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| What: | The Faceless Ones (BBC classic series DVDs/Blu-rays) |
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| By: | Aaron Evans, Canberra, Australia |
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| Date: | Wednesday 18 March 2020 |
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| Rating: |  10 |
As of when this was written, the site continues to state that episodes 1 and 3 will not be in animated versions. Even if the back cover blurb was released and the UK release has passed, this is completely offensive and incorrect. Still a good release however.
| What: | State of Change (Missing Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 13 March 2020 |
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| Rating: |  7 |
One of the earlier novels by Christopher Bulis, "State of Change" demonstrates what he does well and what he often fails to do. This is an alternate history sort of story, though the explanation for it is different from the standard explanation. It allows Bulis to create a kind of steampunk ancient Rome in which the children of Cleopatra rule as a triumvirate. The Roman setting allows for much political intrigue and back-stabbing (literally). Fortunately, Bulis does not play up the decadence theme too hard. Bulis' approach from the Doctor's perspective is really to limit this to a simple problem for the Doctor - getting the TARDIS functioning again. All the complications from the Doctor's perspective principally devolve from that primary problem. As with many of the early Virgin novels, there are a few too many elements thrown in for the fans. For instance, Peri spends most of the novel as a bird superwoman, having regressed to the point in her history when she was almost turned into a bird-woman on Varos. This allows Bulis to retrofit a stronger and more confident Peri of the kind that fans were calling for. Kudos to Bulis for sticking to this plotline no matter how absurd it is. Another is the choice of cause for all this, which involves the return of an oldish villain. There was really no need to make this person the cause, which is fully apparent in that the person has very little actual presence in the story. It really could have been anyone. Bulis keeps the plot running apace, making this a swift read. One real problem is that it has an "all chaos breaks loose" ending with multiple factions battling each other - guns, swords, soldiers, gladiators (and gladiatrixes), biplanes, dirigibles, animals, and common folk all going at each other. In summary: "State of Change" is a brisk and entertaining read with a few too many fan-winks and a somewhat chaotic climax.
I have a feeling that The War Master second set is going to divide listeners. It is tough to assess. Instead of four independent but loosely connected stories, this set is one story divided into four chapters, almost an audio novel. The Time War is a distant background, and all the story takes place around the colony world of Callous. The colony is centered around a mine, operated by the colony founder, Elliot King. They are supposed to be mining a substance called sueño (that's Spanish for "dream" if you don't get it). This substance is in high demand, although it is not really explained why, but almost impossible to mine because it has telepathic properties that drive people mad. Elliot King struggles to get anything out of the mine, suffering setback after setback, while trying to fend off greedy governor Teremon, who runs a worldwide protection racket and demands ever-increasing fees. Plus, Elliot is constantly pestered by a strange ood with an old-fashioned phone who keeps telling him that there is a call for him. After Elliot's death, his estranged daughter Sarah, and her wife, space pilot Martine, take over and try to make the mine a going entity. They suffer many of the same problems that Elliot had, but are eventually seemingly rescued by a kindly if peculiar old man named Orman (get it, ore man?). But, once Sarah has her lucky strike, things go downhill in a hurry.
One can see that almost none of the focus is on The Master. Whatever his plan is, it is slow to develop, taking over ten years to happen. He is very much in the background for this, hardly appearing at all in parts 1 and 3, and only really significant in about half of part 4. The focus is really on the colony and the Kings. There is very little adventure or danger and most the conflict is person against person. The soundtrack music emphasizes this aspect by being mostly low-key piano rather than big orchestration.
All this leaves a listener with a puzzle. On the one hand, the story is very well executed and sticks to a consistent tone right down to the bitter end (and it is very bitter indeed). On the other hand, it does not really need The Master in the plot, which is shown by the fact that he is in less than half of the whole thing. So, someone expecting a Master story may be right to feel a bit disappointed when The Master of Callous isn't really much of a Master story. I am giving the benefit of charity on the side of the production, which is very well written and well acted.
| What: | Infamy of the Zaross (Tenth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 24 February 2020 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
Doctor 10, Rose, and Jackie are back fighting another alien invasion of Earth, except this one just does not seem quite right. The story is quite funny in the first half, then turns to more serious when the real threat emerges. It manages to be critical of television without being too critical of Doctor Who.
