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| What: | Worldwide Web (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 21 March 2022 |
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| Rating: |   8 |
"The Eight Truths" sets the pieces in place for this finale. "World Wide Web" sets those pieces in motion with a vengeance. Whereas not much happened in "The Eight Truths," this one is pacey and interesting. The villains are revealed as the Spiders, sorry, the Eight-Legs from Metebelis, with a new queen spider planning maker herself the next Great One. She has recruited The Head Hunter to assist her in accomplishing this. The Head Hunter has delivered to the Eight-Legs the remote stellar manipulator from "The Vengeance of Morbius" and "Orbis," and in conjunction with millions of Metebelis crystals distributed through the Eightfold Truth cult, the new Great One is harnessing human minds as the amplifiers to make her universally worshiped. The new Great One has taken control of Lucie, but we find out that plucky Lucie ain't so easy to control. Stephen Moore gives a good performance as cult leader Goodman, thoroughly baffled that new age nonsense he thought he invented turned out to be true. For anybody who has seen "Planet of the Spiders," there is much deja vu about this story, though, which brings it down just a bit. Overall, though, it is a satisfying season ender.
| What: | The Eight Truths (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 21 March 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The finale of this season of Eighth Doctor adventures begins with The Doctor and Lucie seemingly taking a break in London of the early 21st century. The Doctor, however, can't help but do some meddling when he learns of a space probe to Mercury gone missing. Lucie, meanwhile, just happens to meet Karen once more, this time played by Kari Godliman, who promises that she has left The Head Hunter (would you believe her?) and has joined a new self-help movement called The Eightfold Truth. What connects these events? It's the arrival of a "new sun," or so it seems, just as the cult leader Clark Goodman (played by Stephen Moore) has foretold. The cult is very much modeled on Scientology, and the idea of the story seems to be "what if the cult based around aliens coming to Earth were true?" One of the problems with this one is that it is all setup for the next story, and so in itself does not seem to get us much of anywhere. Writer Eddie Robson spends most of the story putting the pieces in place. Therefore, it really must be listened to in conjunction with "World Wide Web."
| What: | The Cannibalists (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 21 March 2022 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
"The Cannibalists" is almost unremittingly loud and violent. It starts with a gang of thug robots tearing apart another robot, with much shouting and screaming. It pretty much continues on that note for the next hour. Phil Davis is rather wasted as Titus, leader of the thug robots, since all he has to do is shout in nearly every scene. The useless trio of good robots is voiced such that it is difficult to distinguish the three. Phil Jupitus puts in a good performance as Servo, the robot poet. The story itself has interesting background. The location is Haven, a large, orbiting colony, or so it would seem. It turns out that the humans set the robots to build the colony, but the humans for unknown reasons either never really arrived to take charge, or were wiped out before the station's completion. This leaves the AI robots on their own. Some programming glitch gives the robots individual personalities, and allows a few robots to gain independence from the orders of the main computer. These independent robots go on rampages where they track down other robots and cannibalize them for parts. It is interesting enough. I just found all the shouting and screaming quite irritating, with violent scenes that carried on just a bit too long.
| What: | To The Death (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 21 March 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
"To the Death" is a double sequel, both to "Lucie Miller" and to "Patient Zero." The Daleks are reinvading Earth a couple of decades after the failure in "The Daleks' Invasion of Earth," and using mostly the same plan they are succeeding this time thanks to the help of The Monk and to the strategies of the Dalek Time Controller. The Doctor is seemingly dead, but Lucie doesn't believe it, and sets out to get back to him by getting back to the TARDIS. The situation is desperate, and writer Nicholas Briggs has upped the emotional impact by killing off important characters, just to remind us that The Daleks are a real threat. Tamsin learns that The Monk has led her astray. The Monk is portrayed as a grown-up child, not fully understanding his emotions, wanting to do good but unable to overcome his selfishness, unable to accept when he's done wrong. The story works on the whole. For me, there is a sense that this is rehashing "The Daleks' Invasion of Earth," only making the plan and the stakes bigger. Thus, there are not many surprises about where this story is going.
| What: | The Scapegoat (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 7 March 2022 |
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| Rating: | 4 |
Although the writer of The Scapegoat is Pat Mills, the whole thing felt to me like it was Paul Magrs. It has all of Magrs' obsessions and tricks in it. It is located in a favorite historical period for lovers of the camp and kitschy - Nazi occupied Paris in this case. It doubles down on this feeling by centering on the theatre district in Montmartre. It has huge amounts of overacting. Emotional and potentially tragic scenes get undercut by wink-wink, nod-nod types of humor. There are some funny moments sprinkled throughout, but I did not find them strong enough to make up for the deficiencies in plot and conception.
