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TARDIS Guide

Overview

Released

Thursday, September 6, 2018

Written by

Justin Richards

Narrated by

Colin Baker

Runtime

77 minutes

Time Travel

Past

Tropes (Potential Spoilers!)

War, Ghosts, World War I, Doctor Who?

Location (Potential Spoilers!)

Germany

Synopsis

"You've seen what happens, Mark. You know what time can do if it's damaged."

Travelling alone for once, the Sixth Doctor elects to return to Earth, and the First World War. There he must solve, once and for all, a mystery he unearthed in earlier incarnations. Someone has been interfering to alter the course of the war — but to what end?

With Captain Mark Steadman and Nurse Annie Grantham, the Doctor travels to a forest in Germany, on a cold morning in November. At the heart of the forest is a massive temporal disturbance, and there he will rendezvous with whoever is behind significant changes to the accepted history of the Great War.

But the forces of Time bring other entities to the meeting place: terrifying, corporeal ghosts of soldiers from many centuries of battle. If the Doctor, Mark and Annie are to escape with their lives — and return history to it proper course — they will need help from unexpected quarters.

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This review contains spoilers!

👍🏼(7.65) = Good!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!


The third and final story in Justin Richards’ WWI trilogy takes us to the last days of the war and reunites the Doctor with Captain Steadman from Men of War and nurse Annie Grantham from Horrors of War as they unveil the sinister secrets behind the altered timeline and the missing soldiers once and for all.

In this story, Sixie travels alone, so Steadman and Annie serve as his companions. As they venture into the core of temporal disruption, they encounter a peculiar sight: dead soldiers from battles spanning the entirety of human history. It's like The War Games again, in a smaller format.

Interestingly, the story is told from the Doctor’s point of view; Colin Baker narrates as the Sixth Doctor, and the story unfolds through his eyes. Justin Richards portrays the softer and more considerate Six from the BF audios, providing him with some excellent opportunities to resolve conflicts through dialogue.

Kaxton tackles a central role here, and Baker gives him a distinct voice and captures his emotional turmoil.

An army of dead soldiers surrounds the Doctor and his friends in a very exciting sequence, paying off the build-up from the previous two stories.

The whole narrative is more contemplative and slower, as it leans on the emotional exploration of the events and their various consequences, especially the weight of not being able to save the doomed lives of the war. It keeps following the same themes and doesn't evolve.

The story reaches a stunning and poetic conclusion.


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Statistics

AVG. Rating34 members
3.97 / 5

GoodReads

AVG. Rating34 votes
3.97 / 5

The Time Scales

AVG. Rating1 votes
4.50 / 5

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"I stood in the console room, my hands hovering over the door control. A part of me wanted to run, to go and find something wonderful and incredible and fun to see. To remind myself of the wonders of history, rather than the horrors. But the turbulence in the time vortex around the war had grown too great to ignore. 'Somebody has to do something about it.' I said to myself as I opened the doors. 'I can't keep putting it off forever'. So I stepped out of the TARDIS into the last days of the First World War."

— Sixth Doctor, Fortunes of War

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