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 | Big Finish Celebrates Itself |
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| What: | The Legacy of Time (Miscellaneous audio dramas) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 24 February 2020 |
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| Rating: | 8 |
This big production is for celebrating 20 years of Big Finish. It brings together all the Big Finish Doctors, those currently living and three voiced by actors other than the original. It has six individual stories, each with a different Doctor, plus guest performances from various Big Finish creations, such as Counter Measures. There is a story arc through them all, but all can be heard without reference to each other, and the story arc really does not become important until disc 5. It begins with Doctor 8 plus River Song and Benny Summerfield in Lies in Ruins. This Doctor 8 is the war-weary Doctor, sad, introverted, nearly ready for his transformation into the War Doctor. The story itself has the two archaeologists have a sort of who has the bigger trowel face off. It also goes for the contemporary Doctor Who trope of the female adventurer (two in this case) who is just so much better and smarter than that bumbling idiot The Doctor. It does have something of a surprise payoff late in the story. Next is The Split Infinitive. Here, Doctor 7 and Ace join up with Counter Measures again in a rollicking adventure involving split timelines and getting them to converge. It's quite fun. The third story is The Sacrifice of Jo Grant. This is my favorite of the six. Here, we have Jo Jones, back consulting for UNIT and working with Kate Lethbridge and Osgood. Jo gets a message from the past - she died in the 1970s saving the world. The resolution of the seeming contradiction involves time distortions, of course, and Doctor 3 confronting sensibilities of the 2000s. Next is the weakest of the six, Relative Time, featuring the Doctor's daughter, Jennie (played by Doctor's daughter Georgia Tenant) meeting Doctor 5 (played by Doctor's daughter's father Peter Davison). The story seems made mostly to get these two together. We get the return of clever woman/stupid Doctor, this time boosted to 11, plus a meeting with the split personality Time Lord, introduced as The Eleven with Doctor 8, but here reduced to The Nine. It has the kind of "none of it really happened" and "you won't remember it" ending that is too convenient. Doctor 6 goes next in The Avenues of Possibility. Here, Doctor 6 travels with Charlie Pollard and they meet once again the intrepid D.I. Menzies. This one was originally intended to involve Jago and Litefoot, but Trevor Baxter's death required a quick rewrite involving novelist and early creator of the idea of a police force Henry Fielding and his brother John. The story is standard "we have to shut off one time line to preserve the real one" writing. Last is Collision Course, another clever converging Time Lines story with Romana and Leela both remembering travelling to the same planet with Doctor 4 at different times, although maybe they weren't, or maybe it didn't happen. The ending is a truly Big Finish, getting Doctors 1-8, plus 10, to put everything right. The through line in all this is a plot by The Sirens of Time, thus taking this set of stories back to the Big Finish story that started it all. The whole thing is a real treat for fans of Big Finish.
