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Big Finish in its endeavor to regenerate interest in its products has shifted heavily into producing these box sets rather than as many new adventures. These sets also make strong ties between the classic series and the new series. This set is probably the ultimate effort in this regard. It says so in the title. We know that several of the monsters from New Who are presented as if the Doctor has encountered them before. So, why not relate some of these earlier encounters? It seems good. To do this as a box set, though, requires adhering to the New Who formula of single-part one-hour adventures. Further, each of our Doctors is companionless, which works out fine for fitting the 6th, 7th and 8th Doctor stories into their sequences of adventures, but is problematic for the 4th Doctor. Big Finish seems to have side-stepped the problem by not mentioning it at all and providing a few stray references to Doctor 4 televised stories, which would place this one as perhaps before Peri. The stories themselves are of a uniform good but not great quality. Probably the standout story, not by much, is the 8th Doctor adventure. On to the stories themselves.
1. Fallen Angels. Doctor 4 meets the Weeping Angels. Basically, this is a riff on "Blink" and offers not much new about the Weeping Angels. A couple of English tourists in Italy get tricked by a mad priest who worships Weeping Angels and gets sent back to 16th-century Italy, where they meet Michaelangelo himself, working on a project from a priest who worships the Weeping Angels. Michaelangelo thinks he is sculpting an angel that he is in fact releasing. Everything else, the listener can guess just from having watched "Blink."
2. Judoon in Chains. This is probably the most original of the stories. Here, Doctor 6 is using a court trial in the 1800s to rescue a lone Judoon on the run from his own people. The Judoon Captain Kybo seems to be gaining in intelligence and sensitivity far beyond any Judoon's ability. Great voicing from Nicholas Briggs pulls off this story. Mostly, the story is The Elephant Man with the Judoon playing Rhino Man.
3. Harvest of the Sycorax. This one is a riff on "The Christmas Invasion." Again, if one has seen the first, then the audio will be probably overly familiar. There is some attempt to give the Sycorax more culture, with art and a religion. However, basically they are the same as in the TV series. The setting this time is humanity in the future, living among the stars and enslaved to medical products provided by a pharmaceutical conglomerate. There is some nice commentary on the overabundance of and dependence upon mood altering designer drugs. It's all entertaining and very Doctor 7.
4. The Sontaran Ordeal. Doctor 8 encounters the New Who Sontarans who are trying to enter the Time War. Dan Starkey is brilliant as a disgraced Sontaran who survives a botched attempt at assassination from his less than honorable commanding officer. This story probably follows the New Who formula most closely in having an interesting idea get sidetracked by irrelevant dangers inserted at moments where the "action" seems to be flagging in favor of dialogue. However, the story does offer us new insights into Sontaran psychology and makes them more believable.
When I was younger and first read a few of the New Adventures virgin books when they introduced the character of Bernice Summerfield I have to admit I was as far from enamoured as its ever possible to get. I didn't like the character at all. But with the arrival of Lisa Bowerman as Benny on audio my view has come to be the total opposite now. I love Lisa and I love Benny! Benny is so damn cool! She's so vivid and bright as a character and Lisa does a spot on job on bringing the bright sparkly archaeologist to brilliant life. She has totally won me over with her brilliance. She has charm, she's funny, she's intensely diverting and always a joy to listen to! And then when you pair her with the wonderful Sylv McCoy and Mrs Aldred then your on for a sure winner.
And what a winner the first set in this brilliant New adventures of Benny for Big Finish is! But that's not surprising when you have writers like Nev Fountain and Una McCormack on board! Nev's story in particular is such a comedic jewel and it makes me mess myself how the comedy just doesn't relent from the get go in story one. What I also love about this first set though is also how markedly different in tone they are. Nev's story is all out bags of fun comedy and wit, Una's is a touching emotive yarn about Benny and her Mum, which I think is a splendid little piece of acting work. Guy Adams Random Ghosts is unsettling and brilliantly plotted and a little creepy, and James Goss' finale is back to the brilliant all out powerful ending block to this first set. And then just add a good dash of the pepper pots from Skaro then you know you have all the ingredients for a wonderful box set. Now I love Benny. She's such a cool character! And I love you Lisa! You keep on going girl. This series has started perfectly, I bet it will only get better and better and better. I love the four stories in this set, they all explore different aspects of Benny's character and flesh out her character ever more from her early days in the Novels. But she is far better in audio than on the page. She literally jumps to the ears and is always the most fun character in every story I've heard her in yet. One just cant get enough of good old Benny Surprise Summerfield. And its great to have her back with the good old Doc and Ace too. They are a formidable team!
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 | Harrowing and yet riveting Historical... |
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| What: | The Peterloo Massacre (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | Matthew David Rabjohns, Bridgend, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Friday 9 December 2016 |
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| Rating: |  10 |
Paul Magrs is a brilliant writer, I've always known that ever since his Stones of Venice script for Paul McGann all those years ago when Big Finish was in its infancy. But since then he has written the superb Nest Cottage Chronicles which is a must for any Tom Baker and Paul Magrs fan. And now we have this sublime and really decent and sad hard hitting story.
I had never even heard of the Peterloo Massacre before I heard this title. I am so ignorant with many parts of history. But I am always really interested to hear and learn about these unexplored regions of history.
