This is a story with a lot going on, a large cast of characters and a real sense of energy and fun. Paul McGann and India Fisher return for the start of their second full season as the 8th Doctor and Charley Pollard and they launch themselve into it with gusto. McGann immediately grabs the chance to play the hard-boiled detective and India Fisher embues Charley with an appealing exasperation with the Doctor hinting of further adventures beyond the four from their first season. There is such a comfortable, sparky rapport between them and it isn’t hard to see why they continue to be one of BF’s most popular TARDIS crews.

Alongside the detective noir conceit, replete with gangsters and femme fatales called Glory Bee, there is plot involving Orson Welles famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast which, allegedly, caused mass panic in the US when people thought it was real. A little like the controversy surrounding the BBC’s Ghostwatch, there are varying opinions on precisely how extensive the panic caused was, but – historically accurate or not – it’s a fun backdrop for the adventure and allows Mark Gatiss to play with the idea of an real alien invasion being thwarted by a fake one. It also means we get Orson Welles himself in a Doctor Who story.

The gangster plot, which also involves Nazi sympathisers and Russian spies, brings a clutch of impressive guest stars, namely Mark Benton, Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes (formely Stevenson). All have subsequently appeared in the modern series and are great here. Pegg is almost unrecognisable as Don Chaney, the Al Capone type and Hynes has a lot of fun as Glory Bee in both her fake femme fatale persona and her real Russian spy character. She also gets to go full New Yorker as Carla, an employee at the radio station broadcasting War of the Worlds.

The cast also includes David Benson, known for his turn as Panda in the Iris Wildthyme audios, and Paul Putner who appeared in the sketches for Doctor Who night alongside Mark Gatiss and David Walliams. Both are great. Benson plays Welles and Putner is Bix Biro, the producer of War of the Worlds. While Welles is real, Biro seems to be a fictional creation. Jonathan Rigby also appears as John Houseman who is a real person and founded the Mercury Theatre with Welles.

The real villain of the piece, Cosmo Devine – a Nazi sympathiser – is played by John Arthur. He is hugely camp and leads the overall tone of the story which, belying the noir trappings and gangsters, is actually rather over the top and silly. I remember that, the first couple of times I listened to this, I found his performane a bit much, but this time round I leant into it and found it fitted a bit better than I hard originally thought.

The reason for this is because of the aliens – the bizarrely named Laiderplackers. Bat-like and huge, it turns out they are pretty useless and basically running a protection racket (a fun parallel to the gangsters). Paul Putner doubles as the more destructive (and yet completely ineffectual) of the two, with Jonathan Rigby playing the slightly more intelligent of the two who is more interested in scientific research before the destruction.

I don’t think they are the best Doctor Who monsters ever but the concept behind them is sound and although they are maybe a bit silly, the overall tone is so flamboyant especially in the performances of Arthur, Hynes and Pegg, that it just about works.

Historically, the oncoming war seethes in the background. Devine’s German allies are silent and because he is merely using them as a means to an end, the approach of World War Two is quite low profile but it is there and adds to the overflowing melting pot of this story. Critics may say there is too much going on and too many characters but I just enjoy the sheer bravado and silliness of the whole thing. It has some cracking cliffhangers (although the editing of them is a bit shonky at times – a problem I often have with Big Finish cliffhangers) and a real sense of devil-may-care. McGann and Fisher are sublime which forgives many a sin and listening to this reminded me how exciting those early days of McGann at Big Finish were.

The Monthly Adventures #028 - "Invaders from Mars” by Mark Gatiss

From here, number 28 of the Main Range, to the 33rd audio - Neverland - is the second “season” of the Eighth Doctor’s run and it is quite possibly Big Finish’s most popular and revered series of stories in its history. Being unconnected from most lore, the Eighth Doctor’s audios are the usual go-to starting point for new listeners and whilst his introductory four stories were perfectly fine as an establishment of the series, it's here where we begin to see some of the more iconic episodes, with fan favourites like Neverland and Seasons of Fear featured, along with the next audio, The Chimes of Midnight, which may just be the most famous audio in Big Finish’s nearly 25 year history with Doctor Who. But all stories must have a start, so how does Season Two fair?

