The Monthly Adventures #96 - "Valhalla" by Marc Platt

Sometimes you get a story where there is simply so little to talk about that you end up filling your word count with rants about how little there is to talk about. Valhalla is very much one of these stories. Platt is a bizarre writer to me because he both lurks in the legendary annals of fandom, being a key figure in the Wilderness Years, and frequently pens utterly lambasted scripts; for every Spare Parts or Lungbarrow, there’s about five Valhallas. And that makes it seem like this is some travesty, but it's really not. It’s a lot worse. It’s painfully alright.

The lunar colony of Valhalla is a dead end, a commercial centre selling junk and broken dreams. But there’s a new seller in town: he calls himself the Doctor and he’s here about the colony’s bizarre termite infestation.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

If there’s one thing that Platt does undeniably well, it’s atmosphere. From the gothic shroud that encircles Ghost Light to the chilling coldness of the corrupted TARDIS in Time’s Crucible, all his work has a very specific tone to them that helps them stand out from the crowd. And Valhalla is no different, its titular colony being easily its biggest pro. The slapdash, rotting world is brilliantly realised on audio but the script definitely doesn’t slack off either. From the bookable riots to the casual indifference of all the miserable residents, Platt manages to build a powerful setting that truly does envelop you. But that’s also where the problem for me lies, because this audio is utterly, undeniably competent. It’s incredibly well put together in my opinion and there’s very little that’s actively bad, but there’s also very little that’s actively good.

This is a creature feature at heart and it really struggles to be more than that. I find its downfall comes in the fact that rather than go all in on the b-movie aspect of its plot, it tries to make it a more serious and nuanced story about slavery and purpose. In summary, the termites underneath the colony have become intelligent and are planning to enslave and sell the colonists. The Doctor saw an advert for their trade a year in the future and decided to go back and stop them. Now, where this could be a big, shouty, shallow but endlessly fun monster flick, it instead chooses to try and be something deeper, which really shoots it in the foot. The termites, when they’re big scary monsters, are just that: big, scary and monsters. However, during Part Three it’s revealed that they possess human level intelligence, including speech. And it’s here where things really go wrong for me because I find them so boring. There is another story that has faceless, dull, amorphous insects as its antagonist and that story is The Creed of the Kromon so that’s how you know Valhalla f**ked up. I’m not interested in a bunch of personalityless bugs and for the most part, I found them annoying.

Not to mention that the story feels like it's going through the motions the whole time; there is not an original bone in this script’s body, it just trundles along through familiar beat after familiar beat as we wait for the inevitable outsmarting to happen. Not to say that there isn’t something to be enjoyed here: Platt’s pacing is excellent and there’s a very nice rise and fall of action, the momentum never gives up and the story never feels stilted. However, there’s nothing to actually interest me within that movement, the story is completely banal in every way. There’s also an attempt at introspection on the Doctor’s character, with him considering settling down, but it goes nowhere and is basically just window dressing. 

There’s a lot I simply don’t know how to talk about because I felt so apathetic towards it. Michelle Gomez is in this story as a one-time companion but her performance is utterly fine, the character is utterly fine, it doesn’t interest me or enrage me, which is what can be said about a majority of this audio play. It’s a story seeped in derivation with very little making it stand out and that’s super unfortunate, because Platt is a writer who absolutely can do great stuff, this just doesn’t know what it ought to be.

Valhalla is a forgettable story, it’s a story with very little that makes it worth a listen. In fact, the only thing I can think of is the inclusion of Michelle Gomez years before her debut as Missy and if your only claim to fame is the inclusion of a soon-to-be well-known actor, that’s probably not really a positive. There’s very little to say on Valhalla, it’s not actively bad, but it is actively mediocre.

5/10

Pros:

+ Rich and fleshed out world

+ Good pace and momentum

Cons:

- Incredibly generic and unthreatening antagonist

- Plot points are derivative and boring

The Monthly Adventures #95b - "Urban Myths" by Paul Sutton

Urban Myths, much like its predecessor - Urgent Calls - is built off a small but fun idea, this time being “what if Doctor Who did Rashomon?”. Whilst I like this much more than “what if Doctor Who was on the phone?”, this seems to be a lot less beloved story and after the disappointing return that was Exotron, I was expecting some light weight and forgettable fluff. But as it turns out, Urban Myths is absolutely the highlight of this group of stories.

Three CIA agents are gathering in a café. Their conversation: the persecution of violent criminal “The Doctor”. To catch him, they only have to get their stories straight. So why is it they can’t?

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

The thing that instantly strikes me about Urban Myths is that it boasts an idea perfect for the short form. Very often, the downfall of a short story can be that it bites off more than it can chew and what it's trying to tell can only work with a longer runtime. Thankfully, Urban Myths knows precisely what it is, what it wants to do and how long it will take to do that; three people are in a café, each have a different account of the Doctor and Peri’s trip to a fated alien world, except the story keeps changing. Quick, concise, clever, fantastic. 

This was a super fun listen that moves with an excellent pace, the repeating story is versatile and short enough to not drag and there are enough hooks and mysteries set up in quick succession so that it grabs you instantly. There’s also a dark humour to it that I find very unique to this story, comedy being an area Sutton rarely strays but I dig it here, it works excellently.

I’d say my biggest complaint though is that it struggles to maintain the strength of its opening. By the end, it’s gotten pretty predictable and the final retelling feels like going through the motions, being almost entirely different to the other stories and feeling overly convenient so as to wrap things up. However, that doesn’t make Urban Myths not a brilliantly fun listen that is absolutely worth your time and a really nice palette cleanser after the slightly droll Exotron.

7/10

Pros:

+ Really good concept that works excellently in short form

+ Great pacing that hooks you instantly

Cons:

- The idea struggles to maintain its intrigue

The Monthly Adventures #95a - "Exotron" by Paul Sutton

Paul Sutton has risen to be one the most underrated Doctor Who writers for me, penning absolute masterpieces like Arrangements for War as well as underrated gems like No More Lies. And yet, nobody talks about Exotron. Going into this, I saw the cover, I saw the blurb and I went “huh?”. One of the most interpersonal and human Doctor Who writers is doing a story about mechs? Really? Well, no. Exotron turns out to be a love story disguised as an action flick, which falls in line with Sutton’s MO, but what exactly makes it so forgotten?

In a colony base besieged by the titanic Farakosh, an army captain’s invention - the similarly gigantic exotron - defends the population. Upon arrival, the Doctor and Peri find themselves at the centre of a bizarre siege and an even stranger love triangle that threatens to wipe out the colony.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Exotron is a really weird story to me and definitely stands out as the black sheep of Sutton’s body of work, being easily his most underbaked. The story is pretty simple: a colony world is being attacked by the native population and are using giant robots to defend themselves, except that there’s more to the situation than originally appears. Simple, thoroughfare stuff. But Sutton isn’t a simple writer, he specialises in sweeping character epics and you can really feel the clash here. Apparently this was pitched as “Doctor Who with big robots” and then once it actually got picked up, it turned into a more standard Sutton script; you can really feel the difference in opinion in the script because what we get is strained.

Firstly, Sutton does what he does best and I really like the character drama put forth here. Our side cast is generally pretty strong and the central dynamic between Paula, Major Taylor and soldier-turned-exotron Christian is great. It’s a very unconventional kind of dynamic but that’s what I like about it, all these characters have a decent amount of nuance to them I can get behind. The supporting cast also have their moments, with surprisingly endearing ally Mozz getting a genuinely great death scene and giant talking hyena Kucha being oddly likeable. The only member of the cast I didn’t love was big bad Ballantyne, because he felt unneeded and shoved in for a bit of unnecessary drama.

So, Sutton has a really nice character drama going on here but as I said, this is first and foremost a unique take on the base under siege and you can feel how much there is going on. It’s got a lot of fantastic ideas and tonally, it’s incredible -  it balances epic and tragic effortlessly, reminding me a lot of the space opera romance of Arrangements for War - but my main issue with it is one that I find tends to be Sutton’s achilles’ heel: the action feels underbaked.

However, rather than because of something like focus or pace, the story’s simply not long enough to accommodate both the character plot and the action plot. This is once again a three part story and, unlike with I.D., you can absolutely feel that missing part four. Everything here is rushed and underbaked, every plot beat feels like it happens because of convenience and a ton of good ideas get left by the wayside. The Farrakosh are a telepathic race who are mentally tortured by the exotrons’ radio signals? That’s cool, how about we see how their world and society work? Or we could just get the reveal that they’re intelligent in Part Three and then have them do nothing. So much in this story would have benefitted from another twenty five minutes to explain and explore everything but instead we’re just lumped with a really strong A plot and a really weak B plot.

And whilst I really enjoy one half of it, the other is so generic and unengaging that I simply could not get into Exotron. There is some fantastic potential here, especially in the reveal that the exotrons are piloted by the consciousnesses of dead soldiers, but it’s clear that wasn’t the story Paul Sutton wanted to write so all we’re left with is a sweet character study in the middle of a bunch of bland half-concepts. This could’ve been a lot better if not constricted by its format but as it stands, this is by far Sutton’s worst story.

5/10

Pros:

+ Impeccable character writing

+ Tragic and epic tone

+ Full of interesting, interpersonal concepts

Cons:

- You can really feel the missing Part 4

- Ballentyne felt forced

- A lot of the material feels underbaked

Virgin New Adventures #23 - "No Future" by Paul Cornell

Paul Cornell has been, for a very long time, one of my favourite Doctor Who writers ever; and since Rob Shearman never wrote an original Who novel, I can safely call Cornell my favourite author from the Wilderness Years. From the groundbreaking Love and War to the gorgeously rich Goth Opera, Cornell has had a pretty much flawless streak throughout his tenure, so didn’t it come as a surprise that one of his books seemed relatively maligned. No Future is usually brought up as Cornell’s lesser effort - an opinion seemingly even shared by the man himself - so I found myself entering it tenaciously. Especially after the absolute joy that was Conundrum, did I find No Future to be the let down I was told it was?

Somebody has been playing with time. With his TARDIS crew divided and his old home of London falling into anarchy, the Doctor finally enters an end game with an unseen foe. But with even his closest friends turning on him, can the Doctor win this match?

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Let me just begin by saying this is by no means a bad book. Cornell is one of the writers who I think can never do true wrong. All of his books carry an excellent style and characterisation to them and even though this is probably the worst solo effort I’ve seen out of him, it doesn’t lose the charm that makes him so good.

Anyway, let’s recap: this is the end of the alternate time cycle - the arc of books that began way back with Blood Heat - and Cornell has the tall task of wrapping up all the plot threads and reuniting our characters, who have drifted apart in recent novels. Not easy, certainly, but if anybody should be up to the task, it’s this guy. Right? 

Well, first of all, I think No Future is perfectly serviceable in all these departments, the arc is decently concluded by the time it wraps up and we can move on to bigger and better things. However, there are a lot of ups and downs in the way he carries it out. For instance, I think his biggest challenge was probably character since things had become so strained between members of our cast. In my opinion, he succeeds the most with Ace, who is at the forefront of this novel.

Ace, in this iteration, is a soldier, a violent and volatile woman hanging by a thread, ready to turn on her travelling companions at any point. And here, she does. I. Love. This. This is something I have wanted for so long: a companion who actually betrays the TARDIS team in a believable and sympathetic way. Ace has been through some s**t in this series so when she seems to switch sides half way through, we believe it. Do you know how difficult it is to have a character actively try to murder the other leads and still feel sympathetic? It’s like the perfect culmination to where she’s been going since Deceit and I was enraptured with every detail about her heel turn. And then it turns out she was just manipulating the antagonist. Frankly, this is understandable - she still had to be a companion, that wouldn’t really work if she tried to murder the Doctor and Benny in this book. But to that I say: “cowards!”. Do something new, do something fresh, this was predictable! Granted, it’s not bad, it still feels natural and ties off her character growth nicely but personally, I would’ve found it way more interesting if she fully did betray the Doctor here. Although, betrayal or not, this is still a great book for Ace.

