We’re almost at Big Finish’s landmark 200th release – which means they’re way beyond the number of stories produced by the classic TV series, incidentally – and the “Locum Doctors” trilogy rolls on with “Last of the Cybermen,” an Alan Barnes script that pairs the Sixth Doctor with Jamie and Zoe, companions of the Second. Is this the story that makes innovative, intelligent use of the trilogy’s concept? Well, this is the monthly range, so you should know the answer by now: of course it isn’t.
Unless something astonishing happens in the final part of the trilogy, it’s already obvious that this “Locum Doctors” concept is a failure. Yes, “Last of the Cybermen” unites Colin Baker with Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury, but so what? What is done with this idea to make it interesting? Sure, there’s a brief period where they don’t trust him but he ingratiates himself through his knowledge of Doctor Who trivia, but beyond that, what happens? The Doctor comments that his earlier self would have done the smart thing and left before anything went wrong. Eh? We’ve had twelve (or more) Doctors and not one of them has ever turned tail and fled at the first sign of trouble. So what was the point of introducing the Sixth into this story? There’s absolutely nothing about it that’s unique to him or his personality – it’s just a generic Cyber-themed runaround with the same old clichéd bits about possession hammered into your skull. Admittedly, it does more with the concept than “The Defectors,” but don’t let that fool you into thinking anything interesting happens here.
Here’s the problem with “Last of the Cybermen:” we’ve done this before! Big Finish already teamed the Sixth Doctor up with Jamie and Zoe in “Legend of the Cybermen,” even if it wasn’t the “real world” – so what on earth was so important about this story that they had to do it again? Tales of the Earth-Cyber wars? The “Cyberman” miniseries handled those, along with multiple Doctor Who audios set alongside. I said this in my review of “The Light at the End,” but it bears repeating: Baker, Hines, and Padbury are repertory players for Big Finish. The fact that they are starring in the same audio is in no way significant or remarkable, even if they are all playing their famous Doctor Who characters. Something else needs to be done with the story, and “Last of the Cybermen” completely fails in that regard.
I admit that it’s not like Barnes doesn’t try to make the story unique, but his attempt merely renders it incomprehensible. What appears to be a straightforward tale degenerates into a morass of time travel, unreliable narrators, and varying perspectives without any attempt at a cohesive theme or message. Episode 4 starts in media res, which would be fine if it added anything to the story or if any of the previous three episodes had followed suit. Instead, it comes across as an author attempting to show off rather than any sort of attempt at narrative cohesion. The Cybermen want to slave Zoe’s mind to a Cyber-computer so that the consciousness of the “Super-Controller” – and yes, that is a stupid name – can be carried in her body. Frightening stuff, right? You wouldn’t know it from the characters, who barely seem bothered by the situation – apart from Zoe’s comically unconvincing scream that concludes Episode 3.
Alan Barnes has been the script editor of the monthly range for years and he has written countless Doctor Who audio stories, and he STILL can’t produce a script that isn’t full of jarring audio dialogue. Is it really so hard to avoid having characters constantly describing their surroundings to each other? Isn’t it disturbing that literally every single other regular Big Finish writer has figured out how to do this but their script editor hasn’t?
What on earth is the point of this? It’s a generic Cyberman story with absolutely nothing new to say and absolutely nothing that hasn’t been seen dozens of times before across multiple forms of media. It unites a future Doctor with past companions and then does absolutely nothing worthwhile with the idea. It has possibly the worst Cyberman voices on record – Nicholas Briggs is usually excellent at his monster voices, but these are very obviously him with a funny voice under a slight filter. And the less said about idiotic regional caricature Lanky the better. Yeah, it has some funny parts. Yeah, the direction by Ken Bentley is fine, and the sound design from Nigel Fairs expertly recreates much of the atmosphere of “The Tomb of the Cybermen.” But none of that makes up for the atrocious script and the dearth of ideas, two elements that have become a sadly common part of the monthly range. Once upon a time, this range was the exemplar of all Doctor Who, demonstrating the very best the series had to offer on a monthly basis with only the occasional misstep. Now it’s a sad parody of its former self, a nostalgia-driven death march that barely scrapes mediocrity with every release thrust upon the unsuspecting buyer. “Last of the Cybermen” is nothing more than another entry in this interminably long line.
After the surprising quality of “Requiem for the Rocket Men” comes the quasi-sequel, Matt Fitton’s “Death Match,” the next in the fourth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures. While still of a better quality than the majority of the range, “Death Match” is a step down from its predecessor – it returns to the traditional feeling that has been to the detriment of the range for so long and suffers as a result.
Perhaps nothing sums up the difference between “Requiem” and “Death Match” better than the Master. In the first story, Geoffrey Beevers is largely tangential to the plot: while he is a crucial part of the Doctor’s plan, he has no scheme, doesn’t act as the villain, and has no involvement other than mockery with the Rocket Men of the title. In “Death Match,” he’s the main villain, and he shambles around cackling and doing evil things and generally being the Master we’re all familiar with. There’s nothing wrong with this – and indeed Fitton gives him some fun dialogue and good scenes with Tom Baker – but there’s also nothing particularly interesting about it. Fitton does make overtures toward psychoanalyzing the Master, but they’re essentially the same obvious thoughts he presented in “Dark Eyes 3.” So there’s nothing new going on here, which makes “Death Match” another in a long line rather than a distinctive piece of drama.
A group of people is brought together and forced to fight to the death for the amusement and profit of their wealthy employers? We’ve seen all this before, and while Doctor Who of this period made a living out of pastiching pop culture, there’s not much of a Doctor Who twist on this material. I do like how Fitton incorporates the use of television, especially how the Master has the feeds go down every time his champion is in trouble – it’s a sly commentary on the programmed nature of reality television – but ultimately this is “Battle Royale” and all of its followers translated directly into Doctor Who audio. Again, it’s done with consummate skill, but I was waiting for some sort of surprise or revelation and none was forthcoming.
A bigger problem with “Death Match” is its use of Leela. Her romance with Marshall came completely out of nowhere in “Requiem for the Rocket Men,” and here it’s pushed to the fore, with Marshall calling the Doctor to help him find his lost love. They pine for each other throughout, Leela calls them “pair-bonded,” and they even reflect on the possibility of children. This is fine in theory, but there are two major problems: first, since this arose from nothing, there’s no believable chemistry between the two characters; second, since we know how Leela’s story ends, we know that something’s going to write Marshall out of the plot, so his heroic sacrifice comes across more as an exercise in box-ticking than anything else. It does lead to a wonderful little scene at the very end where we get to hear Tom Baker’s Doctor comforting his companion, something we’ve rarely (if ever) heard before, but I’ll also wager a considerable amount that Leela’s character will not act differently in the next story and it’ll be like this never happened.
Nicholas Briggs directs, just as he has done for this entire series so far, and the convincing sound design comes from Jamie Robertson. Overall, “Death Match” is a good, solid story – and that makes three in a row, which has to be some kind of record for this range! As with a lot of Fitton’s work, I think the seeds of a great story are in here somewhere, but I’ll definitely take “solid” over “The Exxilons” any day of the week.
For the third story in the fourth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, Big Finish turned to John Dorney for “Requiem for the Rocket Men,” something of a sequel to two Companion Chronicles. While I hadn’t heard either of those stories at the time of listening, “Requiem” was entirely accessible and an entertaining story to boot.
I’ve been asking for years for these Fourth Doctor Adventures to try something different, and with rare exceptions they have not done so. Even the better releases have been almost aggressively traditional, so imagine my surprise to hear “Requiem,” a story that completely ignores 1970s Doctor Who tradition and goes its own way. The Fourth Doctor was arguably the most reckless of all his incarnations, so it’s quite refreshing to hear a story in which he organizes and carries out a master plan that would make the Seventh proud. He’s in control throughout, with only a couple of minor incidents compromising his scheme – and if it wasn’t for some characteristic Tom Baker laughter, I would never have guessed the Doctor was in disguise. Dorney also plays with time in this story, starting the story in one place but not resolving that conflict until later, in flashback. It’s hardly the most complex story ever told, but to even see this level of innovation in a Fourth Doctor Adventure is fantastic.
I’m also a huge fan of how the story uses the Master. Rather than being the shadowy figure in charge of an evil scheme, he’s actually an unwitting part of the Doctor’s plan. We also get to see what he does when he’s not taking over the universe – in this case, meeting with the Rocket Men to evaluate their potential as henchmen, and finding them sorely lacking. This is also the first meeting between the Master and K-9, and Dorney uses that to the script’s advantage, concealing K-9 with the Rocket Men and allowing the loyal robot to exploit the Master’s ignorance. Geoffrey Beevers plays the role perfectly – he’s irritated, exasperated, and when he thinks he’s finally killed the Doctor, surprisingly emotional. “What will I do tomorrow?” is one of the best Big Finish lines in recent memory.
Unfortunately, the story struggles to reach the finish line. Dorney bookends the script with two reflective passages from Leela about knowing when it is time to stop – unfortunately, this leads to a clunky scene at the conclusion in which Leela abruptly decides to abandon the Doctor and travel with Marshall (Damian Lynch), a former Rocket Man who reminds Leela of herself. Is she in love with him? Does she want to teach him? Both? Neither? It’s impossible to tell, because this twist comes out of nowhere – although it’s easy to say it’s in character, because this is exactly how she ends up marrying Andred. And since we’ve already seen Leela’s departure story, it’s hard to make this seem concerning – we know she’ll be back, and, knowing this series, probably in the next episode.
Nicholas Briggs directs, and he approaches the unusually dynamic material with his usual skill. Jamie Robertson’s sound design is effective, and the score continues this series’ pattern of paying tribute to Dudley Simpson. Overall, “Requiem for the Rocket Men” is one of the strongest Fourth Doctor Adventures we’ve ever seen. It’s not perfect, and it ends abruptly even before the cliffhanger, but this is the sort of ambition this series deserves. And it still hits the requisite marketing beats – if you really want to, you can sell this as “K9 meets the Master!” What I wouldn’t give for more stories like this one.
I’ve almost always enjoyed Justin Richards’ Doctor Who work. He’s rarely been the most innovative or the most boundary-pushing writer, but he almost always demonstrates the ability to come up with an interesting idea and build a solid Doctor Who story around it without needing to be enslaved to tradition. So while “The Darkness of Glass,” the second story in the fourth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, doesn’t push the boat out in the way I’d like this range to try, at least it’s not as mind-numbing as the previous offering.
The Doctor and Leela are stranded in a castle on a small island, the high tides cutting off their escape to the mainland, and a creature is on the loose in the castle, endangering the people within. If you think this sounds like “Horror of Fang Rock,” you’re not wrong, and the characters even comment on the similarity of the setting right at the top of the story. But “Fang Rock” was a fantastic story, and Richards’ script alongside Jamie Robertson’s sound design does a fine job of creating a claustrophobic, suspenseful atmosphere. Richards ties the story around “Magic Lanterns,” the precursors to modern slide and film projectors, and the lanternists that operated them. Doctor Who stories with historical settings are often made stronger by the inclusion of lesser-known historical details, and this story is no exception. Furthermore, the villain arises directly from the lantern technology, which gives the Doctor a great opportunity to engage in some historical detective work.
As a season 15 story, this is definitely more “Fang Rock” or “Image of the Fendahl” than “The Invisible Enemy.” The Doctor is largely in serious mode, embracing darker humor, while Leela’s hunting instincts are put to good use throughout the story. Unlike in many other Fourth Doctor Adventures, Leela is not portrayed as an idiot who cannot pronounce things; rather, she is a smart, resourceful warrior who rapidly gains the respect of the locals. The supporting characters are largely interchangeable, though Mark Lewis Jones goes delightfully over the top at the conclusion as Professor Mortlake.
The biggest problem with “The Darkness of Glass” is that it has very little to say, and as a two episode story there is little opportunity to dwell on the setting or the guest characters. It’s quite well made – the regular cast is great, and director Nicholas Briggs and the aforementioned sound designer Robertson do fine work with the material – but it’s still by-the-numbers Doctor Who. I don’t mind disposable stories, but this range never offers anything else. But hey, this is much better than “The Exxilons” – if “The Darkness of Glass” typified the Fourth Doctor Adventures, I’d still be agitating for something deeper, but I wouldn’t be nearly as down on the whole thing.
For many years, Big Finish produced Doctor Who audio stories without the services of Tom Baker, and his absence was, for many people, a yawning black hole. So when Big Finish finally signed him, I was ecstatic: the most popular and arguably best Doctor in new stories? How could this be anything but perfect? It was therefore utterly shocking to listen to the Fourth Doctor Adventures and discover the worst range in the history of the company. And now, here we are, ready to grind our way through another endless series of nostalgia-driven, drama-free stories, and who’s written the first one? Why, it’s Nick Briggs!
You already know what I’m going to tell you about “The Exxilons.” It’s not awful, but you know that. It’s also not impressive in any way: the script is plodding and obvious, the dialogue lacks anything resembling sparkle, the characters are drawn from the most clichéd stock – but you know all of that too. There’s one surprise, in that the cliffhanger to the first episode of “The Exxilons” isn’t that the Exxilons are the bad guys. That’s good, right? Not when you realize Briggs waits until the *second* episode to drop that shocking revelation in our laps! But at least it’s a sequel to “Death to the Daleks,” so you’d expect an exploration of the alien culture from that episode to have some interesting elements, right? Of course you wouldn’t, because you’ve heard other Fourth Doctor Adventures – the mysterious Exxilons, in thrall to their sentient city and sent across the universe to build relay beacons, act exactly like a starship crew from any science fiction series you’d care to name. And there are native aliens, who are presented as backward, yet noble, savages with a poor grasp of grammar. Maybe you didn’t know that, but you should have guessed.
I still don’t have anything to say about these stories, which fits because they have nothing to say about anything. I’ve seen Tom Baker’s performance praised, but for nothing more than his ability to recapture his TV performance – are we seriously so bereft of things to praise in these Fourth Doctor Adventures that we praise an actor for convincingly playing his longest-lasting and most popular role? Briggs directs, which he does passably well. Alistair Lock attempts to recreate the score from “Death to the Daleks,” and it’s a good attempt – unfortunately that score was one of the strangest in the history of the series and it doesn’t really fit this material.
It’s a struggle to write these reviews at this point. You know what these stories are by now. If that’s what you like, more power to you. That is not, however, what I like.
After the conclusion of the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the shift to box sets in the Dark Eyes series, Big Finish struggled to establish consistency, either tonally or thematically. While certain individual parts of the various Dark Eyes sets were excellent, the wholes never followed suit, relying on grimness and technobabble in lieu of character and drama. Finally, with the release of “Dark Eyes 4,” the final set from writers John Dorney and Matt Fitton, they find that elusive consistency – and as a result it’s easily the best set of the four.
“Dark Eyes 4” is split into four episodes, but there are really only 2.5 stories presented. The first episode, Dorney’s “A Life in the Day,” is essentially standalone, and it’s easily the best episode of any Dark Eyes release. Aiming to check up on Molly, the Doctor and Liv journey to post-war London but quickly find themselves pursued by killer androids. This is the plot, but the focus of the story is on their relationship with Martin Donaldson (Barnaby Kay), a local man slowly revealed to be trapped in a time loop. Dorney structures this perfectly: there are plenty of hints about his status, some of them even obvious in retrospect, but the revelation still comes as a surprise because he never beats the listener over the head. It’s also fascinating because this is one of (if not the) first times in Doctor Who that we’ve seen a time loop from the outside instead of seeing the Doctor and companions living through it. Furthermore, Dorney doesn’t ignore the emotional ramifications of the time loop: Martin falls in love with Liv, as he spends every day with her and varies his activities so every day presents a new date. It’s believable, it’s very human, and it’s heartbreaking, especially when the Doctor struggles to explain to Liv why Martin shouldn’t be saved. There’s nothing revolutionary about “A Life in the Day;” it’s just a smart, emotionally honest story with believable characters.
The first half of the next story, Fitton’s “The Monster of Montmartre,” is largely standalone as well, as the Doctor and Liv travel to Paris to search for the missing TARDIS and become embroiled in the Parisian criminal underground. This is a solid if unremarkable story that builds a nice sense of mystery, but it comes to a rapid halt when it crashes headlong into the arc plot. The Dalek Time Controller is back, you see, but now he is infected with retrogenitor particles and is using the Doctor’s stolen TARDIS to construct a giant Dalek in the middle of Paris. This sounds awesome, but unfortunately we never get to hear the multi-story monstrosity wreaking havoc. Instead, we get a shocking revelation that really isn’t shocking at all: the Dalek Time Controller is working with the Master!
This leads to Dorney’s third episode, with one of the greatest titles of all time: “Master of the Daleks.” Here, we journey into an alternate history in which the Master has taken over the Earth and is using the enslaved population to construct a massive war fleet with which he intends to conquer the universe. While it’s true that this time he is in an uneasy alliance with the Daleks, I’m forced to wonder if Dorney listened to “Dark Eyes 3,” in which almost the exact same thing happens. This version of the story is much better than its predecessor – the Master actually seems like a dangerous adversary, there’s a lot of good interaction between the major characters, and even the Doctor’s amnesia isn’t too irritating – but we really need to get away from “the Master builds an army to conquer the universe” stories, because that’s literally all he does anymore. Best of all, though, is the use of the Sontarans – I usually don’t go for overly fannish “what if x met y” stuff, but the Dalek-Sontaran battle is exactly as fantastic as you’d expect, and possibly even more so.
The final episode, Fitton’s “Eye of Darkness,” serves as the epic finale to the entire Dark Eyes series, and the Master is abruptly written out at the end of “Master of the Daleks” to clear the decks for the final confrontation between the Doctor and the Time Controller. Molly is reintroduced in the third episode, and (I’m guessing) due to scheduling conflicts the role is recast, with Sorcha Cusack playing an older version of the character. I’ve seen mixed reviews of Cusack’s performance but I found it nearly flawless and difficult to differentiate from Ruth Bradley. Anyway, as the focal point of the story – indeed, the subject of the title – Molly is also the one to resolve it, finally defeating both the Time Controller and the Eminence (yes) at the same time. These final scenes are very well done, giving Molly an appropriate departure that manages to be emotional without being depressing, even if the Eighth Doctor’s horrific luck with companions continues. Liv had better watch out in “Doom Coalition.”
There’s a lot to like about “Dark Eyes 4,” and Paul McGann is one of the best parts of the package. The tone is still dark, but it’s balanced by occasional moments of fun, and McGann sounds like he’s recaptured his enthusiasm for the part. Nicola Walker is fantastic as ever – I love how her quiet, sardonic nature balances out the Doctor’s natural exuberance, and how she’s such a good companion despite not fitting into the generic job description. This might be Alex Macqueen’s best performance yet as the Master – his false incredulity at the suggestion that the Daleks will betray him is absolutely hilarious. The supporting cast also includes fine performances from Rachael Stirling and Susannah Harker, and it goes without saying by now that Nicholas Briggs and Dan Starkey are fantastic as the Daleks and the Sontarans, respectively.
