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| What: | The Mahogany Murderers (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 5 October 2021 |
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| Rating: |   8 |
As Big Finish have gone along with the Companion Chronicles, they have gotten more experimental with the format. In this case, we get two characters telling each other fundamentally the same story, as their exploits converge about halfway through. Henry Gordon Jago and George Litefoot have teamed up again to solve the peculiar case of the resurrected criminals made from wood. Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter fall right back into their roles from thirty years before. They work extraordinarily well together. The story itself suits the Victorian setting. It's a fun ride.
| What: | Independence Day (BBC Past Doctor novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 3 October 2021 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Peter Darvill-Evans' "Independence Day" is a bit of a mishmash of multiple elements that do not quite come together. The plot is basically rescue the princess from the tower, done twice. The setting is the twin planet system of Mendeb Two and Mendeb Three. The novel has a little vignette opening with Doctor Two and Jamie in which Jamie takes a communicator component from a ruin as a kind of souvenir, and The Doctor does not really recognize its significance. When the main plot starts, it is now The Doctor several regenerations later with Ace, who discovers the old communication device and sets it up as a kind of objet d'art in her room. The Doctor recognizes the object, this time realizes its significance, and heads off to Mendeb Two to return said object. However, this becomes the excuse for yet another blame The Doctor. The situation is not quite what The Doctor has expected. The two planets, both with Earth colonists from centuries before, have devolved into lower level societies. On Mendeb Two, you get fisher folk and farmers at a medieval level who have no clue that there is another civilized planet nearby. On Mendeb Three, you get a mixed up society of medieval political structures, 18th-century military styles, and 20th to 21st century technology being reintroduced. This is all thanks to two aristocrat scientists, the impossibly perfect in every way pair of Kedin Asher and Tevana Roslod. These two have sold their technological rediscoveries of the former Earth colonists to a local warlord, Vethran, who uses it to make himself king of the planet. To ensure Kedin's cooperation, and because he has the hots for her, he takes Tevana captive. Using the new technology, he has his armies invade Mendeb Two to steal the population, give them a drug to make them docile, and then turn them into slaves. Along come Ace and The Doctor. Ace apparently cannot control her sex drive and falls instantly for Kedin, who apparently looks quite a bit like Richard E. Grant. Kedin extracts information from her, uses a modified form of the slavery drug on her, and sells her into slavery. But that's ok. He's good looking and impossibly perfect in every way, and so late in the novel when she comes to her senses she forgives him and wants to become his new consort. Go figure. Kedin has been secretly plotting to overthrow the evil Vethran, not so much because Vethran is evil, but because he wants to get back Tevana. But they are both impossibly perfect in every way, and so that is ok. The plot splits The Doctor and Ace for almost the whole book. So, while Ace is enslaved to advance Kedin's plans of rescuing his princess, The Doctor unwittingly becomes a kind of Spartacus to the enslaved people of Mendeb Two so that he can rescue Ace, his princess so to speak. The novel has quite a bit of political scheming, and seems to be a means of getting medieval politics joined with high technology. It reads more like a historical than a science fiction story on alien worlds. Darvill-Evans keeps the plot going apace. There is plenty of action and subterfuge. It's entertaining enough, even if the various different kinds of story do not fully gel.
| What: | Horror of Glam Rock (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 20 September 2021 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
Here is another example of Paul Magrs love of kitsch, and his usual method of getting in as many cultural references as he can despite their making any sense in terms of plot. Doctor 8 and Lucie arrive in England, north of London, in 1974, the closest The Doctor can get to getting her home. They step into a diner under siege because one the performers in a glam rock band is in contact with aliens through his stylophone. Plus, Lucie meets her Aunt Pat before Lucie is even born and spills the beans about time travel and all that. If kitsch and nostalgia are what one wants in Doctor Who, then this is the story.
| What: | Prime Time (BBC Past Doctor novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 15 September 2021 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
BBC effects designer, Doctor Who fan, and frequent co-author with Robert Perry of Doctor 7 fiction Mike Tucker goes solo this time. He lets his inner fan run rampant in "Prime Time," a novel that seems mainly to be a vehicle for him to let out his anger at the BBC for cancelling Doctor Who. Doctor 7 pursues a mysterious "signal" to planet Blinni-Gaar, a once agrarian society now completely enthralled to the massive television corporation Channel 400, run by the slick, merciless, tasteless, and generally odious Vogol Lukos (sounds just a bit too much like a James Bond villain name?). Lukos has one interest only, to capture the attention of the entire galaxy through his programming, and so programs only the lowest grade forms of "entertainment," which have already mesmerized the entire population of Blinni-Gaar into bland capitulation to endless TV wherever they go. Now, Lukos has made some kind of arrangement to fulfill his dreams by using The Doctor as his newest star attraction, without The Doctor even knowing it. The novel is another entry in the wink and nod to as many Doctor Who references as you possibly can kind of story. Everyone in the universe, apparently, knows who The Doctor is, the Time Lords, the TARDIS, and the whole of all of Doctor Who. This sort of thing changes The Doctor from "just a traveler," which is what he should be, to "world-famous crime fighter" of the kind in 1930s movies and comics made for boys. The resolution of the plot rests on magic again. Can one really create a fully functioning clone copy down the clothes in just a couple of hours? The novel is not irredeemable. Tucker paces the story well, with plenty of exciting and desperate actions to keep it going. He ties up the story well, so that there are no obvious loose ends. Still, it is just too much in the Pip and Jane Baker variety of Doctor Who for me find it enjoyable.
