*Unregenerate* is a weird Story for me, I think I liked it? But honestly, I am not 100% sure on that. It has great Ideas to it, one would even argue superb Ideas. It has a good Doctor/Companion Pairing, who I like, and it has an interesting setting to it and yet.. when I first finished it, I was like, "That's it..?". It's a peculiar feeling, it's competent, and you'd think with its Ideas it would leave a bigger Mark on you, but it simply doesn't.
McCoys Acting here is sadly one of his weakest Outings, I can see what he is going for, sadly it doesn't work for me quite as well. Bonnie on the other Hand is much better and so is the Side cast, but even those can't really save the Story. I will say the earlier parts of it worked much better for me. Maybe it was the Atmosphere or the Intrigue to get the Questions answered, but I don't know, those worked much better compared to like the final Part.

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

“UNREGENERATE! – TOO MUCH MIND FOR ONE BODY?"

David A. McIntee’s Unregenerate! boldly slots itself just after Time and the Rani, making it the earliest Seventh Doctor story in the Big Finish timeline. That alone is an intriguing choice—plunging us into the chaotic fallout of a regeneration that was already abrupt on screen, and playing with the Doctor’s instability in a way that few stories dare to explore.

And what a way to begin: a mysteriously empty TARDIS lands without the Doctor, delivering only a holographic message to a puzzled Mel. Meanwhile, inside a grim and secretive institute, a raving, deranged figure—barely recognisable as the Doctor—screams in agony. Back in the 1950s, a man is recruited for a strange experiment, only to be retrieved the day before his death decades later in the 1990s. It’s eerie, fragmented, and very Seventh Doctor. The tone is closer to the show’s later McCoy seasons than one might expect for something set so early.

The first episode is particularly strong, setting up a layered mystery with a blend of sci-fi paranoia, New Series-style character drama, and classic weirdness. There’s even a touch of The Doctor’s Wife in the premise, as the story delves into what happens when TARDIS consciousness is transplanted into humanoid forms—a concept we’d later see explored more fully in 2011.

MENTAL HEALTH, MANIPULATION, AND MIND MELTDOWNS

The early asylum setting lends the story a psychological edge, but not without problems. The portrayal of mental health care feels rather dated, at times grating and insensitive in its language. It’s a reminder that Doctor Who, for all its ambition, doesn’t always age gracefully in how it approaches sensitive topics.

Still, Sylvester McCoy delivers a gripping performance, playing the Doctor as shattered, incoherent, and intermittently terrifying. His agonised screams are genuinely unsettling, lending real weight to the suggestion that his mind has been damaged beyond repair. Yet, in classic Seventh Doctor fashion, it’s all part of a bigger plan—though one that goes slightly wrong. He’s attempting to expose a dark experiment involving TARDIS minds and dying bodies, but in doing so, accidentally pushes himself too far.

This is where Unregenerate! leans heavily into The Savages-style mind transference, fused with more timey-wimey technobabble than your average Doctor Who story. The institute is conducting experiments on time-sensitive individuals, blending Time Lord technology with ethically dubious intent. The end goal? To create stable, humanoid time travellers who can help regulate the flow of time as other races begin to master it.

MEL GOES SOLO (WITH A CABBIE SIDEKICK)

Mel, too often underused in classic Who, gets a refreshingly proactive role here. After receiving the Doctor’s holographic SOS, she sets off to investigate on her own—with the help of a delightfully confused taxi driver who turns out to be part of the Doctor’s contingency plan. The two make for a fun duo: Mel taking the lead with surprising competence, and the cabbie providing comic relief with his perpetual state of bafflement.

Bonnie Langford plays Mel with real verve, bringing charm and sharpness to a companion often unfairly maligned. Her computer skills and deductive reasoning are given time to shine, and she holds her own in an increasingly surreal situation.

