The Dollhouse

What if Charlie's Angels, but Torchwood? Except what if it was also trying to impart important messages about femininity, the role of women in the world and the way they are exploited and commodificated? Except what if it it was also a Stealth Pilot for a 1970s LA Torchwood series? Except what if it was also a star-making vehicle for a new writer and a new set of voice actors?

You'd probably say that it was trying to do far too much with not a lot of resource, and that historically the accent work on Big Finish hasn't been great so...oh, you want one of them to be from the Bible Belt, one of them to be a hip-talking Black woman (it's audio, obviously, but you can see the comedy Afro from a mile away) and one of them to be a...a yes, a Hispanic woman who can't go three seconds without mentioning her abuelita or using the word "chica"? That's fine, won't get in the way of your story at all, I'm sure.

I didn't think this was as much of a stinker as the generally low rating on the site would give it. Just chock-full of BF Bad Habits, with a central story that's really rather dull and played out. The little sparks of interaction between the core three are some of the stronger parts, but we're given no reason to invest in any of these characters. As a matter of fact, the little potted history we get of each of them at the start had the opposite effect, if anything. But of course, why bother actually letting your actors and dialog tell us the story of who these people are when you can just explain in a very clunky manner who they are up-front and then have basically none of it feed into any choices their characters make throughout. I was trying to say this one isn't a stinker, but apart from the accents I think you could probably have switched any of the three main leads in this story around and it wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference.

A campy Charlie's Angels parody could have worked with over-the-top characters and cheesy dialogue. In practice, incredibly bad American accents and awkward dialogue pair up to make one of the most difficult listening experiences that Big Finish has produced.