There are 4,107 reviews so far. To add a review of your own, click on the item in question, then click the Vote link.
 |  |  |
 | Displaying 1 to 20 of 4,107 reviews
Next>> |
|
| | |
| What: | Quinnis (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Tuesday 26 November 2024 |
|
| Rating: |   6 |
This entry in the Companion Chronicles series has Susan telling a story about an adventure she and her grandfather had before the events of An Unearthly Child. This is meant to fill in a gap created by an offhand remark in the episode The Edge of Destruction. So, The Doctor and Susan travel to the Fourth Universe, landing on a primitive planet where the simple people believe that a single person could potentially have the power to make rain. Of course, The Doctor gets mistaken for rainmaker, and off we go. Susan, meanwhile, has repeated interactions with a ragged orphan girl who turns out to be something quite different and much more menacing. What irked me about this one is the depiction of the people of Quinnis as just superstitious, low-level thinkers ruled by their emotions. It's a hamfisted, stereotypical depiction of societies with basic technologies. Perhaps it fits in with the early Doctor Who stories by working that way, but I find Quinnis disappointing given what it could have been.
| What: | The Creeping Death (Tenth Doctor Adventures audios) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Tuesday 26 November 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 6 |
This entry into the Doctor-Donna series will probably appeal to those who think this was the greatest combination for Doctor Who ever. It would have very much fit into that series. That is where I have the problems with this one. It fits too much, so that it has all the flaws of that series as well as the virtues. Aiming for swinging 60s London, the TARDIS crew arrive in not so swinging 50s London, on the first day of the worst smog ever to hit that city. Making it worse is an alien species, the fumifugium, who of course live up to their name by eating, or at least thriving in the toxic gasses that will kill a few thousand Londoners across four days. They are making the smog worse, so The Doctor has to put a stop to it. The Doctor, of course, co-opts a ragtag group to help him in that task. Some of them die. He offers the aliens a chance to go somewhere else and stop killing people. The aliens, typically, have no morals apart from "eating good," so refuse. What is wrong here? Well, among other things, in the ragtag crew we get a gratuitous gay couple (whether they are gay or not has no effect on the story), some pontificating about how terrible attitudes were in the past, a plucky young proto-feminist, an alien species with no sophistication of culture or mentality, and tons of "smart" dialogue that just rolls off the tongues of characters, especially Donna, as if they had a repertoire of quips lined up for that purpose. It's entertaining enough, but I find the lack of sophistication at all levels - plot, character, motivation, theme - to be a major drawback.
This collection gives us two four-part series, The Unzal Incursion representing the 1970 season, and The Gulf representing the 1974 season. The first is the better of the two. The Unzal Incursion finds The Doctor, Liz Shaw, the Brigadier, and UNIT fighting another invasion. This time, it is an invasion by stealth. A new training program for soldiers turns out to be an alien brain-washing system to make the Earth soldiers work for the alien invaders. UNIT has been infiltrated, and The Doctor, Liz, and The Brigadier become fugitives, trying to escape capture while also ending the alien menace. The story fits into the 1970 series in being both a rollicking adventure while at the same time a rather sombre exposé of human shortcomings. The second story brings back together Sarah Jane Smith with Doctor 3. Bopping around Time and Space, they land in the future, on an ocean world. Set upon the poisonous ocean is a decommissioned "spin drifter," designed for mineral extraction, now used as home to an artist collective. The story quickly becomes a haunted house narrative, with semi-corporeal aliens that have telepathic abilities forcing people to cry so that the aliens can remove the salt from their bodies. As with most of these things, motivations are somewhat unclear. I would like to see aliens motivated by more than just hunger. Also, I cannot help feeling that The Doctor and Sarah are butting their noses in. At the beginning of the story, they don't really have a stake in what is going on, so why get involved?
