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 | If you love Torchwood this is for you |
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| What: | The Torchwood Archive (Torchwood audio dramas) |
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| By: | Andrew Munro, Corby, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Tuesday 9 April 2024 |
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| Rating: |   9 |
This is a must listen for any Torchwood fan of the tv and now audio show.
It has a cinematic quality (In my mind anyay) and the plot allows each character to have their turn in the limelight.
I haven't listened to much Torchwood but still was able to follow the plot, but I am sure I have missed out on some easter egg treats contained within.
Great acting sound design directing, writing etc etc. Buy it now!!!
Synopsis
Welcome, visitor. The Torchwood Archive provides a complete history of our Institute from its distant beginnings to the present day. When we founded our great enterprise in the year of our Lord 1879, we decreed that there should be a record of this achievement, stored at the very furthest limits of the British Empire. By visiting you are spreading that legacy, perhaps out through the skies. For now, I shall bid you a good day and welcome you to the Torchwood Archive. Do, please look around.”
The Torchwood Archive is a forgotten asteroid in the centre of a great war. Jeremiah is its first visitor in many centuries. He’s come to learn something very important. And the ghosts of Torchwood are waiting for him.
Written By: James Goss
Directed By: Scott Handcock
Cast
John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness), Eve Myles (Gwen Cooper), Gareth David-Lloyd (Ianto Jones), Naoko Mori (Toshiko Sato), Indira Varma (Suzie Costello), Kai Owen (Rhys Williams), Tom Price (Andy Davidson), Tracy-Ann Oberman (Yvonne Hartman), Richie Campbell (Jeremiah Bash Henderson), Rowena Cooper (Queen Victoria), Julian Lewis Jones (Alex Hopkins), Samuel Barnett(Norton Folgate), David Warner (The Committee), Emma Reeves (Miss Trent),Krystian Godlewski (Maxim Ivanov), Guy Adams (Archie), Geoffrey Breton(Bartender), Lisa Bowerman (Miss Mitford), Laura Doddington (Delilah), Aaron Neil(Mandrake), Kerry Gooderson (Little Girl), Ryan Sampson (Ivan Putin), Damian Lynch (Kieran Frost), Paul Clayton (Mr Colchester)
Produced by James Goss
Script Editor Steve Tribe
Executive Producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs
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| Discontinuous Strangeness |
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| What: | The Eighth Doctor: The Time War 2 (The Eighth Doctor: Time War audios) |
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| By: | Doug W, An Alternate Reality (formerly Pocono Summit), United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 15 February 2024 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
It's hard to say a lot about The Eighth Doctor, The Time War 2, the second "season" of the eighth Doctor Time War series, because it generally left me rather befuddled. The stories lurch from one to the next to the next without a continuity of events between them. The Doctor tries to bring Bliss home in The Lords of Terror, only to find her home planet radically changed by the Time War. There is a development in this one that I won't spoil that does deliver a good deal of powerful revelation. Then, in Planet of the Ogrons, a more comedic story, a very strange ogron shows up (I won't spoil this detail either), and they also meet The Twelve, the next incarnation of what was previously The Eleven, played excellently by Julia McKenzie. This time, The Twelve is more or less able to control the breakthroughs of her former selves. She remains with the Doctor and Bliss throughout the rest of these stories. Next, we get thrown into In the Garden of Death, where the characters are imprisoned by the daleks and suffering from amnesia. After this, we are suddenly in a submarine, of all things, in Jonah, the final story of this set. Another ultimate weapon is being sought in the ocean of a planet that somehow disables TARDIS operation under the waters. It's a kind of strange and again incongruous story that nevertheless is entertaining. McKenzie again steals the show here as The Twelve. It's also well worth mentioning that Jacqueline Pearce is great fun to listen to as Cardinal Ollistra throughout the stories in this set, sadly, apparently her last role in Doctor Who before her death.
So, due to the cast and performances, and some elements of the stories, this is an entertaining "season", but it left this listener struggling to maintain a sense of the overall flow of events throughout.
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| On the Fringes of the Time War |
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| What: | The Eighth Doctor: The Time War 1 (The Eighth Doctor: Time War audios) |
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| By: | Doug W, An Alternate Reality (formerly Pocono Summit), United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 8 February 2024 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
It was previously established in The Night of the Doctor that the eighth Doctor would not fight in the Time War. So, going into this Eighth Doctor Time War series, we're not really in the thick of it, and this seems a dubious storyline to tread. However, it's Paul McGann and the eighth Doctor, so I have an interest regardless. McGann and his Doctor can almost always deliver engaging situations. Still, this box set only barely gets a 7 from me.
