MR 063: Caerdroia

I wasn't the biggest fan of this one either, although it certainly has more to it than the previous story. There's definitely some interesting story, but it's mostly pretty vibes based. There's some good vibes though so that's kind of fine.

We've been seeing this border guard the whole time in the Divergent Universe, the Kro'ka. It has been directing them into the different zones of the universe, but now the Doctor has figured out how to get at it. The whole opening sequence involves the Doctor tricking it into trying to go into his mind and then the Doctor traps it there and figures out what's going on. This whole sequence was quite fun and allows Paul McGann to play, essentially. His mind is a twisted web of corridors and he doesn't quite know what all is in there. Indeed, the Kro'ka randomly finds a piece of cheese and the Doctor is like "whoops forgot about that."

The Doctor gets the Kro'ka to tell him about where the Divergence are and what they're doing. They're based in a castle on a planet called Caerdroia. So naturally they go there and somehow the Doctor gets split up into three. There's an irritable/mean Doctor, an easily excitable/giddy Doctor, and the normal Doctor who balances them. So it's just an exercise for Paul McGann to play three different Doctors. Which is quite cute.

So then we go into a bunch of vibes based scenarios. The irritable Doctor goes with Charley and the excitable Doctor goes with C'rizz while the normal Doctor goes by himself. Irritable Doctor and Charley go into a clock and try not to get crushed. C'rizz and excitable Doctor go into a zoo with animals trying to kill them. And normal Doctor goes into a big bureaucratic nightmare world. This is really the only one that's interesting to be fair because there's lots of "not my department" type jokes where he has to register to use a pen and has to travel down corridors to find the right departments. I particularly liked the sincere vs rhetorical questions department.

They all meet again in a labyrinth where they meet a random guy who tells them they need to break into the center. This is where the story kind of lost me because it's a weird idea that some civilization would build a labyrinth around their water and electricity maintenance systems. The Doctors think it's odd too and it's because it's all a construct. The Kro'ka built this world and had them wandering around a maze to try to break into the Doctor's TARDIS at the center of it. He wants to present the TARDIS to the Divergence in the hope that they'll forgive him for stealing a mind probe or whatever.

Then the last part has Charley and C'rizz wandering around the construct city for awhile and they eventually find the TARDIS and leave, the Doctors form back together, the end. Thank goodness.

This is the type of vibes based story that I generally dislike, but there was enough fun stuff here to make it at least an enjoyable listen while it was happening. The main draw is Paul McGann chewing the scenery, which I always enjoy, and the confrontations with the Kro'ka which were fun. Still better than the previous story, I'll grant it. Generally this is pretty forgettable though. Indeed, I'm already forgetting most of it.

MR 062: The Last

For the most part this is rather mediocre, but it does have some good ideas in it. It's an exploration of a society that has destroyed itself. How did this happen and why did this happen?

The problem is the explanations are rather mediocre. The leader is mad, power hungry, controlling. She's the very essence of a fascist. Power for its own sake and anyone who questions that power gets executed. She'll even kill people herself if it comes down to it. This character, Excelsior, will just do things and then act as if they were no big deal. She'll come up with excuses and pretend to ignore what's happened and pretend to be mad. The one thing she will never do is attempt to justify her actions because she doesn't feel like she needs to do so. She's the one in power and so everyone does what she commands, no justification necessary.

Her ministers are self-interested and intent on keeping themselves alive, navigating through Excelsior's mad mood swings. They're trying to escape this impossible situation after the people on the planet have all been killed. There's only a hundred or so people left alive on the planet in this underground bunker and somehow they're mostly all still loyal to Excelsior, who probably knows about everyone being dead, but pretends not to know and practices her victory speeches.

This is the situation as the Doctor, Charley, and C'rizz arrive in this nuclear irradiated hellhole. Everyone is destroyed. Charley is stunned at the idea that ONE SINGLE BOMB could do this much damage, kill millions of people. Of course, she doesn't know about the nukes in WW2. They take shelter in a house that collapses. The Doctor gets buried, Charley gets entirely paralyzed by a beam hitting her extremely hard and C'rizz goes for help. What help he thinks he's going to find, who knows. Charley and the Doctor get pulled into the bunker by Landscar, a mysterious figure in the government who claims to represent the planet, or some such. C'rizz finds a bunch of ghosts, though he thinks they're survivors.

Things in the bunker go immediately downhill as everyone has to tiptoe around Excelsior. Charley impresses her with fashion after she executed her make up artist and they all just mostly putter around for a bit, filling up the run time until there's a flood. An underground river bursts and they have to evacuate, but most everyone dies, leaving a few left. And Excelsior still talks about executing people for disagreeing with her when there are literally five or six people left. Indeed, she threatens the Doctor and Charley with execution just for them saying that everyone is dead on the surface.

Charley figures out that Excelsior is not quite so mad. She just pretends to be to hold on to power and so Excelsior kills her. She's entirely paralyzed and can't resist. There's what you'd expect here, with Charley, about leaving her behind because she can't walk but the Doctor and C'rizz wouldn't ever leave her behind of course. Excelsior also kills one of her ministers for attempting to tell her about everyone being dead.

The Doctor helps repair a rocket to get people off planet. It was originally built for space travel, but was repurposed for war. Now it's being repurposed againt for space travel, but Landscar scares the last minister to his death and/or kills him, doesn't matter. Landscar is going to stay behind. So the Doctor, C'rizz and Excelsior go up in the rocket. Excelsior kills C'rizz and the Doctor absolutely refuses to help her escape. He calls her the most amoral person he's ever known and that's pretty accurate. She just does whatever she wants, plays with the lives of her people, because they are her pawns to do with as she wishes. She doesn't need to justify herself to anyone.

The planet pulls the rocket back down and when Excelsior goes out of the ship, she gets eaten up in a forming volcano. Which just leaves the Doctor. The Last. Landscar says that when everyone dies, the cycle will begin again. Earlier in the episode, Excelsior didn't understand the concept of children. When people die, they just don't replenish their numbers. Because once everyone's dead, they all come back and begin this whole thing again. So Landscar tells the Doctor to kill himself. He says he never considered himself suicidal and does it anyway.

Which brings everyone back. Charley and C'rizz are watching a parade and Excelsior gives her victory speech as the war has finally ended. Charley calls her an inspiration, which is all ironic to us. I'm not sure if the Doctor is meant to remember everything that happened, but it certainly feels like he does.

And that's that. I suppose it is accurate that one power mad, insane despot can absolutely cause the destruction of the planet. Along with self serving ministers who will say anything she wishes to hear to keep themselves alive. It's wild, to me, that we're all still alive after the Cold War. At least for now. We shall see. The story itself, though, was pretty mediocre. I wasn't exactly thrilled by it, but it wasn't the worst story either. Mostly just inoffensive.

MR 061: Faith Stealer

So much lucidity.... So much lucidity.... Am I listening to Doctor Who or Discworld right now? This setting feels like a Discworld set up. It kind of goes in a Discworld direction as well, with a more incomprehensible Doctor Who style ending.

Like Discworld, we have a city where religions coexist in peace. The Doctor, Charley and C'Rizz need to declare a religion to get in. C'Rizz actually IS religious, but the Doctor and Charley are not. So the Doctor declares that they are of the "Tourist" faith. They worship C'Rizz. Naturally, that religion starts to spread throughout the interfaith center. They hear someone on the street preaching tourism and saying "C'Rizz be praised." And it only gets even more silly from there.

From the very beginning this was clearly a bad idea. The interfaith center seeks to promote interfaith dialogue or some such. But the nature of faith is belief without evidence. If you're a zealot and truly believe in your religion, why would you tolerate other faiths? The very idea doesn't make any sense. Your religion is right and everyone else is wrong. If you want them to follow the one true way, you shouldn't tolerate anyone else's beliefs.

The religions that we see are quite unique and interesting. We have a religion where they constantly sing a chant and that chant in and of itself IS their god. There is the Church of Kabari, which worships an extremely versitle household product that can be eaten or used as wallpaper or a hat. It was quite entertaining seeing the Bishop of this religion getting offended at seeing the kabari used as wallpaper in another church because he considers it sacred. There is the Shrine of Serendipity, which worships happy accidents. Anytime something accidental happens and they get hurt they are eccstatic. Indeed, when their shrine burns down they were overjoyed. "May obstacles cover your path."

There are a few other religions that are just mentioned by name for gags like the Microbaptists, the Divine Gas, and The Temple of the Ever Open Door (which has closed its doors for services). The main religion here, though, is the Church of Lucidity. It was a small cult when it entered the interfaith center and is growing rapidly. They dream the divine dream and create crystals in their dreams, the sacred objects of their faith. They recruit people who are depressed and looking for meaning, as all religions do. But then that small cult that recruited people who were depressed grew up and became the dominant religion.

The Church of Lucidity is spreading very rapidly. Indeed, it has become the most popular religion in the interfaith center very rapidly. There are regular sleep riots where people show their worship for Lucidity, sleep walking and talking. The director of the interfaith center has seen conversion swings before, but nothing like this. Banning the religion would go against everything the interfaith center is supposed to stand for. But the Church becoming the dominant and then sole religion in the interfaith center ALSO goes against everything the interfaith center is supposed to stand for. As I said, this was always a bad idea. Religions compete with each other for followers and if one grows to become dominant, it will have the power to take over all the others. This is not science. There is no agreed upon universal objective truth. For religion, truth is relative. Faith is based on nothing. So who's to say which religion is true?

C'Rizz gets pulled into the Church of Lucidity and tries to strangle Charley in his dream, remembering killing his girlfriend in Creed of the Kromon. So the Doctor takes him to the "de-faith center." The very idea is quite silly. They pull all your ideas out of your brain to get you to stop being religious. You've "believed too much." This, too, feels like a Discworld idea. The Doctor doesn't want him treated, but the de-faith center employee does so anyway. He tries to pull all of the Lucidity beliefs out of C'Rizz's mind, but they overwhelm him and take him over.

It turns out the Church of Lucidity is preying on people, stealing their minds and collecting them in crystal form to feed a weird crystalline entity from another dimension who eats thoughts dreamt during REM sleep, lucid dreaming. I know, it's an incomprehensible monster. The point is that people are getting pulled into this religion only to have their minds sucked out while they sleep. The director of the interfaith center tries to ban the Church of Lucidity, going against what she believes in, but she gets killed by the head of this church.

There's a part where the Doctor and Charley are lucid dreaming as well and they see what they want to see, the TARDIS so they can escape. Charley has the Doctor take off in the illusion and it disappears around them. I liked this little scene. I also liked the Doctor saying "oh ye of too much faith."

How else is faith defeated? With cold hard truth. The Doctor realizes that the leader of the religion isn't real. He was created by the weird crystalline entity to head the church. He disappears in a puff of logic and then the creature gets banished back to wherever it came from. The Doctor appoints a new head of the interfaith center and they get out of there.

This was a cute one. I enjoyed focusing on C'Rizz just a bit more. We know that he's susceptible to cults because he's already religious and we know he's haunted by his girlfriend's death. We could have guessed this already so we didn't learn THAT MUCH about C'Rizz to be fair. Still it's something. I liked the setting and the story. Despite the more incomprehensible ending, it didn't ruin it. I liked the meditation on faith itself. Faith is based on nothing but feelings and so it's inherently not going to get along with other faiths. It's very much a means of division between people, yet another way to pull people towards their own communities and away from other communities.

The religions themselves were quite fun and it was enjoyable to see C'Rizz pulled into a different faith than his own. His brain was taken from him and he just preached for Lucidity, helping to make it the dominant religion. The other religions can not exist in the might of Lucidity. I also liked what Charley said. This feels like a religious stock exchange. May the strongest faith win.

MR 060: Medicinal Purposes

This one legitimately pissed me off. I almost turned it off after the first episode and it was a struggle to get through. It took me several days. And it's for all the usual reasons that I get pissed off at Doctor Who. Excuses like "we can't interfere with history" and "the web of time" and "fixed points in time" ect ect. This kind of thing is cowardly, feckless writing that has all the moral weight of a Star Trek episode where we let millions of people die because "prime directive." It's this sort of callous disregard for life that upsets me about these kinds of sci fi writers. They think they're so intellectual, thinking about the moral ramifications of letting people get murdered or die of disease for the greater good, but really their ideology leads to pretty evil places like malthusianism. It's the kind of ideology that falls apart, as it does in this story, the moment you consider the people being killed your friends. When it's your family member or lover or friend being murdered for the greater good or to preserve the time line or to prevent you from contacting a pre-warp civilization, well suddenly it's not so great is it? I'm glad to see that at least some people got to see why I get pissed off at this kind of thinking in sci fi. From what I can tell, this one isn't very well regarded. It's mostly just forgotten.

It's absolutely character assassination as well. The Sixth Doctor was not well regarded before Big Finish came along, obviously. They massaged his character, gently sanded down the rough edges but still kept the core character underneath. This is a return to the type of thing that made people dislike him in the first place. This is not a story I know well, as I'm not British, but from my understanding of this story: a medical doctor named Robert Knox paid two men, William Burke and William Hare, to kill people and to grave rob bodies so that he could experiment on them. The Doctor seems to think this is justified because of advancements in medical science that might save people in the future. That's one thing. It's another thing to go up to Burke and Hare and want to shake their hand and tell them "well done, you're doing great, keep it up."

That's what really pissed me off at the beginning. The Doctor HERO WORSHIPS THEM!!?????!!!!??!! Ok, let's take a step back and think about this for a few moments. There was a good Star Trek episode about this very concept: Nothing Human. It's the Nazi Doctor argument, like Mengele. We have medical research that was obtained through extremely immoral, illegal, and unethical means. Should we use that research? Yes, of course. If it exists, we should use it. Does that make that research justified? Absolutely not. That is an ends justify the means argument. It's not even a utilitarian argument. We can't normalize letting people conduct such immoral experiments because maybe in the future people will be saved by that research. That's abhorrent. It's quite another step to CONGRATULATE not only the people doing that research, but also the people digging up bodies and killing people for that research. That's quite frankly obscene. I don't know what this author was thinking. It feels like he doesn't understand Doctor Who at all.

He certainly doesn't understand these characters at all. He doesn't understand this Doctor and he certainly doesn't understand Evelyn. The writer fails even the most basic characterization of Evelyn. She's a HISTORY PROFESSOR and yet knows nothing of Robert Knox, a very popular urban scandal in the UK if I understand it correctly here. Sure, it's not her period, but a history professor would probably know some basic history about something that happened just a century and a half ago. Yet here she acts as if she has no idea what's going on at any given moment. That's step one. Step two, the writer has Evelyn act less like the oldest, most mature Doctor Who companion who gently tempers the Doctor's worst impulses and more like a typical 16-20 year old girl companion both in the way she talks to the other characters and to the Doctor. She's constantly rude to everyone, including an autistic boy (we'll get to it later), and makes sassy comments to the Doctor, but doesn't ever meaningfully challenge him on what he's saying or doing. "Oh he just has weird taste in hero worship," when he's congratulating a murderer. That's just the Doctor being the Doctor. You know him, always justifying murder for the greater good. Excuse me what.

The very last story we heard was Arrangements for War in which Evelyn had to have some time away from the Doctor because of his CALLOUS DISREGARD FOR DEATH. Two young people had died in previous stories and it deeply affected Evelyn to the point where she didn't know if she wanted to continue in the TARDIS. And it's at this point that I just throw up my hands in frustration. That story ended with the Doctor getting extremely upset at the deaths of two young people and trying to go back in time and change it followed by the Doctor saying that he doesn't just turn his emotions on and off, it affects him even when it doesn't seem like it. And Evelyn accepted him for who he is and seeing that to be the case. He isn't just an inhuman monster. Ehem. THIS FUCKING STORY ends with the Doctor taking the autistic boy to the exact place and time where he dies in the history he knows, exploiting and abusing said autistic boy's trust and friendship in him, in order to get him killed so that history will remain the same as he remembers it. And now that I type it, I hate it even more. Talk about stories with bad politics and morals. THIS IS IT! And after he does this, Evelyn doesn't immediately go back to her time and shut the Doctor out of her life completely. In fact she says she UNDERSTANDS WHY the boy had to die. I just... no words. No words at all. I can understand if the writer hasn't listened to the past few stories with Six and Evelyn, but did the producers not give him at least a summary of what just happened? I doubt it would have made any difference even if they did.

And the Doctor hypocritically suddenly starts thinking these murders are bad when he learns that Robert Knox is not actually the real historical Robert Knox after all. He is a human from the future. Or something. So now that it's not the history that you remember, it's suddenly bad to murder these people. I hate this. I hate it so much. So once you take the abstract preservation of history angle off, now it suddenly matters that people are dying? Indeed, the story has to go out of its way to make this Robert Knox seem so horrible to make the murders seem less justified. He's doing it to save an alien race on another planet. Except not really because he's just created a time loop and having people play Burke and Hare in an obscene play for entertainment over and over again to make money. None of this changes the fact that an hour ago this story wanted to justify and congratulate the real Knox for his work. Indeed, it even says that the real Robert Knox was probably a good man. The primary point is not changed. This is just an out that the story tries and utterly fails to take to escape its abhorrent morals.

Oh and yes, as I mentioned earlier, there is an autistic boy named "daft Jamie" played by David Tennant. It's treated with exactly the kind of delicacy you'd expect from the mid-2000s. Evelyn initially and especially the Doctor throughout the story are extremely condescending towards him. To the point of luring him to his death at the end of the story. The Doctor even uses him to infect Knox with the virus he is trying to kill (Jamie is infected because he doesn't drink and drinking prevents the virus from taking hold). The Doctor eulogizes that Jamie had to die, but he was such an honorable and brave boy as the Doctor is luring him to his death. As I said, this ideology falls apart the moment the people dying "for the greater good" are your friends. Now suddenly you're not so happy, not so ready to shake Burke and Hare's hands and congratulate them on a job well done huh? As I said as well, seeing the Doctor lure this boy to his death should have been the catalyst to piss Evelyn off and get her to leave permanently as well, given her entire character arc up until now. She certainly shouldn't be agreeing with it. Imagine having David Tennant and then wasting his talent so thoroughly like this.

Indeed, there's a great character here: Mary, who is historically one of the people who dies. The Doctor keeps telling her that she's supposed to die, that she's supposed to be dead and she doesn't like the way the Doctor keeps looking at her. Understandably when the Doctor offers to protect her she says "and who's going to protect me from you." So when she goes off on her own she dies. I can't blame her for thinking the Doctor wanted to kill her because he certainly acted like it.

This is abhorrent. Easily the worst morals in a Doctor Who story I've heard so far both because it doesn't understand Doctor Who at all and also because it understands Doctor Who only too well. Normally Doctor Who is not about the ends justifying the means. Normally the Doctor doesn't congratulate murders. But all too often, unfortunately, the Doctor does let people die to preserve history as he sees it or the "web of time" or "fixed points in time" or other such excuses and nonsense. That is all too evident here. Even though it pissed me off, I'm glad it exists because it exposes the rotten underbelly of stories like that in Doctor Who. And I'm glad that at least some people saw the evil of that kind of ideology here when we pair it with "ends justify the means" morality. Preserving history the way you remember it was always an "ends justify the means" argument, but it's all the more pronounced here.

MR 059: The Roof of the World

Well I certainly didn't expect to like this one as much as I did. The Doctor takes Peri and Erimem to a big cricket game that's supposed to take place in Tibet at the height of the British Empire. Seems like a silly premise yes? It actually gets to be more interesting than that.

Starting with how Peri goes after the Doctor for liking British Empire sensibilities. He likes the types of guys who sit around and tell slaves what to do while writing a chronicle about how amazing they are. Which is wild. Why is this Doctor like this? Why does he like these people? The British Empire is exactly the type of evil empire that he regularly takes down everywhere else but on Earth. Yet for some reason he not only lets it continue to exist and doesn't try to fight it, he revels in it. It's kind of horrifying to be honest. Peri is absolutely right here, as she usually is.

Regardless, Erimem is the focus here, which is very fun. They meet up with one of the participants in the game, a general who is obsessed with his own image and literally has a chronicler who is fluffing him up as braver and more important than he really is. Erimem gets captured by a scary death cloud and this is where the story really comes to life. Up until this point I thought it was fairly average, but here we start getting character examinations.

The scary death cloud plays into Erimem's fears and insecurities. It shows her father ordering her death because she is a woman and women can't rule. It shows her Peri dying and scolding Erimem for making the TARDIS worse. She accidentally caused an explosion that killed them both. It even shows her the Doctor saying that he never wanted Erimem in the TARDIS in the first place and that neither the Doctor nor Peri ever trusted her.

It's so effective because we really get to deep dive into Erimem for once. We see who she is as a person and what she cares about. She loves her father deeply, seeing him as one of the most important people in her life. She sees him as proping her up, supporting her no matter what. So the cloud destroys that love. She says that she will always have Peri no matter what, but here is Peri hating her and she doesn't want to be there anymore. She trusts the Doctor completely, but here is the Doctor letting her down, hating her, joining with the scary black cloud to release it. The cloud feeds on her fear and insecurity. It needs her to release itself back into the world. And ultimately she agrees to help it so that it will stop tormenting her.

These scenes are absolutely fantastic for all three of our leads. Nicola Bryant and Peter Davison go from being sympathetic to being menacing and hateful in a heartbeat. They're so good and you really feel for Erimem as Caroline Morris shows such a fantastic range of emotion here.

Meanwhile back in reality, the Doctor and Peri try to figure out what this evil cloud is and how to stop it. They figure out how to get into the cloud, but it turns out that Erimem has already been captured. She is the key to allowing it into the world. The cloud is "The Great Old Ones." The "old gods" if you will, in the lovcraftian sense of the phrase. They bring fear, chaos, division, hatred, all the negative emotions as they destroy worlds one at a time. They embody all of humanity's shadows and boogiemen that go bump in the night. A memory of the evil that was once released but was held back by Erimem's father.

