousands, the people take it in stride – which of course is what those responsible for the Harbinger want. Potter takes a brave step by having the Harbinger’s victims commit suicide, and Barbara’s (quite beautiful) intervention to stop a particular case makes clear that this is a metaphor for depression. Intelligent material sensitively handled – who could ask for more?
There’s also a framing device! Yes, after the range seemingly abandoned them, we’ve got Ian back on Earth interrogated by the police about the circumstances surrounding his two-year disappearance. But things aren’t entirely what they seem, and his interrogators seem quite familiar with the TARDIS crew. The twist here isn’t difficult to work out – yes, they’re still in the dream world – but the story isn’t constructed around that twist so the obviousness doesn’t hurt anything. There’s also a sly line at the end that I loved about how Ian perceives Barbara in his dream world that pokes a hole in the uniform chastity of the Hartnell era.
William Russell is of course fantastic in what is his final Companion Chronicle to date. Of particular interest is his impression of Maureen O’Brien: it’s utterly fantastic, both loving and gently mocking at the same time. I defy you not to smile when he says Vicki’s lines. John Banks is also quite good in his supporting roles. Lisa Bowerman directs with expected skill, and the sound design from Toby Hrycek-Robinson is up to his usual high standard. Overall, “The Sleeping City” is a fine slice of 1960s science fiction and a great snapshot of the Hartnell era.
Matt Fitton’s “Luna Romana” is a lot of things. It’s the 75th Companion Chronicle. It’s the final part of the anniversary trilogy and the final story to feature Stoyn. It’s the last Companion Chronicle to feature Lalla Ward and the last one to feature a living Doctor. It’s the last four-episode Companion Chronicle. It’s a tribute to the late Mary Tamm. And it’s… well, it’s not very good, unfortunately.
I’m under the impression that “Luna Romana” started out as a story intended for Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward, but that Tamm’s unfortunate passing caused a restructuring. Ward is still in the story, but taking Tamm’s place is Juliet Landau, first introduced in the Gallifrey series as a future incarnation of Romana. She narrates the story as her Romana reflecting back on an adventure experienced by her first incarnation, which leads to the odd experience of Landau doing Mary Tamm and Tom Baker impressions in the same story. And she’s quite good at it, especially her take on Tamm – she really nails her predecessor’s tone and inflections. She also has a pleasant, listenable narrative voice. Lalla Ward’s part of the story is more conventional, though it’s probably her best Companion Chronicle appearance yet.
The story follows both incarnations of Romana on separate adventures with the fourth Doctor that intersect at a few crucial points. Fitton keeps the Doctor largely out of the loop in the earlier story while allowing the later Romana’s memories of the first encounter to govern her actions. Fitton is normally quite good at structuring these time travel stories, and this is no exception, as the plot logic holds firm throughout. The story itself is languid: much of the “first” story involves the Doctor once again shirking his Key to Time responsibilities in ancient Rome and taking in a Plautus comedy instead. Terry Molloy plays all the parts of the play, and while his performance is largely excellent, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the story: I don’t think there’s any significance to it. So the first episode drags quite a bit, and really every time we return to Plautus’ company the story grinds to a halt. I think the other plot, with the Doctor and the second Romana visiting a Rome-themed lunar theme park in the future, is better, as things actually happen, but even that tends to drag. I like how Fitton ties things into season 16, making the Doctor and Romana conduct a second search for the fifth segment of the Key to Time, but even that sounds like padding when you write it out.
The biggest problem here is Stoyn himself. Nick Wallace gave him some genuinely interesting material in “The Dying Light,” but here Fitton transforms him into a generic cackling maniac hell-bent on revenge. Sure, he still wants to return to Gallifrey, but now he wants to destroy the Doctor on the way, and erase Earth from history in the process for reasons I’m sure are known to him. Stoyn’s “splintering,” while interesting, doesn’t really contribute to his story – “Luna Romana” is an example of taking a subtle character and making him more obvious for no particularly good reason other than to provide a conclusion to his story. Molloy is great, of course, but he deserves better material than this.