A botched trip to Singapore in the 30s lands the Doctor and Charley in hot water, when they come across the dead body of a private investigator in the streets of Manhattan. With the mob peddling weapons from beyond this world and Orson Welles panicking the population on radio, the travellers prepare for a war of the worlds.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

It’s always fun writing a review about a Mark Gatiss story because he’s one of those writers with little to no interesting qualities in his scripts. His works are true skeleton stories, the absolute basics of a Doctor Who narrative with all the buzzwords necessary for a familiar plot. Which makes it incredibly hard to talk about his works, as they usually don’t have anything for me to highlight. Eight and Charley are, as usual, great here and McGann and Fisher are clearly having fun with this script. The Doctor trying to navigate 1930s Brooklyn with dialogue directly ripped from Miller’s Crossing is incredibly funny and how he and Charley bounce off each other is expertly written. I think if there was one word to describe Invaders from Mars, it would be “fun”. This is a fun script, this is a goofy runaround with cartoony mobsters going “forgetta ‘bout it!” where the Doctor saves the day by tricking aliens into thinking a rival invasion is happening using Orson Welles’ the War of the Worlds, which is a really fun way to implement a bit of sci-fi history into a Doctor Who story. It truly feels like going to New York and fighting space bats with the mafia, and Mark Gatiss sells Brooklyn to me, a lot of this feels straight out of cheesy B-list film noirs.

However, this style of light comedy riffing mafia flicks does come with its downfalls. Pretty much every mobster character has the same, overacted and cartoonish Brooklyn accent and it’s painfully obvious that it’s a cast of Englishmen voicing them. I think the best it gets is with the main gangster - Chaney - funnily enough played by Simon Pegg of all people, but the rest range from really annoying to indecipherable. And beyond that, whilst I call it a film noir set in the Doctor Who universe, it’s also not really because half the plot is the Doctor running around with a KGB agent trying to recover the Russian scientist working with the mobsters as a nazi works to steal his research and other members of the alien he’s experimenting on’s species come to kill them all. And on top of this you have the Orson Welles subplot that barely ties into the story and is, for the most part, underused. In fact, a lot of this story is underused, The War of the Worlds is a really cool historical moment to base a Doctor Who story off but it’s basically just there until the final part, when the script decides it’s needed. And, with the metric f**k ton of plot threads all colliding, most of the ideas feel underbaked. A Doctor Who film noir; cool idea, but we can’t focus on it because we’re too busy fighting annoying bat aliens. Gatiss is a writer who isn’t short on good ideas but often fails to use them the right way, and Invaders from Mars is no exception.

Entering a Gatiss script, you can expect a good but ultimately unfulfilling time. There is a unique genericness to his stories, a certain hollowness that plagues a good majority of scripts and leaves you with a fine narrative, full of fine ideas realised okay with fine characters. A little boring and very much core Doctor Who, as close as you can get to formula for this show. Invaders from Mars is not bad by any means, but it’s not leaving you with anything special.

6/10

Pros:

+ Eight and Charley are at their best here

+ New York is well realised in its time period

+ Really fun and fast paced story

+ Clever use of the War of the Worlds

Cons:

- Too many similar characters with cartoonish accents

- Balances far too many plot threads at once

- Underutilises a lot of cool ideas

I quite enjoyed this audio.  It's a fun and breezy take on the atmosphere around both War of the Worlds and the famous audio broadcast of the radio play.  There isn't anything too outstanding or memorable here, and maybe the story meanders a bit at first.  It all kind of works out, though, and becomes quite entertaining.  In hindsight there's some decent set-up for the next few adventures with Charley and the Doctor, while I think they did a good job conveying the vibe of Orson Welles and War of the Worlds.  Really paid it off nicely in the end, too, and actually felt like a story set in America.

Charming, but I wish I could dig it much more. From other Gatiss entries this one places a bit higher, as always Gatiss gets a pretty cool idea, but the execution feels a bit lackluster. Our leads still have so much chemistry that I can’t really say it’s bad, just kinda lackluster.

Biiig yawn for this one.

As other reviews say, good ideas here (using the War of the Worlds broadcast to pretend there's already an alien force invading Earth, the Doctor and Charley pretending to be PIs, NYC gangsters in general), but the execution was lackluster. I started writing an outline of the plot here and just deleted it because so many threads just go nowhere and it's confusing, and the end is unsatisfying. Charley is kidnapped and questioned with a truth serum, and just doesn't get to do much else. The Doctor unwittingly helps a Russian spy, and then comes up with the second fake broadcast*, which doesn't quite work. The random Russian scientist guy who we thought died in part 2 saves the day with a... homemade atomic bomb? Alright.

I did like the performances for Welles and Devine. That's pretty much all I can say.

*read with Pippin's intonation of "second breakfast"