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| The Problems are in the Details |
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The second in the series The War Doctor Begins presents this Doctor still struggling with his new identity as warrior rather than doctor. In other words, he plays the warrior, or in this case the Warbringer, because he has to, but cannot stop himself from doing Doctor-like stuff, such as saving a planet from certain doom. Paired with the single- minded Veklin as a foil, The Doctor keeps straying and returning. The moral questions dominate the series. The premise for this series is interesting. Even though it is three parts with three different writers, the three really combine into one story. That story, the listener will find out, gets told in classical epic manner, with the narrative starting more than midway past the events of the plot. It circles back to the actual beginning only in part 3. The reason for this is to introduce a new character - Case, a failed Dalek conversion who might prove useful in the war against the Daleks. Without giving away too much, the plot involves a planet on which everyone grows up in and partakes in war. There are two sides who are not committed to annihilating each other, but are instead committing to perpetuating their war because it is their culture to do so. This planet is about to be annihilated by a crash from a Dalek "harvester" ship. Can The Doctor save these people and get them off the planet before the disaster? Do they want to be saved?
The flaws in the series for me come in two varieties. First, there is quite a bit of plot by convenience, particularly in part 3 (which, remember is part 1 chronologically). It has quite a bit of capture and escape, with our characters magically meeting each other when they have been previously separated to quite different parts of a giant spaceship in which they have never been before. There are other elements in other parts that equally seem to be there merely because they function to keep the plot moving rather than as logical developments from what has gone on before, secret tunnels and that sort of thing. Second, The series never properly explains just what these people are doing on this planet. They all seem human, and derive their personalities, accents, and so on from Earth history, and thus seem to have been transplanted at some time in the past. By whom (the Daleks? doesn't seem their style) and for what purpose are never explained. There are several other gaps in details about the hows and whys of things.
So, there is a consistency of theme and tone that works well. The chronologically twisted plot also works well. The setting and events work well in focusing us on the question of whether The Doctor who refuses that name now should take the name of Warbringer. The cast are all quite good. Jonathan Carley is brilliant in his interpretation of John Hurt's Doctor.
| What: | The Memory Bank (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 15 December 2025 |
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| Rating: |   7 |
This set is an anthology of four individual short episodes featuring Doctor 5 and Turlough. The thread tying them together is the theme of memory. In the first story, they arrive in a society where if a person is not remembered, then that person disappears. The next story is The Last Fairytale, taking place in a late medieval setting where everyone is awaiting The Storyteller, but no one knows exactly who that is. What they do know is that all the kinds of people cast as villains are sick and tired of it and want to capture The Storyteller to force him to make them the goodies. The third of the stories is Repeat Offender. This is the playing with time story involving a locked room mystery. The last, and weakest of the stories, is The Becoming, about the rituals of a people who rely upon race memory to continue their existence, and whose evolution has created rites of passage that create metamorphosis. Because these are short, the stories have small casts, one or two guest actors only, and lean very heavily on dialogue rather than action. All have the problem that the concept is too big for the container, which leads to some rushing through details and endings, and quite a bit of exposition.
| What: | Toy Soldiers (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 30 November 2025 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
I enjoyed other Paul Leonard DW novels I have read, so felt let down by this one. The story centers on Doctor 7 and crew investigating child vanishments at the end of WWI. There is an elaborate plot involving someone using teddy bears as transmat locators to whisk away children to fight a war on a far-off planet, after some nasty surgical brainwashing. I find three large problems with this novel. Problem 1: Yet again we have Doctor 7 and crew playing intergalactic Mission: Impossible, complete with costumes, false identities, improbably easy insertions into businesses, governments, and other institutions. I say it again - The Doctor is a tourist, not an agent. He stumbles upon trouble; he does not go looking for it. Problem 2: To get all the bits of Leonard's main idea tied together would require a much longer novel. Too many threads are left hanging. Too many rationales are rushed through without consideration for the necessary logic. Characters are brought in, raised in importance just by volume of narrative devoted to them, only to be killed off without particular consequence to the plot, and then forgotten. Problem 3: This novel, like so many in the New Adventures line, has a messy and unnecessarily violent ending, discounting the denouement.
Among the better aspects of the novel are that the references to other Doctor Who stories are minimal and not gratuitous. Leonard does a very good job of writing from teenager perspectives without using the usual teen clichés. The villain of the story is misguided rather than evil, thus adding some needed moral depth to the story.