As a tribute to Mary Tamm, “Luna Romana” is better, but even then it goes too far. I loved the audio clips of her other Big Finish appearances at the beginning, and Fitton writes a great line for Landau about how Tamm’s Romana exists eternally as a time traveler. But then, at the end, the tribute goes on and on, and leaps from touching straight into mawkish, which left me cold during the credits instead of emotional.
On the production front, Lisa Bowerman’s direction is quite good, but the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is questionable – some of the background effects repeat to the point of irritation, for example. Overall, “Luna Romana” is another disappointment. There’s nothing truly bad about it, but as the capstone to an anniversary trilogy it’s a letdown. Honestly, the same is true of the trilogy as a whole: it’s by far the worst set of linked plays in the entire Companion Chronicles range. Of all Big Finish’s various ranges, this is the one I would have thought least likely to fail at an anniversary story, but here we are.
Another year, another series-ending Nick Briggs spectacular in the Fourth Doctor Adventures, and another crushing disappointment. This time it’s “The Pursuit of History,” and while it’s only the first of two parts, it inspires no confidence that the second part will be any good.
For this story, Briggs resurrects Cuthbert (David Warner) and the Conglomerate, last seen in the “War Against the Laan” and “The Dalek Contract” two-part stories from the second series. Cuthbert is an important character to Briggs, as he was one of the recurring villains in the old Audio Visuals series. But he’s not an important character to me, because my only exposure to him was in these Fourth Doctor Adventures, and this appearance is just as uninteresting as the previous ones. After three years, it’s easy to forget the details of the Conglomerate, so fortunately there’s lots of ham-fisted expository dialogue to catch the audience up. It’s still an intergalactic mega-corporation whose tentacles extend into almost every facet of society, and Cuthbert is still the mysterious CEO with no apparent personal history. “The Pursuit of History” goes into his background, and reveals that he is quite literally a self-made man: he has engineered his own success through time travel. We saw this sort of paradox in “The Paradox Planet” two-parter earlier this year, but that story was actually good.
The Laan, who have been enslaved by the Conglomerate to power their Quantum Gateway, kidnap Romana and take her into the far future. She spends the story on a Conglomerate station pitted against Mr. Dorrick (Toby Hadoke), Cuthbert’s assistant. (There’s also a blue alien of some kind, but I can’t remember the character’s name or species and I have no interest in listening to any of this a second time to find out.) Romana believes she is superior to everyone on this space station, and she expresses this by condescending to every single character like they’re in preschool. I like Lalla Ward, and I like Romana, but I don’t like this arrogant, obnoxious caricature that has appeared in her place. Yes, the Doctor and Romana were arrogant know-it-alls in season 17 – but they were also witty and likable, something Briggs apparently overlooked.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and K9 wander around 1850s Yorkshire in pursuit of Romana and come face to face with Cuthbert and a bunch of regional accents masquerading as characters. The problem with Cuthbert is simple: if he has no history, he’s not a character; he’s just a manifestation of greed, much like his company. The story briefly entertains the idea that the Conglomerate has actually done a lot of good for its business partners, but we don’t spend much time on that idea because it’s subtle and therefore unwelcome in this script. Also unwelcome in this script are things like believable dialogue and characters finishing complete sentences before being interrupted.
There is very little to like about this story. There’s a brief interlude at the beginning with a parrot, voiced like a Monty Python reject, that’s probably setting something up, but I don’t care. None of the characters are interesting at all. David Troughton’s in it, and with literally no setup whatsoever we find out he’s the Black Guardian at the end. Briggs directs well enough, and I’d like to comment on Jamie Robertson’s sound design but I don’t remember much of it, so consumed was I by slamming my head repeatedly against the wall. This had been the best Fourth Doctor Adventures series by far, but since we can’t have nice things, here’s “The Pursuit of History.” You can keep it.
Matt Fitton’s “A Life of Crime” kicks off a new trilogy for the seventh Doctor and Ace, and features the reintroduction of Mel to the crew. We’ve seen Big Finish reintroduce regular characters before, but any expectations from those stories should be curbed as, sadly, this story isn’t very good at all.