The production also reaches a high standard, with director Ken Bentley expertly handling the disparate elements of the script and Howard Carter’s sound design and epic, orchestral score helping to convey the emotions of the story. Overall, “Dark Eyes 4” is easily the best installment in the series, and a great way to go out. While it still gets bogged down in occasional technobabble, the scripts from Dorney and Fitton create enough interesting, compelling characters to overcome any problems. If the whole series had been like this, we’d be praising it as one of Big Finish’s best; instead, we can only hope that this bodes well for the upcoming “Doom Coalition.”
It’s the run-up to Big Finish’s 200th monthly Doctor Who release, and that means it’s time for a celebratory trilogy! The concept for this one – described as “Locum Doctors” – substitutes the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors into stories intended for the First, Second, and Third Doctors. The first of these, “The Defectors,” substitutes Sylvester McCoy for Jon Pertwee. That’s a fascinating idea, replacing the most upright and honor-bound Doctor with the one most likely to betray his morals in service of the greater good, and it’s fertile ground for whatever writer Big Finish assigned to… oh, it’s Nick Briggs? Never mind.
“The Defectors,” quite frankly, is a waste of time. It spreads one episode of material over four and ignores everything interesting at every turn. It drags interminably and never captures the attention. It almost completely wastes the substitute Doctor idea. In short, the Doctor and Jo are sent to a mysterious island where everyone is acting strangely and need to figure out what’s going on. You’d expect Pertwee to shake his captors at the earliest opportunity to go exploring, so McCoy’s decision to hide in plain sight might be interesting. Unfortunately, the best Briggs can come up with is the aliens eventually getting tired of putting up the pretense of being human and just telling the Doctor what’s going on. And it’s not like the Doctor uses his towering alien intellect in order to deceive them into revealing their secrets – it’s staggeringly obvious that something strange is going on, and all the Doctor does is point out all the flaws. This is supposed to be interesting? Meanwhile, Jo wanders around with Shedgerton (David Graham) and discovers that yes, aliens are indeed involved, while Briggs makes sure to capture the spirit of the Pertwee era as closely as possible by having her point out the obvious at every possible turn.
The thing is, the central idea of the story isn’t that bad. It’s hardly original, but it nicely avoids stereotypical Doctor Who plotting: the aliens aren’t evil, they’re defending themselves against unwarranted human aggression, and all they want to do is leave and find an empty planet to live on. This is undermined quite a bit by the decision to make them into comedy aliens with incomprehensible voice filters, but perhaps that was the fault of a novice director who… wait, it was Briggs again? Oh dear. Moving on, everything builds to a final decision by the Doctor: will he allow the aliens to escape, thus dooming the entranced humans they leave behind, or will he allow UNIT to arrive and gun down the defenseless aliens? This is a recipe for good drama, but it could have been even better had the previous three and a half episodes actually mattered in any meaningful sense. Instead, we’re left to reflect about how this Doctor’s thinking differs from his predecessor’s – indeed, as Jo says, “My Doctor wouldn’t do that!” All well and good, except I’m forced to wonder: wouldn’t he? I can’t really see Pertwee grabbing the radio from Jo and declaring “Come on in, Mike, and kill ‘em all!” If anything, I think the difference is that the Seventh Doctor is willing to make the choice in the first place, whereas most (if not all) of his other incarnations would have tried to find a third way and save everyone. That’s just my theory, though, as of course it’s not present in the script.
Even the production isn’t great. The performances are first-rate, especially McCoy’s, and that’s down to director Briggs, but we already discussed the decision to cloak the aliens in incomprehensible effects. And while the sound design from Joe Kramer (Kraemer?) is solid, the score is jarring and doesn’t really fit the piece. Overall, “The Defectors” involves a lot of pointless running around before finally getting slightly interesting right at the finish. It does nothing particularly useful with the “Locum Doctors” concept; it captures the Pertwee era only insofar as that era could be plodding and predictable; and it’s a return to the terrible form we’ve come to expect from the monthly range. Looks like we’re in for another wonderful Big Finish anniversary celebration.
If you’re going to adapt old Gareth Roberts novels, and you’ve already done “The Romance of Crime,” you might as well move on to “The English Way of Death” – and so here we are, in an adaptation penned once again by John Dorney and featuring the entire season 17 cast. This story was released in a box set with “Romance,” and while it strikes a similar tone to its companion piece, it doesn’t prove quite as successful.
When I first read the novel, and later when I listened to stories like “The Auntie Matter,” I developed a similar complaint: I have a very hard time relating to period comedies satirizing the English class system. I understand the influence and importance of Wodehouse, but I really get nothing out of watching the stuffy upper crust pander ignorantly to one another. “The English Way of Death,” as the title implies, spends a good deal of its running time employing this style of humor. When the world is threatened with destruction because a man couldn’t bear the thought of his rose garden being destroyed, I get what they’re going for but at this point I’m mostly just shrugging my shoulders. Perhaps the best joke in the play is when an exasperated K9 loads a vocabulary bank based on 19th century literature and proceeds to talk about death rays and thunderbolts – it’s much broader but I preferred it to the endless satire otherwise on display.
Speaking of K9, John Leeson is at his best in this story, seeing the friendly computer running over a whole range of emotions. When K9 is possessed, it sounds as though the performance is switching between Leeson and Terrence Hardiman, but Leeson is so effective it’s hard to tell when – or even if – this happens. Much like “The Romance of Crime,” Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are also on top form: Baker clearly loves this material and Ward gets something new to try as we’ve never heard the embarrassed Romana at the denouement before. It once again raises the question of why the Fourth Doctor Adventures can’t be like this – yes, “The English Way of Death” is spread over four episodes but it’s not like this is brilliant, unassailable material. So why is this so vibrant when the 4DAs are so often dreary?
Despite the excellent performances, there are times when “The English Way of Death” grinds to a halt, and none are more significant than the extended episode 3 excursion to the future that serves as little more than a gigantic info-dump. They try to make it interesting with the aforementioned K9 possession and scenes of the Colonel (Tim Bentinck) bumbling around breaking things, but ultimately it’s just there for Romana to listen to a ton of exposition about what’s going on. Part of the problem is that the adaptation to audio naturally loses the novel’s narrative voice, and in novels like these that use elements of a Douglas Adams style, that voice can break up otherwise monotonous scenes. That can’t happen here, unfortunately – and the story is often so confusing that drawing the listener’s attention to the plot seems like a mistake.
The dialogue, though, is magnificent, and instantly reminded me of why the novel was so much fun to read. The “you’re not going to believe what’s going on” exchange between Percy (Richard Braine) and Romana is hilarious, as are the aforementioned scenes where Romana gets it wrong and the Doctor mocks her relentlessly. And then there are the zombies, who are so over the top with their hunger for “Brains!” that I was laughing out loud while listening.
On the production front, Nicholas Briggs directs again, and the performances and pacing are admirably done. Jamie Robertson’s sound design is effective as well. Overall, “The English Way of Death” is another successful release. It’s not quite as good as “The Romance of Crime” but it’s unquestionably entertaining. The lesson is clear: if you want good Tom Baker material from Big Finish, go for the box sets.
I questioned the decision to go with “The Highest Science” as the second novel adaptation from Big Finish because it wasn’t especially famous and it wasn’t especially well regarded. The same cannot be said of “The Romance of Crime,” the first MA from Gareth Roberts and the first in a celebrated trilogy of season 17 stories, which was both well-known and highly acclaimed. Adapting that story, with John Dorney handling the novel-to-script duties, was an obvious step for Big Finish, and the result is largely successful.
It’s amazing how the Fourth Doctor Adventures, which openly aim to capture the atmosphere of the 1970s stories, are largely dreary, boring slogs, but every Tom Baker story outside of that range is vibrant and interesting. The same holds true here, as “Romance” captures the feeling of season 17 while simultaneously providing more modern elements. And unlike “Highest Science,” which was deliberately scattershot and based around coincidence, “Romance” is centered around a murder mystery that holds together rather well considering its comedic elements. It’s not perfect – the ending is almost as abrupt as its predecessor, for example – and it’s not a brilliant, incisive drama, but it’s quite entertaining with several laugh out loud moments.
Tom Baker is easily the best thing about the story. I’m not sure what inspired such a strong performance, but he sounds like he just stepped off the set in the mid-‘70s. He’s also clearly having a ball – more than once, his lines start with a spontaneous chuckle that leaves little doubt of the massive, famous grin across his face while he reads them. And his declaration of “Ogrons!” at the end of the second episodes is over the top in all the best ways. Of course, credit also goes to Roberts and Dorney for crafting such fitting lines – I’m sure the sparkling dialogue helped Baker’s enjoyment immensely.
While this certainly isn’t Lalla Ward’s first performance for Big Finish, it’s the first time she’s appeared in a story opposite Tom Baker since “Warriors’ Gate.” And while behind-the-scenes records indicate the two never recorded together, it’s impossible to tell from the final product – it sounds as though the two are sparking off one another even if they’re not. John Leeson is also back to play K-9, and he gets some of the funniest lines in the script. Just hearing a full-cast Doctor Who story with this cast is glorious, and the effortless way it recaptures the feeling of the era makes it even better.
The huge guest cast is quite strong as well. Miranda Raison is the star, going way over the top as Xais, and Michael Troughton does the same in a wonderful performance as artist and coward Menlove Stokes. Dorney doubles up on acting, as he often does, bringing some color to the role of Eddie Nisbett (as well as some Ogrons). Marcus Garvey is perhaps the only weak spot, as he deliberately underplays the role of Spiggot but, in doing so, forgets to make him entertaining – there isn’t much humor in a perpetually deadpan delivery, even with repeated references to the wife and kids.
The production is effective throughout, with Nicholas Briggs directing and drawing excellent performances from his regulars, while Howard Carter’s sound design is convincing and often disgusting. Overall, “The Romance of Crime” is an effective adaptation of a good novel. There’s nothing brilliant going on here, but there’s also nothing to complain about – this is a strong, funny Doctor Who story with almost uniformly great performances and a strong production. That I don’t have a great deal to say about it should not be taken as a criticism – it’s a good way to pass two hours and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
When Big Finish produced an audio adaptation of “Love and War” for the anniversary of their Bernice Summerfield audios, it seemed like a one-off: an adaptation of a beloved novel that introduced an exceptionally popular and enduring character to the Doctor Who universe. But if a Big Finish release proves successful, you can bet that an entire range of similar releases is not far behind – and so it is here, a fledgling range of novel adaptations beginning with Gareth Roberts’ “The Highest Science,” adapted by Jacqueline Rayner.
“The Highest Science” is an interesting choice: it was Roberts’ first novel, it featured a strange mix of offbeat humor and downbeat drama, it introduced the Chelonians, and it was definitely one of the more traditional New Adventures. For the most part, this is a faithful adaptation that captures the feel of the novel, both in terms of strengths and flaws. Unfortunately, the novel’s biggest flaw was its lack of cohesiveness: it felt like a bunch of random elements tossed together with little rhyme or reason, and that’s exactly how the audio adaptation feels. The Chelonians and the 812s have absolutely no bearing on the plot and no reason to be there, and the fact that Roberts justifies this coincidence by introducing a cosmic coincidence generator (the “Fortean flicker”) doesn’t make it any more sensible. And the way the story ends, with the Doctor freezing everyone in a slow-time field and then giving up and leaving, is stunningly ill-conceived.
The main plot, such as it is, is much more interesting, and Roberts does a fine job of subverting traditional clichés in its construction. Everything is set up to draw the characters to Sakkrat and the Highest Science, and Roberts tells this part of the story as a quest narrative, bringing together a group of unlikely teammates to pursue a greater goal. So when it all turns out to be a trap to eliminate Sheldukher (Daniel Brocklebank) and recover the Cell (Sarah Ovens), it’s genuinely surprising. The further revelation that the Doctor knew what was happening all along – or at least suspected as much – is very much in keeping with his characterization in this era. I also like this glimpse at his early relationship with Benny, trusting her to survive on her own but still taking actions on her behalf for her own good.
Unfortunately, the acting is another issue with this adaptation. The Chelonians were always humorous characters, but Tom Bell’s performance is so wildly over the top that it stops being funny. Characters like this, no matter how ridiculous, should always take themselves seriously, yet the acting here is so clearly taking the piss that it ruins the immersion. Likewise with Brocklebank as Sheldukher – the character isn’t supposed to be a ranting megalomaniac, but that’s exactly how he comes across. Other issues come from the source material: lines like “Rumors of my breath have been greatly exaggerated” were in the novel but still almost made me drive off the road.
The production is solid as ever. Scott Handcock directs, and the action never feels overlong or drawn out, despite the large amount of padding in the script. Neil Gardner’s sound design is effective, as is Howard Carter’s score. Overall, however, “The Highest Science” doesn’t have a great deal working in its favor. It’s an audio adaptation of a debut novel best remembered for being fun and disposable – there’s nothing especially bad about it, but every good point has at least one flaw as a counterweight. I wasn’t sure about this decision when it was announced and I’m still not sure about it now.
I’m not sure what Big Finish is trying to accomplish with these “Dark Eyes” stories anymore. The first one was pretty obvious: it was intended to follow on from “To the Death” with a new, darker plot that pitted the Doctor and a new companion against the Daleks in a battle across time. No, it wasn’t very good, but at least you could tell where it was headed. But since then we’ve introduced the Eminence and the Master and the Viyrans and another companion and a bunch of technobabble about retrogenitor particles and I have no idea what it’s all in service of or where it’s heading. And while “Dark Eyes 3” brings everything under Matt Fitton’s creative control and achieves a consistency of tone as a result, it still doesn’t manage to go anywhere interesting.
As usual, the story is spread over four episode and five hours, the first of which is “The Death of Hope.” The title is a pun based on the plot – there’s a character named Hope, get it? – and that’s about as deep as it goes. Oddly, even though this is the first Paul McGann story in quite some time, he’s barely even in the first episode! Instead, we’re given a generic space Western starring the Master. To be fair, that sounds awesome, but unfortunately the description far outpaces the result. The entire purpose of the episode is to show us that the retrogenitor particles inhabiting Molly O’Sullivan’s body actually function as a cure for and a vaccine against Eminence possession – everything else is there purely for entertainment. Now, I’m all about stories that eschew plot for atmosphere, but this is genuinely boring: the Master giggles a lot, the colonists ask unanswered questions, and the Doctor occasionally interjects with a disgusted comment. There is no reason for this episode to exist: it is neither entertaining nor informative and it’s a real struggle to make it all the way through. Everything important could have been summed up in five minutes during one of the later installments.
Fortunately, things improve in the second episode, “The Reviled,” which features the Doctor trying desperately to quell a human rebellion on an alien planet before the Eminence arrive and kill everyone. This is the only segment of “Dark Eyes 3” with any sense of urgency, and Fitton fleshes out the conflict with ease: the indigenous race was once enslaved by humanity, but have risen up and retaken their planet, controlling their former masters in the process. But they’re not needlessly cruel – even though they would have every justification to treat humanity like a plague, they afford their prisoners some basic kindness, even if it does involve crowded accommodation and minimal food. Nonetheless, the humans want to rebel, and the Doctor ends up in the middle of things, trying to talk both sides down in turn before disaster strikes. This would have been a great story on its own and it fits convincingly into the arc plot, with McGann at his best.
From there, though, the story takes a downward turn. The Master’s plan comes to the fore, and while it has some interesting elements – let the Eminence take over the universe but seed something inside their slaves that allows him to take over in turn – the biggest problem is that it’s incredibly unthreatening. The first problem is with the Eminence itself, which still hasn’t become interesting despite multiple appearances over several Big Finish ranges. It speaks in the voice of a comic book villain, and while David Sibley’s performance is entertaining as hell, it’s not frightening in the slightest. Fitton tries to create drama from the Infinite Warriors as possessed members of other races, but it’s clichéd, unimaginative body horror stuff that Doctor Who has been doing since “The Ark in Space” and beyond. But I don’t blame Fitton for this because the Eminence has nothing to distinguish it. It possesses people and tries to take over the universe for no reason other than to follow its own purpose. At least with the Daleks they’re driven by their intense, paranoid hatred of all other races; the Eminence merely lives to conquer, with no other motives.
Secondly, the Master is a big problem in this story, and for similar reasons: he’s almost entirely unthreatening. I really like Alex Macqueen in the role, but there’s nothing dangerous about him or his performance in this story: he rolls through four episodes, giggling and joking, with only the briefest glimpses at the insanity underneath. It’s incredibly similar to “Last of the Time Lords,” with the Master conquering Earth and using the people to construct a space fleet with which to invade the rest of the universe, but while the Masters in both stories inject levity and silliness into their performances, only John Simm gets to play the character as a madman rather than as someone casually amusing himself. The scene with McGann and Macqueen locked in a room together should be incredibly intense and revealing, but it’s just boring – both characters sound disinterested, lobbing cod psychology at one another, and we learn nothing about either character in the process.
All of which begs the question from the beginning of my review: what’s the point of this supposed to be? Finally, we get some mention of the deaths of Lucie and Tamsin and Alex, but the Doctor gets one line in response and then it’s never mentioned again. Yes, the Doctor is upset, but nothing is done to push his character forward. Molly is in this, but so briefly that she hardly registers, and that’s a problem for arguably the most significant character in the story. I know this was due to actor availability but that doesn’t retroactively make the story better. Then there’s Liv, and while Nicola Walker wrings every possible drop of emotion from the character, she remains one-note and uninteresting – and then, just to top everything off, that one note is eliminated from her character! I’ve already discussed the Master and the Eminence – none of the recurring characters are at all interesting in “Dark Eyes 3,” so it’s certainly not a character drama. Oh, and Narvin from the Gallifrey series shows up, but he doesn’t distinguish himself in any way other than “amoral CIA operative,” so…
If this was an action story, at least I could approach it on those terms. I wasn’t a fan of “UNIT: Dominion” but I enjoyed the pace of the story and the action-driven sequences over its long running time. “Dark Eyes 3” is bleak and slow-paced with its action sequences largely kept off-screen. There’s no character drama to follow, there aren’t many exciting action sequences, and there aren’t many opportunities to laugh. So what is there? The production is solid as ever, both from director Ken Bentley and sound designer Wilfredo Acosta. But apart from that, “Dark Eyes 3” is a long, impenetrable grey mass in which nothing particularly interesting happens. 90 minutes of that would be bad enough, but 300?