So I came to this story really looking forward to see if it would deliver. And yes, it damn well did. I would even go so far as to say this could seriously attack Arrangements for War as my favourite Big Finish Doctor Who story ever. This story has so many extremely well drawn and acted characters. You really really feel for them as the horrendous events of the Massacre in Manchester slowly unfold. History is sometimes shocking and brutal. And I was disgusted that yes, here is another event that really took place. It must have harrowing for those who had to really go through this.
Sarah Sutton as Nyssa gets the chance to shine again here. Her moral and friendly and charming core are really tested by her becoming friends the servant girl and her fated little baby boy Peter. I had to choke back tears when the poor mite..well, I wont give too much away but to say Sarah has never been better as Nyssa. We get to see her angry and dead set on seeing the wrong doers brought to justice. Sarah is sublime all the time but here she just cranks it up a notch.
And Peter and Janet need no talking about either. They are both brilliant as ever, the Fifth Doctor was always underrated and yet here is a story that proves to me why he is not a bad Doctor at all. No, Peter is a first class actor and a phenomenal Doctor. And its always great to hear Janet back as Tegan. She is the best gobby Australian who ever lived in fiction!!! And well again back to Peter, He has been given a fantastic story here and it is fair to say that this is one of the very strongest historicals that Big Finish has ever done.
I really cant overpraise this story. This is what real drama is all about. Its sad the new series has seemed fit to give up on the pure historicals. This story more than proves that this notion is a serious mistake. A fantastic story indeed.
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I just love John Hurt as the War Doctor. To me yet he still has not done one thing worthy of his saying don't call me that anymore! He is still the Doctor just in one of the hardest times of his long and exciting life. And the Big Finish Team had a lot to do to see Infernal Devices was anywhere near as good as Only The Monstrous. But somehow, they did it with consummate ease.
I just love John's take on the Doctor. He is sarcastic and abrasive and clipped severely but somehow I just absolutely love him to bits. He is such a very very fine actor. And pair him off with the likes of Jacqueline Pearce and you're bound to succeed. Only The Monstrous was a brilliant first outing for the War Doctor on audio, and now we have the follow up:
Legion of the Lost is a gritty and hard piece of Doctor Who story telling written by the ever dependable and reliable John Dorney. And we also get the super David Warner again in this stupidly awesome and dark tale. He plays his character really malevolently, and his clashing with John is both memorable and superb in the extreme. This is definitely a harsh and dark tale that takes you for a great and emotional ride. Its portrayal of dark times religions and fears is very strongly put across. And we also have a tiny bit of nostalgia in the fact that the varga plants are back again! Yes, so Mr Dorney opens up this second trilogy of stories faultlessly.
And then it just gets better with the all out war story tale A Thing of Guile by Phil Mulryne. This is a splendid story. Truly epic and never once pausing for breath from the minute it gets going. And I love the design of the huge alien worms and the sound design on this story in particular is cinematic and seriously cool. This is definitely the kind of story the new TV series should try and do a bit more often. It would be so much the better for it. Mr Mulryne has done a brilliant story here.
And then we close with the epic The Neverwhen by Matt Fitton. Yet another superb and brilliant writer. oh the Big Finish team did themselves proud with this set and their choice of writers. Matt's script gives John some brilliant spiteful things to shove down the throats of his own hypocritical race. Cardinal Ollistra is absolutely a class deviant villainess, and Jackie Pearce is so brilliant in the role. Her and John are such a great double act, as I've said. I really like how these war Doctor stories are really muddying the name and whole race of the Time Lords. They have always been deviant and treacherous and this makes for some superb listening.
I was a little worried that after the phenomenally good Only The Monstrous that Infernal Devices couldn't come close. I've never been more glad to be proved wrong. Infernal Devices is yet another War Doctor and John Hurt must have. John is well and truly the Doctor!!!!!
Big Finish has seemingly thrown most of its effort of 2013 onward into these box sets of 3-4 single-episode adventures connected by story arcs. For these, they really have managed to pull in some acting heavy weights. In addition to Alex Kingston and Paul McGann, listeners to this set will also hear Imogen Stubbs, Alexander Siddig, and John Banks, to name a few. In these sets, Big Finish apparently wants to get as close to the revived TV Doctor Who as possible, with each set feeling like a "season." Such a concept is mostly as strong as the story arc concept. In this case, the concept is a little thin. The four stories are these: 1) The Boundless Sea, which has River Song in The Curse of the Mummy, essentially. It's good enough if one likes those sorts of stories. We get introduced to recurring character and semi-villain Bertie Potts; 2) I Went to a Marvellous Party, an Agatha Christie style closed environment murder mystery on a space station that truly gets the story arc going; 3) Signs, a two-hander that is the River Song version of Capaldi's Heaven Sent; and 4) The Rulers of the Universe, which closes the story arc and leaves River triumphant, sort of. The story arc itself involves a community of the uber-wealthy who reside at a space station turned perpetual cocktail party and from there plot the fates of worlds so as to enhance the bank accounts of the self-styled "rulers." One of these, Bertie Potts, is recruiting River Song as an agent in the delicate negotiations they are having with an ancient super-race that has launched millions of "spore ships," drones that destroy all life on a planet and reseed the planet with a new life template. In story 3, one of these ancients, appearing human, kidnaps River, drugs her, makes her believe she is dying and that he (the alien) is another version of the Doctor. He does this to use her genius to find a way to stop the spore ships. River escapes and in story 4 exacts revenge on the "Rulers," who have decided to recruit Doctor 8 to replace the failed agent River. This creates a dilemma for River, since she must help the Doctor without letting him know who she is so as to preserve his time line. It's all well acted, with good sound design, and plenty of nods and winks to the fans of New Who. No story is really spectacular, but they are all competent enough and entertaining in their own ways.