It's not a bad read, just not a good one.
| What: | Timewyrm: Apocalypse (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | Alan Prentice, Melbourne, Australia |
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| Date: | Thursday 27 November 2025 |
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| Rating: | 5 |
This book isn't bad. It's a perfectly serviceable, competently written outing but it commits what I believe to be the cardinal sin of a Doctor Who story - it's kinda forgettable.
This is a real shame as it has a lot that should work in its favour. A cameo from a past Doctor that doesn't feel fanw*nk-y, a romance with a devastating outcome and an actually unsettling villain.
Unfortunately, the book never really explores any of it in a memorable way. I think the problem is that this concept was proposed as a TV story and is still written with a TV budget in mind. This means that this book ultimately comes across as a lengthy and subpar novelisation of an untransmitted story.
The Timewyrm did feel like a genuine threat in a way it didn't in the previous two books which was nice and the fallout between the Doctor and Ace was reminiscent of their tense interactions in Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric, which was nice.
Sadly these alone were not enough to make this book a winner.
A little interesting in places but overall average.
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| Fun but a little problematic |
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| What: | Timewyrm: Exodus (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | Alan Prentice, Melbourne, Australia |
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| Date: | Tuesday 18 November 2025 |
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| Rating: | 5 |
The "What if the Nazis won WWII" concept may, by 2025 standards, be a bit of a tired cliche but it's used quite well here. An alternate timeline Nazi-occupied England is where the Doctor and Ace start the story, on the trail of the Timewyrm. The Doctor impersonates a high ranking Nazi to gain access to secret historical records to find out where the timeline diverged.
What follows is the Doctor earning a favour from a pre-WWII Hitler in order to help correct the timeline.
The Timewyrm, meanwhile, is trapped inside the mind of Adolf Hitler. And while this may, on paper, seem like a really interesting idea, the direction the book goes with it is where it lost me.
Essentially, the book blames Hitler's insanity on the Timewyrm, basically making all of the atrocities of WWII the fault of an alien. This leaves a really bad taste in my mouth and forces the book into a dodgy moral area. If we accept that the Doctor is allowed to intervene in history where alien threats exist, doesn't that mean that the Doctor should be obligated to prevent WWII entirely? I think this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding on Dicks' part of how Hitler and the Nazi party rose to power and held it for as long as they did.
This is a real shame as it spoils what is otherwise a fun book with interesting characters.
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| Terrible by almost every metric |
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| What: | Timewyrm: Genesys (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | Alan Prentice, Melbourne, Australia |
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| Date: | Thursday 13 November 2025 |
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| Rating: | 1 |
I was excited to start reading this series. I'd heard so many good things about many of the Virgin titles. Imagine my shock and disappointment to find that this is the one that kick starts it all.
The Doctor's characterisation is way off. He's far grouchier, far more bad tempered and far more rudely dismissive than this incarnation ever was on screen. His infamous scolding of Ace for worrying about being molested by Gilgamesh is the most wildly and irresponsibly out of character moment I've encountered in any piece of Who media.
Gilgamesh is a boring one-note character, which wouldn't be such a problem if we didn't spend so much time with him throughout. I really relate to Ace wanting to kill the bastard because I wanted to, as well.
It seems that John Peel took "more adult" to mean filthy and perverted. There are numerous descriptions of temple women walking around topless in scenes where drawing attention to it was wholly unnecessary; it made the scenes in question difficult to read as I kept being drawn out of the story by it.
There is also a strange desire to lean heavily on the past; with cameos by both the 3rd and 4th Doctors. The 4th Doctor cameo is actually kind of fun but the 3rd Doctor's personality taking over the 7th later on was not only confusing on first read but ultimately comes across as a bit desperate. "Hey, remember the much cooler Doctor that I, the author, much prefer? Yeah, wouldn't it be better if this story had him instead?" Not the kind of fan service you want to be encouraging so early in a new series.
The eponymous Timewyrm doesn't even get a chance to shine as [SPOILER AHEAD], the villain doesn't become the Timewyrm and adopt that name until literally the last few pages. For the rest of the book she spends her time plotting in the shadows and we spend very little time following her part of the story.