As the end credits rolled on Jonathan Morris’ “The Entropy Plague,” the final story in the latest Peter Davison trilogy from Big Finish, I sat motionless, stunned by what I had just heard. Two high-quality stories in a row in the monthly range? A conclusion to a story arc that wasn’t bungled in some way? All true, and genuinely rewarding as a result, even in spite of some minor flaws.
To begin with – and this isn’t a spoiler if you’ve been paying attention, plus it’s revealed in the first five minutes – this is the final story for the older Nyssa introduced all the way back in “Cobwebs.” Morris does well to structure the story around the journey rather than around a twist at the conclusion, because otherwise it would be quite predictable. That Nyssa makes a self-sacrificial decision at the expense of her own happiness is par for the course, really, but Sarah Sutton plays it to the hilt, investing her performance with the kind of emotion I wish we could have seen on television. And of course she gets into an argument with the Doctor over who gets to be marooned in E-Space – it’s almost sadly humorous, but juxtaposed against the calculating nature of Pallister (Robert Duncan) it really works.
As mentioned above, the story is told in flashback, opening with the Doctor visiting Nyssa’s son to tell him of his mother’s fate. Each episode is told by a different character, concluding with Nyssa writing an unsent letter about the final part. The brief instances of narration in the first three episode jar with the tone, if only because verbal narratives don’t sound like prose, but the style works exceptionally well in the final episode. It’s also interesting to see the story from each character’s perspective, though this is put to best use in the second episode where Nyssa and Tegan meet the Doctor without knowing the extent of his plans. The fourth episode also presents a couple of scenes that Nyssa wasn’t present for, but this is hardly noticeable and ultimately forgivable. Overall, Morris’ decision to tell the story this way is a great one – it gives everyone in a crowded TARDIS something to do and it adds drama to what could have been a lesser tale told by conventional means. We need more Doctor Who stories in this style, quite frankly.
The atmosphere of “The Entropy Plague” might just be its best feature. Set on a dying world inside a dying universe, the characters can do little more than await the inevitable, with apocalyptic imagery present throughout. There is a true sense of hopelessness and chaos pervading the script, and the Doctor’s lack of solutions and seeming willingness to compromise on his moral principles only adds to the feeling. All credit to director Ken Bentley and sound designer Andy Hardwick for their work here, which is first-rate – parts of this story are harrowing, even nerve-wracking, something not commonly found in Big Finish Doctor Who releases of late. The villains, such as they are, fare less well – Pallister is a great character, but the pirates and their leader Branarack (John Voce) are straight out of the Big Book of Stock Characters. At least they actually use extras to voice the pirate band – I was waiting to cringe at yet another “Everyone! Come with me!” but it never came. The Sandmen, creepy as they are, are also unnecessary – they largely seem to be there to instill panic and pad out the story to four episodes.
Overall, “The Entropy Plague” is another successful release, and a great conclusion to both the E-Space trilogy and the second story of Nyssa. Admittedly it’s hard to be upset about her departure, since we all know we’ll be hearing more stories from Sarah Sutton, but within the fiction this is executed quite well. Is this a sign that the monthly range is finally lifting itself from its recent doldrums? We can but hope.
After a lackluster start to the “return to E-Space” trilogy, Big Finish turned to Matt Fitton for the second story, “Equilibrium,” which picks up where “Mistfall” left off: the TARDIS crippled and the crew desperately searching for a missing part and the man that stole it. Fitton basically ignores this setup in favor of a much different tone, and the result, pleasingly, is hugely successful and constitutes the best main range release in quite some time.
The concept behind “Equilibrium” is quite simple: a pre-industrial society has been told by a higher power that its population must never change, and so any births must be offset by the execution of an older family member. Naturally, when the Doctor and his companions arrive, this causes a problem, but rather than going the obvious route and sentencing the regulars to death, Fitton’s script schedules four innocents to die in their stead. From there, the Doctor must figure out what’s happening and undo the problem. What I loved about “Equilibrium” was its pace and quiet tone: there are very few action scenes, very few clichéd confrontations, and very few instances of contrived, obvious writing. There’s not even a villain: the society is the sad result of an experiment gone wrong, and the people in charge aren’t evil – in fact, the society would die if it became overpopulated. Everyone is sympathetic, everyone has believable motives, and even the Doctor solving the “problem” doesn’t resolve the situation. It’s mature writing, in other words, divorced from the tiresome action sequences and tedious appeals to nostalgia that have been the hallmarks of Big Finish Doctor Who for quite some time now – and it’s almost inarguably the best script yet from Fitton, one of Big Finish’s most reliable writers.
There are a few cracks around the edges that keep “Equilibrium” from the best of the best Big Finish stories. The strain of the four-person TARDIS crew is evident: the Doctor works to undo the equilibrium of Isenfel and Nyssa aids him and explores the palace, but Tegan and Turlough are sent off on largely extraneous quests to keep them occupied. There are also more instances of a recent, chronic Big Finish problem: having large yet mostly silent groups of people following actual characters around, and those characters issuing orders starting with “Everyone!” to obviously empty rooms. The final episode also has a few instances of clunky expository dialogue – (paraphrasing) “Look! The snow beasts are circling the TARDIS!” and so forth – but they don’t detract significantly from the experience.
The performances help set “Equilibrium” apart as well. In addition to the usual strong turns from the regulars, especially a melancholy Peter Davison, the play employs guest appearances by Annette Badland and Nickolas Grace as Queen Karlina and Balancer Skaarsgard. These are two excellent performers, of course, and their scenes together and with Davison are all highlights. Badland in particular is both resolute and sensitive: when the story begins, she sounds like the typical pompous science fiction dictator, but by the end she’s every bit as sympathetic as every other character and that’s in large part down to the performance. Grace, too, is excellent, walking us through his character’s crises of confidence and identity before achieving redemption. Mention should also be made of Joanna Kirkland’s turn as Inger, though that character is a bit broader and doesn’t develop as interestingly as the others.
The production is excellent – Ken Bentley’s direction is reflected in the performances, and the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is top-notch, especially the wonderful piano-driven score that eschews the synths I would expect from an E-Space story. Overall, “Equilibrium” is a very, very strong release with only a few small missteps that keep it from the Big Finish elite. I’ve been rather unforgiving in my main range reviews of late, so it’s good to have releases like this to renew my confidence in BF’s ability to create excellent Doctor Who.
Season 18 of Doctor Who certainly divides opinion among fans, but like it or not, it is an indisputable fact that it took the program in a bold new direction, eschewing many of the staples that had brought the series to that point. I make no apologies about loving it to death, especially the E-Space trilogy – so naturally you can imagine my disappointment when the plodding boredom of the Big Finish monthly range comes to consume this era as well.
“Mistfall” comes from Andrew Smith, penning a sequel to his earlier “Full Circle” from television. “Full Circle” was a fine episode: rich in atmosphere and full of great ideas, it tied its themes of evolution splendidly to the season-long theme of entropy, drawing fine performances from the cast in the process and even featuring some interesting direction, especially on location. “Mistfall” accomplishes literally none of these things. It flirts with some interesting ideas, building on the earlier story and threatening to explore the implications of the rapid evolutionary development of the Marshmen. But it fails to follow through on any of it, opting instead to focus on a standard, predictable revenge story built on cliché instead of drama. Solus (Nigel Carrington) and Drell (Paul Panting) are staggeringly uninteresting characters, one focused on revenge to the exclusion of all else and the other a one-note ranting savage distrustful of all technology. I’m not sure if Smith actually intends us to wonder along with the main characters who the saboteur is – it’s so obviously Solus that revealing it doesn’t even count as a spoiler. And what about the horrible choice that Decider Merrion (Jemma Redgrave, wasted) was forced to make? Does it inform her character throughout the script, or is it vomited upon the audience in a solid block of exposition near the conclusion? What do you think?
Perhaps more disappointing, though, is the quality of the production. I usually take it as read that a Big Finish production will sound professional, with convincing sound design and actors invested in their performances. Sadly, I can’t even say that about “Mistfall,” which sounds like it was about as boring to make as it is to hear. The regulars are unconvincing across the board – Davison sounds half-asleep, Fielding is all over the map, Sutton is barely in it, and Strickson is trying but his character is almost unrecognizable. Jemma Redgrave, so good in the TV series, doesn’t even sound like she understands what she’s reading. I didn’t listen to the extras – did the actors talk about how much they loved the script? THAT would be good acting.
Everything sounds so flat that there’s no way I can call Ken Bentley’s direction a success. Nigel Fairs handles the sound design, which also fails to convince. There are multiple scenes in which the main characters are traveling with a whole group of people from the ship, and there is NO evidence of this apart from characters occasionally (and embarrassingly) saying “Everyone!” and then issuing a command. Even the score isn’t that great – it apes Paddy Kingsland’s work from the original story, but fails to capture the atmosphere of its predecessor. In its defense, though, I think season 18 had the best incidental music of the entire classic series, so I’m probably holding this to an impossibly high standard.
Overall, this is yet another boring entry in the monthly range, indicating that 2015 is probably going to be another long year. “Mistfall” is remarkably short for a 2-CD release, and yet it still feels padded and overlong. So what do I have to look forward to next month? Is it going to be vampires? Is it going to look like vampires but – oh ho! – it’s something else? Are they going to kick the dead horse of the “older Nyssa” arc and see if it twitches? Boy, I can’t wait.
Doctor Who has always embraced the fantastic – even the stories that take place in or around the present day largely involve alien invasions or other problems greater than everyday life. Matt Fitton’s “An Ordinary Life,” the final story in the first series of Early Adventures, pushes against this a bit by showing two companions trying to adapt to daily life in the 1950s. Yet unfortunately it’s the science fiction elements that ultimately let the story down.
It’s an idea so simple I’m surprised we don’t see it more often: the Doctor disappears for a protracted period of time and his companions are left to fend for themselves for days, even weeks. By setting the story in the 20th century and using Steven and Sara, Fitton is able to make the ordinary seem alien without having to resort to “What is yon horseless metal beastie?” comments from characters rooted in the past. Furthermore, by placing these characters in a Jamaican immigrant household, Fitton deepens the alien nature of “ordinary” London – a place where racism and prejudice are a serious problem and gainful employment is often difficult to find.
Yes, some of it gets ridiculous – Sara thinking she can get a job as a police officer by attacking a police station is a particularly silly example – but overall Fitton does a fine job of portraying everyday life and the attempts of the TARDIS crew to fit in. I enjoyed the cute scene of Steven and Sara trying to cook before giving up and getting fish and chips, and I thought the scenes of prejudice were played well without going too far over the top. I also appreciated Big Finish’s casting in these roles – Ram John Holder, Damian Lynch, and Sara Powell were all convincing without the performances or the script resorting to stereotypes.
My biggest problem with “An Ordinary Life” is that, ultimately, it’s not about an ordinary life. It starts out that way, but soon enough the tale of two TARDIS crew from the future acclimating to the 20th century becomes yet another story about an alien invasion of Earth. Perhaps the title is meant to be ironic, showing that people with the Doctor never lead an ordinary life, but as there’s no hint of this in the script, I doubt it. And perhaps the story would be better if the science fiction elements weren’t quite so generic – seriously, an alien race who create duplicates of people but need to keep the originals alive in some sort of organic machinery? They’re the Zygons in all but name.
Actually, the big problem is that they’re local – the “monsters” in this arose from the sea, telepathically activated by a dreaming Michael Newman. So they’re living beings that share the planet with us, but that we haven’t had experience with until now, when they start arriving on our shores – and instead of integrating with our society, they overrun it, literally transforming our people into crude duplicates forced to live a subhuman existence under their control. Fortunately, we are able to drive them completely from our shores and back from whence they came, thus regaining our way of life from these dangerous invaders. Holy crap – and this story claims to be *opposed* to racism?
The production, from director Ken Bentley and sound designer Toby Hrycek-Robinson, is as solid as ever. Overall, “An Ordinary Life” is a story of two parts – the great part about ordinary living, and the mediocre part about an alien invasion with some questionable (and surely unintentional) politics. It’s an enjoyable listen, and a solid conclusion to the first series of Early Adventures – and hopefully, now that the range has found its feet, we’ll get some true greats in series 2.
The Early Adventures, Big Finish’s follow-up to the Lost Stories range, appears to be tracing a path through the early days of Doctor Who. We started with Ian, Barbara, and Susan; we continued with Ian, Barbara, and Vicki; now, in Ian Potter’s “The Bounty of Ceres,” we have Vicki and Steven taking center stage with the Doctor. Unlike its predecessors, this story takes place in a very limited setting, capturing the studio-bound feeling of the era – but more importantly, it uses that setting in a claustrophobic, dramatic script with a surprisingly simple conclusion.
The premise is simple: a mining station on a dwarf planet, crewed by three people, is starting to come apart at the seams, endangering both mission and crew. The TARDIS crew land in the middle of this, of course, and immediately get involved. On the surface, the story should have been easy to predict; an isolated base where things keep inexplicably going wrong is obviously being sabotaged by one of the crew, right? But Potter structures his story to lead the listener toward a different conclusion: Ceres itself is alive and trying to drive away those who would mine its component parts. Despite the use of narration, the story is almost exclusively limited to the perspectives of the TARDIS crew, and from those perspectives the idea of a living planet is not only believable but also probable. It’s only when the Doctor draws a conclusion Steven and Vicki have not yet reached that the obvious flaws in the argument become apparent. It takes a skilled writer to lead an audience down the wrong path without being obvious about it and Potter executes this with aplomb. And that makes the conclusion all the more rewarding – we get to enjoy some interesting science fiction ideas, but the ultimate resolution is rooted in simple human flaws.
The script is certainly strong, but the performances are even better. Maureen O’Brien is predictably excellent, improving even on her “The Doctor’s Tale” performance, but Peter Purves is an absolute star, not just in his turn as Steven but also in his impression of William Hartnell. Purves may have surpassed even Frazer Hines in his skills – the voice is very close but the tone and inflections are note-perfect, to the point where I almost forgot I wasn’t listening to Hartnell himself. I also enjoyed that the script didn’t sideline the Doctor – the Lost Stories didn’t shy away from including the early Doctors and these stories shouldn’t either. Lastly, the supporting cast is strong, especially in the shifting roles of Moreland (Richard Hope) and Thorn (Peter Forbes).
The production is strong as ever. Lisa Bowerman typically gets great performances when she’s in the director’s chair, and the sound design from Toby Hrycek-Robinson expertly captures the era and the enclosed, “studio-bound” nature of the script. Overall, there’s not a great deal to say about “The Bounty of Ceres” other than it’s a well-written, well-acted Doctor Who story that entertains throughout. Hopefully the Early Adventures will eventually have its own “Farewell, Great Macedon,” but for now, stories like this won’t draw any complaint.
After fifteen years of producing Doctor Who audio stories, it’s no surprise that Big Finish has brought back almost every single recurring character from the classic series for repeat performances. Yet, for whatever reason, it took them until now, the final release of 2014, to bring back the Rani – and due to the unfortunate passing of Kate O’Mara, Big Finish was required to recast the part. The result, Justin Richards’ “The Rani Elite” is yet another disappointment with absolutely nothing interesting to offer.
Remember “Time and the Rani,” in which the eponymous Time Lord collected the intelligences of a number of geniuses to create a super brain to operate a “time manipulator?” Well, she’s at it again, except now she’s collecting the intelligences of a bunch of college students in order to… reverse engineer chaos theory, I guess. In true Pip and Jane Baker tradition, Richards comes up with a nonsensical idea and then fails to explain it in any detail, so hooray for tradition. I suppose it’s in keeping for the Rani to be skulking around corridors and conducting experiments, but would it have killed Richards to give her something interesting to do? It’s such generic mad scientist material that Siobhan Redmond does nothing to elevate.
Speaking of which, let’s talk casting – I don’t know if it’s down to the script or the performance or both, but Redmond is absolutely dreadful in this. I’ve seen the performance praised for being “amoral” – thing is, “amoral” doesn’t mean “is a robot.” Her line readings are consistently flat, only exhibiting emotion in moments of brief irritation with the Doctor. There were moments when I thought she sounded like a computerized voice reading out the lines. Was this a deliberate choice, to play against Kate O’Mara’s incredible campiness to emphasize the characteristics of this new incarnation? A couple of briefly interesting moments do nothing to change the utterly boring nature of her performance, so I hope she shows some personality in future appearances.
So with the main hook of a new Rani a failure, does the story have anything else to offer? Sadly not, as the first three episodes consist largely of the characters running up and down corridors and getting captured. Ideas are raised and then forgotten – there’s a moment when a tearful Peri begs the Doctor not to allow her brain to be transferred again, and a desperate Doctor promises he’ll never let that happen. But the Doctor fails, and Peri briefly loses her mind again… and then once it’s put right, it’s never mentioned again. In fact, “it’s never mentioned again” applies to this whole trilogy: this is supposed to be a slightly older Peri who’s not so quick to trust the Doctor, but Richards writes everything like it’s 1985 again and completely disregards any sense of a character arc.
Here’s a serious question: why should I care about plot elements like that when the people producing the stories obviously do not? Time and again, we’re given the beginnings of character arcs that are disregarded so flagrantly it almost seems defiant. This reached its nadir with the final Hex trilogy, in which the *same author* that started an arc ignored it in the conclusion, but it’s almost as bad here. Are we going to do anything with this different take on Peri? Is her relationship with the Doctor going to change in any meaningful way? And it’s not just the characterization: there’s absolutely no imagination in the monthly range, no attempt to do anything different, no attempt to produce anything with even a hint of significance or thematic resonance. It’s telling that the best monthly release of the year was an anthology featuring mostly new authors and no major continuity references – and then right back to more of the same, culminating in the company’s first ever Rani story, which they gave to Justin Richards because of course they gave it to Justin Richards.
Sure, the production is fine, though I wonder how much of Redmond’s performance to blame on Ken Bentley. But the production is always fine. Sure, Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are good. But Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are always good. Sure, it’s entertaining enough and it’s not offensive or anything. But most Big Finish is entertaining enough and inoffensive. “The Rani Elite” is yet another in the increasingly long line of bland, boring Doctor Who stories called the Big Finish monthly range. I used to look forward to these.
The second story in 2014’s final trilogy, “Masters of Earth” from Mark Wright and Cavan Scott, sees the sixth Doctor and Peri return to Earth in 2163 during the Dalek invasion first seen during the William Hartnell era. It’s a solid enough action runaround with a couple of interesting twists at the conclusion, but ultimately there’s not enough going on here to put the story among the classics.