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| Better Than the Radio Version |
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| What: | Slipback (Miscellaneous novelisations) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 22 February 2020 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
Eric Saward's novelization of his radio script for Doctor 6 and Peri corrects many of the problems in the radio version, but adds a few new ones. The original is almost universally regarded as awful, mainly because it seemed to be written entirely as a sendup without any regard for story sense. Here, Saward uses the opportunity of exposition inherent in the novel format to fill in many gaps. Saward's exposition style, as shown in his other novelizations, can best be described as imitation Douglas Adams. Sometimes it works. There are some genuinely funny passages. Sometimes it doesn't. On the whole, it makes the novel a more enjoyable read than the radio version is a listen. Still, there is not much here that makes sense in terms of unified plot. It has various characters, but their motivations and presence in the story do not match up with each other. For instance, the character of Shellingborne Grant, who would seemingly connect all the various pieces, being the only character to interact with all the other major characters, does not bring together the various plot elements. That he is an art thief serves only to justify the presence of the two policemen, who themselves do not interact with either the captain or the computer, and thus have no relationship to the central problem of the plot. Similarly, large plot holes are left unfilled. How does the computer know a) what a Time Lord is, b) where one can be found, and c) how to project its thoughts into the mind of Time Lord inside a TARDIS mid-flight? Not one of these questions is answered in either version. A problem unique to Saward's novel version is that the brief on the Target novelizations was to be brief. Therefore, Saward gets about 3/4 of the way through the plot of the radio version and realized that he has just about reached the word limit Target specified, and so in the last 15 pages he condenses large amounts of dialog and plot into clumsy 2-3 sentence exposition. In sum, the novel is more entertaining than the original, funny in places, but ultimately unsatisfying.
| What: | Engines of War (BBC prestige novels) |
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| By: | The Keeper of Traken, Canberra , Australia |
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| Date: | Wednesday 12 February 2020 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
This is a great book, that had me riveted throughout. George Mann does a fantastic job of writing the War Doctor, you can hear John Hurt speaking as you read it. It’s fast paced, with good references to both of and new Who. An utterly fantastic book, which can’t be put down.
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| Ends One Series, Starts Another |
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| What: | The Resurrection of Mars (Eighth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 11 February 2020 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The various strands of this season of the 8th Doctor adventures come together in this story, which is also pretty much a "part two" of "Deimos." Much of this story is designed as a challenge to the Doctor's morality. In particular, the questions comes up about the value of life in raw terms - are all lives of equal worth? How many would one sacrifice if it meant saving many more? There are a few rabbits out of hats moments late in the story that subvert this line of thinking to some extent. Much of the technology has too many magical properties. Still, it is a solid adventure.
| What: | The Secret History (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 10 February 2020 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
This ends a trilogy that has been going backwards from the Doctor's perspective - Doc 7, then Doc 6, now Doc 5. In each case, he finds himself taken out of his normal time line and placed in an earlier time line with companions from his earlier self. Someone has been messing with The Doctor's History, but who, and why? (Part of the answer is in the Doctor 8 episode "Lucie Miller." Holy tie-ins, Batman). Here, we get Doctor 5 inserted into Doctor 1 time, in Italy and the late Roman Empire. The adventure takes us to Constantinople, where something strange is happening with Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora. It is nice to hear Vickie and Steven together again. Generally, it is a good but not overly ambitious ending to the trilogy.
| What: | Protect and Survive (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 10 February 2020 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
This story begins a trilogy, but that does not become fully apparent until part four. For the first three parts, it is an intriguing exercise with Ace and Hex separated from the Doctor and the TARDIS, and apparently trapped in a virtual reality prison. Thus, we get a very small cast for most of it, and plenty of discussion among characters. It appears that the Big Finish people have decided to amp up the whiny side of Hex, which I find a bit annoying. Another thing bringing the rating down for me is that this all has something to do with the "elder gods." The problem here is that there is no way to make such beings meaningful as characters. In this one, it amounts to some deep-voice shouting in the way that small children imagine really powerful bad guys to sound. It seems silly rather than powerful and scary. The first three episodes, though, are very good and the story is well worth listening to for those.
| What: | The Fourth Wall (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 4 February 2020 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The Fourth Wall is interesting, with many funny lines, and a heck of a lot of violence. Basically, a new hightech form of TV creates a "reality bubble" in which the story takes place. Within that bubble, events are "real," no matter how preposterously they have been scripted. New companion Flip gets unwittingly trapped in the bubble and Doctor 6 tries to get her out. There are some big surprise turns early in the story. I don't think that overall this one quite balances the humor with the killing, so that once the slaughter really begins, the humor often feels out of place or belittling. The Doctor also gets a little too preachy at the end. But, there are some cracking ideas and actors get great chances to go far over the top and at the same time make fun of that fact.