It starts out well with The Starship of Theseus. We get some really intriguing abrupt time and continuity shifts that result from the effects of the Time War, even in far off parts of the universe that aren't right in the middle of actual battles.
Echoes of War is an okay story having a lot to do with zones on a planet with greater or lesser degrees of temporal disturbance, and a dalek with temporary amnesia resulting from this.
The Conscript was really disappointing to me, because it features a Time Lord soldier training camp that is far too human. Okay, yeah, the old Gallifrey has become corrupted by the Time War and the drive to win it at any cost, but still... This is not what I come to these for. The Time Lords have at other times had very mysterious great powers. Now they've been reduced to very conventional space soldiers. That's quite an unfortunate degradation. This is the story that really pulls down the box set's score in my opinion, though the next detracts also.
Lastly, we have One Life, which unfortunately gives us a grand deus ex machina ending in the not so great tradition of The Parting of the Ways and others. It was done rather nicely, I must say, but is still just too convenient of a wrap up of the box set. It certainly left the production team unfettered as to what direction to take the next box set series in.
Again, this whole thing was still done rather nicely, so I'm leaving the 7 out of 10 on it.
| What: | 60 Moments in Time (Miscellaneous factual books) |
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| By: | Charles G. Dietz, San Jose, CA, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 3 February 2024 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
Overall tons of information with pictures and a great index for stories but it is in a packaging that gives the impression that it has extras that are sold with it all it is an extensive magazine celebrating Dr Who for $29.99. They could have made it hardbound for that cost.
| What: | Conundrum (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 3 February 2024 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
Steve Lyons' debut for Doctor Who is quite unlike anything else written for Doctor Who. It is both metafiction and not, humorous and dark, violent and sentimental. What makes it work is the overarching trope. He places the TARDIS crew in the Land of Fiction, from The Mind Robber. The unknown enemy of The Doctor who has been plaguing him with alternate time lines for the last four or five novels has resurrected this pocket universe and found a new Master of Stories to run it. This new master is not a bookish early twentieth-century writer of light, popular works, as was the previous master, but a boy in his late teens from the 1990s who devours fan fiction, comic books, and the like, and thus populates his fictional world with all of these late twentieth-century popular media tropes in the little town of Arandale. What makes this work is the way that Lyons tells the story. He has chosen to make the new Master of Fiction the narrator, and to have him narrate in "real time" so to speak. Thus, everything that happens is filtered through his perception, and so it is never fully clear whether the TARDIS crew are acting and speaking as they really do or as the narrator perceives or wants them to do. It's a tricky exercise in dramatic irony for the reader. There are a couple of aspects that trouble me about the book, though. One is not really Lyons' fault. He was given a brief about how his novel would fit into the ongoing story arc and how the TARDIS crew ought to behave. That means we get more of the same, tiresome, infighting that has been going on throughout the New Adventures. We get the same tired and totally untrue argument that The Doctor is just "playing games." Ace is particularly annoying. The new shoot anything that moves Ace is boring, full of herself, angry all the time for no good reason, petulant, and not in any way a pleasant person to be around. Every time she comes into the story I am begging, "Please, bring back the old Ace." The other bothersome aspect to me is Lyons' fault, and it is the amount of brutal physical violence directed at women by powerful men. The detailed accounts of these incidents are disturbing. I cannot tell what Lyons wants the reader to think about them. Is this a commentary on the type of schlock media that the Master of Fiction admires? If so, then Lyons should make that point more clearly. Is it Lyons' accidentally letting out something in himself? Hard to tell. So, two demerits, but otherwise Conundrum is the best of the early run of New Adventures.
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| Some of the very best of this series |
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| What: | Gallifrey: Time War - Volume Four (Gallifrey audio dramas) |
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| By: | Doug W, An Alternate Reality (formerly Pocono Summit), United States |
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| Date: | Monday 22 January 2024 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
Hey, Timelash.com guys! Reviewing four stories in one shot is kind of tricky! That could be part of why fewer reviews of these have been submitted. Having said that, I'm excited to come back and write about this final? "season" of the original Gallifrey series. It's at least the final volume of Gallifrey Time War.