As for the rest of our cast, the Doctor is also pretty damn stand out. This seems to be the end of his overly moody phase, which is a relief, but you can really tell how much Cornell gets Seven. The chessmaster is robbed of his board, his pieces retroactively taken away from him, and he has to save the day on his own two feet again. Really, this only works because of his dynamic with our main antagonist - the Monk. The Monk is not a character I would’ve thought would work in the VNAs, he’s a decidedly silly 60s villain whose concept doesn’t really work anymore because the Doctor has turned meddling with time into his MO. However, in came Cornell and he absolutely solved it. One, he doesn’t change the Monk’s character to be darker or anything, this is still a gloating, self-aggrandizing asshole with a huge ego and the book still makes him a threat through his unhinged abilities as a time lord. He’s a really interesting villain because he’s not outwardly threatening and obviously flawed, which we honestly rarely see in these grand, time hopping villains. And then there’s the relationship he has with the Doctor, which is where the real good stuff comes in. To exemplify this, I’ll just talk about my favourite scene in the book; the Monk has captured the Doctor and is monologuing about how he acts all superior and criticises the Monk’s own use of time travel whilst turning around and doing the same thing himself and when he tries to turn it around on the Doctor, ask why he can do it and the Monk can’t, the Doctor just replies: “skill.”. And that single line saves the Monk as a character whilst also perfectly capturing what makes Seven so great. The Doctor meddles with time, sure, but the Monk bulldozes it. There’s so much good stuff between these two, from when the Monk realises he’s nearly revealed his entire plan in a monologue and stops himself to the final confrontation between the two, where the Doctor tries to save the Monk’s life despite everything. They’re really the crutch of this book and were by far the best part.

Nobody else in the cast really hits the same highs but they’re still pretty strong. I can safely say I love Benny now, even if she doesn’t grow that much throughout the book. She joins a punk band and has some great scenes with the Doctor, it’s enough. We also have UNIT returning, which should be an instant positive for me but I do feel their characterisation was a little weak. The Brigadier didn’t feel quite as lovable as usual here, I don’t know how to describe it. However, it’s still UNIT and I’m still happy.

So, our characters are all pretty strong and their development is solid, we can confidently call that part of the story good. But how is the rest? Well, this is where No Future’s failings begin to show themselves because this book can only be described as a mess. So, I mentioned how the Monk was our surprise villain, yeah? Well, so are the Vardans, who have been working with the Monk to invade Earth. But also so is a chronovore that the Monk has trapped in his TARDIS. And that chronovore is talking to Ace in her dreams and also that punk band Benny joined have to do something to save the world and UNIT’s been mostly replaced by Vardans and- it gets cumbersome quickly and ends up being pretty damn hard to follow. You can tell too much stuff needed to be in this book because a lot feels rushed. Scenes happen without context sometimes, whole plot threads barely go anywhere, a lot of the novel feels like filler, it’s a very unpolished novel in my opinion.

And what makes it stranger is that there is genuinely brilliant stuff here; the aforementioned moments between the Monk and the Doctor are obviously the highlight but there are whole stretches of this book that felt like true, 10/10 material, with some incredible ideas and moments of character. The way I’d describe it is I feel like this is a great book that got published a few drafts too early. It’s very rough around the edges and it begins to hurt the story in major ways. For one, the first half is very slow and takes a good hundred pages to get to the real plot and all that great character development is just kind of written off in the end. For as much as I love what this did with our companions, the conclusion is a travesty. Ace was faking the whole time, the last however many books of tension are instantly forgiven and they literally go hand in hand back to the TARDIS. I understand that they had to resolve the tension because it was beginning to impact the stories too much but when half the story is about the end point of that tension being a betrayal, the sudden hokey skip off into the sunset doesn’t hit well at all.

Which is a real shame, because No Future felt so close to being great. The energy is really there, the use of a counter-culture movement in the plot really gives the whole novel such a lively momentum that makes it a super easy read. It’s just that the plot is so cumbersome and poorly handled. I think Cornell did what he had to do and the arc concluded well, but there’s too many plot points being juggled for this to feel satisfying as an individual novel.

6/10

Pros:

+ Incredible introspection of Seven’s character

+ Ace gets some all-time great material

+ Kinetic and rebellious tone

+ Peppered with moments of true greatness

+ The Monk was a surprisingly interesting villain

Cons:

- Overstuffed and incohesive

- Difficult to follow in places

- Pacing is all over the place

- The conclusions to the character arcs are disappointing

The Monthly Adventures #94b - "Urgent Calls" by Eddie Robson

Three audios ago, we looked at Circular Time - the Main Range’s first experiment with format - and I mentioned how it would not be the end of Big Finish’s formula shake ups, with the next experiment beginning here. I.D., uniquelly, is a three part story with an additional short adventure - Urgent Calls - making up the fourth part. Of all the different story formats that were used in The Monthly Adventures, this one seems to be the most polarising and I concur that it does seem the hardest to pull off. But since we have one of my favourite writers - Eddie Robson - creating the jumping off point for this type of story, does it prove itself as a viable format for the Main Range?

Lauren Hudson has just dialed a wrong number, but the man on the other end can save her life. A marvellous coincidence! Right?

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Urgent Calls is a bizarre audio to me because I hear basically nothing but good things about it. The consensus seems to be that I.D. is OK but utterly overshadowed by this story and, whilst I agree that Urgent Calls is better than its three-part predecessor, I don’t think it’s that much better.

Ok, first, the positives. This is a two-hander between Baker and one time guest Kate Brown; I think this entire script relies on these two’s performances and luckily, they’re great. They have a wonderful chemistry and bounce brilliantly off each other, I was relatively invested in the pair by the end.

As for the story, whilst I have complaints I agree that this is done well. The idea is relatively simple - create a story solely through phone calls - but it’s achieved brilliantly. You know I love stories that use their format accordingly and this is no exception, I think the way Urgent Calls presents itself is pretty damn close to ingenious.

However, I find myself really not buying into this one as much as other people seem to do and it’s mainly because of one problem I had with it. It’s a story where, once you understand what it's trying to do, you’ve listened to the entire thing. The plot is relatively weak, with an underdeveloped threat and very little sense of tension of growth and I had basically worked out where it was going from the start. There’s very little to offer here in my opinion and I struggled to get that invested. There’s not much story and even if the performances are good, I don’t think our two characters are unique enough to carry everything by themselves. There was definitely a lot that could’ve been done with the idea but I don’t think the story really makes use of it.

6/10

Pros:

+ The chemistry between the two actors is strong

+ Simple idea done well

Cons:

- Thin on plot

- Once you get the concept, you’ve basically heard the whole story

The Monthly Adventures #94a - "I.D." by Eddie Robson

Three audios ago, we looked at Circular Time - the Main Range’s first experiment with format - and I mentioned how it would not be the end of Big Finish’s formula shake ups, with the next experiment beginning here. I.D., uniquelly, is a three part story with an additional short adventure - Urgent Calls - making up the fourth part. Of all the different story formats that were used in The Monthly Adventures, this one seems to be the most polarising and I concur that it does seem the hardest to pull off. But since we have one of my favourite writers - Eddie Robson - creating the jumping off point for this type of story, does it prove itself as a viable format for the Main Range?

On a planet-sized junkyard, a years-long quest to uncover a mysterious data pack is coming to fruition, but with it something deadly. As crazed robots pick off the employees of a salvage expedition, the Doctor must face down the endpoint of genetic science.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I.D. is, by itself, an utterly fine story. It’s often overshadowed by its much more beloved sister story Urgent Calls (I am uploading a review for that alongside this, by the way) but taken out of the shadow of its partner, we’re left with a fun if messy episode of Doctor Who. First of all, this is an Eddie Robson script and I think Robson is a writer who, even in his worst stories, has some consistent strengths. For one, I think our sidecast is altogether pretty strong; yeah, maybe Gabe is a little underdeveloped - especially considering his prominence in the third act - but the rest are all relatively impressive. I think Bridge worked great as a one time companion and the detail of her having artificially removed her ability to feel guilt is a great, dystopian concept. Doctor Marriott was a convincing antagonist with believably petty goals and Atkinson-Wood’s performance as both Ms. Tevez and Tindell is incredibly strong, with the two personalities appropriately distinct.

I think another thing Robson tends to excel at is pace and I.D. is very good at keeping a momentum, the story beginning swiftly and moving at a good speed right up until its final moments. This is a very action heavy script, which can often be difficult to do on audio, but Robson manages it incredibly well, with a lot of high-speed chases and tense situations filling out the runtime. There’s a real kinetic element to this story that makes it an incredibly breezy listen.

However, the actual quality of the plot varies. For a story that is shorter than the average Monthly Adventure, I.D. manages to be more overstuffed than even the series’ longest entries. The plot changes maybe three times throughout, first being about corrupted “scan-droids” going haywire, then about a mad scientist uploading his consciousness into one of the characters and then in the final part it suddenly becomes about people turning into mutant creatures because of some failed genome project. It’s very haphazard and does make the whole script feel very jumpy; the story wraps up about halfway through and then just feels artificially inflated.

I also think the script feels a little surface level. Sure, it’s definitely intended to be more spectacle than anything but even then, there are just some basic things that seem overlooked. For instance, it has a really weird relationship with death. Like, at one point a character’s mother is killed and he seems sad about it for all of five seconds; it barely impacts how he behaves throughout the rest of the story. This is a trend I find to be consistent with most of the cast. And it’s little things like this and Robson’s decision to not be more introspective about his central concepts that make I.D. feel so lightweight for me. The setting is rich and interesting and detailed and I love the idea of personality grafts becoming a trend but all he really does with it is use it to turn people into spooky monsters, which feels a lot more shallow than that should’ve been.

I.D. is by no means bad; as with most Robson scripts, it’s pretty damn fun but there is a reason it’s so under-talked about. It’s a decent story but it struggles to rise up above the crowd and just ends up being sort of mediocre, with a messy script and a lack of deeper meaning. It’s a good time, just not a memorable one.

6/10

Pros:

+ Well developed cast

+ Good pacing and action

+ Interesting and well realised setting

Cons:

- Narratively all over the place

- Thematically shallow

The Monthly Adventures #92 - “Renaissance of the Daleks” by Christopher H. Bidmead

Christopher Bidmead, for me, represents the failings of Classic Who’s second half, being the progenitor of the hard sci-fi elements and tonal disparities that would eventually tank the show in the 80s. Whilst I think there is a lot to love in Season 18 and even in some Bidmead scripts (I unironically think Castrovalva is good fun), he’s still become a figurehead for Doctor Who’s failings in my opinion, and nowhere does that feel more evident than Renaissance of the Daleks. From a turbulent production to a thoroughly weak script, I find Bidmead’s only contribution to the Main Range to be a distillation of his worst qualities and, unless my opinion softens on this with hindsight, one of my least favourite Dalek stories ever.

A ripple in time and the emergence of a bizarre toy line lead the Doctor and Nyssa on a trans-temporal adventure, where a plan of epic proportions is being set into motion by one of the Doctor’s oldest enemies.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

The reason this story is credited as “based on a story by Christopher H. Bidmead” is because apparently, there were some behind the scenes issues and Briggs had to come in and rewrite a lot of the story, to the point where Bidmead disowned it. Now, when I first learned this, I thought I had found out why Renaissance of the Daleks is such a mess, hasty rewrites often being the death knell of otherwise healthy scripts. But then I found out just why it was changed, and I realised this was doomed from the beginning.

Easily, Bidmead’s best quality is his ability as a sci-fi writer. The alien worlds and concepts he uses are all pretty damn good and even quite charming. I loved the scenery of the new Dalek homeworld, especially the city literally made out of Dalek casings shaped into walls, that’s a super fun idea I haven’t seen before. And even in places I didn’t like, I can admire the ambition. The Daleks turning themselves into toys to secretly invade Earth is an idea that should’ve been explored so much more than it was. Same thing with the nano-Dalek stuff, these could be relatively quaint plot points but they’re all presented in really haphazard ways. If this script had been a little cleaner, I could even say it felt similar to some speculative 60s fiction but unfortunately, the rest is too much of a let down for me to really think that.