Ultimately, this book is a mess; and not even a fun one. It misrepresents its main cast, it lacks interesting guest characters and comes across as just kinda gross.
| What: | Thin Time / Madquake (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 11 November 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Here we have two one-hour stories, one featuring Doctor 5, the other featuring the companions, with the Doctor returning to them at the end. The first story, Thin Time, is a kind of William Hope Hodgson or H.P. Lovecraft story in which a Victorian dabbler in science is trying to contact his future self, but ends up paving the way for the entrance of some interdimensional being that wants to feed (do these things really have no other motive?) on reality after reality. In another sense, this is a base under siege story, with the base being the locked house, monsters trying to get in. Thin Time performs for the story arc the job of reminding The Doctor who he is and what his true relationship with his companions are. It has a little postlude when Doctor 5 meets Doctor 11 (not played by Matt Smith) and they have a little discussion over tea about getting away from it all. The second story Madquake involves the companions, left behind on a planet that seems tailor-made for mental healing. Each companion goes through their identity crisis, which is pushed to the limit with the arrival of some Slitheen, which allows the companions to solve the crisis without The Doctor's help. There is a brief reunification postlude that sets the conditions for the next adventure. Once again, the stories are entertaining without straining any bounds of the genre they are put into. The stories are also mostly functional, meant primarily to accomplish some goal in the larger story arc.
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| Time for Doctor 5 to Think |
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| What: | Time Apart (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 11 November 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Time Apart gives the listener 4 individual adventures of Doctor 5 on his own, without companions. Having left his companions behind "for their safety," the Doctor finds himself somewhat baffled about his identity. Each of the stories here tests some aspect of the Doctor's character, either directly or indirectly. The first, and I think best, is Ghost Station, where The Doctor encounters a lone guard in the underground railway system directly below the Berlin Wall. This is a ghost story, and a two-hander, where the guard must decide what direction he wants to take - duty or freedom. The second story, The Bridge Master, takes place in the 1600s and follows a usual line where The Doctor must undo the damage from random alien tech falling in the wrong hands, while battling a medieval superstition that appears might be real. The third story, What Lurks Down Under, involves sea monsters attacking a transportation ship bound for Australia, plus gives The Doctor an opportunity to take on a new companion, which he denies. The last story is another historical tale in science fiction clothing. The Doctor confronts The Dancing Plague, a famous case of mass hysteria in medieval Strasbourg. Each story highlights a different aspect of Doctor 5's distinct characteristics. I think the short form of each story ends up being too limiting. There is too much need to get the story over with in a hurry, and the only one that suits this format is Ghost Station. The collection is enjoyable but not revolutionary Doctor Who fare.
| What: | Serpent in the Silver Mask (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 12 October 2025 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
Two farces bookend this trio of adventures. Kingdom of Lies starts it off with a kind of medieval-punk story of what could be Italian nobles but feels more like Noel Coward. Ghost Walk, the middle story, was a serious spooky adventure. Then, it is back to farce with Serpent in the Silver Mask. I found Serpent funnier than Kingdom, but that is mostly a matter of taste. Serpent is played as a cross between the film Kind Hearts and Coronets and Sherlock Holmes mystery. In the far future, the Mazzini family are gathered for the wake and reading of the will of the deceased patriarch, after which, the Mazzinis start getting murdered one by one. Samuel West plays the entire Mazzini family just as Alec Guinness had done in Kind Hearts. West is great at distinguishing the characters in all their over-the-top manners. The funniest bit is when Maria Mazzini is putting the moves on The Doctor. West leans into this so brilliantly and Peter Davison is in his element as a Doctor who has met his match, reducing him to an embarrassed, gibbering wreck. Some jokes do not land quite so well, such as the detective who literally has a nose like a bloodhound. The script works well in dividing the TARDIS crew so that each has something real to do and is not just asking questions of The Doctor. It's not genius, but it is well done.
| What: | Kingdom of Lies (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 12 October 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Kingdom of Lies takes the situation of the film War of the Roses and turns it into a medieval fantasy farce with just a touch of Gormenghast. The Duchy of Cardenas is split in two by a line separating the halves each claimed by the squabbling Duke and Duchess. The world of Cardenas seems to be located entirely in a massive castle. The Duke has hired an assassin to kill the Duchess, and the Duchess is milking the entire situation for publicity, to get the people on her side. The Duke mistakes The Doctor as the assassin, with the help of Nyssa who plays up the story to the hilt. The Duchess mistakenly believes Tegan and Adric are there to protect her from the assassin, thanks to Adric's tale-telling as a way to get them out of trouble. There are plenty of funny bits, mostly with Nyssa trying to act tough. It has its serious moments, but mostly the idea here is for laughs.
