Protect and Survive features another Big Finish original companion, Thomas Hector Schofield, or Hex for short. His story goes back before the character was even introduced and started way back with the Sixth Doctor. During his travels with Evelyn Smythe, the Doctor met a woman named Cassandra Schofield who had run away from her life to work at a casino in the hopes of earning enough money to provide a proper life to her little Tommy. Unfortunately, the casino she worked at was run by vampires (it’s a mistake anyone can make) and she ends up infected. The Doctor and Evelyn take her Norway and promise to return with a cure. By the time that happens though, they find her working as an agent for the Forge, a secret British military organisation that investigates and fights aliens “for king and country”. Basically Russell T. Davies looked at the Forge and said “I wanna do that!”

Cassie spent all the time the Doctor was away being brainwashed and used as a killer by the Forge’s leader Nimrod, who then kills Cassie when she breaks her conditioning and tried to save the Doctor and Evelyn. Cassie’s death and the Doctor’s alien manner towards it causes a rift between him and Evelyn that according to the Seventh Doctor, she never forgave him for, even when they mended their friendship afterwards.

At the same time in the Seventh Doctor audios, they introduced a new companion Hex, a nurse working at St Garts Hospital who gets caught up in a mission by the Doctor and the “pretty young lady in HR” Ms McShane to foil the Cybermen. Hex went on to join the Doctor and Ace and it wasn’t until a year later they decided to tie him back to Cassie and make him her son.

Hex’s whole deal as a companion is not exactly having the best of times travelling with the Doctor; on top of having a crush on Ace that he’s never able to admit and is never reciprocated, Hex is more averse to the Seventh Doctor’s secretive and manipulative tactics that Ace by this point has gotten used to. This leads to several outbursts and confrontations where he feels the Doctor doesn’t trust him enough to be more open and honest about his plans. It gets worse later on where he finds out in the worst way possible what happened to his mother, the Doctor’s role in that and the fact that he knew all along and never told Hex about it…. oops.

Hex’s story and how far back it goes chronologically is the sort of thing that’s theoretically possible to do in the show, but it would require years of planning, forethought and an agreement between showrunners to commit to it. It’s a unique take on a companion who experiences travelling through time and space with the Doctor in a more harrowing way than how others experience it. When you first listen to some of his stories he can come off as a bit whiny but when you learn more and more about his story and his ordeals, it does feel justified, also no spoilers but it doesn’t end well for him.

Protect and Survive takes place during his later travels and the climax of a long running story arc that started pretty much at the beginning of Big Finish’s audios with Seven and Ace. Starting from The Fearmonger onwards, the Seven and Ace audios present themselves as a direct continuation of the show after it was cancelled where we gradually see the two evolve; Seven gets more extreme with his schemes and Ace starts to mature, even briefly discarding her preferred name for her birth name. Partway through Hex joins the team and their story goes on, we have the fallout of Hex learning the truth about his mother and now we have the Seventh Doctor embarking on his biggest crusade yet, hunting down and destroying the Elder Gods one by one over the course of several stories.
Hex and Ace finds themselves in a TARDIS out of control as the Doctor has gone missing (in reality Sylvester McCoy was away in New Zealand filming his scenes for The Hobbit). They end up in the English countryside outside a cottage owned by an elderly couple preparing a fallout shelter for the forthcoming nuclear war!

Protect and Survive is a story in two halves, the first half is a brilliant, depressing and horrifying apocalyptic war story as Ace and Hex are trapped in this world where history’s gone wrong, being forced to live out World War III and a nuclear holocaust. It pulls no punches with how eerily close to reality the setup is with the events going on in the outside world before going full blown horror with the effects of a nuclear bomb and the futility of hoping to survive such a holocaust. A good prerequisite I recommend going in is to look up the actual Protect and Survive documentary, it’s one of the scariest real things to come out of the Cold War and this story relies heavily on it for its setting and theme as protect and survive plays a huge role in the ending and how Ace and Hex manage to escape. This story is a favourite purely for that first half but given the way things are in the world right now it may be a bit too much for some people.