But why does the script not work exactly? Well, I think its biggest problem is that it's cumbersome. There are a lot of ideas in this one and practically none are well explored. Not to mention the huge cast of nobodies that we’re constantly having to juggle. So, we have a general from an alternate Earth where the Daleks didn’t invade, his nephew, a Knight’s templar, a former slave and a Vietnam veteran all running around and Bidmead does a really bad job at fleshing them out. Apparently, there were going to be more characters before the impromptu rewrites, so I can only imagine how clumsy that would’ve been. Also doesn’t help that our cast is pretty awful; I really struggled to buy into a lot of the characters, especially when they’re speaking in god awful fake American accents. Even Sarah Sutton is doing pretty badly here with a lot of Nyssa’s lines being delivered very flatly.

The story really isn’t much better either. The first half is like a worse version of Castrovalva’s TARDIS tag, with our cast chasing after dumb little toy Daleks and picking up random side characters every now and again. It’s mind numbing by the halfway point and it’s an absolute godsend when we finally get to the actual, full sized Daleks. But then it’s at this point that Renaissance of the Daleks completely loses the plot because Bidmead starts trying to manage all of his different narrative threads at once and it utterly crushes the story. I will say, I liked the pace a lot better in the final part and there were a few moments I really liked, such as General Tillington and his nephew Will being wiped out of history by the Doctor stopping the Daleks; it was a great moment delivered with appropriate gravitas. Unfortunately, there’s very little else about this climax I’d complement, mostly because I barely remember it. There’s a lot going on and by this point I had mostly checked out, utterly destroyed by the first hour and half of aimless running about.

Just to give you an idea about how overbloated this third act is, you have: the alternate timeline, the nano-Daleks, the Dalek hybrid thing called the Greylish, the TARDIS getting weaponised, time anomalies everywhere, about half a dozen little details that came and went in seconds, it’s incredibly difficult to keep up and I’m still not entirely sure how everything wrapped up. It also doesn’t help that I was distinctly uninvested for a majority of the story. Sure, it feels cinematic and I can buy into the stakes of the episode but the pacing is abysmal and the Daleks feel lifeless. It’s one of those stories where they turn into a miscellaneous ton of robots instead of being genuinely threatening and their weird “seed Dalek” takes precedent for the climax, further nullifying their involvement. Tonal issues also affect my rating because it acts like it wants to be some dramatic, tense epic with the whole world at stake but then has such goofy ideas like the miniature Daleks or the array of cartoon characters we have as a side cast. If Renaissance had tried to be a little more like The Chase in tone, it might’ve been a lot better.

As it stands however, this is just the absolute lowest lows of Bidmead. An indecipherable, overbloated chore with too much going on and no way to handle it all. Everything from the barren cover to the miserable cast makes it feel like nobody wanted to do this story, resulting in a toneless, unimpressive and miserable experience. This is an audio I am in no way enthusiastic for, either positively or negatively, it’s just a bit crap.

3/10

Pros:

+ Some really unique and interesting imagery

+ The scope feels very large and cinematic

+ The climax picks up the pace a little

Cons:

- Both incredibly dense and lacking in depth

- The entire sidecast is made up of poorly-acted caricatures

- The structure and pacing is haphazardly thrown together

- The Daleks are a non-threat

- Mind-numbingly dull for most of its runtime

The Monthly Adventures #92 - "Nocturne" by Dan Abnett

There is a comfort in formula. I have often been a campaigner for the seven out of ten, for the pieces of media that strive to be nothing more than a pleasant and predictable time. Just look at Ubisoft’s entire game catalogue: formulaic but enjoyable all the same. Doctor Who is an interesting example of this phenomenon, because it both heavily relies on constant change and a lingering sense of familiarity, sometimes leading the generic stories to be good pieces of fun, and sometimes making them feel like they got old a couple decades ago. Nocturne is a script that teeters on the precipice between these two aspects of formula, constantly begging to be a classically thoroughfare runaround, but barrel rolling into pure, dreadful boredom. But does that mean there is nothing of quality to note?

The artist’s paradise of Glast City is a favourite getaway of the Doctor’s, whose oftentimes gone to peruse its concrete streets and vibrant art scene. But this time, something’s wrong. A violent murder by an unseen killer has set off a chain of events, and it all leads back to the disappearance of a troubled young composer.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Nocturne, for all its faults, has the makings of a great Doctor Who script. An utterly alien world deep in the throes of a renaissance, stalked by an unnatural killer brought to life by an abnormal musical composition. You could really do anything with the premise - from deep and gorgeously atmospheric world building to heart pounding tension - but instead, what we get is really nothing at all. Nocturne lacks the heart it needs to be truly brilliant and it adheres to no single tone or aim, simply opting for a bare bones structure reminiscent of some of Doctor Who’s oldest tropes. Some of the slower moments are saved by Abnett’s inherent skill as a writer, but most of this script drags like hell.

It’s competent enough to not be a complete trash fire and I at least liked a few of the ideas. The war torn, brutalist cityscape of Glast City was a brilliantly evocative location and the ideas of a future renaissance seems like a no brainer. I’ve brought this up in other reviews, but I adore when we run into little connections the Doctor has made in unseen travels, like, for instance, his firm friendships with a number of the major talents in the city. It’s things like this that made Nocturne feel like a real, lived in setting and I was decently immersed the whole way through the audio.

Another thing I’d like to throw praise towards is the idea for our antagonist: an empathetic, living piece of music that pulls emotion from wherever it’s composed; Nocturne, being a war-torn planet, has caused it to become incredibly deadly and begin hunting down and killing artists. You already know I adore villains that make use of their story’s format and the idea of living music being the villain of an audio play is incredible. Unfortunately, very little is done with it.

The biggest sin of Nocturne is probably the fact that it’s just wasted potential. The story could’ve been something super fun - maybe even great - but all we get is a derivative chore that moves at the pace of a stalled car. There’s so little here I would dare to call innovative or original, a good 90% of what we see is clichéd. We have the Doctor being called a spy, a random self sacrifice, robots getting corrupted by the antagonist, scene after scene of rehashed dialogue and story beats. By the end of its runtime, Nocturne had become exhausting.

And the thing that really clinches it for me is our sidecast, who are just awful in every regard. There is not a single person here who feels unique or memorable, every performance is fine and every character is serviceable. Except one, actually; the police chief Reeney was a confoundingly terrible character and I feel I have to bring her up. So, she’s the deliverer of the whole “he’s a spy!” speech (which she ends up doing twice, by the way) and her entire character flip flops depending on if the script needs padding. She arrests both the Doctor and Hex, assumes they’re both spies and murderers for literally no reason and then immediately trusts and is subservient to them for again, literally no reason. It’s moments and beats like this that really destroy Nocturne for me.

And the plot is full of them. I think the most egregious is when a character randomly decides she’s on the side of the psychotic living music entity (it was set up in one scene and not very well) just for some pointlessly shoehorned in tension. However, Abnett also manages to slip in some bizarrely great moments here and there too. Notably, veteran Will’s conversation with Ace as to his short time in at war is genuinely heartbreaking and phenomenally acted, which is weird because so little else is. And then there’s Ace’s conversation with the Doctor as to his duplicitous tendencies or the music creature being driven off by a character’s terrible poetry. There are moments of genuinely great Doctor Who in Nocturne, but that’s all they are, moments, reprieves.

Inherently, there is nothing wrong with formula. However, there is something wrong with blandness. Nocturne is not a story I would say is worth listening to, because its moments of greatness are brief and the rest derivation that can be found in better stories. It’s a competent script with some genuine merit but an astoundingly small amount of worth. Could’ve been so much better than it was, unfortunately.

5/10

Pros:

+ Great idea for a setting

+ The antagonist was a really cool concept

+ Peppered with moments of fantastic quality

Cons:

- Utterly derivative

- Dreadfully boring side cast

- Straight forward and predictable plot

The Monthly Adventures #91d - "Winter" by Paul Cornell

Circular Time is the first example of something I’ve been awaiting since I began this review marathon: the anthologies. Consisting of four short stories rather than a collective narrative, the anthologies were always going to be a challenge to review since they’re technically four stories in one and so four reviews in one. The best work around I could think of is just to write four short reviews, so today, we begin our journey down the road of short fiction. And luckily, we just so happen to have a collection written by one of my favourite authors. Well, half of it anyway.

A recurring dream leads Nyssa to find the Doctor trapped within a mysterious mental construct, and with him an approaching force.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Winter really should be my favourite story in this anthology. A gorgeous idea set in a haunting dreamscape with themes of death and acceptance abound, there’s very little I shouldn’t have disliked here. And yet, there’s one or two things that knock it down just below Autumn for me.

Ok, first things first, this is an absolutely wonderful send off to Five, set during his death as the Master tries to prevent him from regenerating. The final few minutes were absolutely stunning and the little inclusions of the lines from The Caves of Androzani were a lovely touch. I’ve never considered Five a favourite but this moment still really got me, it felt like such a fittingly poetic end.

The atmosphere is also on top form, Cornell captures dream-like feelings effortlessly and it was truly engrossing all the way through. Unfortunately, the story wasn’t quite the same. I love the idea here and the second half but so much of Winter just feels like circling around a drain. In this dream reality, the Doctor thinks he’s married with children, which isn’t as much of a novel concept as it once was. This whole section is pointless and you could cut out a lot of fluff surrounding it. There’s a really neat idea in here, but we don’t see it properly because that isn’t what Winter’s about. And in the end, it’s wrapped up too quickly because the story needs to move on and so just drops the whole plotline in a super unsatisfying way.

And that’s a shame because other than what I feel is vaguely interesting fluff, Winter is a beautiful send off to Circular Time - a rich, poetic anthology bursting at the seams with imagery. I really enjoyed this collection, even though it was a little scuffed at the edges, and I think it’s a great pilot for this format. I’m looking forward to seeing how the other anthologies compare.

7/10

Pros:

+ Really beautiful send off to Five

+ Captures a dreamlike tone brilliantly

Cons:

- Half the story feels pointless

- Conclusion came too readily

The Monthly Adventures #91c - "Autumn" by Paul Cornell

Circular Time is the first example of something I’ve been awaiting since I began this review marathon: the anthologies. Consisting of four short stories rather than a collective narrative, the anthologies were always going to be a challenge to review since they’re technically four stories in one and so four reviews in one. The best work around I could think of is just to write four short reviews, so today, we begin our journey down the road of short fiction. And luckily, we just so happen to have a collection written by one of my favourite authors. Well, half of it anyway.

A holiday in the small town of Stockbridge playing cricket quickly turns sour, when local politics and an unprecedented romance aim to derail the Doctor and Nyssa’s travels.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

If you had told me a low stakes romance would be my favourite entry into this anthology before I listened to it, I would not have believed you. And yet, here comes Paul Cornell to do his usual bit of grabbing my heartstrings by the throat and garotting them. 

I don’t usually like romances, they just don’t appeal to my tastes and as an aroace person, I often find them unrelatable but what I can get behind is some glorious character development. Nyssa was a companion that really needed an episode like this - actually, you could say that for every 80s companion - and every single moment we get with her is pure gold. I love how she considers leaving the TARDIS, how well she settles into life in the 20th century, how she deals with her memories of Traken. Plus, Andrew’s a very down to earth and believable character, who manages some nice chemistry with Nyssa.

The Doctor, also, has some great material here. His relationship to cricket is surprisingly profound and his reaction to realising Nyssa might leave him is genuinely heartbreaking. I think Cornell focussed maybe a little too much on Nyssa’s plotline and the Doctor’s subplot could’ve used a little more attention, because its emotional ending doesn’t hit quite as hard as Nyssa’s did.

However, there’s one thing really holding Autumn back for me: despite what I said, I still don’t really jive with it. Especially the early scenes just feel kind of awkward to me and whilst I think critically there’s very little wrong with the story, my enjoyment was not 100%.

8/10

Pros:

+ Provides stunning development for both Five and Nyssa

+ Effectively creates whole character arcs in a short amount of time

Cons:

- The cricket plotline was somewhat sidelined

- Personally, not my kind of story

The Monthly Adventures #91b - "Summer" by Mike Maddox

Circular Time is the first example of something I’ve been awaiting since I began this review marathon: the anthologies. Consisting of four short stories rather than a collective narrative, the anthologies were always going to be a challenge to review since they’re technically four stories in one and so four reviews in one. The best work around I could think of is just to write four short reviews, so today, we begin our journey down the road of short fiction. And luckily, we just so happen to have a collection written by one of my favourite authors. Well, half of it anyway.