TIME LORDS, TWISTS, AND A STORY BURSTING AT THE SEAMS

As the story progresses, the scope expands dramatically. We learn the Doctor infiltrated the institute deliberately, aiming to expose a Time Lord-backed experiment that’s causing untold suffering. The plan involves TARDIS minds, doomed human hosts, and a secret CIA operation tied to preserving the Web of Time. It's big, bold, and very lore-heavy.

Supporting characters Shokhra and Louis aren’t just side dressing—they’re integral to the plot. Shokhra, a Feledrin multiform alien, helps the Doctor contain the trauma of his fragmented mind. Louis, a fellow Time Lord, ends up regenerating in a moment that adds unexpected weight. These two are vital threads in the Doctor’s complicated gambit, and their inclusion adds texture to the wider universe.

Dr. Kleist, the initial face of the institute, is an interesting figure—cold and scientific, yet slowly forced to reckon with the ethical mess she’s facilitating. She’s eventually challenged by CIA Coordinator Rigan, who takes a more aggressive, power-hungry stance. This rivalry adds another layer of intrigue, but also adds to the already bloated structure of the final act.

Because here’s the issue: Unregenerate! tries to do a lot. There are fascinating ideas throughout, but the final episode becomes a technobabble-heavy tangle of voices, revelations, and plot turns. It’s hard to keep track of who’s doing what, why they’re doing it, or how we got from scene to scene. While the backtracking narrative technique (revisiting earlier scenes from new perspectives) is clever, it doesn’t always help in grounding the story.

A HEADY MIX OF CLASSIC CONCEPTS AND MODERN PARANOIA

Despite the overload, there’s no denying the ambition here. McIntee crafts a story that bridges The Savages, The Doctor’s Wife, and even shades of New Adventures-era paranoia about Time Lord manipulation. It’s a rare tale where the Time Lords are the true villains—corrupt, secretive, and willing to sacrifice lives in the name of temporal control.

The moral centre remains with the Doctor and Mel, both trying (in their own ways) to expose the horror beneath the surface. But there’s something almost New Who about the way it all unravels—a sense of personal cost, institutional betrayal, and a Doctor who carries the weight of too much guilt and too many secrets.

📝VERDICT: 76/100

Unregenerate! is a dense, concept-heavy early Seventh Doctor adventure that leans hard into Time Lord politics, mind-swapping horror, and regeneration trauma. Sylvester McCoy excels as a fragmented, dangerous Doctor operating on the edge of sanity, while Bonnie Langford’s Mel proves herself as an unexpectedly capable investigator in her own right.

The story’s strengths lie in its tone, its ambition, and its fascinating central premise: a Time Lord experiment gone horribly wrong. But the plot ultimately strains under the weight of its own complexity. With too many threads, too much technobabble, and a final act that descends into narrative overload, Unregenerate! feels like a four-parter trying to squeeze in six episodes’ worth of ideas.

Still, it’s a worthy listen for McCoy fans, for those interested in Time Lord intrigue, or for anyone who wants to see what Doctor Who might have looked like if it had tackled post-regeneration madness with a bit more edge.

The Monthly Adventures #070 - "Unregenerate!" by David A. McIntee

I’m sighing as I write this. Unregenerate! isn’t that bad. In fact, very few of the last six audios I’ve listened to have been that bad (with one exception) but god damn there is just nothing to talk about here. Another story with good ideas and a poor execution, neither good nor bad, stuck in a miserably mundane middle ground, a limbo of mehs and whatevers. I’m very tired of this type of story, it’s where the Main Range tends to struggle most: the middle of the road. I can laugh at a bad  story and be enraptured by a good one but a six out of ten? All I can get then is apathy.

Through the echoes of a mysterious institute comes the screams of the insane and one particularly mad time traveller. Separated from the Doctor, Mel begins to look into the mystery surrounding a local insane asylum and the horrific experiments going down in it.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I’ve been putting off writing this review for a while because I’m just so bored with having nothing to write about. I didn’t hate Unregenerate! but I’m also completely unperturbed by the whole thing. The central idea - TARDIS consciousnesses being uploaded into people’s heads on the day of their deaths - is a neat idea that has been somewhat lessened by the future existence of The Doctor’s Wife but oh well.

