Hello, Guide! This review is long overdue - I finished this story months ago, and yet am only writing the review now, but at least it's being written! I mostly enjoyed this story, with some notable issues bringing the story down, and gave it a 3.5/5. Vague spoilers throughout.

The first thing I noticed is that the segues into pieces of exposition didn't always work - they often felt awkward or clunky, but I don't feel like that affected my overall view of the story. The second thing I noticed was the character exploration - the cotnrast between "nightmare eldritch horror who kills children" Doctor and fun-loving spinny-chair-"wheeeee" Doctor was amusing and well-done, and I really appreciate what this story was going for with the idea of the Doctor's darker side. I did not think it was possible, but this story made me love Evelyn even more, with her willingness to admonish the Doctor while still wanting the terrible things he did to not be true creating a very interesting dynamic. She's not exactly becoming doctorified, is she? Maybe because she's more sure of herself than other companions, so there aren't really insecurities for the Doctor's codependent personality to leech off of in the way we see with a lot of the others. She provides an excellent anchor of common sense to his recklessness, and generally felt very fleshed-out and well written in this audio.

I really enjoyed the world building of this one (which I'm sure will come as no surprise if you check who made the pages on things like the species and locations involved in this story on tardis.wiki/wiki), and would love to see the Galyari again! Some really interesting politics were explored here too, with the Galyari colonisers being presented simulatneously as sympathetic victims and oppressive imperialists. This is their way of life; it never occurs to them that it harms other species, but we see both the effects of their actions on the people they invade (through Nintaru), and their own people's fears and horrors (through the Doctor, their childrens' skins being stolen, etc). One line hit especially hard - "your "promised land" belongs to another race". I absolutely adored this aspect of the story, and do not think I can say anything else here - that line says it all.

One thing that severely impacted my enjoyment of this story was the voices. Nintaru's constant tremble got on my nerves, and the Galyari voices were completely and entirely unintelligible. It took me several weeks to get through this audio because I had to keep rewinding, and I only understand what happened at all because I eventually found a transcript. I really cannot emphasise enough that the voices were entirely beyond understanding.

Finally, the thing that really brought this story down was the ending. I am struggling to restrain myself from releasing a litany of curses here - the resolution was beyond terrible. Psychic bonds made with blood and feathers sounds cool on paper, but in practice, it felt rushed and out of place, and honestly the villain being who he was felt completely out of left field as well. A sore disappointment of an ending to an audio which I feel had good potential, if it weren't for this ending (and the Galyari voices).

A story with some interesting concepts and solid worldbuilding, but poor execution, and a truly terrible ending. I am just about giving it a 3.5/5, but I could definitely go lower here. I don't think I'd recommend this story, although it definitely wasn't all bad (and I definitely wouldn't recommend it without a transcript!)

Fazia muito tempo que não tinha uma experiência tão desgastante com os áudios da BIG FINISH a ponto de cair em um tédio absoluto hein, meu deus hahaha. É impressionante como Simon A Forward (também escritor de Dreamtime) tem um fascínio extremamente estranho por roteiros e conceitos esquisitos beirando a bizarrice – O destino do 6° Doutor e Evelyn é uma espécie de comboio espacial chamado “The Clutch”, lar de alienígenas parecidas com lagartos chamada Galyari, além de responsáveis por uma extensa frota de naves que viajam pela galáxia, eles convivem com um temor/trauma causado por uma figura que aterroriza gerações de sua espécie, o Sandman. Logo tendo contado com os Galyaris é levantada a suspeita que o Doutor é esse grande vilão – É aqui que os maiores problemas de The Sandman começam a parecer, quando esperado desenvolvimento desse tal conflito o enredo decide apresentar extensos flashbacks desgastantes de acontecimentos do passado não dando muito prosseguimento significativo para trama. Além disso o Doutor e a Evelyn são inseridos em situações muito bobas com direito a vários momentos do Colin Baker incorporando uma figura amedrontadora que põe medo nos outros. É nítido o tremendo esforço do escritor em querer convencer seu ouvinte que os Galyaris são criaturas fascinantes, em um minuto eles são empresários legítimos que não têm noção nenhuma de crime (lembrando até mesmo os Foamasis de The Leisure Hive), mas a frente são guerreiros brutais que derrubam outras raças, são tantas ideias diferentes para eles que acaba causando uma pequenas contradições diretamente ligadas com as ações que realizam na trama, sem dizer que o efeito distorcido das vozes dos Galyaris são muito chatos e irritantes de se ouvir em uma período de quase 2 horas de áudio. [⚠️ SPOILERS] E para piorar temos um conceito ridículo envolvendo o cassaco colorido do Doutor, descobrimos que a combinação de cores da vestimenta causava irritação e enxaqueca nas criaturas fazendo-os acreditar todos esses anos que o Time Lord era a entidade maligna o verdadeiro Sandman em pessoa. Assim o status do Doutor se reverte e vem à tona a revelação do verdadeiro Sandman que não passa de um vilão genérico bem mal feito... patético 🤦🏻‍♂️ [⚠️ FIM DE SPOILERS]. Em resumo, esse foi um dos áudios mais arrastados e desgastantes que já ouvi da BIG FINISH parecia que estava ouvindo isso a 5 horas. Mas a pergunta que fica é: “Isso é realmente o que os fãs de Doctor Who querem?”