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 | Best of the Doom Coalition Sets |
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| What: | Doom Coalition 3 (Doom Coalition audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 7 March 2022 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
Doom Coalition 3 makes up for much of the disappointment I had with the first and second installments of the series. It starts building a coherent story out the threads begun earlier. Surprisingly, the first part does not seem to have that relationship until we get to part 2. Absent Friends is almost a one-off. Doctor 8, Liv, and Helen arrive in late 1990s England where people are receiving phone calls from dead loved ones through new mobile phones given out to the community to get them on board with a new cell phone tower. It seems a strange and pointlessly cruel plan for a villain. There is a huge surprise when we discover what is really going on. The story allows Liv and Helen to face some personal demons. All in all, it is a very low key story. It does, however, get the Doctor onto a new problem, a clock built in the 1500s that is much more than an ordinary clock. In The Eighth Piece, the TARDIS crew split into three time zones to track down the pieces of this clock. River Song turns up. What has she to do with it? At least she has a psychic wimple to prevent The Doctor from learning who she is. The pace picks up significantly as we are introduced to a new rogue Time Lord villain - The Clocksmith. Part 3, The Doomsday Chronometer, is the best of this box set. It's a direct continuation from The Eighth Piece, and follows through nicely at all that is implied therein. The final part, The Crucible of Souls, is the big reveal, when we find out who is behind all these time shenanigans and what it's all about. The whole set is quite satisfying, with some problematic bits, such as the living puzzle box aliens and that the universe seems filled to the brim with rogue Time Lords. The standout performance of the series is John Hefernan as The Nine.
| What: | Torchwood: Outbreak (Torchwood audio dramas) |
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| By: | Jack Pawlus, -, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Saturday 26 February 2022 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
I absolutely love this audio drama. Ive listened to a lot of big finish releases and this has to be my favourite. I never write reviews but i just really wanted to write this down. It honestly just feels like a continuation of the show, and idk how to phrase it other than its the most
torchwood-y, torchwood audiodrama i've listened to so far.
I very much do reccommend :)
| What: | Atom Bomb Blues (BBC Past Doctor novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 22 February 2022 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
The final book in the BBC Past Doctor range ends the series on a dull note. Former TV series script editor Andrew Cartmel introduces some ideas with potential, but also introduces too many elements that are just nonsense and leaves too many threads hanging. The book starts with Doctor 7 and Ace posing as British scientists working on the Manhattan Project trying to stop... Well, there's problem number one. We don't ever quite know what they are trying to stop, mainly because Doctor 7 never tells Ace, or never gives her an honest answer. Cartmel writes Doctor 7 as too manipulative, too secretive. He has a plan, and the novel starts when that plan is well under way. Yet, we never really know exactly what that plan is. He also writes Ace as far too much the petulant teenager for my liking. The Doctor continuously hints that they are stopping some plot to disrupt the Manhattan Project, but there is no clear idea of what that plot might be or who is in it. As if realizing this problem, Cartmel manages to drag out a villain in the last 30 pages, a Japanese-American dullard in a zoot suit who wants to destroy the universe because doing so will somehow mean that Japan will win World War II in all possible alternate universes. Cartmel also indulges his taste for turn-of-the-century supernaturalist fiction, making it seem that mathematical equations in one universe are the equivalent of magical incantations in another. There is plenty of 1940s B-movie spy stuff, with tommy-gun weilding henchmen in zoot suits, an Oriental femme fatale, an idiotic military security official, and secret plans sent by encoded jazz records. The biggest problem for me is that by the end, there are too many questions unanswered. How does The Doctor know about this plot against the Manhattan Project in a parallel universe? How does he get himself and Ace into this parallel universe and hide the fact from Ace? How does he just happen to know friendly Apache natives and a visiting alien in a flying saucer in a parallel universe? What happened to the scientist who gets a crush on Ace? Those are just some starting questions. So, the novel reads in a way that suggests that Cartmel had many crazy ideas, threw them all into the novel, and did not put much effort into sorting them all out. It is as if the crazy ideas themselves were enough.