| What: | Psi-ence Fiction (BBC Past Doctor novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 4 December 2016 |
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| Rating: |  7 |
The Doctor and Leela land in England ca. 2001 near a second-tier university where ill-conceived experiments in psi powers have caused an apparent rip in the universe. The book is typical of Boucher's science fiction in a number of ways, and reminds me a bit of Star Cops. One way is that characters are just a bit rounder than "types." They have backgrounds and hidden depths both good and bad. Another is the dialogue, which involves much sniping back and forth, with characters exercising power through sarcasm. A third is that investigators, the Doctor and Leela in this case, sort of blunder into the correct answer rather than discover it. Some areas of this book are not as good as I have seen in other Boucher works. The college students are not differentiated enough in their dialogue, which makes them difficult to distinguish from each other and difficult to sympathize with. Another is that Leela seems to me to be too primitive, a surprising aspect given that Leela is Boucher's creation. A third is a problem haunting it seems all novels using Doctor 4, namely that he is just a bit too distracted and scatter-brained. Boucher puts this down to the effect of the rip in the universe, but even so, on TV Doctor 4 could give a straight answer now and again and could give a coherent explanation every once in a while. Not in this book. The merits of the book are mainly related to some tight plotting regarding the who, how, and why of the evil scheme. It's a decent enough read, but not hugely compelling.
| What: | Death and the Queen (Tenth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 7 November 2016 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The thing about "Death and the Queen" is how close in style and subject it is to the Tennant-era TV series. We have Donna getting married again, seeking an exit from her boring existence. We have the Doctor - all off-kilter enthusiasm. And we have a kind of E.T.A. Hoffmann story of a little-known European country and its eerie bargain with Death. Add in some girl power moments and the listener gets an entertaining romp through some traditional and clichéd story elements.
| What: | The Two Masters (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 5 November 2016 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
As stories go, "The Two Masters" fits well into that category of stories which we can call "Legends of the Time Lords." Two incarnations of The Master go against each other because both are being manipulated by a cult of followers of a now dead or imprisoned Time Lord from the "The" squad of Time Lords, namely The Heretic. Fortunately, we don't get to meet The Heretic, who would have taken focus away from The Master as The Rani had. This machination with two incarnations of The Master is creating holes in time. Now one Master has recruited The Doctor, under duress, to help him defeat the other Master. Can it be done? Our two Masters are both excellent. Alex MacQueen really brings a relish to the role that bridges the gap somewhat between the cold Master of old and the current versions of wild-eyed Masters. Geoffrey Beevers is simply outstanding and really steals the show. The reason this does not get a high mark from me is the writing, mainly concerning the plot. It relies a bit too much on repeating Doctor Who legacy. We get a renegade Time Lord genius who sets up a death cult, just as Morbius had. We get The Master, both versions, shrinking everyone left and right. We get The Master involved in a plot that threatens to erase the universe, just like Logopolis. It would have been better if the writer had struck out for some new territory.
| What: | Persuasion (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 31 October 2016 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
For this trilogy (trilogies being the pattern now for New Adventures) Doctor 7 returns to get Elizabeth Klein, the good version working for UNIT in the 1990s. This is the plotter/schemer Doctor 7 unwilling to tell anyone much of anything about what is going on and basically using people to accomplish the greater good while stating that he doesn't believe in the greater good argument. We get a new character to go along with Klein, one Will Arrowsmith, who is more likeable than Jeremy FitzOliver, but in nearly every other way the same character - inept, socially awkward, childlike in all the wrong ways. The story of "Persuasion" is mainly for setting up the rest of the trilogy. Therefore, its main job is to plant the elements that will be explored in the next two stories. These are as follows: a pair of superbeings from another universe escape into our universe, find it wanting, and persuade a Nazi clerk to build a Persuasion device that they will use to set our universe to their liking; Klein is known and feared in 1945 Germany, so there is a suggesting of connecting this Klein to the Klein of "Colditz"; every baddy in the universe is after the Persuasion device (a bit like the Pandorica there?); the Doctor is nearing the end of his current body and wants to set everything in the universe right because he doesn't trust his successor. With all these elements to set up, the plot of "Persuasion" is rather loose and does not really get the listener very far. The Shakespearean-talking villains get rather tiresome in their long speeches, with much talk but not much action. So, the total is that "Persuasion" is disappointing because it falls just a little short in every area that it shouldn't.