Much of what Fitton is going for in this story is a comparison of how both the Doctor and Mel have changed since last they met. It’s unclear when in the seventh Doctor’s timeline this takes place, but the characterization of Ace seems to put it squarely in season 25. (If it’s supposed to be later than that, then Ace is both written and performed terribly. Sadly, this strikes me as a reasonable possibility.) So we’ve got a Doctor who recently made the decision to blow up Skaro and Mel, who has spent quite some time as Sabalom Glitz’s traveling companion. You’d expect this to factor into the story, and indeed the Doctor spends much of the story suspicious of and disappointed in Mel for apparently falling under Glitz’s profit-driven sway. But the grand revelation is that the Doctor is wrong, and Mel is exactly the same character she’s always been. As a plot twist, that’s not bad, but it’s self-evidently awful character development. Perhaps we’ll find out more as this trilogy progresses, but for right now it sits badly. And for the Doctor’s part, Mel says that maybe he’s the one who changed for the worse – because he’s disappointed in her. This would work if, say, the Doctor’s inability to trust his companions led him into a tight spot, or if his relationship with Ace was notably different than his relationship with Mel, but as it stands it comes almost entirely out of nowhere.
Sabalom Glitz hangs over every minute of this script. It seems as though every character is a former associate of his, every plan originated in his mind, and every piece of currency has passed through his hands at least once. But he’s not in the story! I’ve seen this device many times before – the absent character that impacts the story – but in “A Life of Crime” it just feels awkward because we all know Sabalom Glitz and we’re all waiting for him to show up, and he never does.
Apart from that, there isn’t much going on here. The setting is fairly interesting – a retirement planet for career criminals – but the story doesn’t do anything more with it than generic heist tropes. Gloria (Ginny Holder) tries to fool first Ace, then Mel, by pretending to be a newly regenerated Doctor. I’m not sure why, because the audience obviously knows it’s a trick and the characters see right through it, but that is a thing that happens. Holder isn’t very good in general, actually – she gives a one-note performance, and the story setting her up as a potential recurring character feels more like a threat than a promise. The story of Lefty Lonnigan (Des McAleer) is clever enough, I suppose, but even that twist is visible from a mile off. And the Sperovores are the sort of monsters that sound interesting but fail in practice: they feed on potential futures, meaning that the more interesting you are, the better you taste, but this really just amounts to a lot of slobbering and chewing noises.
The more I think about this, the more I dislike it. The dialogue is excruciatingly descriptive at times. The Sperovore voices are incomprehensible. The characterization is either flat or off. The production, at least, is fine, even though director Ken Bentley doesn’t bring a lot of forward momentum to a heist story that could use it. Overall, “A Life of Crime” is a weak story. Every time it seems as though the monthly range is starting to improve, along comes another one of these damp squibs. But still we plod along, grinding out story after story. I suppose expecting consistent quality is too much to ask after 214 of these.
While I generally enjoyed the first TV season of Torchwood, it had its share of issues, one of which was inconsistent characterization. After the events of “Cyberwoman,” Ianto transformed from a non-entity into an integrated part of the team developing a relationship with Jack, and that transformation seemed to come out of nowhere. Enter Joseph Lidster and “Broken,” the fifth release in the second series of Torchwood audios – the story explains that transformation and, in the process, tells one of the best Torchwood stories.