| What: | Wirrn Dawn (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 21 February 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
One of the patterns of Big Finish with Doctor 8 is to try to rehabilitate monsters from the past, to make them no longer monsters. Wirrn Dawn exemplifies this. The Doctor and Lucie get caught up in a war between humans and the Wirrn. They crash land on a planet with three human survivors of the battle, surrounded by Wirrn. However, one of the humans has memories of what his grandfather told him about surviving by cooperating to an extent with the Wirrn rather than fighting against them. There is much dialogue from the Doctor about how life works and that survival is the basic drive, so one should not put too much stock into notions of good and evil where survival is at stake. The ending seems a bit too magical for me. An awful lot of force fitting the plot to get us there made it less than effective for me.
For this set of Third Doctor adventures, the Big Finish crew are keeping with the idea of the spirit of the times, of recreating Doctor Who 1972-3. The pattern of having one UNIT story and one other world story continues, with modification. They mix it up this time by having the other world be the Earth's past, namely Britain in World War II, and by taking UNIT to outer space. The first story is Poison of the Daleks, which conflates the UNIT and other world adventures by taking The Brigadier and Benton off Earth. The story itself follows the environmental concerns so important to 1970s Doctor Who. UNIT have been called in to look at a new government project that supposedly cleans the air of pollution. The Doctor doesn't believe it for a moment. We find out that somehow the Daleks are part of this project. It is a typical Doctor 3 Dalek story in that the Daleks are more an indirect than direct threat to Earth. The major rationale is to get The Brigadier (expertly played by John Culshaw) and Benton onto an alien planet so we can see how they really work together as military experts, each in his own way. The next story is Operation: Hellfire, in which the Time Lords send Doctor 3 and Jo on a mission to recover a powerful artifact that has somehow made its way to Earth in the 1940s. So, Big Finish has created the Doctor Who historical that Doctor 3 never had. This Time Lord mission is a pretext for a World War II secret agents story with spies, covert operations, British traitors working for the Third Reich and a bit of supernaturalism on top of it. It's fun, though not deep.
| What: | The Beast of Orlok (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 21 February 2022 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
The Beast of Orlok is meant to be a full on Gothic Horror story, and so Barnaby Edwards has put just about every famous Gothic Horror story into it - Frankenstein, The Werewolf, The Golem, just to name a few. He sets it in the 1700s in the Black Forest, just to make sure we get the point. The problem is that there is too much, so that in trying to cover everything, the story has to race along from point A to point B with no intervening information about how one got there. The gaps are maddening. Plus, Edwards just cannot take the Gothic Horror ambience seriously, so that Lucie is constantly undercutting it with her "northern charm." So, many interesting ideas do not come together.
| What: | Out of Time (Out of Time audio dramas) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 6 February 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Getting the generally regarded favorite Doctor of Old Who and the generally regarded favorite Doctor of New Who together to go after the Daleks? What could possibly go wrong? I think that Matt Fitton never really got farther than that. So, we get a typical Daleks seize the base story, with two Doctors trying to outwit them. There is some interesting interaction between our Doctors, with the technically younger Doctor giving the "voice of wisdom" advice to the older Doctor - don't travel alone. The two Doctors are great as usual. It is just that I would have liked them to be in a more original kind of story.
