I quite enjoyed this audio.  I was a little skeptical as it starts out feeling like a hammy version of Romeo and Juliet, but it turns out to be a pretty fun story all about these clones living as Greek Gods, keeping themselves Immortal by constantly raising and eventually inhabiting new, younger bodies.  It's strange, certainly, and an unconventional story, but that's kind of perfect for Doctor Who.

I like how Zeus tries to couple with Lucie but it feels very much like he wasn't going to ever force her.  It was so weird, awkward, and poorly thought out by this powerful being that I couldn't help but laugh at our main villain, and yet it didn't feel like that diminished the stakes or my investment in Immortal Beloved.  There's something about this story that just came across as a very cozy and classic adventure, even if the premise feels a little unique and creative.  It's an interesting one that I think is a little underrated.  I would definitely recommend this audio.

So I liked the introduction for Zoe here, especially thanks to the setting, which feels creative, unique, and like a fun choice overall.  I also like how this is the first use of the "Doctor John Smith" alias for the Doctor, and there's some fun back and forth between the Doctor and Jaime thanks to scenes like that.

The rest of the serial feels like a real slog, though.  It's a boring and slow-moving story, while the Cybermen don't really feel effectively used at all.  It's too bad, as this feels like a story full of missed potential rather than one devoid of any value at all.

It's too bad I haven't been able to connect with these Wildthyme novels.  It's not like I am unable to enjoy the character in general - so far I really like her more traditional Big Finish audios - her own series has been good so far, I like The Wormery, and she's decent in Excelis.  I even like other scripts and stories by writer Paul Magrs a lot more than these audiobooks.

They aren't unacceptable but it isn't overly fun.  I like Polythene Terror slightly more than Wildthyme Beyond!, but only just so.  The Polythene Terror feels like it has more focus on its story.  By featuring the garbage people attacking Earth, there was a strong sense of purpose to this story in a way I didn't quite get from Beyond!

Unfortunately one of the biggest weaknesses I found in both novels were the characters.  While Iris and Panda can be fun, a lot of the other figures in this story feels superficial and shallow.  Tim feels very boring, and even if I like his gay relationship with Vince Cosmos.  They remind me a lot of Lilith and Simon from the last novel.  They all just feel like generic kids, who gosh golly can't believe they are going on this incredibly silly adventure.  I've said it in my review for Beyond, but it feels like Magrs' sense of humour is very contingent on randomness, and it just never works for me.

Even something like Vince Cosmos feels utterly unnecessary.  He feels like a parody of the Doctor, but that's what Iris already is.  So he comes across as completely redundant.  I just don't get it, but that's true of the book at large.  I found it neither funny nor entertaining, but I do appreciate how once again we have an Iris novel ending in everyone having a good party.  It's a cute detail that does give some nice closure at the end of the story.  More books should end like that because it works for me even in a book I otherwise didn't enjoy.

Also, Katy Manning does a great job narrating the audiobook.  She's so good and I loved how she brings so many voices to life for the characters.  I just wish she had a better story to read.

I quite enjoyed this.  It's about a boy with a broken bike encountering the Third Doctor.  The Doctor gives some advice to the boy and it is quite charming, able to effectively bring the voice and charisma of John Pertwee to life.  Katy Manning narrates and I quite enjoyed her here.  It's a simple story with some larger overtones of the Doctor on a diplomatic mission with an alien ambassador that works well on the whole - that angle really makes it feel like the boy is encountering the Doctor on a random day in his life.  It adds a wholesome feeling of this just being an incidental little event for the characters.  I quite liked this Short Trip on the whole.

It's been forever since I've checked out a Torchwood comic, so I picked this one out at random.

That may have proven a mistake as The Return of the Vostok was a webcomic on a defunct site and now only available through the Wayback Machine. I appreciate the latter website for all it does in preserving internet history (and meaningful bits of culture with it) but it does lead to a cumbersome, slow, and disjointed reading experience.

It doesn't help that the writing is not at all well structured. There are some neat ideas with these ice-age monsters using winter to attack Cardiff, and early on there is some great stuff with the Torchwood crew just enjoying winter a little bit, and, to them at least, enjoying a bit of novel winter climate. I wish we got more of that in this book or just Torchwood in general because it makes our characters far more endearing than the sex pests the show would all too often portray most of Torchwood Three as. While it did leave me envious of said climate a bit, living over here in frigid Canada where such weather is a bit of an endurance challenge more than anything, the story itself left a lot to be desired.

The sole redeeming quality of The Return of the Vostok was the artwork . Adrian Salmon had a very distinct look to his work I didn't hate. It took some getting used to but I did come to enjoy it. He really brings some energy into something I would otherwise consider completely flat.

A really wonderful, sincere, and simple story depicting the meeting of Susan and the Eighth Doctor. Something like this, I would argue, basically demands a relatively simple plot so we have a lot of character time and that's exactly what we get!  It pays off magnificently, in my opinion. Susan doesn't feel like she's been sitting on her hands this whole time - she's been living a life with a lot of story to it. That's the main focus here, with the stuff around a post-invasion Earth still recovering and dealing with a new threat largely in the backseat of this audio.  I think is for the best.  That side of it was kind of boring, to be honest.  The focus and attraction of this story is what matters, and that's the Doctor meeting Susan and her new son, Alex.

