Welcome to The Vault – jokingly known as ‘The Museum of Terrors’ – a high security establishment where UNIT keeps all of its alien artifacts.
New recruit Warrant Officer Charlie Sato is given a guided tour by Captain Ruth Matheson, and the archive reveals some dark secrets. An army jacket, a painting, crystal and a wax cylinder all hold a grave significance, and their stories are told by the Doctor’s companions: Steven Taylor, Zoe Heriot, Jo Grant and Romana…
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: TALES FROM THE VAULT
The sixth series of Companion Chronicles from Big Finish opens with a new take on the format from Jonathan Morris in “Tales from the Vault,” an attempt to graft Companion Chronicles together with anthology releases. The attempt is successful in that it produces a coherent, enjoyable story, but the format robs the narrative of any depth or significance.
It works like this: two UNIT officers (Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso, who are certainly not playing their characters from the TVM, rights holders!) are exploring a secret vault in which UNIT keeps all the alien technology it captures. If this sounds similar to the Torchwood vault from “Army of Ghosts,” it’s because it’s exactly the same idea. The various artifacts have corresponding audio recordings, and these recordings feature different companions of the Doctor describing how those artifacts were acquired. So in addition to the framing story, we get four smaller stories starring Peter Purves, Wendy Padbury, Katy Manning, and Mary Tamm. All of this is crammed into a single-disc release – but at least it doesn’t insist upon being separated into episodes, existing instead as a single hour-long story.
The problem, of course, is that it’s virtually impossible to tell five different stories in an hour and have any of them be interesting. There are attempts to tie a couple of them together, and these attempts are fairly successful, but ultimately the story boils down to foiling the plans of a clichéd evil mastermind. You can’t flesh out the characters to any significant extent when you have this many disparate plot strands trying to come together. Perhaps the climax sums things up best: with time running out and no solution presenting itself, Ashbrook’s character looks into the future, sees how the enemy dies, and then does exactly what she saw. Lucky for her that’s what the painting said – imagine if it had showed him dying of old age a thousand years later, having ruled several lifetimes as galactic emperor?
Since they can’t use any characters from the TVM apart from the eighth Doctor himself, Big Finish cast Ashbrook and Tso in different roles but paired them up. I get that they did this because they wouldn’t otherwise be able to use them, but it’s hardly appealing. There are certain former Doctor Who actors that I would love to see in other parts, but neither Ashbrook nor Tso fall into that category. Ashbrook is fine, if a little theatrical, but Tso is wooden and unconvincing. Which doesn’t surprise me – he’s been wooden and unconvincing in every performance of his I’ve seen – but it did make “Tales from the Vault” hard going at times. Katy Manning gets by far the best of the four companion parts because it actually hints at how exasperating life with the Doctor can be. The Steven and Zoe segments are largely clichéd and unmemorable, while the Romana segment is so brief and insignificant I’m not even sure if it actually happened.
Lisa Bowerman directs; Alistair Lock provides what little sound design there is, though I liked the editing on the Jo segment. Overall, “Tales from the Vault” is entertaining enough but paper-thin, and it’s headlined by one of the weakest actors in the Doctor Who canon. It’s a pleasant way to pass an hour, but it’s hardly essential listening.
Disposable.
5/10