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Reviews for Three's a Crowd

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Left me a little Cold blooded

By:Writingbluebear, England
Date:Monday 30 May 2005
Rating:   6

Three's a crowd, lacked something. A good spin on the modern world and our dependance upon technology making us solitary creatures. However this idea was milked to the point of madness. The pathetic cry's of a young girl facing people for the first time was very good to start with, however 60 minutes later it started to get on my nerves.

Overall not great but not terrible, just could have been better.



Not Enough Story

By:David Layton, Los Angeles, United States
Date:Sunday 18 June 2006
Rating:   5

This is a sort of Doctor Who take on E.M. Forster's classic story "The Machine Stops." In that story, technology had advanced so far that all people live in isolated rooms inside a kind of hive city, with all their needs supplied by "the machine." Colin Brake has taken the premise and moved it to a failing Earth-colony (shades of "Frontios"?), provided a human leader, the inexplicable Auntie, played by Deborah Watling, and focused on the phobic nature of such a hive life rather than on its sapping of human spirit and intelligence, which is what Forster focuses on. As a premise, this is fine all by itself. The problem is that it does not lend itself to Doctor Who very well. After all, what is the Doctor to do? He would simply arrive, tell everybody to overcome their fears, throw a spanner in the works, and leave. Two parts at most would cover this. So, in order to make it Doctor Who, Brake has provided a totally irrelevant second plot line, involving a species that uses humans for food and has a bunch of hatching eggs just ready to chow down on wimpy colonists. (A borrowing from "The Twin Dilemma"? You be the judge.) And these colonists are so wimpy, so whiny, so pathetic that one has to marvel at Peri's patience with them. Most people would have given up after about 15 minutes. This is another Big Finish audio that needed some major revision.



Take slow, deep breaths...

By:Doug, Pocono Summit, PA, USA
Date:Sunday 19 November 2006
Rating:   8

It often seems that reviewers here fail to take note of the audio format that these stories have been produced in. I must give Three's a Crowd an 8 partly because I found the sound design to be unusual, quite interesting and very well produced. Being set in space, the story lends itself to the use of an array of high-tech, futuristic sound effects, such as the excellent station computer voice, the "Butler" droid voice, and the sounds produced by the numerous transmat activations throughout the story, some of which Blake's 7 fans will recognize as being the same as the teleport sound in that series.

In addition to all of that, the incidental music is essentially absent, a nearly constant sort of looped, minimalistic, spooky ambient tone sound taking its place. Very atmospheric. This design lends itself very well to the stark storyline, which is played out in the rather dismal setting of the corridors of a spartan colony ship and a few confined habitation cells within it. Stuck in solitary lives in these habitation cells, a few of the colonists communicate online or by voice communication only, and they have "become shy" - to the point of becoming agoraphobic.

The revelation of the extent of this agoraphobia is fascinating to listen to, the most extreme case being that of Lucy Beresford's Bellip, whose repeated panic attacks unfortunately begin to grate on the listener as the story goes on.

Peter Davison is as great as ever in this production, though unfortunately his voice has gone a bit raspy again. Peri and Erimem work well here and don't get ridiculous, as has been the case a bit in some of their other recent outings.

Three's a Crowd actually fits in quite well with the mounting angst and dark pessimism that were trademarks of Eric Saward's Season 21 and which increasingly built up as the show headed toward the dramatic climax of The Caves of Androzani.

An engaging, sonically scintillating production that kept my attention througout.



The ark in space for Peter Davison

By:Matthew David Rabjohns, Bridgend, United Kingdom
Date:Saturday 5 April 2008
Rating:   9

This all feels so cramped and so coolly like the series of old. Its great to hear big finish wanting to keep some elements of the old series.
Lucy Beresford is what makes this story though. She is so brilliant as Bellip, what with all her lovely breathing and nice and easy to listen to voice. Deborah Watling is back too! Yippee! Nice to hear her again too. But im afraid its lucy who's the very best shining star in this story. This story is very interesting for its ideas too. A colony cut off and lost deep in space, with a space station, full of nasty alien eggs.
But i dont feel that the Kellians are overtly evil here though. Despite the fact they are eating people, they have to survive. Usually the doc just would get the aliens away from harming any more people, like he did with the Gravis in frontios, but here, no. He seems a bit rash here for my liking. But maybe the kellians are a bit set against anything else but eating the colonists i suppose. (i forgot actually that he does say a little something about getting them away, or asking them to leave the colonists in peace, never speak too soon!)
And i still really like the feel of this story. Harks back to the Ark In Space. The sound design is brilliant too.



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