This second volume of Fourth Doctor stories contains two stories from the Doctor's time in E-Space, slotting in somewhere before Warrior's Gate. The Tardis crew is trying to find the CVE that will take them out of E-Space and back into N-Space. The first story, The Planet of Witches, works by taking all the clichés regarding witches in media productions and turning them on their head. We get an old crone who maniacally cackles, but turns out is not an old crone who maniacally cackles, witchfinders who do not find witches to burn them, but find witches to pass on as servants useful because of their knowledge. Magic isn't magic; it's just misunderstood technology. There are a few other such surprises. The story itself reminds me quite a bit of Alan Barnes' previous Big Finish efforts: The Other Side and Zagreus. The second story, The Quest of the Engineer, seems to go by the logic that whatever happens in N-Space is replicated in some way in E-Space. That is how it seems. I cannot tell whether that was the actual thinking. Even so, this story is pretty much the E-Space version of The Pirate Planet. An evil genius controls a planet like its a spaceship, destroys worlds to harvest their resources, and has a strange ulterior motive for doing all this. The two stories progress very much like most mid-season Doctor Who TV serials. They are reasonably entertaining, but not the kind of thing to knock your socks off.
| What: | The Secrets of Det-Sen (The Early Adventures audio dramas) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 16 September 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Big Finish presents us with another historical, and another prequel. This time, we get to find out how The Doctor received the Holy Ghanta that he reveals in The Abominable Snowmen. The Doctor, Steven, and Dodo land in the Himalayas, join a group of pilgrims, spot some Yeti, and are taken into a monastery with a holy shrine. There is a pilgrim who is not quite what he presents himself to be, a love interest for Steven, a bad guy to turn up in the second half and thus to speed up what is otherwise a fairly slow-moving story. The plot development and outcomes are pretty much as expected given how hard Big Finish sticks to the original series story methods. It's entertaining in a nostalgic way.
| What: | The Fifth Traveller (The Early Adventures audio dramas) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 27 August 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The Fifth Traveller reunites William Russell (as Ian Chesterton) and Maureen O'Brien (as Vicki) in an adventure that is, for my taste, too close to 1965 Doctor Who. The TARDIS crew escape a world of industrial nightmare and arrive on a jungle planet. However, a new companion, Jospa, seemingly is just there from nowhere. As the TARDIS crew proceed on what seems like a standard situation for them, separated from each other, jungle occupied by primitive ape-people with rudimentary telepathic abilities and an aggressive distrust of anything from outside their little world, dangers from the elements (low light, acid rain, bogs, precipitous drops, etc.), strange things are happening to their minds. They seem to forget each other in odd ways, and to place Jospa in adventures that the audience knows he was never a part of. The story has many characteristics of the first two seasons of Doctor Who. How many jungles planets were there? How many distrustful, easily mislead primitives? Almost all the elements are recognizably drawn from DW TV adventures. The primitives are too much like the Tribe of Gum, down to the fight over who gets to be leader. The sketchy one, Gark, is an awful lot like other such figures such as Tegana from Marco Polo. There is quite a bit of mind-stuff, telepathy especially, what was very common for the early adventures. The one novum in the whole arrangement, Jospa, turns out to be a cartoon villain as well. So, the story gets high marks for nostalgia, but middle marks for originality and plausibility.