| What: | Doom Coalition 2 (Doom Coalition audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 7 September 2021 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
The second Doom Coalition collection is not exactly a full follow-up to Doom Coalition 1. It feels more like an independent adventure. These box sets are necessarily set up so that there is a central plot, but each story is a self-contained incident. Thus, they end up following the quest formula, thus limiting the narrative potential. This time, we get introduced to a new Time Lord villain, eventually to become The Sonomancer. We also get an injection of River Song, who, of course, cannot actually meet the Doctor because it is too soon. This is always problematic to me because River Song inevitably gets overly written as so competent and so smart that necessarily The Doctor looks like an idiot. Also, The Eleven is back for the final episode, but is totally wasted here. All he gets to do is bully Liv a bit. The stories have some genuine interest and pace, and would probably be better if each were wholly independent.
| What: | Blood of the Daleks: Part 2 (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 7 September 2021 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The new radio series for Doctor Who now fully brings in the Daleks. The new companion, Lucie Miller, spends most of the story trying to get away from The Doctor, and he is only too happy to let her go, if he can. The solution to the problem at the end is a bit naff. Daleks defeated by dumping trash on them? I have said elsewhere that radio drama is probably not the best fit for Steve Lyons, whose talents as a writer are much better suited to novels.
| What: | Blood of the Daleks: Part 1 (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 7 September 2021 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
A new radio series for Doctor Who has to start with the promise of the show's top audience draw. Hence, Blood of the Daleks. We get introduced to a new companion, the brash northerner Lucie Miller. She has been foisted on The Doctor and from the start neither likes the other. The contention between them helps drive the story. This is, otherwise, a serviceable but not wholly original Dalek story with many features from previous Dalek stories, but that is really a matter for Part 2. The Daleks appear only late in Part 1.
The first of a new series sees all new actors (sort of) stepping into the roles of the original 1963 TARDIS team. The box set has two 4-part stories written and produced to seem as if they would fit right into the first season of Doctor Who. The Destination Wars is an outer space adventure about a colony world in trouble as tensions rise between the colonists and natives. At the heart of it is the mysterious benefactor, The Inventor. It's an excellent thought experiment in a what if a certain foe of The Doctor's were introduced earlier in the series? The second story, The Great White Hurricane, is a pure historical that has exactly the right feel for 1964 Doctor Who. The TARDIS team get split for almost the duration, each dealing with the historical problem, in this case a massive blizzard that blitzed the US eastern seaboard in 1913. Both stories look at their situations through the moral lenses of Doctor Who at the time. The second story has a few dodgy accents. The new actors play their parts well. Huge credit goes to Big Finish for not making them try to impersonate the original actors. David Bradley is outstanding as Doctor One, conveying the same mannerisms as Hartnell without trying to sound like Hartnell. It's a very entertaining addition to the Big Finish version of Doctor Who.
| What: | The Girl Who Never Was (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 23 August 2021 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
For her sendoff from Doctor 8 world, Charlotte Pollard, Edwardian Adventuress, gets a much better vehicle than C'rizz did in the previous episode. Given Charley's backstory, it had to be a time-twister. This one involves a mysterious vessel from 1942 off the coast of Singapore, a dodgy Australian scavenger named Something Byron or Byron Something, and The Doctor and Charley getting split apart in time, each time zone affecting the other. It's a nice little puzzle of a story with the return of surprise villains, as long as one doesn't take a good look at the cover art. The ending seems to me too convenient. It's another memory erasure thing, which I think gets overworked in Doctor Who. Still, this is a quite entertaining 90 minutes.