I've listened to Volumes 1-3 also, and haven't been inclined to stop and review them, particularly Volume 3, which I didn't care much for at all, though I must say that the time war angle of time paradoxes and distortions of normal causality has been fascinating to listen to, and made me wonder how the writers managed to reach the level of multidimensional twisted strangeness present in some of the stories of the first 3 volumes.
Volume 4 seems like it may have had the first story or two carry over from what was among what had been commissioned for Volume 3, but even in these first two, there's a bit more that makes an impression. In Deception, Leela and Eris, and some Time Lord double agents, encounter deception fields, which are apparently deployed by the Time Lords in various places as part of their war efforts, and cause exceedingly creepy and frantically insane experiences, turning people's own minds against them. I'm sure the production team had a ball crafting the sound effects, but this is seriously unsettling stuff.
In Dissolution, Narvin and Rayo escape a Dalek ambush by taking an emergency TARDIS trip to the hidden Patrix Chapter retreat, which is Narvin's Chapter House, where they meet the Apothecary, who has a history with Narvin. This one is light on action and story, and is much more of a character-driven focus on some of Narvin's backstory.
The story in this volume that motivated me to write a review is the excellent Beyond, which is by far the best story in the Gallifrey Time War series, and the best Big Finish story I've listened to in quite some time. An amazingly enormous depth is written into this single episode. Our Brax and Romana journey into nested realities - a dimension within a dimension within a dimension, in search of The Parallax. Since these are outside of the "prime" universe, some huge and very divergent events can happen here that give the story an immense weight and leave a lasting impression. And the final revelation of what The Parallax actually is, where it actually leads to, and who the engineer is who created it is a very well crafted and meaningful resolution to the story.
With so much different Doctor Who media and so many different Big Finish releases, it's tough to get a good read on what comes before what. In Beyond, in the course of traveling through The Beyond, we get the first appearance of the Ravenous in the Gallifrey series (but apparently not their first ever appearance). These creatures were an aspect of Beyond that I found a bit too dark and disturbing, what with them devouring Time Lords and Time Lord energies, but which is ultimately a minor detraction.
The final story of this volume is Homecoming, which involves a plan to end the time travel aspect of the time war by closing off the possibility of time travel for both the Daleks and Time Lords. It's a fine story to close out this volume, with some fun crazy stuff from the Dalek emperor and Rassilon, and it leaves one wondering what the fate of a few of our regular characters may be after this.
In Homecoming, we have a very striking parallel to present day government madness (this was apparently released in 2021 though interestingly, this volume was in production some 18 months prior to that); the present day real world events I'm referring to are a President trying to exercise power far beyond what he actually has over his citizens, and directives made to throw away decades or centuries of medical science and disregard what is known and established fact. Near the end of Homecoming, as the time war is nearing its peak, Rassilon says, "If I say down is up or black is white, so mote it be. I paint reality with my words." It's a stark portrayal of mad, mindless authoritarianism. After this and after imprisoning the Doctor in his confession dial for billions of years, the Doctor would return to Gallifrey and exile Rassilon ("Get off my planet!") in Hell Bent. By the way, in Hell Bent, the Doctor was "hell bent" on *saving Clara*, if anyone didn't get that. That's what that story was really about. But by then, he'd had enough of Rassilon.
In this volume, we also have Rassilon speaking of the coming "ascension" of the Time Lords into beings of pure thought. This sounds to me very much like the Celestis of the Eighth Doctor BBC books series. I don't know if that reference was intentional or not.
The regulars here in Volume 4, namely Lalla Ward, Louise Jameson, Sean Carlsen and Miles Richardson are all such a treat to listen to, and Richard Armitage as Rassilon is a powerful presence here as well. Nicholas Briggs also does great work with the dalek voices, though I'm not sure I'd say daleks are ever really a "treat" to listen to. To me, Lalla Ward is particularly enjoyable to listen to here and throughout the many Gallifrey series, and continues to sound virtually the same as she did some 40+ years earlier.
Overall, Gallifrey Time War Volume 4 brings the Gallifrey Time War series to a kind of end, as we know there's more to come after this in other media, and does so with some solid stories, including the superb Beyond. I haven't yet listened to the Gallifrey War Room series, which appears to pick up from here.