Erimem's father captured them inside of Everest, which is, you know, wild, building a pyramid inside of it. Not sure how he accomplished that, but sure. They want to use Erimem to escape because they can play on her fears and insecurities, which they do. Peri and the General manage to freeze the cloud with liquid nitrogen which is enough to help the Doctor and Erimem escape. I like when they allude to this early on when Peri uses liquid nitrogen to freeze the swimming pool in the TARDIS and make a skating rink. ("Just apologize and nod, he likes that sort of thing.")

Freeing Erimem prevents the old gods from coming out and they are trapped in their pyramid once more. She goes through quite a lot of trauma here, being tormented by the old ones, but she still believes in adventure and exploration. She's strong and she wants to keep going despite it all.

While not the best story ever made, it was a decent exploration of Erimem's character. All three of our leads did fantastic jobs of jumping between different emotions and character states. Peri and the Doctor's harshness in the nightmare realm were particularly impactful as was their compassion and desperation to save their friend back in reality. I usually feel like Peri and Erimem are a great TARDIS team, but their potential is squandered. This time, I felt like they were used very well.

MR 058: The Harvest

"Oh my god.... oh my god...."
"No, just the Doctor. But hello all the same!"

"Am I going to have to suffer through another bout of you saying 'oh my god'?"
"Very probably."

It's about time that the Seventh Doctor got an original companion. All of the other three Doctors have gotten one already and are on solid trajectories with them. Indeed, the Eighth Doctor now has TWO unique companions, although we still don't know that much about C'Rizz. The Seventh has been lagging behind. He was the true loser of the first fifty main range stories, even. There were only a handfull that of Seventh Doctor stories that I really liked and most of them were mediocre at best. It felt like they didn't really know what to do with this Doctor at the beginning. Now, perhaps, we can get a solid arc going.

We begin in the near future... 2022. The world seems to be divided between three superpowers: Europe, the Americas, and China. Funny how the UK is still in Europe. Hex, our new character, is a nurse in a hospital. One of his friends has just turned up in the ER and a doctor from upstairs has come to work on him. Only Hex hasn't heard what happened since then.

He goes upstairs to try to find out what happened. The computer system doesn't have his friend's name in its file, and so he asks about him. The doctor is rude to him at first, only to be nice and tell him that his friend died whenever he realizes that Hex knew him.

Not only that, but it's his birthday. He goes to his birthday party, but it's understandably ruined by his friend being in surgery and then dying. The mysterious McShane accompanies him as he leaves, only for them to get chased by some rather large men. McShane has Hex drop her off in an industrial area, which is strange. Naturally Hex follows her... into the TARDIS.

The Doctor and Ace are investigating this hospital because they have some sort of non-terrestrial technology that they're using. The Doctor says there's a space race going on between the super powers and Europe is trying to get a leg up with this technology. I like how he says "The Chinese pretty much run the moon." Kind of wild that we thought we'd have a bunch of bases on the moon in the 2020s, but nobody really cares about it in reality.

They go into full on infiltration mode. The Doctor giving instructions to Hex and McShane in an earpiece. But it goes wrong. McShane and another doctor friend of Hex's get caught. They find out what's happening. There are cybermen here and the cybermen are trying to go back to being human. Which is very strange. There's some gore and such as we see dead bodies cut up and vivisected to get at their organs. The hospital has been covering up deaths so as to use people's bodies as organ factories. It's all very gruesome and horrific as you'd expect from the cybermen. I'm not a big fan of scenes like this, obviously, from my reviews of the Projects, Nekromanteia, and Creed of the Kromon. It definitely drags the story down, for sure, but this one is not as insufferably gorey/dark/edgy for the sake of it as those stories.

It gets to the point where the head of security wants the doctor involved in all of this to kill McShane and Hex's doctor friend. He's about to do it, willing to do it to save himself ultimately, when they're saved by Hex who kills the cyberman watching over him.

The Cyberleader who is being converted back to human wants the Doctor's help to finish the process. The Doctor is sympathetic, but then the cybermen start killing all the humans and the Doctor is like lol nope. They see humans as a threat to the process since Hex killed one of them. If one human can kill one of them, all humans are a threat. Sure. Kind of extreme logic there Cybermen. They're not exactly known for being subtle. The Doctor then learns the truth. They're not actually trying to change back to being human for the sake of it. They've learned how to adapt and not be so logical all the time and are now using this hospital as a base to conquer the Earth. ect ect

The doctor who was working with them manages to get the password to shut down all the cybermen, the cyber leader begs for the Doctor's help as he and all the other human cybermen die of organ failure, and the Doctor gets a snappy one liner: "The flesh is weak."

And then the Doctor and McShane leave while Hex runs off to join them:
"Do you know what you're getting into?"
"No even slightly. Isn't that the point?"
"Quite possibly."
Welcome to the TARDIS Mr. Hex! He is definitely charming right from the start. You get the feeling that he will do well carrying stories as a series regular. Yeah, there's a reason why I didn't say too much about this story. There's not a lot to it. It's fun when you're listening to it, but it doesn't really have much to say on its own. Just a proceedural spy thriller, which is fine. It's entertaining in the moment, but ultimately forgettable. It probably would have been more interesting if the cybermen REALLY WERE trying to change back into humans and not just immediately turning it around as invasion #45210452221. That said, I definitely hope this leads to an improvement in the Seventh Doctor's stories with a new companion because he has been STRUGGLING so far.

MR 057: Arrangements for War

Who is this newcomer who just comes out of nowhere and knocks it out of the park with a political thriller on the first try? Project: Lazarus, take notes. This is how you do grief. I said in that review that a better author could do something really interesting with the idea of Cassie dying, and they have. I definitely see what Doctor Who and the Pirates and Project Lazarus were doing to lead into this one, but Doctor Who and the Pirates and Arrangements for War did it way better.

After losing two young people that Evelyn cared very much about in Pirates and Lazarus, she needs a break. Not a break, exactly, but more time away from the Doctor to think and reflect. She wants to go somewhere they don't have to get involved in any way. Somewhere they can just sit for a few moments. The way the Doctor just brushed off Cassie's death really bothered Evelyn. He tries to make it better. He offers her chocolate cake and asks where to go next, but Evelyn can't just move on like that.

This was one of the reasons why Pirates was so much better than Lazarus. Pirates had the Doctor taking the time to allow Evelyn to grieve. Indeed, that was the entire point of that story. The Doctor recognizes Evelyn's grief and they go back to her school to allow her to take the time she needs. Project Lazarus allows no such time. The Doctor is ready to move on almost immediately. He substitutes the earlier setting aside time to grieve for offering a slice of chocolate cake.

Arrangements for War, now, is the Doctor setting aside that time in the same way he did in Pirates. They arrive on the planet Világ. The Doctor chooses this planet because there's a celebration going on. There are three countries on one landmass. Two of those countries are at constant war while one is neutral. The two countries at war: Galen and Malendia are about to ally with each other because of an arranged marriage between their monarchies. Kozepén, the neutral country, is a republic and is just here to support the other two. There will be an invasion later on from an offworld species called the Killorans, but by that time the alliance will be strong enough to repel the invasion. For now, the Doctor and Evelyn can just enjoy the celebrations, wander around, and don't have to get involved in anything. Sounds lovely.

Only, of course they're going to get involved. Evelyn goes off on her own leaving the Doctor to wander by himself and who else do they bump into? Princess Krisztina of Galen and Governor Rossiter of Kozepén. Obviously! Evelyn quickly makes friends with both of them while the Doctor bumps into a soldier, corporal Reid. (As an aside, I love how the Doctor calls him a "geologists' nightmare" because he throws stones back into the water after they've taken years to get onto the shore.) Corporal Reid seems conflicted. He wants to confess his love to someone, but knows he can't, for some reason. The Doctor encourages him to confess, asking if he can live with the consequences of his inaction. He agrees and so vows to confess his love... to Princess Krisztina! Uh oh. Looks like the Doctor has interrupted the arranged marriage. Wah wah.

The Doctor ultimately agrees to help them maintain their affair in secret, but there's a problem. The official from Malendia, Plenipotentiary Suskind, is against this alliance and is trying to undermine it. He has the Doctor bugged and followed and so finds out about the affair. This is the fuel he needs to undermine the alliance and hostility begins again, the war starts anew.

Meanwhile, Evelyn has become a "special advisor" to Governor Rossiter. She has no official title or anything, they just enjoy spending time together. This is where we get a lot of the character development for the story. Evelyn was recently reminded of her own impending death when she fell to the ground in front of the Princess, presumably of a heart attack. And she talks with Rossiter on the beach about how she felt losing her two young friends and what that meant for her. Rossiter relates to her when he talks about losing his wife. I love this conversation so much where Rossiter says that the Doctor does grieve, in his own way, maybe he just doesn't show it all the time. Evelyn agrees but feels like he can be so cold sometimes. Maybe that's just how he grieves. He wants to move on. He doesn't want to dwell on it and so it feels cold to her. It's just a question of whether she can accept that about him. The background sounds of the waves crashing and the wind howling are so good for this conversation. It makes it feel so genuine, I think.

When hostilities continue, though, both the Doctor and Evelyn get arrested. They're seen as political conspirators, helping the Princess to have an affair. The Doctor puts it into Suskind's mind that a military alliance might be a good thing. He can't completely tell him about the invasion, of course, revealing knowledge of the future, but he plants the seed. Meanwhile Evelyn tries to get Rossiter to ally with one country or the other as a bulwark against the impending invasion that she can't tell him about. Galen tries to get Evelyn extradited. Rossiter can't stop it and so she gets arrested, taken on a train. But she JUMPS FROM THE TRAIN! (!!!!???!!)

Of course she ends up in a hospital and here she confesses what we, the audience, know but the Doctor doesn't. She tells Rossiter that she's dying of a heart condition. But he fell in love with her and he doesn't mind, he still loves her. Yet again we have a fantastic conversation here. She realizes that this is probably why the Doctor's reaction has bothered her so much and why she doesn't want to tell him about her heart condition. If he can brush off Cassie's death with a cup of tea and a slice of cake, how would he feel to see her die? Surely he'd just move on very quickly. Even confronting her own mortality and the Doctor's reaction to death, Evelyn knows that she's not going to leave him, despite Rossiter asking her to stay.

It's a huge step for Doctor Who to talk about this. Classic Who's companion exists are usually fairly arbitrary low key. There's no real time to grieve losing a companion, we just find another one and move on. Yet here we are, in this story, talking about what that really means. We did this quite well in Scherzo as well. Losing a companion has to hurt the Doctor a lot. You can't spend so much time with this person, thinking of them as your friend, only to just nonchalantly forget them the moment they leave. New Who is the way that it is because of these audio stories. We've spent a long time in the wilderness years actually acknowledging that pain of losing a companion and what it must mean and how we can't just move on from it. I love that so much.

Meanwhile, the Princess goes to the jail and helps break the Doctor out after a brief confrontation with Suskind's minion: Pokol. They finally find a place where the Doctor can contact Minister Mortund of Galen, but it's too late. The Killoran invasion has begun. Suskind is absolutely open to an alliance now, of course. The Doctor was right. The alliance was important to repel the invasion. Instead, now, the invasion is brutal. In the process, Reid and Krisztina actually get killed in each other's arms, a classic Shakespearean love story.

This time, though, it's the Doctor's turn to respond angrily. He can't accept this. He won't accept this. He's gotten to know these two and has worked so hard to keep them together. He won't let them die. This time the Doctor sees himself as directly responsible for their deaths. If he hadn't gotten them together, the alliance wouldn't have fallen apart and the invasion wouldn't have killed them. He wants to go back in time to prevent them from getting together so that they don't die. He's so overcome with rage and grief that he forgets about Evelyn. He would have left her there, but she comes in with him and changes the coordinates.

Instead they end up five years ago when Krisztina and Reid first fell in love. Before Reid left to join the military because he didn't think they could ever be together. Evelyn convinces him to leave it. They died, but they died together. If he changes it, they wouldn't get to be together. They would live out their lives probably grieving their lost love.

This final conversation is the heart of this story. I even feel bad summarizing it because it's so powerful when you hear it. The Doctor and Evelyn sit together and watch the two of them play in this park. "Tears from the depth of some divine despair rise in the heart and gather to the eyes looking on the happy autumn fields and thinking of the days that are no more."

The Doctor tells her that he doesn't just switch his emotions on and off. As much as it may seem like it. It hurts him to lose someone but sometimes he doesn't show it because that's just who he is. He can't change. I LOVE that Evelyn acknowledges this and says that she wouldn't want him to change. She likes him just the way he is. Which is honestly beautiful. She's ready to move on even though she'll miss Rossiter. The Doctor tells her that it's a challenge to be with her. He's loved every one of his companions ("It's not just anyone I let into the TARDIS." "And it's not just anyone who could put up with your mood swings." "Indeed."), but they're usually very young. Evelyn is more well rounded, more experienced. The Doctor usually has the upper hand, but with Evelyn not so much. Other companions would have accepted the Doctor's response and moved on, but for Evelyn it triggered a crisis of faith.

The Doctor talks about how Evelyn was able to control the TARDIS and how Evelyn must mean a lot to the TARDIS as well for her to allow Evelyn to mess about with the controls like that. It's very like this Doctor to end this incredibly emotional and passionate conversation with "Your boots need a bit of a clean don't you think." And then immediately we jump to the ending theme. I swear, I was really emotional and tearing up at this conversation and then he says that and I rolled my eyes and chuckled. That's my Doctor and I love him for it.

This is absolutely fantastic from start to finish. This story does a fantastic job of really diving deep and examining the emotion of grief. Not only the grief that you feel in someone's passing, but how everyone grieves differently. Even if the way you grieve doesn't match someone else, it doesn't mean that they're unemotional or a stone. Maybe they just don't feel it the same way you do and that's ok.

Not only is this a great emotionally introspective story, it's a very fun political thriller as well. The Doctor and Evelyn getting involved in the political situation on this planet, when they were not trying to, feels very natural and organic. They become intricately a part of it almost by accident. Suskind's continued attempts to undermine the alliance are quite fun as well, until they work and we see the consequences. The beginning and the halfway point are framed by news broadcasts as well which I found fun.

This story is expertly performed by Colin and Maggie, of course. They are the dream team for a reason. Maggie Stables brings an emotional maturity and groundedness to Evelyn that is so rare and so adult in a Doctor Who companion. While Colin absolutely expresses his full range here. He's comical, lighthearted, serious, careless, and ultimately shows how much he cares about the people around him. His outburst of grief at the end feels like such a natural outpouring of this story as Evelyn gets to see what happens when he doesn't bury his grief deep down for once. Evelyn's relationship with Rossiter, too, feels so natural and organic as they start to develop feelings for one another.

Ultimately, this is an extremely powerful story that develops so naturally those feelings of heartbreak and grief that were addressed all too rarely in classic who. Stories like this one and Scherzo were immensely influential on tv who after this point and for very good reason.

I love, so much, how this story has Evelyn confronting how she feels about the Doctor. His flippancy and nonchalance. His avoidance of serious topics. How he kind of moved on after Cassie died. And she doesn't know if she can accept him. But she comes to the conclusion at the end that she can accept him. Even when the Doctor says he can't change Evelyn says "I wouldn't want you to. I like YOU."
That's so powerful. I accept you for who you are. That's how you know they love and respect each other. Because she's willing to accept the Doctor for who he is. Not just for who she wishes he was.

That's so powerful, for the Sixth Doctor. Because it's a lot of the traits that were most pronounced in their worst forms in the show that made everyone hate him. And Evelyn has helped mellow them out. They're absolutely still there and I wouldn't want them to not be there. But here she is saying that she accepts those things in him. She still loves him for who he is even though it's all those things that the audience hated about him. It's like the writer telling us that we can accept him too, just like Evelyn accepts him.

MR 56: The Axis of Insanity

What an apt title. I feel like I'm going insane listening to this. This is another vibes based story. But this one is more like Zagreus than Scherzo. A mix of disjointed ideas that don't really come together to make a coherent whole.

I generally dislike stories like this as well since there's rarely anything to really think about. Just random stuff thrown at you for an hour and a half. I'm definitely reminded of The Ultimate Foe, or the Star Trek Voyager episode The Thaw, about a simulated clown that kills people in the simulation. It's similar here too with a court jester villain.

We land on "the axis" which is apparently where aborted timelines that the Time Lords deem "mistakes" go to rot. Like a giant prison for entire timelines. Which is a pretty wild concept.

Only there's been a couple escapes from those timelines into the axis. As was inevitable. Mythological creatures and a crazed clown.

Personally I think the story squanders its own concept. You could have done anything with the idea of aborted timelines. This could have been a really good examination of the Doctor’s mistakes and how he buries them or something. Like his accidental genocide in Omega. But you went with throwing random set pieces at us and a clown villain. Alright then. Cool.

Theres a lot of running around being chased by the clown and evil mythological dragons, but I couldn't be bothered. It wasn't very interesting to be honest.

The closest it got to interesting was when the Doctor started talking about why the time lords did this. And how it's pretty monstrous. There are whole timelines here in the axis. That must mean there are entire universes full of billions of people who aren't technically "real." The scale is ridiculous. I guess they don't know that they're not in the primary timeline. It doesn't really matter to them.

I'm surprised that the timelines don't just cease to exist. Or the Time Lords don't just destroy them. It's also kind of hilarious that we're presented with an audio where the Fifth Doctor is being overly differential to the actions of the Time Lords when we've just gone through Neverland and Zagreus where the Time Lords are not trustworthy at all.

Unfortunately this story doesn't really do anything with Peri and Erimem either. They're a fun TARDIS team and their potential is usually squandered. Like the story itself. Erimem is sidelined for half the story while Peri is just kind of here. She does figure out how to fly the TARDIS though. So that's cool I guess.

MR 55: The Twilight Kingdom

I'll be honest I checked out of this one about five minutes in. So I'll try to remember what I can.

I feel like this is just pretty procedural. There's a mystery. They spend two hours solving it. The end. It's not a particularly interesting mystery either. Nor does the episode have anything to say really. It's just kind of here being bland.

So there's a military group hunting down a rebel from their world who is hiding out here. He defected when the military didn't tell him about his family dying in a diseased city until after his current mission whatever it was.

They find the rebel group in a cave underground. There's initially an intriguing thing here where the soldier kills his commanding officer at the command of the rebel leader. But this isn't ever really touched on or mentioned again. It's just kind of there for shock factor. One of the other characters in the rebel camp says that this isn't even a normal thing.

There's some tension with the Doctor and Charley as she wants to stay and help the rebels and he doesn't. Which is strange for him. Mr "I've organized more rebellions than you've had hot dinners." But C'rizz and Charley become more and more obsessed with staying.

And then the Doctor wanders around for a meandering hour until he finally figures out that they're in a giant living organism, not a cave. And the organism psychically manipulates people into staying and then eats them, its evolutionary survival mechanism.

The Doctor spends awhile talking to the disembodied head of the real rebel leader who has been down here all this time. He's been attached to the creature and projecting versions of himself to the rebels. He's dying, the organism wants the Doctor to take his place, and then he's saved at the last minute by someone else doing it instead. Classic. The organism can't handle all the emotions and grief of loss that the rebel and the guy who takes his place feels.

We learn that it's not indigenous to the planet. Of course. None of the people on the planet are, which makes sense. It's some sort of scientific experiment maybe? Rassilon plucking these creatures out of time and space and putting them in his divergent universe because he's incredibly racist? That's why there's zones and immigration and customs to direct the flow of traffic. Whatever the thing talking to them at the end is.

The creature also found the tardis apparently. I like how the Doctor feels disoriented in this universe, though. It's completely different with different creatures and no concept of time despite having time. If there is time still working I dont know why the Doctor is disoriented by that part.

The story itself is just pretty blah. Nothing bad about it really. But nothing particularly great about it either. It doesn't have much to say. Despite literally walking around inside a body, it's not as big into the body horror as say Kromon or the Projects. Just a disembodied head and beating organs.

Inoffensive at best. It could have benefited greatly from cutting an hour and turning it into a regular hour long episode. The middle two parts are where it slows down the most.

MR 054: The Natural History of Fear

This is the voice of Light City. Welcome to your new work day. Today is high productivity day. Loyalty and productivity will be rewarded with extra license broadcast hours. Your state loves you. Happiness through acceptance. Productivity through happiness.

Welcome citizen to your life in Light City! Refer to the approved mandatory infotainment broadcast for information on our glorious society. You will have no fear of the censor if you follow the approved rules, ask no questions, and report to your Conscience any deviant behavior. Remember: Questions lead to answers. Answers lead to knowledge. Knowledge leads to freedom. Freedom leads to dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction leads to unhappiness. Your state wants you to be happy.

Alright, that's enough of that. We're gonna actually talk about the story now. This story is incredibly clever in so many ways. It's a story about a dystopia where the people are kept in strict line by a state, controlled by people who keep themselves in strict line. There are two classes of people. A prole, a worker, who is nothing. They don't even have names. They are just referred to by their job: the cook. The maid. The engineer. The fire chief. The nurse.

Then there are the upper class, but even they don't have names. Just their roles. The Editor. The Board. The DJ. The Conscience. The Censor. Their names are very Orwellian in nature, obscuring the true purpose of their jobs. They are afforded a certain amount of more privliges than the lower class. After all, someone must remember. How will we know what is forbidden if we don't have someone to remember it? How will we know that questions are bad if we don't even know what a question is?

That's a question. Questions are forbidden. It's a reductio ad absurdum of dystopian fiction. Questions just in general are illegal. But it cuts to the heart of the matter. Power is maintained through discipline and order. A monopoly on violence. Questioning that violence is what leads to power being toppled, eventually. So you can't let the questions start in the first place. Those that question get revised, their entire personality rewritten into a new person. Perhaps seen as kinder than simply killing them.

Indeed, ideas must be carefully and meticulously controlled. We have state approved broadcasts, infotainments, that are required viewing for all proles. These are created by the DJ for mass consumption and show the values that we must all follow to serve our state.

It's a well ordered system. A state that maintains itself on its threat of violence against everyone. Yet there is no benefit here. Nobody benefits from this. There is no wealthy upper class to benefit from the subjugation of the proles. Even those who have power are subject to the threat of violence, regularly being revised and replaced. The ideology exists to propagate itself for no reason. The story uses the analogy of a spinning top. It goes round and round and round. Never changing. Everything in its place. A well ordered, quiet machine. But one little push... and the whole thing falls apart.

