Skip to content
TARDIS Guide

Review of Sabotage by Goibniu

3 February 2025

A great audio drama with one or two minor flaws.

The excellent story is a very serious one about a corporation, in their greed, destroying the environment, a village, and its people in the process. It's a story that made me feel helplessly outraged while listening more than once. So, it's no fun story, but in succeeding to engage me emotionally, it is a truly excellent story.

Shaheen Khan, Anant Varman, and Tom Hanson as the supporting cast did a superb job giving their characters life. And Sophie Aldred and Paul Clayton as Ace and Mr. Colchester were just brilliant.

The characterization of Dorothy 'Ace' McShane in this story is superb. What kind of person would Ace be a few decades after we saw her traveling with the Doctor? After building the charity "A Charitable Earth" and taking on responsibility as its founder and CEO? I would argue exactly what we get shown in this audio drama. Yeah, at her core, she still is the person that we knew. But she also is more. One of the best scenes in this regard - and without giving spoilers about the story - is when she takes care of the vaccination of some children. The character has grown quite a bit as a person over the decades, in a quite realistic way.

Mr. Colchester, on the other hand, shows some of his more nasty character traits. Very well done. And at the same time, one of my few complaints - at the end, his story thread is not consistently enough "not sympathetic person accomplishing something good." The end is not bad, but I feel it could have been so much better if there wasn't a half-baked excuse for his behavior at the end. It would have been better to just have him be Machiavellian through and through.

Another weak point of this excuse at the end was that it only works with him knowing something since the beginning of the story, but we saw him uncover it throughout the story. After a second listening, I'd say, yeah, it's possible that he knew all the time and still did what he did. But it would have been smoother to not go this route.

That's to some extent just nitpicking, and I am sure for some listeners the end just worked as well as the rest of the story. Your mileage may vary. For me, it knocked off half a point, and together with an obvious exposition dump by one of the characters in the middle of the story, it leads to a very good 4 out of 5 rating.


Goibniu

View profile