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| More Horror Novel Than Doctor Who |
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| What: | The Left-Handed Hummingbird (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 21 January 2024 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
I really wanted to like this novel more than I do, especially after reading all the praise heaped on Kate Orman. However, I have problems. This novel occupies the middle of the "Alternate History" cycle of the New Adventures. Someone, somewhere is messing with time, and The Doctor is pursuing the clues. Apart from some mentions of this time meddling, of someone behind the scenes playing havoc with The Doctor's past, this novel takes the reader no farther toward finding who or what that is and what they want.
Spoilers ahead: The novel itself is basically a stand-alone story, no matter how many nods to the prior novels in the series Orman sticks in. And she does stick in many, and to even earlier New Adventures novels, and to many other Doctor Who stories. It is just packed full of knowing winks to die-hard fans. Even with all that, this novel is almost nothing like Doctor Who. The story, such as it is, is that an ancient Aztec named Huitzilin (Little Humming Bird, because, apparently, the Aztecs thought that humming birds were the souls of dead warriors), got a big dose of radiation from a crashed Exxilon space ship, which gave him huge psychic powers, mainly the ability to "eat" the "souls" of others. Huitzilin's body may be dead, but his soul-devouring spirit lives on in the form of The Blue, a force that takes over people's minds and turns them into killers before erasing them from history. He feeds on the psychic energy released by the dead. The Doctor takes magic mushrooms in an Aztec ritual and in his hallucinogenic state opens "the door" by which Huitzilin can return to life in corporeal form and reclaim an Exxilon weapon of immense power, and thus continue his soul eating ways in perpetuity. End spoilers.
That is the basic story of the novel. The plot involves mostly The Doctor trying to outmanuever Huitzilin, and failing every time. He takes along Ace and Benny, telling them very little of his plans and expecting them just to go along with it. He also involves a Mexican of Aztec descent named Christian Alvarez, who is particularly sensitive to The Blue. Through all of the novel, Christian is a pathetic, damaged, palpitating psychological wreck, so not the most interesting or forthcoming of characters. The action crosses several different years and locations. It is, all told, a violent, unremittingly downbeat story. It read more like a modern horror novel than a Doctor Who novel to me. It had the same idea of ancient evil trying to break through into the modern world, wreaking havoc and death, and being mostly incorporeal. Thus, it is more like Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show than it is like Doctor Who.
Orman is a better writer than the other writers in the New Adventures series up to this point. The one thing that got to me is that she is trying very hard to make this a "great" novel, and so does some things that seem to be the kinds of things that "great" novels do, such as suddenly changing perspective or writing style. However, it is never clear why she does so when she does so, just that it is something that "great" novels do.
It's a good first effort as a novel, and probably a fairly good horror novel for those that like horror novels. It's just not my cup of dark tea.
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| Brilliant reading but disc label error!! |
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| What: | Silver Nemesis (Target novelisation readings) |
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| By: | Matthew David Rabjohns, Bridgend, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Monday 8 January 2024 |
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| Rating: | 9 |
If you can get past the silly labelling mistake, discs 2 and 4 are mislabelled and are vice versa!
But get past that and you have the Cyber Leader himself delivering one of the best novelisations of any classic Doctor Who story ever! Together with the usual high quality BBC sound effects work, this story is absolutely awesome and has that extra touch of the great David Banks himself performing the reading duties, which he does brilliantly I might add. What is also so cool is the novel has everything that the extended version of the TV serial had, so is far more satisfying than the appalling edited originally transmitted version of the story. And its so awesome to yet again hear David in voice as the Cybermen too! He was brilliant on the original show, and he still is here!
So yes asides from the production blooper, this is an absolutely cool release that I will definitively listen to again and again.
| What: | The Nightmare Realm (New series audio originals) |
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| By: | Matthew David Rabjohns, Bridgend, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Saturday 23 December 2023 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
Jonathan Morris clearly loves The Twilight Zone as well as Doctor Who. And that's great for me because so do I too! Here we get a tale woven with so many lovely nods to Rod Serling's classic sci fi show, to me the second ever best sci fi only to Doctor Who. And how brilliant we get a Doctor Who story to celebrate the Twilight Zone!