The casting of Alex Campbell with Paul McGann's real life son was brilliant, and it leads to a lot of weighty scenes that gave me a strong desire to pursue more stories featuring this character. As a holiday-release special, this one sat really well with me. It felt, largely, wholesome and fun, with a touch of that Eighth Doctor blunt detached sensibilities at the end. It's an interesting side of his character that always leaves me thinking. This is a man who has shown many times he is willing to walk away from family and this story doesn't shy away from that or how alien he can be, as much as the Doctor himself might try to romanticize this behaviour, it is a real character flaw and I love when it is explored well. I definitely enjoyed and would recommend this one but you need a strong sense of both the Eighth Doctor and Susan Foreman, so it certainly isn't for beginners.

At first, I was quite enjoying Timeless Passages.  It starts off with a pretty quiet tone, where Bernice comes to a library to do some research.  There's a nice, long conversation where Benny and the chief librarian Archie Spool just talk for a while.  He explains the setting and how the library is able to perfectly preserve books, and I found myself ready to settle in for a quiet, more ponderous adventure.

Then a baby shows up and simply will not stop crying while a loud and annoying cyborg chases around Benny and another librarian named Hermione.  The story lost me at this point and then it simply... ends.  Not with a bang but with a rather disappointing whimper.  It feels like the library setting was squandered, which is especially disappointing as Big Finish has done this exact thing at least once before - introducing a cool library in The Genocide Machine only to not use it in a way I would find interesting.  Compared to Gobbledegook, and audio adventure that actually makes use of a cool alien library in a cool way, Timeless Passages and The Genocide Machine both kind of feel like a waste of time for similar reasons.

It is not easy for any sort of story like this to depict a civilization as advanced as the Time Lords engage in a civil war, so it is very, very impressive to me that Fractures really pulls it off.

Given a limited budget and resources, Big Finish does a very good job at conveying the scale and size of this conflict while still keeping it personable and focused on our main characters.  It's pretty fun having Darkel teaming up with Pandora against Romana, her allies, and Leela.  Narvin is great here.  I love how they developed this character over time, as it really cements the significance of his loyalty to Romana.  Mary Tamm's performance as Pandora is also incredible here.  It's such a creative use of Tamm as a performer, while adding a whole interesting emotional dynamic to the conflict between her and Romana.  This is war is very much Romana's story, so I like how thoroughly the ongoing plot ties that in to her character, her past, and her own current mind set through these web of characters and this powerful villain with a pretty well plotted out sense of motivation and purpose.  Even K9 being "corrupted" was great and made the character stand out when he all to often feels like a side thing.  John Leeson's voice work is so great in his ability to bring K9 to life.

I also like the scheming going on here in general and the tense negotiations around the injured folk just trying to stay alive.  Leela's blindness feels very fitting given the whole business in the show with her eyes changing colour, and they use that well to show a more vulnerable side to her character, forcing her not to rely on her greatest strengths here.  This is a war story, through and through, and Fractures does a very good job at telling that story.

Master is a work of art.  It might be, out of all the hundreds of Big Finish audios I have listened to so far, the single most emotionally moving story I've encountered yet.

I really like all the characters here.  Not only does the Master and the Doctor have a number of incredible scenes and lines here, but the supporting cast is all very memorable.  I got invested in Victor and Jacqueline, and they worked really well as friends of the Master's assumed identity.

The audio is at its best when it is nothing but quiet build-up, mystery, and a growing sense of dread and darkness.  I love the framing device of the Doctor relaying this story to a sniper.  It's very good an a cool take on the Master and Doctor's past together.  Death showing up was quite the twist, and I kept waiting for it to be revealed she is some secret alien in disguise or something, but no.  It's Death, personified and with a very specific agenda here.  It's good stuff all around and absolutely gets a recommendation from me.

I'll be honest, I was pretty skeptical going into Death and the Queen.  I knew this was fairly well regarded among the fan community, so when it starts with Donna engaged and the Doctor in full Mister-Grumpy-Pants mode (a trend that weirdly seems to plague the character in Big Finish), I thought I was going to have to get a bit contradictory.

Things didn't look much better when a big head in the sky showed up and wiped out an entire army.  Donna having to explain basic compassion to her new fiance Rudolph had me very confused as to the purpose of this audio and what we were going for here.

Yet it ends up being a fascinating story with a lot of these plot points proving essential in setting up a very interesting second half to the story.  Donna ends up having a dance with Death while the Doctor uncovers a scheme by alien con artists to gobble up a soul.  I really like the detail that the aliens are not that interested in the Doctor, instead valuing the love and sacrifice involved in taking Donna much more.  It was interesting, and the audio does a great job of evoking these powerful visuals just through speech, sound effects, and music alone.  That's kind of the whole point of Big Finish, sure, but I can appreciate when a story does it as well as this one.