Going into this 4 hour epic was pretty intimidating, especially since I was only familiar with the Eighth Doctor stories and not the other lines that led into this. I’m glad to say this didn’t pose much of a problem at all. There wasn’t anything I noticed that required more context from other stories. As for the length it zipped by, managing to feel half the length of ‘Time of the Daleks’ despite being twice as long.

The biggest surprise for me was Colin Baker. Having not listened to any of his audio stories yet I was unfamiliar with his performance, but here he was delightfully nefarious, clearly enjoying himself in villainous mode, and give such a great performance I’m excited to check out his audios in the future (if I ever get through the Eighth back catalogue). McCoy is also extremely entertaining, and McGann gets a lot of meat to work with, really displaying his range. Unfortunately this means that Peter Davison gets lost in the wash as he’s left with possibly the most uninteresting and least fun of the characters to work with.

The story, whilst a bit all over the place is surprisingly easy to follow, at least until towards the end. There’s plenty of times in Doctor Who were I will lose the thread of a story or it will cease to make sense, and I’ll simply switch off, enjoy the ride, and trust that there is some kind of internal logic ongoing if I had the mental acuity to piece it all together. However whilst I managed to keep up with everything for the majority of the runtime, the denouement in the Foundry lost me. Maybe it was fatigue but I couldn’t really make sense of what was happening or how. Still this didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the overall story.

Overall a fun, chapter heightened by great performances, although Charley kissing Sylvester McCoy’s character whilst shouting “Uncle Winky!” like a little girl is something I don’t think I need to hear.