What is even more impressive though is how damned wickedly accurate Dan Starkey's delivery of Peter Capaldi's 12th Doctor is. He is amazing, and I think he's better than Jacob Dudman who does the 12th (poorly, I think too) for Big Finish productions. Dan is awesome as the 12th! He made this story highly engaging with his voice actually always sounding interested in the story he's delivering. All to often in these BBC audio readings we get "bored" readers who sound like they'd rather be doing anything else. But not so with Dan. He tells Jonathan's story superbly slickly. And its not just 12 he does awesome, he does Nardole brilliant too! I think Dan is another Nickl Briggs in disguise! Such a talented guy!
This story is excellent, and left this Doctor Who and Twilight Zone fan grinning from ear to ear. I hope we get more stories like this with Dan in future. That would go down a treat.
| What: | The Dimension Riders (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 14 December 2023 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The Dimension Riders tells a tale often told in Doctor Who and does not really add much to it. The premise is that some ancient evil wants to take control of the universe and wants to use the TARDIS to do so. Said ancient evil, here The Garvond, yes another "The" ancient evil, has no particular motivation or rationale for taking over the universe; it just wants to because it is evil. So, take a mixture of Shada (actually mentioned in this novel), Earthshock, The Invisible Enemy, and a couple more, swap some names and locations, and you get this novel. The writing is also quite amateurish at times. Mostly, this is a matter of stating the very obvious as if it is the most important thing in the universe. Here is a typical example: "A ghost reaching for help. Help that was not there." This sort of telegraphing and clunky prose runs throughout the book. Another detraction for me is that once again we get a TARDIS crew in disarray. No one trusts anyone. Everyone is mad at each other. Why Ace and Bernice remain if they do not like traveling in the TARDIS baffles me. Bernice in this novel even leaves it up to a coin toss to determine whether she stays.
The good parts of the novel are these. Blythe uses solid characterization. Each character is distinct, and, apart from The Garvond, well motivated. He keeps the pace going, neither too fast nor too slow. Various parts tie together. It is a decent enough read, good for passing a few hours.
The Doctor Who Unbound series brief of "What if..." with Doctor Who goes for "What if The Doctor really did believe in the greater good moral philosophy?" The idea here is that if we take criticisms of Doctor 7 literally, that he is just a manipulator with an "ends justify the means" mentality, what would he really be like? David Collings is The Doctor here, played exceptionally well. The story involves The Doctor trying to solve a problem he left unresolved many years earlier. An experiment in human genetics, paid for off the books by the US military, "must be stopped." So, a fairly typical kind of Doctor Who story, seemingly. Yet, as the story progresses, The Doctor's behavior becomes more erratic and questionable, and he gets more self-righteous than moral. There are a few too many coincidences and improbabilities to make the story totally effective. Yet, writer David Bishop pursues the logic of the main idea with gritty determination. This is definitely not for every Who fan.
| What: | Gods and Monsters (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 5 December 2023 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Gods and Monsters wraps up one phase of a long story, but sets the stage for the next. The Doctor has been trapped and carted off somewhere. Fenric, one of the Old Gods, is back and wants revenge. Or does he? It seems as if he has something else on his mind and The Doctor is only part of a larger scheme. To make a long story short, the story takes place on a chessboard turned into a world. Fenric is not playing chess against The Doctor, but playing against another of the Old Gods. The Doctor is actually a chess piece of Fenric's opponent, as are all the rest of the extended TARDIS team. Much of the story involves The Doctor trying to protect Hex, who seems to be moving ever closer to a predstined end. Of course, that leaves room for Ace to do much emoting (if Ace and Hex are so angry with The Doctor all of the time, why do they stay with him?). The story has many clever elements, several plot twists derived from elements planted in previous stories, and good sound design. But what about Hex? Stay tuned.
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| Long Plot Fully Confirmed |
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| What: | Black and White (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 5 December 2023 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The previous few entries in the series seemed to be just The Doctor dithering around with Ace and Hex, or dithering around on his own. Black and White brings these things together to show that The Doctor has been acting according to a plan all along. The plan - create an expanded TARDIS team to finally take on The Old Gods. But, of course, things go just a bit wrong. The new team get accidentally split into two time zones about 15 years apart, where they get involved in the adventures of some rough and tumble guy named Beowulf. The story has a good mixture of humor and pathos. We get Ace and Lysandra playing "Who's the Boss?", while Hex and Sally seem to be bonding, and The Doctor is out of it for most of the story, placed in deep freeze by a conman frog from space, played with campy brilliance by Stuart Milligan (Garundel makes a return in the episode Starlight Robbery). The whole is clever and entertaining, though not spectacular.