The story itself is less important to the ideas being presented. We see Charley being revised multiple times. First she is a Prole whose husband asks a question. She calls the Conscience to arrest him and she ends up getting revised as well. Just being in the vicinity of someone asking a question means you are infecting. Ideas are infections. Just by exposing someone to them you are spreading them even if you don't believe them. So anyone exposed must be revised so they don't remember. Curing the infectious disease as it were.

Charley gets revised several more times during the course of the story. She is a Nurse. She is a Conscience. She is the ultimate Censor, each time growing in power. While C'rizz starts out as a Conscience and then becomes the new Editor when the Doctor as the Editor falls from grace.

The Conscience is the police and a therapist all rolled into one. They are very powerful. They exist to stamp out dangerous thoughts before they become widespread. The Editor exists as the ultimate Conscience, the judge, who deals with these ideas on a higher level. He believes there is a conspiracy to revolution brewing in this city and he intends to find it. Revolution is hiding in the shadows. A boogey man, waiting to strike.

The Conscience (C'Rizz) confronts the Nurse (Charley). He has a plan to spread revolution by giving her the Doctor's memories. But she believes it is a test. Later the Editor confronts the Nurse and tries to do the same thing, saying he is on the side of the revolution, but this is actually a test. You can't trust anyone. You don't know if they really are who they say they are or if they are testing you.

The Conscience really did have a plan to incite revolution and the Editor revises him. He's after the Nurse now, he believes the Nurse is the key. He visits the DJ for clues as to whether the Nurse really does have the Doctor's memories, but the DJ exhibits a surprisingly large amount of freedom, and the Editor wants to arrest him. But the DJ kills himself or the Editor killed him, it's not clear. Either way, the Editor is accused of his murder as his perception of events start to deviate from the Board's perception of events. He runs away, searching for the Nurse, trying to kill the revolution that he knows exists.

He lives off rats, trying to find her. He does, in a cave outside the city and she shows him things outside the city: things that his brain has no way of perceiving. This was an interesting idea. You have no way of understanding what you're seeing, no perception of it because you've been inside this city for so long, that you seen nothing. But the Nurse helps him to see what the State hides from them.

He brings her back and she gets revised. She is now the new Conscience and arrests the former Editor, now brought low. He still thinks he can stop the revolution, but now it is his turn. He knows the Conscience used to be the Nurse and he thinks the Doctor's memories are buried there. So he lures her out, does the same thing she did to him. Expose her to the outside world. The sound a spinning top seems to coerce the memories of Charley out of her and she reveals that the Doctor's memories are inside that spinning top. The Editor smashes it, convinced he's killed the revolution and now convinced he's the Doctor. He desperately wants to be revised. He calls it his reward for working so hard for the state. He doesn't want to remember being the Doctor. Yet the new Editor thinks he's part of the revolution, convinced of it in fact, and wants him to confess.

We get the Doctor's memories of when they arrived in Light City. The Doctor, C'Rizz and Charley arrived here and thought it was beautiful. They arrived right at the start of the Jubilee. The Jubilee is the quarterly festival in which all crime is legal, kind of like the Purge. The Proles are allowed to think whatever they want, say whatever they want, ask as many questions as they like. So when they encounter people asking questions non-stop, the Doctor thinks it is some sort of greeting. They end up getting seperated and lost in the chaos. Thousands of people will die in this Jubilee and so the Doctor agrees to give them his memories (and Charley's and C'Rizz's memories) in exchange for finding them and keeping them safe. Their memories will be used in the production of infotainment, carefully edited to project the values and messages of Light City to the proles.

The Jubilee serves an interesting purpose as well. It is a way for the upper classes to see what needs to be edited and revised in the infotainment, what ideas need to be purged. While it seems like freedom, it is still a vital method of control.

Ultimately, The Editor is brought before the Censor (Charley). The Censor remembers everything that has been forgotten. The Censor explains that society is like a child. It must be strictly controlled. But it will grow up into an adult and find its own way. Perhaps this society has only existed for a short time, strictly controlling its children until a revolution inevitably topples it. The Censor says there have been revolutions in the past and there will be in the future. They are necessary for advancement. Now it is perhaps time for the Editor's revolution. It is time to topple this society and begin anew.

The Censor reveals the ultimate twist here. The Doctor, C'Rizz and Charley all have four limbs. Two arms, two legs. Yet the people in this story have eight. The Doctor lives for thousands of years, his friends live for decades. Yet a thousand of these people's generations wouldn't fit into one of the Doctor's years. The Doctor, C'Rizz and Charley are long gone. They left immediately after giving away their memories. These are just people using these memories, believing they are these people, to incite revolution.

This is a fantastic story. Well written and well crafted. It is absolutely about a survelliance state and every single scene takes place on a screen. Someone is watching everything going on. Indeed, this framing device is used several times. The Editor watching the Proles. The Prole watching herself. It can easily be confusing: twisting and turning with its plot, but that is very much on purpose. The characters constantly change, revised over and over. The society is a jumble of people who don't even know who they are anymore. That's the point. They have no identity, but they do know that they love the state and venerate the regime.

It's a state that maintains itself largely on the people in it. It depends on the Proles reporting others and themselves if they question or think the wrong thing. And they are happy to do so. Several times we see people call the Conscience on themselves or others. The state REQUIRES participation to maintain its monopoly on violence.

The acting is fantastic here as well. Paul McGann is absolutely brilliant as the Censor. He dives headfirst into this roll, every bit the strong actor we know. He's at once sympathetic and sinister, spiriling out of control until he's begging for revision. India Fisher does a phenomenal job playing several different revised versions of herself. The Prole and the Nurse, fearful of the people above her, happy to maintain the status quo. The Conscience and the Censor, part of the maintenance of the power of the state, confident in her abilities. This is an odd one for Conrad Westmaas because we don't really know anything about C'rizz at all apart from that he's a Monk. It's only his second story and yet we're doing something so experimental as this. This is the kind of thing that you'd want to do when you already know the characters particularly well, like with the Doctor and Charley. We hardly know C'rizz. Still, he plays the part very well, playing the Conscience who tries to incite revolution and the Editor trying to draw out the old Editor's plans.

I don't usually talk about it either, but I have to compliment the sound design and music as well. The editing is superb. You can hear the camera backing up and revealing that someone is watching a scene on a screen. The theme itself fades into a screen as if it too is being watched. There is a theme made specifically for this story that fits, dark and oppressive and moody.

This is a phenomenal production from start to finish. I remember adoring this story when I first heard it and I haven't changed my mind on that. It is very experimental and it probably isn't for everybody, but it's an experiment that works wonders.

MR 053: The Creed of the Kromon

AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

That's it. End review. No, but really, fess up. Who let Philip Martin have a pen?

I just... I'm speechless. I thought we were done with the dark and edgy torture porn for the sake of it stories after Nekromanteia and the two Project stories. And yet here I am. Suffering. I hope you're happy. We went from an absolutely breathtaking meditation on the nature of Doctor Who in Scherzo to... whatever the hell was going on in Philip Martin's mind.

I don't even want to summarize the plot so I'll just gloss over it. After exiting their glass tube, the Doctor come across... immigration and border customs? Or some such. An angry disembodied entity that decides whether people get to cross over into the zones on this planet. Because there are zones on this planet. This whole section was bizare.

And then we go to the zone with the Kromon and we all go wtf. We start off relatively harmlessly by meeting C'rizz, our designated new companion. He's escaped from the Kromon after he and his girlfriend L'da were taken. They infiltrate the Kromon and we get to see their operation. They're a termite like species that exists in a hive. Brainwashing, making all aliens slave workers. They're now a corporate structure because they themselves were destroyed by a corporation but adapted the corporation's methods. Their "creed." It so feels like the director is supposed to be Sil. He sounds like Sil and acts like Sil. I was half expecting him to make the annoying purring sound that Sil makes.

C'rizz discovers that L'da has been made into a queen to birth kromon offspring forever. Which, you know, is horrifying. It reminds me immediately of Dragon Age because that game series has the same sort of monster. It's body horror, but particularly horrifying for women. Women being reduced to baby incubators is certainly what a lot of conservative policy is all about so it has a real world horror to it.

L'da begs for C'rizz to kill him, which he does and then they get put on trial. The story then drags on and gets super boring. The trial goes on forever and nobody cares. The Doctor works on space travel, but tricks them into causing an explosion. C'rizz gets tied to a water wheel and tortured, but is rescued by a friend from the beginning of the story. And Charley gets made into the new queen. This is the horrifying bit. We get to see every bit of the process of Charley being transformed into a birthing queen, as if it's a fetish for the writer. Who knows, maybe it is, he did have Peri transformed in both his two stories.

They eventually escape and I'm mercifully saved from having to hear more of Charley birthing and controlling Kromon offspring. One thing that did strike me as incredibly pretentious was how the Divirgent Universe is not supposed to have a sense of time and yet it absolutely does have time. There are events that occur in chronological order, something that would not happen without time. Regardless, why did anyone think this story was a good idea? And why did anyone think it would be a good introduction to a new companion? This Divergent Universe arc is not off to a great start. Let's hope the rest of it isn't like this.

MR 052: Scherzo

Who is this Doctor person anyway? Why does he constantly take people, usually young women, out of time and space and travel with them? And why is he constantly trying to sacrifice himself? Does he really care so little for his own life?

This is a hard story to review because it's mostly just vibes. Most of it takes place in a white void (give me any other story harder to make in a visual medium) with the Doctor and Charley having a conversation. There's a plot, but barely, just enough to string the conversations along. It's actually about questioning the entire premise of the show and the relationship at the heart of it. As such, most of the review will be meditation on the basic premises of Doctor Who.

When we last left the Doctor in Zagreus, he was going into the Divergent universe to sacrific himself so that the universe generally and specifically Charley would be able to live. He was filled with anti-time energy and letting that into the universe would cause it to be destroyed. Only Charley followed him into the TARDIS. She isn't safe at all. His sacrifice was for nothing.

There's a fantastic line right at the beginning that sums up where this story is going to go. The Doctor is hiding behind the console and talks to Charley, but as if she isn't there. He believes she is some sort of ghost or phantasm. "Impossible. You can't be Charley. She's safe in her own universe. She would never betray me like that." To the Doctor it is a betrayal that Charley would even think of coming with him when he's already made this huge noble self sacrifice to keep her alive.

This is a trend with the Doctors. He tries to sacrifice himself for his companion, for the world, for everyone else. The idea that they wouldn't let him is absurd. Time and time again on Doctor Who (mostly classic, but even in new who sometimes) we see the Doctor telling the companion what to do and she just obeys without question. The Doctor can't even fathom that the companion might have a mind of their own. At the end of my Zagreus review, I even said that it felt absurdly condescending to do the "cruel to be kind" routine at Charley after all they've been through. The Doctor won't consider her feelings. He CAN'T consider her feelings. They do not matter in the slightest. Charley is safe, what she wants doesn't matter. Nevermind that she doesn't want to live in a universe apart from the Doctor. She didn't ask for his noble self-sacrifice. What if she wants to sacrifice herself for him? No no. Unthinkable.

So when the Doctor sees Charley he feels betrayed. He is centering himself first and foremost and that leads him to this feeling. Charley acting on her own feelings is a betrayal. He's mad that Charley dared to come with him and now she's here, not safe. The Doctor was very much expecting to die alone and yet here he is not dead and not alone. In Neverland and Zagreus, both of them said they loved each other, but what does that even mean? Is the Doctor capable of that feeling? They're best friends, supposedly. The Doctor says they are. But are they? Is the Doctor capable of having friendship like that? If they were really friends, why is the Doctor so upset that Charley acted on her feelings? Friends care about each other, not just what they can get out of their relationship.

The Doctor isn't sure he even meant it when he said that he loved Charley. It might have just been a way to make her feel better before she died. To which Charley is rightfully horrified that he would say that. He can say things so fippantly, so casually, and not mean it or, indeed, even understand what it means. What does that make the Doctor?

The plot, such as it is, is barely there. They've created a creature out of sound that adapts and evolves along with a corpse that keeps changing and evolving over time. But they keep eating from it, the Doctor cutting up the corpse with Charley's broach. It's a horrible thing to imagine, but they keep doing it and keep getting used to it as the sound creature continues to try to communicate with them using just sound. They eventually start evolving as well, their hands fusing together until they become one creature. The sound creature feeds on sound and so tries to cut open their necks to get at their vocal cords. The Doctor even has Charley cut his throat open and let his vocal cords pop out so the sond creature can feed, despite there being no blood and he doesn't die. It's all filled with body horror and I'm glad I can't see it.

I particularly liked how the Doctor starts to seek a reason for all of this. He, at first, was quite resigned to the fact that he was going to die and was disappointed, in fact, that he did not die. But now that there is a mystery to solve, the Doctor is more than enthusiastic to solve it. Yet there is no explanation. It simply is a strange environment, they're walking in a glass ring forever and ever with a corpse and a sound creature that keeps changing. Given the opportunity to solve something, of course the Doctor springs to life. Yet there is nothing to solve.

The Doctor angrily lashes out at Charley. Why are you here? Why? What do you want from me? I was supposed to die here to save you and yet you came with me? WHY!? And it's a good question. Why does the companion go with the Doctor? To see the universe? Friendship? They don't think they have anything to live for at home? Adventure? Excitement? A sense of danger? Charley counters with the same question. The Doctor saved her, why did he do that if he didn't want her around?

I LOVE what comes next. The Time Lords have a theory that the Doctor takes companions because they are "memento mori," reminders of death. Time Lords live for thousands of years, humans don't even reach one hundred. What then is the point of them other than the fact that they will die? They will all inevitably leave him or die in his care and he will be left with the empty ache, the pain of losing something, the loneliness. Yet he keeps bringing them onboard despite knowing how it will end.

He didn't expect to care about Charley as much as he did. He put her above time itself, knowing that she was supposed to die and yet he didn't care. He let her live and sacrificed everything so she would survive. Yet again, he feels like she has betrayed him. He doesn't even want to see her anymore because that would mean he's failed in his self-sacrifice. Once again, not caring about or thinking about Charley's feelings because what do the feelings of a short lived human matter to a Time Lord? Charley loves him and won't leave him behind. Their love for each other has killed them.

We get a surreal scene with each character as Charley is giving her brooch to her "daughter," which appears to be the sound creature. The brooch gets handed down from mother to daughter forever and ever. But Charley doesn't have a daughter and will never have one. That's what the sound creature, created by the Doctor and Charely's presence, is her daughter. Yet it doesn't know how to use the brooch and doesn't serve it.

The Doctor talks to something that has Charley's voice and they talk about the Doctor's capacity for self-sacrifice. The Doctor will die for Charley. He'll die for the universe. He'll die for anyone at the drop of a hat. He values life so little. Only one of them can live: the Doctor or the sound creature. The sound creature values its life while the Doctor will sacrifice himself easily, he doesn't value his life at all. So it is only a matter of time before the Doctor sacrifices himself for the sound creature. So naturally the Doctor is willing to die so someone else might live.

Only Charley is a part of him now. They have fused together. She says it isn't the same thing. Why not? The Doctor dying so Charley can live. The Doctor dying so the sound creature can live. It is functionally the same. Why isn't it any different? The Doctor often can't see a difference. He's so willing to sacrifice himself at the slightest provocation that he has no priority system. He doesn't prioritize himself or his friends or those he claims to love. None of that matters at all in the slightest. And Charley won't let him. He will survive. And she accepts that she will one day die for him, not the other way round.

They can keep evolving, go on and become something greater. They can rule this new universe and have everything, but Charley doesn't want everything. She just wants the Doctor. They separate and go explore this new universe together, hand in hand as they began.

Once again Robert Shearman creates a casual masterpiece. This is one of the most intimate conversations between a Doctor and companion ever recorded and with good reason. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. It's as raw, emotional, and unfiltered as it gets on Doctor Who. Shearman understands this show intimately on a level that perhaps nobody before him had even considered. These questions are fundamental to the entire premise of Doctor Who, but nobody ever asks them. Yet here they are. This was hugely influential on Doctor Who going forwards, clearly, in audio, but especially in new who. We have this story largely to think for the stronger relationships between Doctor and companion in new who than we did in classic.

This story questions the entire premise of the companion. No, the companion shouldn't just be a prop. They shouldn't just be there to ask the Doctor questions and make him seem smart. No, the companion shouldn't just do whatever the Doctor says without question. They're there for a reason. They're people in their own right. The Doctor does consistently ignore their feelings, particularly towards him, and perhaps it's time he didn't. What better Doctor and companion to pull off an intimate story like this other than Eight and Charley? The most romantic Doctor questioning that very nature. The most romantic companion being rebuffed over and over, yet still persisting. And they end up going together anyway, stronger together, as they should be.

MR 051: The Wormery

In the middle of 1930s Berlin sits a little club called Bianca's and in that club sits a leading lady, staring every night in her own show. No, this is not the beginning of the 1970s Broadway musical Cabaret. This is the beginning of the first post-Zagreus main range story: The Wormery. This is the first of two appearances in the main range for that trans-temporal adventurous Iris Wildthyme.

Iris is a bit of a meme character, created in the first place to make fun of Doctor Who in general and she certainly does that in this story. Her TARDIS is a large double decker bus that is actually SMALLER on the inside. Her best friend is a sentient talking stuffed panda bear plush, although he doesn't like you to mention it. She's usually drinking at any given point, a fact that will come in handy in this story.

Most of this story is just vibes, like the musical Cabaret. We're just kind of vibing in the club with the Doctor, Iris, Bianca, Mickey the bar waitress, Henry, the manager, and Allis and Ballis, the strange double act dimensional physicists who are holding this place together somehow. The story is revealed to us in bits and bobs. It's mostly pretty meandering. Mickey is telling the story in the far future through recordings of what happened. Bianca loves singing and pleasing her clientelle. Henry is often put upon. Allis and Ballis are weird. Iris shows up at the beginning already drunk and falls off her stool dead drunk, passed out. Apparently she's maybe stolen some of the house special? Or it's her own? Either way Bianca is not impressed.

The Doctor has come here just to relax and for entertainment after his trial, most unlike him. He is also quite surprised to see Iris, someone who has been dogging his steps for centuries. She's in love with the Doctor, you see, but he's not really capable of love. In fact, he even talks about how, when he was a kid, he broke down the exact physical process that creates love in a paper so it doesn't really hold much mystique for him.

It's at the end of the first episode that we learn Bianca's is actually in deep space, not in 1930s Berlin at all. Or rather it is in 1930s Berlin, but it's also on numerous other planets. There are portals that connect it to many different planets. This is where it starts to go a bit technobabbly unfortunately and it starts to kill the vibe a little bit. Not too much though.

Iris learns that there are worms in the alcohol and in the makeup. When she drank Bianca's alcohol she started hearing voices and so she drank some more and kept hearing the voices. She at first thought it was because she was drunk, of course, but it's actually because that's where the worms live and they were talking to her. Naturally. That's what we should all blame when we're drunk. It's the worms talking to us.

It turns out the worms have two different factions. The pros want to freeze time at a very specific moment using Bianca's singing voice so as to make sure nothing ever changes or evolves and they retain their perfect worm forms. While the antis want to use Iris's singing voice to cause mass chaos everywhere in the universe. Neither of which are very good. Iris thinks these worms are quite mad.

We then later learn that Bianca is... duh duh duh.... Iris herself. Naturally. She is trying to steal all of Iris's remaining regenerations.... wait... where have I heard this one before? She sees Iris as the ugly shell and she's the beautiful butterfly waiting to emerge. As if her lack of originality wasn't enough, she even steals the Doctor's lines directly from Trial and then tries to assassinate Iris by having her driver start to drive into a brick wall.

Bianca has some sort of mysterious hold on the Doctor as well, getting him to feel something for her. Very odd. Iris even has a tearful love confession where she's been hoping for years that the Doctor would notice her, but no such luck.

The finale comes when shadows start to emerge, taking people over just as the worms are taking people over through the alcohol. The shadows are the forms of what the worms would have evolved into if this freezing time moment didn't end up working. It's really sad. Wandering as a shadow, knowing that you could have had a form and knowing what it would have taken, but you are stuck in limbo forever. No wonder they're angry.

The Doctor realises that Bianca's is the remains of Iris's TARDIS and so uses his TARDIS to land inside it, causing a time ram, destroying it, sending everyone back to their own time, and stopping all of this nonsense for good. And then at the end it turns out that Mickey has been telling the story to the Seventh Doctor, who promises to take care of the tapes. Cute.

Iris is very fun, played masterfully by Katy Manning. It's no wonder that Big Finish decided to make Iris into a series in her own right. Katy Manning is charming, as always, and she plays Iris very differently to Jo. Where Jo is naive, Iris has seen it all and then some, drinking constantly for fun and to forget her troubles. She has amazing chemistry with Colin right off the bat, as if they've been playing off each other for years. The Doctor even mentions that he met Iris one time when Jo first left him.

I'm surprised that this exists at all to be honest. It's a brief little sidestep away from all the drama of Zagreus before we get back to it in the next story. It can be quite nonsensical at times, but that's the writers: Paul Magrs and Stephen Cole. They've both written other stories that are filled with technobabble or don't quite make sense. I'm surprised they were able to hold it together enough to make something halfway coherent here that works. It was a nice little diversion. It's a fun little story with a fun little character. Nothing special, but not bad either.

MR 050: Zagreus

Wow. I don't even know where to begin. Fifty audio stories. Fifty! One hundred hours of audio content. Was all of that content good? No, of course not, but it sure was content. There definitely were a lot of gems here for sure. Zagreus functions as a celebration of everything we've done so far and also a look to the future. It's very much so a wilderness years story through and through with all the positives and negatives that that entails. I'm not even sure it's good or not, but we'll work that out together shall we?

Part 1: Wonderland

Starting from the beginning. The Doctor has been infected with anti-time at the end of Neverland and yells at Charley and then hits her. To which she disappears naturally. After which she appears as a kid next to her mom who is taking her to Doctor Zagreus because she won't eat her carrots. She is then greated by the Brigadier who tells her the thing we all feel when listening to this story: "Welcome to your insanity."