Both of these stories include the daughters of the original actors taking the roles of their mothers. Daisy Ashford, daughter of Caroline John, plays Liz Shaw, and does so quite well. They have some vocal similarities, but Ashford does not try too hard to be exactly like her mother. Sadie Miller, daughter of Elisabeth Sladen, is much closer in vocal manner to her mother. She really gets the little characteristic mannerisms, when the voice raises or lowers, distinctive pronunciations, and so on. It is really nice joined with Tim Treloar's marvelous Doctor 3 impression and John Culshaw's equally marvelous Brigadier impression, giving one the feeling that the old gang is back together.
A peculiar aspect of this box set, and I do not know whether this was intentional, is that it is a big exercise in girl power. Both companions are played as strong, independent characters, not just hanging onto The Doctor. Additionally, in The Unzal Incursion, we get the villain, the villain's assistant, and the guest companion, Sergeant Attah, played by women. The entire cast, apart from The Doctor, in The Gulf is female. I find this neither good nor bad, just interesting.
Expanded from an outline and early draft by John Lloyd, friend of Douglas Adams, The Doomsday Contract has Douglas Adams and Graham Williams written all over it. Basically, although the stakes are high, after all Earth might be destroyed, nothing in this is taken even remotely seriously. The entire story is an elaborate spoof of the British legal system. The Doctor is called as a witness for a trial. His old friend from Gallifrey is plaintiff in a case as president of a charitable agency charged with preserving endangered species throughout the galaxy. A ruthless corporate executive wants to use Earth for nefarious industrialization that will mean sterilizing the planet, and The Doctor must prove that he has visited Earth and that he can confirm that Earth has intelligent life. The snag is that in confirming that he has been to Earth, The Doctor is also confessing to a crime since Earth is a protected planet. This one is for fans of 1979 Doctor Who, the series that made ridicule the sole rationale for the show. It's amusing, but not much more than that.
| | |
| Could Have Been Done on Telly |
|
| | |
| What: | Revolution in Space (Third Doctor Adventures audios) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Thursday 7 November 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 7 |
Revolution in Space takes Doctor 3 and Sarah to the future, where a colony in the asteroid belt is seeking independence from Earth authority, while behind the political plot an alien artifact extends its terrible influence. As a six-parter, this production probably needs the two plots to sustain the duration, especially given that, as usual for a Big Finish production, the cast is rather small. This story has very much a nostalgic sensibility, a familiarity of reaching into the past to reproduce the past. The plot is very similar The Mutants and Colony in Space, and the story proceeds quite along similar lines. So, the fan listener gets rewarded with a fond feeling of revisiting old friends, but this reduces potential quality of the story, which could use some upgrades in plotting.
| What: | Parasite (New Adventures novels) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Friday 25 October 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 7 |
With Parasite, Jim Mortimore decided to take Doctor Who into the giant, mysterious world genre of science fiction, like Larry Niven's Ringworld, Tony Rothman's The World Is Round, and Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama. The idea is that humans have discovered a mysterious planet or giant manufactured object, and some kind of investigative unit has been sent to explore it. In Parasite, that world is The Artifact, a planet seemingly turned inside out. The TARDIS crew have arrived here by accident, but of course just after some shenanigans have gone on with the investigative team. However, against the usual course of events, the TARDIS crew are not blamed for these shenanigans, but instead gradually get pulled into the attempts to discover what The Artifact is, and to discover what political double-dealing led to the deaths of the investigative team. However, all that gets sidelined to a large extent as the novel becomes a survival story, with The Doctor, Ace, and Benny separated and reunited several times. The Artifact is changing, going into a kind of self-destruct mode. On top of that, inside The Artifact, all species of flora and fauna go through impossibly rapid mutations into new species. This process of rapid speciation presents a threat as the life systems contaminate the people inside The Artifact. This is the ambitious part. Mortimore has made the strongest attempt in the New Adventures series of writing a hard science story for Doctor Who. There