| What: | Criss-Cross (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 28 October 2016 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Doctor 6 gets a new companion, a married language expert from Bletchley Park near the end of WWII. Her husband is under cover somewhere in Europe. What is going on here? Something secret and dangerous enough to make her want to join the Doctor and disappear until the end of the war. So, she's a little bit Turlough and a little bit Evelyn. The story to introduce her follows Doctor Who formula well. The Doctor is trapped on Earth, pretending to be someone he isn't so that he can secure the means to re-energize his TARDIS. This involves tracking down some alien signalling devices that lead us to a new alien species. This one exists entirely as electromagnetic signals. They are apparently fighting a war in the aether. Ah, but are they really as weak and desperate as they seem? The story has plenty of cloak and dagger, double agents, double crosses, hidden motives, all the things one would expect. It does not really break new ground, but it does serve its purpose of introducing us to Constance.
| What: | The Trouble with Drax (Fourth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 19 October 2016 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
It's so sad that Barry Jackson was not around to do this one. Fortunately, Big Finish got a cracking good cast. The story itself is in the best tradition of con man stories. This time, it is nicely tied into a plot reminiscent of Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps." Is the universe ready for multiple Draxes at a time? As clever as it is, the one down side with a story of this kind is that there is not much beyond the clever ending. Once it's all revealed, there is not a significant amount more to get out of the story. Still, for what it is, this is very good.
| What: | The Blue Tooth (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 18 October 2016 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Big Finish did everything to make this story feel like Doctor Who 1970. The music soundtrack is very 1970. The story involves mysterious disappearances, a bit of psychedelia at a dentist's office, some brain washing, plus the Doctor trying to do the moral thing while the Brigadier tries to do the practical thing. Caroline John is a great reader/narrator, and apart from Nick Briggs performing the Cyberman dialogue, this is all her. The story itself purports to explain why Liz Shaw left UNIT. The reason is never stated outright, though one can suspect that what happens to her friend was the tipping point. There are a few too many moments when Liz passes out. In places, the writer tries to hard to evoke the 1970 feel by repeating elements from early Pertwee stories. It's enjoyable enough.
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| Intriguing New Things for Doctor 8 |
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| What: | Doom Coalition 1 (Doom Coalition audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 14 October 2016 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
This first part of a new "series" for Doctor 8 continues the Big Finish idea of using Doctor 8 as transition to New Who. Individual stories are around 50 minutes long, all are tied by a central story arc, yet some stories are fairly standalone while others full focus on the arc. Liv from Dark Eyes returns as the companion, and in story 2 they pick up a new companion, Helen Sinclair, a 1963 historian/archaeologist frustrated in her career goals, a kind mixture of Evelyn Smythe and Barbara Wright. The story arc involves the escape of a dangerous Time Lord criminal, The Eleven, and the Doctor's being recruited to find him. The four stories are of uniform quality, and each serves its function within the overall series well.
1. The Eleven. This story gets it all going. We meet The Eleven, a criminal genius Time Lord suffering from a unique condition - all of his previous ten regenerations still exist in his brain and they all try to take control. The setup is based on The Silence of the Lambs in which a young, female student interviews the psychotic genius. This paves the way for the escape of the psychotic genius. He causes chaos on Gallifrey, manages to get some Rassilon relics, but is curiously uninterested in the power he could have. Instead, his intention is to steal a TARDIS and escape. Why? Could be something more is at stake.
2. The Red Lady. Here we get introduced to our new companion in a story straight out of Hammer Horror. A collection of artifacts from around the world all contain a faint image of a mysterious red lady. But once she gets inside your head, watch out. It is quite creepy. It leaves far too many things unanswered, deliberately so according to the interview disc, but that still does not satisfy me. I want answers.
3. The Galileo Trap. Here is a long setup to episode 4. Someone is holding Galileo hostage as a lure for the Doctor. A pair of third-rate alien criminals with "full-body masks" have a great taste violence, and one just loves sucking the minds out of people. John Woodvine from "The Armageddon Factor" turns in a great performance as the aging Galileo.
4. The Satanic Mill. Here we have some classic-style Doctor Who. The Eleven is using an abandoned remote stellar manipulator prototype to both humiliate and destroy the Doctor at the same time, but hints that there is something more and he might not be working alone. The device itself, which is the size of a small planet supposedly, or at least the size of a large factory, seems to run by using people to drive treadmills. How this would ever generate enough power for the thing is unclear, as is the rationale The Eleven might have for setting it up this way.
Overall, this is an enjoyable start to a series. It doesn't get a high rating from me mainly because the stories all transcend the 50-minute limit in scope, and so there is some rushing of scenes and plot to make them fit.
| What: | Scavenger (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 14 October 2016 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
"Scavenger" is disappointing for all the things it could have been. The basic story is a nice hard-science, near-future, space is dangerous type of adventure along the lines of Ben Bova or Martin Caidin. Doctor 6 and Flip land on a space station observation module in time to see a joint venture operation between the Indian and British space agencies. Then, the operation goes wrong and it is a race against time to fix the problem. If only William Gallagher had stuck to that idea, this would have been a breakthrough work potentially taking Doctor Who down a new avenue of more science-based and less magic-based stories. But then, he just couldn't resist piling more stuff onto the plot and introducing magic once more. In this case, the pile involves an alien scavenger robot woken up through the Doctor's efforts to save the space station. OK. That would be fine, a new problem to deal with. However, it turns out that this robot had visited India 400 years earlier and turned a prince into an immortal, and this prince is now a flight mission engineer using the space program to retrieve his beloved from the alien robot ship. Aargh. After being very careful in building up a realistic scenario, Gallagher adds this silliness? There are a couple of other problem areas in this story. One is that in the near future, apparently, computers will be these magical entities that can reprogram space ship flight paths within a few seconds and do so with immense precision. Everything involving the space station, rockets, and missiles happens too quickly. Another trouble spot is Colin Baker's continued overpronounciation of the name Jyoti. Baker is an excellent voice actor overall, and otherwise is fabulous in this production, but this little hitch became annoying to me after a time. The production is not a total disaster. Flip really comes out as a strong character in this one, much more fully a person than in some of her earlier stories. The Indian aspects of the story provide a welcome relief from the sometimes stifling focus on matters British in Doctor Who. It's good to bring in the rest of the world. And the main premise of space missions to remove orbiting space junk is itself quite interesting.