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| Another Mad Timelord Meets His End |
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| What: | Doom Coalition 4 (Doom Coalition audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 5 December 2023 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Doom Coalition 4 is the epic ending to the epic adventure that is Doom Coalition. With Doctor 8 in the 2010s and after, Big Finish seems to want to bring him ever closer to Gallifrey. More and more, his fate is tangled up in that planet. Thus, Doom Coalition revolves around the concept of Save the Universe by Saving Gallifrey. And save it from what? Well, it turns out in Doom Coalition 3 it is not from the new mad Time Lord The Eleven, and not the even newer mad Time Lord The Clocksmith, but from ultra patriotic, snooty Civil Servant Time Lord, and, of course, a quondam friend of The Doctor, Padrac (finally, an evil Time Lord who does not have a "The" for a name). Thus, the Doom Coalition of the title is not The Doctor and pals, but Padrac + The Eleven + The Clocksmith + The Sonomancer (from earlier in the series). Part 1 of Doom Coalition 4, Ship in a Bottle, starts with The Doctor, Liv, and Helen, trapped in a lifeboat of sorts in a future that is rapidly disappearing. The story is an occasion for much self-reflection and confessions from the characters, as every effort to escape is doomed to fail. Of course, they do escape, but to what? Part Two, Songs of Love, concentrates on River Song, now seemingly a prisoner of Padrac. However, she schemes her way out, sort of, and exits the series via the Matrix, sort of (it is not really clear just what happens to her in there other than that she rescues The Doctor, who temporarily gets back all his memories of her, only to have her take them away again, which is becoming an all-too-easy out for Big Finish, and then just fade back into her regular timeline, maybe?) So, with River now out of the story, Part Three, The Side of the Angels, gets the TARDIS crew back together. They end up in an alternate New York City where The Monk has formed an alliance with Cardinal Ollistra and the Weeping Angels to create a new Gallifrey on Earth rather than make a direct strike against Padrac. This is an earlier Ollistra incarnation. This one might be the best episode of the four. Then, we get the big confrontation at the end with Stop the Clock. The whole series is fast-paced and keeps one riding along. Writers Fitton and Dorney tie up most the loose ends from Doom Coalition 1. Robert Bathurst is suitably upper-crusty arrogant as Padrac. I have a problem with the resolution, because it rests on Caleera/The Sonomancer being completely doolally for Padrac. The simplification of characters to simple types, to having just one dominant emotion or point of view, does not resonate with me. It seems to me like a solution derived from time constraints or lack of imagination, or both. In sum, Doom Coalition 4 works only if one has already listened to the rest of the Doom Coalition series. The scope is suitably big for Doctor Who, but there are many corners cut in terms of story, especially with the resolution.
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| the worst rtd series its rather good |
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| What: | The Complete Second Series (BBC new series DVDs/Blu-rays) |
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| By: | alonzo butterfant, norwich, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Monday 6 November 2023 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
episode's 1 6/10 2 8/10 3 9/10 4 10/10 5 7/10 6 9/10 7 2/10 8 10/10 9 10/10 10 6/10 11 1/10 12 9/10 13 7/10
overall a really strong series with too many lows and the christmas invasion is a 5/10
| What: | Blood Heat (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 4 November 2023 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
"Blood Heat" is generally regarded as the best of the "second season" of Doctor Who novels. It does have much going for it. I will start, though, with what for me are problem areas. One is the continued portrayal of Ace as a single-minded, professional soldier, who is somehow still angry all the time and not for any good reason. This one-dimensional Ace is nowhere nearly as interesting as her younger self in the TV series and the early Big Finish audios (produced a few years after the Virgin run of Doctor Who novels). Another is that Mortimore indulges in too many drawn-out battle and fight scenes, described in just a bit too much gory detail. If realism is what he is aiming for, that is fine, but to have characters performing superhuman acts, such as Bernice's single-handed takeover of a nuclear submarine, undercuts the supposed realism injected by the detailed descriptions of all the ways to damage a human body. Further, the ending of the novel is a greatly rushed final battle sequence, and the resolution just magically "happens" because the novel has to end. Last, for this review anyway, is that because the novel is an alternate universe story, the reader gets to retread much old ground if the reader has seen the previous Doctor Who TV serials that this book builds on - "The Silurians," "The Sea Devils," and "Ghost Light" primarily, with a few smaller references to others. Something that may bother some readers is that this is the first novel in a five-novel "Alternate Universe" sequence that finds The Doctor being manipulated, forced to live through versions of history in which he did not win out or was not around to solve the problem. As such, the ending of this novel is a blank space. We know that The Doctor is being manipulated, but we do not know who is doing it or why.
