Put on some trousers, Pond

Prerequisites: None needed

Space and Time make for a pretty entertaining minisode, if nothing mindblowing. It's got fun character dynamics, and an actual interesting idea at play: what if the Tardis materialized inside itself? Of course, the entire thing is predicated upon the point that it's Amy's fault that men keep looking at her skirt, but I digress. For what it is, this is fun.

Put on some trousers, Pond

Prerequisites: None needed

Space and Time make for a pretty entertaining minisode, if nothing mindblowing. It's got fun character dynamics, and an actual interesting idea at play: what if the Tardis materialized inside itself? Of course, the entire thing is predicated upon the point that it's Amy's fault that men keep looking at her skirt, but I digress. For what it is, this is fun.

Eastended

Honestly, this is pretty fun! I was fully expecting a corporate cringe-fest advertisement, but I actually found myself enjoying the jokes, despite being an American who didn't catch most of the British references. It's still just basically still a commercial, but at least it's a funny one (I suspect it's only because Moffat himself seemed to have written it).

Ghost Train

Prerequisites: None needed for the most part, other than the knowledge that the other stories in this boxset have been with a similar structure of the Master telling a story to an audience.

Signal and I'll Come to You ends this boxset on an alright note. The story the Master tells this time around is pretty engaging, and I did find myself liking the characters. The idea of some entity from the Time War being trapped in a time loop/paradox thing and the Master needing to complete the loop to keep it contained is pretty cool, and I think it's set up decently here. However, as a closer to the overarching story, this audio doesn't satisfy me. The reveal that the Master here is just a projection from his Tardis after he left the Time War is something I'm mixed on. While it does cast the previous stories in a more forgiving light, it also renders them just a bit more pointless, since this is a story thread I'm not particularly interested in. I love the War Master range for displaying just how manipulative, cruel, and even petty the Master can be... and we just don't get a lot of that in this boxset. The Master is more of a side character in nearly every story here, and it just seems like an odd choice for the Handcock era of this range to end on. Somewhat disappointingly, I think I'd call Future Phantoms the worst boxset of this range, and something I wouldn't recommend people buying. Still, this isn't bad by any means, it's just not up to the standards I've come to expect.

He's sitting there... menacingly!

Prerequisites: None needed

The Sitter is easily the strongest story in the boxset so far. I'm still not a huge fan of the whole 'The Master is telling stories' structure, but this particular story is great. It's actually creepy, features some great performances, and is quite well paced. Plus, the ending is super good; really, this is back to the normal level of quality of what I'd expect from this range.

Prerequisites: None needed

Spoilers!
The Foxglove Cylinders, like His Close Companions, is just a bit of an odd War Master story. For one thing, the Master doesn't actively do anything Master-ish. It's extremely unclear what his goal is, what he's done in the past, and why he's even interested in a wax cylinder that presumably contains information he could find in his Tardis. Plus, it's just sorta unclear in the story itself what even was going on; I still don't fully understand the last five minutes. The premise here is decent, but in my view this is just a much worse version of The Life and Loves of Mr. Alexander Bennett. This isn't a terrible story, but it's an odd script for this range.

Boo!

Prerequisites: None needed

His Close Companions isn't a terrible audio, but it is rather the weakest War Master story in the range so far, and it's kinda just disappointing. The concept of the Master telling us a ghost story is honestly great; this range has done great things with horror in the past. However, here it's just pretty bogged down. For one thing, using 2-3 nested framing devices is more silly than it is clever, and it's confusing to hear in an audio drama. I'm of the opinion that this kind of thing works best in a novel (like Dracula). Plus, the central story here is just... not that interesting. The pacing is slow, the characters are dull, and the Master doesn't even do much. He just sort of sits on the sidelines and pushes things around. Maybe there will be some revelation later in the boxset as to what his plans are, but right now, this is absolutely nothing to write home about.

An ending of sorts

Is It Worth It?: I'd say no. For $12, you can get much better audios.

Prerequisites: This is kinda complicated. Despite being literally titled "Coda", it doesn't really rely on knowledge of what happened during Once and Future. You'll want knowledge of who the War and Fugitive Doctors are, but other than that you can go in mostly blind.

Coda is... not great. For starters, I'm really not a fan of how it doesn't even attempt to serve as an actual epilogue to Once and Future. For being an event that occurs directly after The Union, there's barely any mention of the entire event (beyond a few brief references to degeneration). It just seems like a waste. Now, in terms of what the story here DOES do, it's also pretty underwhelming. Of course, there's the admittedly cool novelty of this being the first Fugitive Doctor audio (and it's fun hearing Jo Martin), but there's almost zero character work done here, either on War or Fugitive. Conceptually, it seems like a slam dunk; these Doctors have a lot in common thematically, but while the story has a brief line or two at the end affirming this, I really wanted that aspect to be explored. Instead, both Doctors act out of character, even in the context of the story, as the Council of the Last were apparently influencing their minds. Such a story decision removes a lot of weight from events that occur. Plus, I think it's pretty stupid to introduce an entirely new antagonist in the literal epilogue of a year-long story (and they've only shown up in exactly one audio before this one). Plus plus, Coda's script is just plain overstuffed. There are way too many characters, and most didn't even need to be here (why on Earth would you try to fit Bernice Summerfield, Vienna, the Voord, and Queen Elizabeth I into an hour-long story??). It's almost ridiculous at times. Come to think about it, there's really not that much I like about this story. Like Time Lord Immemorial, it seems like almost a textbook example of how *not* to do a multi-Doctor story. It's crazy, considering that this range has already had actual good multi-Doctor stories.

Confidence

Prerequisites: None needed

I actually liked Slow Beasts the most out of any of the stories in this boxset. For one thing, I love the concept. The idea of a planet with a species of ginormous humanoids who live at a millionth the speed of humans is fascinating, and the story mostly satisfied that curiosity. Yes, it's true that the anti-colonialism message is pretty worn out in these types of stories. Yes, it's true that the conflict was resolved a little too easily at the end, and the Cha-Harr seemed to too easily be willing to let them go. However, I still quite enjoyed this (and it featured one of the funnier moments in this range in memory, with Helen using the psychic paper). This wasn't anything to write home about, but I appreciated it.

Family Ghosts

Prerequisites: None needed, although Albie's Angels gives context to a brief interaction.

Like Birdsong before it, I was pretty unimpressed with Lost Hearts. The concept is solid enough, and even sounds like some quintessential Who fun. There are some spooky moments, and the time paradox the story attempts is fairly well done. My issues lie within the characters: none of them are that interesting. For one thing, we're introduced to Helen's grandfather, but the story doesn't really take that link anywhere interesting. There's a moment where he expresses sexism, but it's later completely glossed over by saying he wasn't in his right mind. Compared to a story like Albie's Angels, this audio just fails to live up to its premise. Beyond this lack of real character moments, this is a decent story, it's just kinda underdeveloped.