Four new stories starring the Seventh Doctor and Ace!
You Are the Doctor by John Dorney
YOU are the Doctor, a mysterious traveller in time and space. Will YOU succeed in foiling the ghastly plans of the horrible Porcians, the most inept invaders in all the cosmos? Or will you get yourself killed, over and over again?
Come Die With Me by Jamie Anderson
A spooky old house. A body in the library. A killer on the loose. The Doctor accepts the challenge laid down by the sinister Mr Norris: to solve a murder mystery that’s defeated 1,868 of the greatest intellects in the universe… and counting.
The Grand Betelgeuse Hotel by Christopher Cooper
The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Ace to the most opulent casino hotel in the cosmos – a haunt of the rich, the famous and the unutterably corrupt. There’s a robbery in progress – but is the Doctor really in on the plan?
Dead to the World by Matthew Elliott
Tourist spaceship the Daedalus hangs suspended in space, all but three of its passengers having fallen victim to a bizarre infection. But if the Doctor saves those last survivors, he risks destroying the entire human race.
YOU ARE THE DOCTOR AND OTHER STORIES
YOU ARE THE DOCTOR
It’s not particularly well known, but Doctor Who has a long history of “Find Your Fate” / “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, and John Dorney embraces that history with “You Are the Doctor,” the first story in the 2015 anthology release. It actually makes a great deal of sense: just number the individual tracks and then have in-story cues about which track comes next. And there are certainly consequences: pick the wrong track and the Doctor and Ace die horribly; pick the right one and another deadly choice is soon to arrive. But as you listen, you notice the choices becoming more and more perfunctory, along with the reactions of the Porcians to those choices. That’s when you realize that Dorney has made the format a functional part of the story, and that the story works even if you just listen to the tracks in order. This doesn’t completely work – the silly tone makes it very difficult to take at all seriously, for example – but it’s a fun way to play with the audio format and a very enjoyable start to the anthology. We need more boundary-pushing work like this.
8/10
COME DIE WITH ME
The second story, Jamie Anderson’s “Come Die With Me,” isn’t structured particularly well. The Doctor and Ace show up at a spooky old house where a mad genius presents them with a murder mystery in which an incorrect guess means death. Fairly straightforward Agatha Christie-type material, but where are the victims? It turns out the victims are the previous players, and the task is to figure out who will kill you if you guess wrong. By the time this is spelled out, the story is half over, meaning the first half talk of murders is deeply confusing. And the resolution doesn’t help much: who was the original victim, anyway? Who killed that person? How did this endless cascade of murdered geniuses get started? I really like the central conceit that the previous victims are the murderers, but I don’t like how the story gets there. And Ace saves the day by catching an obvious flaw in the Doctor’s puzzle logic? Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.
5/10
THE GRAND BETELGEUSE HOTEL
“The Grand Betelgeuse Hotel” from Doctor Who Adventures comic writer Christopher Cooper, is better than its predecessor despite one unavoidable flaw. The “planet with weird legal rules and court procedures” trope is overdone, but it’s nonetheless dramatic to hear Ace trying desperately to argue her innocence. It also underscores just how unlikely the Doctor’s adventures are – to an outsider, Ace absolutely sounds guilty at worst or an unwitting accomplice at best. But my problem, unfortunately, is with Sophie Aldred, who is asked to deliver intensely emotional lines about the Doctor and their relationship, and who is, on this particular day, not up to the task of the performance. There are certain scenes that she handles quite well; this is not one of them and it took me completely out of the story. Apart from that, though, “The Grand Betelgeuse Hotel” is a solid, entertaining story. I was hoping for a Wes Anderson pastiche, though!
6/10
DEAD TO THE WORLD
One of the best things about season 25 on television was how it mixed the humor of the early seventh Doctor era with the increasing darkness to follow. It always took its villains seriously: even in “Silver Nemesis” the threat is legitimate. Matthew Elliott’s “Dead to the World” trips up on this score: there’s an absolutely legitimate threat undercut by comedy aliens that the Doctor defeats with virtually no effort. I do like the reversal in the main plot, though: the captain is the only one who knows the Earth is in danger and she is heroically sacrificing herself and her crew to protect it – but no, she’s actually acting out of pure selfishness and saving the Earth is an extra benefit. The story doesn’t explore the implications to any great extent, but I like the moral ambiguity of someone doing the right thing for completely wrong reasons. As an aside, I think Sylvester McCoy is excellent throughout this box set: they really let him get back to his character’s comedic roots and it’s refreshing. “Dead to the World” is a valiant attempt that didn’t quite grab me, but I enjoyed the listen.
6/10
Box set average: 6.25/10