is no mysterious figure who is the "soul" of the world, no quasi-supernatural nonsense. Mortimore has tried to make it all work on scientific grounds. Part of the problem, though, is that his scientific knowledge, especially in biology, is not quite up to the task. That is not the worst problem, though. Another problem is that, as he conceives it, the inside-out world means that there are two surfaces, two locations that are "the ground," and so in between is a zero-gravity center where all the air is. The ground itself has only light gravity. That means that most of the action takes place floating, or more often flying, in zero-gravity. Mortimore repeatedly forgets this, and so has characters move and act as if they are on the ground. He will throw in little reminders that they are not, but mostly these do not compensate for the long stretches in which people floating or flying are having ordinary conversations, turning toward or away from each other in the normal sense, and so on. Plus, when characters are on the ground, Mortimore forgets that the gravity is low, so that they should be bouncing and bounding along. He has the characters walking through landscapes as if they were ordinary places on Earth. Also, Mortimore makes a quite pointless tie to one of his previous New Adventures novels. The Doctor is out of the action for three fourths of the novel. Mortimore returns to the earlier relations between the TARDIS characters where Ace openly despises The Doctor and distrusts Benny, and Benny has a lot of nothing to do. For me, the biggest problem is that Mortimore wants to batter these characters into oblivion, and still have them act and talk as if they have only little cuts and bruises. Benny is knocked unconscious at least four times. Ace has critters living inside her skin that burst out, she has her eyes gouged out, and suffers several more physical indignities. Benny undergoes impromptu surgery twice, both by people with no medical training. One time, it involves drilling a hole in her head, and another it involves injecting her with poison, and then surgically removing a parasitical creature. How she survives either of these tortures (the second by Ace), and revives to quip away with ironic witticisms like the Benny of old is beyond my understanding. Given what Mortimore puts them through, the entire TARDIS crew should have been dead halfway into the book. It seems to me that all my complaints about the first two years of New Adventures books really come down to failures of editing. These are all problems that the editors could and should have fixed.
| What: | Falls the Shadow (New Adventures novels) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Wednesday 9 October 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 4 |
I read Daniel O'Mahony' s The Man in the Velvet Mask, which I quite liked, before reading this one. So, perhaps my review is skewed because I was expecting so much more out of Falls the Shadow than what I got. I have seen some other reviews, and those that favor this book try to make some justification for such a decision, with multiple qualifications. This, to me, is a sure sign that something is seriously wrong with the book. Let me start with the good things before I get to the many, many problems. O'Mahony is the most stylish writer of the New Adventures novels up to this point (late 1994). His control of language and tone is very good. Plus, if this weren't a Doctor Who novel, it might be better. That is, O'Mahony has written a modern horror novel in the manner of Clive Barker, and then shoehorned in the Doctor Who elements. This structure makes the Doctor Who elements - the characters, TARDIS, Time Lords, and other DW paraphernalia - always feel out of place. It might, therefore, have been a pretty good horror novel if left with the elements that O'Mahony created. As it is, it is a Doctor Who novel, though, and thus does not work. Here are my reasons for saying so.
1. This novel is a distinctly unpleasant read. It is 300+ pages of viciousness and cruelty without break. Thus, if it were a piece of music, it would be a one-note piece of music, a sustained dirge in chaotic harmonies.
2. There is not one character to root for or have sympathy with, let alone identify with. The inhabitants of Shadowfell, the setting for most of the novel, are all psychotic, self-obsessed, and devoid of reality. The outsiders are otherworldly beings with either dubious moral sensibilities, or no moral sensibilities. Each of these - the Gray Man, Tanith, Gabriel, the Mandelbrot set - are, like the book, all one-note. The TARDIS crew are utterly useless. Ace is reduced to angry outbursts, and the attitude of "I don't like it - shoot it," Benny goes from a whining wreck to nothing but lame, smartass quips, and The Doctor spends half the novel in a state of self-pity, and the other half spinning his wheels on plans that have no effect.
