FIVE MINUTE REVIEW

I'm trundling through the First Doctor's era right now in a foolhardy attempt to comprise a timeline, and that trundle led me straight to Frostfire, released in 2007 for the Big Finish Companion Chronicles range. A couple of pleasant firsts here; the first audio set in the First Doctor era, the first Companion Chronicle in the series, and the first time we get the wonderful Maureen O'Brien back as Vicki Pallister.

She's the strongest thing in this audio, for my money. She has a great lilting voice and she's able to convey the pretty broad range of emotions that the script calls from her, as well as managing to give subtle differences to the Vicki of the past and the Lady Cressida of the present. Speaking of that script, Marc Platt of Lungbarrow fame puts in a decently respectable piece of work here. The Frost Fair isn't exactly breaking the mould in terms of locations, but it's an evocative setting that you could easily imagine 1st/Vicki/Steven finding themselves in, and he nicely ties the weather into the story itself. The chilly atmosphere is palpable. The Doctor, Steven and Vicki end up at the Frost Fair, where tucked away in a stall full of curios from far-off lands is a strange alien egg, the chick growing within slowly sapping all of the heat from the city of London so that it can hatch.

Jane Austen is there too, but she's a little bit too much of an historical stunt-cast for me to care that much; despite Vicki's assertions that she's full of surprises, she's really sort of just there as "formidable older woman" and apart from a couple of jokes at the expense of Vicki and Steven (who we are briefly made to think might end up having a dalliance) there's not much you could pin down about her that makes her Jane Austen specifically. While a fun diversion, it felt superfluous.

Unsurprisingly in a series called The Companion Chronicles, Bashin' Billy Hartnell takes a bit of a back seat in this one - Maureen's rendition of him is good enough, but he's not really the central point of the story. When he is spotlighted though, the script captures the compassionate and grandfatherly attitude that started to emerge from One at this point in his life, and there's a lovely high point where he takes to the dance floor with Miss Austen that you can absolutely imagine happening on-screen.

The framing structure is weird to start with, although once you realize that we've been building up to a clever little bootstrap paradox at the end, you can't help but give Marc Platt the sort of nod you give a bloke in a pub who's just bamboozled you with a magic trick that you didn't necessarily want to see in the first place. Tangentially, this also clearly starts the tradition of Companion Chronicles stories giving us some quite bleak insight into what happens to The Doctor's companions when he leaves them. Here, it's clear that there is damage and trauma that Vicki, now Lady Cressida, is having to work through, being left behind in a world that was so far away from her own, and now only with the tiny embers of an alien phoenix who hates her to keep her company. In this way, Companion Chronicles expands on the world of Doctor Who in a way that a lot of main-line stories simply cannot. Whilst also telling a short story, we often get very realistic looks into what happens after.

I wasn't blown away. It's a sort of humdrum story, told well in two parts. It isn't making any fundamental changes, and it also isn't technically knocking anything out of the park, but for what it represents? A willingness to look past The Doctor, especially in the Classic Era where 1 and 2 would so often turn up, break things, and piss off, Frostfire is a worthwhile character piece that gives us a glimpse into Vicki's life past the TARDIS, and in doing so gives Maureen O'Brien a chance to really let her vocal performance shine. The moments of yearning, regret, and fondness that she can convey with quite simple lines, changes of tone, and inflection connect you to the story in a way that it's material parts can't. It's a great opening to the range, and an even better return for (for my money, anyway), one of the First Doctor era's best, and perhaps most under-served companions.