It's pretty insubstantial overall.  I really like the artwork here, though.  The Daleks are really rendered in an interesting way visually here.  Richard Jennings does an impressive job with this comic's art.  He has a good opportunity to express his creativity, too, as the story depicts the Daleks attacking various installations across the solar system.

The story that unfolds around our main human characters beyond that is pretty boring and run-of-the-mill, though.  Nothing too substantial, other than clearly setting up some more of the comic stories going forward.

There's no real story here, but I really like the artwork and found it quite vivid.  It's striking and a great start to the Dalek Book, which features some pretty impressive art overall from what I've seen so far.

Don't let my spoilery review ruin this for you, Red Darkness is best approached fresh, and is easy enough to follow so long as you listen to the whole Shades of Fear box set and are familiar with the rebooted TV series up to the Eleventh Doctor.

Oh, I'm with the majority on this one. Red Darkness is something special. I love the talking dog character, that feels like he is an easy sell but I also feel he is just well written compared to other talking dogs in fiction. Doyle felt like a vocalization of the thoughts a border collie might have, and I say that having grown up with a border myself.

I think the plot structure was a stroke of genius. The Vashta Nerada were a brilliant choice for a threat to go up against the Ninth Doctor. That alone was exciting, but then the story is built like the film Pitch Black and it just works so well at getting you invested in the story. That's not the end of how impressive it is, though. I was so skeptical when I realized a second villain was involved, and was essentially teaming up with the Vashta Nerada like they were two Spider-Man villains. It seemed like a recipe for disaster to me, and I was a little worried that all the positive reviews for Red Darkness were undeserved.

But I would argue instead that these two monsters actually blended really well together. Both the Verimine and Vasta Nerada each get new abilities and resources by working together. It makes their return here purposeful, adding a new dynamic to their abilities and the nature of their threat while showing a new side to both beings we hadn't seen before. It reminded me a lot of the Angels first return, right down to the monster crawling into people's eyes.

I just loved it. Like everyone else, I hope so much that Doyle and Callen return. Big Finish and writer Roy Gill (shaping up to be one of my favourite Who writers at this point) gave us every reason to care about these two and I'm so invested in these new characters. They could basically travel with the Ninth Doctor indefinitely looking for a new home without it even affecting canon too much. To the Doctor, this is him fulfilling a promise just as much as it is getting two new companions so it doesn't feel like this should affect Rose's story with the Doctor, and both Doyle and Callen are fun characters that I think could bring out a lot of great moments in future Doctor Who stories. They already bring out an interesting side to the Doctor in this story, with discussions of life expectancy, the loyalty of Doyle, and Callen's youth all being excellent topics available for future adventures.

It all just works so well, Big Finish would be stupid not to at least try and make it happen.

Quantum of Axos like the rest of this range teaming up the Tenth Doctor and classic companions, follows a certain pattern and handful of traits common to all three of these audio plays.

The story does some interesting stuff with K9 and has a fun enough time overall, but yes, these audio stories are definitely a little mediocre. Once you have the first one down, you definitely know what to expect out of the others.

Still, Sophie Aldred is SO good, while Leeson and Tennant are a treasure to the franchise. Stuff like that makes Quantum of Axos feel a little special where otherwise the audio would be overwhelmingly average.

A pretty cute experience overall.  It definitely had me laughing at times but you can tell this comedy simply comes from a different era.  Sure, it is clearly minded for a younger audience - the Master spending hundreds of years trudging through the sewers is a good example of that, but it also has a ton of jokes that really wouldn't fly for an all-ages audience these days, either.

In any case, it's great seeing Rowan Atkinson do a genuinely good job as a Doctor actor.  With the other regenerations along with stuff like McGann, John Hurt, and even the Shalka webcasts, there's definitely this sense in the fan community that there's a series of "lost Doctors" - actors who very likely would have had the role in the 90s during the Wilderness Era had the series not been cancelled.  I think, even though The Curse of Fatal Death is clearly a silly parody, they do take the source material just seriously enough we can get a real sense of what that show might look like, what sensibilities it would have had, and, given Moffat wrote this, a real sense of some of the aspects of production that would define Doctor Who in the future.  Any Doctor Who fan who really digs this sort of material should watch this at least once - it is a very interesting experience and short enough it doesn't overstay its welcome... at least not too much.