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 | Different Sort of Two-Hander |
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The Prisoner's Dilemma has an interesting structure unlike other Companion Chronicles stories. Here, narrating duties get traded off between Zara, from the Key 2 Time series with Doctor 5, and Ace. However, they also get some interactive dialogue. Zara narrates Part 1, while Ace narrates most of Part 2. This is the origin story, more or less, for Zara, so here she does not even have a name. Ace finds herself in prison with Zara, whom she knows nothing about. However, they have been interacting with the same dodgy character, Harmonious 14 Zink, each without the other knowing. It's an interesting enough story, with long segments in which the two narrators reflect on the meaning of their existence.
| What: | Absolution (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 23 August 2021 |
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| Rating: | 4 |
We always knew that C'rizz story had to end badly. Just how badly is another matter. What I mean is that he was given a really bad story for his exit. Of course, it all has to do with his impulse to "save" people by killing them so that they can then live on in his memories. Now, someone from across the universe has latched onto him and pulled him and the TARDIS there so that C'rizz can fulfill his destiny. It's all a confused muddle. Most of the story works by magic. Late in, there is some attempt at a kind of scientific explanation, but not much of one and it gets abandoned for more magic. Just how does Aboresh know anything about C'rizz, locked away as he is in his hell-dimension? C'rizz is from another universe. Our universe is big enough that there is just no way. The whole roaring armageddon like battle at the end comes down to a family squabble. So many things just do not make sense about this story it is hard to pin it down without giving away too much of the plot. Suffice it to say that whatever one thinks about C'rizz as a character and companion, he deserved a better sendoff than this.
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| Another Holiday Goes Wrong |
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| What: | One Mile Down (Tenth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 22 August 2021 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
"One Mile Down" fits well into the middle of the Donna season. Here, The Doctor and Donna are very palsy, with Donna constantly taking the mickey out of The Doctor. The story is also rather obvious in its political messaging. The pair go to visit an underwater city, once a great wonder, but now turned into a chintzy tourist attraction by a corporation operating as a quasi-official branch of the government. The local economy is depressed, totally dependent upon tourism. Someone, however, is sabotaging the systems, causing leaks in the shielding protecting the system. It's only a matter of time before things get out of hand. Like much of Davies-era DW, it's brisk, entertaining, and only a little preachy.
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| Standard Doctor Who in Gory Detail |
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| What: | Storm Harvest (BBC Past Doctor novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 22 August 2021 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
After the experimental "Matrix," Perry & Tucker return to more normal Doctor Who territory with "Storm Harvest." Doctor 7 and Ace go on holiday to beach resort planet Coralee. What could go wrong? Well, apparently there was once an ancient civilization there that built a nearly indestructible bio-weapon called the Krill. No, not the tiny shrimp-things that whales eat. This Krill are individual mechanisms of pure destruction that cannot be reasoned with. It turns out that a race of rugby-player sized humanoids called the Cythosi have somehow learned about these Krill and want to reactivate them to use in their own war. The first two parts of the novel are the exploration parts, where The Doctor and Ace gradually uncover what is going on. The second two parts are the bloody denouement. It becomes one big gore fest driven by not one, not two, but three mad men (well one a Cythosi, one a dolphin, and one a Cythosi who thinks he's human, or sometimes not), each of whom want more or less total destruction of everyone else. I have some quibbles with some of the basic science that Perry and Tucker really ought to have known about, such as that nuclear reactors do not blow up, and probably in the far future, if they are still using nuclear reactors by then, the likelihood of blowing up would be next to 0. Another is that objects travelling in space do not arc. The novel has a number of interesting bits, and goes a long way toward straightening out the relationship between Doctor 7 and Ace. Still, the ending is too frantic, too desperate.
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| A wonderful return to form from Chris! |
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This boxset is a pretty wonderful return of the 9th Doctor. 3 connected stories to bring back 9. All 3 stories are really good, with Food Fight being the best of the set!
| What: | Solitaire (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 9 August 2021 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
This audio differs from most other Companion Chronicles stories in being a 2-hander drama rather than a narrated story. Charlie finds herself in a toyshop, but cannot remember who she is, why she is there, and what she is meant to do. The Toymaker runs the shop. She must play his game, but she does not know the rules or the objective of the game. It's as if Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett were writing Doctor Who. The interaction between India Fisher and David Bailie works very well. Some of the dialogue gets repetitious, and Charley seems far too clever at points. However, overall this audio is very good.
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| Might Have Better as Full Cast Audio |
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This story is a typical Companion Chronicles endeavor. The companion is narrating the story, there is one other voice actor, and the story's focus is squarely on the companion, with The Doctor pretty much out of the picture for most the duration. Interestingly, this one manages to have a good reason, revealed at the end, for both the companion as narrator and the presence of the other voice, one integral to the story and not merely down to a visitor from the outside. Eddie Robson has not done so well in providing reasons for The Doctor being largely missing. For some reason, he is negotiating a conference trying to avert a war, a bit obviously active for The Doctor, and so cannot devote any attention to whatever is going on with Bennie. She is there for an archaeological conference, when she hears about a "forbidden language," and so just has to stick her nose in and make it unforbidden. The plot has too many moments where something happens merely because the writer needs it to happen. It's a nice little jaunt for the Doctor 7 & Bennie pairing.