Unregenerate! has a surprisingly good side cast as well, with members such as the charming unnamed cabbie played by Toby Longworth or the gestalt entity composed of six smaller organisms in a pile, which I find to be a pretty cool alien species. They all feel appropriately deep and have some interesting and varied personalities, which is certainly more than you can say about a lot of these audios.

As for the story, the mystery in the first half was good; the reveal of the institute being a hollow facade was fun and the Doctor’s situation raised some questions but by the second half, I was just not on board with anything happening. It’s a meandering run around empty corridors with a couple so-so action set pieces that eventually comes to a somewhat hokey happy ending. I liked the twist that the institute staff were all Time Lords but it wasn’t enough to keep me invested.

The biggest problems I faced listening to it however was probably McCoy, who’s gone insane due to, I dunno, sciencey stuff and is putting on one of his most grating performances. I love the guy but just let him do dark and brooding, this is too much. It also doesn’t help that it’s only there to create some forced tension and is easily solved when the story wants to be done with it.

And that’s my review. A hell of a lot shorter than usual, I know, but I listened to this two weeks ago at the time of writing this because I couldn’t work out what I wanted to say. And honestly, I still don’t. Unregenerate! is a story, it happened, it ended, and I came out of it luke-warm.

6/10

Pros:

+ Good initial concept

+ Interesting mystery in first half

+ Above average sidecast

Cons:

- McCoy’s insane acting isn’t fantastic

- The story gets more and more uninteresting as it goes on

- The Doctor’s insanity is a non-obstacle that’s easily overcome.

MR 070: Unregenerate!

Or the one where Sylvester McCoy chews the scenery for an hour. There's definitely some interesting stuff going on, but this one is kind of hampered by its format. It could have benefited from being an hour long story instead of a two hour story.

There's a mysterious organization that is abducting people outside of time a day before their death. They make a faustian deal with them to make their lives better in exchange for grabbing them at the last minute.

The Doctor is in this facility having just recently regenerated. He lost his mind and is a gibberish wreck for some reason while Mel is off on a chase with a cabbie that the Doctor directed her towards.

This facility is abducting people to wipe their mind and put in an artificial mind for the purpose of controlling time travel. They can direct the course of time travel research by controlling the minds of those who are time sensitive.

I was thinking that this was something the time lords might do and it turns out they are indeed time lords. It's interesting how the episode tries to disguise them being time lords and use it as a cliffhanger for the last episode. It recontexualizes what's going on. It's very Rassilonian to interfere in the development of another species for your own benefit. They don't want a bunch of other species to have time travel and mess up their precious web of time. The thing that allows them to be dominant in the universe. They see it as a noble purpose but of course they do. They're brainwashed.

And hypocritical. When the show is not doing the changing history is bad/fixed points in time bit that I hate so much, the Doctor regularly changes history and interferes all the time. That's why the Time Lords put him on trial twice, as Mel helpfully points out.

Of course this is not new ground for the CIA. They're the ones who go against traditional time lord rules to preserve time lord supremacy. To actually maintain those rules they have to break them. Cause they're not good rules in the first place.

I like that they first tried this on Daleks and it didn't work. Kind of a precursor to the time War. They knew the Daleks were a threat, clearly with Genesis.

With the recontexualization that these are time lords, we also get that these are not just generic ai, they're mini-tardis intelligences. They're growing tardis intelligence on a computer essentially instead of however tardises are normally grown. The only problem is that a tardis intelligence is way more than a human or time lord brain can contain so it's not a very effective process.

The two newly born tardises commune with the Doctor's tardis to figure out how to make the facility into a tardis themselves and then leave while the Doctor dismantles the program. I do like that one of the characters is a CIA agent and calls them, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not sure why the human cabbie stays but sure I guess.