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

Previous Story: Real Time

Can't say I'm a big fan of this one. It has some really interesting ideas that get lost in shoddy sound design and generally weird story beats. The Doctor has an interesting role in this story, essentially being the boogeyman to an entire species. It's an interesting way to explore the Doctor especially when he's forced to play into the role a little. Colin Baker is absolutely acting his socks off here and it's a shame we don't see him in more villain roles if I'm being honest.

Besides that I couldn't tell you what actually happened here, it's really dull and needlessly confusing. The voice modulation of most of the characters makes them difficult to understand and distinguish, to the point that Anneke Wills was somewhere in this story though I couldn't tell you where. It's all a bit disappointing honestly, I really think this story could have been a lot better.

Next Story: Jubilee

📝2/10 = VERY UNENJOYABLE!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

THE RONETTES DID IT BETTER!

I struggle with audios that feature confused or muddled beginnings, and The Sandman is just that. It’s a mess of strange sound effects and editing that make it very difficult to grasp what is going on. The only takeaway of Part 1 is that Sixie and Evelyn arrive in a world where the Doctor is believed to be the mythical, child-murdering Sandman. This puts the Doctor in a unique position among the aliens he comes across: they fear and loathe him, forcing the Doctor to use this status to slowly uncover the hidden secrets of the Clutch.

Part 2 doesn’t help much in terms of making sense of things—we still get strange sound effects, voice-modulated performances, and a plot that is all over the palace yet nowhere at all simultaneously. This audio flies way over your head, and Simon A. Forward clearly doesn’t grasp how to write an interesting Doctor Who story. You could say that he gets it all backwards!

This story is so dull and full of itself that I have completely zoned out by the time we hit the second half of it. I couldn't tell you a single thing about what is going on in it, and that's never a good sign. And what's worse is that the climax in Part 4 is a lengthy scene of incomprehensible bugger.

It's always a joy to hear Sixie and Evelyn together, but this time around Colin Baker and Maggie Stables don’t inject a lot of energy into the story. Stables drown under all the confusing stuff.

This audio goes all in with the supporting cast, mostly consisting of the lizard-like Galyari, all with weird voices. Anneke Wills, best known for playing companion Polly alongside William Hartnell’s and Patrick Troughton’s Doctors, is part of the cast but completely wasted in a performance you don’t even notice.

The Monthly Adventures #037 - “The Sandman" by Simon A. Forward

It’s really hard to talk about audios like The Sandman. I mean, what is there to say, it's a story with nothing to it. Frankly, I don’t know how this script even lasted two whole hours. Now Simon A. Forward is far from a popular writer - looking at his Doctor Who oeuvre, I see practically nothing unanimously considered at least passable - so I somewhat knew what I was getting into. I’d already listened to and failed to understand Dreamtime later on in The Monthly Adventures and it seems Mr. Forward’s problem persists even here. If you want a comprehensible story, then feel free to look elsewhere.

The Sandman: the boogeyman of the Galyari people, a multicoloured creature that steals the hides of young and kills those who look upon it. When the Doctor and Evelyn arrive, they find the Galyari’s home - The Clutch - in turmoil over a spate of recent deaths, but things are only going to get more complicated. For, you see, the Sandman is also known as the Doctor.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Simon A. Forward is a writer I’d describe on the whole as frustrating. He clearly is a talented world builder and his stories are often injected with this galactic mysticism fuelled by the bombastic stylings of the classic space opera. Central to The Sandman are what seems to be Forward’s crowning achievement - the Galyari - a reptilian race of nomadic traders that have returned a couple times again in the audios and make for a relatively interesting extraterrestrial species that lay the groundwork for some really enticing worldbuilding, mostly pertaining to the fascinating setting of the Clutch, a massive fleet of ships sort of bundled together into one big flying city. Unfortunately, due to the many issues with the script, we never really get to properly explore the Clutch and most of the other little bits of lore we’re drip-fed are mostly explained to the viewer poorly. However, I can not deny the innate brilliance of Forward’s greatest idea here, and that is the premise. The Doctor preventing a species’ warmongering efforts by becoming they’re generational boogeyman, an urban legend told to the children before bed, is f**king brilliant. Genuinely one of the most interesting ideas I’ve seen for a story in a while and it’s such a shame it had to be written into this one. Still a concept we should definitely return to, perhaps with some better writing. However, I don’t think I could wish for a better performance, Baker pretty much knocks it out of the park playing the Doctor pretending to be a fearsome creature of the night. I actually want to stop a moment to congratulate the whole cast, even when the story was at its slowest, they were the shining light in the darkness. Especially Robin Bowerman (Lisa Bowerman’s older brother as it happens), who plays the “space gypsy” Mordecan; not a particularly enthralling character but Bowerman makes him at least fun to listen to.

