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This is one of the best 8th Doctor story. Excellent suspense throughout, using dialog rather than action to hold you, which comes across will. An excellent start to a key of time style punch of stories.
Rarely Charley and the doctor worked well together and the normal constant silly jokes and offhanded reactions was replaced with suspense and surprises.
Excellent.
| By: | Doug, New York |
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| Date: | Sunday 14 March 2004 |
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| Rating: |   8 |
You folks may think I'm very strange, but this story is remarkably spiritual to me. In the final two tracks of part 4 (and then retrospectively back), listen to it thinking of Doctor as "God"(/the One/the Tao/etc.), Charley as the individual (who is actually also the One, the Tao, etc.), and the creature as the ego/surface self/devil. Disregarding all of that, this is very inventive story anyway...
| By: | Matthew David Rabjohns, Bridgend, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Monday 26 November 2007 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
Robert Shearman has done it again. Produced one heck of a script for big finish, and with top notch direction this story is very different yet as scary as hell. Paul and India are all on their own for this story. This has more of a horror feel to it than pure sci fi. The spooky effects of something trying to communicate with them were particularly chilling. And i did literally jump out of my seat in a few occasions, see if you can guess which parts. Certainly i was expecting scherzo to be mind numbingly dull, but i was glad that it was nothing of the sort. Rob again gives us a great setting and great ideas welded into a classic doctor who. This is a great story for the introduction to the divergent set of eighth doctor audios...
| By: | Jake Johnson, America |
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| Date: | Monday 6 December 2010 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
Despite several shared themes and ideas amongst Robert Shearman's other works, Scherzo delivers an original, puzzling storyline about love, life, and music.
Highly recommended.
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 20 March 2020 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
This story introduces listeners to the Divergent Universe and sets the themes in place for the remaining series. It's a two-hander, just The Doctor and Charley. Here, they exist in a world of light so bright that they are constantly blinded (i.e. the beginning of the universe right after the Big Bang), and discover that matter is malleable as they merge into each other, and discover that they are inside some kind of grand scientific experiment with whoever is running it, distant and unreachable. Much of the focus is on the interaction between the two characters. The Doctor is bitter and angry that Charley followed him into the Divergent Universe. He just wants to be left alone to die and not have any responsibility for anyone. Charley keeps pleading, "But, Doctor, I love you." Gradually, the two come to a reconciliation, but only with the help of a sound creature that takes what they say and imitates it, growing in power and ability, moving from child to adult, and thus introducing the listener to the evolution theme that will carry through the rest of the series. This theme is echoed in the "food" that the Doctor and Charley are supplied with, bodies that are vaguely humanoid in shape, but get increasingly closer to human, as if they are experimental cast-offs, attempts to create the life being studied inside the glass tube crucible that The Doctor and Charley find themselves in. The story would work very well as a two-parter. Stretched to four parts, the story has much needless repetition in the dialogue, sort of like Doctor Who does Samuel Beckett. In general, it is a good introduction to the Crucible World of the remaining series.
