Charming. Utterly Charming.

Sure it’s a glorified trailer with mostly clips from the old show and badly edited in CGI, but look! It’s Vicki!

The Marketing Department didn’t have to go that hard. They could have given us an ordinary trailer and folks still would have bought the dvd, but they did and it was wonderful!

It’s so nice to see Vicki get a confirmed happy ending. Her exit from the Tardis was frothed with uncertainty, but it’s wonderful to know that she was ultimately happy with her choice.

Ah Big Finish, where would Doctor Who be without you?

For those who don’t know, Big Finish is a company that specializes in producing radio plays… radio plays that are listened to on CDs and MP3s instead. With the resurgence of podcasts recently, radio plays have come back in vogue, but Big Finish was out there decades prior still plugging along.

They primarily produce audios for old sci-fi and fantasy franchises, along with the occasional audiobook. However Doctor Who is their bread and butter. They helped keep the show alive during it’s 16 year long hiatus, and are still making new content for older eras of the show to this day.

The Companion Chronicles are a ‘spin-off’ series that focuses on the Doctor’s past companions recounting previously untold tales of their travels. Unlike the ‘main-range’ with it’s full cast audios, CCs tend to only have one to three actors at a time. They’re paired back, more intimate affairs, but they tend to be longer than Short Trips, hence why I place them in the full audio category.

Besides, for earlier Doctors they tend to be more abundant than full cast plays.

But enough background, what is this particular audio play about?

More or less, yes.

Steven, Vicki, and the Doctor land in Britain in 1912 during the height of the Suffragette movement. In a quarry they find the bones of a physic alien that can possess women. It’s goal? To destroy all men.

Not just mankind, but anyone male specifically. Basically the alien is a radfem, who becomes worse than the very thing it supposedly hates most, as it subjugates people and forces them to fight against their will.

It’s not a very subtle message, and it conveniently ignores the existence of trans people who would throw a monkey wrench into the idea of an alien who feeds off of ‘female energy’, as if such a thing could even exist. However, I did enjoy this outing more than the previous Steven and Vicki adventure I read last week.

For starters, the inclusion of the original actors does heighten the material. I won’t lie, books have their place, but they can’t recreate the chemistry of two real live people interacting. Steven and Vicki have a fun sibling dynamic that was lost in The Empire of Glass, but shines here front and center as they retell the story together.

Another thing in the audio’s favor is that it’s smaller scale. It feels like something that could have feasibly happened in the show proper, even if the approach is different because of the medium. It’s also more focused thematically speaking, as well.

I also enjoyed the humor and the insights into how classism and sexism intersects. How women themselves can uphold systems of oppression against them if they feel it will protect their own power, and how men can be important allies too. I also enjoyed the critique on what types of political protests are most effective or not. While the message isn’t subtle, it does have layers.

Honestly I would have enjoyed these aspects of the story more, but they are mostly only focused on in the second half of the story, which also features a lot of exposition dumps. They’re important info dumps as they explain the main villain’s goals and motivations, and being an audio there’s no other way to get that information across, but still it’s a bit uneven pacing wise.

Overall though, this has been one of the more enjoyable stories so far. It’s no Crusade and I liked Set in Stone more, but it was a fun romp itself.

(PS. I love how the story unintentionally implies that Steven is actually a trans man who is offended by the alien mistaking him for a woman constantly, only to try and kill him whenever it figures out he’s actually a guy. lol)

This is a novel of two halves. Half of it is very good, and the other half is not so good. But it’s by no means bad per-say.

Let’s start with the basic plot. The Doctor returns to the Tardis after being taken out of time by the Time Lords. Long time fans will recognize that this story takes place after the events of The Three Doctors, but that matters not. What’s important is that the Doctor returns with an invitation in his hand, with no memory of ever receiving it.

Said invitation lacks any sort of explanation but comes only with time coordinates for Venice in the year 1601 AD. The Doctor and his companions, Steven and Vicki, fear it’s a trap, but the Doctor wants to spring the trap and get to the bottom of this mystery. From there we have a wild romp through the late Italian renaissance with aliens, mistaken identities, and several historical figures.

Now let’s talk about what doesn’t work first. For starters, there are way too many plot threads going on. I wouldn’t say it’s unwieldy, it does all come together in the end, but it’s very convoluted.

As a side effect of this, the inclusion of so many important historical figures feels superfluous and forced. Yes they all have a function within the plot, but it’s nothing that couldn’t have been achieved with mostly original characters to begin with. Rather than enhance the story, they often distract instead, especially William Shakespeare’s ludicrous sub-plot.

Also, and this may just be a personal taste thing, but this really didn’t feel like a ‘missing adventure’. I don’t know what it is with Virgin Publishing and their Doctor Who books, but a lot of the stuff I’ve read from them are too try hard and edgy, and would feel very out of place within the show proper. This particular book isn’t the worst offender by far, but it does take you out of the story sometimes. Especially since this is trying to mimic an actual First Doctor story, albeit one that has more sci-fi/historical mash up than was usual for him.