So that’s the first half and Christ what a first half it is!!! The second is a bit more conventional as we learn more about what’s happened and where the Doctor’s disappeared to. It does admittedly go off the rails a bit in part four, but the second half is still a strong act in its own right. Despite being away filming The Hobbit, we do get a short section with the Doctor carrying out one of his best schemes to date as he effortlessly averts the nuclear war and traps those responsible in an endless time-loop experiencing the agony of a nuclear apocalypse for all eternity!!! I’ve often considered the Seventh Doctor and Ace to be the original Walter White and Jesse Pinkman but in this case the Seventh Doctor isn’t just Walter White, he’s full-on f**king Heisenberg!!! It’s such a brief but such an awesome sequence.
Protect and Survive is an outstanding listen but I should warn you, if you’re unsettled by certain events and concerns happening right now in the world, this is just gonna make you feel worse!

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

Previous Story: Project: Nirvana

I'm a big fan of stories like this that are fairly small scale while still managing to pull off massive stakes. A really great example is Five Twenty-Nine. This story is pretty much that for the entire first part and it's really effective, particularly with things like the constant radio broadcasts and general grounded feeling. It's infinitely more immersive when you aren't hearing the planet Glorb 9 being blown up and instead the quaint little cottage of an elderly English couple.

It's because of all that that I'm slightly disappointed by the reveal that this was all some elaborate scheme by the Doctor to trap two elder gods in a time loop where they die over and over. Don't get me wrong, I think that's really cool (and it gives off Human Nature vibes) but I can't help feeling that it's too extreme. I just don't see how the Doctor could have set it up no matter how much of a chessmaster he is, especially with the flashback scenes that explain how it all happened. I also don't see how he wouldn't have accounted for the Gods lying to get out or the other TARDIS being drawn in instead.

I still think it's a really compelling story with brilliant performances, but there are way too many odd bits and plotholes to give this a full 10/10 in my opinion.

Next Story: Black and White

Well, this was bloody chilling.

Protect and Survive starts out with an absolutely gripping first part, and frankly, if the entire story had just been Hex and Ace stranded and struggling to survive nuclear fallout, I would have been absolutely on board.

But it didn't stop there. Raising the stakes and changing the game with each part, Protect and Survive remains absolutely gripping.

The introduction of the time loop. The realization that the loop is a prison. Learning just who those prisoners are – and who the jailer is. Every beat raises the atmosphere of  terror, helplessness, and distrust.

The sound design is top notch. The pacing is impeccable – the chilling transition from Peggy getting sick to the radio droning on about burial to both her and Albert being dead in the ground is particularly notable, but the whole episode keeps that standard.

My only quibble is, right at the end, when Hex realizes their escape plan has failed and begins to panic (thus triggering their escape), that moment feels a little cut short. To really drive home the helplessness at the core of this story, it would've helped to have a more drawn out sequence of helpless terror.

But that's a nitpick, and does nothing to prevent me giving Protect and Survive an easy five stars.

I love Big Finish stories when they're a little bit scary - something about scary on audio is thrilling to me. And Protect and Survive isn't exactly a horror story, but it is chilling.

Ace and Hex, trapped in a time loop where they are forced to live out the same nine days of nuclear fallout ovet and over again sounds pretty horrible on paper, and in your ears, it is exactly as spooky as you imagine. Interspersed with the radio giving instructions on what to do in event of nuclear attack, the story unfolds slowly, and the deaths at the end of the loop still managed to affect me even knowing they were coming.

An incredible story, overall, and even as we learn that it's a trap for some Elder Gods rather than a story about some normal people in Yorkshire, it doesn't lose impact. So often, the resolution of an episode like this takes away from the suspense that's been built into it, but this episode blew me away with how chilling it was right to the end.