This release comes as two new Third Doctor stories and a disc of extras:
Prisoners of the Lake (by Justin Richards)
Captain Mike Yates is investigating the disappearance of artefacts from an archaeological site deep below Dunstanton Lake. It’s hardly a job for UNIT. But when the team discover a mysterious ancient structure buried deep underwater, all that changes.
When chief archaeologist Freda Mattingly ventures inside, she soon realises that her skills do not begin to equip her to deal with what she finds. As an ancient menace begins to stir the Doctor, Jo Grant and Mike Yates must dive down to the lake bed and discover the secrets hidden there. Secrets that could mean the end of all life on Earth…
The Havoc of Empires (by Andy Lane)
The Doctor and Jo take Mike Yates on his first trip in the TARDIS, but instead of the historical cricket match they were aiming for they end up on a futuristic space station in the middle of a diplomatic crisis that might escalate into galactic war.
The alien leader of the Chalnoth Hegemony is marrying the human Director of the Teklarn Incorporation, but there are forces that will stop at nothing to disrupt the ceremony. The Doctor is accused of murder while explosions occur across the station, and only Jo Grant, pretending to be a security consultant, can save the day.
But then, there’s the Eels to consider…
THE THIRD DOCTOR ADVENTURES
PRISONERS OF THE LAKE
For many years, the Jon Pertwee era was largely underrepresented in the Big Finish catalog. Relegated almost entirely to the Companion Chronicles – and the last Lost Story – the second-longest-serving Doctor simply didn’t have much of an audio profile. But now that finally changes with the release of “The Third Doctor Adventures,” a box set of two full-cast, four-part dramas featuring the Third Doctor.
The first of these, Justin Richards’ “Prisoners of the Lake,” faces the same dilemma that will face every Third Doctor release Big Finish attempts: every regular cast member except for Katy Manning and Richard Franklin is either deceased or unwilling to participate. To get around this problem, Big Finish took the unprecedented step of bringing on Tim Treloar to play the Third Doctor. While Treloar did briefly appear in “The Light at the End,” this is still essentially the first time any Doctor has been replaced by an impersonator who wasn’t already a regular cast member. So we have to start with the obvious elephant in the room: Treloar’s impression of Jon Pertwee. It’s a significant improvement on his effort in “The Light at the End,” but it’s still not entirely convincing. He makes a good attempt at the voice, and he has the vocal tics and inflections down, but at no point did I forget that I was listening to an impersonator. Perhaps that’s an unfair standard, but every time Treloar failed to convince, it took me right out of the story. It’s easier to accept in the Companion Chronicles because there it’s being presented as an impression; here, we’re expected to accept that this is the Third Doctor, and at times it’s difficult. And honestly, did they have to black out Pertwee’s face on the cover? I suppose that’s better than Photoshopping Treloar’s head onto Pertwee’s body, but are you trying to call attention to it or not?
It seems as though there’s a standing contractual offer to Justin Richards from all producers of Doctor Who spinoff material. When a new range of novels or audios starts up, or a new Doctor is introduced into an old one, Richards almost always comes along to write one of the first stories. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Richards is adept at writing entertaining stories that mesh well with their eras, but it does mean that he often resorts to clichés. Nowhere is this more evident than in “Prisoners of the Lake,” which is quite possibly the most clichéd Jon Pertwee story in Doctor Who history not written by Terrance Dicks. A heroic archaeologist unearths an ancient, deadly menace, all the while fighting off the stupidity of the arrogant bureaucrat in charge? Lots of padded out sequences of the Doctor describing something incomprehensible followed by Jo or Yates summing it up with an apt metaphor? Ludicrously single-minded villains seeking to conquer or destroy the Earth, ignoring the Doctor’s desperate appeals to their morality? Venusian aikido? I could go on – it’s all here, and all in exactly the form you’d expect.
The biggest sin of “Prisoners of the Lake” is that it’s boring. Right from the protracted opening sequence in which none of the regular characters appear, you know you’re back in early-1970s storytelling mode, and this continues throughout. This could easily have been a full episode shorter if some of the interminable transit sequences were cut out – and that’s considering that much of that has already been eliminated through narration! None of the characters have any depth, which is a particular waste of Carolyn Seymour (or Caroline, as it’s misspelled on the website), and the villains are utterly two-dimensional. Frankly, it seems as though the mission statement for this was to recreate the era as slavishly as possible, not to create a compelling drama. Even the most comfortable periods in Jon Pertwee’s tenure occasionally offered something challenging or controversial – but not “Prisoners of the Lake,” which floats placidly by on stagnant, shallow waters. I’m sorry, but I no longer give bonus points because hey, it’s the first Third Doctor story.
They can do better.
5/10
THE HAVOC OF EMPIRES
Fortunately, they’ve got another story in which to try to do better! It’s “The Havoc of Empires,” from Andy Lane, and it’s a Pertwee-in-space story that serves as an appropriate companion piece to “Prisoners of the Lake,” for better or for worse.
This might as well be a Peladon story, because it basically hits the same sorts of notes. There are only two opposing factions here, and they are being united through a political marriage – a marriage that, naturally, parties within and without want to stop. The Doctor, Jo, and Yates arrive in the middle of everything and are mistaken for security consultants, so of course they stick around to solve all the problems. The people involved in the marriage of convenience are unsure about one another, but of course they seem to be falling in love by the conclusion. There’s a bigoted chief adviser who seems like the obvious villain, so of course it’s someone everybody overlooked. When everyone finds out at the end that the TARDIS crew aren’t security consultants but instead are random strangers, of course they don’t care about the massive deception. It’s a big pile of clichés, in other words.
Fortunately, Lane’s script makes these clichés reasonably entertaining. While the broad strokes are predictable, the details have a few surprises, and the plot is structured elegantly with few obvious holes. It’s fun to listen to Jo pose as a security expert, and actually use some of that UNIT training she always talks about – similarly, she’s never portrayed as silly or unthinking, though we still get stereotypical lines of the “He’s alive, I KNOW he is!” variety a bit too much for my taste. Yates is more superfluous, however – he doesn’t get a lot of stuff to do, despite the Doctor being tied up for most of the second half of the story, and the script seems unsure of what his actual personality is.
The script seems unsure of quite a lot, actually. Is this a comedy or a drama? Doctor Who often mixes both, of course, but this story veers wildly between the two with little consistency. The wedding planner, for example, feels incongruous with the rest of the story. And while the continuity reference to the Delphons amused me, did we really have to introduce them into the story? Yes, the Doctor needs to be released from imprisonment to communicate with them with his eyebrows – very amusing, I’m sure, but this is an audio story, remember? So instead of a great visual gag, we get people saying things like “Why is he waggling his eyebrows like that?”
I should mention that both stories use Treloar as a narrator to gloss over unimportant, transitional scenes. This works rather well – it takes us from one scene to another without needing to hear characters running up and down corridors. It’s a bit of a crutch, in that the best Big Finish stories succeed without it, but there’s nothing wrong with a more efficient story, especially one rooted in an era famous for its padding. Treloar is a very good narrator, too – better at that than playing Jon Pertwee, if you ask me.
Overall, “The Havoc of Empires” is a solid, unmemorable story. It has a bit more weight than “Prisoners of the Lake” but it’s still not the sort of thing to stick with the listener. While I’m not a huge fan of Treloar’s Third Doctor, he’s successful enough that I would purchase the next set – and with “Volume 1” in the title of this one, you know there’s more coming. But now that we’ve gone the traditional route, let’s hope we get something a bit more boundary pushing in the next set, lest these stories go down the same endless, miserable road of the Fourth Doctor Adventures.
Not bad.
6/10