| What: | Zamper (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 28 July 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
A 1987 Doctor Who cast of characters in a 1989 Doctor Who plot about sums up Zamper, Gareth Roberts' last novel for the Virgin New Adventures line. In this novel, he brings back the Ultramilitarized Mutant Space Turtles called the Chelonians (not terribly original given that "chelonian" is Greek for turtle). However, he has moved the story forward quite a bit in their history. The Big Mother, presumed supreme ruler of Chelonia, has been usurped. Little Sister is now in power with a reform policy turning the collapsing Chelonian Empire into a cooperative, prosperous, peace-loving society. What is left of Big Mother's loyalists are now desperate to find a means to take back power. They have landed on a scheme to get a gleaming new powerful battle cruiser from the mysterious shipbuilders of Zamper. This Zamper is a planet set up by a mysterious consortium 472 years earlier, impregnably protected, and absolutely neutral with regards to what side of a war its clients are on. Zamper does two things only - build military space ships better than anyone else and run an intergalactic online gambling business on a "duty free" basis. This latter business seems to be beside the point as far as the main plot goes, and is one of the weaknesses of the novel, which is basically a failure to tightly connect all of its pieces. Only five people actually work on Zamper, all of whom have been more or less kidnapped and forced to work on Zamper for the rest of their lives, forced never to mention anything of their identity before Zamper. This is another weakness, as even with future technology, it seems unlikely that an establishment that big would not require a vast number of workers. Zamper is run by the mysterious Management, a computer avatar that appears only on video screens, but has absolute control over everything that happens there. The Chelonians send two delegates to Zamper to collect their space ship. The problem is that Management is failing, systems are breaking down, and something is going on with the genetically modified slimy critters that the consortium originally set up to be the shipbuilders. Into this explosive mix, The Doctor and crew accidentally arrive, separated from the TARDIS. They quickly become embroiled in the unfolding disaster.
Zamper has many features that hearken to Roberts' favorite era of Doctor Who, the Graham Williams period. The warlike despotic ruler kicked out of his home planet reminds one of Graff Vynda-K from The Ribos Operation. As in Williams-era Doctor Who, the dialogue is of two kinds - the overly serious, which is to be laughed at by the reader, and breezy flippancy in reaction to the overly serious. Another such trait is splitting the Doctor from the companions for half or more of the story.
There are some weaknesses. One is that Roz and Chris do not have much of a role in this story. As in the previous New Adventures novel, the writer seems to want to just push them aside for a while until they might prove useful. I suspect, and it is just a suspicion, that Roberts originally had Ace in mind as Roz and Chris seem to be Ace split into two characters, Roz being soldier-Ace and Chris being romantic-Ace. Also, toward the end, Roberts seems to be in a rush to kill off every character but the TARDIS crew. I don't see a good reason for him to do this. The major weakness in the novel I found was, to me, a botched ending. Roberts writes about the basic setup of the failing Zamper quite well, creating a mystery and a problem. However, he pulls a "surprise" in the last few chapters, an indication that the previous part of the novel was just misdirection. The surprise is simply not nearly as interesting as the setup. What seemed to be a theme of "there are no real bad guys here" gets swapped for an "I want to conquer the universe" bad guy. The bad guy is a kind of Cthulhu with an Etonian manner. I found this resolution boring and unimaginative, and I would have much preferred that Roberts had stuck with the logic of his starting points.
The strengths of the novel are quite good. Roberts does very well at giving each character a distinct identity and voice. Characters who appear at first one-dimensional gradually gain depth and aspects. The dialogue moves along quite briskly, and Roberts has a special affinity for Bernice, who seems to me to be fully herself for the first time in a New Adventures novel. I like it that Roberts has gone back to the earlier TV series in giving us a Doctor who just stumbles upon a problem rather than one who has a save-the-universe plan already in place, and just uses everyone as pawns in the plan.
In total, I got more enjoyment than dissatisfaction out of Zamper, but just couldn't take the ending.
It has taken a while, but the Companion Chronicles series has generally gotten much better after Big Finish removed many of the restraints for the series. This box set has four stories, each with a different set of companions for the First Doctor. The first is "E is for...", which is the closest to earlier Companion Chronicles stories in format, one companion narrator telling a story and interacting with one participant in that story (though in this case there are an additional character and some dramatized scenes rather than narrated scenes). This is the weakest of the four. Susan gets separated from her friends and somehow manages to get undetected into a prison where she meets a young prisoner with extraordinary abilities. She releases him and then the chase is on to find her friends. In this society, people with special abilities, such as Susan's mental powers, are forced to become living weapons. There is much moralizing in the dialogue. I found the story had too many unbelievable elements and coincidences. The second is "Daybreak," which might be my favorite of the collection. This one is also mainly a two-hander with some additional characters and dramatizations. In this story, The TARDIS crew has landed on Earth in Barbara and Ian's future, but Vickie's past, at a crucial historical point. Rebels are going to attempt an assassination that Vickie knows will lead to the overthrow of a tyrannical government. However, Vickie is arrested and interrogated by the man she knows will be assassinated. The situation leads to an interesting dialogue in which the two characters get to express their worldviews and to compare the relative moral value of each. With a little modification, it could make an excellent stage drama. "The Vardan Invasion of Mirth" features Steven out of place in 1950s Earth where he hooks up with a comedian struggling to make a go of it in television. The story has a good mixture of the funny and the sad and seems just right in highlighting the qualities of Steven's character - forthright, a bit literal-minded, honest, but not at all stupid. Peter Purves is an excellent actor who brings out the best in the character. Last is "The Crumbling Magician," which is most like a full audio drama and not much like a Companion Chronicle story. The Doctor, Polly, and Ben are captured in a hospital now totally run by a mad computer that thinks it knows what is best for humanity. There are some timey-wimey shenanigans that has characters jumping around to different points of the narrative. It is a real work-out for Aneke Wills, who has to voice Polly, the computer using Polly's voice, and The Doctor temporarily occupying Polly's body. Elliot Chapman is really good as Ben. Another treat is David Warner playing an eleven year old boy who has the body of a seventy year old man. Once again, the writers have done very well in not pitching characters as stupid. My only true quibble with this story is that the solution does not hinge on Polly. Since it is a Companion Chronicle, I would have preferred that Polly found the surprise solution. This set was very good listening and I am glad I got ahold of it.