3. The plot makes no sense. Perhaps it made sense to O'Mahony, but he fails to deliver necessary connections. He does provide something like an explanation late in the novel, but it really fails to answer all the "why" questions that a reader might have. Basically, O'Mahony has created a fantasy world, but not told the reader what the rules of operation are. Without rules, things just happen. Just as a for instance, he has the character of Jason Cranleigh become a hybrid creature of all his possible selves in the multiverse, or something like that (it is never clearly explained), without any description of how it happened, or an explanation of why it happened. It is just one of the several crazy things going on in the house.
4. The villains, Tanith and Gabriel, lack motivation for their actions, and the other characters have weak and clichéd motivations. Characters just act on whatever whim O'Mahony wants to give them in the moment.
5. Pretentious chapter titles. The chapter titles are names of songs by Kate Bush, Steve Hackett, and others, or novels by J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Michael Moorcock, or movie titles, and so on. It is as if O'Mahony wants to show off his intellectual credentials. The relationship of the allusions in the titles to the contents of the chapters is, at best, loose.
I could say more, but really this is more than enough to display what is a huge disappointment. Perhaps O'Mahony had great ambitions for his first novel, but just not enough time to see them through.
| | |
| As Dreadful in Drama as in Print |
|
| | |
This is one of the scripts commissioned for the second Colin Baker series that got scrapped. Original scriptwriter Wally K. Daly has adapted it for audio format, and plays the part of the alien parrot bird thing. This is a script that I think should have remained scrapped, and probably should never have been done at all, unless they really were that desperate for scripts in 1985. It is even worse than The Twin Dilemma in terms of plotting, pacing, rationale, plausibility, and clunky dialogue. The whole thing is at the level of the 1930s Buck Rogers serials. The Doctor and Peri decide to take a holiday, and The Doctor finds a hightech bowling ball shaped device that acts as a tourist agency. It suggests the planet Tranquila (how's that for obvious naming), where The Doctor has been before. So, off they go. However, things on Tranquila are not so tranquil (now where did I come up with that?). Tranquila is in a state of permanent truce with their rivals on the other half of the planet, the Ameliorans (who of course are entirely the opposite of ameliorative). This state of affairs has existed for a long time, but one ambitious minor noble doesn't like the status quo. He would like to be in charge, and so he has made a deal with a slimy arms dealer named Mordant, who, it just so happens, sold the bowling-ball travel agency to The Doctor hoping to use it as a device to monitor The Doctor. Mordant has a "hate ray" that he secretly turns on the Tranquilans to make them act like monsters temporarily, so that they would blame the Ameliorans, restart the war, and keep Mordant in the arms business for a very long time. This magic ray gun can be as broad or narrow as he likes, and has multiple settings, such as fear and peace. Oh, and the Tranquilans can transport themselves to anywhere just by thinking about it. I cannot stress enough how preposterously bad this all is. Daly is an old hand at plot by convenience, and doesn't really care all that much if character actions make no sense, or that magic "rays" went out of fashion in science fiction forty years before his first draft. The one redeeming feature is that the actors do their damnedest to make the best of it.
| What: | The Suffering (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Monday 30 September 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 7 |
The writer of this story contrives for it to be narrated, with interruptions, by the two actors. Thus, there is a bit of dramatic dialogue, but mostly it is storytelling. The story itself is like the transitional historicals of Doctor Who, set in an important historical era, but with a science-fiction component. In this case, writer Jacqueline Rayner has decided to take up feminism as the cause. Thus, the story takes place in the suffragette era, and revolves around the controversies of female emancipation in 1912, with some playing around about the origin of the Piltdown Man hoax thrown in. The villain of the piece fits into the theme by being a powerful alien female with a vendetta against all males. Thus, Rayner tries to cut a middle path, that feminism is just dandy, but it should not be about hating men. It's the kind of simple approach that would have fit well with 1965 Doctor Who and the concept of a "family show" of the period. It just makes the villain rather uninteresting. There are some cute moments of temporally displaced Vickie and Steven making false assumptions and social errors due to unfamiliarity with the time period. It's all entertaining, if rather simplistic.