Every character in this story is played by a companion or Doctor actor, which is certainly fun. It makes it a game of "spot the voice." In this first section we have Anneke Wills playing Charley's mother and Elisabeth Sladen playing Charley's school master. It's kind of wild that she's here at all. As far as I know, this is the only time Elisabeth Sladen was ever in the main range at all before she died. It makes me wonder what we could have had if Tom Baker had joined Big FInish from the beginning.

The Brigadier is not actually the Brigadier, but the hologram avatar of the TARDIS who guides Charley through a series of stories. What's happening with the Doctor during this section isn't important. He's just wandering through a series of Wonderland motifs, arguing with himself and with the ship. And the talking cat from Wonderland. He gets put in a bottle with cyanide and gets to play Schrodinger's cat before he gets to work chopping down trees with his mind, naturally.

Charley sees a series of three scenes. The TARDIS is projecting these holographic scenes like a slide show, similar to the series 12 finale. What sets it apart from that episode, however, is that Charley and the Brigadier get to interact with the scenes, taking the form of characters that the other characters expect to see. The Brigatardis is guiding her through the scenes. Much like the beginning, the TARDIS uses companions and doctors in its projections. So this first scene shows a British military base during the cold war in which the military is working on a possible weapon by ripping a hole in reality. Which is one hell of a weapon. Not sure how well that's going to go.

This military base is filled with the Fifth Doctor's companions. We have the actors for Turlough, Nyssa, Peri, and Erimem here all playing different characters. I particularly liked Nicola Bryant playing a patriotic military minded scientist working on this reality warping weapon. The Fifth Doctor himself is playing a reverand, Mathew Townsend, who is working with the scientist. He wants to rip a hole in reality to find god, or some such. You know, to figure out why some life is similar while other life isn't. I guess without referencing evolution? He does say he's not a creationist, so I'm not sure why he think this will help him solve the mysteries of the universe. Anyway, when they manage to open a hole in reality, they see some sort of mysterious species on the other side that wants to eat them. A Cuban spy (played by Nyssa's actress) kills them all with a bomb and that's the end of that.

Part 2: Heartland

The next scene has the great mother of what will eventually become the Sisterhood of Karn and her assisstant waiting for the surviving vampire council of three. With one of vampires, Tepesh, being the Sixth Doctor, which is a cute choice. You guessed it, this is the Sixth Doctor section with the actresses for Evelyn, Peri, and Mel. Only Mel's character gets eaten by the Doctor's vampire.

They sneak their way into Rassilon's Foundry, which is his giant workshop and they see Charley as Rassilon, which is kind of hilarious. Then we get a giant lore dump. We learn that Rassilon is experimenting with regeneration, limiting it to thirteen regenerations, but not for him. He gets to live forever with no limit, naturally. As if that wasn't enough to tarnish Rassilon's legacy, we then learn that Rassilon is effectively a fascist. He hates everything that doesn't look like Gallifreyans. There's no real reason given for this either, other than that he's afraid of anything else challenging the Time Lords' supremacy over the galaxy. So he genetically modified all life in the universe, using time travel to influence their evolution, so that it would conform to Gallifreyan physiology. So, you know, fascist.

Rassilon also say a species that was supposed to appear at the end of the universe and destroy it, like the Reapers from Mass Effect. They also feel like the Ravenous from the later Eighth Doctor series. I wonder how much the writers there were influenced by Zagreus. So he sealed time into a time loop. Once it ends, it circles back and begins again, so that these Reapers, or Divergence as the story calls them, can never enter the universe to destroy it and thus destroy Time Lord supremacy. He sealed these Divergence in a pocket universe running on his desk, the Divergent Universe. Catchy name. This is probably the one decent thing he's done. For the wrong reasons, sure, but keeping the universe from being destroyed seems like a good thing.

He can't get a single W before going back to being a fascist, however, because as it turns out, the vampires used to only drink the blood of mindless genetically bred animals, but Rassilon looking to genocide them forced the vampires to start going after sentient species. It sounds to me like they had animal farms where they raised livestock to eat, but Raassilon forcing them off planet made them have to seek other means. And thus they became the ancient enemy of the Time Lords.

The Foundry draws power from the divergent universe. So when the brigatardis advises Charley to turn off the power, the divergent creatures can break through. The Foundry automatically destroys itself to keep them from escaping. This scenario is also where the brigatardis starts to act not very nice. Indeed, the Doctor figures out that the anti-time that infected him and turned into Zagreus also infected the TARDIS itself as well. Zagreus is both of them: TARDIS and Doctor.

The final scene has Charley being a mouse in battle armour where she's the leader of an animal army against human animatronics. It's a theme park where the animatronics are fighting over their creator. The Animator, Walton Winkle, or Uncle Winkie. Finally, this is the Seventh Doctor scenario with the actresses for Ace, Mel, and Bernice. They wake up the Animator, played by the Seventh Doctor, who is distraught to learn that it's the end of the universe and all the people are dead. Nobody to enjoy his theme park anymore. It definitely feels like this was supposed to be Walt Disney and this is Disneyland. The nickname is even a reference to the nickname "Uncle Walt." There's lots of references to Disneyland here too like the pirate ride or the fairies or the mountain (Disneyland famously has four mountains: Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, and the Matterhorn).

The park has been moved around several times and is now on the old ruins of Gallifrey, where the Foundry used to stand. I found it quite amusing how the animatronics were being influence by the Divergence and so woke up Unckle Winkie to operate the controls. Since the animatronics can't reach the controls with their stubby little arms, you see. Unfortunately, Uncle Winkie was put into suspended animation to survive his heart condition (another reference to the famous urband legend of Walt Disney being frozen in suspended animation), and he then dies of it, right before seeing the Divergence try to escape their universe one more time.

Finally, after the slideshow is done, Charley is pulled back into the console room where the Doctor and the TARDIS are having a bit of an argument. The Doctor deletes rooms while the brigadtardis dumps the Doctor's stuff out the TARDIS door, electing to dump Charley out the door as well.

You thought that was the end? No, this thing is FOUR HOURS. No all that was just the prologue. Leela is on Gallifrey because season fifteen had a dumb ending and she meets with President Romana because she has a message from Rassilon. Ok cool? As if there wasn't enough going on. Again, FOUR HOURS. And then Charley and the three Doctor characters from the projections: Matthew Townsend, Tepesh, and Uncle Winkie, are all in the Death Zone on Gallifrey.

Part 3: Wasteland

This is the most bizzare of all of the parts. So far it's just been a slideshow projection (albeit one that Charley can interact with), but now... it's still a slideshow projection, albeit one in the Matrix. Everything is in the Matrix from this point on, I think.

Leela leads Romana to the dark tower and Rassilon's tomb (from The Five Doctors) where Rassilon wants Romana to resign and wants her to sign a paper saying she resigns and makes Zagreus the new President. Ok, bizarre. Romana won't, obviously, so he mind controls Leela to attack her. I like how during these scenes Leela gets upset that Romana calls her stupid over and over again. Romana exhibiting the Time Lord arrogance that Rassilon was known for here.

After some banter between the Doctor actors (not the Doctors) and Charley, the Jabberwock from Alice in Wonderland appears. They have to say some nonsense and the Jabberwock allows them to ride it... all the way to the top of the dark tower. They solve the chess board from the Five Doctors to get in and then the brigatardis and Rassilon torture the Doctor.

This part I find very interesting. It's set up for how Doctor Who treats the Doctor's relationship with his ship going forwards, especially in The Doctor's Wife. The TARDIS is a fourth dimensional sentient being. Yes, the Doctor is very into self-sacrifice. That's his go to move. It's all well and good trapping the station inside the TARDIS so that the anti-time bomb explodes on him. But he didn't ask the TARDIS if she was ok with it. She's the Doctor's oldest friend and the Doctor is willing to sacrifice her without a second thought. But he's constantly trying to make sure his companions don't die. The TARDIS is actually jealous of the Doctor's companions. From her perspective, the Doctor and the TARDIS have been together for hundreds of years. How long has he known Charley? A year at most perhaps? The TARDIS even rants about how there's always girls inside of her and how she's always jealous.

As if we weren't done destroying Rassilon's reputation, we also see a frozen super nova that Rassilon has suspended. Simply because it was a solar system that could have rivaled the Time Lords. He's not content to simply compete. He fixes the competition in advance. The Time Lords will not be just another empire that rises and falls. They will last forever because nobody will ever be able to challenge them. That is the timeline that they strive to maintain. Their precious web of time. The one single timeline where they are always in charge of time forever, thanks to Rassilon. It's such a interesting idea. If you have access to time travel, why not go back in time and rig things in your favour? And then we see how that will turn out with the Time War.

The three not Doctors turn out to be sort of the Doctor? Question mark? They've elements of the Doctor's personality in them. They find the Doctor hammering away at a sword on an anvil, creating it. Rassilon is going to use him, as Zagreus to fight the Divergence with his sword. The sword is created from the TARDIS after it was melted down. I feel like the brigatardis would object to that, but he's ok with it somehow. Rassilon kills all the not-Doctors and then the Doctor begs Charley to kill him in a reverse of what happened in Neverland. Rassilon even says "you've played out this farce before." And it is a farce now since we've already seen it happen. It's kind of hilarious that Charley actually does it. She stabs him, but the Doctor doesn't regenerate.

I liked this little scene, mostly because it's the only time the Doctors are actually playing their Doctors, where the previous Doctors are all like "welp, he didn't regenerate oh well" They're all very flippant. Instead the Doctor becomes Zagreus permanently, at least for the next five minutes. Rassilon thinks he's got Zagreus under control, but Zagreus throws him into the Divergent universe instead of following his orders, refusing to be his puppet. Which is cute, Zagreus has a personality of his own. Rassilon thought he could control the anti-time creature, not so Rassilon.

It turns out, being melted down was the best thing for the TARDIS. The brigatardis comes back, cured of the anti-time infection, and gives the Doctor a bit of zero matter. You mean to tell me all of this could have been ended four hours ago if the Doctor had a bit of a lie down in a zero room? Really? The Doctor wants to go into the Divergent universe to quarantine himself because the anti-time is still there, the Zagreus personality just isn't there anymore. He does the whole "go on, get out of here, just go" throwing a rock at a dog trope you do in movies to protect them with Charley. Which is incredibly condescending. Even I felt how condescending it was. It's Charley's choice. She feels like there's nothing for her in this universe. If she wants to go with you, she will. And she does, sneaking in the TARDIS's back door(!!!???!??!?!?!?!?)

And that's that. I can definitely see the influence it's had. It's the first time, as far as I know, where we've really delved into the Doctor's relationship with the TARDIS itself. We see a lot of later companions in Charley as well, willing to defy the Doctor when he's talking nonsense. I like that kind of companion, for sure. She feels very influential on companions like Rose, Donna, Amy, River, Clara, and Liv.

A huge part of its legacy, too, is deconstructing Rassilon's legacy. Omega did a number on it, of course, where Rassilon took the credit for Omega's invention of time travel. This one certainly blows all of that out of the water. Rassilon did everything he could to make sure Gallifrey was the dominant empire in the galaxy, unquestioned, unchallenged. He did whatever he liked with time, up to and including manipulating the evolution of ever other species in the universe.

However, as a piece on its own, I don't know if I can recommend it. It's too long and drawn out. Do you like slide shows? Because you're getting a bunch of them. Personally, I liked the Doctor actors playing different characters because I've just listened to fifty audio dramas with them and I know there's way more, but that's just me. It made for a nice change of pace. But a lot of what was happening here with the Eighth Doctor wandering around the TARDIS in wonderland could absolutely have been cut. It's far too long. Does it really need to be four hours? It makes a lot of classic who serials look positively fast paced and snappy by comparison. It definitely feels like a hot mess, but it was an enjoyable hot mess.

MR 049: Master

"Are people born wicked? Or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?"

That is the question that this story seeks to answer. Welcome to the last of three stories examining villains of classic who. Today our story is about The Master. The Doctor's equal, but also his opposite. Where the Doctor seeks to preserve life, save people, fight injustice, the Master seeks to kill, to destroy, to BE injustice in and of himself.

This is also the FIRST use of the Master in Big Finish and who else but Geoffrey Beevers could have pulled off this script. It's curious that they had him as the Master because Roger Delgado died in the 70s, they couldn't get Anthony Ainley (who would die a year later) or Eric Roberts, so the only Master left is the one that was there for five minutes, Geoffrey Beevers. His audio performances, including this one, solidify him as my favorite classic era Master. He has a silky smooth voice that works so well for audio, yet he is horrifying and mostrous in appearance. Perfect for the allegory of Jekyll and Hyde or Phantom of the Opera, a classic horror villain.

There is an interesting framing device here. The Doctor is telling this story to an assassin about to shoot somebody in a parade. We don't know who or why, but that is kind of irrelevant to the story. We'll talk more about it later at the end.

Geoffrey Beevers absolutely knocks it out of the park with his first performance on audio. We open on him having a dinner party with his two best friends in the world, Victor and Jacqueline Schaeffer for his ersatz birthday. They found him ten years ago wandering the streets with severe amnesia, not knowing who he was. Jacqueline took him into her hostal where she takes care of people who struggle to survive. He became Doctor John Smith, a medical doctor who inherited a mansion from one of his patients. His birthday isn't really his birthday, just the anniversary of when they found him. There is quite a lot of irony in the Master using the Doctor's nom de plume when he doesn't know who he is. That seems to be part of the point of the story: that the Doctor and the Master are not so different.

The only other person in the house is Jade, John Smith's live in servant who cooks and cleans for him. There is also a cat who came with the will who John doesn't particularly care for. Over the course of the dinner conversation we learn that there has been a series of gruesome murders recently against prostitutes, being investigated by Victor, the local adjudicator. The most recent murder was someone who wasn't a prostitute but was mistaken to be one, which ties into a story about the house. There is a legend of a curse. One of Jacqueline's ancestors was the black sheep of the family. He threw wild parties in this very house, hiring prostitutes. He mistook one of the guests to be a prostitute and got her drunk and had sex with her. Her father took revenge and violently murdered him so his ghost is said to walk the halls. It alll seems to be deliberately invoking Jack the Ripper's own hatred of prostitutes.

As the dinner party continues, the guests act strangely. Jacqueline verbally abuses Jade. Victor acuses John of being deceitful. Until a strange little man's face appears in the window contorted in agony, screaming. John being the man that he is goes out to help against Victor's and Jacqueline's protests, but John is not one to let someone die. He is everything the Master is not. He helps the strange little man, revives him, and they have a chat.

This is where we get some of the best material in this script. Like with Omega and Davros, we have some very strong back and forth conversations between our Doctor and our subject. McCoy and Beevers play off each other phenomenally well. John is an amateur psychologist, in addition to being a Doctor, obsessed with why people do what they do. Why do people commit such terrible acts of evil? What would drive someone to murder?

It is tempting to say that these people are just wicked monsters and dismiss it at that, because if you were to be able to come up with a motive, with some reason for their actions, that would be admitting that you perhaps have something in common with that monster. There's a good scene, a little later, where the Doctor does exactly this. He's asked what reason there could be for murdering all of these prostitutes and he comes up with several potential motives on the spot and it's a little creepy hearing him be able to just spout them off. As if he has thought of them himself?

John has come to the conclusion that perhaps some people really are just evil. Or is evil even a real concept? Perhaps their morality is so wildly different than everyone else's that it just has no way of making sense to everyone else? A psychopath is so removed from reality, from everyone else, that they're trying to get everyone else to understand their morality. Perhaps their red is different from your red and they're just trying to get everyone to see in their color red.

The Doctor hints in this conversation that there is perhaps more to John than he's letting on. He evien talks about how he once had a friend who he thought of as evil, the Master, who killed countless amounts of people, but doesn't say anything more than that. Or more than that he is looking for a friend of his. While John confesses that he sometimes hears voices telling him to kill and he wants to see if Jacqueline and Victor can hear them too. There's a very well done and disturbing scene where John suddenly gets possessed by some entity, the Master perhaps? And the Doctor is reminded that he must kill the Master. It's chilling and does a good job of setting up the rest of the story.

There is suddenly a scream. The cat has died in the same manner as the prostitutes, mutilated, heart removed. Jacqueline and Victor continue to snap. And then John pretends to take Jacqueline hostage, threatening to kill her if the Doctor doesn't tell him who he is. The Doctor refuses, saying that if he tells John then everyone will die, many more people will die. The Seventh Doctor's morality here is the opposite of Eighth Doctor's. When confronted with a person in danger, the Seventh calculates the potential cost down the line while the Eighth does whatever he can to save the people he can see in front of him. The Eighth absolutely would have told the Master his identity right then and there. But the charade is up, for both of them. John won't kill Jacqueline of course and the Doctor has already confirmed that he does know more than he's letting on.

He tells John about the Master, about the countless people he's killed, but also about a story from their childhood. When they were children, they were relentlessly bullied by another child named Torvic. Usually when they got bullied, they just stood by and watched and waited, unable to do anything. But this time was different. As Torvic held one boy's head in the water, drowning him, the other boy picked up a giant rock and smashed it over Torvic's head. They burned his body and never spoke of it again, but the guilt of the murder led the Master to become who he was, a psychopath, disconnected from the people he murders.

More recently, the Doctor made a deal with Death itself to give the Master ten years of a nice, normal life. He got to have love, friends, acceptance into a community, things he'd never felt before. But at the end of those ten years, the Doctor had to kill him. Naturally, the Doctor won't kill him and so Death herself has come to collect. Jade, the servant, is Death incarnate.

That's when all hell breaks lose. The pretension of the friendly dinner party is long gone. Death tells everyone that Victor is the murderer and Jacqueline is in love with John, not Victor. Death demands a murder victim. Someone must die, if not the Master. John pretends to hate Jacqueline to get her to run away, but she runs right into Victor, who holds her hostage. John kills her in a jealous rage, unable to live with the idea that she loves John and not him. Death's blood lust is satiated, the Master returns, and he is bitter. Geoffrey Beevers does a fantastic job of turning the Master back on. Filled with anger, hatred, resentment, bitterness. He is every bit the Jekyll to John Smith's Mr. Hyde.

But then the Doctor makes another deal. John can either kill Victor and save Jacqueline, which will bring back the Master. Or he can do nothing and simply leave, staying as John Smith. We end on the story resetting back to the beginning. Jacqueline and Victor come to the house for the dinner party while the Master holds a knife on Victor and we don't get to see what he chooses. Does he save himself or the woman he loves?

We don't know the answer and it doesn't matter. There is one last revelation. The Master was not the one to kill Torvic, it was actually the Doctor. The Doctor made his very first deal with Death that night, that the Master would have the memory of killing Torvic and not him, so that the Doctor would not be tormented with guilt. It's a devestating revelation and plays into the central theme. Was the Master just born evil? Or was he destined to always be evil? Or was it the result of his environment, the people he was around, the friends he kept. Same thing with the Doctor. Perhaps the Doctor was going to be the evil one, going around killing innocents, if not for this deal with Death.

In the framing device, the person the Doctor is telling the story to was, naturally, Death herself. The Doctor was supposed to kill an innocent, but of course he couldn't do it. He can no more escape his nature of wanting to preserve life than Death can of taking as much life as she can. The Master is her agent, her servant, while the Doctor is her eternal enemy. Indeed, even after all this, the Doctor still has hope that one day he can save his oldest friend, the Master.

This was very well done. Well written and well performed. The talk about psychology is fascinating. John holds this terrible secret deep inside that he doesn't want to hold. His friends hold their own secrets that Death allows them to show. Jacqueline, despite running a hostal, is actually judgemental and classist. Victor, despite being the adjudicator investigating the murders, is the real killer, filled with hatred for prostitutes. And the Doctor, despite doing everything he can to save life, passed on his guilt for accidentally kiilling someone onto his best friend, when he was a child.

Making it about the Master means that the Doctor is necessarily going to be heavily involved. They are best friends. Their rivalry runs deep. The Doctor wants so desperately to save him, but can't. For so long in this Geoffrey Beevers isn't even playing the Master. He's playing John Smith, but he does it so well. You can feel the creeping horror in his voice as he discovers more about who he is and what it means. And naturally Sylvester McCoy works so well here as the jaded, bitter grandmaster Doctor who no longer has fun and feels desperate and sad. This was a great examination of the Master and a fitting conclusion to this trilogy. It is easily the best Seventh Doctor story in the first fifty and shows the potential with the Seventh Doctor that these first fifty stories missed. It also makes me look forward to more Geoffrey Beevers who is absolutely phenomenal.

MR 048: Davros

"When I press this switch, I will die. The poison in that projectile injector will kill me in a moment. It is a perfect, efficient killing machine."

Now we move to the second story examining classic who villains. This time our subject is the one and only Davros, the creator of the Daleks, and this is probably the single best Davros performance ever made, tv or audio. Speaking of fascism, there seems to be a running theme in these opening audios. If only the writer of Flip-Flop got the memo.

Davros is known as the creator of the Daleks, of course, but in this audio he is curiously on his own, without the Daleks. This gives him a lot of room to develop as a character in his own right, without his shouty monstrosities wheeling around. We get a lot of interesting backstory as well, revealed gradually over the course of the story and running sort of in parallel with the main story.

And in that opening we learn some backstory. Davros was offered a way to kill himself by the Kaled people. Fascists, of course, are not known for being favorable towards disability. After his accident from being hit by a nuclear blast, Davros is incredibly disabled, only able to move one arm and having no sense of sight or taste or smell. Now that he is disabled, his own fascist government thinks he is no longer part of the master race and must be destroyed. They don't have the heart to do it for him because of all his work for the Kaleds in the war, so they say he should do it. But Davros refuses to die. He can not and will not die.

We open on a massive intergalactic mega corporation where there's a rumor that they're going to shut down all their mines. This, of course, would devastate millions, perhaps billions, of people's lives and many different communities that rely on the mines. It's a parallel to how corporations work now. Whole communities and millions of people rely on the work from massive corporate projects like Amazon warehouses, but a few mega rich ghouls on the board of a corporation can just decide to devastate whole economies and cast millions of people into poverty by closing these warehouses just on a whim. It's a pretty horrifying way to organize society. It's just feudalism again with a few extra steps. It's also why cities will bid on and try to make laws favorable to corporations to lure them into building a warehouse there. Think about how many cities, communities, and people were devastated by factories closing in the US and going overseas where it's cheaper to run.