This review is going to sound like I disliked “Masters of Earth,” and that’s not entirely true. There’s actually a lot to enjoy here, most of which revolves around the acting and production. Colin Baker is up to his usual high standard, while it’s interesting to hear Nicola Bryant’s take on an older, world-wearier Peri who seems less interested in bickering and more interested in genuinely challenging the Doctor. While Tracy Wiles’ character is all over the map, her performance is solid throughout, and Brian McCardie is even better – Weir is a believable, somewhat sympathetic character even though he’s in no way a good person. It’s rare to have three-dimensional supporting characters in stories like this, but you can usually depend upon Scott and Wright to provide them.
The big problem with “Masters of Earth,” on the other hand, is that in spite of its successful production, it’s not really about anything. The first three episodes go on and on with action set piece after action set piece – the Doctor and Peri land, get captured, escape, encounter Varga plants, encounter Slythers in the sea, fight off infection, explore the deserted Orkneys, and so forth, and not a minute of it seems at all important. It’s certainly better written than other Dalek runarounds Big Finish has released, which is why I’m not as down on it, but for a story that plays up its setting so much it’s remarkable how little it’s actually used. We get window dressing – Robomen, Daleks with satellite dishes on their backs – but nothing that seriously engages with the Dalek invasion. The Doctor is audibly terrified when the TARDIS first lands when he figures out where they are – what are they going to do if he’s forced to interfere with the actions of his past self? What if the Daleks capture and interrogate him? Heck, the blurb even says “The rebellion must fail – and as a Time Lord, the Doctor can do nothing to help” – so why does the story fail to engage with this possibility? Heck, even when the Doctor is captured and interrogated, he spends the session mocking and ignoring the Black Dalek!
At least the final episode tries to claw back some significance for the story, though the eye-rolling revelation that the runaround of the previous three episodes was actually an elaborate Dalek test is difficult to take seriously. And when one character is seen to change allegiances at least four times in the same story, it stretches belief. Interesting concepts are introduced and then dropped. Can the human race be as bad as the Daleks if you let them? Sure, quite possibly, so why not explore that over the course of four episodes rather than ten minutes at the end? How does the Doctor’s failure to wipe out the Daleks in “Genesis” inform his actions here? Couldn’t we have spent more than a minute on that? Episode 4 is one part of a great story; episodes 1-3 are three parts of an average one.
The production is generally excellent, especially the direction and the suitable score from Nicholas Briggs. I enjoyed Martin Montague’s sound design, though it occasionally falls prey to the Big Finish tendency to communicate action via incomprehensible explosions and screaming. Overall, “Masters of Earth” is disappointing. It’s largely an action story, and while it’s a fairly well-told action story, it gets just interesting enough in the final episode to make you wonder what might have been. Despite the tone of this review, I enjoyed listening to it, but even though I enjoyed what it was I was disappointed in what it wasn’t.
The end of 2014 and another trilogy begins for Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor, following on from the loss of Flip and reintroducing Peri to the range. The first story, Nev Fountain’s “The Widow’s Assassin,” is witty and interesting, as you’d expect from the author – but it’s also overcrowded, cluttered, and far too interested in Doctor Who continuity for its own good. Still, it’s the sort of thing I class as a success, in large part because its tone is so much different from the usual Big Finish release.
There’s no doubt that “The Widow’s Assassin” has all the trappings of a comedy story, and even the style of the comedy varies from episode to episode and sometimes scene to scene. This isn’t surprising, as Fountain is a rather eclectic writer, but it’s unusual to directly mix pantomime aspects (a walking sheep as a character) with Python/Adams humor (guards so generic they are actually named Guard One and Guard Two). This style isn’t to my taste – I much preferred “The Kingmaker,” which was equally bonkers in terms of its plot but had a much more focused comedic style – but it’s difficult to make “not my thing” the basis of a review. Besides, there were several laugh-out-loud moments, including the body-swap sequence. I’ve mentioned before that, for such a sci-fi staple, Doctor Who stories rarely indulge in that plot device, but it certainly works here with Baker and Bryant doing fantastic impressions of one another.
Much like Fountain’s “Omega,” there’s a big reveal here, about how we all misinterpreted the conclusion of “The Trial of a Time Lord.” I appreciate the effort to retcon what was one of the dumbest resolutions in the history of the TV series – seriously, Peri marries Yrcanos? – and I think it largely works, though the script goes one twist too far when we learn what’s actually in Peri’s head. While I appreciate that resurrecting Kiv would have led to yet another Mentor story about the evils of unrestrained capitalism, introducing an unrelated mind parasite from the depths of the Doctor’s subconscious struck me as little more than a plot device, and the fourth episode suddenly becoming about the Doctor’s fear of rejection is an uneasy fit with the farcical tone of the rest of the story. There’s nothing wrong with telling a serious story with comedic overtones – look at “The Myth Makers” for an early Doctor Who example – but I think “The Widow’s Assassin” hews too far in the comedic direction for its dramatic points to be taken entirely seriously. Also, Flip’s story is resolved, largely as an afterthought – and it can’t be accidental that a story so devoted to erasing Peri’s terrible exit turns around and gives that same exit to Flip!
I feel more positive about this story than this review sounds, though, largely for the multitude of entertaining moments scattered throughout the script. I loved the Guard One (Andrew Dickens)/Guard Two (John Banks) interplay, the double-act between Pteratrark (Banks again) and Flitamus (Dickens again), the clever hints in the sound design that Wolsey (Tim Chipping) is a sheep before the revelation comes, and many other elements besides. I greatly enjoyed the conversations between the Doctor and Peri and the rare opportunity to see the Doctor apologizing for (however unwillingly) abandoning a companion. And while I didn’t know if the tones worked together, I did enjoy what Fountain had to say about the Doctor’s fears – it’s an interesting look at what motivated the Doctor during the classic series.
The production is successful as ever. There’s a lot going on here for sound designer Steve Foxon, but everything is convincing, and the score from Howard Carter is fitting. Ken Bentley’s direction is unimpeachable as usual. Overall, “The Widow’s Assassin” is a guarded success, and that’s based largely on my appreciation of the humor. For me, the mix of tones was too much to take; if this is to your liking, however, you just might think this is a masterpiece.
While the second Early Adventure remains in the Hartnell era – as indeed will the entire first season – it swaps out Susan for Vicki, placing itself firmly within season 2 continuity. Furthermore, it embraces the Doctor Who historical style, something Big Finish has never shied away from. The problem, unfortunately, is that the strong pedigree behind Marc Platt’s “The Doctor’s Tale” completely fails to make it at all interesting.
Almost every Doctor Who historical story has a hook of some kind. Perhaps the TARDIS crew meets a famous person, or participates in a famous historical event. Perhaps the story is grim and violent, or perhaps it’s a humorous pastiche. Perhaps it’s a “pseudo-historical,” with aliens running around behind the scenes, or perhaps it’s a traditional story free of sci-fi elements. While the latter certainly describes this story, it’s also the most significant thing one can say about it. It’s 1400, and Henry IV has usurped the throne, but we’re spared any court intrigue or tales of battle in lieu of a quiet stop at Sonning Palace with the powerless young queen Isabella. Thomas Arundel is stomping around, freshly restored to Archbishop of Canterbury, but he doesn’t really do anything other than proclaim his distaste for the Lollards. A character takes an undesirable romantic interest in Barbara, and then she promptly disappears for the majority of the running time. Ian remarks that he is a knight of Jaffa, yet nobody ponders that, given his age, this doesn’t make any sense. I could go on, but the point is clear: there are a number of interesting avenues this story could head down and yet it opts for none of them.
Which isn’t to say that “The Doctor’s Tale” is a waste of time. While Geoffrey Chaucer (Gareth Armstrong) isn’t given the usual celebrity treatment, he is given a fascinating presentation as a conspirator – indeed, his writings are his least interesting characteristic in this story. In one of the more entertaining scenes, Barbara’s decision to recite Chaucer as entertainment backfires as she doesn’t grasp the political climate as well as she thinks. Isabella (Alice Haig) is portrayed as a bratty pre-teen but somehow manages not to be irritating but instead rather endearing, and her relationship with Vicki is quite pleasant.
The whole story is pleasant, in fact. Platt’s script has a very languid, almost nonchalant pace, and despite the bloody national climate there is rarely any true sense of danger to the regular characters. Even when Ian faces execution, there’s a sense of expectation for some sort of savior to arrive, due to his placement at the end of a very long line of convicts. “The Doctor’s Tale” is very much a stroll through history – in fact, the characters have every reason and ability to leave in the second episode, and the only reason the story continues is that the Doctor and Barbara arbitrarily decide they want to make a pilgrimage like in the Canterbury Tales. The production is equally solid – Ken Bentley directs to his usual high standard, while the sound design from Toby Hrycek-Robinson is quite evocative of the period.
Ultimately, I don’t know quite what to make of “The Doctor’s Tale.” It’s certainly not a comedy, but it’s not especially dramatic. It doesn’t seem to have much of a story to tell – the TARDIS lands, the crew wanders around for a while, and then they leave. The title is an ode to Chaucer, but the story isn’t, even with his presence. But it’s well made, well acted, and I suppose there are less pleasant ways to spend two hours.
In addition to the Fourth Doctor Adventures, and the Lost Stories box set, Big Finish released an additional box of Tom Baker stories: “Philip Hinchcliffe Presents,” in which the legendary producer offers two story ideas originally intended for television and adapted to audio by Marc Platt. The quality of the set is unfortunately offset by the cost of approximately six million dollars, but on the whole it is a much more successful offering than the 4DAs have been of late.
The first story, “The Ghosts of Gralstead,” sees the Doctor and Leela returning to Victorian London after the events of “The Talons of Weng-Chiang.” It’s interesting to look at this story in light of the current Tom Baker series: while that series claims to ape the style of the TV stories of the time, “Gralstead” is positively dripping with Hinchcliffe-era atmosphere. The important thing about that is the relative freshness of the storytelling: while “Gralstead” is certainly another Hammer Horror pastiche with its roots in other Doctor Who stories, it’s not at all concerned with being an homage. Rather, it tells a new story and tells it well, something sorely lacking in other recent Tom Baker releases.
Ultimately, though, it’s a season 14 horror story. It’s a pretty good one, with body snatchers and alien beings hungering for human brains, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. The Hinchcliffe era was famous for its violent and graphic imagery, and “Gralstead” does not disappoint in this regard, with sound designer Howard Carter offering many gruesome sounds of people being stabbed or devoured. The story also takes a couple of unexpected detours: first, in episode five, the characters pile into the TARDIS and travel to Africa, a wholly unnecessary trip that feels interesting but ultimately is just there to pad out the running time; second, at the conclusion, the villain(s) are revealed to be indescribable, alien, god-like beings rather than evil individuals like Magnus Greel. Unfortunately, this leads to a conclusion in which the characters stand around describing two other characters fighting, and the whole thing sort of grinds to a halt instead of ending organically.
The six-episode length is another problem, as the story has a strong tendency to repeat itself. There’s an alien artifact that can restore the dead to life, something that is used by unscrupulous people to demonstrate supernatural powers to nonbelievers. And there’s a dramatic moment where Leela is killed, only to be resurrected later on by that artifact. So far so good, but did we really have to go back through the entire kill-and-resurrect cycle again with the Doctor? There’s a definite sense of padding throughout, something very common to six-episode Doctor Who stories; I know fans love to crow about how this lets us “get to know the characters” or whatever, but all of that could have been accomplished in four episodes, not six.
Overall, though, “Gralstead” is a very enjoyable listen. Tom Baker gives one of his most energetic Big Finish performances, and Louise Jameson matches him throughout. The characters are well drawn, the production is atmospheric, and the story actually feels of its era without seeming like a forced exercise in nostalgia. If the 4DA range was like this, I doubt it would see very many complaints. More like this, please.
7/10
THE DEVIL’S ARMADA
The second story, “The Devil’s Armada,” is another pseudo-historical in the same vein, though it’s set earlier, in Elizabethan times. Much like “Gralstead,” it’s full of atmosphere and convincing performances, and the storytelling is certainly entertaining, but it’s also too familiar to achieve true greatness.
I understand that it’s unreasonable to expect every Doctor Who author to be familiar with every other story, and I understand that these stories are based on ideas from years ago, but we really don’t need yet another Doctor Who story explaining where the human concept of the Devil comes from, especially when the answer is “ancient, powerful alien.” The Dæmons, Sutekh, the creature in “The Satan Pit” – we’ve been over this, and the idea of humanity taking its inspiration from alien visitors is therefore uninspiring. But if you’re going to do it, do it convincingly – and the story certainly does so, wrapping itself in the Catholic/Protestant divide of the era. The script is unafraid to use religious imagery, and the decision to counterpoint William Redcliffe (Jamie Newall) against the presumptive Devil is a very good one.
The story also takes place over a wide range of settings and locations, building up to a scene in which the Doctor and Leela find themselves on a gunpowder boat approaching the Spanish Armada! I’ve always enjoyed Doctor Who stories that do this, exploiting the four-episode structure to its fullest extent, and “The Devil’s Armada” is no exception. Tom Baker is on especially fine form throughout, even more energetic than in “Gralstead,” but Leela is unfortunately wasted a bit, relegated to following the Doctor around and asking questions without getting to be especially proactive. The production is generally solid, but the opening door sound effect sounds like it was lifted from AIM – or was I just hearing things?
It’s hard to say what I thought of “The Devil’s Armada,” as there’s not a lot that sets it apart from stories of the era or even the other story in the box set. It tries to be about something, which is good, but the subject matter is one of the most well worn in all of Doctor Who, which erases much of the good will. It features great acting and fine production values, as well as an exciting script that holds the interest throughout. And as I said at the conclusion of the “Gralstead” review, this sort of nostalgia is okay. It’s a new story in the style of the era, rather than a hackneyed “Return to the Planet of Evil” idea. I’d still like to get some innovative storytelling into the Tom Baker ranges, but this is still a welcome departure from the sort of thing we’ve received of late.
It wasn’t too long ago that the Sylvester McCoy stories had supplanted the Colin Baker entries as the flagship releases of the Big Finish Doctor Who monthly range, a golden age of audio drama that reached its pinnacle with the twin brilliance of “Project: Destiny” and “A Death in the Family.” The story of the Doctor, Ace, and Hex came to a conclusion great enough to deserve to stand alongside the greatest Doctor Who stories in any medium. And then, inexplicably, it kept going, and despite a couple of high points it ended up crashing and burning in “Gods and Monsters,” one of the worst releases in the history of the company. And then, even though Hex was dead, the story still kept going! So finally, after years of waiting and countless unnecessary stories, we come to (I hope) the last conclusion, Matt Fitton’s “Signs and Wonders” – and it won’t surprise anyone to learn that it’s predictably terrible.
I’m not sure Big Finish ever figured out why “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” and “The Curse of Fenric” are great stories. They’re surprisingly character-focused and dripping with atmosphere – the fact that the Doctor confronts “Elder Gods” in both stories is almost incidental to their successes. Yet this recent arc has besieged our ears with Elder God after Elder God, culminating in the scene in “Gods and Monsters” where everyone stood back and watched two of them fight it out. So how do we one-up this for “Signs and Wonders?” Why, an even MORE powerful Elder God, of course – but this one’s actually pretty nice! Yep, that’s the dramatic twist: the bad guy isn’t bad at all, and just wants to die somewhere where he won’t hurt anyone. I admit I didn’t see this coming, but talk about boring revelations. Of course, something like this could work very well if it represented the central conflict of the story writ large, but it doesn’t. Instead, all the Doctor has to do is press a few buttons in the TARDIS and the problem is solved. Sure, he risks burning out his mind in the process, but since there’s virtually no foreshadowing of this risk, we’re not given any reason to be concerned.
It’s a shame, because the story starts brilliantly. English people suffering mass delusions suggesting the end of the world, an unlikely preacher guiding the people through a mix of religion and celebration – this is great, foreboding stuff, and could have made a fantastic story in its own right. Even when Rufus Stone (Warren Brown)’s angels are revealed to be aliens battling a plague of interstellar leeches, it could still work – it’s a bit ordinary for that introduction, but great Doctor Who has been done with less. But once the arc plot gets involved, everything falls apart at the seams. The Hector Thomas story is resolved so perfunctorily it’s insulting. Oh, turns out everything we learned about Hex’s lost memories was wrong, and here they are! And so Hector is written out, with no reaction from anybody. Wasn’t the whole point that Hector was a person in his own right, not just a vessel awaiting the return of Hex’s memories? Wasn’t the point that Ace was chasing a ghost and the Doctor couldn’t make her see reason? Fitton himself wrote “Afterlife,” setting all this up – or should I say NOT setting all this up, as you couldn’t ignore the themes of that story more if you tried. Don’t even ask if anyone cares that Hector has been destroyed, because you know the answer (of course not) if you’ve listened to Big Finish at all in the past couple of years. Nothing sums up “Gods and Monsters” better than the scene in which the Doctor realizes that Hector’s lost memories give him a unique ability to handle Rufus Stone, and so he sends Hector on a mission to find the prophet – and then Rufus gets killed, Hector gets his memories back, and the Doctor’s theory gets ignored. What?
You’d think that, with Hex back and in his final story, he’d be an integral part of the resolution. And sure, he attempts a heroic self-sacrifice to defeat a villain, but it’s not tied to his character in any meaningful way – save for Ace and Sally Morgan yelling memories at him from the background – and there’s certainly no thematic resonance with the story as a whole. Oh, did you notice how I waited this long to mention Sally’s involvement in the story? That should be a good hint about her importance to it. Ace is dreadful for the second story in a row, as Big Finish continues its apparent drive to suck any development out of her character and return her to the petulant teenager we saw on television. Remember all the stuff in “Afterlife” about how she’s been in the TARDIS for so long that she no longer fits in the real world? If not, I don’t blame you, since it hasn’t come up even once since then – and why would you expect it to be mentioned in a direct sequel written by the same author? Sally does point out that Ace sees everything as a competition, and while that’s true, that’s the sort of thing that should be explored in the story, not mentioned and abruptly forgotten.
I said back in my review of “Afterlife” that if the Hector arc ends with Hex back to normal and back in the TARDIS, it would be a colossal failure, and – with one obvious difference – that’s basically where we end up. Nobody learns anything! Ace spends every moment since “Afterlife” insisting against all logic and reason that Hex can be restored, despite everyone from the Doctor to Hector himself telling her she’s wrong – and then she turns out to be right! So what’s the message here? “Ace never gives up on her friends?” Christ, that’s the best we can do after 27 years with this character? And then, after she finally gets what she wants, what does she do? Gives him a big hug and then pisses off back to the TARDIS! What?! That’s it? They just leave quietly and then show up years later to check on Hex as husband and father?
