It’s 2002. We’re a long way from Christopher Eccleston and the leather jacket, and Doctor Who is still a niche interest science-fiction property consigned to novels and audiobooks. The TV Movie has happened, and everyone who saw it is desperately hoping it won’t Happen Again. It’s a dark time to be a Doctor Who fan. Perhaps. I’m not sure, I was only nine years old. Nobody in my life was a huge fan of the show, and so whatever was going on in that wide weird universe, it all went unnoticed by me, including the release of The Maltese Penguin.

Being nine years old at the time, I would only have been seven when the precursor to this story, Robert Shearman’s sublimely warped The Holy Terror shipped to an unsuspecting listening public and (I can only imagine) left everyone staring at their early 2000s combination sound systems agog, trying to wrap their heads around what they’d just heard. Seven is far too young to have money for CDs and fancy combination sound systems, you see. For that, I can only be grateful; I was a somewhat sensitive child, and I’m sure that story would have left me with anxious nightmares of floating murderer babies and cultish hierarchies for weeks.

The Maltese Penguin, though, released two years later and also by Shearman, would have been far more suited to my seven-to-nine-year-old tastes. I don’t mean this in any way as a flat criticism; I thoroughly enjoyed The Maltese Penguin, but it has to be acknowledged that this is a radical departure from Frobisher’s previous appearance and might have confused listeners coming in for more of the same. This is a straightforward send-up of pulp and noir fiction, exactly the sort of thing you imagine early-90s Patrick Stewart would absolutely have a blast in until the holodeck malfunctioned and tried to kill him.

There’s a corrupt cop, a mysterious beautiful woman that the script gets to luxuriate (read; perv) over and an indiscriminately violent crime boss, complete with slow talking lumbering sidekick. Anyone who has read a pulp noir novel, heck, anyone who’s ever seen any television show that ever ran long enough to parody the genre (and trust me, there’s a lot) will know what’s going on here. The only real diversions we take from the form are, of course, the elements that tie this into the Doctor Who universe.

So, what do we have to tie it in? Arguably, this could be taken as one of the first ever “Doctor-lite” episodes, that modern money-saving venture that’s given us such classics as Blink, 73 Yards, Dot And Bubble, and of course, Cyberwoman. Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor is barely in this, having but a few cameos at the beginning, midpoint, and end. His sheepish desire to have his friend Frobisher back is underplayed well by Colin, but it’s difficult to buy Frobisher’s desire not to come back, especially when we’re not really provided much context for why Frobisher would leave in the first place. There’s an argument to be made that this story slots into canon after The Holy Terror, but it appears that the two larger timelines, Rassilon bless their lunatic endeavors, are a little at odds over which one comes first. For my money, the story makes a lot more sense if you position it there, but not a lot in the story explicitly says so. It’s far more interested in hitting all the correct genre beats; the clifftop execution, forcing our hero to rapidly shape-change as he plunges towards the ocean, is heart-pounding stuff, but it’s balanced against an awful lot of standing around expositing. It’s audio, of course, so there are some concessions to be made, but when at least some of the expositing is coming in Robert Jezek’s Frobisher voice, an acquired taste to say the least, and then yet more of it is coming in Colin Baker’s pretty wobbly approximation of Robert Jezek, an impression OF a dodgy accent, it’s easy to lose what’s actually happening in the swirl of dubious space Brooklynites.

While I am on the subject of vocal work though, I have to pay a lot of credit to Toby Longworth, who here plays Dogbolter with a sly relish. Considering Dogbolter is a frog person, there was always going to be a risk that they played his character with some sort of voice altering synthesizer module, Nicholas Briggs giving him a sonorous croak that made him impossible to understand. Toby Longworth, by this point a Big Finish veteran appearing in many Main Range stories, is allowed to just let his voice and performance do the work, and as a result his villainy is far more grounded and, frankly, comprehensible.

Robert Shearman is a writer who I think works best when he’s allowed leeway to write a twisty-turny script full of unexpected revelations and diversions; I think perhaps that as well as Frobisher’s built-in backstory as a private investigator led him in this direction. Sadly, I don’t necessarily think it suits him. The most interesting part of this story is the big reveal; that Dogbolter has the planet rigged, its economy never creates anything, it just keeps generating him a steady profit by existing, doing absolutely nothing. The “Something” they are all looking for is literally just that, something somebody made, and it has the capacity to crash their entire economy. That’s a far more interesting idea space to play in, one that almost feels wasted as the big reveal at the end of a fairly pedestrian genre pastiche. Almost as if he can’t help himself, Robert ups the complexity by having Alicia Mulholland, the spicy femme-fatale, reveal herself to be Frobisher’s Whifferdill ex-wife in disguise, allowing them to have a tearful reunion before an even more tearful departure.

This is seeded early in the story – Frobisher is clearly mourning somebody, but when he chooses to go with The Doctor anyway, and when the emotional beat is two penguins hugging their love out in a rain-soaked space mystery, it’s hard to take it all seriously. And truly, I don’t think we’re supposed to. That’s why I’ll happily loop it around and say that at nine years old, I would have loved this. It’s fast-paced, it’s fun, it has exactly enough edge to make it feel mature, but none of the real inherent darkness that the Big Finish Main Range was doing at the time.

Am I one of the people who wants Frobisher back? Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. I think, actually, in this big year 2024, post Space Babies and in the Disney era, it would be an incredibly dangerous idea to introduce Frobisher to the wider fandom. Imagine the uproar – “DISNEY FORCES WOKE SHAPESHIFTING PENGUIN INTO TARDIS, AND HE’S AMERICAN?”.