| What: | The Edge of Destruction (Target novelisations) |
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| By: | Matt Saunders, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Thursday 6 October 2016 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
I've just read this book again after many years since the first time. It is actually a truly timeless classic and makes good use of the TV story. The book also includes lots of juicy inner thoughts, which are always very useful - it's also well fleshed out. The book also makes the TARDIS much more exciting than the TV version. All in all, go and find this great book, or hope that BBC Audio will release it soon!
| What: | Eye of Heaven (BBC Past Doctor novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 6 October 2016 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
Jim Mortimore has an interesting science-fictional idea regarding the moai on Rapa Nui, but takes far too long to get to it. Instead, he has written a rather standard rollicking adventure book that goes from one brush with death to another, fight after fight, that never seems to advance the plot. All of this leaves the science-fictional idea, which is the generator of the plot, rushed through in the last 20 pages or so. Here is the book we get. The Doctor has in answer to an ad for a reason that we are never told, met a man who has been broken by his memory of an item he stole from Rapa Nui, the stealing of which caused the deaths of two friends. The Doctor on a whim decides to pay for the expedition. The bulk of the novel is taken by the sea voyage to Rapa Nui. Here, Mortimore throws every adventure novel cliché he can think of into the mix. There are dangerous thieves, cut-throat sailors, storms, water spouts, and even pirates. Leela and a character get swept off the boat and manage in some preposterous fashion to ride a whale to safety, well almost, but then Mortimore has the events after the whale dies just raced through by one character and then forgotten, as though Mortimore knew had stretched things too far. Another key problem with the novel is the manner in which the story is told. It is all in first person, but from different characters' perspectives. The one who gets the most narrative space is Leela. Mortimore's characterization of Leela makes her far too savage and superstitious, especially if the story is taking place after "The Talons of Weng Chiang." On the other hand, she knows too much, especially about all the terms of 19th-century sailing. The next problem area of the narrative is that Mortimore has broken up the chronology, so that chapters do not follow from preceding chapters but relate to much earlier or much later events. This is a needless complication. It could have worked had Mortimore taken a straighter path and concentrated on the science-fiction end of the story.
| What: | Wirrn Isle (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 5 October 2016 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
"Wirrn Isle" would have worked well for late 1980s television Doctor Who. There is nothing in it that could not have been done for TV at the time. The story itself is straightforward classic Doctor Who. The Doctor and companion arrive in a remote location populated by just a few people and the whole crew are put under immediate threat by something that could wipe out humanity. The setting is some 40 years after "The Ark in Space" and the people from Nerva are having a rough time recolonizing the planet. A family has returned Loch Lomond, now completely frozen over, to restart the outpost they had abandoned 15 years before. Then, they discover that some Wirrn actually made it to Earth and are frozen in the loch. Unfortunately, dark secrets from this family's past create a chain of events to release the Wirrn once more. The story plays out as a no nonsense thriller, with frayed nerves, high tension, daring escapes, and clever mucking about with technology, in this case transmat technology. The Doctor is here the cleverest of them all, and knows it and is not afraid of saying so. We also get to see his "big picture" morality pitted against the more immediate situational morality of the rest. The music soundtrack reminds me quite a bit of Tangerine Dream from around 1978, which increases the sense that one is listening to a story that was actually from the 1980s.
| What: | Seasons of War (Miscellaneous short stories) |
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| By: | Prunella Apter, Bristol, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Tuesday 20 September 2016 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
An unofficial Doctor Who charity anthology focused on John Hurt’s War Doctor, Seasons of War presents a pleasingly engorged table of contents featuring stories from a mix of writers both known and lesser-known. I’ve been watching the project unfold for quite a while now, and was waiting for the (now delayed) paperback release to read the book until I eventually caved and bought the ebook (which you can do for whatever price you choose to pay here, going directly to charity.)
It opens, in pleasingly timey-wimey fashion, with the Epilogue – Warsmiths (by Matt Fitton). It reminded me fleetingly of the opening to Obverse’s City of the Saved Sherlock anthology, with a bleak, iconic image setting the tone for the rest of the stories to follow and, just a little bit, taking a hammer to what we might expect a Doctor story to be like.
It’s followed by I. Karn (Declan May) which does a stand-up job of handling continuity (it follows the short Night of the Doctor) and taking a further crow-bar to our image of the Doctor. Here is shown immediately forgetting the name of a dead woman and unremorsefully refusing to save an entire race. There’s setting out your stall, and then there’s this story.