As the Doctor is investigating these rumors with a journalist, Willis, and an inside worker, Kimberly Todd, he discovers something pretty horrifying, to him. The CEO of the corporation, Arnold Baynes, and his wife Lorraine have recovered the corpse of Davros himself and are attempting to revive him. The Sixth Doctor, being the type of Doctor that he is, immediately breaks cover and runs out from hiding shouting about how Davros shouldn't be revived. Of course Colin is amazing in this, as he always is. As the audio goes on, he plays his Doctor so well as the shouty, in your face, irreverent Doctor. That is how the Sixth Doctor should have been played from the beginning on tv instead of menacing and murderous. I definitely remember this audio in particular being one of the formative stories in my love for his Doctor, understandably so.

I love how the Baynes couple try to play on the Doctor's compassion. Shouldn't a Doctor try to save lives instead of kill them? Only in the Doctor's mind, there is no conflict, Davros is already dead and needs to stay in suspended animation. But it's too late. They revive him and then offer him a job after showing him a commercial for the corporation. "We're just a good old fashioned family run mega corporation." It's like Momcorp from Futurama. The Doctor, desperate, offers his own services and so they work together.

This is mostly an excuse for the Doctor and Davros to bandy wits back and forth, and boy is it fun. The Doctor ruins two hours of Davros's work, hilariously before Davros pours his heart and soul out to the Doctor. He talks about being in suspended animation for a very long time after the humans defeated the Daleks. He talks about how he almost went mad, or did go mad, or already was mad. Every second stretched out to an eternity as he was forced to relive his entire life over and over again, unable to move or do anything but think. Davros says he's going to change his ways and become good to which the Doctor obviously does not believe him. All the while that Davros is talking about the torturous existence of being suspended, the Doctor is being flippant and irreverent, not buying it for a second.

There's also an interesting scene in which Willis interviews Baynes and then Baynes destroys his tape recorder and holds him prisoner. It absolutely sounds like something a mega powerful CEO would do to an unfavorable reporter. There's another interesting bit where they're required to break for lunch and Davros thinks it odd that there are laws that make workers less productive. Because, of course, he sees workers as slaves.

Lorraine then interviews Davros. She's a historian and wants to write his biography because she admires him so much. And this is where we get some more backstory. He created weapons for the war effort and he created food pills made out of the corpses of fallen soldiers. The only thing on Skarro in abundance is corpses, after all. He worked with a woman named Shan who first came up with idea of evolving beyond their bodies and creating the Daleks, but Davros continued the work.

The Doctor and Davros complete their work on a what was supposed to be used as a starship's navigation computer (but was actually used for robots without their knowledge) and Davros is tasked with ending famine. He finds the system grossly inefficient, because of course it is. Capitalism is ridiculously inefficient because it's a failure of distribution. People being unable to buy food and starving to death while corporations throw food out regularly is very much so inefficient and wasteful. As Davros says, planets that don't make enough food for their own population grow cash crops for planets that already have too much food. Because they have to make the cash crops just to survive, thus serving the imperial core.

And in response to this, Davros decides that it's time to bring down the inefficient corporate system. He's going to do this through the stock market. He understands it perfectly, able to develop a perfect algorithm to predict it. When he releases this algorithm to the world, stocks will be worthless and corporations will collapse allowing him to replace it with his new galactic order. Only instead of creating something better, he will create something far far worse. He plans on making the galaxy into his slaves to create weapons to enslave even more people. Even without the Daleks, Davros can't help but think like them. Or, more accurately, they can't help but think like him because he created them after all.

And now that we know that Davros is indeed still evil, we hear more backstory. It turns out that he might have been in love with Shan and was jealous that Shan was talking to someone else socially. So in that jealous rage, he fabricated evidence that the person Shan was talking with was a Thal agent and had him and all of his associates executed, even Shan. He let his hatred consume him to the point where he actually believed that Shan was a Thal agent just because she was hanging out with someone else.

When Baynes, Willis, and the Doctor go down to the robot factory where his work has been put to use, we see Davros break cover finally when he tries to kill them all. He gave a nuke to Willis earlier telling him it was evidence against Baynes (even though he just made it up) and sets it off. The Doctor gets to run with it very fast and drop it into a hole, hoping that it won't kill them. The blast doesn't, but the radiation starts to sweep upwards into the corporate dome, killing thousands of people who work there. But Davros has holed himself up in the bunker inside the bunker, the computer center, completely shielded from the radiation.

In keeping with Baynes still being evil (but less evil compared to Davros), he takes the opportunity to kill Willis. The hostile journalist will never get word out about what's happened if he's dead. When they get back up, Davros is trying to send out his stock market algorithm to the world, but he keeps getting stone walled. Baynes comes back to offer to take Davros away and use the algorithm for them both to get rich, but Davros kills him. We see the contrast here. Baynes' evil comes from his greed. Davros' evil comes from his hatred. Davros doesn't care about being wealthy even as Baynes offers him money over and over again. He wants to rule, to conquer.

The Doctor manages to foil Davros's plans over and over to send out his algorithm, so Davros escapes to a ship where he can use the com system to transmit it, but that fails as well when they're able to control the ship from orbit. The ship crashes and the Doctor assumes Davros has survived because he always does while he gets Lorraine arrested for causing all this mess in the first place because she admired Davros.

Davros is very much so a product of his environment. He grew up on a world in constant nuclear war, tearing itself apart from the radiation and nuclear blasts over thousands of years. War was all he knew and it's all he can contemplate even now. It's just hatred for the Thals turned into hatred for the rest of the universe. He then transferred that hatred into his Daleks. That hatred stays with him still. It's hatred for everyone but him. Even when he thinks of someone as his equal, like the Doctor, that hatred never leaves him. He thought of Shan as his equal, but killed her all the same. It's that hatred that motivates him to live. He refuses to die. He will live out of spite when everyone has turned on him and everyone is afraid of him. He will live and he will conquer and he will rule all.

Like I said, this is the best Davros performance I've ever seen/heard. Terry Molloy injects Davros with such pathos. You never truly feel sorry for him, but you understand why he's so evil. Colin plays against him perfectly. His irreverence is perfect for Davros's overly dramatic shouting and it works so well. This is a triumph of a story that shows how good both Colin and Terry Molloy can be and lets us really get to know Davros in all his disturbing glory.

MR 047: Omega

Welcome to the first of three stories really examining some of the greatest villains of classic who. Well, I say villains, but Omega isn't really a villain is he? And that's what this story is about. It's about history and legacy and how stories about famous people are perceived long after they're gone. It's something that you can't really examine in Doctor Who because it's a show about time travel. Historical figures are just regular characters. But the Time Lords have uniquely locked their own history from time travel. They zealously guard their history from both their own people and anyone else with time travel technology. So Time Lord historians have to rely on good old fashioned historical research rather than going into the actual history.

And I'm glad that I watched all of classic who first too, because I wouldn't be able to make heard nor tail of this story. I definitely didn't when I first listened to it over a decade ago and I didn't know anything about classic. Now, though, I know the two stories with Omega from classic. Thankfully, this one is much better than both of those.

We start on board a historical vacation ship. Apparently in whatever time period we're in now, "History is the new soap opera." People love historical re-enactments and all that juicy gossip about historical figures, whether the legends about them are true. Again, something that can only happen with Time Lord historical figures. I like the idea that actually time travelling into history is not popular anymore. It's just not as fun as a re-enactment. Like going on a roller coaster versus confronting actual danger. Real history is dirty, dusty, dangerous, you can't interact with anything, there's no toilets, and, worst of all, they don't serve snacks.

So now the Doctor is going on one of these re-enactment expeditions to the area of space where Omega detonated his stellar manipulator and exploded the star that allowed the Time Lords to invent time travel. There's a bunch of tourists on board including a couple of sweet old ladies, and a bunch of staff members, including the re-enactment actors. Only, this region of space is notoriously unstable, thanks to the exploded star, and people sometimes lose their minds a little. Nothing like that would ever happen to our heroes though right? Right?

In the official story, Omega's assistant, Vandekirian, sabotaged the mission on behalf of Rassilon. Why Rassilon wanted to sabotage the mission in the official history... who knows? However, Vandekirian felt guilty about his betrayal and cut off his hand. Omega did not accept his guilt and so cut off his other hand and put it in the stellar manipulator, later known as the "Hand of Omega." But, thanks to Vandekirian's sabotage, the ship was still destroyed and Omega was sent into the black hole and ended up in the anti-matter universe. Later, naturally, Rassilon boosted Omega's popularity by praising him as a fallen hero, as you do as a politician.

We get to see the re-enactment of that little tale when the company creates a full, life size replica of Omega's original ship, the Eurydice. However, the actor who played Vandekirian in the re-enactment is starting to act very strangely and tried to kill the actor who played Omega. He then got stuck in a garbage disposal where his hand was destroyed. It's all very odd as the Doctor figures that it's the dimensional instability.

The Doctor gets knocked out by the stewardess of the ship and he gets a strange visit from some sort of spirit Omega who asks for his help. He wants to go back to his own universe where he was a god, not here where he is nothing. It's interesting because Omega worked incredibly hard to get back to his own universe, yet it's not enough.

Only, something else strange is happening again. The real Eurydice has appeared out of nowhere. The Doctor and an historian have gone aboard it. The historian has spent his many lives (since he's a time lord) researching Omega's legend and his written several books and done several documentaries on him and other historical figures. A lot of his work is conjecture, naturally. Since history is so popular, he even has rivals and their books regularly sell out.

(Before I move on, there was a funny part in the book shop where a robot worker sees the Doctor looking at a book for more than two minutes and says he's stealing by reading it in the store and not paying for it. How very late stage capitalism of you robot.)

On the real Eurydice, there are strange creatures and Omega himself manifests to the Doctor as a ghost. The Doctor helps him rig his ship to go into the black hole and back to the anti-matter universe. We then find out that the stewardess wants to marry Omega for some reason, and go into his universe with him. The Doctor is pretty ok with all of this. The actor who played Omega is supposed to do the wedding because he was ordained as a priest as a publicity stunt for a show.

This is where we get some fantastic conversations between the Doctor and Omega. The Doctor talks about how Omega was one of his heroes and Omega talks about how he is perceived. How his legend is told. He talks about how stories get made up all the time that aren't true about history. This is some good stuff and Peter Davison actually does a fantastic job here. I'm very impressed with his performance in this story, just in general, but especially here in his conversations with Omega.

The actor who played Vandekirian is back and tells her about the strange creatures on the ship who Omega genocided. Omega is determined not to let his wife to be find out about the species he genocided because he feels shame and guilt over doing it, but she says she knows and doesn't care, which horrifies him all the more. How can you not care about the person you love having committed genocide?

The big twist in this story comes when Omega kills the actor who played Vandekirian and the history professor in front of the actor who played Omega. The Doctor is confused because he's a ghost, but a particularly corporeal one. The actor who played Omega holds a gun on the Doctor and is scared of him and Omega's wife to be tells him to stop asking questions. Until we hear the TARDIS noise and out steps... the Doctor. Duh duh duh!

The Doctor we've been following has been Omega the whole time, talking to himself. Omega used the Doctor's consciousness to escape his own universe in Arc of Infinity and in the process gained a copy of his body and mind. So he's been running around looking like the Doctor the whole time. That's where the stewardess found him and helped him when he wanted to get back into his own universe. He's so confused, though, that he doesn't know he's Omega or the Doctor. The two personalities are basically completely separate from one another. The Doctor side called for help from the Time Lords and the Doctor came to help.

But everything is extremely dimensionally unstable in this part of space, especially for non-Time Lords. The only thing that was keeping it stable was the historian's TARDIS, but now that he's dead, that TARDIS is sulking, sad that her Time Lord died. It's an interesting idea that TARDIS's just fade away and go to the end of the universe out of grief when their Time Lord dies because they're that psychically linked. Reminds me of The Doctor's Wife. The Doctor is able to make it stable again (presumably with his own TARDIS, I didn't catch that part).

He then confronts Omega and this is where we get the real story. There's some excellent flashbacks to Omega's memories. He remembers being in the Gallifreyan academy where his teacher gave him the worst possible grade because he believed his theories on time travel were dangerous. The grade, naturally was an Omega and so that became his name. He was friends with Rassilon who enacted a revolution to gain political power, even though Omega was hesitant about it. And in his memories, when he went to actually harness the power of a collapsing star to create time travel, Vandekirian warned him about a sentient species on the planet below who Omega would kill by collapsing their star, but according to his scans there is no species there. They're made of pure thought and so don't show up. Vandekirian sabotages the ship and tries to stop him by destroying his own hands (as they need the hand print of everyone on the crew to make the stellar manipulator work), but Omega does it anyway, cutting of Vandekirian's other hand and committing genocide for his work. That's why he's haunted by these strange beings on his ship. They're not real, they're echoes of that species that died.

Only, according to the Doctor, that's not what happened at all. HE killed that species accidentally in an unrelated adventure. Not Omega. And when Omega got a copy of the Doctor's memories it got jumbled up in his own. It relates to the central idea of the story. How stories and legacy are perceived. Was Omega a monster? Or a victim? I LOVE the idea that Omega can't stand the idea that he was just a victim. That Vandekirian had just gone insane or really was an agent of Rassilon and sabotaged his ship for no reason. Omega wants to be seen as a monster. Better a monstrous villain who influences the course of history than a tragic victim who has no control of their actions.

In the end, Omega gets his way. He gets to go back to his universe because his wife to be goes insane and sends his ship there. I love the ending, though, when it turns out one of the little old ladies was actually a secret Time Lord agent from the far future. They've somehow been able to go through the time lock and time travel into Time Lord history because they're a secret agency bent on preserving history the way they perceive it. You know, basically the CIA, but not the CIA for some reason. They're here to preserve the Doctor's reputation. The script gets flipped here. The Doctor is perceived as a great hero in their time and they don't want it known he committed accidental genocide and so they bring with them the only person who knows what really happened. I thought they were going to kill him, they did talk about having tried to wipe his mind before, but instead they take him forward to do historical re-enactments about the Doctor. And it ends on the agent asking for the Doctor's autograph, which is cute.

This was actually quite good. Omega, as a character, was always an interesting one, albeit underserved by the two underwhelming classic stories about him. This one goes much deeper into who he is at a fundamental level and it's great. He's a scientist at heart, not a warrior or a commander or a dictator or a megalomaniac. He just wanted to harness the power of an exploding star and he did, but he was sent into another universe to do it. This story does a fantastic job of portraying that, of portraying him in the sympathetic light that he deserves. Fantastic work and fantastic performance from Peter who plays both Omega and the Doctor. He does a great job of working out that he really is Omega before the Doctor shows up as well. Great twist to have the Doctor not actually be there at all until the last episode.

This is good stuff, but it definitely requires you to already be in deep with Doctor Who to truly appreciate it or even to understand what's going on. This is not a beginner friendly story and that's probably why it did nothing for me at the time, but it is good for those who are already fans.

MR 046: Flip-Flop

Wow. You know it didn't have to be like this. This could have been fixed so easily with a couple more rewrites. This one is bad not because of badly written dialogue or being boring. It's not because of bad audio mixing or any technical issues. It's not because it's buried in technobabble or does hilariously bad accents that make your skin crawl. This one is bad because of its politics. Ironically the second with bad politics after The Fearmonger, another Seventh Doctor story.

But first, the story. The Doctor and Mel are involved in a double time loop. Two versions of history keep switching back and forth as people from those timelines want to go back in time and change it so their version doesn't happen. Like a grass is always greener situation. Yet each time they regret the change.

The basic premise here could have been a good one. You're supposed to be able to listen to either disc first and the story will make sense from either side. The first story of each disc is simultaneously the beginning of the story and the end of the story from the other disc while the second story of each disc is the end of the story and the beginning of the story from the other disc. It could work really well, especially if it didn't essentially repeat the exact same dialogue but with minor variations in each timeline.

The divergent point is when the human colony of Puxatornee (named for the groundhog in groundhog day, get it? get it?) gets visited by a battle cruiser filled with a species call the Slithergees, giant blind slugs. They are refugees who demand to be allowed to live on Puxatornee's moon or there will be war. One version has a war that leaves devestating radiation with the Puxatornee humans on the verge of extinction. The other version has the Slithergees essentially invading and conquering Puxatornee. This is where the problem comes.

Each version of history has a Stuart and Reed, commanders in the war history and dissidants in the conquered history who try to go back in time to change their history and end up creating the other time line. Thus it is a double time loop. Each time the loop goes round the history changes back to the other side. Like I said, this could be an interesting premise and could work better in the hands of a better writer.

The bad politics comes from the conquered Puxatornee side. The writer really thought he had something here. He thought he was going to create a liberal and a conservative side and have them both be dystopias. He wanted to satirise liberal politics. Just like every other conservative who thinks they're creating satire, they can only ever imagine liberals creating a fascist dystopia with the humans becoming slaves. It's as if we all inately understand that conservative politics are evil, even the conservatives who are trying to inact them.

All of the conservative "satire" comes from one episode in which we see the Slithergee have pretended to be victims in order to enact an actual invasion while the weak willed (naturally) woman liberal complies to all of their demands in an effort not to look offensive. It's a pretty dangerous line of thinking.

There's the typical rhetoric you see from conservatives. White people (I mean humans) are being made into a minority in their own colony (white genocide anyone?). It makes a point of saying that Slithergee occupy 90% of the planet while humans are forced into ghettos. Humans are forced into being servants/slaves to avoid looking offensive to the Slithergee.

There's even one to one War on Christmas rhetoric straight from Bill O'Reilly circa 2003. Quite literally. It's set at Christmas specifically so that the Slithergee can say that Christmas is offensive and should be replaced by their own holiday.

The War on Christmas stuff is obviously ridiculous, but it's part of a larger rhetoric to pretend like immigrants are forcing white people to become oppressed minorities. We live in the middle of the global ressurgance of fascism. We're all very familiar with this rhetoric by now. Conservatives don't really dog whistle anymore, they just show open contempt for minorities now. They believe that immigrants and refugees are invaders and the liberals are collaborators in white people becoming a minority and becoming oppressed.

If you really believe that refugees or immigrants are an invasion there are only two solutions to this problem. And it's not going back in time to prevent refugees from coming into your country in the first place. You either round up people from their homes and mass arrest everyone of that minority so that you can deport them. Or you do the same thing and kill them instead. The Nazis themselves did both. They tried to deport the Jews, but no other country would accept them as refugees, because of their own xenophobia. So the Nazis ended up killing them instead.

This is why this audio is seen as taboo. With good reason. And it could have been such an easy fix. The Slithergee actually invade and enslave the humans instead of this ridiculous pretending to be victims conservative fever dream. Done. It would have been much more respected in the past twenty years instead of seen as despicable as it is now.

This is always the problem with conservative "comedy" as well. They aren't funny because they have no relation to reality. Immigrants don't pretend to be the victim in an effort to enslave the majority in the country they're in. Whenever you hear anything about racial tension, it's always the white people in the area getting upset that non-white people are there and making up rumors about them. This can be things like there being an increase in traffic accidents or something like they're killing and eating pets or even they're killing and eating children. In the conservative fever dream of reality, that's what they're really doing, as we see in this story, which is why their attempt at satire doesn't land. It's not real in any way.

I'm mostly surprised that this script was green lit in the first place. Doctor Who has always traditionally been more left wing so whenever you see scripts like this with conservative politics you have to wonder how they got made. I'm also rather surprised that Sylvester McCoy agreed to do this one too, considering his own personal politics. Ultimately, this would have been an interesting experiment, but the author ruins it with his bad political beliefs. It could have been good with a better author.

It's wild how we JUST had Jubilee, this fantastic dissection and look into the way fascist politics works at the human level. I was just talking about, in that review, how we have to guard against the encroaching reach of fascism, because it always pops up insidiously. And here it is, popping up.

MR 045: Project Lazarus

I did it. I made it through the story. I'm free. I did not care for Project: Twilight. It was very emo, very Hot Topic, very violent and gorey for no real reason and had no real point to make at all. Kind of like a bad B horror movie in that way. It was the last story I would have wanted to get a sequel and yet here we are.

This one is slightly better. But only slightly. It's still violent and gorey for no reason and still has no point to it, but at least the story is slightly more interesting. When the Doctor finds the cure for vampirism, he goes back to Cassie, but because he's an idiot he lets the TARDIS land years after leaving her in Scandinavia. Evelyn even says that they should go back to the moment when they first found her. It's just an excuse to have them be late and it doesn't work particularly well when you have a time machine and can not do that before you even set out the door. But it's fine to kick start the story.

They meet Cassie and a researcher who is researching a myth in the area. And then Cassie brutally murders him and calls herself Artemis working for the Forge. And none of that matters at all in the slightest nor do we really get any reason why she does it. The Forge is investigating weird slime and they want to see the effect of the weird slime on humans. Whatever, it's irrelevant to the story. We're basically just wasting time before revealing that Cassie is evil and edgy now. She does the thing that the original story did as well, trying to act all jaded and sarcastic while she kills him. It's just immature, poorly written dialogue. There's a lot of that in this story, particularly from Cassie, now Artemis, and Nimrod himself.

They take the Doctor and Evelyn to the Forge where Nimrod proceeds to take the Doctor's DNA by trying to induce regeneration. He's trying to capture the power of regeneration to use it in an army, which is definitely pretty horrifying. Evelyn tries to talk to Cassie and gets her to remember her son and turn her against Nimrod after all her programming. And then she rescues the Doctor and gets killed. Leading to Evelyn crying and being rather depressed about her death. Probably viewing her as a daughter figure.

It's just... not very good and extremely blunt. We can compare it to a much better story just a couple stories back, Doctor Who and the Pirates in which a similar thing happens. Someone who Evelyn sees as a surrogate child figure dies and she gets depressed. But that story is much stronger with its nuances and intricacies. Her trying to cover up her grief with comedy, but ultimately finding it useless. Here it's just very in your face showing a pretty great contrast between the writers. I don't trust the writers of this story to be able to handle grief and they don't, really. I'm wondering if and how the next story with Evelyn will address it. This could make a very strong jumping off point for a better writer in Evelyn's relationship with the Doctor.