| | |
| Why Is It Always "Because I'm Hungry"? |
|
| | |
| What: | Ghost Walk (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Sunday 29 September 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 7 |
Ghost Walk takes us to many places that Doctor Who has already been, and shows us around them one more time. The story is set in a Yorkshire village known as a site of hauntings. There is a contemporary setting (early 2000s?) and a historical setting (early 1700s). In the historical setting, the TARDIS arrives is some catacombs in which resides an alien entity, ancient and awful, that feeds off energy. In trying to escape this entity, the TARDIS crew get separated, and we follow three stories: The Doctor and Tegan trapped with the beast, Nyssa being mistaken for a witch, and Adric sentenced to death for stealing a loaf of bread. Somehow, all of this is connected to the contemporary setting in which a woman who runs a ghost walk business is the key to preventing Sebaoth, the hungry beast, from manifesting and devouring the world. The story thus involves the rapid introduction late into the story of The Doctor's secret escape plan, a la Stephen Moffat. I find some of the story unconvincing, especially the Nyssa part. It does not strike me as realistic that in the 1700s an English village, even one in Yorkshire, would just decide that any strange woman would automatically be a witch and that she would have to go through the old witch torture routines of a century prior. Additionally, I just don't get why ancient beings of immense power from the beginning of the universe have only one motivation - hunger. All they want to do is eat. Surely, the writers could come up with a more complex motivation than that. So, entertaining, but maddening in its deficiencies.
| What: | Strange England (New Adventures novels) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Sunday 8 September 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 6 |
Simon Messingham's first novel is not his best. I have read others that I thought were really quite good, especially Tomb of Valdemar and The Indestructible Man. Strange England lacks the plotting and strong characterization of those novels. It is another of the bubble universe or mental landscape stories that the Virgin Doctor Who book editors seem to like. The TARDIS plops down our crew in a landscape that looks like a typical 19th-century country estate. However, the landscape and people in it are "not right" in peculiar ways. The presence of our TARDIS crew leads to a wave of violent attacks by giant insects, killer fur babies, and various hybrid creatures. Ace gets kicked into the "real world" near the house at the center of the fake world, the connecting incident being a fire that burned down the house. This real world, though, is just as pointlessly nasty and violent as the virtual one, and virtual beings in the "real" world still have both a presence and an effect. So Messingham does not have it quite clear enough what is virtual and what is real. Then, there is the violence. This novel has heaps and heaps of violence, described in graphic detail that goes on and on. It seems to be there mostly as filler, which is another disturbing quality of the book. That is, there is no reason for much of the violence in terms of plot. It seems to be there because Messingham couldn't think of something else for the characters to do. Additionally, the plot device, the key that opens the explanation, does not require that so much of the action be this violent. It could all have been handled another, cleverer, way. A last problem for me is Messingham's characterization of Doctor 7. This Doctor just hangs around "thinking" and letting everyone else get into trouble. His dialogue just did not, to me, sound like Doctor 7. All that aside, there are some very interesting bits in this novel, some ideas that could have born sweeter fruit.
As with previous editions, we have four independent stories, quite varied in tone and style. The first is a 3rd Doctor + Sarah adventure involving the Hoxx of Balhoon, brother of the Moxx of Balhoon. The story takes place slightly before the 9th Doctor "End of the World" episode, and explains a bit how The Doctor knows about the end of the world. Hoxx wants to create a museum and preserve old Earth for tourism. However, we have a bit of a haunted house situation. The greatest thing about this episode is Tim Treloar and Sadie Miller recreating a favorite Doctor / Companion combination. Sadie Miller is brilliant in capturing Elisabeth Sladen's vocal mannerisms. It takes a listener right back to 1974. Next is The Tivolian Who Knew Too Much with Doctor 4 and Leela. This is a spoof of old movies that have the "guy in the wrong place at the wrong time" plot. It is quite fun and a bit funny and definitely light weight. Third is Together In Eclectic Dreams, a 6th Doctor story with a cameo from the 8th Doctor, and the first of two dream crabs episodes. The story takes us to Inception territory, where there are multiple dream levels and the listener never quite knows what is or is not part of a dream. Writer Roy Gill here writes what feels to me like a typical Marc Platt script, playing dodgems with reality. Last is an 8th Doctor and Charley story also with dream crabs. In If I Should Die Before I Wake, writer John Dorney has taken the path of likening dreams to mythical stories. The Doctor is telling Charley a bedtime story, but it keeps getting disrupted. It takes a while for the drama to arrive at what it is all about, and the twist was not very surprising to me. The drama itself is a two-hander, with India Fisher handling all the voices (including monster roars), except for Doctor 8's. The total package is entertaining. I like the variety. Nothing stands out as brilliant (apart from Tim Treloar and Sadie Miller).