A blunder in a renaissance England public house leads to the Doctor and Nyssa’s imprisonment, only for an anachronistic artefact to catch the eye of their jailor: Sir Isaac Newton.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

If Mike Maddox’s biggest mistake with the last story was having too much to say, this is the complete opposite. Summer is definitely the most fun out of the anthology but it is very obvious it was a single idea that got blown up into a whole story.

Firstly, this is a fun script. Maddox writes humour very well and the pacing is great. The characters don’t feel wasted and the time is used well. I loved all the little gags in this, from the drowsy prison guards to Five reciting Pertwee’s “I Am the Doctor” whilst practicing alchemy.

Summer also does something that I always love in historical stories: realistic characters. Rather than doing the New Who take of “wow, look at this person, aren’t they so cool and perfect!’, Isaac Newton is an actual person with actual flaws and they are all on full display. His genius mixed with an insatiable ego genuinely makes him feel alive and his monologues were enjoyable because of how he was written and David Warner’s excellent performance.

However, there was really only one idea with this story. Isaac Newton works out the whole plot of Doctor Who through a coin, everything other than that is window dressing. Summer is a fun story but I hesitate to call it great, it’s very lightweight and you’re not going to leave it feeling entirely fulfilled.

7/10

Pros:

+ Decent bit of fun

+ Makes good use of its length

+ Good depiction of historical figures

Cons:

- Almost entirely uneventful

The Monthly Adventures #91a - "Spring" by Mike Maddox

Circular Time is the first example of something I’ve been awaiting since I began this review marathon: the anthologies. Consisting of four short stories rather than a collective narrative, the anthologies were always going to be a challenge to review since they’re technically four stories in one and so four reviews in one. The best work around I could think of is just to write four short reviews, so today, we begin our journey down the road of short fiction. And luckily, we just so happen to have a collection written by one of my favourite authors. Well, half of it anyway.

Assigned by the Time Lords to track down a renegade, the Doctor finds himself at the heart of a deadly tradition and the return of a godly prophet.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

The opening to Circular Time was definitely not what I expected. The theme of this anthology seems to be somewhat vague, but the actual link between stories doesn’t begin until Cornell’s half. So, what we have firstly is a massively trimmed down political thriller about birds and a really f**ked up legal system. The thing that really stood out to me about Spring was the worldbuilding. Mike Maddox manages to create a believable society in only about thirty minutes and it’s wildly impressive how alive everything feels. I like how alien everything is, and how he manages to call out some tropes surrounding these types of stories. The beats about perspective and respect of other cultures is really interesting and some truly fantastic stuff.

The material on Time Lord interference and the Doctor’s relationship to them is also great. I like when Zero calls out the Doctor for obviously working with the Time Lords and even being Gallifrey’s president at one point, despite his supposed denouncement of them. These are things that were never really explored in the classic era and I’ll eat up any introspective analysis of the Doctor’s character.

Unfortunately, this story doesn’t stick the landing for me because of one simple mistake: it bites off more than it can chew. This is an idea common with short fiction, when the author uses a concept that simply can’t work in the allotted time frame. All the interesting world building and moral quandaries sort of go out the window towards the end and the story doesn’t actually bring any real analysis to these questions. It asks them but then chickens out when it comes to following them up. This really felt like half a story and I think it probably would’ve worked much better as a Companion Chronicle.

Also, I don’t know what was happening with the score here, but it is really very bad. Like seriously, I don’t know whose idea it was for the horrible squawking sound effects but it genuinely gave me a visceral reaction.

Spring raises some interesting points and it’s a decent introduction to this collection, but falls apart due to one of the classic sins of short fiction. Things will only get better from here.

6/10

Pros:

+ Really great worldbuilding in a short amount of time

+ Posits some great questions about interference and Time Lord involvement

Cons:

- Completely abandons most of its interesting themes by the end

- Needed more runtime

- Atrocious score

The Monthly Adventures #90 - "Year of the Pig" by Matthew Sweet

Wow, people really don’t like this one, do they? I’ve listened to Matthew Sweet’s work before - namely The Magic Mousetrap further along in The Monthly Adventures - but I distinctly remember struggling with that one due to a disappointing story and number of half baked tonal decisions. So, my expectations going into the rather maligned Year of the Pig were low and yet, what I got I can genuinely say I loved. But why is that? Why did I love this when so many didn’t? What separates this from my previous views on Sweet as a writer? And what exactly was going on with that pig?

A reading holiday for the Doctor and Peri is foiled when the pair find themselves wrapped up in the hunt for a mysterious circus performer. One with a ceaseless appetite, impeccably good manners, a snout and trotters.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I can fully understand why this story is disliked. It’s most definitely a matter of taste and even though I enjoyed the audio, I can admit where its obvious faults lie. This entire thing is just conversations, and I think you should know that before going in. There are one or two admittedly pretty good scenes of action but a solid 90% of the runtime is taken up by characters having pleasant chats with one another over a constantly increasing list of different foodstuffs. But even then, these are some entertaining bits of back and forth. I think the thing that really clinches it for me is the cast; these characters could so easily be unbearable if the casting on this story wasn’t incredible. The personalities are heightened, the characters characterful, a couple seem more quirk than person but then you have actors like Michael Keeting, Adjoa Andoh and even Maureen O’Brien. Each one of these impressive performers gives this decidedly unserious story their all and I think without such a strong list of people behind it, I would’ve enjoyed this a lot less.

Not to say I don’t believe it has merit of its own, quite the contrary in fact. I think the dialogue is a real strongpoint of this story and moves with fantastic pace, which is lucky considering how much of this script is dialogue. It hits that nice balance of witty and believable and each character feels equally distinct. And even though the plot mainly consists of various luncheons, I think it works incredibly well. I fully thought I had the whole thing worked out by the halfway point but then it kept on throwing twists at me. It’s not blow-your-mind crazy but it’s enough to feel like a satisfying resolution. The pacing is good, the plot is interesting, the reveals are great. For all intents and purposes, I found this whole story an incredibly solid Doctor Who adventure.

So where is it this story goes wrong for so many? I think the main thing is that a lot of people didn’t take to the structure, what with the relatively drawn out lengths of dialogue and only short bursts of action. Now, I was hardly bothered by this, but I do have to concede with a different aspect. This story is way too long, clocking in at just over two and half hours. Now, very few Doctor Who scripts should last that long, but even less so when we’re considering the actual amount of things this story had to say. By the end, we’re basically just having the same conversation over and over again and there was a point where I realised a good chunk of this could have been cut out. And yes, even though it didn’t particularly bother me like it did to others, this story needed more stuff happening. It relies far too much on its central joke of a talking pig and struggles to move past it, causing a very large chunk of the plot to take a hit.

However, even then, I feel other reviews exaggerate this point. There are still a number of really fun moments, like the halfway-point cliffhanger or the opening scene of Six saving a man from drowning. My favourite moment was probably when Chardalot tries to kill the Doctor with a “time bomb” (a bomb that literally affects time as well as space), as the scene has some really nice tension and a pretty good idea behind it. Not only that but it’s even decently set up by an earlier scene where dead cows began raining from the sky. Yeah, I haven’t mentioned how weird Year of the Pig is yet, have I? First and foremost, this is a comedy, and I really dig its style. As I said before, this story is zany and is full of tons of personality but never loses its emotional core. Sweet has some real comedic chops and I like how he never went too full on with the humour, allowing it to settle in the background. It’s a tonal balance that really aided this story in my opinion.

Whilst I can see where the dislike for this story stems from, I do disagree with a lot of the points. This is a genuinely great comedy with an incredible cast and a decent story. Perhaps overbloated at points, yes, but this has got me interested in Matthew Sweet’s other works, and I’m wondering if I’ll change my mind on The Magic Mousetrap when I eventually get around to it. Until then, I’ll just be content with this hidden gem.

8/10

Pros:

+ All star cast on top form

+ The dialogue is snappy and witty

+ Interesting plot that unfurled nicely

+ Pretty funny at times

Cons:

- Far too long for what it is

- Too much of the runtime is made up of small talk

The Monthly Adventures #89 - "No Man's Land" by Martin Day

We’ve seen our fair share of World War Two stories in Doctor Who, from chess matches with Fenric to escapades with gas mask zombies. Yet somehow, World War One is often missed. There’s something about the mud-caked misery of the Great War that seems ripe for story telling and yet it’s bigger, deadlier brother seems to always hog the spotlight. Because of this, the plot to No Man’s Land initially intrigued me, with shady experiments going down in a world war one hospital, but upon listening to it, I found my expectations matched in some places but utterly missed in others.

Rescued from the middle of No Man’s Land, the Doctor, Ace and Hex are transported to an army hospital, where they find they are to investigate a murder - one that hasn’t happened yet. A grisly product of time travel? Or something far more human?

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

When I think of the First World War as a setting, I think trenches, I think misery, I think tension, I think despair. Whilst No Man’s Land doesn’t quite manage a few of those points, I think it for the most part manages to capture the atmosphere of the time period well, the mildewed halls of the old army hospital vivid in my head. The scenes actually set in the titular No Man’s Land are also incredibly tense and even somewhat surreal, what with the fact we never actually see the enemy, only the death they cause. Superficially, this audio succeeds.

But of course, my main concern is always going to be story and if an audio can’t get that right, it’s usually going to lose my favour. The blurb instantly grabbed me; I adore the idea of “investigating a murder that hasn’t happened yet” and I was really looking forward to a timey-wimey murder mystery, á la The Chimes of Midnight. What I got wasn’t that but I can confidently say the mystery had me intrigued for at least the first half. I think there could’ve been bits and pieces it could've tightened up and I wasn’t exactly on the edge of my seat, but it kept the plot moving and kept me interested, which is all it needed to do.

And to carry any good mystery, you have to have a good cast. I am happy to say that No Man’s Land has an especially strong group of characters leading it, from the sympathetic Taylor to the brutish Sergeant Wood. Our main antagonist, the duplicitous Brooks, also excels and I think Michael Cochrane’s performance captures the descent from disarmingly amicable to full on crazy super well. As for our main cast, we get good performances out of everybody but I don’t love how Ace and Hex are written here. Hex gets sort of brainwashed pretty early on in the story but literally the only thing that comes of it is him and Ace bickering like it’s the JNT era.

Finally, something that really stood out to me in No Man’s Land was the use of theming and imagery. The basic plot boils down to a rogue army captain brainwashing troopers into becoming perfect soldiers by ridding them of feelings of regret or cowardice, but only succeeding in turning them into raging psychopaths. It’s a pretty simple anti-war message but it’s done fantastically, and I love scenes like Taylor describing how he couldn’t bring himself to kill a German soldier when he had the chance or the final conversation between our surviving characters. The criticisms of the concepts of cowardice that killed so many during this war is excellently explored and for all of the problems I think plague this script, Day really excelled when it came to the subtext.

But like I said, I have some problems. First and foremost, this story just really does not interest me. I don’t know how else to put this, but especially once the initial mystery wraps up halfway through, I found the story to thoroughly uninvest me. It moves along incredibly slowly and the fact that this is only two hours long is astounding because it felt like so much more. The biggest detractor is tension because for whatever reason, at no point did I feel particularly worried about what was going to happen. It’s a slow burn story applied to a script that really needed a little more action or compelling build up. When the soldiers finally lose it in the final part and kill Brooks, that should feel like an explosion the whole story’s been building up to. Instead, it sort of just happens and I feel absolutely nothing in the way of pay off.

It also doesn’t help that the script keeps doing too many things at once. Some of the plot lines don’t go anywhere; I’ve already mentioned how Hex’s brainwashing is entirely incidental but there’s also stuff like the insane private they meet at the very end immediately losing it or Sergeant Wood dying halfway through. Even that central mystery feels like a copout. Turns out, there’s no kind of time travel involved, Taylor just heard the Doctor, Ace and Hex’s names when they arrived in No Man’s Land, and then in his sleep wrote the army summons naming them and the murder they were trying to investigate was his subconscious feeling that he would kill somebody. It’s unbelievably contrived and an absolute let down after the descent mystery that preceded it. Not to mention, once Taylor actually kills Woods, that whole plot line is mostly dropped, no true consequences come out of Taylor’s crime.