By contrast, Crowsnest Past (Warren Frey) takes an abrupt detour from the grimy opening, launching the Doctor into a pretty standard Doctor story, complete with information-eating monsters and spur-of-the-moment plan. It’s pretty decent, though feels like a bit of a u-turn from the opening pages that have been so adamant about de-heroing the Doctor in this particular guise. If anything, this feels like an Eleventh Doctor story–although that doesn’t necessarily detract.
It’s followed by one of my favourite of the collection, Eight Minute War (Lee Rawlings), which tells the tale of an (unsuccesful) battle from the point of view of a footsoldier in the Doctor’s army. The minutiae of the alien worlds of Doctor Who has always been more interesting than the huge battles, and this story succeeds in the same way, showing the war-time cameraderie of training and preparation, before blasting everything apart in the final pages as the mission fails, to no concern of the Doctor. This Time War is shaping up to be truly horrific.
The Mind Robber (J.R. Southall) is another Land of Fiction story which — although functional — doesn’t manage to be as meta or clever as Land of Fiction-style stories deserve. It’s solid, and includes some powerful imagery, but I was still left feeling somewhat underwhelmed.
Following this, the first of the flash-fiction pieces that pepper the anthology, from the pen of the editor himself, throws together the War Doctor (here known as the Man in the Bandolier) with another Time Lord, the Corsair. These segments shine as small flashes of story that can revel in atmosphere and pathos without an overburdened need for plot mechanics, and this one is brilliant: the story of the Corsairs TARDIS in particular is a beautiful flight of fancy.
The Ambassador of Wolf-Rayer 134 (Kate Orman) is likewise a great piece, although I wouldn’t have expected anything less from Orman. Moffat really needs to just hire her to write an episode already. It’s followed by The Amber Room (Simon Brett and John Davies) in which a time-displaced soldier is rescued from dinosaurs by the Doctor, only to discover the Earth has vanished. I’m not the first review to point out that the soldier is absurdly accepting of all the information thrown his way (although maybe a dinosaur will do that to you) but sometimes that’s the cost in a short story of getting-the-hell-on-with-it, and this is an entertaining and adeptly-paced story.
The Celephas Gift (Andrew Smith) is probably the lengthiest piece in the anthology, which is by no means a bad thing. It has the feeling of pure vintage Doctor Who, richly textured with a neat hook to it, and manages what action-based short stories rarely achieve: the feeling of a satisfying finale.
Up next is a further Declan May flash fiction piece, The Girl With The Purple Hair I which introduces companion-for-the-book Jenny Shirt. Given how hard it is to pull together a likeable companion (I might controversially argue that RTD never managed it in an entire series with Martha) it’s pretty impressive to do so quite so successful in under two pages. Jenny Shirt forever.
It’s followed by a section of Henry V reworked by Matthew Sweet to be about the Doctor. Other reviews have not been kind to this, which is a bit unfair. It’s clever, it’s got a whole bunch of in-jokes I had to look up to understand, and even if it is a bit ephemeral amongst all the other stories here, at least its erudite ephemera.
Next up is Here Comes The Doctor by Christopher Bryant, in which the Doctor infiltrates a war hospital. The first half is a superb spiral of imagination; the opening descriptions of the hospital are some of the most evocative world-building in the collection, and if the ending (they’re really Dalek’s and they were evil all along!) is slightly less exhilarating in comparison, its partly due to the strength of the opening and partly because this particular twist occurs tangentially quite a number of times throughout the other stories – such as, sort of, in the next, Your Move (John Peel). Telling the tale of a strike against the War Computer in the company of a sure-to-be-a-villain robot, the sure-to-be-a-villain was in fact a villain. Predictable but fun.
Sonnet by Jenny Colgan does what it says on the tin; it’s brief, but packs a punch, with Shakespeare relating his view of the Doctor and his adventures. Somebody please release an anthology of Doctor Who poetry, please?
After a string of stories against an ever-encroaching backdrop of war, Disjecta Membra (Elton Townend-Jones) is something of a breather. It’s dressed up in the gloomy horror vestments, and the traditional Doctor Who reveal of ‘barely explained science was responsible for the supernatural whatnots all along’ does nothing to diminish the power of the imagery that this story employs. (Hands, cups, mirrors–that’s all I’ll say.)
IV. Loop is another of May’s short entries. In some ways this feels like a missing scene from the 50th Anniversary (actually–that’s a touch unfair, as May handles this with more subtlety and mordancy than Moffat ever would) in which a young War Doctor meets the War Doctor who is about to steal the Moment. (It’s also worth applauding that fact that none of the above is explicitly spelled out, which makes the story all the more rich.)
The Holdover (Daniel Wealands) takes the Doctor to an internment camp for refugees. Unfortunately, I found this story to be one of the few mis-fires of the anthology–rather laboured and a bit awkward in style. Thankfully, the next story, Climbing The Mountain (Lance Parkin), is an antidote. Although slight of plot, it revolves around a neat twist that, for all it might seem quite light, in some ways says more about the necessities of war than any number of annihilated planets.
The Garden (Sami Kelish) is, quite frankly, sublime (and definitely in my top three stories of the collection). Delicate and infused with pathos, it tells the story of an old woman on Gallifrey who is so absorbed by the caretaking of her garden in which all the flora of Gallifrey reside that she hasn’t even noticed there’s a Time War going on. The ending in particular is elegant and sad. Stunning story.