Like I said, a lot of interesting ideas, but they're mostly in the backhalf after a bloated first half. Condense it down to an hour and this could have been much better. Still it's decent for what it is. If you ignore McCoy's cheese.

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

Previous Story: Time and the Rani

The first half of this story is so utterly boring and annoying that it completely negates the relatively solid second half. We get about an hour of Sylvester McCoy wailing and moaning while Mel tries to find her way around in a taxi. Once all that's done though, it's a fairly decent adventure.

The idea of the CIA (the Time Lord one) trying to graft TARDIS minds into humans is very interesting and a pretty neat way to explore how a TARDIS thinks, reminiscent of The Doctor's Wife only a lot less personal to the Doctor himself. McCoy is really fun to listen to, he gets to give some great speeches and he's generally quite fun once he stops babbling incoherently.

Overall, while I did enjoy this story by the end, it never really gets good enough to recover from that abysmal first half.

Next Story: Red

Doctor Who – The Monthly Adventures

#070. Unregenerate! ~ 8/10

◆ An Introduction

After enduring an utterly abysmal Eurovision parody, and a story with some extremely bad political takes, I’m glad to say that the next few adventures with the Seventh Doctor and Mel are actually really good. Regeneration is an extremely traumatic event, but I doubt it helps when the Celestial Intervention Agency decide to capture you and do extremely unethical neurosurgery on you!

◆ Publisher’s Summary

In a run-down asylum, screams echo in the halls as mysterious creatures roam, terrorizing the staff. Patients complain of betrayal rather than illness, and no-one is quite what they seem.

Mel knows that the Doctor is the best person to find the answers - but she is stranded on Earth, and the TARDIS has returned without him...

Why does a medical facility need to be under armed guard? What procedures are the staff carrying out, and to what purpose? What is the price that must be paid for making an agreement with those who run the asylum?

As the answers begin to be uncovered, the Doctor finds that the past may yet come back to haunt him...

◆ The Seventh Doctor

‘Unregenerate!’ was among the first BigFinish plays I listened to, way back in 2017, and it used to be one I had an intense disliking for. Whilst my opinion on the adventure overall has drastically improved, I can’t say the same for Sylvester McCoy’s performance here – having him spend nearly an hour and thirty minutes babbling away to himself like he’s had one too many bottles of Smirnoff does not make for a fun listening experience (I’m honestly reminded of the abysmal depiction of clinically insane McGann gave us, way back in ‘Minuet in Hell’… and you really don’t wanna be reminding me of that adventure!)

The Doctor’s list of convictions and outstanding warrants would be the envy of anyone in the Underworld, according to Rigan – he apparently has a penchant for overthrowing “legitimate national governments”, and there are even grounds for genocide charges, alongside numerous smaller crimes!

◆ Mel Bush

In complete contrast to McCoy, ‘Unregenerate!’ sees Bonnie Langford absolutely firing on all cylinders and delivering a performance to really be proud of. This is definitely her story.

Mel doesn’t think much of the 21st century, thinking that all people care about is footballer’s haircuts and people who lost silly game-shows (Good god, nobody tell her about Love Island!) The Cabbie thinks she’s a pretty bad liar, and that it shows like a bright red beacon. She’s not a police woman, in fact, she’s a computer programmer. Mel read the entire Sherlock Holmes canon by the time she was nine!

◆ Story Recap

The Klyst Institute is a giant complex hanging in the middle of deep space, ran by the clandestine Celestial Intervention Agency, with the goal of placing TARDIS consciousnesses into organic life-forms. If such an experiment were to be successful, then Gallifrey would have pilots with a perfect understanding of Block Transfer Computation.

The Doctor decided to investigate, only to be driven insane himself, thanks to one of the many TARDIS consciousness the Institute had on hand. Luckily, he had a contingency plan set up just in case something happened to him.