What is not fun to listen to, however, is the rest of the story. Something I find Forward really struggles with is that ever so pesky task of visualisation on audio. Perhaps the biggest problem an audio writer will face is conveying meaning aurally without resorting to characters just saying what they’re seeing. It’s a tough issue to overcome but a talented enough author can easily do it and, whilst I certainly hate the tell not show approach, you also do need to make it clear what’s happening half the time. Which is where we run into a problem with Forward, who has a plethora of grand, high-concept ideas to show us but with no actual means of, well, showing us. There are still so many little complexities of Galyari society I’m still unclear on because we never had a moment to understand what they were, things were just introduced without giving the audience any context clues. Maybe Forward is just suited better for novel writing but I found it really difficult to follow along with what was happening, which was also an issue I faced listening to his later story, Dreamtime. But what I find even more of a blatant sin is how utterly dull this script is. I’m not sure if there really was a plot here, this felt like 50% exposition and 50% wandering around until the plot wrapped up. It felt almost aimless, like every problem was just floating about the place until the climax. The entire second part of this story is a Galyari explaining the backstory of the Sandman and let me tell you that a full half hour of exposition followed up by another half-a-story where I was still lost by the plot was frankly insulting. And, whilst I praise the performances, most of the characters here are cookie-cutter role fillers, and most of them feel lacking in personality. And don’t even ask me to try telling the Galyaris apart.

The Sandman was a disappointment in my eyes, full of good ideas that are never fully realised by a seemingly blind script and a lack of explanation. It’s beyond me how a story that dedicates half its runtime to expositing lore dumps still manages to miscommunicate enough for the whole thing to feel undefined, but Simon A. Forward managed to do it. Much better in concept than in execution, The Sandman isn’t an audio I’ll be rushing back to any time soon.

4/10

Pros:

+ The core idea of the Doctor being the boogeyman for a whole species is genius

+ Has a lot of interesting but poorly conveyed ideas.

+ Boasts a cast of particularly great performers

Cons:

- A real lack of adequate description that makes The Sandman an unnecessarily confusing listen

- Almost plotless to the point where entire parts can just be pointless exposition

- Full of indistinguishable if well acted characters

- Devoid of motive or drive

06.08.2022

Excellent premise. Doctor terrorizes a whole species all throughout its history and becomes their boogeyman, one they scare their children with. Why on Earth would he do that? And how would that go?

The story executes this premise brilliantly. I would scold it a little for confusing mechanics like shushkubra. Still how the real villain is contrasted with the Doctor, as well as the nature of the race is enough to give it a 4.5/5.

MR 037: The Sandman

Something something two sides to every story. Or the one where the Sixth Doctor’s coat causes literal physical damage to people's eyes.

There is a legend amongst the reptillion Galyari people of a monster with a rainbow coat who kills children in their beds and weaves their skins into his coat. A bedtime story to scare children into behaving. Except it is absolutely true. Sort of.

The Doctor returns to the Galyari who live on and operate a big fleet. The Doctor uses the term "space gypsies" quite a lot to describe the people who live in the fleet. It actually kind of reminds me of Battlestar Galactica, this massive fleet that sticks together for protection.

When the Doctor meets the Galyari in charge he suddenly starts acting like a comic book super villain and Evelyn is like lol wtf. She's not exactly someone who could be easily fooled by that posturing. She's just annoyed that the Doctor won't get to the point. Which is hilarious and makes sense. Someone older like that doesn't have the patience for that posturing.

The legend is that the Galyari were driven off their homeworld by the Doctor who made this little species of rodent sentient to kick them out because he just hated them in particular.

Naturally, though, the truth was that the Galyari consider every planet they conquer to be their homeworld and the sentient rodents there were the native species. So they were colonizing another world. The Doctor maintained his monster image for thousands of years to try to keep their conquering in check.

Now however we've got a copycat killer on the loose who is emulating the legend and really skinning Galyari alive instead of using the skin of already dead Galyari.

And this is where the story lost me a bit. There was something about the skins of the Galyari being used in a big monument and the copycat killer being able to puppet their skins to attack others? No idea what that was about.

There's also a subplot about a criminal enterprise where one of the rodent species came to offer that monument to the Galyari in exchange for them leaving their homeworld alone this time.

In general though this one was pretty ok. It was cute to see Colin acting like a monster. And because it's the Sixth Doctor you don't know if it's true or not. So that's fun. But it's nothing special, particularly when it starts going into the whole using skins thing and it doesn't make sense.