With most Big Finish stories — and stories in general — I can explain relatively easily why something doesn’t work for me, where something went wrong. I can’t do so with this one. I really rather heavily didn’t enjoy it, but I also struggle to find the words to articulate precisely why I felt so actively disconnected from the material. It’s just simply a clunker of an episode, and I really don’t know what else to say about it. I will attempt to do so real quick, but let it be known that words fail me in describing why this one’s bad — it just simply is.

On paper, it’s essential. An interlude between both halves of “With the Angels,” Catastrophix has two distinct jobs: sort of write out Harry and Naomi and reintroduce Ray into the narrative. These are character based things, necessary for the narrative of With the Angels, and which are worth digressing from the main narrative in order to explore. The idea of positioning a story within a larger one is something that I don’t think Big Finish has done before, and I think this is a worthy time to do it.

The trouble is that Catastrophix seems uniquely uninterested in doing anything character-based, and is instead of a slower character piece, a fast-paced (bordering on the difficult to follow) hyper-active story involving the Doctor bouncing between time periods with Harry, Naomi and Ray, on the tail of disaster profiteers who have foreseen the end of the world thanks to the time shenanigans and wish to profit off of elite doomsday preppers. Catastrophix has nearly nothing in common with it, but it reminds me most of Survivors of the Flux, an episode that’s constantly rushing off to do a billion other things that have vague purposes rather than sit with our characters and how they feel for a moment.

Now that will probably begin to sound like a coherent critique that I have constructed, but frankly, I still don’t feel it quite accurately summarizes how alien and strange Catastrophix is as an episode. The episode still has character scenes. None of the dialogue in it is actually bad. The characterization is on the money — There’s never a moment where you pause and go “no, no, that’s not how you write ______!” None of the ideas are necessarily completely terrible either. The performances are all good enough — Sara Griffiths especially shines after years away from the role in ways that Big Finish returnees after a long absence don’t always do. And yet, despite all it’s actually decent qualities, of which there are many, Catastrophix fails consistently to make me care about anything that is happening, which is bizarre, especially considering how enraptured I was by “With the Angels Part One.” Catastrophix is just simply not good. And I wish to god that I could articulate exactly why.