| What: | Hothouse (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 6 February 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
"Hothouse" finds The Doctor and Lucie trying to repair their relationship. The Doctor still cannot remember Lucie all that well, while Lucie is desperate to show that she is worthy of his trust. She wants to go back to the old times when they were best buds crashing the best parties in the universe. The story takes place on Earth, some time in Lucie's near future. The planet is hot, everything is drying up. The population is too big. Governments are collapsing. Into this mess steps a former rock musician turned environmental activist who has a radical plan for healing the Earth. The story tries to play the "he's not evil, just misguided" card, but there is a bit too much ruthlessness in our villain to make that believable. What sort of CEO of a charitable organization wanders around the place carrying guns? The main problem with this story is that it does not go anywhere we have not already been.
| What: | Dark Universe (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 6 February 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Finally, we get a script that shows what The Eleven is really about. Dark Universe is another of the Doctor 7 has a plan stories. This time, it has been 20 or so years since the Doctor separated from Ace. She's a professor now, running a major ecological non-profit, and she's really not happy with The Doctor. However, The Doctor recruits her to help out with one of his devious plans. This time, The Doctor wants to trap The Eleven, and uses Ace to get close to The Eleven. Said Mr. Eleven is after an ancient Time Lord weapon that would release total disaster on the universe, and The Doctor wants him to have it. However, The Doctor's plan goes awry, because The Eleven is crazier even than The Doctor could have imagined. The story has basically a two-part structure. In part 1, The Doctor has a plan and we hear him try to outwit The Eleven. In part 2, The Eleven has "won" and taken The Doctor as a prisoner to amuse him while he sets about wreaking chaos across the Universe. Part 2 very much feels like a redo (or a foredo if we follow Doctor universe chronology) of "Last of the Timelords." The star of this show is Mark Bonnar. He gets large space in which to deliver a truly terrifying performance.
| What: | Orbis (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 6 February 2022 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
So, we get a new "season" started for the 8th Doctor adventures. Someone had an idea: Let's have The Doctor forget Lucie so that they can start again as if new. It's not the most brilliant problem one could come up with. Somehow, then, the Sisters of Karn from the last episode managed to whisk away The Doctor from certain death to a mostly sea-based planet that no one has really heard of, and kept his TARDIS as a memorial or something like that for themselves. The Headhunter has somehow, we don't learn how, managed to wangle the TARDIS away from the Sisters, and pilot it well enough to track down Lucie at home in Blackpool and shoot her with time bullets (time-released death), so the Headhunter can use Lucie to persuade The Doctor to do something, but we are not sure what. The wrinkle is that when they arrive at Orbis, The Doctor has been there for hundreds of years, and become the protector saint of the squidlike beings who live there. He has lost much of his memory, and does not recognize Lucie at all. Time for Lucie to go emotional (when is there not a time for Lucie to go emotional?). The episode leaves so many unanswered questions, mostly regarding the causes for events, that it would be too much of a burden to enumerate them all. It does have its amusing bits.
| What: | The Algebra of Ice (BBC Past Doctor novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 31 January 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
"The Algebra of Ice" is a great title, but sadly not a great novel. The novel perpetually feels like it is just about to take off, but never really does leave the ground. The story, such as it is, goes like this. The Doctor and Ace are watching some events in time rewind and reshape, then smooth out. The investigation to the cause leads them to a bizarre crop circle in 21st-century England. The crop circle is not a circle, but rather sets of incomplete shapes; plus, it's made of ice that apparently takes a very long time (weeks? months?) to melt. The TARDIS lets The Doctor know that a young mathematician named Ethan Amberglass is somehow part of the problem. It seems that the crop patterns are attempts by a race (unnamed throughout the book) from another universe of pure mathematics, who have used up almost all the energy in their universe fighting off entropy so they can live forever, and are now trying to break through into this universe to do the same here. Helping them is a sociopathic rich guy named Brett and another mathematician he knew from University named Unwin. Brett somehow (we never know how) has Unwin completely under his control. Oh, and UNIT have been called in to look into the crop pattern, and they bring the Brigadier out of retirement to help them out. Also, there is a pathetic publisher of an online magazine about conspiracy stuff, named Molecross, who constantly tags along and annoys everyone. The main problem with this book is how underwhelming it all is. There are many very interesting ideas that just click along before fizzling out. We are constantly reminded that the stakes are high, that the UNIVERSE is at stake, yet no one really acts as if it is, and the aliens are repeatedly rather easily frustrated in their efforts to break through. Rose is not very good in giving his villains motivations. Brett is just a sociopath, and that seems to be all we need to know. The aliens just want eternal life. UNIT and the Brigadier are completely wasted in this book. They do practically nothing and get about 10% at most of the pages. Several key aspects of the book are left unexplained. How did Brett meet these aliens? Why is he so keen on helping them? How do these aliens from another universe know about The Doctor? How is it that Brett can so easily overpower everyone when it is just him? What is the connection of the aliens' attempted incursions and the time anomalies apart from providing a convenient moment to move the plot along late in the novel? So, great title, interesting ideas, flawed conception - that sums my impression of this novel.