| | |
| Katy Manning tour de force performance |
|
| | |
| What: | The Elixir of Doom (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
|
| By: | Andrew Munro, Corby, United Kingdom |
|
| Date: | Monday 19 August 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 8 |
This story highlights the depth and vocal range of our much beloved Katy. I dont know how this was recorded but she slips effortlessly between characters. I love the switch between narrators and even her interpretation of the doctor was spot on!! The story of the golden age of Hollywood is excellent and I dare you not to feel sorry for the demise of one of the monsters!! Give it a listen today.
| What: | All-Consuming Fire (New Adventures novels) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Sunday 18 August 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 3 |
All-Consuming Fire is a dreadful double crossover story, the kind that certain types of fans think are "a good idea." This one takes Doctor Who, places it into the world of Sherlock Holmes, and then transfers that mashup to the Cthulhu Mythos. The result is a nonsensical story with weak plotting, poor characterization, and more useless trinkets for fans than the last merch table at a ComiCon. The story is told primarily from the point of view of Watson, and in this respect is more Sherlock Holmes than anything else. In the first half of the novel, The Doctor is just an annoying side character, Benny gets no mention at all (except in the very brief prologue), and Ace is reduced to one short report. In fact, throughout the novel Ace is almost nonexistent. The story, such as it is, involves Holmes being commissioned by the Vatican (a meeting with the Pope, no less) to recover some books stolen from a secret library. This leads to Holmes and Watson meeting The Doctor in said library, some running around dodging danger in London, a trip to India where things get mystical, and from there a trip across a magic tunnel opened by intoning a nonsense incantation, leading to an alien world. In this novel, we return to the ultra canny Doctor 7, who uses oh so many words to say almost nothing, gives no information to anyone, and is just really irritating with his smug, evasive answers to any question. He is also the manipulative Doctor, planting his agents in dangerous foreign locations, Benny in India and Ace on the alien world, without telling them what to expect, how to get around, or any of the basics of survival, let alone what they are supposed to do there. And indeed, the reader never finds out what The Doctor does or does not know about this situation, why he has planted his agents in these places, how he knows where to plant them, or what he is trying to accomplish with this elaborate scheme. With the companions, Andy Lane has gone for the badass women characterization, so mostly they bully, blast, shoot, beatup and generally show off their fighting skills. It's utterly boring 1990s action film stuff. Ace is particularly irritating when she finally makes a real appearance in the last 30 or so pages. This is "military" Ace as fans who know nothing about soldiers understand it. All she wants to do is shoot things and blow things up and talk tough and condescend to everyone around her. One good thing about this novel is that Lane does a passable pastiche of Conan Doyle's style. This, however, does not elevate a novel of thin plot, riddled with holes, unimaginative characterization, and a portrayal of the TARDIS crew that is, frankly, reprehensible.