No Man’s Land is by no means a bad story, it has a great number of strengths and some really strong thematic elements. It’s just that its script is kind of weak. The story doesn’t grab me but there’s definitely a lot to love here and I feel like with a little more focus in certain areas, this could’ve been a whole lot better. As it stands, it’s yet another story that ends up being just fine.

6/10

Pros:

+ Interesting cast

+ Fantastically evocative setting

+ Decent central mystery

+ Well realised themes and imagery

Cons:

- Slow script that fails to invest me

- A lot of plot lines feel like they go nowhere

- Wasn’t particularly tense or exciting

The Monthly Adventures #88 - "Memory Lane" by Eddie Robson

The TARDIS team of Eight, Charley and C’rizz is, I believe, the most underappreciated and underdeveloped set of lead characters we’ve ever gotten; one of the best depictions of the family dynamic trope, C’rizz’s darker leanings, the chemistry between all three cast members, it’s genuinely really great stuff and the idea of a full fledged alien being the companion is one I wish the show would explore more. Unfortunately, the focus on the Divergence Saga kind of killed the character development, the audios afterwards got buried beneath their blossoming team of Seven, Ace and Hex and repeatedly, writers missed opportunities to do interesting things with the characters. The next story with these leads will be Absolution, which is when they begin to exit the show, so did Memory Lane manage to strengthen our characters at the eleventh hour? Let’s find out.

An idyllic Summer’s afternoon in suburbia is interrupted by the arrival of three travellers, who find something very strange is going on. The houses are all identical, down to their occupants, and the street goes on forever. What’s more, something wants them to stay.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Eddie Robson is one of those writers who, even at his worst, will make a compelling script. His style, humour and pacing is all near perfect and you can expect to come out of his stories having at least had a good time. And that’s just what Memory Lane is, it’s fun. Whilst I think this omits some much needed deeper levels of complexity, take it out of its arc, take it away from previous stories, and you have an absolute blast of a script. Firstly, the idea is amazing - take the uniform endlessness of suburbia, and crank it up to eleven. The setting and the exploration of it were by far the best things about the story and what I enjoyed the most; this is a good sci-fi concept taken to its furthest extreme and fully explored. 

Furthermore, Robson’s understated comedic leanings really shine through. The pacing is fast but not inconsiderate, everything evolves and flows naturally throughout. The scenes are snappy, the dialogue is witty and plot points are never around long enough to exhaust themselves. This is an expertly balanced piece of writing that knows when to move its story along. Carrying a lot of the pace is just Robson’s general ability as a writer, his characters and dialogue are charming and quotable but never to the detriment of his cast’s believability.

And what a cast that is, practically everybody here is on top form. Kim makes for an interesting side character and I love the idea of a Planet of the Apes style fish out of water situation for a pioneering space traveller. Tom’s actor puts in a great performance and manages to capture the energy and mannerisms of a ten year old really well and Ms. Braudy is another piece of pure fun. McGann’s also putting in a brilliant performance, when he likes a script he can be one of the best performers the show’s ever had. His intellect, his witticisms and his innate mysticism is all at its peak here.

I think the only member of the cast I have any kind of problem with is C’rizz, because his character journey begins to really struggle by this point and you can tell there’s not really anywhere else for him to go. The psychopathic undertones that have been building the last few audios turns into JNT style bickering with Kim that really got on my nerves after a while. It wouldn’t be as bad if it wasn’t with a character I was promised more from. Also the conclusion of him using his weird personality storage thing that’s been barely explained to break the prison is… flimsy.

Actually, quite a bit of the resolution of this story is flimsy. It’s eventually revealed that Tom is in a prison that traps him with his own memories and he’s being kept so as to repeatedly reenact the crash that served as the planet he’s on’s first contact. An interesting idea but it feels a little humdrum in my opinion. The reveal of “it was all a simulation” is a lot less interesting than I was hoping it’d be. Not that it’s all bad, a lot of cool stuff is done with the concept, like trapping the Doctor in his own memories or using the invention of television to resolve the plot, but for me I was just not personally taken by the answer to this story’s conundrums.

However, this is still an utterly brilliant piece of Doctor Who. It’s certainly not the deepest, there’s very little character development besides some stuff with Charley and her mother, but it’s what the show is best at: the adventure. The pace and character of it all is sublime and makes for an incredibly enjoyable experience, which is what I always value the most. 

9/10

Pros:

+ Incredibly fun

+ Witty and fast paced

+ Great setting and idea

+ Interesting sidecast

Cons:

- The reveal behind what’s going on feels a little pedestrian

- C’rizz and Kim’s bickering got old fast

Eighth Doctor Adventures #11 - "Dreamstone Moon" by Paul Leonard

One thing keeps bugging me about the EDAs, one thing that keeps coming up, and resolving itself and unresolving itself and taking over my reviews: Sam. Sam, for a long time, was my least favourite companion ever. I found her a bland retreading of better companions that had nothing new to say or do. Then came the Finding Sam arc and with Longest Day, I had finally started to come around to her. And now I don’t know anymore. I have a confused relationship with Paul Leonard - I remember reading and liking quite a few of his works, but then I forgot them and read the absolute mess that is Genocide. Dreamstone Moon isn’t quite as annoyingly convoluted as that one - in fact, it’s astoundingly simple - but it still carries over his worst qualities, leading to yet another dud for the EDAs.

Separated from the Doctor, Sam finds herself on Dreamstone Moon, where the eponymous mineral that records unconscious thoughts is mined. But with the Doctor hot on her tail, she discovers the horrifying secret about Dreamstone Moon, and how it might just kill them both.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Leonard is often called a “complex writer”; I remember from collection videos back in the day his works being described as having complicated plots and being hard to follow. I disagree, from what I’ve seen of his work, he’s relatively bland with his storytelling. However, he is mind numbingly confounding with his prose. I had the same problem with Genocide, where he comes up with all these unique, detailed alien locations and then fundamentally fails at conveying them to the reader. His worldbuilding is thorough - I may criticize the man’s storytelling capabilities, but he has some great sci-fi concepts in him - but it’s so hard to visualise anything he’s writing. His descriptions are always a little too short or a little too vague, they focus on the wrong things or entirely omit details. For the record, I love how interesting and alien the setting of Dreamstone Moon is, it really feels like a lived in galaxy and not the usual convergence of future humans. However, reading this book is a chore and so often I just ignored some of his descriptions because they were so confusing.

The purpose of this little rant was to tell you the backdrop with which I read the rest of this book, because for all intents and purposes, this is a very simple story. We’re on a moon, there’s a mysterious substance, the moon is alive. Throw in some action, some character deaths and a snappy climax, and you have yourself a book. Now, a simple story doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad one and I can go as far as to say I enjoyed quite a bit of Dreamstone Moon; it didn’t blow me away, but it was a decently engaging story with a nice little mystery to it. For all of the problems I have with it, this book is not substantial enough for my issues to be more than surface level. This is certainly not a terrible book and after Legacy of the Daleks, it’s a godsend. However, I still have some points I really struggled with.

For one, let’s talk characters. Our sidecast this time around is actually pretty good. The stand out character is alien environmental protester Aloisse, who’s paired up with Sam for most of the book and is by far the most realistic and interesting. The friendship the two form is actually quite endearing and she was at the centre of most of this book’s political allegory. There is also temporary sidekick Daniel, who’s somewhat bland but gets the job done and then there’s Cleomides. See, like I said earlier, this book has some political allegory in it. The main thing is environmentalism - a company is harvesting parts of a living being for profit, it isn’t subtle - but there’s also some stuff about racism, with Cleomides being a soldier with a harsh distrust of aliens. She’s a little all over the place for me, I like the idea of her character arc and learning to trust the Doctor but it’s really not handled well. The story ends with her siding with the Doctor and that’s kind of the point where we see she’s redeemed, but she’s also just left two people for dead because they’re aliens. Her character doesn’t change naturally, it changes for the plot. And that’s my biggest problem with this book’s commentary, it doesn’t feel well written into the story, it feels like window dressing. It comes and goes and there are glimmers of interesting stuff in there but it feels entirely disposable.

And then there’s Sam. So, Sam’s been growing on me recently and, especially in Longest Day, I’ve been accepting her more and more as a nuanced character. And it all came crashing back down in this book because I really don’t care about her here. She’s the central focus for most of this novel and I don’t really know what it is about her that makes her so lifeless to me but there’s definitely something. She’s spunky and foolhardy and optimistic but it’s all so one note. The fact that she feels so much like earlier, better companions really harms her but also, it might be that all these traits feel less like traits of Sam Jones and more like traits of a generic companion. Sam is a seventeen year old girl from 90s London and it barely shows. She’s confident, mature, determined and none of that really feels to me like it lines up with that backstory. She’s far too generic and what possible uses she could have are overlooked. There was some stuff later on I did like, where she feels guilty for leaving the Doctor and is conflicted on her feelings for him. I do really like the idea of a companion being in love with the Doctor but being completely unreciprocated, it fits the character a lot better and is a nice subversion of expectations. I also think Eight’s a little bland in this one, I couldn’t picture McGann speaking a lot of the lines and he seems very uninterested in getting Sam back. The whole Sam and the Doctor being separated thing feels very contrived here, there’s literally a moment where the Doctor has the option to go get Sam and says “oh, that can wait”.

So, as it stands, we have a generic but entertaining story with a decent side cast but some really weak theming and characterisation. Not a terrible book, but also not the end of the world. However, the conclusion really screws this book up for me. Dreamstone Moon doesn’t have an ending, not really. It wraps up incredibly abruptly and leaves a bunch of plot threads unceremoniously dumped. Everything goes from zero to a hundred in a second, the moon is destroyed and we’re dumped on the planet below for a bit. We barely get to explore it, some technobabble is thrown at us and we leave the story behind with very little satisfying resolution. Combining all of this with Leonard's miserably convoluted prose and the final thirty or so pages were utterly tensionless for me. It’s a real shame because I was looking forward to seeing where everything was going, but it all really went nowhere. It’s not like everything before this was amazing and this was all a massive let down, but it’s still a great disappointment in my opinion.

I did enjoy Dreamstone Moon, it engaged me for most of its page count and I think that’s the main thing a book should do. However, I was not invested in the real meat of it all, none of the arcs or themes engrossed me and I left it feeling a little cheated. It probably doesn’t help that I really don’t get on with how Paul Leonard writes things, but this was an unfortunate dud. The EDAs are slipping back into painful mediocrity, can anybody save us? Maybe Kate Orman.

5/10

Pros:

+ Really unique and thorough world building

+ Decent side cast

+ The story, whilst simple, is relatively engaging

Cons:

- I really struggle with Leonard’s prose

- The entire conclusion feels rushed and underdeveloped

- Has a thin allegory shoehorned in

- Sam goes back to being bland and generic

The Monthly Adventures #87 - "The Gathering" by Joseph Lidster

As The Monthly Adventures moved past the number fifty mark, it began to lose some of the experimentation that so defined its original run. But as we near our next milestone, we begin to see a different kind of trail blazing. The Main Range really began to play around with format from this point on; some changes stuck - like the anthology releases - and some didn’t. And then there’s this two part adventure from Joe Lidster, who begins his story with the heart wrenching The Reaping and then continues to absolutely destroy my feelings with his follow up, The Gathering. But does this experiment work?