Lidster has always been one of Big Finish’s strongest writers, especially when it comes to characterization and relationships. In “Broken,” we follow Ianto through the events following “Cyberwoman,” how he deals with his grief at losing Lisa, his rage at Jack for killing her, and his feelings of detachment from the world at large. It’s a disturbingly accurate portrait of a man dealing with grief and depression, and how he latches on to the first friendly face in an attempt to stabilize his existence. Ianto’s local pub becomes his safe haven, and bartender Mandy (Melanie Walters) is the one who keeps hope alive for him. The story also explores the aftermath of “Countrycide,” the sheer horror of which nearly drives Ianto to suicide. And since he’s quiet and socially awkward, he doesn’t know how to turn to his teammates for help. Torchwood has never shied away from engaging with emotional trauma, but this is one of the most honest and, consequently, bleakest explorations we’ve ever had of a Torchwood character. It’s also one of Gareth David-Lloyd’s most powerful performances. John Barrowman is also great – Lidster plays up Jack’s upbeat, cocky attitude in the script because Ianto doesn’t see anything beneath Jack’s surface. And the conclusion, that Ianto may be broken inside, but it’s okay because everyone else is broken as well, is Torchwood’s haunting philosophy laid bare.
Scott Handcock directs, and the lead performance is a testament to his ability. The sound design from Steve Foxon and the music from Blair Mowat wisely stay out of the way of such an intense, character-focused story, though a brief foray to an alien planet is convincingly realized. Overall, “Broken” is the best release yet in a consistently excellent series. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
I think Big Finish needs to get away from these UNIT box sets. The first UNIT series, released individually, was quite good; unfortunately, it was followed by “UNIT: Dominion,” “UNIT: Extinction,” and now Matt Fitton and Andrew Smith’s “UNIT: Shutdown,” all box sets and all bad. “Shutdown” has all the same flaws as its predecessor: it’s too long, it’s boring, it’s clichéd, and the characters are uninteresting. Oh, and this one throws in a pinch of racism for good measure. Hooray.
Here’s the plot: an evil corporation steals alien technology from UNIT, and the aliens that created the technology invade Earth in an attempt to take it back. That’s a synopsis that sounds similar to a bunch of Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters, some of which were successful and some of which were not, but almost all of them were 2-2.5 hours long. “UNIT: Shutdown” is four hours long. There is simply not enough story here to sustain a four-episode box set. The authors try to pad out the running time with globetrotting shenanigans, traveling from London to Geneva to Antarctica, but as these episodes drag on the lack of story becomes more and more apparent. There’s some attempt at political commentary – Lyme Industries retains the services of Cerberus, a Blackwater-like mercenary force – but for the most part it’s lost underneath the obvious plotting and stereotypical villainy.
I’ve often said that a lack of plot isn’t necessarily a problem. Indeed, I’ve given high scores to many stories that weren’t plot-driven. But in those situations, the stories feature fantastic character development, or memorable atmosphere, or thematic richness – “UNIT: Shutdown” features none of those things. Kate is all business, all the time, and Jemma Redgrave’s one-note performance, which works in small doses on television as a counterpoint to the Doctor’s mania, doesn’t work at all in a lead role. About the only hints of characterization she gets indicate that she likes a drink. Okay, so do I, but I’m not the leader of a paramilitary alien investigation force. Then there’s Osgood, who’s really smart but also socially awkward… and that’s it. The story briefly flirts with doing something interesting with her, showing her at a trivia night with college friends and developing a hint of a romance – but then all of that is wiped completely off the map in lieu of more generic action sequences. Josh still has his plastic skeleton (and ludicrous super strength) from “Extinction,” but he’s also still lacking in characterization. And as for Sam Bishop, well, he’s in it for about 20 minutes and he’s just as memorable (read: not at all) as he was in the last one. It’s amusing how the story builds him up as some sort of brilliant super-spy that’s going to change the entire dynamic, and then he shows up and he’s just another competent UNIT operative.
And then we have the Tengobushi, the warrior caste of the alien Kamishi. We’ve seen the Kamishi before, in “The Diary of River Song,” but here they could be any other random alien menace. Their leader, Dokan (Dan Li), is from a higher caste, and it is he that has the standard realization that humanity shouldn’t be wiped from existence for no reason. They have some interesting abilities – manipulating matter, extracting information directly from a brain – but these aren’t used to any sort of similarly interesting purpose. Still, they’re fine as generic sci-fi action villains, except for one problem. They’re based on Asian cultures, and they’re dangerous, so the story represents this by giving them outrageously broad Asian accents. I’ve seen Dan Li in other things, and he sounds absolutely nothing like this, so why on earth was this decision made? It’s a “yellow peril” device – we know they’re bad because they’re Asian – and while I have no reason to think that the production team was trying to be offensive, that sort of device is inherently racist and shouldn’t be present in modern drama. I mentioned Hollywood blockbusters earlier – well, this is the kind of stereotype that Michael Bay deals in.
