He Kills Me, He Kills Me Not

What an absolute, unadulterated delight!

It has an evil Ood, a lesbian couple fighting for their love (but not against homophobia!), a nicely foreshadowed B-plot, absolutely sparkling dialogue, and of course over-the-top pseudo-Western accents and settings. It's the campest Western I've ever met, and I love that journey for me.

📝6/10 = SLIGHTLY ENJOYABLE!

Time Lording through time and space, one victory at a time!

VICTORY XII

Carrie Thompson’s Big Finish story finally gives a voice to everybody’s favourite Ood assassin, as Silas Carson goes up against Paul McGann. We finally learn how Eight gets dragged into the Time Lord Victorious event when he arrives on a desert planet looking for a wonder of the universe that is missing and bumps into Felicity the fugitive and Brian the Ood, an assassin sent after her.

This story quickly turns into a sort of intimate mystery of Brian’s true nature as well as the nature of the Wild West-like setting the Doctor has arrived in. The twist of Brian being a killer isn’t very surprising, though, if you've already read The Knight, The Fool, and the Dead (Victory VI). 

Later on, the story turns into a sort of relationship drama when we learn the true nature of Felicity and Sophie and why Brian is after them. Brian is biding his time, holding Felicity hostage, while the Doctor frantically works to find a way to defeat him. And that’s the gist of this fairly flat adventure.

Silas Carson is the one standout here, and he plays out the sinister split personality of the character to perfection, but Misha Malcolm and Melanie Stevens are pretty good as well. The locals with American accents sound typically overdone, and Paul McGann sounds somewhat bored.

The story builds up to the conclusion, which explains how Brian ends up in the Dark Times and how exactly Eight appears together with the Daleks at the end of The Knight, The Fool, and the Dead—a story further explored in the next audio, The Enemy of My Enemy (Victory XIII).