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| Jago & Litefoot meet Jekyll and Hyde |
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| What: | The Beast of Kravenos (Fourth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 25 January 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
It's back to 19th-century London, and The Doctor, Romana, and K-9 are on the case with the help of Jago and Litefoot. Our intrepid Victorian investigators are as entertaining as always. The story itself suits the setting - a mysterious thief is making off with things from locked rooms, and a beast is out there ferociously killing people. Are they connected? And what have they to do with Jago's Theatre? In general, this one is light and entertaining, following the formula of 19th-century popular fiction and injecting just a bit of Doctor Who business.
| What: | Theatre of War (Big Finish novel adaptations) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 25 January 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Justin Richards adapted his own novel for audio drama. He took some liberties with the plot, though in the essentials this is the same story. It is still complex compared with the standard Big Finish production, with more characters and settings, and more moving parts to the plot. The story itself involves Doctor 7, Ace, and Bennie at a mysterious archaeological dig that turns out to be a hologramatic theatre, except that the holograms are real enough to affect people and the theatre turns out to be more than just a theatre. There is, of course, a corrupt space empire involved. Plus, we get to meet the devious Braxiatel. This is a big story, grand scale space opera stuff. That means that there are a few plot holes so that the story can keep the scope, just a few bits of plot by convenience at the end.
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| I Said Morbius Didn't Amount To Much |
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| What: | The Vengeance of Morbius (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 23 January 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
"The Vengeance of Morbius" is a title whose promise is not really kept. After "Sisters of the Flame," Zorodnix has managed to resurrect Morbius, who now has robbed the Time Lords of their power from the Eye of Harmony. Morbius has waged a ten-year reign of terror, conquering many star systems. We are told all this rather than actually getting to witness it. Everything seems to be going Morbius' way; however, the genetic process that brought him back to life is not stable. He needs to extract Time Lord "essence" or something like that, to stay alive, and the one Time Lord he possesses is running out of essence. So, after the main characters from "Sisters of the Flame" are brought together, in a way, it comes time for the mano a mano showdown between The Doctor and the weakened Morbius. The whole just seems to me to be a waste of many opportunities for complexity and development and subtlety. Why, for instance, is Haspira so keen to have The Doctor killed? I kept waiting to find out that during her time spying on Zorodnix for the Sisterhood, Haspira secretly became a devotee of Morbius, effectively a double-agent. That would have been interesting. Otherwise, her eagerness is unmotivated. We are still left with the mystery of what makes Morbius so powerful. The story clips along at a nice pace. I just wish there were more to it.
| What: | Sisters of the Flame (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 23 January 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
"Sisters of the Flame" is definitely a part one. It is designed to place all the pieces for the next episode. Basically, another mad genius, this time an economic one rather than a medical one, has set about to try to recreate the Time Lord dictator Morbius. The Time Lords are terrified, the Sisterhood of Karn are terrified, and all want The Doctor out of existence. I am not sure why everyone is so terrified about this, since, as far as I can gather, there is nothing especially frightening about Morbius, the has-been dictator with no particular super powers. The Doctor even articulates this point. If the Time Lords know who is trying to resurrect Morbius, why do they not just stop him? Most of this story concentrates on Lucie, who is very like Ace in her Northern way - all emotion, yelling at any problem that comes her way. She is, though, absolutely dedicated to The Doctor. There is no real resolution at the end, just the preparation for the arrival of Morbius.