Everything about this is clunky. The plot veers from point to point with no consistency, the characterization is sloppy, the performances are shaky, the sound design is from the “loud noises = exciting” school, the dialogue resorts to “Look, Doctor! There’s energy shooting from his arms!” stuff that sounded bad 15 years ago, the direction is flat – and this is what was supposed to conclude years of storytelling? This arc should have ended twice before, but I suppose beating a dead horse is exciting in some eyes. It’s even difficult to review, as it’s so disjointed I can’t figure out how to structure my commentary. But despite all of that, I’ll close on a positive note: it’s not nearly as bad as “Gods and Monsters,” so…
I’m not even sure what to call the current seventh Doctor arc – the Hector arc, I guess? – but its penultimate story, “Mask of Tragedy,” comes from James Goss, one of the few writers to start on the new series and migrate to classic series work. Unfortunately, inconsistencies of tone and some surprisingly poor performances and sound design let down what could have been a very successful script.
To begin with, I love the audacious conceit around which Goss frames his story: ancient Greece is such an important period of human history, it is besieged by alien tourists and time travelers, so much so that the Greeks themselves are aware of their visitors. This sounds ridiculous – even stupid, honestly – but Goss makes it work, so much so that it seems like one of the most natural elements of the story. Cleon (Alisdair Simpson) interrogates aliens for information and exiles them if he doesn’t like their answers; Aristophanes (Samuel West) drafts them into his theatrical performances. The Doctor floats around in the middle of it all, both manipulating events from the background and enjoying a holiday.
The problem is how all this comes together – or, more accurately, doesn’t come together. I’m entirely unsure what “Mask of Tragedy” is trying to be. It’s full of comedic moments, many of which provoke genuine laughs, but it’s also full of violence and cruelty. There’s nothing wrong with mixing tones for dramatic effect, but this story veers from comedy to drama far too often – sometimes even in the same scene – to feel anything but disjointed. For example, Ace is exiled from Athens and doomed to confront the Spartans, but then the Spartans turn out to be a gang of equality-minded women, but then they reverse field and start brutally slaughtering the Athenians, but then they stop to drink and watch theater. It feels careless, as though Goss was being pulled in several different directions as he wrote the script and couldn’t keep it all together. And none of that mentions the ongoing tale of Hector, who spends 99% of the story acting as a typical Doctor Who companion but flips out in the very last scene about how cruel and manipulative the Doctor and Ace can be. The “real” Hex wasn’t like this, they argue – yes he was! That was Hex’s entire arc – the ordinary person who wasn’t built to handle TARDIS trips like the Doctor and Ace! We did this leading up to “A Death in the Family,” then we did it again leading up to “Gods and Monsters” – do we really have to do it a third time? I get the point, guys!
I normally praise the production of these stories but “Mask of Tragedy” is an unfortunate exception. Big Finish has been producing Doctor Who stories for fifteen years and they still can’t produce a convincing crowd scenes – this isn’t a big problem unless you have a script like this that calls for a ton of them. Emily Tucker just about pulls off the sound of a Spartan leader inspiring her troops to battle, but an enthusiastic command followed by the sound of a few swords clanking together just doesn’t sound convincing. Worse yet, the script has Ace joining in on these yelling scenes, and Sophie Aldred is absolutely dreadful in them. I don’t really blame Aldred, since she’s been playing the part for over 25 years and the writers should know her weak points by now, but it’s distressing to hear something so unconvincing. Director Ken Bentley should have intervened.
Overall, “Mask of Tragedy” isn’t bad. It’s a historical in the style of the new series, with celebrities (Aristophanes, Cleon), aliens, and people speaking with modern idioms. But there are too many flaws for me to give it a positive score – my reaction when it was over was “Well that was a bit of a mess,” after all. But it sounds different from the usual Big Finish offerings of late, and it’s still refreshing after “Revenge of the Swarm.”
When Big Finish’s Lost Stories range began, they tackled famous lost stories like Colin Baker’s original Season 23 or Sylvester McCoy’s never-filmed Season 27. But as the range continued, they began producing lost 1960s stories, presenting them as hybrids between the almost fully narrated Companion Chronicles and the full-cast plays of their other ranges. Now, with the Lost Stories ended, BF has started “The Early Adventures” range: original 1960s stories produced in the same vein as their lost predecessors. The first of these, Andrew Smith’s “Domain of the Voord,” takes a bizarre and roundly mocked alien race from the first season and turns them into a dangerous threat.
I’ll begin by saying, as I have in many other reviews, that I do not particularly care and have never particularly cared about a story’s ability to reproduce the feel of the era in which it is set. Yes, I have the same nostalgic fan gene as everyone else, but I’m not going to give high marks to a story purely because it sounds like a lost 1960s soundtrack. It’s true that, for the most part, “Domain of the Voord” sounds like it could have been shown on television – but it’s also full of large-scale action set pieces that would never have been attempted in 1963. More concerning is the format, which doesn’t quite work. The Lost Stories relied heavily on narration; “Domain of the Voord,” however, is consciously full-cast with occasional, seemingly random bursts of narration. William Russell also plays the Doctor and Carole Ann Ford also plays Barbara, except when the narration takes over, and except in the middle two episodes when Smith writes the two characters completely out of the story. I know the regular actors would occasionally take vacations and miss episodes, but it’s not the same thing here, where you’re insisting on doing a full-cast story when half of your regular cast is dead.
The story itself is fine, if unimpressive. We learned virtually nothing about the Voord in “The Keys of Marinus,” so Smith has free reign to do whatever he wants with them, and he does an admirable job of making them interesting. There’s some Doctor Who fan revisionism in here – they’re not just cheap rubber diving masks, they’re horrible mind control devices fused to a victim’s skin! – but I like the idea of the Voord as a hybrid race, so I’ll let that slide. I also enjoyed the Voord attempts to bring Susan to their side: the “you will let us in of your own free will” was interesting, at least until they threw it all away in lieu of a cackling supervillain plot. And that’s ultimately the problem: there’s not much more going on here than a traditional rebels-vs.-evil-empire story, and anything interesting Smith does with the villains is overlooked by the conclusion. It’s also drawn out far too long, but that’s another “just like the ‘60s!” feature, I suppose.
No complaints about the production, though. Russell and Ford are great as ever, and you’d never know it was Andrew Dickens playing both Admiral Kaan and Overlord Tarlak. Ken Bentley directs to his usual high standard, and the sound design from Toby Hrycek-Robinson is excellent, especially the orchestral flourishes in the score. Overall, “Domain of the Voord” is a solid debut for the Early Adventures range. It’s a well-written story that fleshes out one of the least-known villains from the classic series. There’s nothing particularly impressive about it, and the format feels awkward at times, but if the kinks can be worked out there’s strong potential here.
Over their fifteen years of producing Doctor Who, Big Finish has slowly expanded its roster to include almost every single surviving cast member from the classic series. Only a few holdouts remained, a list that grew even shorter with the announcement of the casting of Matthew Waterhouse as Adric. Instead of bringing Adric back in the main range, however, Big Finish opted to release a “Fifth Doctor Box Set” containing two stories starring the fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan. The first of these, Jonathan Morris’s “Psychodrome,” is an obvious homage to season 19 that still manages to surpass almost every story of the era.
If there’s a common criticism of the classic TV series in light of the revival, it’s that the classic series did little to flesh out its regular characters. We learned about them through their actions, and some were quite memorable, but very little was established about their backgrounds or even their motivations. The TARDIS crew of the early Davison years is an appropriate example of this: with all the bickering and exasperation, it’s entirely fair to wonder why these people continue to travel together. Morris, perhaps recognizing this, gives the era something it desperately needed: a full-on character piece that explains the personalities and relationships of the Doctor and his companions. It’s set directly after “Castrovalva” – Tegan’s lipstick is still drying on the TARDIS walls – and shows, through living metaphor, how the crewmembers view one another.
As mentioned above, this is the first Big Finish story to feature Matthew Waterhouse – though not the first to feature Adric – and it’s fitting that it’s a better presentation of the character than anything we saw on TV. Adric was always easy to dislike, but why was he so unlikable? Consider, as Morris presents here, that this is a teenager, constantly needing to confront feelings of loneliness and abandonment. He lost his brother, he left his people – heck, he left his own universe – and he even lost his best friend and traveling companion when the Doctor regenerated. So why shouldn’t he constantly be trying to prove himself? Why shouldn’t he be passionately devoted to the Doctor, even if the Doctor is no longer the man he met? Yes, he’s irritating about it, but what teenager isn’t? And don’t forget about Waterhouse himself, who returns to his character with a confident, assured performance that only suffers slightly from his attempts to pitch up his voice to sound more youthful. If Adric had been like this on television, he would have been much more popular.
The other characters are served equally well by Morris’s script. Despite countless years and countless stories featuring Sarah Sutton, this is one of only a few that directly engages with her feelings of loss after the destruction of Traken. Sutton’s performance is touching and emotional, and you can finally see how her regal, scientific exterior is concealing her inner pain. We also get to see Tegan dealing with grief, with her anger over the death of her aunt and her frustration with the alien, unrelatable TARDIS crew. It’s easy to sympathize with her desire to leave and return home, as Morris presents her as a sympathetic human being instead of a lunatic desperate to make her flight on time. Even the Doctor is well served: his greatest fear is perfect for this incarnation, one always driven to lead his friends on great adventures but earn their approval in the process. Peter Davison is magnificent; he can’t recapture his youthful voice, but there’s an energy to his performance here that we haven’t heard in quite some time.
I’ve written about the characters; what of the plot? Morris gives us a world generated from the minds of the regular characters, with inhabitants based upon their perceptions of one another. This isn’t a cheap, shock revelation, either – each group of supporting characters is instantly recognizable once you understand what’s happening, and each tells us more about the characters we already know. Yes, it’s a thin plot, and yes, the ending is straight out of “The Dæmons,” but none of that really matters: this is a character piece, and the plot is almost incidental. If I have one complaint, it’s that Morris over-eggs the pudding with continuity references, some of which – including a Time War reference – are far too on-the-nose.
I haven’t even mentioned the production, which is fantastic. Ken Bentley is one of Big Finish’s best directors, but the star of the show is the sound design from Fool Circle Productions, who recapture the music of the era so expertly you’d be forgiven for thinking they employ Paddy Kingsland. Overall, “Psychodrome” is a strong success. It manages to combine nostalgia for a classic TV era with modern, character driven sensibilities, and does so with confidence and skill. If this had gone out instead of “Four to Doomsday,” we might all be calling season 19 one of the greatest in Doctor Who’s long history.
Highly recommended.
9/10
ITERATIONS OF I
The second entry in the Fifth Doctor Box Set is “Iterations of I” from John Dorney, celebrated writer of “Solitaire” and other successful Big Finish scripts. It’s not a character piece; it’s a haunted house story involving some rather speculative writing about sentient numbers. And for the most part it works, propped up at its weaker moments by the excellent central performances – but it still can’t quite reach the heights of its companion piece.
“Iterations of I” is also consciously part of season 19. It’s a Bidmead-style story through and through, using realistic scientific names as window dressing around fantastic, fairytale concepts. Does it make any rational sense that the Doctor can build a jamming device against sentient numbers using a calculator from 1981? Absolutely not, but it doesn’t have to: the threat is real, the concepts are understandable, and the science just has to sound right as it sails along largely forgotten. It’s certainly strongest in its first half, when the characters have no idea what’s going on and it’s a straight haunted house story: the repetition of “I” is genuinely creepy in places, with Sarah Sutton especially doing a great job conveying that feeling.
If there’s a problem, though, it comes in the second half of the story as the conceptual heart of the piece is revealed. The drama largely revolves around the supporting characters, and those characters are largely clichéd and predictable. The story feels like it’s about to wrap up until one character goes rogue and takes Adric hostage, and from there things are drawn out even further with the revelation about the numeric predator. At times it felt as though the script was being stretched out to fill the running time – and while this certainly isn’t unusual in Doctor Who, it’s not exactly welcome when it happens. The fourth episode in particular grinds to a halt with the aforementioned calculator scene, which seems almost unnecessary in that it sounds like the Doctor and companions could just run into the TARDIS and leave but are dicking around outside for reasons unclear.
No complaints about the characterization, though! This is a fantastic script for Peter Davison, and he runs with it, giving a tour-de-force performance that runs the gamut of emotions and sounding even more like his 1981 self than in “Psychodrome.” And, as before, it’s also a great script for Matthew Waterhouse, whose Adric is still a brat but much more sympathetic than he was ever allowed to be on screen. His Alzarian healing powers are a bit much, though – a close-range shotgun blast will take a leg clean off, not just inflict a flesh wound!
The production credits are the same as “Psychodrome” – Ken Bentley directing, Fool Circle sound designing – and the result is just as impressive. The synths of the Radiophonic Workshop were often self-consciously sci-fi, but both this and “State of Decay” demonstrate how that style can contribute to a scary atmosphere. Overall, “Iterations of I” is a strong release and part of an excellent set. If the biggest criticism I can level against it is “It’s not as good as ‘Psychodrome,’” I think that’s pretty darn good.
August 2014, and the annual Sylvester McCoy trilogy is upon us, this time picking up from the ongoing plot established in “Afterlife,” the final release of 2013. The first story in this trilogy, Jonathan Morris’s “Revenge of the Swarm,” is our first full story with quasi-new companion Hector in the TARDIS. Naturally, this means we get an intelligent, character-driven story that helps define the subtle differences between Hex and Hector, how his relationships with Ace and the Doctor have changed, and so forth, right? No? All we get is an uninspired callback to one of the worst stories of the 1970s that essentially writes out the one character we want to learn more about? Great.
I’m going to go back to my review of “Afterlife” for a moment:
“This could be a great arc if it’s used to explore Ace, if she does indeed get it all wrong, if she can’t bring her friend back, if it focuses on her inability to relate to the real world. But if, as I fear, it becomes a quest narrative that ends with Hex back in the TARDIS, it’ll be a colossal failure.”
Anyone want to guess where we’re headed? Remember at the end of “Afterlife” how Ace flatly stated she was “moving on” from Hex, her relationship with the Doctor irreparably changed? It’s not an exaggeration to say that this isn’t addressed at all: the Doctor and Ace are right back to their old ways, with Ace making the occasional insensitive comment to Hector about Hex and furiously defending the Doctor from Hector’s anger. Did “Afterlife” not happen? Honestly, that story wasn’t even subtle with how it developed the regulars, so why are those developments so comprehensively ignored here? Sure, we get some practical matters addressed – Hector’s missing memories are mentioned as part of the plot – but does this sound anything like a story following immediately on from the one that started with the painful meltdown over pancakes? We’re right back to the Doctor being a manipulative bastard, tricking Hector into making a painful, risky sacrifice instead of explaining the dangers to him from the start – and only after talking to him and confirming that there’s nothing of Hex left inside him. This is a deeply cruel thing to do, yet Ace pops right up to defend him against Hector’s fully justified anger. Are we setting up yet another story setting Ace against the Doctor? Shouldn’t she still be pissed off at him? How many times do we have to go through this?
I’m harping on the characterization because there’s honestly nothing else of interest going on in “Revenge of the Swarm.” Have you seen “The Invisible Enemy?” Then you’ve also heard the first half of “Revenge of the Swarm,” which is basically a repeat of its predecessor – the Swarm has been hiding in the TARDIS console the entire time, waiting for its moment to strike! This is clearly intended to be as over-the-top as possible, with director Ken Bentley obviously instructing his actors to chew as much scenery as they can find, but couldn’t we have something with even a hint of imagination? Perhaps we get it in the second half, where the Nucleus becomes more of a computer virus and the Doctor and Ace engage with it in virtual reality. Other reviewers have compared this to “Tron” – and rightfully so, given how derivative it feels. The dialogue is pure B-movie, the Swarm and Nucleus in particular given lines even more ludicrous than the ones they had on television.
Philip Olivier does hilarious things with his villainous dialogue, and clearly loves every moment he gets as the bad guy. I also appreciated Big Finish getting John Leeson back to voice the Nucleus again, and I must admit his vocal work is great. Sylvester McCoy, though, is anything but: it sounds like he’s reading the script for the first time as he performs it, rolling his “R”s to an unbelievable extent and using confused inflections when an “R” isn’t around. McCoy remains my favorite Doctor to this day, but this performance isn’t good enough. Sophie Aldred gives her usual performance, which isn’t a criticism except for the fact that this story shouldn’t feature Ace-as-usual.
I’ve gone on for long enough. This is reheated, derivative, unnecessary Doctor Who, in a release slot that should have been anything but. Pretty typical of the monthly range of late, sadly – and what a perfect time for my subscription to run out, huh?
I enjoy reading Styre’s reviews of the 4th Doctor Adventures I thought I’d have a go. I’ll start by saying the Tom Baker / Phillip Hinchcliffe years were really the only episodes I liked as a whole and “Terror of the Zygons” one of my favourites. I’ve was so overjoyed hearing Tom coming back and doing Dr Who audio plays. Foe & Valley of Death were Great and the 4th Doctor Adventures mostly excellent.
I agree with Styre on the Dalek ones I liked the least, Less is more when it comes to Daleks on audio and they were used way too much.
OK that said “Zygon Hunt” is Superb and best Tom yet, Well done Nick, Lets start with the music score By Alistair Lock which sets the correct mood immediately for this story, every bit as good as Geoffrey Burgon’s original Terror score. Overall Plot wise without going into any detail so as not to spoil links Perfectly to the original TV show but in no way is a copy. It moves along at a good pace, good setup, Nice wait for the Zygon reveal, Misunderstandings, Twist and Turns, The cliffhanger was great as it Wasn’t a put Dr or Leela in peril one but an important to the story one, a Super poignant ending and A Good moral / analysis of what we’re all doing here.
There were plenty of excellent Sub Plots / themes included killing animals for sport , should one get Intimately involved with Shape Changer , Should the Doctor Interfere or when should he , War and War Crimes to name a few. Some Terrific nods to the Original , Depth Charges, Hidden Camera, Target Book Zygon sting is back, Die Doctor Die, Faulty Jeeps , Champagne Cork Audio just to name a few also There is a wonderful Nod to Jack Nicholsons Famous end Speech in a few Good men and well delivered.
Everyone gave Good Performances, especially all the whispering which most of the cast did at some point.
Its fun when Tom and Louise do the running around thing, Tom is way more fit cause he seldom huffs and Puffs like lou, Sometimes description or exposition scenes in audio are clumsy but I didn’t notice any for this audio, a testament to Nick’s writing and shows he was a big lover of the original Zygon Story and put his Heart and Soul into this one, I wished they could have used this story for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary special, I will treasure this Zygon Hunt audio along with the original TV show.
“Zygon Hunt” is the final story of the third series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, and that’s about the best thing I can say about it. I’ve lamented, over and over, that this range lacks anything approaching ambition, that it rejects anything but repetition and mediocrity in the name of nostalgia. It seemed, ever so briefly, like we were getting away from that with “The Abandoned,” but here’s “Zygon Hunt” just in case we forgot what a Hinchcliffe-era story felt like to a teenaged Nick Briggs.