Tracing a strange pattern through time, the Doctor finds himself in mid-2000s Brisbane, where he runs into his old companion, Tegan Jovanka. Tegan’s moved on with her life, but it hasn’t moved on with her. The Doctor’s up against a familiar face, only he hasn’t met her yet.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Joe, my guy, could you do me a favour and write a story that doesn’t absolutely destroy me for once? Our themes of life and death are carried on from The Reaping, and Lidster does not give you a single second to recover. The central dynamic of this story revolves around Five and Tegan and like with Peri in the previous story, Lidster works his magic on them. A question I often see raised about the companions is what happens after they leave? How do you carry on with your life, how do you settle down after such an experience? It’s been explored dozens of times, some better, some worse, but I can’t think of anybody more capable of doing it than Lidster. And of course, the interpretation he gives us is tragic as anything. His use of down to earth characters really excels here as he explores the nature of a simple but content life and settling down, Tegan’s humdrum existence is a very relatable image. I like the unglamourised portrayal, I like that it’s not 100% good or bad; this is what real life is like, without the childlike whimsy of Doctor Who, this is the real world, for better or for worse. And then Tegan gets cancer. On paper, this shouldn’t work, it sounds too forced or too sad for this show, but it’s executed really well. I love Tegan’s acceptance of it, I like how it symbolises the hard truths of life Lidster is trying to portray. Sometimes, tragic things happen, and we are unable to stop it. I’m not fully on board with the reveal that the tumor was caused by her time aboard the TARDIS because it kind of takes away from the message about moving on and living in the real world, but it was minor.

If The Reaping was about grief and the suddenness of death, The Gathering is about acceptance and moving on, and I think it’s done brilliantly. Tying into this is our villain - the returning Katherine Chambers, utilising cyber technology to try and save her dying brother. The idea of having a side character turn into the main villain is pretty good on its own but tie in the parallels to Mondas and the connection to themes about letting go of the past and she becomes an incredibly tragic villain. We still have a crazy psychopath with her accomplice - James - but it’s nice to have a morally grey antagonist with some real nuance and realism to them. I don’t particularly love the rest of the sidecast - Jodi feels like a plot device and Michael is sympathetic but kind of bland - but I should shout out Tegan and Five, who both get fantastic performances that really complete the story.

And the story itself, whilst not fantastic, has some nice bells and whistles to it. It’s not quite as grim as some other Lidster stories but like all of his scripts, I loved every scene of character development, which is good because that makes up the entire first half of our story. In fact, the first part has a pretty neat structure to it, told non-linearly and framed by a conversation between Kathy and a particularly chatty waiter. It’s really fun seeing everything slot into place and erupt at the end of Part One. However, this structure does have a few issues to it. For one, I think the pacing is off. Basically, this is a two part story, the first part is set up and the second part is action. Both are fine on their own but it feels like going from 0 to 100. Also doesn’t help that I didn’t feel that invested in the story. I loved the themes, I loved the development, but what was actually happening didn’t exactly leave me on the edge of my seat. And what’s more, there wasn’t much tension. Jodi going into the building to disable the cameras was a little nail-biting but it’s blindingly obvious where it’s going.

And finally, we should talk about that gimmick; does the two part story work? Not really. Whilst the thematic link is super strong, the actual stories really don’t. You could very easily remove all the links to The Reaping and have this be entirely stand alone, which I feel means this doesn’t really deliver on its previous episode. Also, the conclusion to the whole pattern thing is super dumb and feels entirely arbitrary.

The Gathering wasn’t quite as good as The Reaping for me, purely because of a less engaging story, but it was still an emotionally devastating rollercoaster. There are bits and pieces that could be tightened, sure, but the themes and subject matter are all on point. This is an incredible moral allegory that is expertly tied into the characters, absolutely expected of Joseph Lidster. Whilst its existence as a duology could’ve been better utilised, I really like these two stories, even with their imperfections.

8/10

Pros:

+ Builds excellently on Tegan

+ Really great analysis on companions

+ Interesting non-linear structure

+ Katherine makes for a tragic villain

Cons:

- Poorly paced

- Lacking in a lot of tension

- The links to The Reaping are poorly handled

The Monthly Adventures #86 - "The Reaping" by Joseph Lidster

I don’t think Joseph Lidster is a writer, I think his chosen profession is just absolutely ruining my day. Every time, every single time I listen to one of his audios, that’s it until tomorrow, I am completely inconsolable. I don’t know when he decided that his entire career should be made up of the most devastating scripts known to man, but that was both a great and terrible day. I haven’t felt like this since Broken. And like with Broken, this story turns a character I liked into a character I would go into battle to protect. The only thing I thought this whole time was “man, poor Peri”. The ultimate character builder is back at it and with him, the most tragic depiction of the cybermen.

Peri is going home. After learning of an old family friend’s murder, she’s returned to Baltimore, but things aren’t like they used to be. Her family’s moved on without her and the world is leaving her behind. But a familiar and devastating force is awakening and the world might not have a say in the matter.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

So, we’ve just had the darkest Doctor Who story with Red, and now we have possibly the saddest. Front and centre, this is an audio about Peri. Now, I like Peri, she’s a fun character and Nicola Bryant is an incredible actress, but I’ve never really grown to particularly care about her. Mostly residing in the most confused and batshit season of the show, she’s never gotten a great amount of time to shine, even in her stories with Erimem. That’s where The Reaping comes in because by god does this one go some places with her character. Returning home to attend a funeral, she finds herself at odds with a family who have grown to resent her in her absence, and the studies of grief and growing apart from your family are utterly devastating. It’s like Aliens of London, but written by somebody who isn’t completely delusional. Bryant puts in her best performance, Lidster gives some incredible, intelligent character interactions and there’s an honestly groundbreaking portrayal of the companion’s family. There’s one particular scene, where Peri overhears her former best friend and mother talking about how they preferred it when she was gone, and it’s genuinely the most tragic scene of Doctor Who I’ve ever heard.

But this story wouldn’t really work without the rest of our cast being on top form, and luckily they absolutely are. Baker is firing on all cylinders and I think Lidster strikes a great balance between the Season 22 and Big Finish styles of characterisation. As for the rest of the cast, Lidster has a real affinity for creating down to earth, homegrown characters so this story about family and loss is just perfect for him. The real star is Peri’s mother - Justine - and the relationship she has with her daughter. Claudia Christian puts in a fantastic performance and I got extremely invested in the pair of them. The way Lidster concludes their relationship, I wasn’t a fan of, but I’ll get onto that.

The Cybermen make an appearance too, and for me, it’s always a gamble with them. I love them conceptually and the original idea and design is perfect in my opinion. I don’t love The Tenth Planet, but I do love that portrayal of Cybermen. Cybermen, for me, rarely get great stories and are far too often portrayed as generic robot men rather than the body horror monster they truly are. Spare Parts had an excellent portrayal of their bleakness, but The Reaping gives an excellent portrayal of their tragedy. Linking cyber conversion and grief is a genius idea and I really like the despondent, dying Cyberleader, letting his lost emotions slip in the throes of death. The scenes between the converted Anthony Chambers and his children hit a little too close to the Yvonne stuff from Spare Parts but I still like the idea and the performance sells it.

I think the thing that really makes The Reaping for me, however, is the funereal tone of it all. The constant rain, the urban setting, the themes of grief, there’s this melancholy that is draped over the whole audio making it a brilliantly atmospheric listen that really puts you in the shoes of the characters. David Darlington also delivers a score very unusual for him but one I’d go as far as to call his best. The haunting acoustics lends a very understated personality to a lot of the scenes, adding to the tragic undertones but avoiding any melodrama that could hamper the message. The Reaping is one of Who’s best depictions of tragedy, and for that I can only commend Lidster.

The story itself is also pretty great; standard Cyberman fare in terms of action but it’s certainly not unenjoyable. It’s carried a lot by its atmosphere, however the first half did posit an engaging mystery with some nice pacing; the scene where Peri realises the Cybermen killed Anthony is really good. My main problem with it is that it begins to take precedence in the final act and I think that’s a real mistake. The twist that there’s only one Cyberman and the whole plot has been a trap to ensnare the Doctor I think is contrived and the script spends too long trying to justify what is a pretty outlandish reveal. I like the solution to the problem - the Doctor tricking the CyberLeader into going to Mondas - but the third act feels pretty much tensionless to me, and mostly because this is a character piece choosing to focus on action. All that stuff I loved in the first act with Peri’s relationship with her family doesn’t really go that far. I think what we get is serviceable but I would’ve loved the conflict to go on a bit longer and have the Cybermen be the backdrop to that rather than the other way around. And the ending genuinely annoys me. So, the story wraps up and Peri randomly decides to keep some Cyber tech, which then promptly blows up and kills her mother. I like the idea of Justine dying, it feels like a fitting ending to Peri’s character arc in this story, but why couldn’t she have been killed by the Cybermen, why did the story end first and then kill her off? The way it’s constructed now, it feels shoehorned in for some extra shedded tears and little else. It’s surprisingly clumsy for this story and was a bit of a sour note to end it on.

However, overall, The Reaping’s pretty close to a masterpiece. This is peak Lidster character writing, but he loses focus towards the end and Janine’s death was the final nail in the coffin for me, causing this story to lose what was close to a 10/10 score. But that first half, the atmosphere, the gorgeous score, the detailed characters all make it worth it. Peri has massively risen in my companion ranking because of this script alone, which is something impressive all by itself. Now I’ve just got to hope The Gathering delivers just as much.

9/10

Pros:

+ Adds some brilliant layers of complexity to Peri

+ Well characterised and likeable side cast

+ Excellent depiction of the Cybermen

+ Wonderfully sombre tone aided by a brilliant score

+ Devastatingly heartbreaking

Cons:

- The story begins to fall apart towards the end

- The script loses focus

The Monthly Adventures #85 - "Red" by Stewart Sheargold

The EU is a strange place. It’s a messy, extravagant, imaginative playground with just the slightest hint of depravity and every so often, it forgets where it came from. A common topic discussed within Doctor Who fandom is how dark can the show go? When do disturbing themes turn to pointless cruelty? Already, some of my favourite stories are criticised for this; Project: Twilight I loved for its well realised grittiness whilst some others loathe it for the same reason. So, what am I meant to do with Red? Headed by a pair I’d dare to call the goofiest TARDIS team, Red is a story that truly shook me to my core, and I’m not certain if I loved it.

The Needle: a symbiotic apartment complex that changes with its inhabitants, who have all lost the need for violence thanks to the ruling supercomputer. But the loss of primal instinct has made the residents bloodthirsty, and something’s letting the rage out.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I guess the first thing I have to say about Red is jesus christ, this thing is f**ked up. Genuinely, I think this is the darkest Doctor Who story I’ve seen by a mile. In a futuristic society where violence has been eradicated, a mysterious, sentient virus is causing people to go on violent killing sprees. It’s a really dark, miserable time with some absolutely horrific stuff in it. Combined with some brilliant world building and you have a deeply unsettling story about a society obsessed with feeling pain. If you ever wanted to hear Sandi Toksvig calmly talk about her obsession with having violence inflicted upon her, then boy do I have the story for you! The world of Red is some truly incredible stuff, the little details we get about how the society functions, how the Needle works, how the lack of any kind of violence has affected the population, it’s really immersive and endlessly fascinating.

And that’s where Red’s greatest strength lies: its immersion. The atmosphere is on point all the way through - there’s a real grim oppression to everything with some neat cyberpunk leanings. The sound design is a tricky one for me because it’s sometimes incredible and sometimes noticeably awful. I love the rain sodden sounds of the undercity and the mechanical glitch noises used for the absolutely terrifying Red Virus but then sometimes things will just be completely silent when they really shouldn’t be and break the immersion the story’s built up so well. Also, I am a hundred percent sure they use that shitty violin sound effect those “GHOST FOUND AT 3AM!!!” videos use at least a few times. For the most part though, it’s great and at its absolute best when realising the villain.

Our main antagonist - the mysterious Red Virus - is an absolutely terrifying entity. Randomly infecting the chips that suppress violence in the Needle, they cause those infected to become deranged, chanting “red” and releasing corrupted, static sounds. Genuinely frightening stuff that really unnerved me when I listened to it (I love creepy motifs). McCoy is also doing some weird s**t with his voice in a performance that just teeters on being silly but manages to land on the side of utterly bone chilling. Langford’s also putting in a good - if more restrained - performance.

