Eccleston’s wonderful performance and the fizzing promise of further adventures with Big Finish is what makes this box set worthwhile. This story though will not be the pinnacle.

The upside of this final episode is that the resolution at the core of the plot is rather clever. If you showed me the first episode of Ravegers, then the final 10 minutes of episode three id think Briggs was onto a winner… it’s just a shame that the journey between those two points is drab. As Grafty mentions upthread it is NUTS that given how much of the plot revolves around VR games - The Doctor never ends up in one. Wouldn’t that have been a perfect episode 2? Instead we end up on well worn “timey wimey” ground.

With this first box set it would have been perfect to have three distinct stories for the 9th Doctor to flex his muscles across. Instead, we got one great 45 minute adventure needlessly stretched out over three instalments, leading to a soggy middle.

This Big Finish intro has been handled better than the 4th Doctor’s but not as strong as the 10th or 8th’s.

Given that Ravagers is structured more like one big story than three small stories, I don't have much to add from my last two posts. I liked Ravagers a lot more than I expected! Not as bad as people make it out to be!

B.

16.09.2021

I decided I'd better sum it up and give it a single grade, seeing how this was a single story throughout the three episodes.
To be honest, underwhelming. For a return of Christopher Eccleston himself this is such a disappointing first story. The "you killed a lot of people, but you didn't know any better" moral is questionable, and there isn't really anything else cohesive there.
I don't like how the solution to the whole story is the Doctor invents rogue-likes. That's it. In the far future as well, with gaming being one of the central focus points in the story.

The companion Nova is bleak. Think Martha, if her downgrade from Smith and Jones onward continued further. The timey-wimey stuff is way overtuned, to the point of becoming slightly confusing. I don't see the point for it either, other than ripping off The Girl in a Fireplace.
Nicholas Briggs may be a man of many feats, but writing is not one of them. 2/5

Food Fight ends the Ravagers set in a rather disappointing way. I'll leave my thoughts on the larger audio set for the box set review, but Food Fight really best expresses the overall story they were going for, which is great. I like how we actually get characters from across different time periods running around and doing stuff, which felt absent from Cataclysm and Sphere of Freedom. I also feel like Food Fight best clarifies some of the particulars around what was happening with Audrey.

I don't know - Doctor Who has done these paradoxical stories before, where stuff happens out of order. It can be fun as a novelty or when done in a creative way, but I'm just not sure what about Ravagers stands out to me in a positive way. I don't have a lot of key moments I cling to as something worth revisiting. I also found the ending with the Doctor getting a drink particularly off-putting. One of the few times I've encountered Eccleston's acting not meshing well with Doctor Who writing.

Music and sound effects were fine - competent, but hardly remarkable either.

Food Fight is a pretty disappointing experience on the whole, which is a shame because some of the ideas around the Ravagers and soldiers Nova was working with had a lot of potential. There's a version of Ravagers that could have been the Ninth Doctor's War Games. Instead, it is basically just better ignored and forgotten, in my opinion.