| What: | Shadow of the Past (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Sunday 4 August 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 7 |
In this story, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw returns to the UNIT vault to inspect a piece of leftover alien technology some twenty years or so after UNIT had captured it. She gets to chatting with the UNIT guard assigned to her, which leads her into telling the story behind the capture of the alien device. The story she tells is very much in the vein of 1970 Doctor Who, quite a bit like a Quatermass story. Writer Simon Guerrier has given Liz room to express some of her own views of her time at UNIT and her relationships with The Doctor, The Brigadier, and other UNIT members. The surprise ending was not very surprising to me; I got it less than halfway into the story. Nevertheless, this is a good example of how a Companion Chronicle can give the listener a new understanding of old Doctor Who.
| | |
| Good First Doctor Style Adventure |
|
| | |
| What: | The Bounty of Ceres (The Early Adventures audio dramas) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Sunday 4 August 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 8 |
The Bounty of Ceres is the closest to hard science fiction of any Doctor Who offering I have encountered. I have long thought that Doctor Who could have some hard science stories and that it would work well. The Bounty of Ceres justifies that opinion. Here we have Doctor One, Vicki, and Steven accidentally arriving on a base located on the planetoid Ceres. The Doctor has tried repairing the TARDIS, and the TARDIS has now broken down in a way that prevents the travellers from getting back inside. So, they go in search of help. The base is a mining installation, corporate owned, run by three people and a set of maintenance robots. Some things have been going wrong on the station, and one of the crew is more than a little paranoid. What follows, then, is classic Doctor Who of the 1960s, with the travellers at first being the subjects of suspicion, then winning trust, and finally helping to find a solution. Writer Ian Potter has done a very good job of plot misdirection, so that a listener thinks that one thing is happening, when in fact something else is going on. Peter Purves and Maureen O'Brien fall right back into their roles as if they had never left them, and Purves does a marvellous William Hartnell impression. He does not sound exactly like Hartnell, but he does have the rhythm and speech patterns of Hartnell down perfectly. I found this one quite well done.
| | |
| The Master Is Becoming More Himself |
|
| | |
| What: | The Home Guard (The Early Adventures audio dramas) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Sunday 4 August 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 7 |
The Big Finish Early Adventures series are done as a blend of the Companion Chronicles, basically as stories read by Doctor Who actors from long ago, and the monthly series of new adventures, fully dramatized. I think it would be better to make them entirely like the new adventures and drop the narrative links. The Home Guard is a curious affair. Simon Guerrier has tried to maintain the spirit of 1966 Doctor Who without rehashing old territory. Thus, it starts out almost as a historical, in which it seems the TARDIS crew are for some reason living and blending into a World War I setting. However, we learn that they are not pretending, but really believe that they are part of a town holding out against some undefined enemy. Polly and Jamie believe they are a married couple, and Ben seems to be a best friend to them both. They are part of the Home Guard, led by an incompetent officer who seemingly does not like being a leader and really does not like military ways, calling himself The Doctor. What ensues is that the TARDIS crew got accidentally caught up in an experiment being run by The Master. This pre- Roger Delgado Master, played brilliantly by James Dreyfus, is a character in transition. He thinks that he is doing good, righting a wrong, and has, Master fashion, created an elaborate plan of deception and manipulation so that he can also gather "information" from the experiment. He is becoming more like The Master that we see by the Third Doctor adventures in that he is single-minded in purpose, and has an "ends justify the means" mentality, so that if people are hurt or killed it does not really affect him. Apparently, the starting idea for this story was to have a Doctor Who adventure like Dad's Army. However, while references to Dad's Army remain, the story itself turned much more toward a Doctor Who tone. I think another of the ideas for this story is to "introduce" (or retroduce?) the technology that the War Chief will use in The War Games, the mist that fogs people's minds and makes them believe they are in a scenario, to reinforce the notion that it is stolen Time Lord technology. The Home Guard is entertaining but not deep. For me, it took too long for The Doctor to escape the induced delusion.