However, Red is a very style over substance story for me. I loved the aspects of the world and the ideas and the atmosphere but I really did not take to the plot of this thing. There are a lot of things going on in Red, Sheargold throws around a lot of ideas but he really struggles to make a lot of them clear. A lot of the story feels like it would be better with visuals and because of that it’s really hard to follow. I struggled listening to this one because I kept getting lost - so much happens and so much feels like it's lacking the image that should be going with it. This would never get made on TV, which is a shame, because that feels like the only place that could properly house it. And even looking past the convoluted elements, Red just hasn’t got a whole lot of substance past its ideas. The story is very slow and consists mostly of watching things on a monitor, the rest delegated to running around empty corridors and needlessly extending the story with extra plot beats. Also, as much as I love the creativity on display here, you have to know when to cut your losses. Sheargold had way more than one story’s worth of ideas bouncing around here, with stuff like the time-altering drug Slow and the supercomputer Whitenoise having temporal energy in it from time travellers. Yeah, that was the bit that really lost me, I still don’t know what the whole “Celia was a time traveller” reveal meant or why it created the Red Virus.

Red is a masterclass in atmosphere, disturbing themes and detailed world building but as an actual story, I wasn’t too into it. I loved just existing in this world and getting creeped out by the absolutely horrific things happening in it but I couldn’t really have cared less what happened to the characters.

7/10

Pros:

+ Great performance from McCoy and Langford

+ Atmospheric and disturbing

+ Brilliant central concept and antagonist

+ Oppressive and unnerving sound design

Cons:

- The script struggles to make things clear to the listener

- Story is pretty uneventful and poorly paced

The Monthly Adventures #84 - "The Nowhere Place" by Nicholas Briggs

Nick Briggs is a truly confounding writer - an author who never seems to stick to a single style or tone or even level of quality and will just insert his own stories into ranges whenever he gets an idea he likes, for better or for worse. This has sometimes worked - with stories such as Creatures of Beauty - and sometimes really hasn’t - like with the boring as sin The Mutant Phase. Here though, he’s posited a story whose premise intrigued me. No, not just intrigued me, fascinated me, absolutely drew me in and grabbed me by the ears. But in the end, I don’t feel he delivered on it properly, but I’m not really sure why.

There is a sound. A sound that rings through time. And those who hear it are drawn away. Away to nowhere. The Doctor and Evelyn are on the trail of a centuries long mystery, and at the end of it is a place only ever theorised to even exist: Time’s End.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Nick Briggs is a writer who can really excel in atmosphere when he wants to - Creatures of Beauty and the first half of Embrace the Darkness are both proof of that - but somehow, The Nowhere Place just falls shy of the mark for me. On the surface, I love everything about this. The Doctor hears the sound of a bell projected through time and discovers that the crew of a spacecraft carrier can hear it too. When they do, they are compelled to walk through a door that shouldn’t exist into a mysterious “nowhere place”. Cosmic and existential themes combined with unique imagery and an omnipresent threat, what isn’t to like there? Well, I honestly don’t know. I love the idea of the door and for the first half of this story, I was really interested in knowing more about what exactly was happening, but nothing felt particularly tense. I think it was the fact that the door somewhat felt like an afterthought and not enough focus was placed on it. It was treated more like a neat sci-fi idea rather than the root of a cosmic evil and it caused the atmosphere surrounding it to dissipate somewhat.

There are still some brilliant moments and Briggs conjures up some incredible imagery: the bell portending death, the door on a wall that should lead into space but doesn’t, Evelyn seeing screaming faces inside the mouth of an unknowable horror beyond imagination, it was really gripping for a long while. However, I think things began to really turn when we got to the train. See, it’s discovered half way through that the bell people keep hearing is from a steam train in the 1950s carrying two British cold war agents and it's here where the story stops feeling like a ghostly base under siege and more like another one of Briggs’ stray ideas running amok. Things become too tangible, what was something beyond comprehension doing things beyond comprehension becomes a plot to stop humanity developing space travel, which feels like an idea out of a much different, more generic story. And that’s a real shame because if the script had focussed more on the cosmic horror aspects of it all, I think I would’ve liked it a hell of a lot better.

And that’s what this story really needs, it needs focus. We spend the first half on a freighter at the edge of the Solar System, whose crew is slowly being picked off one by one. Great premise, ripe for possibilities, but then we change focus to the stuff on the train and then when we return, it’s two months later and we’re back in the first location but now with the changed tone and it all feels very jumpy. The ending also really annoys me because it amounts to a lot of technobabble. The Doctor finds the entity behind the door and discovers it’s an alternate version of humanity who experimented with time travel and got trapped in “Time’s End”, the theoretical point in the future where the laws of physics break. Bitter, they then began to sabotage other versions of humanity - including ours - out of spite, trying to stop them from advancing past the edge of the Solar System. It’s a weird ending that is the final nail in the coffin towards the atmosphere here, it really sucks the life out of the script and makes it feel less like the atmospheric horror story it wants to be and more like a weird speculative fiction thing. Funny considering Embrace the Darkness had literally the exact same problem; I guess Briggs just does this for some reason.

Now, this review has basically amounted to me trying to work out why this story didn’t click with me as it should’ve but that’s not to say I disliked it. It’s still a neat little idea box with some great imagery and whilst it fell apart in the second half, the mystery was intriguing for the first hour or so. I also think that Briggs’ character work is a lot better here, especially with the overwrought Captain Oswin, who was a very interesting and layered take on the authority figure trope so often seen in the Classic Era. I also liked Briggs’ own performance as wishful astrophysicist Trevor, who became very likable in the short amount of time we spend with him. For all intents and purposes, this is a good script with a pleasant pace to it. It was just missing something for me, a certain spark, a certain extra level of atmosphere or scope that would’ve made it all click into place but as it stands, it’s more like a grab bag of different ideas.

A Briggs story could really go either way and I’m swinging to the positive side on this one. This was an enjoyable but muddled horror story whose greatest crime was not living up to potential. It’s well worth a listen but I can’t help but imagine what could’ve been if all these cool ideas and images were handled a little better. Briggs certainly has some worthy concepts rattling around in his head but he doesn’t always succeed at executing them.

7/10

Pros:

+ Really interesting existential themes

+ Contains some brilliant imagery

+ The mystery is incredibly intriguing

+ Interesting and intelligent side cast

Cons:

- Missing a certain spark

- Needed to focus in on one of its aspects

- The ending is a lot of technobabble

8th Doctor DWM #1.3 - "Fire and Brimstone" by Alan Barnes

Returning to a place he helped create, the Doctor finds all of reality in danger from a powerful invader, and a mysterious puppet master pulling the strings.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Fire and Brimstone was the first DWM comic I felt really worked. Somehow, Barnes managed to do a big, high stakes story and not make it feel rushed. The pacing here is great, the cast is great, there’s a brilliant rise and fall in action and it makes sure to plan around its length.

I really like that it’s a sequel to the previous story as it really does make this feel like a proper narrative season of Who and not just some random stories. This is also my first encounter with The Threshold, apparently responsible for Ace’s death at some point (did not realise that happened in the comics), and I have to say I really like them. A mixture of a really great visual design and some super fun character beats make them both joyous to read and a genuine threat.

As for our main characters, I think McGann’s voice is really nailed here and I could practically hear him talking as I read it. Plus, I think Izzy’s finally getting some development, having a decent amount of agency in this strip. I really like the headstrong, geeky angle they’re going for, I have high hopes for this.

In other news, the Daleks are back! That was a fun twist and I think they’re pretty good here. I didn’t love them using a weird nanobot wasp thing because it did take a little bit of agency away from them but the idea of them fighting parallel universe versions of daleks is super cool. Didn’t love that they were defeated by deus ex machina Dalek wasps though.

I think the climax could be a little stronger; I liked the Threshold but how they were implemented felt super clunky and they were only really there to exposit. In fact, quite a lot of this story is exposition, which is a shame but it’s by far the most satisfying and competent arc we’ve gotten from 8DWM.

8/10

Pros:

+ Izzy and the Doctor are both fantastic

+ Loved the idea and presence of the Threshold

+ Had great pacing and a satisfying arc to it

+ I enjoyed its ties to the previous story

Cons:

- The climax feels muddled and janky

- Too much focus on Dalek Wasps and not Daleks

The Monthly Adventures #83 - "Something Inside" by Trevor Baxendale

f**k Trevor Baxendale.

Ok, now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Something Inside. There’s a recurring theme with Eight and I won’t be the first to admit, it’s a strange one. The poor guy can’t seem to keep his memory. Already, we’ve seen this in the Main Range, when he went full crazy during the events of Minuet in Hell but it’s been a prominent thing since his very first appearance, collapsing in an abandoned hospital wing and screaming “Who am I!” like some kind of artificial intelligence with a split personality. And there’s a point where every trope starts to become a cliché, and I think Something Inside solidifies that. What we have here is a pretty run of the mill story that uses the familiar amnesia trope in a way that ends up really boring me.

Separated and trapped inside a prison for psychics, the TARDIS crew find themselves up against a brutal warden and a ravenous creature of mental energy feasting on the inmates’ minds. 

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Something Inside seemed promising on the outside. The cover was intriguing, the synopsis was vague but drip fed me some interesting information and putting aside everything wrong with him as a person, Trevor Baxendale can be a really compelling writer from time to time. However, it was upon learning that this was another Eight story where he magically contracts amnesia that I began to doubt it. First of all, I really like the premise of psychic-proof prison meant to house telepaths; I like psychic stuff and that was a fun concept to play around in, especially when you learn who the psychics are and how they came to be. However, the material we’re given inside this premise is thoroughly average.

Eight’s amnesia, advertised in the DWM teaser, is completely incidental and contained mostly within a couple drawn out scenes in the first half, confusingly and unnecessarily being in non chronological order. If it had used the reveal of the Doctor’s amnesia as the Part One cliffhanger rather than a muddled flash forward, it could’ve derived some decent tension but as it stands it just feels a little pointless. It isn’t utilised well at all, he still acts exactly like the Doctor - the amnesia not hindering him one bit - and then he magically gets his memories back for the final act. This might sound like a big, noticeable blemish on this story but really, it’s just another symptom of a tired plot. Something Inside is a lot of running backwards and forwards, with little in the way of structure or pay off. By the time it had ended, it didn’t feel like a victory, it just felt like the last thing that happened. It’s a real shame the story feels so rehashed to me because there were some good ideas in there that could’ve used a little more dynamic exploration than this.

For one, we have two decent antagonists. The Brain Worm, as it’s somewhat stupidly called, is the sentient psychic powers of one of the inmates and it’s started hunting down the other prisoners. It’s a decent monster that can even be quite creepy, hiding inside an unknown character’s head. I also like how the characters can’t see it either, as it puts us in the same position as them. However, I do think it would work better in a different story. This is two for two with Baxendale scripts that feel like they should be horror stories but instead feel tonally lifeless, both this and The Dark Flame would have benefitted from a little more personality. Something Inside, as it stands, is a generic action flick desperately wanting to be something different. The worst offender of this tonal disparity is the score, which is overall quite bland but the sound mixing tends to make it egregiously loud, turning into an obtrusive, overdramatic mess.

I mentioned earlier that there were two excellent villains and I wasn’t lying when I said that. Also playing antagonist is cruel prison warden Rowden, who created the inmates as psychic soldiers but was unable to remove their powers. He’s a truly slimy piece of s**t with a really great performance from Steven Elder backing him up, I love his smug personality immediately crumbling at the first sign of danger. However, this is the only member of the sidecast I like, everybody else is entirely one-dimensional to me and when they start getting picked off I really struggle to care. I will say though that there isn’t a bad performance here and even a couple I really liked, especially John Killoran as Latch, a character I couldn’t care less about but had some really great lines in the final part, read brilliantly by Killoran.

Something Inside is a very thin story with some great ideas and some real talent making it bearable. It’s not exactly a boring listen but leaves very little impact and doesn't live up to many of its ideas. If it had leant more into its horror undertones rather than going for a bland thriller, it could’ve been a lot better but as it stands, it’s an incredibly skippable script that doesn’t make any kind of impact on me.