The production is fine. Howard Carter handles the sound design while Ken Bentley directs, and the story generally sounds excellent, with convincing effects and a real attempt to keep things fast-paced despite the excessive running time. Overall, though, “UNIT: Shutdown” is not good. It’s far too long and virtually nothing interesting happens over the entire running time. It deals in the worst sorts of clichés and doesn’t seem to understand why this isn’t appealing. It seems we have a new contender for Big Finish’s worst range.
After the disappointment of “The Beginning,” the second Companion Chronicle in the anniversary trilogy, Nick Wallace’s “The Dying Light,” is a great improvement. It’s a quiet, character-oriented story that doesn’t have any true villain, and as a result it’s a rewarding listen.
The problem with Stoyn in “The Beginning” was that he wasn’t especially interesting. While he served as a point of comparison for the Doctor, and a representation of the attitudes the Doctor sought to escape, he was very one-note. In “The Dying Light,” however, that changes completely. Here, he appears deeply intelligent, even dangerous, as he recognizes his situation and works to change it. Stoyn is still desperate to get home, but since he knows that may be impossible, he has embraced the role of a fallen god and rejects that of a villain. It’s still a bit difficult to relate to Stoyn because we don’t actually know that much about his character, but this presentation is much more layered and interesting than what came before. His relationships with the Doctor and Jamie are the most interesting: while he’s still hostile toward the Doctor for the events of “The Beginning,” he develops an unexpected respect for Jamie, perhaps viewing him as another man out of time due to the Doctor.
The setting is absolutely brilliant. Big Finish doesn’t do a lot of world building in its Doctor Who stories, so “The Dying Light” is a pleasant surprise. The planet is covered in a silicon sea, with vessels afloat atop an ocean of fine sand. The dying light of the title is the planet’s sun, in the (relative) final days of its life, keeping the world in perpetual twilight. And then there’s Sanctuary, the ancient city carved into a mountain, all floating on that aforementioned sea, serving as a refuge for those that have lost their way or their faith. Finally, the planet itself is a living being, something that understands the needs of its inhabitants and provides for them. All of this enables Stoyn to construct the seemingly magical equations intended to draw in the Doctor’s TARDIS and finally give him a way back to heaven.
Of course, with such a slow, contemplative story, there isn’t much of a plot: the Doctor and his companions basically arrive, figure out what’s happening, and leave, barely making time to restore control of Sanctuary to its people. And this is odd for a Troughton story, coming from an era that rarely featured anything particularly deep or thoughtful. But it works in spite of all this, as the atmosphere and the performances deliver a pleasantly melancholy feeling to the listener. Frazer Hines has the narrative duties, and it’s good to hear his Troughton impression kept in check by the nature of the Companion Chronicle format, as it is exceptional in limited doses. They also have Wendy Padbury along to play Zoe, and while her presence is always welcome, it does make me wonder why she didn’t voice the other female characters, since her voice is already part of Jamie’s narrative.
With all the praise I’ve been heaping on the atmosphere, it should come as no surprise that I think the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is absolutely exceptional, and Lisa Bowerman’s skilled direction holds the whole thing together. Overall, “The Dying Light” is a success. It’s an unusual story for its era, but it’s also the kind of thing the Companion Chronicles do so well, and it sets up the trilogy for an interesting conclusion.
The advent of Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary in 2013 led the entire expanded universe of Doctor Who to announce anniversary plans, including multiple options across multiple ranges from Big Finish. One of the most intriguing came, naturally, from the Companion Chronicles, announcing Marc Platt’s “The Beginning” – which, as the name implies, tells the story of the Doctor and Susan’s initial flight from Gallifrey. With such a compelling, anticipated concept, how could it possibly go wrong? The answer, unfortunately, is “quite easily.”