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| Season 18, a great season |
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| What: | The Collection: Season 18 (The Collection Blu-ray box sets) |
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| By: | Sofia Fox, Hale, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 2 February 2020 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
The Leisure Hive, an underrated story that's a great opener to the JNT era.
Meglos, a extraordinary story featuring the final appearance of Jacqueline Hill in Doctor Who. RIP
Full Circle, the opener to the E-Space trilogy is amazing
State of Decay, a great vampire story written by the amazing Terrance Dicks. RIP
Warriors' Gate, a great finale to the E-Space trilogy and the final appearance of Romana & K-9
The Keeper of Traken, a great story re-introducing the Master
Logopolis, a great send-off for Tom Baker
As always the extras on the Blu-ray seasons are superb!
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| Season 19, a really great season |
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| What: | The Collection: Season 19 (The Collection Blu-ray box sets) |
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| By: | Sofia Fox, Hale, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 2 February 2020 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
Castrovalva, a great opener for the Fifth Doctor
Four to Doomsday, a great story that is really underrated
Kinda, a great introduction to the Mara
The Visitation, a great story featuring the Terileptils
Black Orchid, a great murder mystery story
Earthshock, an amazing Cyberman story
Time-Flight, an underrated, flawed gem
The extras on this Blu-ray release are as great as the 1982 season.
| What: | Rose (New Target novelisations) |
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| By: | The Keeper of Traken, Canberra , Australia |
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| Date: | Wednesday 29 January 2020 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
This is the best of the new target books. With a great balance of the familiar story, and new pieces, Russell T Davies draws on the best of the old targets. This book is one of the all time best of the great range of target books.
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| Still Dedicated to Doctor 3 Style |
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The fourth of the Third Doctor Adventures box set takes a slightly new turn for this series in that it features two stories that fans would have liked to have seen but did not get the chance. It still follows the format of delivering stories that would easily have fit in the Pertwee era. It also follows the pattern in these new adventures of having one Earth-based and one space-based story. We start with the Earth-based story, "The Rise of the New Humans." It has The Doc and Jo investigating some strange occurrences with unusual deaths, and takes them to a private hospital in the country where experiments on creating superhumans are underway. We meet an old enemy, but not the one we are expecting. "The Tyrants of Logic" takes place on the dying planet of Burnt Salt (which presumably would have been filmed in a quarry), where the Cybermen, having lost their war with the Earth empire, have hatched a desperate plan to renew their numbers. As with the earlier Third Doctor Adventures, what makes this work is Tim Treloar's uncanny impersonation of Jon Pertwee and the great rapport he has with Katy Manning. I like the pacing of these stories, there is time for some character development and genuine dialogue, which is too often lost in the more frantically paced Big Finish productions for other Doctors and the new Who series.
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| Old Fashioned Master Story |
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| What: | The Evil One (Fourth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 27 January 2020 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
"The Evil One" places Doctor 4 in a Doctor 3 style story with the Master. In this one, The Master (Geoffrey Beevers) has a complicated (as usual) scheme for getting his revenge on the Doctor. This involves using telepathic powers to turn Leela against The Doctor. Some familiar actors from the Baker era are in this cast as well, Gareth Armstrong (Masque of Mandragora) and Michael Keating (The Sunmakers). It is an entertaining story.
| What: | The Collection: Season 26 (The Collection Blu-ray box sets) |
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| By: | Trevor Smith, Nottingham, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Sunday 26 January 2020 |
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| Rating: | 10 |
A fitting, fantastic final season of Who with four great stories. Looks beautiful in HD and some great new extras. Particularly enjoyed the making of documentary for Fenric.
| What: | Warzone / Conversion (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | Matthew David Rabjohns, Bridgend, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Monday 13 January 2020 |
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| Rating: | 9 |
WARZONE/CONVERSION
By Matt Rabjohns
Whilst Adric may not be many fans favourite companion to have ever graced the show, his death at the time in Earthshock was definitely a palpable moment and very moving moment in the history of the show. We had had deaths of companions before, with Katarina and Sara Kingdom in The Daleks Master Plan, but somehow Adric's death seems to be more vividly remembered.
