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"DREAM TEAM: A NIGHTMARE-FUELLED TWO-PARTER WITH FAMILIAR FOES"

Dream Team pits the Fifth Doctor and his companions against the terrifying Dream Crabs in a tightly paced two-parter. Set on Concordium, a planet offering corporate away days, the story sees the TARDIS crew trapped in layered dreamscapes, where the line between reality and illusion blurs. While the Dream Crabs have been used before, this story leans into their potential for eerie psychological horror, creating a tense and compelling adventure.

LAYERED DREAMS AND UNSETTLING TENSION

The narrative plays with multiple dream layers, twisting and turning as the characters attempt to realise their predicament. This structure works well, keeping the tension high and preventing the story from feeling predictable. The Doctor's journey into Tegan and Adric’s dreams while leaving Nyssa to fend for herself adds an extra layer of suspense, particularly as Adric struggles to convince Tegan that none of what she’s experiencing is real.

A RUSHED RESOLUTION

Despite the strong build-up, the climax feels hurried. The reveal that the Porcians are behind the entire scheme is an abrupt turn, leaving little time to explore their motivations or actions in detail. While the resolution is serviceable, it doesn’t quite match the intrigue and intensity of the preceding dream sequences.

THE TARDIS TEAM SHINES

With only the regulars in the cast, Dream Team makes excellent use of the Fifth Doctor’s crew. Peter Davison once again proves adept at balancing authority with warmth, while Nyssa, Adric, and Tegan each get moments to shine. Nyssa’s independence is particularly notable, holding her own while the Doctor is occupied, and Adric’s struggle to break through Tegan’s dream delusions adds emotional weight.

VERDICT: A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

A solid two-parter with a strong concept and effective tension, Dream Team makes good use of its limited cast and delivers a compelling psychological mystery. However, its rushed ending prevents it from reaching its full potential. Still, for fans of dream-based Doctor Who stories, it offers a satisfyingly eerie ride.

📝7.5/10

The fact I’m shocked the story didn’t do the thing I thought it was gonna do it’s just a fun really good dream crab story and I love it for that

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: God of War

A fantastic TARDIS team, an underutilised Moffat villain with loads of potential, what more could you want?

Seriously, this story is Big Finish at it's best. It's a small cast, only the main 4, but that's all you need. The Dream Crabs are a horrifying villain put to use brilliantly in this story. Once again, this story is full of Big Finish's talent for character development, especially Tegan. We get to see a lot into her motivations and history. She's easily the most keen to believe the dreams are real seeing how badly she wants to get home and this makes for some compelling drama.

This is quite a trippy, surreal story, jumping from location to location. It's quite possibly one of the very few stories where "it was all a dream" is a satisfying conclusion. I did find the ending to be slightly rushed, I don't think this would have been good as a 4-parter but it definitely needed a few more minutes to explain the ending. The villain reveal at the end was just a bit underwhelming but that is a minor complaint in an incredible story.

Next Story: The Visitation

This story is an instant favorite. Two of Big Finish's strengths are 1) providing more depth to classic characters and 2) being able to seamlessly blend the classic era of Doctor Who with the modern one. This release does both perfectly, and it's a testament to the powerhouse of the Season 19 tardis team that they make up the entire cast of the episode! We get a fascinating examination of how each character would react to a nightmare world of their own making, and the trippy nature of the dream crabs propels this story with ideal pace. For me, this has established itself as one of my all time favorite Doctor Who stories, ever!:)

Lizzie Hopley's Dream Team is a story features only the main cast as they arrive on the Trine Archipelago, a natural wonder of the universe now overrun by Dream Crabs and corporate advertising, where they quickly find themselves trapped in perilous dreams with very tangible threats.

You'd be mistaken to assume being limited to the main four cast members comes with a lack of scope, the most is made of the cast and the dream scenarios to provide interesting and varied scenes, while the sound design does a good enough job at implying the existence of more characters.Where the story seems to suffer is in its shorter runtime, Hopley brings no shortage of interesting ideas: the disarmed Dream Crabs are a curious enough hook to begin with, the idea of too many people sharing a dream causing them to lose their sense of reality is a nice one to up the danger but it's never really returned to. The more interesting ideas come very late into the story and don't have the time to be expanded on and fleshed out. The story also lacks a proper villain behind the curtain which I feel it needed and that's an area where I feel the limited cast comes back to bite it as well. The resolution to the story feels a bit unsatisfying although it is well set up, and the get-out for the midway cliffhanger was a bit of a head scratch and a shrug, I'm still not sure how that was supposed to have worked.

The scenes with Tegan are among the story's strongest, she's the character most drawn in by the dreams and throughout she's driven by a fighting spirit and desire to protect her family. This ties in well with the greater Dream Crab plot and is an interesting angle for Tegan's character. The story never spells it out, but you have to wonder if this motivation was brought on by the loss of her aunt in Logopolis.

It's easy and even exciting to imagine a longer version of Dream Team where the late-on revelations have more time to be explored, where the story isn't having to wrap itself up in a hurry and it could be doing even more with dreams, but as it is it's not a bad two-parter by any means.