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| Interesting Morality Play |
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| What: | Memories of a Tyrant (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 9 August 2021 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
"Memories of a Tyrant" concerns this question: How should we act about political atrocities when they have become only memories and historical records? The story goes at this question in a sideways fashion, being part whodunit and part spy thriller. The story is that Doctor 6 and Peri have been summoned to a space facility for research into how to recover and restore true memories. This facility is now down to a skeleton staff and on lockdown because the researchers are now working on only one subject, an old man who may or may not be a former political tyrant who destroyed whole planets for reasons unknown. Various factions and interests outside the facility are keen to know for certain who he his, not to get to the "truth," but to use the information for their own political and/or personal benefit. It's an interesting premise. Peri in this story is especially well written - loyal, honest, determined, and cleverer than she thinks she is. A couple of things keep this story from being really outstanding. One is the necessity of keeping it to a small cast. This limits the scale on which events can occur and creates some improbable events. Another is that the whodunit plot sidetracks the main story at several points. Still, this is a generally satisfying story.
| What: | Matrix (BBC Past Doctor novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 9 August 2021 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
Everything about "Matrix" is "not quite." The story, such as it is, follows what happens when some mysterious magician type uses the TARDIS telepathic circuit to take over The Doctor's mind and turn him into a savage murderer. The magician uses something like golems, but mainly just to chase people and destroy things. Eventually, the magician gets The Doctor to land the TARDIS in late 19th-century London, and to turn him into Jack the Ripper. The magician also tries to get Ace to become the Cheetah person lurking around in her mind. Out of desperation, The Doctor removes the telepathic circuit from the TARDIS, throws most of his consciousness into it, then hurls it into the Thames before running off not knowing who he is. Oh, and somehow The Doctor is partly saved by The Wandering Jew. There are plenty of other bits to this, including an abused mentally retarded young man, a circus run by a criminal mastermind, and a harsh, unforgiving vicar. These elements do not quite come together. One of the key problems is that for over 100 pages the story keeps ticking along without providing any clues as to what is driving all this, who the evil magician is, why The Doctor is in such a terrified frenzy about it all, and so on. Things happen, but no information emerges from them. The ending is a big show down in which The Doctor does something, we are never told quite what he does, to resolve the situation. And what about The Wandering Jew? Why is this character even in this story? I think that, for this novel, Perry and Tucker had an idea of what they wanted to happen at the end, but not a clear sense of how they were going to get there.
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| Sequel Not As Good As Original |
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That Johnny Byrne had submitted a sequel to his famous "The Keeper of Traken" script was well known. I think the reason it did not get made for TV, which would have been in the Davison period, was that John Nathan-Turner deemed it too expensive and difficult to produce. The Big Finish people managed to get a hold of two synopses of the story that Johnny Byrne wrote. Byrne died in 2008, and for some reason a copy of the full script was not available. The duty of turning these synopses into an audio story was given to Jonathan Morris, who does a serviceable job. There is a bit more humor in the final version than probably would have been in the original. Big Finish assigned the story to Colin Baker's Doctor, and Morris does well in giving Baker's Doctor a more confrontational attitude toward authority than we would likely have seen with Davison's Doctor. Ultimately, the story itself is mainly "The Mummy" set on another planet. There are a few remnants of "The Keeper of Traken," such as a ruling elite that "begs conference" with a computer system that maintains a protective shield of peace and harmony. The Melkur are back, several of them, and this time as themselves rather than The Master pretending to be one. My main complaint is the repetitious insistence that the Melkur and their leader, Malador, are sooooooo evil. They are pure, all-pervading evil. What does that actually mean? And is it convincing if, in the end, Malador is just another would-be galactic dictator who enjoys hurting people? The production of the story is very good, keeping intact the feel and sounds of mid-1980s Doctor Who.
| What: | Ringpullworld (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 26 July 2021 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
One of the more interesting Paul Magrs scripts. This one still has some of his usual bits of pointless whimsy, such as a universe in a can of beans, and indulgent use of his favorite word - benighted. Still, these do not interrupt the story too much. Since Magrs really likes the act of narration, the Companion Chronicles format works well here. The story gets relayed through dialogue and trading of narration between Turlough and Huxley, a being from a race of "novelizers" who latch onto people and then tell those people's stories. This idea allows Magrs to sneak in some philosophizing about the nature of narrative and the need for storytelling. Mark Strickson is also an excellent narrator. Some people might be put off by an ending without resolution, though ending this story in that way makes some degree of sense.