I didn't expect much out of this TV Comics adventure because, well, they aren't usually all that great.  This one was pretty fun though.  It felt like a take on The Daleks but with John and Gillian Who and slightly different enemies in the form of the Trods.  Which is exactly what is going on here - TV Comics didn't have the rights to the Daleks so this is their clear rip-off.  Yet the art is pretty great and the comic does exactly what a comic should do.  Free from the constraints of TV budgets and actor limitations, this is a story with a lot of energy, dynamic action, and pretty creative set pieces.  It's not the best comic in the world, but I had a fun enough time, and it compares really well to some of the other TV Comics I've read so far.

I was excited to see a story with Beep the Meep in it returning.  I thought they got his voice down well, and I loved the reveal along with that theme song, but the story was a little unsubstantial.  It's just a bunch of television references, like something one might see in the Mojoverse of X-Men fame or even The Long Game and Bad Wolf from Series One.  It's fine, an acceptable enough experience, but not exactly something I found that fun or mind-blowing.

What at times feels like it could and should be a clever follow-up to Kinda, instead I just kind of find both these stories underwhelming.  It's that same level of unfocused weirdness that plagues a lot of 80s Doctor Who that make these episodes feel like a noisy mess.  Production around this alien world of Manussa at first had me intrigued, but I never quite felt like I was given a reason to be invested in this planet or whatever was going on with Teagan.  It's too bad as I feel I just didn't happen to connect with Snakedance even if it felt like it could have had a lot of potential.  I struggled to take these characters seriously though and don't really feel like it is one of the stronger stories with the Fifth Doctor.

Flatline is rad as hell.  It's a very fun episode where Clara gets to take centre stage in a way that felt both natural and much-wanted.  I wish I liked her as a companion more.  Jenna Coleman is clearly an incredibly talented actor, but often this show felt like it had very little for her to do or even enough space for her to be a real character other than just as a sounding board for the Doctor.

Yet here she gets to take the lead in solving this mystery as a small part of London becomes terrorized by the Boneless.  She really drives the story forward in a cool way, using the sonic and leading the other survivors against these monsters.  It's brilliant and not only one of her better episodes, but also one of the better episodes in general to really rely on its companion characters.

The Boneless that confront Clara and the Doctor are mysterious in the best possible way at the start of this episode.  I like how their nature as extra-dimensional invaders is expressed in them being essentially flat.  It made for a lot of creepy scenes and the Boneless felt very powerful, especially as they were able to affect even the TARDIS.

One thing that bothers me, and it is mostly minor, is that the Boneless are only named at the very end.  It might just be my Canadian ears, but when the Doctor finally names them, a big moment the whole episode feels like it is building up to - I actually can barely make out him saying "Boneless."  Maybe it's Capaldi's accent, maybe it's just the sound mixing of his line is too low against the big sound effects used in that moment, but either way it blunts the hell out of that scene's effectiveness.  It's a great episode overall though.  I like the characters who were all pretty distinct.  Rigsy was a fun companion of sorts for Clara, and the cop at the beginning was good too - what happens to her is quite brutal for Doctor Who standards and it gets into the episode's more distinct and memorable qualities - the Boneless are true menaces that feel dangerous and scary - I love it!  That one supervisor guy was a little annoying, though.  He felt unnecessarily antagonistic and blemishes and otherwise excellent episode.  I definitely enjoy revisiting this one, too.  Top-tier stuff overall.

I remember when this came out.  We were well past the point of "found footage" being novel.  The Blair Witch Project was already old enough it get a learner's permit, and since then television has used the found footage method of filming so much it felt kind of tired and gimmicky, even back in 2015.

So I didn't go into this episode feeling exactly optimistic.  With Moffat kind of falling into some bad habits as a writer by this time to the point I was really starting to feel he had overstayed his welcome (this of course being before his series ten renaissance), I came into this episode not exactly expecting the best, yet it feels so much worse on reflection.

The monsters aren't scary and the explanation behind them is pure silliness.  The concept of people losing their sleep seemed intriguing, and I thought there would be some cool twist to connect people not sleeping to the scary stuff.  Yet that connection is weak as can be.  It's the eye boogers!  I just can't take this story seriously.  And it doesn't help that the whole thing ends on the villain spreading the horror through the footage of this episode.  That felt so cliche.

Not to mention this one is full of Moffatisms.  That means there are constant quips, frantic energy, and the politics are broad and obvious.  Colour me thoroughly unimpressed.