Abject slop. It's been months since I've heard it and it isn't any less rooted in my mind as being abjectly terrible. A terrible way to introduce a new companion, a terrible followup to the masterpiece that is Scherzo, a terrible, fetishistic plot, and a wholly unnecessary return of The Guy Who Wrote Peri Getting Tortured In An Unnecessarily Weird Way Twice. Seriously, why bring Phillip Martin back? How does one make a story about big bug accountants gross and icky in a bad way?

no where near as bad as people have said it is, but it’s within true doctor who fashion that a weak, weird story, should came straight after a veritable masterpiece

The beginning with Kro’ka was interesting. Everything afterward was disappointing or unpleasant.

Well it’s been quite a while since I listen to this, that said I still remember it well enough and well I don’t hate it, neither do I like it. I think in many ways at best it’s a bit unremarkable, at worst it’s a letdown in its Series, as well as in the MR after such a stellar Run (Omega - Scherzo) and then this!
Following such a good Run will always be hard and well Kromon does not live up to it. If it wasn’t for its Writer and for being the Introduction Story of C’rizz, it would have be forgotten, I’d reckon.

After doing some Work with Six, Martin returns to pen his first Big Finish Play and his first Adventure with a new Doctor. It’s not good. Not to say I am too thrilled about Martins work from what I heard and seen, but this one falls into the Trap of his previous Work but without the Substance. It’s offputting but lacks a Commentary that made Varos such a good Story.

Gone is an interesting, unique World, replaced for a Society that on Paper could be interesting but offers mostly nothing. Of course following up Scherzo would have been hard anyway and if this Story delivers in being enjoyable I would have been very satisfied. Sadly it simply isn’t, if we don’t have some gross Imagery we kinda have a very Standard and very boring Who Adventures.

That said, not all of it is bad, C’rizz is introduced fairly well here, and you get the Gist of his Character. Some of its Cliffhangers are intriguing, but really what does it offer?
Of course, it’s fine if a Writer decides to go with a style, has a pattern, it can work very well, sadly Martin’s later Work (from the very little I know) doesn’t reach the Highs of his first one.
Despite all I wouldn’t say it’s truly “bad”, it isn’t “good” either and not really “middling” either, I am unsure how I would rate this Story. There are Things which work, but they get overshadowed by some of its worst Parts, a mess of a Story really, and I am not necessarily sure if I make sense, but I tried my best .

Have you seen Mindwarp? OK, you can skip this one, just know that this is where C'Rizz comes from and you're set to continue the Divergent Universe arc.

Philip has some trappings in his stories, and they can be pretty off-putting. He likes writing over-the-top violence, especially against women, and specifically body horror is almost certainly a fetish of his, given it pops up in BOTH of his TV stories and again here, more violent and horrifying than ever.

I will give him props that none of the women in Mission to Magnus have their bodies taken away from them. No, instead they're all belittled for being misandrists and the big strong men come along to force them to be their wives, which the Doctor approves of. What's the moral here?
But you know what else is in both of his TV stories AND Mission to Magnus? Sil. Big corporate interest, doesn't care about lives if they can't profit him? Yeah, Martin's most well-known villain is a businessman.
He recycles that, here, too.
The Kromon are all bland and uninteresting. They probably had names but I can't tell you any of them. They all blur into one big "what if businessmen were slightly more evil", with a twist of the story being that their slave encampments are built off literal company directives.
I will say that it's a slightly interesting idea. They're based on insects, many of whom have one queen and a bunch of worker drones, so depicting them all as almost mindless drones following the corporate directives could work... if it didn't feel like such a retread.

Had this been Philip's ONLY contribution to Who I'd probably view it more favorably, but every piece of context I glean from his other works just makes it worse and worse.
But don't worry: there is a new and exciting way he found to fumble something interesting.
C'Rizz is the newest companion, and for a lot of the story he's kind of fleshed out. Guy with a heart of gold, wants to help his people, horrified by evil monsters, friend to the Oroog, can't leave anyone in danger... We've seen it before, but it's a good start. What fumbles it for me is the end of the story. C'Rizz talks about having been selected, but neglects to mention anything before that. At the end of the story the Kro'Ka shows up and says "yeah he was a pacifist monk". Why wasn't that IN the story? Have him grapple with it!
The Kro'Ka then starts going off on the Doctor saying that he's the one who weaponised C'Rizz and that he should think on that... So essentially, Philip seems to have been given a character brief and an emotional arc, then pawned it off on the next write because he didn't want it

Speaking of emotional arcs, remember Scherzo? It ends 30 seconds before this one starts? Well, let's just ignore it. No mention of the big revelation of the Doctor and Charley openly admitting they're in love, no, time for a standard Doctor-companion pair. If it weren't for the Kromon going "time travel? What is 'time'?" (and a companion introduction), you'd be forgiven for thinking this was a random extra story set between, say, Minuet in Hell and Invaders from Mars.

In a point in time where Doctor Who is trying to be more experimental and focus on arcs and character more than ever before, Philip Martin paints a dreadfully by-the-numbers story with little memorable about it other than slurping noises.