Finally, the characterization for the Doctor and his companions felt uneven. I was told that this was originally meant to be a Third Doctor story and I think it shows. There are definitely times when it feels like the First Doctor is a later Doctor just wearing a First Doctor mask it seems.

Vicki fares a little better, but is given little to do. However I do appreciate that the author is trying to give both her and Steven depth by exploring their respective traumas in a way that just couldn’t and wouldn’t be done on screen. However, Steven feels a little too abrasive… Yeah, I mean Steven was never the most enthusiastic companion, but I don’t remember him being this much a downer. I also don’t think the romance between him and Marlowe really worked. It feels like a scene is missing from their story, one where Steven actual recuperates Marlowe’s advances or something.

So for the good things… It’s well paced. The story trots along nicely and gives plenty of good details. The character’s who aren’t the mains are well realized. I like that the threat isn’t an alien invasion, but an attempt to sabotage an alien peace conference. I also like that the person who successfully negotiated the peace conference was a human priest who thought he had died and gone to heaven. That was the best twist, but most of the twists were well thought out.

There’s also illustrations!!

These are so rare in novels! Why? They’re a great thing to have.

However the best thing about this book is Brax.

For those who don’t know, Irving Braxiatel, known as Brax to his friends, is the Doctor’s brother. He’s also a rouge time lord, but unlike the Master or the Rani, he’s not really a villain. Nor is he always a good guy, but here he is trying to do the right thing and he easily charms his way into the reader’s hearts.

This is my first real encounter with the character, though I had heard of him before. He was named dropped in the Fourth Doctor story, City of Death. The only thing we knew about him was that he owned a massive library and museum. Turns out he’s kind of like the Collector from Marvel, but slightly less of a dick about it… slightly.

Anyways, the expanded universe has since took this one off mention and spun him into an important character who appears in books, audio plays, and even some spin-off cartoons!

Like I said, this is the first time I’ve come across the character, but I shall be rather pleased if he manages to show up again in the marathon. But who can say, it’s all up to the randomizer.

Oh and does anyone else think the random no-named Time Lord from Terror of the Autons is Brax too?

I have very little to say about this story other than that it’s really, really good. I hold the First Doctor’s era in high esteem and The Crusade is one of the best stories in season two. It’s a shame half of it is missing.

For those wondering, two of the episodes are considered lost to time, so in order to watch the whole story I watched the Loose Canon reconstructions of the missing episodes.

The pacing here is superb with plenty of action and intrigue. The dialogue sparkles and the character work is sound.

Refreshingly both sides of the conflict are shown as heroic and flawed in kind with no clear good guy/bad guy except for two antagonists who are on opposite sides of the war.

If I have any complaint, and it’s very minor, I wish it was told to King Richard at some point that if he wants to end the war so badly that he could just pick up and leave. He’s the invader here after all.

I love Short Trips. Anthologies and short stories are perhaps my favorite expanded media to come out of Doctor Who.

Today’s story comes from Short Trips: The History of Christmas. As you may guess from the title the theme of the anthology collection is Christmas and it’s surrounding holidays. There’s actually quite a few such Yuletide themed anthologies within the franchise.

This particular outing involves the First Doctor, Barbara, and Ian landing in Scotland in 1950, shortly after Susan has left them. What starts off as an extended holiday, to give them time to move on from their loss, turns into a heist caper to steal the coronation stone on Christmas day.

Apparently the story is based off a real event. On Christmas Day, 1950, four college students stole the Stone of Scone, a Scottish relic that was used for royal coronations for centuries, from Westminster Abbey where the English had stolen it centuries before to use in their own coronations. They had planned to return the stone to Scotland but accidentally broke the stone in half during the theft. They had a stone mason fix it and left the stone in Arbroath Abbey, a church in Scotland, where the English authorities just picked it back up anyways.

Since then the real stone has been returned to Scotland and rests with the Scottish crown jewels, but the English royalty still gets to ‘borrow’ it whenever they want to, like for King Charles' recent coronation. I wonder how well that arrangement will work out if Scotland votes to become an independent country again.

Anyways, back to the story. Barbara, Ian, and the Doctor replace the four students within the historical timeline of this retelling. However their reasons for doing so is less political and more extra-terrestrial. Turns out the stone is an intelligent alien space rock and they’re rescuing it.

What I really like about the short trips is that they don’t have to be these grand action packed adventures. Some are, but just as many are small character studies or world building exercises. This is a small, sweet story, where the most climatic, tension filled thing is a flat tire. Nothing is in danger of blowing up, no one dies, and the main conflict is whether or not Barbara and Ian want to continue traveling when they’re so close their own time; only 13 years too early.

It’s delightful. Utterly delightful, and I highly recommend it along with the rest of the anthology. Especially as Christmas nears.