The second half is also not great. The Seventh Doctor arrives at the Forge as they're investigating a portal in which aliens comes through. This is also completely irrelevant to the story. The main thing going on here is that Nimrod has cloned the Doctor and we get to have Colin and Sylvester play off each other. That is fun, for sure, just because the actors are so strong. But the dialogue still isn't that great. This is probably the only real redeeming feature.

The Seventh Doctor opens up the portal and lets the aliens in who attack the clone Doctor in retaliation for whatever horrific thing Nimrod has done and the clone Doctor loses an arm. Which makes the Doctor believe that he's not actually him. And then we find out there are a lot more clones constantly being killed to try to induce regeneration and the clone Doctor initiates the big red self-destruct button.

It's just all very pointless and dark and edgy for the sake of it, just like its predecessor. I'm not a fan really. If they had scaled back and controlled themselves a little, they could have ended up with their own version of Torchwood controlled by an especially evil man, Nimrod. But it's just too unpleasant and not at all fun to listen to. Not to mention all the completely irrelevant plot lines like the professor at the beginning and the aliens coming through the portal. There's a very good reason only three of these things were in the main range and the third isn't for a long time from now, thank goodness. Get me out of these terrible scripts.

MR 044: Creatures of Beauty

Excuse me, Nicholas Briggs wrote this one? What? That's wild. I don't associate him with good writing, but apparently he had it in him to be creative this once. Who knew? Good job Briggs.

This story is told out of order and feels rather experimental which is definitely the point. It's actually rather effective in this method of storytelling. The order in which events and details are revealed is very important here.

The story starts out with Nyssa being imprisoned after being roughed up by security, accussed of murder. To which, naturally, she insists she's innocent. We learn that a psychitrist has tried to examine her and thinks she might be telling the truth, to which the chief of police chews him out and later beats him up violently. It's an effective start because we're curious right away as to what is going on.

Then the second episode shifts to the Doctor having an encounter with a wealthy lady in a mansion. He has no idea what's going on, but neither does she know what's going on with him. So they're talking past each other while Nyssa gets arrested. This conversation is particularly interesting, especially when she ends it by saying "You saying you don't know what's going on is making me nervous." Which presumably and does indeed later lead to further interrogation.

We then learn that there was some sort of major ecological disaster here caused by an alien race called the Koteem. But we don't learn details about it until a little later. We do learn, however, that they're working with the lady in the manor, Lady Forleon. The security use this assumed murder as an excuse to investigate Lady Forleon's manor and what they find is shocking to them. Some sort of lab downstairs.

There's some scenes that are out of order here with the Doctor and Nyssa meeting the Koteem for the first time and then a scene with the Doctor and Lady Forleon's agents rescuing Nyssa from prison. The third episode ends on the actual ending where Nyssa asks if they made a difference. This was honestly a fantastic place to end the third episode because we get the full explanations in the last episode, naturally, so the musings are really interesting to us.

When Nyssa asks if the Doctor wanted to make a difference, The Doctor compares the universe to a painting that you don't want to look too closely at because all you'll see is brush strokes. Which is a rather sad way of seeing the world. He's getting older I guess. Too bad he has another two dozen incarnations to go, rip. When Nyssa asked him if that was why he originally left Gallifrey, to make a difference, he said "ah the folly of youth." Ok old man, get off my lawn.

The fourth episode actually begins with the beginning of the story, with the Doctor and Nyssa in the TARDIS. As it turns out, the real enemy was capitalism all along, as it always is. The Koteem had, a century ago, created energy out of a rather dangerous type of radiation, but it killed their world. So they eventually reversed course. The problem was they had all this radiation they had to get rid of, so they were allowed to dump it in uninhabited parts of space. They just weren't allowed to carry their dump trucks through inhabited areas. The people in charge didn't really mind, though, if they went through an inhabited system because it was cheaper on fuel. They would look the other way. Unfortunately there was an accident in orbit over this planet, leaving everyone hit with radiation sickness that killed them slowly and made them severely malformed. Which is why they hate the Koteem now and see everything happening as a potential Koteem agent. This paranoia makes sense after what they've been through.

The Koteem are working with Lady Forleon to create an entirely new species. They can't cure the disease, but they can put their essence into people. Which is rather bizare, but it works. The important thing is that it's the only way to save both species because they're both dying. It's kind of a wild solution, and both governments think so. These Koteem are rogue agents. It's an "everyone is right" situation. These rogue Koteem are right for trying to save everyone even if it means combining both species. And these security are right to be paranoid about Koteem incursions after the horror the Koteem inflicted on them in the name of cutting costs. That said, saving both species is certainly "more right" by my count.

That's what the "murder" was with Nyssa. She didn't murder anyone. Someone who was getting the Koteem insertion violently rejected the procedure. And then right in front of Nyssa she stabbed herself to death repeatedly trying to get the Koteem out. Which is, you know, horrifying to witness. Nyssa should be scared for life now. Not that we're going to mention this again, but hey we can hope for character development. Who am I kidding. We never mention her planet or father's death ever again after all.

The big reveal at the end is what recontexualizes everything. So at the beginning of the story the TARDIS was malfunctioning, the Doctor materialized it in space in an area where people weren't allowed to travel, over this planet. Just as the dump truck was coming through. They had made their hold weaker to travel faster, or some such, just in time for the TARDIS to hit them and then get pushed a century forward in time. So the Doctor and Nyssa were absolutely vitally important in what happened here, in causing this to happen. And it pretty expertly ends on the Doctor saying "I don't think we made any difference at all" when he partially caused it in the first place! It's kind of f**ked and feels careless as hell, but it makes for a chilling ending.

This Doctor is absolutely perfect for this script too. This is the Doctor that does nothing and is passive and observes the stories he is in. That's actually perfect for the ideas in this script. He's just dragged along for the ride because Nyssa got arrested and we get to see the devestation caused by that initial accident through him and Nyssa. It's also perfect because he's partially to blame for what happened by doing what he does. Not getting involved, just observing. More importantly, carelessness. It's a rare Fifth Doctor W. The audio I mean, not the actions. Obviously it's an L for his actions. But the audio itself is fantastic. I'm really surprised Nick Briggs had it in him.

This is an intriguing story from start to finish and pretty dark in its subject matter. It feels hopeless, like nothing could really change or get better because of the destruction of Lady Forleon's lab, and it's made all the more hopeless by the Doctor's own actions. What really makes it work, though, is the way it's out of order and the order in which those events are told. If that ending was at the beginning it would change the entire way we listened to the story, as would putting the scenes together in order in general. It's much stronger as it is, I think. Well done.

MR 043: Doctor Who and the Pirates or The Lass That Lost a Sailor

Once again Jacqueline Rayner knocks it out of the park. It makes sense that she'd do so well with Evelyn because she wrote the first story and originated the character. She understands Evelyn more than most and it really shows here. Besides Jubilee, this is Evelyn's best story since the very first one. What a long way Evelyn has come too. She has nine stories in the first fifty main range. NINE! That's wild. Early Big Finish knew they had a good thing going with her. She was probably popular and with good reason.

This story feels like it's emulating Robert Shearman, in a good way. It's being hilarious and witty while at the same time being about something much more dark and painful. But there's hope in the end too, like the best of Robert Shearman's work.

There's a general framing device to this story. Evelyn, and then later the Doctor as well, are telling this story to one of Evelyn's students, Sally. Sally absolutely does not want to hear the story. She at first gets bowled over by Evelyn and then the Doctor who completely ignore her and then she tries to get them to leave and tell them that she doesn't care about their story. To which they completely ignore her and continue.

The framing device works to tell the broader story, but it also works to inject comedy into the story. Evelyn and the Doctor fudge some of the details or have the characters say things differently. The Doctor has the pirate captain call him well dressed and well spoken. While Evelyn tries to liven things up and deliberate steers the narrative to ignore the existence of a person who is too painful for her to acknowledge.

And it's with this narrative device that the story later turns into a musical where Colin sings not one, not two, not three, but FOUR different songs. Evelyn even gets to sing a song herself. This being a musical is brilliant. As the Doctor says, nothing even goes wrong in musicals. To which Sally helplfully points out a bunch of musicals where people die.

The actual story here is that long ago a pirate crew was infiltrated by a British spy. When the pirate captain found out about the spy, he hid his treasure on land and then had everyone in the crew marooned or killed to avoid the spy. But got got anyway by the last member of the crew, who was presumably the spy. That spy had a child who is now on the ship that the Doctor and Evelyn are on. He has a compass with a map. It feels very Disney Pirates of the Caribbean which came out in the same year as this one. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!

The pirate captain boards the ship and goes about torching it but the captain, Evelyn and son, Jem, survive while the Doctor basically just hangs out on the pirate ship and hears the backstory. And then gets into a song contest with the pirates. It all ends in finding the treasure and the pirates marooned while the sailors on the ship that was captured sail back on the pirate ship.

None of that really matters, though. The pirate romp story is just set dressing to the real story here. In the process of interogating Jem for the treasure map, the pirate captain kills him. Evelyn blames herself for mentioning the islands that they're looking for and it deeply affects her. It's wild because usually in Doctor Who we just see death as a matter of course. It's a Doctor Who story, of course people die that the Doctor can't save. But here we actually stop to examine it and what it means to the people involved. The Doctor shrugs it off, of course. He says sorry but it doesn't really affect him the way it affects Evelyn. This sort of thing is why being a companion changes you as a person permanently. You get desensitized to death, your own or other people's.

Evelyn relates her trauma in maybe causing a death to the trauma of her student, Sally. The reason why Sally doesn't want them there is becasue she accidentally killed her lover in a car accident where she was driving. She was trying to drive fast to get to where she was going and didn't see them before hitting them. And this is the night where she left a suicide note for Evelyn and went to kill herself.

In a rare turn of events for the Doctor, he actually lets Evelyn go back in time and save Sally from killing herself. Normally in a situation like this he'd say something like "we're a part of events now, we can't go back" to avoid creating a paradox. They see the suicide note, go back in time to stop it, and so she doesn't leave a note and so they don't go back in time to stop it. But that kind of time travel explanation would defeat the entire point of the story, and ruin it, so we're ignoring it. It makes for a very good ending. That's the reason why Evelyn refused to leave and bowled her over to tell her pirate story. She won't leave Sally alone because she knows what Sally will do and she needs someone to sit with her and show that she cares. The night is darkest just before the dawn. And in the end Sally makes it to that next dawn.

That framing story is ultimately what makes this story so strong and so impactful. The pirate romp is delightful and fun, but at the center of it is an evil/mad pirate kind who will stop at nothing to get his treasure, killing everyone along the way. It's an over the top cliche, but it relates to the much more real story of someone dying in a car accident, something that is all too common. It gives Sally some really strong, emotional songs in the middle of the silly ones as well.

You'd think something like this would be mood dissonance, but it works quite well. Rayner weaves the comedy in with the tragedy so expertly, as if she's been writing stories like this all her life. She knows when to play up the tragedy or when to play up the comedy for full effect. It works particularly well when Evelyn is trying to ignore her trauma and bury it by covering it up with comedy. Evelyn uses comedy as a coping mechanism while the Doctor helps her heal. Indeed the Doctor says that he brought her back and did this for Evelyn. He's desensitized to death, but not Evelyn. Not yet. After all the death she's seen in the previous seven stories with her before this one, THIS is the death that impacts her the most. A young man who just wanted to sail the seas.

MR 042: The Dark Flame

Damn, my mind is in the process of rejecting this thing so I'm going to try to write it down now before I forget it.

This one is bad. And not for the same reasons of Nekromanteia. This isn't written in a bad way. This is just bad for a standard sci fi reason: technobabble. The story is buried in the stuff and makes it completely incomprehensible. That's why I'm immediately forgetting it. If you need two thirds of your story to be technobabble, you've written a bad script and you need to try again.

So as far as I can tell, the story is that there's some sort of experiment going on on a station in orbit around a planet. The Doctor and Ace are going to pick up Bernice from said station. But then she gets attacked and sent down to the planet where there's a guy trying to resurrect a cult that worships this dark flame.

The guy puts the emissary of the dark flame inside of a recently deceased researcher. Ala Fenric. Who then resurrects a skeleton army. And then it gets a bit procedural. Running around and fighting the cultists and skeletons.

I'm not even sure how it gets resolved to be honest. The Doctor goads the emissary into trying to mind control him and it gets burnt in the process. Apparently the dark flame that everyone worships is the last gasp of life from the end of the universe? Something like that? I can't be bothered to be honest.

I'm not terribly invested in Bernice as a character at all either. I don't listen to her series and I don't read Doctor Who books at all, so she's just kind of a random character for me. She was fine here, I guess, but nothing special. Like in Shadow of the Scourge.

Ace gets to be an action hero so that's cool I guess. The Doctor said she fell in with the military which is... weird and extremely out of character for Ace. So definitely not a fan of that one. Seems as out of character as having her work for the Time Lord CIA. It's weird to have Rapture as the last story with her in it before this where she wanted to be called Dorothy and now she's getting on the Doctor for calling her that, insisting on Ace.

I dunno, I feel like the Seventh Doctor just can't catch a W. His comedy story was very fun, but he's not really gotten a decent serious story yet. Colditz is the closest that's managed to get into that A tier range rather than B-D

Yeah, just not a lot to say on this one. Excessive technobabble can absolutely kill a script as we see in this one. If it didn't have that problem, it could get close to feeling like Dark Souls with the dark flame, the cult, the emissary inhabiting a corpse, the mind control. But it's just not interested in being fantasy and insists on maintaining a sci fi aesthetic even though it's clearly not that.

MR 041: Nekromanteia

Is this a joke? Am I a joke to you? Am I being punked? What is this? Why is this? This is an absolute MASTERCLASS in what to do wrong in a Doctor Who story. Everything about this is terrible. It's boring. It's overly complicated for no reason. It's violent, dark and edgy just for the sake of it. It's overly sexualized just for the sake of it. The story is amateurish and basic. The dialogue is badly written and immature. The only thing it needed was a surprise conservative moral like Kerblam to complete the bad Doctor Who tropes list. All this immediately after the excellent Jubilee and the fun Bang-Bang-a-Boom! This felt more like a badly written Ao3 fanfic than an actual professionally produced audio drama with the original cast.

All that to mention that there is a pointless first part as well. The Doctor visits a space station with a friend who helps get him black market parts for the TARDIS, but that is completely irrelevant to the story. They're just suddenly transported into another world out of nowhere. And that's where the story really begins.

There's a large cult of evil witches who most of this story's pointlessly gratuitous content comes from. They're guarding a relic that contains their god. A corporation is after that relic. Ok cool. The corporation sends a ship that gets destroyed by the technologically superior witches who then kill everyone in it and stack up the corpses in a room where the TARDIS lands. There's a scene where the witches are "crawling on the outside of the ship" like they're insects. They of course eat the people they kill, obviously they're cannibals.

The only corporate survivors find the Doctor, mistake Erimem and Peri for witches (knowing this story probably JUST because they're women) and shoot them. Peri gets captured by the witches and then she gets taken to be stripped naked and bathed in oils. Again with the gratuitous sexualization. And then one of the survivors attempts to sexually assault Erimem. Why though? Why is this here? I don't care if you're sexualizing for the sake of it in fanfiction, but the main range is one of the most prominent non-tv Doctor Who spin offs. You NEED to have a reason for doing stuff like this and the story offers no excuse. It just does it just because it can.

Not only that, but the second episode ends with the Doctor GETTING HIS HEAD CUT OFF by the witches. Of all the Doctors, of course it happens to this one. The Fifth Doctor is true to form in this story: getting led around by the plot and taking a passive role. But this takes that character trait to the extreme. I always talk about how easy this Doctor is to bully, but even I feel a little bad for him. Just a tad.

When he dies, he goes into the relic which is one random guy's version of heaven, a cricket game in the Olympics, for some reason. And here we learn that he's been maintaining his afterlife for thousands of years with the witches watching over him, but the corporation is after him. The survivors of the attack steal the relic and then the corporation CEO destroys the ship with the relic on it, all of which potentially is going to cause the system to be destroyed because of the power it takes to maintain it.

The Doctor gets put back into his body by the guy in the relic and now it needs a new person to sustain it so it doesn't get destroyed. The Doctor offers himself, then Erimem, then the cat just randomly jumps up and gets taken as the new god. Huh. Sure, I guess. Poor Andronak.

The only interesting thing here, to me, is when an archeologist gets his tongue and heart cut out by the witches for desecrating the temple (more gratuitous violence), Erimem says that he deserved it for violating a temple. Which makes sense for her as she believes that violating a temple is one of the worst acts you can do. It just hit me when she said it that she is from a VERY different culture and time and it plays into that.

Otherwise, this is just terrible. I don't know why this was commissioned as a script in the first place. Nevermind acted out and edited. Oh yeah and the sound mixing is terrible too, like Loups Garoux. Just talking about the summary, you can tell how awful this was to listen to from start to finish. This one goes into the F tier bin and good riddance. Legend has it that Peter Davison asked that this writer never write for Big Finish again and good thing too.

MR 040: Jubilee

He doesn't miss ladies, gentlemen and others. He doesn't miss. Robert Shearman can do no wrong. He's so good, he wrote the first good Main Range Dalek story.

And boy is it a story. It's not as good as his first two stories: The Holy Terror and The Chimes of Midnight, but it is very good. Like his first two, there's some exploration of narrative structure here, specifically the way in which we view the Doctor and the Daleks. The Daleks are the eternal evil and the Doctor is the eternal good. But you can twist either to suit your own ends.

That is what this story is about. A century ago, the Doctor and Evelyn stopped a Dalek invasion in pre-WW1 UK. The British Empire used that as a rallying point, bolstering national confidence and preventing the British Empire from ever falling. The Nazis presumably didn't come to pass because the British WERE the Nazis. They grew more and more fanatically fascist, seeing the Doctor as this great fascist military war hero who fought off the Daleks. And now the British Empire never fell and has conquered a great deal of the world, including the US. Possibly all the world.

And like any fascist regime that has run out of enemies to fight, they have to invent new enemies. Daleks were the great enemy, but they are few and far between. Now we invent new things to execute people over like contracting your words. There are even whole pretend Daleks ready to be executed to maintain the public hatred of an other.

The real secret is that the British Empire took prisoner a single Dalek and they torture it regularly. They create juice out of its fluid it leaks under torture. They're trying to get it to talk, to say anything, so that they can blow it up in front of the people to maintain that fear of an other.

They market the shit out of Daleks in the media and on products. There's a great comparison here to the way we treat the Nazis in our reality. We often just use them as a fun plaything, a cartoonish super villain without any real thought to the real horrors that they committed.

The direct comparison would be how the people of the British Empire have the Daleks, an evil fascist force, and then they market them and sell them and then end up just like the Daleks. We do the same thing with the Nazis, we market and sell them as this evil force and yet we have literal fascist political movements that are prominent around the world right now, especially in the US. Everyone knows that the Nazis are evil, but we're not Nazis, you say as you believe the same things they did.

The real REAL secret is that they also took the Doctor prisoner as well. The Empire presumably thought that the Doctor would work for them, but he always refused to become their fascist puppet. So he ended up rotting away in the Tower of London, stuck there for half a century after they cut off his legs. Evelyn starved to death right next to him in that very cell. This shit is dark and this is where it goes to the straight up horror that Shearman is so good at writing. The idea of cutting off the Doctor's legs is so effective because it's his thing. What is the Doctor known for? Running. What can't he do without legs? Run.

The story does an effective job of making you think this is Davros as well. The President's wife starts out by saying that he's in a wheelchair and he's been lurking in the dark in the Tower, going mad. That he's responsible for the Daleks being there. And then it does a great second episode turn around cliffhanger when it's actually the Doctor who's been there the whole time. This was horrifying for Evelyn, to discover this Doctor, a hundred years older, trapped here, decayed, a shell of his former self.

Speaking of the President's wife, the story has two very good characters in her and the President himself. The President is quite mad, thinking he wants to be good but that everyone is under mind control and so he has to pretend to be evil. But he's really just using it as justification for his evil. There's a great scene directly illustrating this point when the dwarf who came from America won't fit inside his Dalek casing (since he uses dwarfs to pretend to be Daleks and get killed for the people's continued hatred of the other) and so he cuts the man's hand off, but then immediately says that he's not actually evil, he's just pretending to be evil. The President's wife WANTS to be the anti-feminist fascist barefoot and pregnant house wife who acts silly, wears tons of makeup, gets abused, and follows her husband's orders. But she thinks her husband is TOO WEAK to actually abuse her properly and wants to depose him to get a stronger ruler. They're both quite insane and they're both justifying their actions with their insanity.

The scene that gets people to compare this to Dalek from series 1 is when the Doctor sees the imprisoned Dalek, but this story is very different from that one. There's a similar set up in the Doctor confronting a weak and helpless Dalek who has been tortured as well as his companion being sympathetic to said Dalek, but that's where the comparison ends, really. The people doing it in Dalek are doing it for money and the people doing it in Jubilee are doing it to maintain the fascist regime.

Speaking of the Dalek, there's a fantastic scene where the two fascists who have been torturing it now attach the gun stick back onto it, giving it the ability to kill someone. The one who is used to giving orders orders the Dalek to kill the other one, who is used to following orders. The Dalek reverses it and orders the one used to giviner orders to kill the one used to following orders. But he can't do it. He can't kill with his own hand. He's killed SO many people by ordering others to do it, but he can't do it himself. But the one used to following orders absolutely can and kills the other one. The ones on the top can brainwash other people into following orders and being willing to kill for their cause, but they can't do the same things themselves. As if they don't really believe the bullshit they spew.

The Dalek, itself, is struggling because it doesn't have any orders to follow. Daleks follow orders. Fascists follow orders. But nobody has given it orders in a century. So it goes to the Doctor in the tower, its old enemy, and begs for him to give it orders, but he won't. Colin does a fantastic, hysterical, chilling even laugh at the suggestion before the Dalek kills him, wiping out this timeline. I wasn't sure why he didn't regenerate, but that would rather defeat the point of the sequence I think.

