We come back to the Short Trips series for a story featuring quite possibly the most hated companion in all of Doctor Who, this being the boy from E-Space, Adric. During Tom Baker’s final year (and boy did he look like a guy who was tired of it all after seven years!) we got a trilogy in the middle of the season called the E-Space trilogy where the TARDIS crossed into another universe. There they meet and end up stuck with a stowaway named Adric. Played by Matthew Waterhouse, Adric very quickly established himself as one of the most unlikable companions in Doctor Who; he was clever and he knew it, he was arrogant, whiny, argumentative, rude, condescending and sometimes caused more trouble than he helped with. Fourteen years after killing off two companions in the same story, Adric became the third companion to die in Doctor Who, much to the delight of many fans! In fact, in the bonus features for the Earthshock DVD we get a clay animated parody showing him miraculously surviving only to die a much more horrible way a few seconds later!

Big Finish have been more honest and self-aware about Adric’s many many many flaws as a character, and they have done a fairly admirable job of giving him more likeable moments and traits. Don’t get me wrong, I still hate the little twerp, but he is more tolerable in the audios. Though I should give a heads up that out of all the companion actors to come back to play the roles, Matthew Waterhouse is one of a very few who’s voice is noticeably different after all the decades. I mean I don’t hold that against the guy, he was a teenager when he was on TV, you try and keep the same voice after all that time. But honestly in this audio in particular the old age in his voice does work perfectly.

Narrated by Waterhouse, the story features the Doctor, Adric and Romana, in their latest adventure in E-Space, land on the planet Veridis, a world where the dead don’t stay dead. But not in a zombie apocalypse sort of way, one of the scientists succeeded in creating a machine capable of bringing back the recently deceased. But of course, there’s a price to pay for finding the cure for death as now the population has grown to unsustainable levels and the planet is in total chaos with riots and fighting between the living and the resurrected. The Doctor and Romana have only one option to destroy the machine, but Adric will have to live with the consequences of what comes after.

I don’t want to give away too much, but this story throws a massive twist in at the halfway point and when I first listened to it caught me completely off guard and for a while I wondered how and when they’d resolve this. But as the story progressed it dawned on me that that’s not what the story’s about and that there was no resolution to what happened. I was completely floored by this story and what it pulls off being a break from continuity, being a great dive into Adric’s character and how he lives with himself day after day and even the ending. Of course, the story does throw in a little get-out clause, but the key here is that we don’t hear the payoff to this, it’s all left to the imagination with what happens after and it makes for a perfect cliff-hanger ending, not to mention a tragic ending given what the implications are for Adric and his loved ones. I’d say this is Matthew Waterhouse’s best work, both as an actor and for Adric himself, since Earthshock. Definitely worth recommending to all listeners!