The biggest problem, for me and likely almost everyone else that doesn’t care for “The Beginning,” is self-inflicted. This is the first-ever adventure in the TARDIS, after all. What glorious, amazing wonders must have awaited the Doctor and Susan as they set off into the universe? Perhaps it wasn’t a voyage of discovery at all – perhaps it was a nerve-wracking escape, with Time Lord pursuers breathing down their necks until they finally got away. So I was quite disappointed to get such a standard, average story – and while I appreciate that’s my own fault, I don’t think I’m out of line for expecting something groundbreaking for such a historic tale.
Sure, there’s lots of stuff here to tickle the fan gene. The story references “The Name of the Doctor,” with the Doctor and Susan initially selecting one TARDIS before being convinced to take another one by a mysterious outsider obviously intended to be Clara. There are references to Platt’s own novel “Lungbarrow” as well. Platt opts to leave vague any details about why they left Gallifrey: all we know is that the Doctor had caused some sort of trouble by speaking out in favor of interference. So when the Doctor and Susan encounter an alien race seeding life on an unfamiliar planet, but insisting that life follow their rigid structures, the Doctor has a new authority against which to rebel. And can you possibly guess which unfamiliar planet this life is being seeded upon? Why yes, it’s Earth! About the only thing about this plot that made me sit up and take notice was the conclusion, when the alien engineers try to wipe out life on Earth but are blown to smithereens when the humans retaliate with a missile attack while the Doctor and Susan run away.
“The Beginning” also introduces a recurring character for the trilogy, Quadrigger Stoyn, played by Terry Molloy. I’m not really a fan of this idea – the Doctor and Susan escaped Gallifrey, but little did they know a repairman was still in the engine room! I understand why Platt incorporated him, because it’s an easy way to juxtapose the Doctor’s morality against that of his fellow Time Lords even at this early stage of his development. The problem is that Stoyn is, by definition, uninteresting: he doesn’t want to interfere and he’s terrified of the unknown. He’s a static character, in other words, who wants nothing more than to return to Gallifrey and set things back to their proper order. He’s also clearly the Doctor’s intellectual inferior, which doesn’t help matters. Some attempts are made to make him sympathetic – his face is inadvertently burned when the Doctor starts up the TARDIS, for example – but they don’t entirely work. Molloy isn’t the problem, of course, but his performance can’t save the character. Fortunately, Stoyn gets more interesting as the trilogy progresses, but in “The Beginning” it’s fair to ask why he needs to be around at all.
The production is generally faultless. Lisa Bowerman directs, and Carole Ann Ford gives a fantastic performance that really captures the travelers’ nervousness at stepping into the unknown. The sound design from Toby Hrycek-Robinson is effective as well. Overall, though, “The Beginning” is a colossal letdown. Generic in almost every way, it displays none of the imagination and inventiveness that characterized Doctor Who in its earliest days. It’s competently produced and professionally acted, but it feels like any random middle-of-the-road Companion Chronicle instead of a 50th anniversary story.