The show at the time never dwelt much upon personal or emotional issues as much as they do in the modern era, so with Warzone/Conversion its very good to see Big Finish going into detail with how the Doctor and Nyssa and Tegan cope with the fallout of Earthshock. Do the writers succeed in delivering a memorable follow on to those shocking events? Well, the answer is yes in most respects.
Firstly the sound production and music are truly authentic to the 80s era of the show. Impeccably so. The bonus interviews are always fun to listen to too. Always great to hear insight right from the actors mouths.
Warzone and Conversion are written by two different writers (Chris Chapman and Guy Adams) but the stories are directly linked. It is always very annoying though that Big Finish may nor always use the monsters name in the titles, but they always have a picture of them on the front! This at once ruins any mystery the stories may have in my own view. However, if you can get past this annoyance and give the stories a chance they are rather superb overall.
Warzone begins with the TARDIS team, together with new companion Marc, landing in Warzone. A massive gaming race track full of life threatening obstacles in the best Doctor Who fashion of old. The story has very good pace and develops not quite as ludicrously quickly as most of the modern era show on telly does. The Doctor and his friends at once have to literally run for their lives and become embroiled in the race. And the Doctor soon discovers just what the race is for. The main plot thrust of this story may actually be one of the more simple given to a Big Finish story, but it is all the better for it. It gives the characters a firm background and the acting from all involved in this story is top notch and right on the nail. Two of the best actors in this first story are definitely Pepter Lunkuse as Esma. She interacts well with the Doctor over the course of the two episodes almost enough to make you think she has the potential to become a companion.
Timothy Blore as Morris works so well paired off with Nyssa. Its good to hear Nyssa being given such a good role within the story. And she seems to strike up a great friendship with Morris so its quite sad and jarring at the riveting climax to part two to have to break apart the bonds that were forming between both Nyssa and Morris and The Doctor and Esma. The warning the Doctor gives to Esma and Morris about being strong willed enough to resist becoming the Cybermen is a brilliant scene.
Amidst all of this Tegan is not forgotten. The chemistry between her and George Watkin's as Marc is wonderful to listen to. It is quite the fearsome and soul destroying ride that Marc is forced to suffer in this story, and it is only going to get worse in Conversion.
Peter Davison is absolutely on his best form within these two stories, but especially in Conversion.
I will get the only niggle I have with this story out of the way first. The characters of Herb and Creasey just seem a bit too caricatured and clichéd. Though Angela Bruce gives a brilliant performance as Herb the characters are just absolutely nothing new and seem to be rather grafted on to the story rather than written in. Your typical run of the mill space pirates who aren't given anything original to handle. Mind you if you love space pirates then these two girls banter can be very amusing. I'll give them that. But that is where my niggles end.
The rest of the story is extremely well written. It gives Peter Davison the chance to display a more angry and upset and therefore more rude and unknowable. Its always excellent when actors get to rise above their normal game with an exceptional script, and this script definitely gives Peter the chance to blow our socks off with his titanic performance.
And then the delicious treat of once more being able to hear David Banks and Mark Hardy reprise their 80's Cyber roles just steals the show. Here in this story the Cybermen are truly soulless and incredibly nasty with their plans. The prototype conversion they almost succeed in performing on Marc is harrowing and George Watkins copes sublimely well in being totally broken and at his wit's end amidst this horrendous experiment.