6/10

Pros:

+ Both antagonists are pretty compelling

+ The cast is incredibly strong

+ Interesting and original setting

Cons:

- Obtrusive score

- Whilst well acted, the characters are bland

- Uneventful and formulaic plot

Virgin New Adventures #08 - "Nightshade" by Mark Gatiss

Sike! I’ve gone back in the VNAs, I’m unpredictable! I’ll always keep you on your toes! Ok, jokes aside, I’ve reread Nightshade because since I first read it a few years ago, I've been calling it my favourite Doctor Who book of all time. However, having recently read the fantastic Conundrum, I began to wonder about that verdict. I began to wonder if Nightshade truly was the greatest Doctor Who book. Bizarrely written by the often middle of the road author Mark Gatiss, Nightshade is a tight, sensational and immaculate horror story that hits just about every note I love in a story. But do I love it as much as I once did?

The Doctor’s had enough. Finally considering retirement, he decides to think things over in the sleepy town of Crook Marsham. But as Ace gets cozy with the locals, the Doctor discovers that a malevolent force is returning to the village, and that he can’t escape his past so easily.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

It’s been a few years and I’m still not entirely sure how Gatiss wrote this. On the tin, there are bits I can understand; Gatiss specialises in… let’s call it model Who: the man clearly gets the show and so writes episodes that don’t feel particularly out of the box, that follow the show’s formula intensely and often consist of simple stories told relatively well. Nightshade is not a complicated or innovative story for the most part, it is just a horror story. Granted, it’s an amazing horror story, but it’s just that: a simple story told well. But the thing is, there are elements to this that Gatiss never seemed to approach again. Something I take note of with other works by the guy is that they are lightweight, often comedic and aren’t particularly deep. Here though? We have a harrowing character drama that pushes our lead to the extremes.

Whilst I adore the plot and the thrills, the best part of Nightshade is the Doctor. Burnt out, irritable and tired of adventures, the Doctor has become despondent, intent on wandering around the TARDIS and snapping at Ace every so often. Within the first twenty pages, the Doctor has raged at his young companion in a way we’ve never seen before, immediately telling us that there’s something wrong with him. This is the most sensitive and, honestly, human we’ve ever seen Seven, but it works so well. It works because it’s not like this character to show pain and suffering, it’s not like this character to lose his temper. It’s fascinating seeing his sensitive side emerge and see that clash with his alien indifference. The talks about retirement are done here better than they ever will be in the revival. And there’s so much good stuff he does, from his denial at the beginning as to if anything alien is happening in Crook Marsham, to when the regret-feeding entity plaguing the village takes the form of Susan, to when he full on dislocates his arm and has to beg Ace to help him. He gets thrown around in this story and it makes for some truly incredible character building that sends ripples throughout the rest of this series. When Ace asks to leave him, and he refuses, that is the character defining moment of the VNAs’ version of the Doctor.

But I’ve talked enough about the Doctor, what else has this book got to offer? Well, for one, we have an absolutely incredible plot. I will say, it isn’t perfect, the first half drags on just a bit too long but once it gets going, it does not slow down for a second. Drenched in atmosphere, this is a genuinely horrifying story with some really bleak undertones. This is a book where anybody could die, where any character could just get wiped out in a half second and it makes for one of the most engaging and tense Doctor Who stories of all time. It all explodes in the third act, when the malevolent Sentience takes a hold of the town and begins feasting on its residence. There are so many expertly written scenes here of pure dread mixed with some genuinely brilliant action. From the horrifying deaths of the old peoples’ home residents to the tense as balls elevator fight scene that had me speed reading the page to find out what happens next, Gatiss handles a brilliant pace effectively and mixes it with some stark, horrifying imagery to really hook you. Seriously, the way people die in this story is terrifying - rapidly decomposing as they’re absorbed by ghosts of their past.

Actually, let's talk about the antagonist because it’s one of my favourites. The Sentience is just that - a sentience, an unknowable thing that doesn’t even understand itself, a force that dredges your deepest fears and regrets and uses them as weapons, feasting on your past uncaringly. The way it so easily takes a grip on the town, the looming presence it has over the whole story, the way it so effortlessly ties into the Doctor’s character arc in this novel. It’s all sublime. I love unknowable entities from the dawn of time!

And none of this would be so effective if the town of Crook Marsham didn’t feel so alive. There aren’t many members of our cast that feel particularly deep but they all feel particularly believable, they all feel like flawed, genuine human beings who fall and rise and triumph and fail throughout the story. The highlight besides our main character was easily retired TV actor Trevethick, who goes from a jaded old man living in his past to facing down ghosts of his lost golden years so as to let others get on with their lives. His death scene was the most heartbreaking and bittersweet thing in this whole novel. I also like how Gatiss didn’t shy away from the problems of the 60s. Yes, it’s a little shocking to see slurs getting used in Doctor Who but they are being used in the dialogue of a horrible racist. I personally hate it when social issues are sanitised in commentary (*cough* *cough* RTD2 *cough* *cough*), because it harms whatever message is trying to be told.

All in all, this is a well written, nuanced, evocative chiller with a top cast and an incredible interpretation of our lead. Has to be my favourite, right? Well, not quite. I already mentioned how the first one hundred pages or so are too slow for my liking but that’s not what really puts a spanner in the works for me. No, it’s Ace and Robin. So, Ace has her first major romantic involvement here, something that’ll get expanded on in the next book, and it’s pretty goddamn terrible. I like the sentiment but it was so clearly forced in to give a reason for Ace wanting to leave and is uncomfortably awful. For one, Ace and her love interest have zero chemistry and Robin is uncharacteristically wooden for this book, feeling more like a function than a character. Secondly, there is no development to this relationship, they see each other once and are instantly madly in love; this could’ve worked if Gatiss gave it some more attention but as it stands, it is some shockingly awful writing for an otherwise immaculate book and it annoyed me so much I was close to marking this down to a 9/10.

However, I eventually decided “sod it”. Less than five percent of an otherwise near perfect novel will not damper my enjoyment of it. Nightshade is my kind of novel, this is the book I like to read. It hits so many things I enjoy in a piece of literature and for that I adore it. It is a tense, scary, emotional joy ride that I always get a kick out of and as it stands, this is the best thing Mark Gatiss has ever written. I consider it the true beginning of the VNAs and I think everybody who's ever enjoyed an episode of Doctor Who should read it. And to answer that burning question at the beginning, no, I don’t think this is the greatest Doctor Who book ever anymore. But it is pretty damn close.

10/10

Pros:

+ Genuinely really horrifying

+ An incredible exploration of Seven’s character

+ Drenched in sinister atmosphere

+ The Sentience is an all time great antagonist

+ Our side cast is consistently strong

+ Simple but endlessly effective

+ The third act is utterly perfect

Cons:

- The story takes a long time to get going

- Ace and Robin’s relationship is underbaked and contrived

8th Doctor DWM #1.2 - “The Keep” by Alan Barnes

Arriving in the 51st Century, the Doctor and Izzy discover a settlement on a barren Earth, which houses the secret to humanity’s survival.

The Keep was a little bit of a step up from Endgame in my opinion. With a much more classic idea and a touch of comic book weirdness, I think this certainly appealed to me quite a bit more. It’s also interesting that, despite being half the length, this had much better pacing than Endgame.

I really like the idea of a living artificial sun and the bits and pieces of world building we get are quite good. The Amazon Desert especially makes for a great setting. The art, whilst by the same team, seems like it managed to pin down the likenesses of our characters a bit better this time.

There was honestly a nice poetic quality to this story and the dialogue was certainly a step up from last time. Shame it just kind of ends though. Like, there’s stuff going on with (vaguely racist) tribes outside the titular Keep but they’re just dropped at the end. Curse of the length I guess but it felt very sudden and avoidable. 

Izzy is sidelined and I don’t have much of an opinion on her still but the ending was quite interesting, I wonder if this plot line will return. This was a pretty enjoyable story but that weird ending and a feeling of missed opportunity really hurt it.

6/10

Pros:

+ Great setting and concept

+ A small but significant step up from the last story

+ There was a wonderfully contemplative element to this

Cons:

- Ends super suddenly

- Could’ve done with a few more pages in length

The Monthly Adventures #82 - "The Settling" by Simon Guerrier

When it comes to the pure historical, I’m really on the fence. On one hand, the focus on actual events and character work forced by lack of sci-fi shenanigans can really strengthen a story and lead to some of the most mature and intelligent material in Doctor Who but on the other hand I find they very often can be boring as sin. Already, fan favourites such as The Council of Nicaea have disappointed me and I was ready to call it quits when it came to untampered history. But along came Simon Guerrier, who has a real knack for this sort of story. And whilst it suffers from the same issues a lot of its peers do, I think Guerrier made a pretty damn good effort.

Arriving in one of the worst atrocities in Irish history, the Doctor, Ace and Hex are separated by the warfare, the latter getting taken in by none other than Oliver Cromwell. Faced with the opportunity, can Hex change a tyrant?

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

This is a story we’ve seen done before. Put back in time, faced with a moral dilemma, can we stop it, can we change it? It’s the usual and very often, I would groan at this but luckily, this is being written by one Simon Guerrier, who I consider a master at both story and character. One tactic he uses to set this morality tale apart from others of its kind is the structure; he begins the story after it’s already concluded, showing Hex and Ace talking over the events in the TARDIS. I really like this approach and it helps to strengthen the central aspect of this story: Hex. Hex is a companion who will go on to be one of my favourite characters in the mythos and The Settling is really the first time he gets to shine. Placed as a nurse in the middle of a battlefield, he’s shacked up with Cromwell and desperately tries to minimize casualties, only for it to backfire on him. Olivier is an absolute sensation in this one, he manages to go from charming to scared to angry to heartbreaking in a half second and he’s really the driving force behind this whole thing. What’s more, the relationship between him and Ace gets some fantastic development and the scenes with them in the TARDIS are written perfectly. Plus, this story interprets Seven in a way we honestly need more of, focusing less on the dark trickster aspect of his character but the clownish and caring personality that often took centre stage on the air. He isn’t plotting here or making grand schemes, he’s delivering a woman’s baby and making casual conversation with a medic. It’s an approach to the character sadly amiss in the EU.

Guerrier’s talents shine through in every aspect of this story. It’s a really intelligently written bit of fiction with a very understated style to it. It moves with a mature, thought provoking stoicism that really makes everything go down a bit easier. It’s a really good depiction of history, the sound effects and storytelling bring the 1600s to life and it doesn’t skirt around or simplify issues. People can die, people can be good and they can be bad and most can be in between. People can make mistakes and people can save the day, not everybody is one thing or the other.

The biggest contribution to this depth is our historical figure of the week: Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell is a very lambasted figure in history; he killed a lot of people and he is hated for that, quite rightly, but the truth of the matter is that he was a human being and was not purely an evil tyrant. I love when a historical takes this approach to history, when there isn’t a true antagonist, nobody’s truly evil or truly good. It was my favourite part of The Marian Conspiracy and it’s my favourite part of this, a great performance and a number of shades of grey really help Cromwell feel like an incredibly deep character.

However, I do consider The Settling to be one of Guerrier’s weaker stories for one specific reason: the plot isn’t particularly strong. I find this is a problem with a lot of stories, a loose plot is a real achilles heel for me. Guerrier is capable of some truly great narrative but The Settling feels very haphazard to me and a lot of things could be improved. For one, the actual scene to scene progression could be tightened a lot, there’s a pretty clumsy time jump in the middle and there’s not much cohesion between subplots. Like, you have Hex getting cozy with Cromwell right beside the Doctor having to care for a pregnant woman looking for her brother-in-law. On their own, these are two perfectly fine stories but they don’t really work together and the flow of the script is very jumpy; the pace is fast but the story takes place over weeks, it doesn’t gel.

And, due to the focus on our central cast, there is quite a large amount of dull soldiers filling out our roster of characters, most of whom I couldn’t tell apart. It made it increasingly confusing as more and more people with identical Irish or Old English accents popped up and I ended up losing track. I appreciate how good our central circle of characters is but it does mean everything else feels like cast fillers.

The Settling was a decent historical with some fantastic character work - in other words, Simon Guerrier’s modus operandi. Whilst I found the focus on character to be to the detriment of a lot of the other aspects, this was still a strong outing for this cast and a good time.

7/10

Pros:

+ 1600s Ireland is incredibly well realised

+ Hex gets some world class character development

+ An intelligent and well structured script

+ Cromwell is a wonderfully layered character

Cons:

- The cast is filled out by generic soldiers

- Very little actually happens in this story