Briggs, writer-director because of course he is, once again manages to present a Doctor Who story devoid of anything but the most basic feelings of recognition and nostalgia. The story is called “Zygon Hunt,” but can anyone guess when comes the revelation that there’s a Zygon duplicate about? Why yes, it IS the first cliffhanger! We’re in a futuristic, Earth Empire-type setting, so naturally there is an order of knights tasked with protecting the motherland. The Knights of the Grand Order of Oberon, perhaps? Briggs’ own Knights of Velyshaa? Nah, they’re completely different, but they’re still gruff and warlike and unapproachable. And their leader’s a psychopath, if that helps. The problem with this, just like almost everything else in this range, is that it’s so generic: absolutely nothing stands out, with the possible exception of Michael Maloney’s performance. One of the things I love about Doctor Who is that, even in the episodes I dislike, there are fascinating ideas or witty lines for me to enjoy. Stories like “Zygon Hunt” seem designed to bleed this enjoyment out of the series.
It took me close to a month to write this, partially because I was ill but partially because “Zygon Hunt” inspired no feelings whatsoever. If I love a story, I’ll write about it; if I hate a story, I’ll gleefully get the knives out; if I’m frustrated by a story, I’ll often talk through my feelings in my review. But this? In the words of the fourth Doctor himself, “How paralyzingly dull, boring, and tedious!” The Zygons were put to better use in “The Day of the Doctor,” and there they were deliberately employed as a generic Doctor Who monster. Hell, Tom Baker himself was put to better use in that episode and he was in it for three minutes! The attempts to make Mina (Gillian Kearney) sympathetic are so facile they don’t warrant description. And what happened to the real Mina, anyway? Did everyone forget? Speaking of inexplicable omissions, what happened to that Doctor-Leela conflict that started in “The King of Sontar?” Did everyone forget? Are we to deduce from the (excruciating) group laughter at the very end that everything is okay? Why does Briggs think the only way to characterize Leela is to portray her as an idiot? Why, if he has a “fourth Doctor filter” as described by him in the extras, does he apparently not use it when he writes the fourth Doctor? Why, why, why?!
What on earth is the point of “Zygon Hunt?” What was the point of “Destroy the Infinite?” What was the point of “Energy of the Daleks” or “The Dalek Contract” or “The Evil One” or any of the rest of them? This range is the worst BF has ever done and it’s not particularly close. Every month it’s the same reheated, generic nonsense. Sure, occasionally a Jonathan Morris or John Dorney will inject some life into the proceedings, but pushing the boat out? Trying something new? Forget it. They might as well change the banner ad: “Doctor Who: Living in the Past.” Well, you can keep it.
The fifth series of Companion Chronicles rolls on with the ninth entry, David Lock’s “The Forbidden Time,” another story that uses the vocal talents of two TV regulars. There are some fantastic ideas on display here, but they’re held in check by a curiously uninspiring framing device that’s too clever for its own good in places.
Nobody seems to know for sure who David Lock is; there’s a lighting designer from “Battlefield” with that name, while the various Doctor Who wiki entries seem to think it’s a pseudonym for Andy Lane. It certainly could be a Lane script, but why the pseudonym in the first place? In any case, most of “The Forbidden Time” takes place in what the Doctor describes as a shadow of normal time, a place where everything is seen in a fragile, monochrome version of reality. The quiet, haunting nature of this environment is brought out expertly by the sound design of Richard Fox and Lauren Yason, as are the sounds of the alien Vist that inhabit it. It’s fun to think about how this would have been presented on television, given that everything was in monochrome in the first place!
The characterization is also of a high standard. Credit to Lock for setting a story in the crowded TARDIS of the early Troughton era, but “killing” Ben midway through the first episode is a rather transparent way of reducing the number of characters. Polly is great, though – this is the combination of fragility and heroism that the best writers give her, rather than the helpless coffee maker she too often becomes. It’s also interesting to get insight into Jamie’s early days in the TARDIS, and how close he already feels to the crew. Frazer Hines gives a great performance despite his limited role, especially when Jamie gets choked up reflecting on Ben’s apparent death. This is also the more manipulative second Doctor of this era; unfortunately his plan involves saying “Oh no, don’t do that!” when he actually wants the Vist to do that, and it works!
The weakness of “The Forbidden Time” comes in the framing device, in which Polly gives a speech to an assembled, indistinct group of experts to inform them of the reasons behind a telepathic message received by the entire planet. There’s no reason for her to tell this entire story start to finish, the “cliffhanger” is far too “meta” for its own good (Really? A five-minute break?), and relaying Jamie’s parts of the story through voice recordings feels forced and unnecessary. It also runs into Big Finish’s long-standing inability to present convincing crowd scenes, though I won’t hold that against this story in particular. It reminds me of “The Trial of a Time Lord” in that the story crashes to a halt every time it returns to the framing sequence – though here the story itself is much better.
Overall, “The Forbidden Time” is still a success. Anneke Wills and Frazer Hines give fine performances, the script is a fine example of atmosphere and occasional creepiness, and Lisa Bowerman’s direction is up to its usual high standards. If the framing sequence is a bit of a slog, that doesn’t entirely take away from what is otherwise an entertaining, intriguing example of Troughton-era science fiction.
After wrapping up the largely brilliant Sara Kingdom trilogy, author Simon Guerrier starts into another one, immediately following Sara’s time in the TARDIS. “The Perpetual Bond,” the eighth release in the fifth series of Companion Chronicles, breaks new ground for the range by introducing a new companion – and apart from this success, establishes itself as one of the range’s best stories in the process.
Big Finish is no stranger to introducing new companions – from Evelyn to Charley to Erimem, to more recent efforts like Klein and Flip, they’ve largely been successful in their attempts. But for a range structured around classic series companions, introducing an original character is an audacious move, and – at least in the first story – an outright success. Oliver Harper, played by Tom Allen, is a commodities trader in London, every inch the successful 1960s financier. But he’s done something illegal, and the police are after him – and only his encounter with the Doctor and Steven prevents his capture and arrest. This is much subtler than the usual 1960s companion introduction, but then that’s the beauty of the Companion Chronicles in general: bringing modern storytelling sensibilities to early periods of Doctor Who. We don’t learn Oliver’s secret by the end of “The Perpetual Bond,” providing a nice hook for subsequent stories. Allen’s performance is quite good: he’s confident enough in his element, is utterly taken aback by the existence of aliens, and then recovers his confidence enough to take a heroic stance. I’m definitely looking forward to more of this as the range continues.
As for the story itself, it’s a satire on the oft-callous nature of capitalist trading – yes, it’s more than a little obvious, but it’s good to have a 1960s story showing that the UK, in dealing with aliens to sell humans as livestock, hadn’t quite lost the colonial mindset that allows one to view people as commodities. The first Doctor is magnificent: dealing both with the emotional fallout from “The Daleks’ Masterplan” and his fury over the slave trade, he’s at his most self-righteous and pragmatic. His apparent decision to consign Steven and Oliver to a life of slavery is just about believable, considering how elegantly Guerrier positions this story relative to “Masterplan,” and his eventual reversal is a triumphant, manipulative moment on par with the second or seventh Doctors. I also love the initial conceit of the Doctor and Steven landing in 1960s London as a result of the TARDIS wanting them to visit Ian and Barbara to salve their emotions – and how the Doctor, at the conclusion, prefers adventure over reminiscence!
I haven’t even mentioned Peter Purves as lead performer; he’s just as good as the rest of the production. This is the best Hartnell impression he’s done to this point in the range: it may not sound exactly like him, but the tone and inflection Purves uses, especially in the angry sequences, is riveting. Steven is written well, too, emotionally vulnerable after recent tragic events and therefore understanding, if not necessarily supportive, of the Doctor’s positions.
Overall, there’s really nothing to complain about when it comes to “The Perpetual Bond.” From the acting, to the script, to Lisa Bowerman’s work as director, to the fine period-film-specific sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason, this is an assured, confident production and something of which Big Finish should be rightfully proud.
Finally. Finally, after almost three full years and twenty different releases in Big Finish’s range of Fourth Doctor Adventures, we get a story that tries to do something different with the format. That story, “The Abandoned” from Nigel Fairs and Louise Jameson, plays with different realities and the themes of perception and memory. While it doesn’t really work, it’s still refreshing to hear something that tries to be different instead of another action-packed 1970s pastiche.
Fairs wrote several Companion Chronicles for Leela, so it’s unsurprising to see the two pairing up on a script in this case. I’m also fairly sure this puts Jameson alongside Ian Marter as the only companions to write officially licensed Doctor Who stories. And while I see what they’re trying to do with the script, the first episode is too much of a misstep to allow the entire play to shine. I don’t generally like stories that overplay the effects of madness – cackling laughter, random acts of violence, a child’s voice reciting nursery rhymes, etc. tend to irritate me – and that’s basically all the first episode is, with the fourth Doctor and Leela battling insanity. There’s something to be said for allowing the listener to experience confusion along with the characters, but when that takes up literally half of your story, you’ve got the balance wrong.
The second episode clears things up, and sets out a number of interesting ideas – but because of the two-episode structure, it doesn’t explore them nearly as much as I would have liked. That said, I loved the idea of the Point of Stillness and why Time Lords cannot venture there. I also enjoyed the explanation behind the villains, which gave a nice, multilayered explanation in turn of the title. The revelations in this story remind of a recent Peter Davison play, but they work, and they answer a fundamental question about the Doctor and the TARDIS that I can’t believe hasn’t yet been asked.
While it normally goes without saying that Tom Baker gives an enjoyable performance, he deserves special praise for his work in “The Abandoned.” Of all the ways you could describe his Doctor, “vulnerable” would be near the bottom of the list, so when Baker brings that to the fore it’s genuinely surprising. Yes, we’ve heard this Doctor under mind control, being asphyxiated, and so forth, but hearing him beg helplessly for his sanity and for his life is an unsettling experience, and it’s a huge credit to Baker that he can still find new ways to play his most famous role. Jameson doesn’t break new ground as Leela, but she gets to be even more proactive and heroic than usual and it’s enjoyable to hear. And Stephanie Cole’s Marianna is a fascinating character in her own right, one I’d like to hear more of in the future. Unfortunately, my dislike for “madness” acting means I found the performances of Mandi Symonds, Andy Snowball, and Fairs himself to be deeply irritating, but they’re doing exactly what you’d want out of these sorts of parts.
The negative reaction “The Abandoned” has received is disheartening but, ultimately, understandable. I give it every credit in the world for trying to do something different with Big Finish’s most traditional range, but between the inexplicably confusing first episode and the unforgiving structure, inventiveness alone is not enough to make “The Abandoned” a success. I’d still rather listen to this than yet another “Energy of the Daleks,” though, and I’m already gritting my teeth in anticipation of “Zygon Hunt.”
For the 2014 anthology release, Big Finish reunited Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, who hadn’t been heard together in the monthly range since “1963: The Space Race” and before that since 2011. “Breaking Bubbles and Other Stories,” an anthology engaging with the theme of perception, is quite successful, and while there’s nothing game-changing here, all four stories are worthwhile listens with refreshingly mature attitudes. On to the capsule reviews!
BREAKING BUBBLES
The first story, “Breaking Bubbles” by LM Myles, really sets the tone for the anthology. It strongly engages with the theme, as multiple layers of perception are peeled away both from the setting and the primary guest star. It would have been easy to tell the story of the seemingly harmless woman in the garden turning out to be a one-dimensional, cackling villain, but instead Myles writes Valtris (Jemma Churchill) with appropriate degrees of subtlety. Is she a war criminal? Is she a person who did the best she could? Or is she simply caught in the middle, someone who made hard choices and made lifelong enemies in the process? We don’t get a definitive answer, nor do we require one – and it’s great to have a story that recognizes this. This is what “Last of the Colophon” should have been, in other words.
Very good start.
7/10
OF CHAOS TIME THE
Mark Ravenhill’s “Of Chaos Time The” is the weak point in the anthology, largely because there’s really nothing to it. Did you notice that the title has rearranged the words in “The Time of Chaos” and presents them out of order? Hooray, you understand the story! Fortunately, I really liked the presentation: Colin Baker is particularly good, and I enjoyed the scenes where he narrated over events as he observed them. There’s also a fantastic line about everyone who uses the word “traitor” being an idiot, which is a glib but rather wise political observation. But while the out-of-order format engages with the “perception” theme by definition, Ravenhill doesn’t go beyond that, leaving the story feeling too slight. “Creatures of Beauty” is the gold standard for Doctor Who stories like this, and “Of Chaos Time The” isn’t really in the same league. As weak points go, though, this one’s still fairly strong.
6/10
AN EYE FOR MURDER
“An Eye for Murder,” Una McCormack’s entry in the anthology, is a fantastic listen simply because we just don’t get Doctor Who stories like it. Yes, it’s Agatha Christie in format, but it’s set in a women’s college immediately before the start of World War II and it’s overtly political without ever becoming polemical. It’s a credit to the author that she wrote a WWII-era story featuring a communist and a Nazi without ever resorting to crude stereotypes, especially in an environment like Doctor Who that so often veers toward the melodramatic. And let’s not overlook this: apart from a brief appearance by a policeman, the only male character in this story is the Doctor! For a company that struggles mightily with female representation in its Doctor Who ranges, stories like this are more than welcome. And I haven’t even mentioned the elegant plotting or the wonderful sound design. We need more stories like this.
9/10
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOCTOR IN THE NIGHT-TIME
Despite a recent negative review of his Companion Chronicle, I’m a big fan of Nev Fountain’s Doctor Who work, and “The Curious Incident of the Doctor in the Night-Time” is a perfect example of why. Hilarious and touching in equal measure, it manages to tell a Doctor Who story through the eyes of an autistic youth without ever feeling patronizing or clichéd. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could feel cloying or obvious, but the comparisons Fountain draws between Michael (Johnny Gibbon, brilliant) and the Doctor are unexpected yet perfectly understandable. The way the Doctor relates death and the past is beautiful, too. Michael is a genuinely funny character, too, and yet never in a way that mocks or belittles his condition. Oh, and there’s a ridiculous band of violent space gnomes running amok, in case you were wondering. We also need more stories like this.
Great stuff.
9/10
Overall, “Breaking Bubbles and Other Stories” is a very strong anthology release. If there’s a word to describe it, it’s “mature” – these are four authors with specific stories to tell who don’t feel constrained by the usual Doctor Who clichés. We used to get writing like this all the time from the monthly range; hopefully this is a step back in that direction. Highly recommended.
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: PERI AND THE PISCON PARADOX
“Peri and the Piscon Paradox,” the seventh entry in the fifth season of Companion Chronicles, is distinct in many ways. It’s double-length, it features two Doctors, it actually features one of the actors who played the Doctor, it’s the only Companion Chronicle to feature Peri, it’s the last one to feature the fifth Doctor, it’s written by the brilliant Nev Fountain… I could go on, but I’ll stop the list here: it’s also one of the most acclaimed stories ever released by Big Finish. And while I certainly see why it’s so beloved, there’s a difficulty to the story that left a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve been thinking this over for quite some time, and it’s late and I can’t sleep, so here we go:
The first thing you notice about “Peri and the Piscon Paradox” is how damn funny it can be, how so many scenes and situations get twisted into remarkably witty gags. This isn’t surprising from Fountain; while “Omega” was slyly funny, “The Kingmaker” was an overt comedy, and both were brilliant. The central conceit is wonderful: the sixth Doctor accidentally kills his previous self’s adversary before they meet, and so he has to dress up in an unconvincing fish costume and play the part in order to trick himself. But of course Fountain doesn’t even indicate this is going on: the first two episodes are entirely from Davison’s perspective, and the hints of Baker’s involvement are only obvious in retrospect. When the play starts, we’re frustrated by “Zarl’s” refusal to see reason; when it ends, we’re frustrated by the Doctor’s refusal to do the same! Sure, some of the humor is a bit too glib – the Doctor accidentally killing a sentient being is played entirely for laughs – but this is largely an elegant script, carefully constructed to function on multiple levels and reward multiple listenings.
This is why the ending is so jarring at first: if you’re not attuned to the clues, the revelation about the older Peri seems to come out of nowhere. My complaints are coming, but I have absolutely no problem with a Doctor Who story tackling domestic abuse. In fact, the story addresses the issue with surprising subtlety: on a second listen, it’s so obvious that Nicola Bryant is portraying her older character as a survivor, so much so that I kicked myself for not picking up on it the first time. The script plays up the younger Peri’s innocence, too: her repetitive desires to settle down to a husband and children are a bit much, but they serve as a counterpoint to what her older self never really had and never would. Describing the older Peri’s reaction to a throwaway gag “as though she’d been punched” suddenly feels a lot more queasy in light of the ending, and certainly not in a bad way. Honestly, there’s a lot to applaud here, and a lot to appreciate.
So why, why, why is the overall tone of the story so hostile? If it stopped with the younger Peri’s (and the Doctor’s!) judgmental view of her older self’s nose job, it would have been fine, since it all ties together into the revelation and the themes – but it didn’t! The narration is an endless string of caustic putdowns revolving almost entirely around appearance: Peri criticizes modern TV stars for appearing malnourished, with giant heads, but then both Peris turn around and lambast her producer for being too different from the ideal. You’re trying to write something sensitive about domestic abuse, so you fill it with comedy Southern accents used to imply stupidity? You try to write a scene in which the older Peri laments her faded beauty, so you have her grope her own chest and then, later, get into a clothes-ripping mud fight with her younger self? You parallel the Doctor’s regeneration with a childhood crush turning out to be a vicious, violent abuser?
This is my huge problem with the story, and it’s the reason I can’t give it a good score with a clear conscience. Even if it was a straight comedy, the needlessly cruel humor wouldn’t appeal to me, but “Peri and the Piscon Paradox” is trying to present deeply serious subject matter. We’re supposed to sympathize with Peri and her shattered dreams, but simultaneously we’re asked to laugh along with her as she sneers at someone for having “fish lips.” And even this might be okay if it was part of a larger point, perhaps about Peri trying to cover for her own insecurities, but it demonstrably isn’t.
This wasn’t easy to write. There’s a lot of good here, and I haven’t even mentioned John Ainsworth’s direction, Jamie Robertson’s sound design, or the stunning central performance from Nicola Bryant. I also haven’t mentioned Colin Baker’s hilarious turn in the supporting role, but frankly I just didn’t find these elements particularly important. I very much admire Nev Fountain’s work, but “Peri and the Piscon Paradox” declines in my estimation every time I think about it. I’m not sure where something this misguided came from, but I definitely don’t want to hear anything like it again. I’ve often said that boredom is the worst feeling a Doctor Who story can inspire in me, but that’s a rhetorical point. The sad truth is that disgust is the worst feeling a Doctor Who story can inspire, and “Peri and the Piscon Paradox” is on a very short list of Doctor Who media to do that. There’s still a lot of good here, even great, but…
…I have to stop thinking about it.