When the actual Jubilee comes, the TARDIS and the Doctor serve as a link between the two times. A century ago and now. They're both stuck in both times at once and so now the Doctor is serving as a conduit to allow the Dalek invasion in 1903 to come through into 2003. The President's wife deposes her husband and wants to marry the Dalek because it will be a stronger ruler, because she's quite mad. But it doesn't matter because they both get killed by the Daleks anyway, fighting over who is the leader. There is also a really good speech from Colin in which he says that he can't tell the difference between the Daleks and the British Empire, which was great. Colin is always good at giving scolding speeches and this was a good one.

The Dalek invasion is stopped, ironically, by the Dalek that his been imprisoned all this time. It has decided that the British Empire tore itself apart. And because the Daleks are so like the British Empire, they have to avoid becoming them and ripping themselves apart. In order to survive, the Daleks must die. To win the Daleks must lose. It's the self-defeating mental gymnastics that fascists have to do to justify their own beliefs. And so the Daleks end up killing themselves. The invasion force from 1903 is destroyed and thus the invasion never happened and thus the timeline returns to normal.

But the Doctor and Evelyn still have echoes of it. In a very Chibnall style "this is the moral" wrap up, the Doctor talks to Evelyn about how the humans are doomed to repeat their fascism. We bury it and try to ignore itand pretend like we're not like that. We could never be like that. But in reality, it comes creeping up and we have to deal with it again and again.

What another triumph for Robert Shearman. This is a knock out of the park. It's dark and edgy (and not just for the sake of it like Project: Twilight) with some really profound things to say on the nature of fascism. It feels like Shearman took a course or read a book about fascists before doing this one because he nails the fascist attitudes spot on. The need for an enemy, the denial and disassociation from the evil you're doing, the inability to believe or act on the horrifying bullshit fascist ideas from the upper leadership, and the deeply submissive nature of fascists, unable to do anything without orders. Shearman took a huge swing with his very direct comparison of Dalek ideals with humans at their worst and creates a story that is not only relevant to the current age, but is also timeless. Fascism always has a chance to creep up from the shadows and take control. We must be ever vigilant to stamp it out.

MR 039: Bang-Bang-a-Boom!

Or the one where Patricia Quinn pushes Sylvester McCoy's face into her bosom.

It's the intergalactic song contest on Dark Space 8! Worlds from across the galaxy are competing, but there's been a murder or two in the background and it's up to our plucky protagonists to stop them before the song contest is ruined!

Yes, this is a sort of spiritual successor to The One Doctor. It's a parody, this time of Star Trek and Eurovision. It's definitely not as good as The One Doctor, though. I am big into Star Trek, but the parody was not as direct as the parody of Doctor Who itself in The One Doctor. It's still VERY good though. It's a shame that we don't do intentionally comedic/ridiculous stories like this anymore.

The Doctor and Mel land on a shuttle carrying the new commander of Dark Space 8, only it blows up just in time for them to get pulled onto the station via transmat. The Doctor gets mistaken for the commander and it goes from there. It's quite entertaining to hear the Doctor playing commander on this Star Trek type space station. He gives orders and talks to the principal crew, the Doctor and the scientist while investigating a series of murders.

The main story here is that two of the competitors in the song contest are Angvia and Gholos, a gestalt entity, two species that have hated each other and fought for years. There's a peace conferance going on, but in the meantime the song contest is a symbol of that peace.

However, there's a little secret. The song contest is actually the REAL peace conference. The arbiter of the song contest is the arbiter of the peace conference, all of it conducted psychically and subconsciously so that the singers don't know that they're negotiating.

It's mostly just a fun little romp with much hijinks and murders along the way. I particularly enjoy the parodies of Star Trek where the commander gets killed in an appropriately Star trek episode fashion, leading to the Doctor becoming the new commander.

The space station scientist and doctor are actually quite incompetent at their jobs even though they look and sound quite profession. In fact the doctor gives stardate logs of what's happening. But she is not very good. She can't revive someone who's just got a bump on the head and doesn't know what smelling salts are. And she says "I feel so helpless" a lot. It turns out that she stowed away and just said she was a doctor because she wanted to live the life of a star trek doctor, running down corridors with a tricorder in hand and saving people. But she actually got a lot of people killed along the way.

As for the scientist, he was drunk the whole time. Whenever anyone asked him something, he just said whatever random crap popped into his head. Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow indeed. He, doubtless got a lot of people killed as well.

As for the eurovision parodies, we get some fun parodies of the announcers and voting when the Ice Warriors cast their vote for Mars' delegation. But the actual performances sure are... something. There's a pop star from Earth named Nicky Newman who has stage freight and has a bomb that goes off when he's stressed inside of him (true story) so the Doctor goes on for him instead. Guess what he plays, and then wins the whole contest with?

The murderer is revealed to be the translator to the gestalt entity trying to sabotage the peace conference. The idea of a translator being the only one who understands what someone is saying and thus manipulating them and lying about what they say is a fun idea.

I also particularly enjoyed the theme starting and then cutting off when Mel says it was too easy to just wrap up. Speaking of which, I find it interesting that both parody/comedic stories use Mel as the companion. Presumably Gareth Roberts thought she contributed well to comedy, which was a good call, she does. Definitely a fun romp, not as good as The One Doctor, but still a good time. And a reminder of what we could have had if they kept up the comedy stories.

MR 038: The Church and the Crown

The Doctor faces his arch nemesis. A cat!

I love how the Fifth Doctor is the most easy to bully Doctor. He not only gets made fun of by Peri, he also gets bullied by a cat in the opening scene. I swear he'd be the Doctor to get shoved in a locker.

The story itself isn't all that interesting though to be honest. It's a pure historical, but I feel like pure historicals themselves aren't all that interesting. It usually comes down to a matter of either:

1. Interfering in history is bad in and of itself or;
2. Our interfering in history is actually A PART of history and so it's totally legit.

And both explanations are pretty dumb obviously. This story goes with option 2. The Doctor seems to think that his interfering to stop an invasion of France is legit because it was always "supposed to" happen. That his interference is actually a "part of history." Which is, unsatisfying as an explanation obviously. But more than that, the obvious question is why? Why is this history where you interfere to stop an invasion of France really "supposed to happen"? According to whom? The Time Lords? Destiny? God? Aren't you an atheist? Don't you disagree with the Time Lords trying to control all of history? Ridiculous. Peri even asks him why he's doing this as if she knows his reasons are complete bs.

Anyway, the actual story here is just that Peri looks like Queen Anne, ala Androids of Tara so she gets kidnapped because they think she's the queen, again ala Androids of Tara. Yadda yadda we've heard all this before. It's just a plot by an English guy to divide France between the Cardinal and the King to weaken it for invasion. Whatever, very exciting.

What's more interesting here is the character interactions. It's Erimem's first trip outside of her time and she's having a great time. She gets to pretend to be a princess and basically bluffs her way into the King's court, which is hilarious. Erimem and Peri prove that they can work together quite well and that they uplift the Fifth Doctor and make him more interesting. Peri gets to prove that she is absolutely the Fifth Doctor's best companion. Her personality just kind of leaps out at you with how quick witted and just fun she is. Way back when I first listened to these stories, the only time I found the Fifth Doctor himself interesting was when he was with Peri and Erimem and we definitely see why here.

The Doctor also gets to introduce the phrase "one for all and all for one" to the musketeers and he's very excited about it. Nicola Bryant also gets to play Queen Anne too which is nice since she looks like her, much like any other doppleganger episode. She's good in the part.

Otherwise it's pretty C tier coded, but there's some nice interactions between the principal cast. And Erimem gets properly invited into the TARDIS at last. As well as her cat who gets one last scene to bully the Doctor at the end.

MR 037: The Sandman

Something something two sides to every story. Or the one where the Sixth Doctor’s coat causes literal physical damage to people's eyes.

There is a legend amongst the reptillion Galyari people of a monster with a rainbow coat who kills children in their beds and weaves their skins into his coat. A bedtime story to scare children into behaving. Except it is absolutely true. Sort of.

The Doctor returns to the Galyari who live on and operate a big fleet. The Doctor uses the term "space gypsies" quite a lot to describe the people who live in the fleet. It actually kind of reminds me of Battlestar Galactica, this massive fleet that sticks together for protection.

When the Doctor meets the Galyari in charge he suddenly starts acting like a comic book super villain and Evelyn is like lol wtf. She's not exactly someone who could be easily fooled by that posturing. She's just annoyed that the Doctor won't get to the point. Which is hilarious and makes sense. Someone older like that doesn't have the patience for that posturing.

The legend is that the Galyari were driven off their homeworld by the Doctor who made this little species of rodent sentient to kick them out because he just hated them in particular.

Naturally, though, the truth was that the Galyari consider every planet they conquer to be their homeworld and the sentient rodents there were the native species. So they were colonizing another world. The Doctor maintained his monster image for thousands of years to try to keep their conquering in check.

Now however we've got a copycat killer on the loose who is emulating the legend and really skinning Galyari alive instead of using the skin of already dead Galyari.

And this is where the story lost me a bit. There was something about the skins of the Galyari being used in a big monument and the copycat killer being able to puppet their skins to attack others? No idea what that was about.

There's also a subplot about a criminal enterprise where one of the rodent species came to offer that monument to the Galyari in exchange for them leaving their homeworld alone this time.

In general though this one was pretty ok. It was cute to see Colin acting like a monster. And because it's the Sixth Doctor you don't know if it's true or not. So that's fun. But it's nothing special, particularly when it starts going into the whole using skins thing and it doesn't make sense.

MR 036: The Rapture

Oh we're getting religious in here now are we? Between that and hearing everyone call Ace "McShane" or "Dorothy" this was a really odd one, but a good one.

Ace is depressed after seeing David Tennant split in two in the TARDIS, understandably so, and insists that everyone call her McShane. And the Doctor wants to take her on a holiday. Enter the Rapture dance club, run by two literal angels where people go to have a religious experience.

Relating dance clubs to religion is interesting. You can get the same feeling from everyone moving and dancing to the music as you can from religious music in a church. Which definitely makes sense.

The club's angels play music that literally puts everyone into a trance so that they don't know what's happening.

The second episode is the best part I think. The entire episode bounces back and forth between three conversations, not cutting between them. One character ends off on a line that another character is saying in their conversation. It's well written, edited, and acted. Ace finds out that she has a long lost brother separated as a toddler. One of the angel DJs gives a drug to someone suffering from bi polar. And the Doctor works out what's happening with an old friend of his.

And can we stop to take a moment and say how bizarre it is that the Doctor has a friend he made fighting in the Spanish civil war? I thought that was changing Earth history. I thought you hated doing that. We learned that in Colditz. Yet for some reason you deemed it acceptable to fight in the Spanish Civil War just as you deemed it acceptable to undo the Nazi timeline in Colditz. Very hypocritical.

That's not important to this story. It's just odd, I'm not used to the Doctor outright fighting fascists on Earth, he always makes some lame excuse not to. Like in Fearmonger.

We find out that the angel DJs are refugees from a war where their peaceful people were attacked. One of them got PTSD from fighting and ended up having his mind scrambled and his brother has somehow convinced him that they're actual, real angels. They plan to conscript all the people in the club with their trance music to fight in their war. Which is a pretty wild plan.

Only the plan goes awry when the brother who genuinely believes he's an angel dies along with the Doctor's friend, who initially sponsored this, but wasn't keen on the conscription part.

There's some arguments here that without a grand enemy to fight or something greater to belong to or believe in, people just slip into depression and "battling themselves" as the Doctor's friend and the one angel argue. Which definitely is slipping into fascist territory, ironically considering they've both fought fascists. That's the exact rhetoric that fascists use to lure people in: the need to belong to something greater than oneself alone.

As revenge, the other angel seeks to take revenge for his brother's death by killing everyone. Which is, uh, a choice. But the Doctor stops him by talking him down and relating his brother relationship with Ace and her long lost brother.

There's definitely some really good character work for Ace here as she struggles to cope with the idea of a long lost brother and a long lost father who left a long time ago. Ace has a tendency to lash out when things get too real for her and she does it here. She yells at him and runs away. It's definitely reminiscent of Fenric when she realizes that the baby she's protecting is her mom and how upset that makes her feel. They do end on good terms with Ace promising to return. She thought about leaving, but she can't. Understandably so.

Overall it's pretty ok. A story with a lot of pathos, especially with sibling relationships. I liked a lot of the editing here as well as the music. They made a cute dance music intro for this story only and it's a nice change of pace.

MR 035: ...ish

Oh dear. Another incompressible one. There definitely was a point where I lost the plot and never got it back. But it was much later into the story than Time of the Daleks at least. Probably around the middle.

There's a linguistic conference with professors who are working to compile literally every single word spoken ever. Which is insane. That's an insane person thing to do. Thus they have created an AI called "Book" to compile the words and define their meanings for them. But one of the professors winds up dead by suicide and some rogue "anti-linguist" (lol wut) is stalking the conference seeking to cause trouble.

The Doctor is in his season 22 rude phase, like with Whispers of Terror. In a way you can kind of call this one a little brother to that one. It had a creature made up of sound and this one has a creature made of words. Only this is not as good and makes less sense. The Doctor is very weirdly obsessed with British language purity, going after Peri for using American English. Which is just bizarre and so petty for the Doctor. Why is he obsessed with saying one country on one planet's version of language is the best one? Aren't you someone who explores all of time and space? What are you on about? It's so colonial for no reason.

That said, this particular Doctor is known to use big words. There's a funny part where he says a bunch of flowery language and one of the linguists says "and again in words with more than one syllable please?"

It turns out the AI Book and the dead professor went to look for the longest word ever spoken, a myth. But they collected a part of it somehow. It's just a part of the word that says "ish" and it makes everyone else say "ish" all the time. For reasons.
There is a cute part mid way through where the Doctor uses something to censor "ish" so every time anyone says it or says a word with "ish" as a suffix it gets bleeped. That's kind of hilarious. There's another cute part where Peri and the Doctor go back and forth with British versus American ways of saying the same thing to confuse the bad guy.

It turns out that the rogue anti-linguist guy is also an AI but it's turned against its creator for some reason. This was past the point I stopped understanding what was happening so. He wants to destroy all language for some stupid reason I'm sure.

Yeah, I'm not a fan as you can tell. There's some cute stuff here, but I'm not a fan of how overly complex it is.

MR 034: Spare Parts

Yes, it's good, despite the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa. It's amazing to me that Marc Platt did the incompressible Ghost Light and then did the incredibly boring Loups Garoux and then somehow pulled this out of his hat. It's pretty wild. I don't know how he did it.

The Doctor ends up on Mondas in its ancient history where Nyssa makes friends with a local family. Modas is Earth's twin, the long lost planet from Earth's solar system. It was knocked out of orbit and set adrift into space when a moon formed between them. The Earth thrived while Mondas died. All the people live underground. Their society faintly resembles Earth except it's more desperate, more based around survival. There's a market for artificial body parts: organs, limbs, anything as people get sick and injuried regularly. Doctors go around harvesting "spare parts" from people to sell as replacements. It's a dark and twisted reflection of humanity and it's good stuff.

It's this world that produces the Cybermen. Some time ago in Mondas's history they executed the royals, French Revolution style. This desperate set of circumstances lays the blatant evil of capitalism and wealth inequality bare when people don't know if they're going to survive from one day to the next. However, the "central committee" that they established is actually 20 people's brains pushed together as a think tank, like Shada. The brains inside their corpses kept alive to make decisions for the planet.

They've established a propulsion system on the surface of the planet to try to control the direction of Mondas's drift through space. But now Mondas is drifting towards a dangerous nebula that threatens to doom its civilization. The surface of the planet is too dangerous for anyone to go out unless they are FULLY converted and processed into the cybermen that we know. And even then they don't live very long. So working on the propulsion system is practically impossible.

The conversion process and the propulsion system are sucking up all the power from the city, especially in the dangerous nebula. People are starting to die. The government is using corpses from the graveyard in its conversions. And there's a lottery for who gets picked to go up to the surface. They don't know that they're going to be converted though. Of course not.

The nebula starts to destroy the cave system. People WILL start dying unless they can fix it. But the Committee decide to convert EVERYONE in order to save everyone. To survive, they become Cybermen.

There's something about the Doctor being the template for the Cybermen, which was odd. Not sure why that was a thing. The Doctor also manages to get Mondas's propulsion system to push it away from the nebule where it begins its journey back to the solar system where it will be destroyed in The Tenth Planet. The Doctor tries to get them to stop converting people, but they do it all the same.

There's a lot of really good stories here. The lottery is not exactly random. There's a job called the "sisterman" who goes around seeing who would be best suited for conversion. It's a pretty f**ked up job for evil people. The sisterman in the story KNOWS what she's doing, but she doesn't care. And in the end she gets converted herself.

As does the doctor who goes around harvesting organs to sell. He bemoans the government selling artificial parts and driving his organic parts out of business. Which is suitably f**ked.

We get to see a lot of the events through the family that Nyssa befriends. The dad is a cybermat catcher, because the cybermats were used as pets but have apparently become pests. The son wants to go to the surface because he thinks it's his patriotic duty, but the sisterman chooses his sister instead. And we get to see the horror in the conversion through her, especially when she comes home and how horrible it is for the family to see her like that. Also, it definitely really threw me off to have a character named Yvonne who isn't, you know, THAT Yvonne.

The cops are also the first to be mostly converted. The cops and their horses. The description is horrible. They're still recognizably human, but only just, cybernetic implants on everything. Of course the police are the first to be mostly converted.

There's some good stuff for the Doctor and Nyssa as well. The Doctor does his usual bullshit of saying that changing history is bad in and of itself, that preventing the rise of the cybermen would be bad for some reason. And Nyssa gets to call him out on it. There's some pathos for me, as the world's only Adric fan, to hear her calling the Doctor out on his not saving Adric when he totally could have.

I'm pretty happy with Nyssa's character development in these audios so far. She's surprised me. She's becoming more of a character who can call the Doctor out on his bs, which is the type of companion I like. For the most part, though, the Doctor and Nyssa are just observers in this story even though he restores power to the city. Which fits this Doctor. They're just struggling to survive like the people on the planet.

Definitely very good. Rare Fifth Doctor w. And rare Marc Platt w, I still don't get how he did it. We're coming out swinging, apparently, after the second Eighth Doctor season that concluded in Neverland. We shall see if we can keep the good stories coming.

MR 033: Neverland

The Doctor is the boy who never grew up. It's such an obvious comparison, I'm surprised the classic show never made it. The Doctor literally ran away from Gallifrey, avoiding any and all responsibility, just to explore the universe. He just happens to have the technology to be able to BE Peter Pan. Unlike everyone else.

Somehow Charley being saved from the R101 has caused a rift in time. Not sure how, but ok. She has become a portal from the universe of time, the universe we know, to a universe of nothing, of anti-time. Again, sure. Most of what happens in this story you just have to accept.

Charley being saved being this huge cataclysmic thing plays into Doctor Who's usual "changing history is bad in and of itself" narrative, which I don't like. I always prefer it when changing history stories tell us WHY changing history is bad. What about this particular event being changed would result in a worse timeline. This story makes it pretty explicitly clear, too, that Charley's death doesn't actually change anything in the timeline. She wouldn't have gone on to do anything significant and nothing really would be different. But somehow she's patient zero to allowing anti-time into the universe. What about all the other people the Doctor has saved throughout... literally all of Doctor Who. "Just this once Rose everybody lives?" All of those people are now breaches in time. It's just bizarre.

Like I said, you just kind of have to accept it. Which is fine. It makes for an interesting story even if the premise itself is faulty. The Time Lords try to lay a trap for the Doctor to get at Charley, but the Doctor wants to run away and he does. But Charley wants to take responsibility for being alive when she "isn't supposed to be" and hits the fast return, going into the Time Lords' trap.
The Time Lords mean to use Charley as the portal into the universe of anti-time to explore it, but there is an ulterior motive. There is a story about Rassilon accidentally creating anti-time and then going into the universe of anti-time to try to destroy it.

So when they get into this universe, they find Rassilon's TARDIS and his casket, contrary to his casket being in the dark tower in The Five Doctors. But CIA coordinator Vansell thinks it's really him. It turns out it's all a trick.

You see, there are these ghosts in this universe of anti-time. They're ghosts of time lords who have been "dispersed." The Time Lords thought this punishment would be to wipe someone out of all of time so that they never existed. It did that, but they ended up in the universe of anti-time instead. This is a pretty wild thing for the Time Lords to have done. And the interesting thing is that they don't ever realize that they've done it. Because once someone is dispersed so they never existed, naturally nobody remembers the dispersal even happened. That's pretty f**ked and a really good idea for the Time Lords, showing them to be a lot more sinister than shown on classic who.

The leader of the ghosts who has taken Charley's form is an even more clever idea. It's a former coordinator of the CIA who ordered hundreds of these dispersals, but had no idea. When they uncovered the truth, they used the dispersal machine on themselves, overcome with guilt, only to be with their victims in the anti-time universe.

Now the ghosts mean to use Rassilon's fake casket to disperse anti-time into the universe and thus escape, but the anti-time will destroy all of time and all of history, everywhere. So the Doctor and President Romana work to try to stop them.
The Doctor gets a visit from Rassilon, somehow, but sure. This visit from Rassilon to both the Doctor and Romana is particularly odd when we learn, in this story, that he was the one who created the dispersal punishment in the first place and thus caused this. Seems odd to revere him then, but sure.

The Doctor materializes his TARDIS around the time station with the anit-time bomb on it and manages to get it to explode entirely in his TARDIS, thus saving the universe from it. But in the process, the anti-time is trapped entirely within himself even as the paradox of Charley is also somehow resolved. Unfortunately, the Doctor becomes the very embodiment of anti-time. The mythological figure who is a being of pure anti-time. "I am ZAGREUS!!!!!!!" A cliffhanger that we'll have to wait to resolve until story number 50.