| What: | Revenge of the Swarm (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 6 July 2025 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
Revenge of the Swarm has the problem of not offering much new. The Swarm somehow has been living dormant inside the TARDIS for centuries, since Doctor 4 days, and finds a suitable host in the empty spot in Hector's brain where Hex should be. The swarm then tries to retrace its origin and complete what it started, making itself the biggest thing in the universe just because. We still have a Swarm that doesn't swarm, the "contact has been made" infections, the siege on the medical base (now in its earlier version as a research facility), and a microbe with ideas above its station. The only real addition to the original is a side venture into Tron, with digital racing bikes in a game-like virtual world. If one really, really likes "The Invisible Enemy," then this is a delightful trip down memory lane. For the rest of us, it is just difficult to find a reason to get into it.
| What: | Decalog 2: Lost Property (Decalog short story collections) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 4 July 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The second collection of Doctor Who short stories discards the story arc as connecting link, and uses instead a common idea - various "homes" The Doctor has had through his travels. All seven Doctors up to that point get represented in ten stories of varying style. Decalog 1 had an array of quality, from the quite good to the very bad. Decalog 2 settles for mid level through the entire collection. No story is outstanding, but no story is truly terrible, either. By my standards, the worst in this collection is the second story, "Crimson Dawn" by Tim Robbins. This is a mess of story involving Doctor 4 and Leela on Mars in the future. Robbins tries too hard to please fans, making his future Mars just a version of 1920s British Empire Egypt, with much of the same politics. The story includes just about every reference Robbins could think of to some other Doctor Who story. The main problem is that Robbins, like so many others, appears incapable of writing Doctor 4 correctly. A couple of the stories are basically farces, including Paul Cornell's "The Trials of Tara," written as a pastiche of Shakespeare plays, and "Question Mark Pyjamas" by Perry and Tucker, an attempted satire of historical recreation theme parks. If there is a best story in the collection, to me that would be "The Nine-Day Queen" by Matthew Jones, a Doctor 1 historical about the events leading to the brief reign of Jane Grey as Queen of England. In total, this collection is mildly entertaining, but not worth going out of one's way to get.
This Lost Story is an adaptation of the original script that Gerry Davis wrote in 1974, which became Revenge of the Cybermen for the TV series. It has much of the same structure as the TV version, and more or less the same direction, but there are notable differences between the two. That final version was heavily rewritten by script editor Robert Holmes. The major difference is with the asteroid of gold that the Cybermen want to destroy. In the televised version, it is a roving planet trying whose people are trying to hide from outsiders who want to steal all its gold. In this original version, it is an asteroid rich in gold, now occupied by miners who have been stranded on the asteroid for 25 years (which seems an absurd length of time). The other major difference is that Gerry Davis employs several elements from prior Cybermen stories, especially The Moonbase (the plague that is not one) and The Wheel in Space (Cybermen hiding on the base). It also feels surprisingly like the later story Earthshock, and I wonder whether Eric Saward (writer) and Antony Root (script editor) were familiar with this script when they produced Earthshock. This is the first BF production featuring Sadie Miller stepping into the role of Sarah Jane Smith played by her mother. She sounds very much like Elisabeth Sladen. Christopher Naylor steps into the role of Harry Sullivan. He does not sound much like Ian Marter, but he has a very good understanding of Harry's character and stays true to that. This story is very good for the memory lane feeling, and despite a few absurdities is quite satisfying to listen to.