4/10
(Thanks to Eiphel on the Gallifrey Base forums for writing a review that helped crystallize many of my uncertain thoughts about this story.)
The fifth season of Companion Chronicles rolls on with Marc Platt’s “Quinnis,” a rare story in the range for its setting: before “An Unearthly Child” and the start of Doctor Who on television. Platt has explored something like this area on audio before, in speculative Unbound release “Auld Mortality,” but this is the first time the company entered that era. And it’s largely successful, though perhaps most curious is how little the story actually does with its series placement!
I won’t say that Platt doesn’t embrace the concept, of course. There are all kinds of wonderful little nods to the era: the Doctor and Susan traveling to the Fourth Universe, the TARDIS chameleon circuit working, the Doctor seeming to have more control over the Ship before it breaks, and so forth. The framing device, which is simultaneously a companion piece to the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Doctor’s reunion with his granddaughter, fleshes out Susan’s relationship with her grandfather. In many ways, it’s a traditional story of a teenager trying to engage with a beloved yet often unapproachable authority figure, something that Platt captures beautifully. And the Doctor is certainly more difficult than he often was on television, something that also hints at the story placement. But the story doesn’t go far enough in these areas for my taste: sure, the Doctor is more irascible, but there’s very little here of the man willing to execute an injured caveman to facilitate his own escape or the man willing to sabotage his own ship to force his companions to explore an alien city. And the setting, while beautifully evoked, is hardly a departure from Doctor Who norms. Honestly, with a few tweaks, this wouldn’t feel much different from the Hartnell era as we know it, and that’s something of a missed opportunity to me.
That said, there’s certainly nothing wrong with “Quinnis” as presented. Platt is at his best when allowed to engage in world building, and his city of bridges, elevated on posts and attacked from below by vicious alien weeds, is a delightful creation. The people aren’t incomprehensible but are still different enough to feel alien. I liked the monster, and its relationship with the culture, though its child form grew somewhat irritating by its final appearance. Susan’s natural empathy and desire to belong make her an easy target for exploitation, and I liked that Platt didn’t beat around that bush, setting her directly against the Doctor in places.
Carole Ann Ford makes her second appearance in a Companion Chronicle, and she’s every bit as good here as she was in “Here There Be Monsters.” Susan was helpless and two-dimensional far too often on television, but Ford makes her incredibly sympathetic in this story: you can feel her loneliness and teenage angst in every line. This isn’t a very different character to the one we saw on television, but she’s different enough, and that’s largely down to Ford’s performance. Her Hartnell impression has also improved, largely because she’s cut down on the “Hmm?” in every other line. The production is also successful, with able direction from Lisa Bowerman and nicely atmospheric sound design from Nigel Fairs. Overall, “Quinnis” is a success, with a fine central performance supporting some of Marc Platt’s best traits. Pick it up if you want a good story — just don’t expect much of anything from the “before it all started” setting.
When Nicholas Briggs wrote “Destroy the Infinite” a few years ago as a vehicle to introduce new Big Finish recurring villain “the Eminence,” he realized the delay until Tom Baker’s third season would allow Big Finish to release the stories out of order, thus creating a new way to discover a new Doctor Who villain. So finally, after “The Seeds of War” and “Dark Eyes 2,” we get to hear the long-awaited first meeting between the Doctor and the Eminence – and what do you know, it’s bad!
So let’s review what we learn about the Eminence in this story: they’re evil, they want to take over the universe, they appear to travel around in a gaseous form, and they use something called the Breath of Forever to kill people and possess their bodies into slaves called Infinite Warriors. We learned this in “The Seeds of War.” We learned this in “Dark Eyes 2.” So why are we learning it yet again here? Letting us hear the stories out of order is an interesting idea, something that couldn’t have been done on television – but instead of constructing the narratives to facilitate this, Big Finish literally just released the stories out of order. All that accomplishes is making “Destroy the Infinite” utterly predictable, because the Doctor already told us what happened to him when he first met the Eminence. I suppose this would work better if you hadn’t heard the other Eminence stories, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the exercise? I don’t even know anymore.
As for “Destroy the Infinite” itself? It’s a Nicholas Briggs Fourth Doctor Adventure. There’s a generic future setting, a long and terrible war, an implacable enemy, a group of hard-bitten rebels with hearts of gold, a curiously badly written Doctor, and a Leela with the intelligence of a lamppost. The title might be interesting, if it referred to the concept of the infinite, or even the Infinite Warriors – but no, there’s a ship called the “Infinite” and people want to destroy it. I’m really running out of ways to review these stories. You could take random five-minute samples from any of them and you’d barely be able to tell the difference. I’m looking at the cast list and I’m struggling to remember who any of the characters were – perhaps if they wrote “Generic Mistrustful Rebel Leader” instead of “Tarrant” or whatever the hell, I’d remember them?
Look, you know the drill by now. The production is solid – Briggs always directs his action material with a certain amount of verve, and Jamie Robertson’s sound design is as good as ever. Lots of things explode convincingly; the Eminence has a creepy voice filter; etc. If this were the first Doctor Who audio you ever heard, you’d probably like it. This is the nineteenth Fourth Doctor Adventure, however, and it feels like we’ve already had 100 of the things. Next month should be better, as I really enjoyed Nigel Fairs’ Companion Chronicles. It had better be, though, because I guarantee you I’ll be writing this same review AGAIN after “Zygon Hunt.”
For the final release in Big Finish’s 2014 Peter Davison trilogy, they turned to Doctor Who veteran Stephen Cole for “Masquerade.” While it’s not a brilliant story by any stretch of the imagination, it separates itself easily from the recent monthly releases because it features interesting ideas, actual characters, and a plot that isn’t immediately predictable. Imagine that!
I loved the first episode of “Masquerade.” It starts with the Doctor, Nyssa, and the recently acquired Hannah Bartholomew arriving at a French estate in the guise of a doctor, his ward, and her governess. This sounds like the start of a typical Doctor Who historical, with the characters involving themselves in the affairs of the past – but Cole rapidly turns this on its head, revealing that the Doctor and his companions actually believe they are from this time period and slowly realizing their memories are faulty over the course of the episode. What sounds like a story that merely skipped the traditional TARDIS intro actually becomes one starting in media res, as the listener has no idea why they’re in this situation or how they got there. And as the supporting characters start to lose their own French personas, and the Steamroller Man (Andrew Dickens) shows up, I found myself eager to go right to the next episode for the first time in a long time.
Naturally, the following two episodes are largely runarounds in which the characters flee the pursuit of the Steamroller Man. This is of course a recurrent problem in Doctor Who, one in which an interesting idea isn’t enough to hold the attention for 90 minutes, so padding like this sometimes feels inevitable. And at least in this case it’s entertaining padding – I like the Steamroller Man and his rhyming cadence, and the lack of unsubtle description allowed me to concoct my own image of the “monster” in my head. Yes, he just appears seemingly out of nowhere to smash things up, but as an artificial world, it makes enough sense to hold up. The appearances of the Dead Man (Sean Brosnan) also add mystery to the proceedings.
Why, then, is the fourth episode so overcrowded? Again, I think it’s down to the Doctor Who structure – Nyssa waking up in the real world needs to be a cliffhanger, so that revelation has to be put off until episode 4 when it would be better suited for the 2/3 mark of the story. So we’re left with all the major revelations crammed into 25 minutes, leaving the story straining at the margins. There are a lot of good ideas in this final episode: the Maschera are revealed not to be cartoon villains but rather disgruntled aliens with legitimate gripes against human imperialism, and they even go out of their way to protect humans from the most devastating effects of their sickness. But all of this is handled in a few short lines near the conclusion! We should be spending more time with these ideas and less time running away from a steamroller through an artificial house.
But in the end, the fact that these ideas even exist in the first place sets “Masquerade” apart from the recent stories in the monthly range. Ken Bentley directs well, and while I’ve seen some criticism of the sound design from Simon Robinson, I found his score to be admirably distinctive. Overall, I think “Masquerade” would fit in quite well with the average stories of the Peter Davison TV era: some fascinating sci-fi ideas let down by a needless amount of padding and breathless running about, but still worth experiencing.
I was excited for Paul Sutton’s “A Town Called Fortune,” the fifth release in the fifth series of Companion Chronicles, for several reasons, chief among them the involvement of Maggie Stables in a script from the author of “Arrangements for War” and “Thicker than Water.” What I got was a generic Western, bereft of anything interesting. Perhaps it was my fault for getting excited in the first place?
The motivation behind the Companion Chronicles seems to be twofold: first, the ability to tell stories featuring unavailable Doctors; second, the ability to tell stories through narrative instead of the traditional “full-cast” style. Since, at the time, pairing Maggie Stables with Colin Baker in the studio was something Big Finish was doing, I assumed “A Town Called Fortune” would be the latter: something that would tell a story in a way that a traditional audio could not. And at the start, this appeared to be true, with a unique framing device involving Evelyn and Sam (Richard Cordery) trying to get their stories straight before an inquiry. But this is quickly left by the wayside in lieu of a straightforward, unimaginative Western, something that could be told in any format and remain just as boring. Why is this a Companion Chronicle? Just to tick a box and say “We did one with Evelyn, hooray?”
Russell T. Davies has commented in the past that every historical story can be livened up with the introduction of monsters, and while I don’t agree with him in every case, it’s certainly true here. Not every story needs monsters, but every story needs some sort of dramatic hook: in historicals, it can be a famous individual, a well-known event, or a life-or-death struggle facing the TARDIS crew. Leave all of these things out and you get “The Smugglers,” a story that virtually nobody knows or talks about. You also get “A Town Called Fortune,” which has no ambitions beyond being a Western. Even “The Gunfighters” had the OK Corral and that bizarre ballad – this has nothing save for a few generic characters and a dry, dusty setting. There are saloons and wanted posters and characters named “Rachel Ann” and dreadful American accents, so I suppose if you like this sort of thing and you don’t own a DVD player this is worth checking out, but otherwise I just told you everything you need to know.
It is nice to hear Maggie Stables narrating a story, though it’s not enough to rescue it, and her impression of Colin Baker needs to be heard to be believed. Lisa Bowerman directs well enough, and the sound design from Nigel Fairs is suitably Western-y, but it’s not enough to rescue the story. What was the point of this? It tells us nothing important about the regulars, it’s in no way a character piece, and the plot is so clichéd and straightforward that it fails to distinguish itself in any way. Oh, and the cliffhanger is among the worst in Big Finish history. It’s a competent enough story, I suppose, but honestly, they could have skipped this month in the release calendar and not lost anything.
For some reason, Season 18 is by far the least-explored era of all “classic” Doctor Who in the spinoff media. Apart from a Short Trip or two, Andrew Smith’s “The Invasion of E-Space” marks Big Finish’s first foray into that era – and despite its pedigree and its potential, it is unremarkable and unmemorable in every way.
There’s so much going on in season 18 that could be turned into great audio drama. An increasingly funereal mood hangs over the season, including the ever-present themes of entropy and decay. Tom Baker’s performance is at its darkest throughout. The music is finally taken away from Dudley Simpson and rapidly becomes more atmospheric. Many fans dislike this season for various reasons, but it is impossible to deny that it is among the most unique in the long history of Doctor Who. So with Andrew Smith, author of “Full Circle,” on board, you would expect “The Invasion of E-Space” to fit right in, right?
Well, you’d be utterly wrong. If various characters didn’t make reference to E-Space, there’d be no reason to think this story was set there. Nothing from season 18 is present: there’s no atmosphere, there’s not even a hint of decay in the plot, and the sound design is generic and unmemorable. It’s a simple invasion story, one that is so easily solved that Smith is forced to keep the Doctor unconscious for the entire first episode in order to keep the story going. I’m not kidding: generic aliens have opened a portal into E-Space so that they can invade and steal minerals. As soon as the Doctor wakes up, he flies the TARDIS through the portal, destroys the portal generator in about thirty seconds, and flies back into E-Space. The aliens are forced to leave. The end. Oh, and Romana and Adric are the aliens’ prisoners, but they escape at the first opportunity and then the Doctor saves them.
Of course, I’ve said before that a complex plot is not necessary for great drama, but the characters are all two-dimensional. The aliens are invading because they want raw materials and they are evil! Romana is haughty! The Doctor grins at inappropriate times! Adric is… well, he’s so poorly written you forget he’s even in the story! If you’re in a hurry, you could probably skip every other track and not miss anything. The framing device threatens to be interesting, as it sounds like two characters giving evidence at some sort of inquiry, but that goes precisely nowhere. Same with Romana’s brief mentions of the Tharils and her work in E-Space – why couldn’t we have a story like that instead?
As usual, there’s nothing particularly bad about “The Invasion of E-Space.” Lisa Bowerman directs competently, Howard Carter’s sound design is similarly workmanlike, and the story moves along fast enough. But it’s just another generic, boring Doctor Who story, and that’s unforgivable in Big Finish’s first trip into one of the series’ most unique eras.
The third Companion Chronicle of the fifth series, Paul Magrs’ “Find and Replace” introduces the beloved spinoff character Iris Wildthyme to the range and features a tour de force performance from Katy Manning. It’s not quite up to the standard of Magrs’ previous effort, “Ringpullworld,” but it’s still a fine piece of drama in its own right and well worth hearing.
If anyone ever doubts Katy Manning’s skill as an actor, give them “Find and Replace” and watch their opinion change. She plays three distinct characters in this story – Jo, Iris, and the third Doctor – and though they are sometimes even in the same scene, it’s difficult to tell that the same actor is playing all three parts. She shifts between voices and emotions without missing a beat, even interrupting herself on occasion, giving all three characters a remarkable degree of depth and subtlety. Listening to Manning in the extras shows how different she sounds even from Jo and indicates how chameleonic her voice work can be. Even in the modern day, Jo is earnest and forthright, while Iris is casually impertinent and the Doctor is gruff and apologetic. Of course, Magrs’ intimate knowledge of these characters shines through in their dialogue, but Manning’s performance is the best thing about this story. The final conversation between Jo and the Doctor is heartbreaking; I’m surprised she got through it without tearing up.
“Find and Replace” is largely a full-cast drama rather than a narrative. While Jo will occasionally provide narration for more action-oriented sequences, most of the story is occupied with real-time dialogue scenes. Iris and Jo traveling back to the 1970s feels quite natural – the way the story shifts times with little effort is rewarding listening – and hearing Iris raising hell with the UNIT family brings back memories of Magrs’ own “Verdigris.” And while the Doctor’s plan to protect Jo doesn’t make a lick of sense under scrutiny, it’s a perfect encapsulation of the Doctor’s relationships with his companions: he cares about them deeply but yet he has virtually no understanding of their emotions. I could see Pertwee awkwardly rubbing his neck as he tried to explain himself – it’s a great scene, one of the best in recent memory from Big Finish.
My biggest complaint with “Find and Replace” is the presence of Huxley, the Novelisor from Verbatim VI, making his first appearance since “Ringpullworld.” He’s here to try to convince Jo that her memories are incorrect, and he still has the habit of taking over the narration at hilariously inconvenient times, but the subtlety and the unreliability of “Ringpullworld” is completely gone. He’s mostly just there to argue – “I worked with the Doctor and UNIT!” “No, you worked with Iris and MIAOW!” – and he never really convinces Jo that she’s mistaken. Which is ultimately the point, since it’s an ill-judged scheme from the Doctor, but it does make a large portion of the first episode unnecessarily drawn out and pointless.
The production is impeccable. I’ve already written at length about Katy Manning’s performance, which speaks highly of Lisa Bowerman’s direction as well. The sound design from Daniel Brett, meanwhile, is note-perfect, especially the score, which changes tone beautifully to match the mood of the script. Overall, “Find and Replace” is a very strong release and a worthy treatise on the relationship between Jo and the Doctor. Yes, it’s a bit cluttered, and no, it’s not as good as “Ringpullworld,” but unless you really dislike Iris there’s no reason to pass this up.
John Dorney’s “Echoes of Grey,” the second story in the fifth series of Companion Chronicles, is the first Chronicle to feature Wendy Padbury since all the way back in the dreadful “Fear of the Daleks,” and is thankfully an improvement over that story in every respect. It’s far too obvious and straightforward to be a masterpiece, but it’s nonetheless nice to hear a Zoe story that isn’t terrible.
While I appreciated Dorney’s “Solitaire” quite a bit, one of my biggest complaints about that story was its lack of nuance, and that trend is even more obvious in “Echoes of Grey.” The title implies that there will be some sort of moral quandary on display, and sure enough, we learn that nobody involved is truly good or truly evil. Calling your monsters “Achromatics” doesn’t help the subtlety issue, either, and even the otherwise nice reference to “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is made blatantly obvious by the Doctor quizzing Zoe about it.
The framing device is somewhat interesting, but ultimately it doesn’t go far enough. I like how Dorney approaches Zoe’s memory loss, how he writes her narration in present tense to demonstrate her memory coming back as she talks, and how this is counterpointed against Ali’s more traditional past tense narrative. But the final twist is painfully obvious, even more so than the cabinet in “Solitaire” – I was wondering if the dramatic revelation would be that Ali was telling the truth! This is a script crying out for the use of unreliable narrative. Yes, it’s true that nobody in Zoe’s parts of the story ever interacts with Ali, but that’s just writing to your twist: it’s The Sixth Sense, in other words. Zoe’s narrative needed to interact more with Ali’s; the two needed to throw doubt upon each other. By the time Ali is spelling out her involvement with the company at the conclusion, I was rolling my eyes. The final line shouldn’t be so triumphant; in a story called “Echoes of Grey,” the story itself should contain some ambiguities.
All the above becomes even more apparent when the plot is subjected to scrutiny. This is a straightforward 1960s story from start to finish, complete with endless exploration and corridor chasing for the majority of the first half. “We were trying to help but our creation grew out of our control” is one of science fiction’s oldest plots and this story doesn’t do anything to make it interesting. I’ve never been a fan of season 6, despite my love for its TARDIS crew, so when I say this fits in perfectly I’m not being complimentary. Of course, none of this is to say that “Echoes of Grey” is a bad story; it’s just underwhelming, especially in light of its potential. The performances are good: Wendy Padbury’s narration is improved greatly over her first Companion Chronicle, even if her attempt at Frazer Hines’ accent is more comedy Scot than it is accurate. Lisa Bowerman’s direction is largely successful, while the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is convincing if unmemorable. Overall, “Echoes of Grey” is something of a disappointment: there’s a great story in here, waiting to be told, but instead we got something underwhelming.