| What: | Theatre of War (New Adventures novels) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Sunday 4 August 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 6 |
Justin Richards' Theatre of War is one of those "idea" stories that fans often have when they get together and spend too much time talking. "What if," someone suddenly blurts out, "You had a society that was all about love of theatre!" Then all agree what a swell idea that would be. And so, Richards has given us this "idea," a society dedicated to all things theatrical. To make it "Doctor Who," Richards has made the theatrical society into bloodthirsty conquerors of many planets, with a kind of Italian Renaissance governmental structure, with all the political machinations to go with it. That may be because, at heart, once Richards settled on theatre as the motif, he just had to make it all Shakespearean. To get the reader into this tragedy, Richards has started with an investigation. Archaeologists from the Heletian Empire (Theatre World) are investigating the last remaining structure on Menaxus, a specialized and famous theatre in which the only known full performance of a famous 24th-century (or some such future date) play, in the manner of Shakespeare, took place. The Heletian Empire is now under siege, losing world after world in a war gone horribly wrong for them, and even Menaxus is under threat from the war. The TARDIS crew get involved when they drop off Bernice at a vast private library known as the Braxiatel Collection, where she runs into one of the investigators into Menaxus, who intrigues her curiosity. She wiggles her way into the new archaeological survey team. However, things are getting weird on Menaxus, and people start dying. Bernice hits the panic button (quite literally) and thus The Doctor and Ace join her for the rest of the story.
The novel would be fine as a general run-of-the-mill Doctor Who story. At more than 300 pages, though, the novel demonstrates the theatre-mad society cannot work and really makes no sense. The plotting is also filled with contrivances and coincidences just to keep things running. It's too preposterous for its own good. The novel does have some good points. The Doctor, Bernice, and Ace are well characterized, though I still find Ace too soldiery in a clichéd way. Their dialogue fits the characters well. One can also give credit to Richards for running the conceit through to the end.
| What: | ...ish (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
|
| By: | Andrew Munro, Corby, United Kingdom |
|
| Date: | Monday 17 June 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 7 |
If you are reading this before listening to the story please take the time to sit back and relax and let Colin Baker treat you to yet another master class of the sixth doctor on audio.
This story was written for him.
Don't ask me to explain the story or the plot points, wiser people here will.
Just enjoy it for it is
| What: | Tragedy Day (New Adventures novels) |
|
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
|
| Date: | Wednesday 5 June 2024 |
|
| Rating: | 5 |
Gareth Roberts' second novel for Doctor Who shows all the signs of an early effort. Roberts has written much better later in his career. With this novel, it seems that he could not really decide what the novel was supposed to be. Therefore, it is two things in one and neither at the same time. Tragedy Day seems to be a satire or spoof of some kind, but much of that is undermined by Roberts' attempts to make it a traditional Doctor Who story as if broadcast on TV. The result is that most of the novel makes no sense, it has far too many things happening at once, and major parts are not related enough to each other to matter. Additionally, the writing is quite clunky at times, such as "she asked the slim, dark-haired boy at her side," as if every character must be introduced by direct physical description so the casting director would know exactly whom to cast. Descriptions lack the subtlety and grace of good writing. It would take far too long, and probably not be very interesting, for me to go on about all the mistakes, preposterous coincidences, and throwaway elements. Here are a couple: a human-arachnid hybrid assassin comes to a planet visited by virtually no one, a planet where he has never been before, and manages to secure a super-special James Bond style spy car built especially for him. The big ending in which The Doctor saves the day requires The Doctor to trick the villains in his TARDIS to go to a place with him, where he has never been and knows nothing about, so that he can use the anti-matter thingamajig in the dancefloor, about which he has never been told, to foil the baddies. It is just terribly thought out, and the satire is neither funny nor particularly pointed. The good things about Tragedy Day are mostly in how Roberts has written the characters of the TARDIS crew. The whole "they hate each other" mess that ran through the previous ten novels or so is totally gone now. The characters are actually likeable again. Their lines fit the characters, and I can hear the voices of the actors (even though it would be a few more years before Lisa Bowerman took the role of Bernice) saying the lines. I just wish these characters were in a better story.
| | |
| Displaying 1 to 20 of 4,107 reviews
Next>> |
|
| | |