Now, for the good parts. First, this novel is probably the best-written New Adventures novel up to this point. The novel has very little clunky dialogue. Mortimore avoids the many early-novel mistakes that clutter previous works in the New Adventures series. He gets down to telling the story, with straightforward plotting and a good sense of how to keep characters distinct and interesting. We are meeting characters we know from the past, but these are much different characters in many ways, shaped by entirely different circumstances. Mortimore does very well in making the characters both like their originals, yet different. He is especially good with Sergeant Benton in this regard. The story has about five different threads, and Mortimore does well in keeping them all going on the same general course. As an interrogation of "Doctor Who," and thus, necessarily, of The Doctor, this novel is better than most others. With the exception of Ace, the characterizations are all clear in setting up why characters take the ethical positions they do, and why they act as they do. Thus, "Blood Heat" has more positives than negatives and makes pretty good reading.
Final Note: Mortimore self-published a "writer's cut" version of this novel, substantially longer. I have not read it, so I do not know whether it counteracts some of the criticisms I have.
| What: | Cyber-Hunt (BBV Audio Adventures in Time and Space) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 24 October 2023 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Cyber-Hunt starts another BBV "Doctor Who but we can't call it Doctor Who" series. I think this is the third of four. Here, we have The Wanderer (call me Fred), played by Nicholas Briggs. He's left behind his friends and gone off to have some peace, quiet, and a good think. However, he ends up in a war zone, the war between the Cyberons, I think, but let's just call them Cyber Men, and humans. The humans have won this particular battle, but the commander wants to get a war trophy - to hunt and kill an already damaged Cyber guy. This plan goes horribly wrong and poor Fred is stuck right in the middle of it all. The story is very Doctor Who, made all the more so because Briggs plays his time traveling character an awful lot like Peter Davison's Doctor. There is nothing outstanding about the story or production as a whole. It is very comfortably Doctor Who.
The second entry in the Pocket Universe series finds the Mistress and K-9 still on the lookout for technology they can use to complete their time ship. They discover an abandoned Dyson Sphere. However, this structure is also the target of an expedition financed by a rich scientist / historian (it is not all that clear) looking for evidence of the Old Ones (or something like that), who are now the source of a religion on their home world. The guy starts becoming more and more of a religious fanatic. The counterpoint "science" guy on the trip starts out well enough, but once he encounters our heroes, becomes just a thug with a gun, completely contrary to how he'd been depicted in the beginning of the story. So, my main problem with this one is the inconsistent characterization. The story needs to have our heroes locked up, so characters can completely change just to accomplish that end. So, it is a bit of a frustrating listen.
Another BBV unofficial Doctor Who spinoff series (with only two episodes) is the Mistress and K-9 series. Here, the Mistress is trapped in luxury, spoiled rotten in a castle, desperately trying to get the parts to build her time ship so she can escape. When she foolishly makes an escape in the unfinished craft, she gets a nasty surprise about the history of the world she has been on. Lala Ward and John Leeson are great in reprising their roles. The rest of the cast do their best with some very stilted dialogue. The story aims for an intellectual payoff that does not really arrive.
The last entry in The Time Travellers series is a good old-fashioned Murder on the Orient Express kind of story. The duo are on a train to see the sights, but Alice (Ace), typically, is bored by the whole thing. At this point in future history, a long space war is over, but those who fought the war still do not trust each other. So, there are some depictions of racism for the audience to get worked up about along with Alice. In the meantime, people start dying. The Domine (The Professor), posing as a doctor, becomes the de facto detective. We get the return of a character from the Ghosts episode of the series, but this is earlier in her history than in The Time Travellers' history, pointing out once again the ethical difficulties of time travel. It's a decent murder mystery story with some bits of moral lecturing, and a big emotional outburst from Alice at the end (you knew with Ace there had to be one) that does not quite make sense to me.
