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Reviews for Time Reef

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New side kick just like the old ones

By:writingbluebear, jersey
Date:Wednesday 29 October 2008
Rating:   7

Time Reef starts well and has a couple of good twists, with an originally setting building a picture of a dark place, cold, loss and a stranded doctor, perhaps its the end at last. However the new companion whilst good, there is something very familiar, almost adric/turlow dare i say but let's see where it leads. In the end a good story.



TIME...TIME...

By:Matthew David Rabjohns, Bridgend, United Kingdom
Date:Thursday 6 November 2008
Rating:   10

What i really like about thisstory is its really all about the TARDIS. Thomas Brewster has been a naughty boy and sold parts of it to a bunch of space pirates. What a great idea! Dr who is such a flexible storyboard, for any amount of different tales that can be told. and they are often great and different like this story. Well, another Marc Platt story is always welcome. Intelligently written and directed, and it all comes together. And the one episode special a perfect world is great. A real new tales of the unexpected type of story. With Thomas staying in modern london at the end of it all. That is quite annoying, John Pickard has been memorable even in the two and bit stories he's been in. The fifth doctor always attracts the weird companions doesnt he?

The ruhk is a good and different type of monster for once. I love the thought of Lady Vuyoki sitting in a jar all day long. This really is another story fit for tv, that should have been done in the old series. The big finish scene is still very strong indeed. And Marc Platt hasnt dried up by a long chalk.



Better than Expected

By:Doug, Pocono Summit, PA, USA
Date:Sunday 28 June 2009
Rating:   7

After Marc Platt's last two showings here, the confusing and forgettable Skull of Sobek, and the disasterously poor Valhalla, I was questioning whether Time Reef would be another disappointing story. Thankfully, with Time Reef, Platt is back near the top of his surrealistic game, at least in this listener's opinion. Here we have another really strange environment for the characters - a very improbable coral reef suspended in some kind of time bubble in the wastes of the vortex, or something..., upon which a ship and its crew have run aground, in a sense... Go with it and listen to what the production makes of it... you'll just have to judge for yourself. Along with the interesting rukh creature that's caught there as well, and Platt's favorite activity of putting the TARDIS interior through the ringer, this becomes one of those really trippy tales that only Marc Platt can craft.

The characters are fairly well-acted throughout, and the fact that this is a three-parter means, in this case, that it hasn't been inappropriately padded out. As far as the production goes, there needed to be much better volume leveling here. Maybe the limiter wasn't set properly in post this time... What this means for the non-technical is that if you want hear the whispers, you may be diving to yank down the volume a few seconds later.

The one-part A Perfect World, cowritten by Marc Platt with Jonathan Morris, is brief add-on that thankfully gets rid of Thomas Brewster - hurray! It's rather non-Whoish, or maybe feels more like an Eighth Doctor and Lucie story. It's actually a very sweet little piece, though I disagree with the moral of the story, which is that a perfect world would be a horrible thing, somehow. If we really *need* pain and struggle and hardship to make people nice and to make life joyful somehow, that's just further evidence to me of how fundamentally screwed up humans are.

"Interesting..."



Over the Top

By:David Layton, Los Angeles, United States
Date:Friday 17 July 2015
Rating:   6

The people at Big Finish really liked Thomas Brewster far more than I did. This attempt to rewrite the Adric character ended up not working well for me. He ended up being rather one-dimensional. "Time Reef" is really two stories, the three part story just mentioned, and another called "Perfect World." The first is by Marc Platt, the second by Jonathan Morris. "Time Reef" involves a space-ship of Greek heroes stranded on a growing reef of space coral created by a stolen part of the TARDIS, stolen, of course, by Brewster, pretending to be the Doctor in the bargain. A second ship is stranded, containing only a haughty and arrogant woman from a kind of space ancient Egypt civilization. There are space-time rooks as well. The whole concept is rather strained and does not really survive much thinking about. The Doctor has to battle two recalcitrant personalities, the stubborn hero-captain who has to have battle and sacrifices no matter what, and the cowardly Brewster who can say only, "I didn't do nuthin'" indicating full well that it is all his fault. There are some humorous lines. Nyssa comes out looking fairly self-sufficient. "Perfect World" is another playing with perceptions story in which Brewster has once again mucked things up, this time with good intentions, by sending a wish through a time fissure, all unknowingly, for a young woman he has met to have a better life. This call reaches some existential time-space plumbers to come "do the job," allowing the Doctor to make many stirring speeches about how life is better with all the mistakes in it. Like "Time Reef," it is mildly amusing.



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