Sleepwalking To Paradise (Dan Barrett) chucks us straight back into the war, with no respite. This one’s all story powering forward, replete with a number of smart twists and a lucid, engaging style. It’s followed by Guerre (Alan P. Jack and Declan May), which plants the War Doctor in World War I. It’s a horror-ish tale that pairs brevity with power, relying on the innate pathos of it’s setting to add shades to the War Doctor’s character.
Then The Girl With The Purple Hair is back, continuing the sterling work of her previous introduction. It’s followed by V. Lady Leela, also by Declan May, which tells us what Leela gets up to in the Time War. It rings completely true, further demonstrating May’s capabilities of handling character.
Making Endings by Nick Mellish is another stand-out piece, although to describe to much about it would perhaps ruin it. (It put me in mind of both Patrick Ness’ More Than This and an episode of Black Mirror.) Smart and entertaining.
The Book of Dead Time (David Carrington) is especially memorable for one very specific reason: the library in a tree. Frankly, its unforgivable that I don’t own one. (If you want me to, y’know, review the story: the rest of it matches up to it’s core fantastical image. This feels like the story Neil Gaiman might have written had he been persuaded to write for Seasons of War.)
Driftwood by Simon Brett is another Dalek story, although it is my favourite here. There’s layers of reference and literary shadings that accompany this, but on the surface it’s about Azrael, a wounded Dalek that, amongst other things, now appreciates tea. Lyrical, with a great twist.
The Ingenious Gentleman (Alan Ronald) is a completely left-field oddity amongst the other stories here, although certainly memorable for that. Joining the ranks of fictional characters whom the Doctor has encountered is Don Quixote. The story is giddy and funny, but still turns on the implicit parallels between the two old men no fool’s quests.
Like any self-respecting season of Doctor Who, there’s got to be a returning companion, and in this case it’s the Brigadier in Matt Barber’s Fall. It’s hard to know what to say about this one–as a story it is, just, functional, but the fun resides in the absurdities of a nursing-home bound Brigadier rallying his geriatric army. It has its moments, but it’s really all about having fun with the Brigadier and nothing else. (Which is, of course, no bad thing…)
Always Face The Curtain With A Bow (Jon Arnold) is another oddity of the collection, but in truly spectacular form. Trapped in a time-looped prison in which another Time Lord is forced to kill him every day, this is a nasty, inventive and endlessly ingenious story. Brilliant.
It’s followed by Storage Wars (Paul Driscoll) in a pop-culture collision that absolutely should not work but completely does. Some of the prose clumsiness is completely forgiven for the ability to turn the flippant nature of reality television into something with real heart and power at the reveal of the story. (That said, although it ends with the War Doctor releasing the butterflies into the world, were we at liberty to tinker more with canon, I’d love to see that moment given to Capaldi’s Doctor as he searches for his lost home of Gallifrey.)
The Postman (John Davies) feels like a quirky French film (sorta Amelie-Kafka) portraying the various regenerations of the man whose job it is to write condolence letters to the millions dead in the Time War. The initial jolliness is a feint though: the conclusion of the story sucker-punches you into complete blackness, as the Postman delivers the news to parents before being dispatched to the battlefield in which the soldier actually dies. Timey-wimey, in the grimmest way possible.
The Thief of All Ways (Elliot Thorpe) ups the grim quotient, with the Doctor unheedingly sacrificing lives to power a weapon. This is a good story, but actually feels like it’s from an entirely different world retrofitted to star the Doctor–it’s a touch ill-fitting.
Paul Driscoll returns with a second story, The Time Lord Who Came To Tea, which again delights in the small details to paint a picture of the trickle-down effects of war on a remote homestead. There’s a whole bunch of little things that shine here, but its the Dalek Meat Traders that stick in the mind.
The Nightmare Child is another shorter piece from Declan May, proving once again that he knows his way around the English language. This piece is a gleaming assemblage of wordplay that does wonders with atmosphere.
Meals on Wheels (Paul Magrs) returns us to the every-day world, in which Jackie Tyler runs into Davros who, in this instance, is a senile old man dreaming of the Nightmare Child from his tatty tower block bedroom. In an anthology so taken with war on an interplanetary scale, Magrs’ knack of focusing on the everyday might have been out-of-place, but this story works superbly amongst the run-down.
It’s followed by the comic-book entry into the story, Time Enough For War (Simon Brett and Jim Mortimore) which I’m a little at a loss to describe. The art is superb, richly detailed and evocative, but I was at a bit of a loss to descrie what the hell was actually going on. For all that, I found I quite liked it. Just don’t ask me what it was about.
And alas, poor Jenny Shirt — she had to go. We knew her fate was sealed. Barnaby Eaton-Jones does the dirty work in Doctor Death. Given the appearance of a cloaked and scythed Death, I kept dimly expecting a Pratchett-esque quip from the Reaper, but is actually about the metaphorical implications and not at all about jokes in small caps.
The Beach (Gary Russell) is a last-hurrah straight-up Doctor story, returning us to the familiar caring Doctor, perhaps as a reminder that, despite what you might think at this point, he isn’t all bad. It’s cute, which is exactly the right note to strike at this point.