| What: | Ravenous 1 (Ravenous audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 29 June 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Ravenous 1 picks up where Doom Coalition left off. Helen has disappeared along with The Eleven, so The Doctor and Liv are trying to find them. The four parts are divided 2 x 2. The first two parts are diversions, really, that have nothing to do with the second two parts. Their Finest Hour sees The Doctor come to the aid of Winston Churchill again, who is up against a mysterious alien force shooting down some of Britain's planes in 1940 near the beginning of the Battle of Britain. It's rather standard stuff along the lines of Doctor Who circa 2005-2010. How to Make a Killing in Time Travel is a farce that again has nothing to do with the story arc of this box set. It is amusing, but not brilliant. The last two parts are really one story divided into two parts, both designed to explain what happened to Helen and The Eleven and to set the stage for the appearance of "The Ravenous" in the next box set. Oh boy, another time eating or soul eating or emotion eating monster race from the "dark times." Run out of ideas, have we? In the last two parts, Helen and The Eleven are now in a rehabilitation center for the criminally insane, but the Governor is really trying to use the facility to come up with a mind control process that will end criminality. He has as his partner The Kandyman, who concocts sweet treats to "calm" the criminals. It turns out, though, that The Eleven has other plans, and that Helen might just have, hidden somewhere in her brain, the spirit of The Sonomancer ready to pop out. Mark Bonnar is, of course, superb as The Eleven. It is just that the Big Finish writers do not seem to know exactly what to do with this character. Thus, he comes across as The Master on steroids and psychedelics at the same time. Since the purpose of this box set is to set up the rest, it really does not hold up well on its own.
| What: | Sky Pirates! (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 4 June 2025 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
Sky Pirates! is one of the less-liked NA novels for good reason. Author Dave Stone has applied nearly all of his writing energies to the jokes, which leaves the plot and conception hanging loose and tattered from the yardarm. Humor is, like music, very much a matter of personal taste. I won't say that the book isn't funny, but rather I will say that I did not find it funny. All the sexual innuendos, the exaggerated descriptions, the snarky footnotes, and quirky characters just did not "land" for me most of the time. That left me searching for something else to grab to make the novel work for me, and, alas, I found nothing there.
The problems are these. The novel does not have a plot per se; it has a capture-and-escape first half followed by a quest second half. The quest, however, is never fully explained. The characters are supposed to go after these "Eyes" (gemstones of power), but the reason for doing this is never fully explained. What are the Eyes supposed to do once one has gathered them? Another problem is that Stone provides setup for various things to which he provides no payout. For instance, it becomes fairly obvious that some kind of malign, godlike, superbeing is manipulating events, but the way Stone writes it, characters and situations appear to have been created from the imagination of this being, which is why they talk in extraordinary ways and follow predictable adventure story behaviors. That is, the characters appear to be faux "characters" rather than faux people, and as such it feels through much of the novel that this whole setup is a fiction of some kind and only The Doctor suspects it. Sadly, this concept is not what Stone goes with, so that we are left with no explanation at all of why characters talk and act as they do other than that it is good for a few jokes that they do so. Yet another problem is that Chris and Roz have almost nothing to do in this novel other than be captured and tortured. In their first full TARDIS adventure, they are almost entirely sidelined. The Doctor makes one passing remark about them, and then, as far as anyone can tell, completely forgets about them. And so does Benny. When, near the end of the novel, it finally looks like they may have some contribution to the plot, it turns out that this contribution is pretty meaningless. The Doctor is back to being The Great Manipulator, a characterization that I have never found interesting or compelling. Last, as far as this review goes, is that The Doctor and crew lack motivation. They are blasted into a pocket dimension or something like that, by a reality bomb of some kind, and then simply occupy that reality, moving within it while having no clear goal. If the goal is to reunite with the TARDIS (and there is no explanation of how they got separated from the TARDIS), then why do the characters act with no urgency to accomplish this goal? Alternatively, if there is something "wrong" with this pocket dimension, there is no urgency to fix it.
In the end, I am left disappointed by Sky Pirates! It has many opportunities for interesting concepts and intriguing plot twists, all left behind in service of a very niche kind of humor. Plus, it is much too long (300+ pages) if the goal is just to be funny.
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