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| What: | Drift (BBC Past Doctor novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 28 December 2016 |
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| Rating: |   7 |
"Drift" is a peculiar novel in its mix of good and bad parts. Taking place in New Hampshire on Thanksgiving day sometime around the year 2000, the story places the characters inside a monster snowstorm that contains a monster. The backstory of the main plot comes along in drips and drabs, but basically runs like this. Thirty years prior, a spaceship crashed in the New Hampshire backwoods, dumping an alien couple, male and female and human in every way down to sensitive male parts, on Earth. The few pieces of the crashed ship became the focus point for a Heaven's Gate type alien worshiping cult who set up in an abandoned house nearby. Flash forward thirty years and the military are secretly testing another captured alien device in an airplane. The plane crashes near the previous crash. Unknown to the military, who believe the alien device is a means to manipulate the weather psychically, the device is actually a multi-dimensional navigational instrument that folds dimensions. The weather control is just a side effect. The device has opened a dimension and let in an other-dimensional animal that takes the form of snow crystals arranged like a nervous system. Seeking minds to commune with, the snow creature latches onto humans and destroys them. Into this mix there are several groups to contend with. First, we have The Doctor and Leela, out in the wilderness because The Doctor has forgotten where the TARDIS is. We have the remains of the cultists, most of whom were destroyed when the cult recovered the dimensional drive and opened the portal for the creature. We have the Air Force team sent to recover the device, led by Captain Shaw, who grew up in the town where all this occurs. We have the townspeople, mostly represented by Shaw's older brother, Mackenzie, the local police chief, and his roughly joined family - a woman wronged by her no good first husband and her moody teenage daughter. Most of the novel is concerned with people lost in the snow, getting picked off one by one by the snow creature. There's plenty of family angst as Mackenzie seems to be the good man always doing the wrong thing, disaffected from his brother and barely holding it together with his makeshift family. Most of the early part of the novel is needlessly difficult to get through as the reader gets introduced to several characters, one after the other, with dizzying speed. It becomes particularly hard to keep track of all the military people, even when Forward gives them all unusual names in what seems to be an overdone attempt at American pluralism.
The one part of the novel that stood out to me as "what is this all about?" concerns the remainder of the cult. They are down to three, the leader, his "girlfriend," and a follower, a former thief. The leader lasts for just a couple of chapters. Seeing the device wipe all of his followers from existence drives him over the edge and he gets left behind to die in the snow. The real headscratcher is the girlfriend, Emilie Jacks. She is former military, a tough guy in a woman's body, all muscle and kill instinct. She decides for no particular reason that with the cult done, she must destroy the cult house, beat up or kill everyone who stands in her way, take a hostage, beat her up, kill some more, and abandon her dying cult-mate. Why she does this, what she hopes to accomplish, and why Forward spends so much time on it in the novel never becomes clear. This whole sequence drags the plot rather than progressing it. Another questionable aspect that pops up in other Simon Forward works, such as the Big Finish drama "Dreamtime," is the portrayal of aboriginals, a Native American in this case, as having native psychic powers because they are somehow more in tune with the natural world. This bizarre romanticizing of native peoples is just annoying. Also, everyone wants to drive around in a zero-visibility snowstorm, which seems to be mostly a convenient way for the writer to get the characters separated from each other and thus easier to pick off.
The good parts of the novel are these. It is one of the few Doctor 4 novels that doesn't play The Doctor as all whimsical, scatterbrained, and nonsensical. This Doctor is close to how he was in 1975-6. Leela, too, is portrayed fairly well, not just as a superstitious primitive. The Doctor is not a crusader in this novel, just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time who realizes he is the only one with the knowledge to rescue the situation. The writing is brisk, without stylistic overkill. The alien menace is interestingly different and believable because the menace is purely accidental. This last aspect is probably the best reason to read "Drift."
| What: | Drama and Delight: (Crew biographies) |
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| By: | Trevor Smith, Nottingham, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Monday 26 December 2016 |
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| Rating: | 9 |
An excellent book, well written and researched that is a fine tribute to an amazing woman. All the people who knew or worked with Verity are in there.
Highly recommended.
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 | an enjoyable, fun & slightly dark novel |
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| What: | Timewyrm: Exodus (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | Eye of Horus, Under A Rock, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Friday 23 December 2016 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
After stumbling through the abomination that was Timewyrm: Genesis, I was ready to give up on the new adventures. However, Christmas was round the corner and a family member who knew I had read the first book decided to get me the second. I was quite board in the evening that day so I decided to read some doctor who literature. I didn't want to seem rood so decided to pick up the book and read the prologue and First Chapter or so before The Xmas special started. I was Enthralled by page one and was incredibly frustrated when the Special started and I had to put down the book. I read most of the book over the next few weeks and had ordered the next book in the series. But then things got in the way and I couldn't read it and it just sat on my desk, forgotten about. Until last summer, when I found it again while packing for my holiday. I quickly finished off the last 50 pages and packed the next book.
The Book has 2 main parts to it and also a couple of extra mini parts. the first is in Nazi Germany and is a really fun adventure story which had me grinning the entire way through. The second was in Nazi Germany, on the brink of WWII. This was, of course, the Darker section of the Novel and the story did address the human atrocities done by the Nazis (though it does accidentally make them irrelevant by putting the entire blame on the villain), the section does start to go downhill once the villain is revealed though. The book also has very solid charecters of important Nazis, one of which (I can't believe I'm saying this) was a realy likable person. There are also 2 mini parts. The first of these is the Nazis failed coup on Berlin in which Hitler gets his should dislocated. For someone who's studied this area of history and knows this, it is very interesting to see but is still enjoyable if you can't play spot the thing that actually happened. The second mini section is a year after the events of the second main half of the book and only has The Doctor, Ace the Timewyrm and Hitler in it (and has a maximum of three characters in it at once). You do get very invested in this scene and it takes a much more ominous, dark and looming feel than the rest of the book.
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| Quite possibly the worst book ever |
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| What: | Timewyrm: Genesys (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | Eye of Horus, Under A Rock, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Friday 23 December 2016 |
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| Rating: | 1 |
I bought this book a few years ago off amazon because I wanted to get into the New Adventures and it seemed like the best place to start. How I'm still reading them today, I will never know. The point is, I'm a massive seventh Doctor Fan and the fact the first original Doctor who Novels were completely dedicated to him (not counting dying days) was brilliant. But oh deer the poor fans, after years of waiting, ended up with this garbage. This is a piece of garbage that dares to call itself a Doctor Who Novel. In fact, the only reason I consider it cannon is because I love Timewyrm Revelation. The Characterisation is terrible. Almost all supporting charterers are irrelevant with the exception of the space man and Ishtar. And it made me despise my favourite Doctor. Good Job John Peel!
Oh also, this book is a gross porno. No seriously, half the book is in depth description of Gilgamesh sexually molesting girls and when Ace complains that he wants to do it to her the Doctor essentially tells her to grow up.
*sigh* I hear his target books are good, I guess.
| What: | The Power of the Daleks (BBC classic series DVDs/Blu-rays) |
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| By: | Trevor Smith, Nottingham, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Wednesday 21 December 2016 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
So it seems. To be able to watch, not just listen to, my favourite Dalek story, is something I never thought i would be able to do. Ok its not the original filmed story, but it is the next best thing. Hats off to the boys and girls who worked so hard to bring this dream to fruition. and if thats not enough theres a ton of wonderful extras on this DVD. Fantastic story and lets hope its the first of many.
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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| A superb stellar folllow on... |
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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!