The emotional impact on all the main crew of the TARDIS is palpable at the stories climax leading to a very unexpected ending. Tegan is truly unsettled and unforgiving of the darker side the Doctor has displayed during this story's run. Even in spite of the fact that against all the odds the Doctor has done his utmost to help Marc return to being as much of a human being as he can. Guy's writing in these final scenes is riveting and heart-breaking for all the main TARDIS team.
Conversion is the kind of cyberman story we need to see appearing on the screen in the new modern era televised Doctor Who! To me the serials the modern era have churned out have all rather fallen short of the mark, in that I think they have forgotten the Cybermen aren't robots, they happen to be dehumanized cyborgs! David Banks and Mark Hardy truly work on this fact well in Conversion.
The CyberLeader even gets to have a jibe at the Doctor, whom he accuses of being a hypocrite. The Doctor is resistant to murder, yet he destroyed the Cyber Leader in Earthshock. The only thing to offer in the Doctor's defence is that situation was one of acute stress and even a Time Lord is not perfect every day of the universal year. But it does add a gritty edge and bring out a touch of the mystery of who the Doctor truly actually is once more. Vague little titbits like this are scary to hear. Its good to see Peter being given a more Seventh Persona role for once, after all, all the incarnations are still the same man.
Warzone/Conversion in summation then are two extremely well written stories on the whole. They are a truly stark and belting follow on from the sombre and sad events of Earthshock. I can only hope that Marc can somehow recover from his ordeal. Truly the impact of what the Cybermen can do to people if they get hold of them has never been quite so well portrayed before. This story even beats the Bill Potts conversion of Peter Capaldi's Cyber epic. I would strongly recommend this story as a worthwhile and dark follow on to Earthshock. As two two parters they work extremely well indeed. But be prepared to be stirred by the huge amount of emotional gravitas injected into these episodes.
Although maybe one other little oddity is that Warzone/Conversion does seem to have forgotten the events of the earlier Big Finish release The Boy That Time Forgot. That story led us to believe that Adric in fact did not die but was left at the beginnings of time and went a little insane. Perhaps this is just forgetfulness although it does make the story's timeline placement rather unfathomable from my perspective, as Nyssa and the Doctor in the Boy story were without Tegan, so that means the story had to be set between the TV stories Time Flight and Arc of Infinity, and then Tegan returned but somehow The Good Doc and Nyssa seem to have lost all memory of the events of the Boy that Time Forgot, so that's just a little strange. But its not a major quibble, and its not as if the show isn't constantly mucking around with its own history and time lines!
| What: | The Ultimate Evil (The Missing Episodes novelisations) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 2 January 2020 |
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| Rating: | 2 |
This novelization of a script from the scrapped second Colin Baker series fails in many ways. The major problem is that Wally K. Daly seems to think that Doctor Who was a children's show, and so he comes up with a children's show plot with children's show dialogue. The story of two continents on one planet that remain absolutely isolated from each other so as to prevent war might have worked had Daly created logically functioning societies. Instead, we get people who can teleport just by thinking about it, cartoony villains, and "rays" that turn people murderous, hypnotized, or fearful. The writing style for this novelization is likewise aimed squarely at the eight-year-olds.
| What: | Resurrection of the Daleks (BBC prestige novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 22 December 2019 |
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| Rating: | 5 |
It took decades to get Eric Saward's two controversial Dalek scripts novelized. With this one, it was not worth the wait. Saward's novelization of his own script is worse than the original. The TV serial was pacey and action-packed enough to cover some fairly gaping holes in the logic of the script. Saward's novelization lacks this pace, mainly through dumbed-down prose. It may be that Saward was given the brief that he had to make the novel acceptable for pre-teens. Saward's answer to this is primarily to use ham-fisted foreshadowing of the "little did he know that..." variety. He occasionally breaks out of the juvenile novel mode with some equally ham-fisted side bars in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Mode." Some of the positive aspects are some deepening of the characters, some explanations of their motivations. This is especially important in giving a rationale for Tegan's departure. The book is a very quick read.