The Moments In Between returns George Mann to the War Doctor and his companion Cinder and this is a wonderful final grace note to the multi-shaded Doctor on display here, playing like a stolen moments from Engines of War. And then finally the whole piece is rounded off with another brisk gallop through the fields of language from May in his Prologue, revealing the ultimate cost to the Doctor of saving the Earth (and patching up some canon holes too, kind of.)
Which brings to me to a summary, which seems a bit of a tall order after such an extended run of stories. Frankly, the anthology is an incredible achievement; to bring together so many voices into a cohesive, balanced and above all just-plain-good anthology of this length (all for charity, I might add, so without the benefit of a pay-check to spur the poor writers on) is miraculous. In the entire run-down there were perhaps only a small handful of stories that didn’t chime with me, which given that I somewhat predisposed against grim war stories is even more of an achievement.
So, all in all, highly recommended. Especially as (have I mentioned?) it’s for charity. I await Seasons of War 2.
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| A worthy addition to the Time War Canon |
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| What: | Seasons of War (Miscellaneous short stories) |
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| By: | Jeremy Cairncross, Exeter, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Tuesday 20 September 2016 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
It started life as a project when Declan May was looking for a way to raise funds for the charity Caudwell Children and stands in a healthy tradition of charity Who anthologies such as Missing Pieces, Perfect Timing, Walking In Eternity and Shelf Life (and plenty of others are available). These collections have the strengths of being Doctor Who, one of the strongest storytelling formats devised in the twentieth century, whilst being able to take the character to place you wouldn’t be able to go on television.
This collection is the answer to the question of what the Doctor did in the Time War, an exploration of the mythology Russell T Davies created via the character Steven Moffat invented to bear that weight. As he appeared only three times in the series proper (and two of those were mere cameos) there’s plenty of fertile territory to be explored in a way that there perhaps isn’t for other, more thoroughly explored incarnations. And also, with the nature of this incarnation there are tales you can’t really tell with the other, more compassionate Doctors. This is a collection that goes to some very dark places… but even with the travails of war as a keynote this story maintains a wide variety of tones, from such traditional fare as Andrew Smith’s The Celephas Gift or John Peel’s Your Move to more radical fare such as Elton Townend-Jones’ Disjecta Membra or Daniel Wealands’ The Holdover that look to stretch what can be done in Doctor Who.
Even if you might find some stories weaker than others this is a collection that adds up to more than the sum of its individual stories, sequenced to build an idea of how the character of this Doctor developed during the war. After a striking epilogue from Matt Fitton opens the collection and sets the tone we go back to the immediate aftermath of the regeneration and an indication of how this man is no longer the Doctor but a ruthless warrior. And he needs to be a warrior to cope with terrible events such as those depicted in Lee Rawlings’ sublime The Eight-Minute War and the aforementioned The Holdover. The latter challenges the likes of Lawrence Miles’ Interference and the novels of Daniel O’Mahoney and Jim Mortimore as the darkest places Doctor Who has gone in any format.
That’s not to say that this book is simply strong on darkness and the events of the war. Many of the highlights come in stories which don’t necessarily deal directly with the war – The Amber Room from Simon Brett and John Davies, Gardening by Sami Kelish, Making Endings by Nick Mellish and The Book of Dead Time by David Carrington are all fine examples of slightly more oblique takes on wartime. And these are scattered purposefully throughout the book so the tone doesn’t get unbearably dark and hopeless. Every story here feels as if it’s been selected for a good reason – strong central ideas, memorable images and fine prose, all sequenced to present them in the strongest possible light. I’ve not mentioned half the stories I’d love to, that deserve mentioning – strong contributions from Kate Orman and Paul Magrs mix with promising up-and-coming writers such as Brett, Davies, Dan Barratt, Paul Driscoll and Christopher Bryant. This is one of the most powerful, strongest Doctor Who short story collections, one without a weak link which constitutes something of a minor miracle over more than 40 stories and nearly 400 pages. It ends on a cliffhanger, promising further collections and on this evidence that’s very welcome.
| What: | Signs and Wonders (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 16 September 2016 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
"Signs and Wonders" follows the pattern of Big Finish and recent Doctor Who of ending a long story arc with big, dramatic, over-the-top grandiosity that is really, really huge. Such endings rarely meet expectations, and this story is one that does not meet expectations. What goes wrong here is that the story is quite visual, relying on seeing monsters and crowds, and a host of other things. Matt Fitton has chosen to convey all this in the laziest way possible, through long, dull speeches. We get quite a bit of characters by themselves describing to themselves what they are doing, another matter of lazy writing. Another problematic area is the content of the story itself. All this stuff with elder gods that have undefined immense "powers" and "energy" is just a screen for slipping magic into the story. Thus, we get Hector/Hex taking the Harry Potter role in this story, bumbling through magic powers and a mysterious (to him) past. We get 4 different types of quasi-immortal superbeings. We get a Liverpool that seems to be about 3 streets big given how characters just magically find each other when the story needs them to meet, even though they were blocks apart or in entirely different parts of the city just a scene or two earlier. It is not as if the story is irredeemable. It is good that Big Finish has given Hex a calm and graceful exit from life on the TARDIS, one that suits his character. The story manages to tie up a number of loose ends. For that, at least, one can listen without totally cringing.