From Styre on 3.4 - The Sontarans
Go to comment2017/01/17 at 11:27 pm
From Styre on 220 - Quicksilver
Go to comment2017/01/17 at 9:43 pm
From Styre on 219 - Absolute Power
Go to comment2017/01/12 at 6:49 am
From Styre on U.N.I.T. - Silenced
Go to comment2017/01/12 at 12:07 am
From Styre on Torchwood - Outbreak
Go to comment2016/12/31 at 11:11 pm
From Styre on 3.3 - The Ravelli Conspiracy
Go to comment2016/12/20 at 6:29 pm
From Styre on 218 - Order of the Daleks
Go to comment2016/12/13 at 6:23 am
From Styre on The 3rd Doctor Adventures Vol. 2
Go to comment2016/12/09 at 1:01 am
From Styre on The 3rd Doctor Adventures Vol. 2
Go to comment2016/12/07 at 6:43 pm
From Styre on The Torchwood Archive
Go to comment2016/11/30 at 9:49 pm
From Styre on 3.2 - The Fifth Traveller
Go to comment2016/11/25 at 5:28 pm
From Styre on 217 - The Memory Bank and Other Stories
Go to comment2016/11/16 at 8:25 pm
From Styre on Volume 3 - Agents of Chaos
Go to comment2016/11/07 at 2:04 am
From Styre on Volume 3 - Agents of Chaos
Go to comment2016/10/18 at 3:23 pm
From Styre on Volume 3 - Agents of Chaos
Go to comment2016/10/18 at 3:22 pm
From Styre on Doom Coalition 3
Go to comment2016/10/15 at 3:03 pm
From Styre on Doom Coalition 3
Go to comment2016/10/11 at 7:12 pm
From Dee Activated on 2.1 – Outsiders
Go to comment2016/10/11 at 12:19 pm
From Phill on 2.1 – Outsiders
Go to comment2016/10/11 at 4:24 pm
From Dee Activated on 2.1 – Outsiders
Go to comment2016/10/11 at 7:19 pm
From Phill on 2.1 – Outsiders
Go to comment2016/10/12 at 2:57 pm
From Styre on Doom Coalition 3
Go to comment2016/10/03 at 12:05 am
From Styre on 3.1 - The Age of Endurance
Go to comment2016/09/20 at 5:14 am
From Styre on 216 - Maker of Demons
Go to comment2016/09/19 at 5:24 am
From Styre on Philip Hinchcliffe Presents - The Genesis Chamber
Go to comment2016/09/15 at 8:53 pm
From Styre on The Second Doctor Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/31 at 5:18 am
From Styre on The Second Doctor Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/30 at 7:02 pm
From Styre on The Second Doctor Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/29 at 4:49 pm
From Styre on The Second Doctor Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/29 at 4:49 pm
From Styre on The First Doctor Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/24 at 8:01 pm
From Styre on The First Doctor Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/23 at 3:22 pm
From Styre on The First Doctor Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/22 at 6:52 pm
From Styre on The First Doctor Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/22 at 6:51 pm
From Styre on 5.08 - Casualties of Time
Go to comment2016/08/18 at 7:19 am
From Styre on 215 - Fiesta of the Damned
Go to comment2016/08/17 at 11:43 pm
From Styre on Classic Doctors New Monsters Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/15 at 6:25 am
From Styre on Classic Doctors New Monsters Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/15 at 6:24 am
From Styre on Classic Doctors New Monsters Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/12 at 5:09 am
From Styre on Classic Doctors New Monsters Vol. 1
Go to comment2016/08/10 at 8:58 pm
From Styre on 041 - Nekromanteia
Go to comment2016/08/10 at 7:09 pm
From Styre on 12 - Made You Look
Go to comment2016/08/09 at 7:17 am
From Styre on 8.12 – Second Chances
Go to comment2016/08/02 at 11:40 pm
From Styre on 8.11 – The Elixir of Doom
Go to comment2016/08/01 at 8:13 pm
From Styre on 8.10 – The War to End All Wars
Go to comment2016/07/30 at 11:20 pm
From Styre on 8.09 – Starborn
Go to comment2016/07/27 at 10:39 pm
From Styre on 8.08 – The Sleeping City
Go to comment2016/07/27 at 3:36 pm
From Styre on 8.07 – Luna Romana
Go to comment2016/07/22 at 12:09 am
From Styre on 5.07 - The Pursuit of History
Go to comment2016/07/20 at 10:41 pm
From Styre on 214 - A Life of Crime
Go to comment2016/07/19 at 8:31 pm
From Styre on 11 - Broken
Go to comment2016/07/14 at 8:17 pm
From Styre on U.N.I.T. - Shutdown
Go to comment2016/07/14 at 7:41 pm
From Styre on 8.06 – The Dying Light
Go to comment2016/07/12 at 8:54 pm
From Styre on 8.05 – The Beginning
Go to comment2016/07/05 at 10:36 pm