Accompanied by the world’s most charismatic Cabbie, Mel has to infiltrate the Klyst Institute and restore her friend to sanity. Only then can the trio set about dismantling this amoral facility.

◆ TARDIS Grafts

‘Unregenerate!’ was an extremely unique story when it first released, and played around with some brilliant ideas. Having the mind of a TARDIS grafted onto any sort of organic being sounds like a really misguided and stupid thing for the CIA to be doing, and it turns out that that is exactly the case.

The grafts constantly fail and cause the hosts to lose their marbles faster than Paul Gascoigne! Despite all this, Professor Klyst continues to send out her charming assistant to make a deal with many people from across the universe; to make sure they will come to the Institute the day before they die and surrender their minds for “medical science”.

It’s an incredibly fascinating plot, but it does suffer a bit from McIntee’s decision to tell the story with a somewhat non-linear narrative – making use of flashbacks to fill the listener in on how the Doctor actually found out and ended up in the Institute. It does feel like it overcomplicates an already complex adventure.

◆ Good Omens?

Whilst I definitely believe that the ideas on show in ‘Unregenerate!’ are really brilliant, there is another reason why it’s very rarely talked about nowadays. Six years after its release, an incredibly well known writer called Neil Gaiman created a televised Doctor Who story that played around with the idea of TARDIS consciousnesses being implanted into humans… and it’s fair to say that ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ is still considered to be one of the greatest scripts for the revived era (possibly even in the history of the entire franchise). It sadly means that this little BigFinish script is often overshadowed.

◆ Coolest Cabbie in Fiction

Before we move onto the topic of post-production, I just want to say that BigFinish really missed a trick with this adventure. ‘Unregenerate!’ introduces us to a nameless cab driver who acts like a second companion, and I absolutely wish he’d joined the Doctor and Mel on their travels at the end of this story. Massive kudos to Toby Longworth for making the Cabbie such a delightfully roguish and charming character, and someone who deserves the title of “Coolest Cab Driver in Fiction”!

◆ Sound Design

Ian Potter has made the Klyst Institute sound extremely convincing, like someone set up a TASCAM inside of a mental asylum that’s come straight out of a creepypasta!

Screaming inmates and rattling shackles, in the grim corridors of the Institute. A radio broadcast in 1957 informs listeners that the Soviet Union have just launched the Sputnik satellite, before fading into music typical of the decade. A bustling pub in 2007 has loud music playing on the radio, whilst a news anchor talks about the imminent United States and United Kingdom victory in the Iraq War. There is a strange scuttling behind the walls of the Klyst Institute, almost like rats scurrying up and down the place. Alarms blare throughout the Institute, as Rigan initiates a lockdown in K-Wing. The voice of Shokhra is really trippy, with multiple beings speaking in near unison. Rigan and her security staff begin firing old fashioned guns at Mel, the Cabbie and Shokhra.

◆ Music

Haunting, eerie and truly alien, the whistling music here is absolutely gorgeous.

◆ Conclusion

“He’s recently regenerated!”

Those complete mad-lads at the Celestial Intervention Agency are attempting to graft TARDIS consciousnesses onto organic minds, in the hope that they can get some expert pilots out of it. It’s completely amoral, and with the Doctor incapacitated, it’s up to Mel and the Coolest Cab Driver in Fiction to deal with the mysterious Klyst Institute.

‘Unregenerate!’ gets a bit of a bad rap from the fandom, and speaking as someone who used to despise it, I can somewhat understand why. If you can get past McCoy’s questionable performance though, you unlock a really unique and complex adventure (whose ideas would go on to feature in a story that is revered by the entire fandom).

The highlight of this whole adventure is, without a shadow of a doubt, Bonnie Langford and Toby Longworth. The two of them work so incredibly well together, and the fact the Cabbie didn’t become a new companion genuinely hurts my soul. #JusticeForTheCabbie.