The Early Adventures was created as a way of creating full length stories for the first two Doctors, a combination of full cast and narration, in a lot of ways mimicking the vibe of listening to one of the lost 60s episodes. The series begins with the original TARDIS crew landing on a flotilla of ships traversing an ocean world under siege from old enemies from Marinus itself, the Voord.

When I started listening to this story I thought I was going to be in for one of the longest experiences listening to an audio in my life, and not in a good way. The opening felt glacially slow, and part one was the shortest of the story with part four clocking in at 39 minutes, I looked at that runtime and just groaned, it just seemed like the story was taking an age to get going. It does thankfully pick up the pace a bit in the second half but it's still fairly boring in some areas. I give props for Big Finish and some of the expanded media for trying with the Voord as they've had quite a few appearances in the last several years, but they're just not that interesting a villains. We get some insight into how their race works and the significance of the masks they wear and I feel I should find this interesting, but I just don't care about the Voord, they just personify meh villains. I think this story pacing wise would've worked better as an hour long Companion Chronicles, it more or less operates in that format with the Doctor absent for most of the story. A detail I picked up when listening to The Early Adventures on top of the narration giving off the vibe of listening to a lost 60s episode, it also accurately reflects the 60s by having the main characters absent for whole episodes during the story, as back then the leads would often be written out for portions of the stories to allow the actors time on holiday.

This is overall a decent story, but it is brutally slow for the most part and the villains aren't interesting enough to keep me entertained.