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE GUARDIAN OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
The fifth series of Companion Chronicles from Big Finish opens with Simon Guerrier’s “The Guardian of the Solar System,” the final story in a trilogy that began with “Home Truths” and tells the story of Sara Kingdom after her travels in the TARDIS. Rather than focusing on Robert, as in the first two stories, this story focuses almost entirely on Sara, and wraps her story in wonderfully emotional fashion.
“Guardian” is a story about fate, about being trapped by destiny, about being little more than a cog in a machine. Guerrier opts to symbolize this through the construction of a gigantic clock that anchors the space travel capabilities of Earth and is serviced by an endless series of elderly men. This is unsubtle, yes, but it’s SO unsubtle that its lack of subtlety is transformed into something audacious and appealing. Does it fit with the aesthetic of “The Daleks’ Master Plan?” No, but does it really need to? It helps to see Mavic Chen as a truly powerful man standing behind more than just orders, and fleshes out his character beyond the little we have left of Kevin Stoney’s performance.
With Robert’s story largely complete, the play reaches the conclusion the trilogy has built: he takes control of the house and Sara returns to human form for the first time in generations. This finally allows the tables to be turned on one of Doctor Who’s least well-known companions and gives us a window into what drives her: her guilt and remorse over killing her own brother. Guerrier writes this brilliantly, showing Sara’s difficulty at encountering Bret a year before she kills him and her desperation to alter history. But like many other times in Doctor Who, she is unable to do so; her own actions create the future she is trying to destroy. It’s a bleak, often depressing story that fits right into the downbeat mood of much of Season 3, but the conclusion is surprising and yet wonderfully hopeful. That it ends when it does is a smart move by Guerrier; the purpose of the trilogy is to bring Sara to the moment of redemption, and it would require new stories to progress beyond that point.
I really don’t need to point out that Jean Marsh is a brilliant performer, but she proves it again here with a subtle, layered performance. Guerrier’s script injects emotion even into the narrative passages, and Marsh provides that emotion with a master’s touch. Niall MacGregor is strong in his third appearance as Robert, but he’s very much in a secondary role this time around. The production is also excellent: the quality of Lisa Bowerman’s direction is proven by the performances, while the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is an unsung star of the show. The cacophony of the innards of the clock is wonderful, overwhelming the ear without ever becoming needlessly confusing.
Overall, “The Guardian of the Solar System” is Big Finish at its best. Any complaints are so minor as to be irrelevant. An intelligent, layered script combines with brilliant performances and excellent sound design to create a gem of a release. Many trilogies seem to fall down in their final installments; this one goes out on a wonderful high.
The fifth release in the third series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, Jonathan Morris’s “Last of the Colophon” is yet another in a long series of traditional runarounds, but it’s confident and smart enough to be successful in spite of this. It’s just a shame there isn’t very much to say about it.
You really couldn’t ask for a more predictable story, and this is the primary downfall of “Last of the Colophon.” So when the Doctor and Leela discover the last survivor of a long-dead race, being held captive apparently against his will, it’s not a question of if he will turn out to be a deranged megalomaniac, it’s a question of when. And since it’s Big Finish, and since they have to adhere to the episodic structure, “when” comes right near the end of the first episode, meaning most of it is just an exercise in killing time until the revelation. Fortunately, Morris realizes “he’s evil!” isn’t enough to support the cliffhanger, so he brings in a second, more surprising revelation: Morax (Gareth Thomas) is also invisible! This is the story’s one unpredictable moment, and bodes well for the second episode.
Naturally, the second episode does nothing interesting with the revelation. Morax uses his invisibility to stalk and kill his enemies. There’s a fake ending where the Doctor and Leela head back to the TARDIS, but it’s so excruciatingly drawn-out that it’s obviously about to reveal that Morax survived an explosion and is still around. And then stuff like this: Quick, hurry onto the bridge! Shut the door! Whew, we escaped Morax! You don’t think he snuck through the door with us, do you? Nah! Oh crap, he did! Also, I’m not sure Morris thought this through all the way – an invisible character is threatening because he can’t be seen, but this is audio drama and we can’t see any of the other characters, either. So we rely on the characters to tell us what’s going on – but they don’t know because they can’t see him. It doesn’t hold together as well as it should, and I can’t help but think this is a reason
There are a couple of very entertaining scenes featuring Leela and Morax doing battle, though. There’s no question that Morris is one of the most talented writers on the BF roster, and his script coupled with the performances from Tom Baker and Louise Jameson is worth an above average rating even if it doesn’t push any boundaries. The supporting cast is very skilled, the story moves along at a good pace in the second half – this is a solid, entertaining slice of Doctor Who. But yet again I am left wishing for more: you’ve got the last survivor of an alien race, you’ve got some brief attention paid to the idea that invisibility leads to amorality, you’ve got supporting characters of questionable morality of their own – and all we get from this is running up and down corridors. Nicholas Briggs directs well, the sound design from Jamie Robertson is solid – I enjoyed this, but could we please have something with a little depth? Maybe something to do with the Doctor/Leela conflict from early in the season that’s been completely abandoned? Please?
I’ll be honest – there was a small part of me hoping that “Tomb Ship,” the latest monthly Doctor Who release from Big Finish and authors Emma Beeby and Gordon Rennie, would be terrible purely so I could refer to it with an immature nickname in my review for a chuckle. Fortunately it’s not quite that bad, and thus my immaturity is kept from you all – but it’s still another bland, uninspiring release in a range that continues to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
The sad part is the potential that exists here. An alien race that sends its celebrated dead into deep space to become stars, a thief who spends her entire life searching desperately for a treasure that does not exist… this could be a wonderful character piece with an elegiac atmosphere. Instead, Beeby and Rennie go the traditional action movie route, rigging the tomb with dangerous traps, turning the thief into a megalomaniac, giving her one-note associates, etc. Her sons have one personality trait each: there’s the stupid one, the cowardly one, the violent one, and then her angry daughter. Someone on Gallifrey Base compared this crew to Futurama character Mom and her idiot sons, and it’s a surprisingly (and disappointingly) apt comparison.
What is it with Big Finish’s desire to constantly produce large action stories in this range? I understand that audio doesn’t require the multimillion dollar CG that TV episodes need, but it does require an ability to describe what’s going on, and too often we get scripts like this one in which characters yell descriptions to each other. And maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if things were at least imaginative, but “Tomb Ship” isn’t even that: oh, a giant pillar that crashes into the ground every 2 seconds that a character needs to get around? Remember when Galaxy Quest lampooned the hell out of scenes like that? I do – it was 15 years ago, right when Big Finish was starting Doctor Who!
I just don’t see where stuff like this comes from. You’ve got two authors who are relatively new to the range – shouldn’t they be boiling over with fresh, ambitious ideas? You’re in the Doctor Who universe, where the beauty is its ability to go anywhere and do anything, so you decide to do Dungeons & Dragons in space with one-note ciphers for supporting characters? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised after the wholly uninspiring “The Doomsday Quatrain,” but at least that wasn’t interminable listening. Oh, and at the end, Hannah Bartholomew turns up, triumphantly declaring “…or my name’s not Hannah Bartholomew!” in a scene clearly drawn as a punch-the-air moment for the listener. My reaction: “Who the hell is Hannah Bartholomew?” I honestly couldn’t remember, and I had to wait for Nyssa to spell it out for me before it sprung to mind. This is a character that featured heavily last month and I’d already forgotten her – you’d think I’d have remembered the laughably terrible accent, but I suppose not – and I cannot think of a stronger indictment of the state of the main range right now.
I guess the production was okay. I don’t have anything more to say about this. Don’t waste your money.
And so we come to “Forever,” by David Wise, the final episode of the fourth Gallifrey series. We’ve seen our heroes running from parallel universe to parallel universe, from alternate Gallifrey to alternate Gallifrey, but the series has ignored an important question: what’s the point of this, exactly? Certainly there’s been some terribly clumsy character development for Romana, who now views herself as the “destroyer of worlds” because things tend to go wrong when she’s around. Most of this happens off-screen, between Lord Prydon’s accusations in “Annihilation” and this – it’s little more than self-pity, as it’s rather obvious to the listener that Romana is hardly responsible for the consequences of the last few plays. We do get a moment of choice for her in “Forever,” though, and it seems as though she is ready to doom this Gallifrey to destruction in order to engineer her own journey home… but don’t worry, something happens to change her mind back to the heroic path. Either have the courage of your convictions or don’t bring it up.
And where have we ended up? Okay, so Brax is gone, they’re cut off from K9, and Leela hates Romana, but the characters are still on the run from the end of Gallifrey III – we’re still in the same place, just with slightly different characterizations. That wouldn’t be so bad as part of an ongoing series, but it took five years to create this! Fortunately I know that there will be a Gallifrey V and VI, but at the time, how unrewarding must this have been? Ultimately, I’m grateful that the series embraced a brand new direction after its unfortunate descent into turgid nonsense about Gallifreyan politics, but this new direction isn’t interesting either! If the best reason you can come up with to restart a series after five years is “Let’s wander around some parallel universes,” maybe you shouldn’t be bothering. Still, I didn’t hate it quite as much as I hated Gallifrey III. Yay?
Right off the bat, in an interminably long, ponderous sequence involving the regular characters, Romana muses about whether her decision to journey into the Axis in search of a new Gallifrey was the proper one. Fine, but wasn’t she pissed off with Braxiatel in “Reborn” because he tricked them into thinking they were going to a deserted planetoid while actually taking them to the Axis? So whose plan was this? How do you allow such a massive failure of internal continuity to survive editing? Probably the same way you allow “Annihilation,” Scott Handcock’s third episode of Gallifrey IV, to make it to release. To this day, I think “State of Decay” is a fantastic Doctor Who story with some of the series’ most memorable villains on display – and “Annihilation” certainly wants to ape that story, even using an admittedly brilliant recreation of its score. But merely having vampires in a story does not make it good – “State of Decay” was a triumph of atmosphere, something “Annihilation” almost totally lacks. Casting Geoffrey Beevers as the lead vampire is a great idea, as he sounds even more evil here than he does as the Master – but all he does is talk and threaten and hiss. In “State of Decay,” Romana was visibly terrified; here, she’s unconcerned to the point of relaxation. And then there’s Katy Manning as a female Borusa: she’s fine in the part, but why Manning? Why Borusa? For fun? There’s more to storytelling than throwing a bunch of continuity references at the listener and shooting a thumbs-up and a grin. And then, to make matters worse, we take the best bit of character development of the entire Gallifrey series – Leela’s blindness – and cure it! Is this really Scott Handcock’s script? I know he’s better than this.
It seems obvious that this series is going to amount to little more than our heroes wandering around various Gallifreys, though at this point their motive for doing so isn’t completely clear. Fortunately, “Disassembled,” written by Justin Richards, manages to present an alternate universe that actually tells us useful information about the “real” characters while also presenting entertaining alternate versions. Romana is conceptually aware of the idea of the Burner, the President’s personal assassin, but the revelation that Braxiatel has held and presumably still holds that position adds some interesting shade to his character, especially in light of how the alternate universe Doctor executes his duties. Of course, at the end they apparently write Brax out of the series, but I won’t be surprised if he turns up again. The final scene with Benny doesn’t really mean anything to me as I haven’t heard any of those audios, but apparently it’s a giant continuity headache. Colin Baker is fantastic in this: he starts out playing a Doctor who opposes the local culture of interference, but as we learn his true nature, Baker introduces more subtleties to his performance that indicate something is definitely not right. Louise Jameson also impresses: she plays two versions of Leela, often in the same scene, and only slight variances in her speech make them into two wildly different characters. I’d eventually like something more meaningful from this series, but this was surprisingly satisfying.
I was not a fan of Big Finish’s Gallifrey series: while it provided some further adventures for characters like Romana, Leela, and K9, it failed to do anything interesting with the unlimited storytelling potential of Gallifreyan civilization. By the time the third series was over, everything had fallen into chaos and the principal characters had fled the planet – and the series ended on a cliffhanger, the seeds sown for a sequel. That was in 2006, but the sequel did not arrive until 2011, when Gallifrey IV was finally released in box set form. The first episode, “Reborn,” spends the first five minutes in a massive info-dump to catch up the audience, and then bravely does… absolutely nothing to resolve the conflict?
So we’re back in the Axis from “The Axis of Insanity” – not sure we ever needed to hear that story again, guys – and exploring alternate universes for a potential new Gallifrey that isn’t ravaged by a zombie-creating virus and the loss of the Matrix. In “Reborn,” author Gary Hopkins has the characters wander around one such Gallifrey, meet alternate versions of other characters… and then leave. It’s not that the concept isn’t interesting – a Gallifrey in which regenerations and TARDISes are for sale is certainly audacious – but Hopkins does absolutely nothing with it. Mary Tamm returns as an alternate Romana, one with a family, but we learn nothing from observing her. That’s the thing with alternate universe stories: they’re used to put a mirror up to our own universe so we can learn more about ourselves. “Reborn” doesn’t do this, it just says “Hey, wouldn’t this be funny?” Not really, no. Still, it’s good to hear the old characters again, and I’m not wholly disappointed that we got away from the turgid nonsense that was Gallifrey III for a while.
Hey, that wasn’t so bad! I was afraid that James Swallow was going to go for the explosive, action-packed finale in which the humans overpower their Cyberman oppressors and drive them off Earth – and while “Extinction,” the final episode of “Cyberman 2,” certainly has some action set pieces, the finale takes a more unexpected route. It’s very much like a Joss Whedon finale in that Swallow brutally kills off half the regular cast – but the Doctor Who influences are obvious, as the final heroic sacrifice that saves the day takes the form of a conversation. Unfortunately, that conversation is implausible to the point of being ridiculous. Samantha (Hannah Smith) basically tells the Cyberplanner, “You know conquering humanity is going to be a bit difficult, right?” and it responds, “I hadn’t thought of that! Retreat!” I get that we’re going down the same road as other Cyberman stories, with the villains underestimating the strength their human (and android) adversaries get from their emotions, but this seems like awfully poor planning for a Cyberplanner. I do like that Hazel (Jo Castleton) gets the final monologue, though, as Cyberman 2 has been her story more than anyone else’s, and she runs the gamut of emotions more than any other character. I also want to take time in this final review to commend the sound design from Kelly Ellis and Steve McNichol from Fool Circle Productions, which is consistently excellent throughout all four episodes and serves as a great example of effective atmosphere in audio drama. Overall, “Extinction” is a solid conclusion to a solid series, better than the original “Cyberman” in most respects.
Let’s get this out of the way first: an embedded spy for the Cybermen, a pawn in a larger game being controlled by players who aren’t even on the board – and you call him Chessman? A bit on the nose, don’t you think? Anyway, “Machines” does the job of a typical third part, moving the pieces into place for the conclusion. The rebels decide to attack, Barnaby (Mark McDonnell) is moved toward his execution, and we have Samantha’s (Hannah Smith) identity revealed to Hazel (Jo Castleton). Nothing is really developed in these relationships, making “Machines” the most static and thus the least interesting episode thus far, but the continued excellence of the production and performances keeps the entertainment level high. I’m a little concerned with how this story is going to resolve with only one hour to take care of everything, and knowing in advance that there is no Cyberman 3, but I’m more than willing to let things take their proper course. A solid release that hopefully sets up a great conclusion.
“Terror,” the second part of Big Finish miniseries “Cyberman 2,” ratchets up the paranoia and oppressive atmosphere of its predecessor to even more unnerving heights. On the one hand, it’s a bit redundant to spend so much time on Hazel (Jo Castleton) and Yan (Ian Brooker) investigating what goes on at the Cyberman installation, because we know from experience that they’re converting abductees into more Cybermen. On the other, James Swallow writes it so well, and Nicholas Briggs directs so well, that it’s suspenseful almost in spite of itself. Furthermore, while Richter’s (Toby Hadoke) tip over the edge into madness was fully expected, Chessman (Ian Hallard) framing him for collaboration was not, and I’m not entirely sure where Barnaby’s adventure is going to conclude. There’s an obvious path here: defeat the Cybermen and stop the android bomb from destroying the solar system, but will the story go down that road? If so, I hope it keeps this limited, character-focused form of storytelling without making the mistake of getting too bombastic or action-packed at the conclusion. For right now, this is fine material indeed.
From Styre on 199 – Last of the Cybermen
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From Styre on 4.04 – Death Match
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From Styre on 4.03 – Requiem for the Rocket Men
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From Styre on 4.02 – The Darkness of Glass
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From Styre on 4.01 – The Exxilons
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From Styre on Dark Eyes 4
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From Styre on 198 – The Defectors
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From Styre on 04 – The English Way of Death
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From Styre on 03 – The Romance of Crime
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From Styre on 02 – The Highest Science
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From Styre on Dark Eyes 3
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From Styre on 197 – The Entropy Plague
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From Styre on 196 – Equilibrium
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From Styre on 195 – Mistfall
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From Styre on 1.4 – An Ordinary Life
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From Styre on 1.3 – The Bounty of Ceres
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From Styre on 194 – The Rani Elite
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From Styre on 193 – Masters of Earth
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From Styre on 192 – The Widow’s Assassin
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From Styre on 1.2 – The Doctor’s Tale
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From Styre on Philip Hinchcliffe Presents
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From Styre on 191 – Signs and Wonders
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From Styre on 190 – Mask of Tragedy
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From Styre on 1.1 – Domain of the Voord
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From Styre on The 5th Doctor Box Set
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From Styre on 189 – Revenge of the Swarm
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From Rollo on 3.8 – Zygon Hunt
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From Styre on 3.8 – Zygon Hunt
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From Styre on 5.09 – The Forbidden Time
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From Styre on 5.08 – The Perpetual Bond
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From Styre on 3.7 – The Abandoned
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From Styre on 188 – Breaking Bubbles and Other Stories
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From Styre on 5.07 – Peri and the Piscon Paradox
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From Styre on 5.06 – Quinnis
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From Styre on 3.6 – Destroy the Infinite
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From Styre on 187 – Masquerade
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From Styre on 5.05 – A Town Called Fortune
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From Styre on 5.04 – The Invasion of E-Space
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From Styre on 5.03 – Find and Replace
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From Styre on 5.02 – Echoes of Grey
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From Styre on 5.01 – The Guardian of the Solar System
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From Styre on 3.5 – Last of the Colophon
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From Styre on 186 – Tomb Ship
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From Styre on 4.4 – Forever
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From Styre on 4.3 – Annihilation
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From Styre on 4.2 – Disassembled
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From Styre on 4.1 – Reborn
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From Styre on 2.4 – Extinction
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From Styre on 2.3 – Machines
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From Styre on 2.2 – Terror
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