Does the plot make sense? No not at all. Are the vibes nice? Yeah for sure, when you can comprehend what's happening. When people say things like "Warrior's Gate feels like a BF script before BF," this is the script they're referring to. Well, this and Zagreus itself when we get to that. Incomprehensible gibberish.

That said, it's more comprehensible than Time of the Daleks, so I'll give it that. And, more importantly, there a lot of really interesting ideas here. Time Lord lore and emotional pay offs. Not only do you have the moment with Charley hitting the fast return, you also have the moment with Charley begging the Doctor to kill her so that the anti-time ghosts can't escape their universe. Good stuff.

On the whole, it's a bit of a mixed bag in that sense. Incompressible but with some good ideas and pathos. We shall look forward to when we basically get the very same vibes in the four hour epic at number 50: Zagreus!!!!!!!

MR 032: The Time of the Daleks

Incomprehensible. Thank you. Next. Next.

No but seriously. There was a point in the story where I completely lost the plot and never picked it back up again, probably about halfway through part 1. Yet again, early BF demonstrating that they can't really handle the Daleks very well. Every one of the four Dalek stories so far has been a flop.

Uh... something about a Dalek time ship that crashed, causing a fracture in time, a fascist dictator experimenting in time travel because Shakespeare has disappeared from history, and magic time travel mirrors. For some reason all mirrors everywhere allow time travel. People can just step through the mirror and end up in another time. Like Alice in Wonderland. Because sure, why not, I guess.

The Daleks have apparently changed history so that they've always been the masters of Earth, somehow using these mirrors and deleting Shakespeare. Because Shakespeare is apparently the most important person in history. I guess. And that's the story?

Look, I gave up trying to understand what was happening a long time ago. It genuinely sounds like the ravings of a mad man. Even trying to read the summary of the story doesn't make any sense. Ah well. One more on this season of Eighth Doctor. Just like with the first season of Eighth Doctor stories, it gets gradually worse, but this season started out on a much better footing with Invaders and Chimes. We'll see if Neverland can wrap it up well enough.

MR 031: Embrace the Darkness

I guess "proceedural" is a great word for this one as well? Just like Sword of Orion, most of the interesting stuff happens at the end. And just like Sword of Orion, it could have benefited from being cut down to an hour episode. This is where the classic who format of four episodes hurts the story.

The Doctor is curious about a solar system whose sun disappeared and is immersed in total darkness. There's a station in that system already with people on it working towards creating an artificial sun, but the natives of this system who nobody knew existed, the Cimmerians, are unhappy with that and seem to be attacking.

The Doctor gets wrapped up with a very belligerant army of robots who are trying to rescue the crew while the Cimmerians extract the crew's eyes in an effort to put out the light. "Embrace the Darkness."

The Cimmerians are actually great healers who have psychic abilities for healing. They can take away and restore sight and probably other things. They are extremely sensitive to the light.

In their ancient past, a group called the Solarians sought out their help because of a devestating plague. The Cimmerians' tried to help as many people as they could but their telekenetic abilities for healing nearly killed them all so they fled. The plague victims tried to follow and beg for help, but the Cimmerians literally blotted out the sun so that the Solarian solar sail ships couldn't follow. Which is insane. And now the Solarians are coming back as archeologists and are suprised to find anyone living here.

Other than this mildly interesting story, at the end, most of the story involves the standard running around in corridors, misunderstandings, ect ect. The most interesting part to me is the robots contiued belligerance. I wonder if there's anything to that. If they are being programmed to be unhelpful.
But yeah, not a generally interesting episode. Though there was a sequence I enjoyed with Charley calling the Doctor out on his penchant for noble self-sacrifice after he makes a mistake. She's not content to just sit while he goes off and gets himself killed. "You brought me here and you're going to leave me with these people I don't know in god knows what century for what?" Good stuff. All in all though, definitely very C tier coded.

Oh. Written by Nick Briggs. And nobody at all was shocked.

MR 030: Seasons of Fear

"Do they have orgies?
CHARLOTTE POLLARD!
I went to an orgy once.... I didn't stay."

I could have sworn I heard Daleks at some point in this story. So Nimon huh? That's one of those monsters that I never would have thought would see a return, yet here we are. Horns of Nimon doesn't exactly have the best reputation from a less than stellar season. And looking at their list of appearances, yeah, they didn't make a return appearance any other time. Nobody's out here clamoring for the return of the Nimon in the 2020s?

Fortunately, though, that's not really the main focus of this story. The main focus is on one individual who has been granted immortality by his mysterious masters from beyond the stars, the Nimon, and his attempts at bringing them into the world over time and being foiled by the Doctor.

We meet Sebastian Grayle for the first time, for the last time in Singapore when the Doctor finally brings Charley there for her rendevous with her friend. He says that he's already killed the Doctor. It's an intriguing set up. A character that's battled the Doctor throughout time, but he's taken the long way round, living all this time, while the Doctor has jumped between points in history.

We get stories set in three different time periods. In the first, in ancient rome, we see Grayle in a cult to Mithras as a priest, but he doesn't believe in it anymore because of his connection to his alien masters, who he sees as gods. There's an interesting thread of faith through this story as we see Grayle's relationship to religion all throughout it.

We see him again in pre-unification Britain where he's a priest, but of course he doesn't really believe. He's extracted uranium and created plutonium to allow his masters to come through, but again the Doctor foils him, destroying his rudimentary transmat. I enjoyed the rulers in this one, they were clever and clearly enjoyed each other's company even though the king (and maybe queen) was gay.
And finally we see Grayle in the early 19th century as a wealthy businessman who runs the hellfire club (even just reminding me of Minuet in Hell... ugh, thankfully it's not as bad as that). He has no religion at all and only believes in himself: that the world exists to serve him. He continues to believe that his alien masters will grant him the world. The Nimon manage to make it through this time, but the Doctor flings himself and the nimon into the time vortex where they end up back in ancient Rome. There he gets the cult to Mithras to attack the Nimon and he convinces the younger Grayle to back down because of an encounter with his future self.

I definitely enjoy scenes like this where a character is horrified by what they will become. And Grayle shoots his future self when his future self tries to kill the Doctor.

There's a couple of interesting ending scenes for arc maintenance, Moffat style, here. The Doctor seems to be explaining what's happening to someone. He's been narrating the whole time. And then two of the characters from the third story get apparently eaten by something that seems to look and sound like Charley. Not sure what that's about. I'm sure we'll find out in the next few stories.

Yes, overall I quite enjoyed this one. I love the relationship between the Doctor and Charley now. They're needling each other as friends do and they're very clearly familiar and comfortable around each other. Charley even calls the Doctor her best friend. I liked when she said:

"You even did that thing where you pretend to be an idiot to get people to tell you their plans.

I do that?

I always thought you did."
It's a really satisfying narrative to follow this one person throughout time and see how he gets increasingly more and more lost in the sauce and convinced of his own superiority. Because he keeps living while everyone else dies so he believes he's the only one that matters. That's why I really love seeing the confrontation between his younger self and the person he will become in the end. Grayle has some great speeches here too about why he does what he does, how he's convinced himself he's the only god, ect ect. And all throughout he thinks that his alien masters will give him control of the Earth.

Just a really fun and really meaty script to chew on. I also quite enjoy how scrappy this script is. The Doctor even talks about "the bitchiness of time lord society" which is hilarious. I never would have imagined hearing the word "bitchiness" come from the Doctor's mouth, but here we are. Great story all around and excited to see how the rest of the arc goes.

MR 029: The Chimes of Midnight

TW: discussion of suicide

It's a damn classic for good reason right? Rob Shearman can cook. The Holy Terror was already the best audio so far and now Rob has surpassed himself with this all time classic. This is incredibly nostalgic for me. I remember at the time, years and years ago, thinking that Shearman was my favorite Doctor Who writer... EVER, and being disappointed that he hadn't done any Doctor Who in a long time and probably won't ever again. Sad.

Anyway, this audio is well loved so everyone knows what happens. But for the sake of it:

The Doctor and Charley land downstairs in an old Victorian manor. It seems to be frozen in time and there's some excellent scenes of things unhappening after the Doctor and Charley cause them to happen. As Charley says, something seems to be preventing them from making any impression. That is, until the chime of 10 PM when they get drawn into the world. This is where things go insane.

The staff of the house are people you'd expect: the cook, the chauffer, the butler, and the lady's maid. But they're all particularly mean towards one person in particular: the scullary maid: Edith Thompson. They way they're mean to her in particular is strange. The cook disapproves of her saying something that everyone else and she herself says. The meme line! Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without my plum pudding!

The staff behave very oddly in general. They seem to be in their own little story and, without missing a beat, they adapt the Doctor and Charley into their story.
This is where Rob Shearman's interest in deconstructing tropes and narrative comes into play, as he did with The Holy Terror. The story plays out like a little murder mystery. First Edith gets murdered and then the cook. The other people see the Doctor and Charley as detectives here to solve the murders, but their answers to basic questions are bizarre. The butler continues to insist the murders are suicide as well. Their answers seem almost like talking to an AI. It's eager to get back on script and to repeat the same lines over and over again in different formats in ways that don't seem quite human. It's amazing that Shearman captures that feeling of talking to an AI decades before that technology existed. It makes everything seem bizarre and dream like. They're doing this strange story over and over again, sinking into their roles as it goes on. The chauffer and lady's maid killed the cook to get her out of the way because she plans to turn them in for their love affair. No actually they're not in love because the lady's maid is now the scullery maid since Edith doesn't exist and a chauffer can't be in love with a scullery maid. Now it's the chauffer who's been killed, and the lady's maid is crying over it but just kidding she's just a scullery maid so obviously they were never in love to begin with.

The murders are always bizzare, as the Doctor says, parodies of death. The cook is stuffed with her own plum pudding. Edith drowns in the dish water and then suffocates from a plunger on her face. The chauffer gets run over by a car in the middle of the parlor. Always something to do with their job.
Some force is running this little farce over and over and over again killing them one at a time, each time the clock resetting at the chime of midnight and starting over again at 10PM with someone being killed and then someone else being killed at 11 PM. The mysterious force works Charley into it as well, making her into a lady of the house and the Doctor into a detective. It prevents the Doctor from leaving the house, going outside or going upstairs. In a particularly funny bit, the Doctor tries to go upstairs and talks to the mysterious force, saying he's going upstairs and that it needs to stop him, waiting for someone to come along until the butler comes along with a gun on him.

In the meantime, as Charley is being integrated into the story as a member of the upstairs household, she's been getting bizarre visions from Edith talking about how she's died. The Doctor even gets scared and tries to run away, but he can't. The TARDIS interior changes dramatically back into the scullery, the force integrating the TARDIS into the story too. It all culminates when they realize the house is alive. It's been controlling everyone and killing them over and over again, becoming more alive with each death. It's going to maintain that thread of life that it has as much as it can.
It was given life by, as it turns out, Charley. Edith Thompson was cook in Charley's house when she was a little girl. Charley doesn't really remember her, but Edith remembers Charley as her best friend, which is so sad. Nobody was ever kind to Edith, not when she was a scullery maid and not when she was a cook, so when Charley apparently died in the R101 crash, she took her own life, overwhelmed with grief that the one person who had ever been nice to her died. It's so depressing that this person was never shown kindness at all except from one child who smiled at her. And that was it. When the Doctor and Charley landed in this house and saw Edith before she was a cook, they created a paradox. Charley is now in this timeline alive and dead. And so Edith is now alive and dead. She both did and didn't take her own life. This paradox gives the house life and allows it to create this little time and space loop for itself, giving itself life.

Charley can feel her death. She can feel the flames and hear the screams as the R101 crashes with no escape. But she also is still alive. Edith encourages Charley to die with her, as they should have. But Charley and Edith both choose life, which destroys the entire loop and the house's attempt at life.

That whole sequence: the Doctor appealing to Charley that he needs her and she needs him, that they're a team, literally had me in tears. It's the reason we watch Doctor Who. I live vicariously through Doctor Who and so it meant a lot to me as someone who doesn't really have any friends, this is just what I do, I listen to and watch Doctor Who. The Doctor is my friend and I go on adventures with him. It's saved me from killing myself multiple times. So hearing him appeal to that made me ugly cry.

Not to mention the very end when the loop is destroyed and they see Edith as a scullery maid. Charley tells her that she's not nobody and not no-one. She's special as she is.
This story truly is something special and it's deeply nostalgic for me. It takes me right back to that time when I was in college listening to Doctor Who for the first time and being entranced by the possibility of what these stories could be. It's crafted with care by someone who deeply understands and loves Doctor Who. It also really shows Shearman's love for exploring narrative and tropes. Like The Holy Terror, it starts out comic in its explorations of the absurd nature of these narratives and then turns out extremely dark and tragic. Like I said, his dialogue when he's still in comic mode feels like an AI repeating the same phrases and trying to get the listener on track with the story. And then the shift into dark tragedy feels so natural and so real. The house's voice seems like it could be silly in any other story, but it actually does feel threatening here juxtaposed with Edith talking about killing herself.

And who else could have pulled off a story like this but the Eighth Doctor and Charley? Charley is intimately involved with this story in a way that most companions in classic aren't. This woman whose death sparked the story killed herself BECAUSE of Charley. It's this darkly gothic feeling, of the clock ticking over, of the death that caused all this, of the bizzare way the staff talk and act, all of it feels very Eighth Doctor in his romantic period. Like a weird dream that you can't quite escape. A dream that pulls you into it and makes you part of it.
There's so many fantastic visuals in this story. From the very beginning when time rewinds and things unhappen, Charley being pulled to talk to Edith in another weird reality, the house itself, the weird deaths, the TARDIS changing into the scullery the second hand on the clock whirring forwards, the resets. This would make a really fantastic filmed story, of all audio stories. I don't know if it would ever be as good as the version we all have in our heads, but it would be interesting to see how it would get adapted to screen.

This is the peak of what Doctor Who audio can be as far as I'm concerned. I love audio dramas quite a lot. I'm more of a Doctor Who audio fan than tv show fan. I enjoy most audio stories I've heard. But I don't think any of them have ever surpassed Chimes of Midnight, and I don't think any ever will. This is not only the greatest Doctor Who audio drama, this might be the greatest Doctor Who story ever made. All from one of the most talented writers we've ever seen.

MR 028: Invaders from Mars

Another comedy huh? And more silly voices? Yet it's actually pretty decent.

Yes, it's BF's second attempt at silly American accents. But unlike Minuet in Hell, it's not completely miserable. The fact that it doesn't take itself seriously definitely is a huge reason for that.

Orson Wells is doing his famous broadcast of War of the Worlds that made people think it was real. But at the same time there is a real alien invasion happening and a lot of mobster drama and violence. A professor from Russia had found alien artifacts and is working on them while agents for the CIA, the Soviets, and the Nazis all try to track him down and take the alien artifacts for themselves. Meanwhile the Doctor gets to play at being a private detective.

The real aliens are trying to make it seems like there's an invasion and then do a protection racket. Similar to the last story actually with the Doctor imposter. But Orson Wells' broadcast tricks them into thinking the planet is already being invaded by bigger, badder aliens and they need to run away.

This one is pretty cute. Not as strong as The One Doctor, but still a fun time. The actors are on point here with their comedic timing and the stereotypical mob silliness that you'd expect. Of course because the War of the Worlds broadcast was on radio, you have to do an audio drama about it at some point, and they choose sooner rather than later.

Looking forward to the next one and this "season" of Eight/Charley, hopefully it's better than the last. But anything would be better than Minuet in Hell. That's for sure.

MR 027: The One Doctor

Mwhahaha, I control everything. You must surrender to my will. I own Park Place ANNNNDD Boardwalk. That'll be 2354 pounds rent please.

Oh my god, what is this and why do I love it so much. I absolutely remember adoring this one and with good reason. This is the second one I explicitly remember from when I listened to all of these years ago, after The Holy Terror. While that one was a comedy AND a tragedy, this one is JUST a comedy. And a very good one at that. It makes fun of the Doctor Who formula quite well, and specifically multi-Doctor stories.

The Doctor and Mel land in the system of... ehem... Generios where an invasion of the evil Skelloids has just taken place. It turns out, though, that that invasion has been coordinated and manipulated by a certain couple of con artists posing as the Doctor and his companion. Banto Zame and Sally-Anne.They're just here for the money. And they're madly in love. Naturally.

But there's a real invasion afoot as a giant cylinder in space (which I imagine looks very like the whale probe from Star Trek 4) demands the three treasures of Generios.

The treasures involve an infinite shelf that exists in multiple dimensions with instructions that you can never quite finish, a quiz bot that knows absolutely everything in the entire universe by sending versions of himself back in time playing the Weakest Link for all of eternity, and an incredibly valuable diamond guarded by a single celled organism called The Jelloid who signed a fifty million year contract to defend it. And has currently been waiting one and a half million years for his television set to arrive. They put him on hold for fourty three thousand years and then gave him a two million year window in which to have it delivered, you see.
Seriously, the jokes here are fantastic. Absolutely everyone is on perfect form with their timings. Colin, Bonnie, and the guest actors who play the imposters. It's also notable for having a pre-Nardole Matt Lucas and he's also quite hilarious.

There are all kinds of running jokes here making fun of Doctor Who in general. I almost don't want to ruin them and just encourage everyone to listen to it yourself.

Whenever I saw that it was written by Gareth Roberts I was a little worried that it was just going to be conservative all the way through. There was a little bit of that with the Doctor bemoaning people not being able to save themselves, followed by the people of Generios saying they were useless in the invasion of the Skelloids, but for the most part it wasn't conservative, it was just making fun of Doctor Who in general.

I whole heartedly recommend this one. This is amazing. If you're invested in Doctor Who at all you need to hear it. It's a joy from start to finish. Not to mention the six minutes of quiz show questions at the end.

MR 026: Primeval

All hail Kwundaar, our living god, I guess. Something something Traken will rise again? Return to Traken? Traken 2: Source Harder?

The Doctor takes Nyssa to Traken in the ancient past because she's sick and only her people can cure her. Not sure why he took her to the ancient past, but sure. Seems like taking someone to a leach specialist to cure your humors.

The ancient past Trakenites are extremely superstitious and have a vague spirituality. The Source, which is this big energy source from the original Keeper of Traken story, is the source of all good in the world and it banishes evil. It's part of their mythology and history. Therefore Nyssa is sick because she's come into contact with evil and being near the source will wipe out that evil. Again, Doctor, what the hell. You took Nyssa to a leach doctor.

There is another power hanging around. A group of pirate ships commanded by Kwundaar, a living god. He's made himself a little cult on these ships. The pirates worship him and follow his law.

Speaking of which, a little interesting bit I remembered: the Doctor says the conservative thing: the best way to help someone is to help themselves and not foster dependancy. Give a man to fish, feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, teach him for a lifetime. And then a little later in the story, the pirates have a commandment from Kwundaar that is similar: Kwundaar helps those who help themselves. I.e., no dependancy.

Anyway, the Doctor and a Traken Doctor tries to go to Kwundaar to see if he can heal Nyssa, which turns out disasterous. Kwundaar wants the Doctor's help in exchange for curing her and then he falls right into Kwundaar's trap. He goes into the room with the Source and increases the shield around it for... reasons. That allows Kwundaar to approach the planet and invade, normally he would be burned out by it.
As it turns out, Kwundaar used to be the original Traken god, but when the Trakenites invented the source, they abandoned their religion for science and used the Source to kick Kwundaar out. Reminiscent of what the Doctor said about every paradise having its snake. They exiled the snake from paradise instead of getting exiled from it themselves. Kwundaar means to unite with the Source, safe from its power against him now and use it to call in his old god buddies from before time. He reads a code from Nyssa's mind that gives the Source's power to the Doctor. The Doctor then destroys Kwundaar and gives the power over to one of the council, creating the first Keeper of Traken, in control of the source.

It's... ok. Nothing special I don't think. A lot of it is just strange and hard to follow. I don't think I have too much to say on it. It's pretty instantly forgettable and expendable. It's just an interesting idea for a prequel to Keeper, but I don't know if anyone was clambering for that. The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa are still pretty boring, unfortunately. That's to be expected, though. 🤷‍♂️

MR 025: Colditz

You shot my friend! Oh hey it's David Tennant. You shot my friend! First appearance of Klein, nice, I remember her. YOU SHOT MY FRIEND!

Well this one was quite good. There's some very interesting ideas about time travel here which I'll go into in a second. The Nazi stuff makes for some very interesting backdrop for the arrival of a mysterious woman named Klein who may not be what she claims to be. Also, a pre-Tenth Doctor David Tennant playing a creepy/sleezy Nazi guard! He orders Ace to take her clothes off and implies sexual favors from her. Tennant is always good at playing the villain and he's good at it here too.

The TARDIS makes a landing right outside of Colditz Castle, a famous Nazi prison. The Doctor and Ace quickly get captured. Ace tries to escape while the Doctor gets taken by Klein. Klein gives the Doctor's TARDIS to the prison's commander and then takes off. But it turns out her method of transport is gone. This is where it gets interesting.

Klein, it turns out, is from a timeline where the Nazis won. She's from the 60s in the UK in that timeline and is working on a government project studying the TARDIS. In this original timeline, Ace gets shot trying to escape Colditz and the Doctor leaves in his TARDIS, only to come back a decade later and get captured and shot when the Nazis won. They were able to use the technology in Ace's CD walkman to win the war, using lasers.

However, it turns out Klein has been tricked by a future version of the Doctor into coming back in time and changing history. She works with a future Doctor who convinces her to go back and capture the Doctor. She tampers with her own timeline and her intervention is what prevents Ace from being shot and prevents the TARDIS from falling into Nazi hands and prevents them from winning. Hence the trick. The future Doctor has been clever, seeing how her interference would wipe out her timeline.
The discussion between the Doctor and Klein is very interesting as well. The Doctor argues for his usual "changing history is bad in and of itself" bullshit. And Klein rightfully calls him out on it. Yes, it is absolutely good to change history here so that the Allies win, but there are plenty more times when changing history would be good as well. Why stop at changing history so my timeline doesn't exist anymore? Why not go back and save the people colonized by the British? Or the people who died in the numerous wars before WW2? The Doctor's going after her "paradise built on the back of genocide" rings holo when he's not willing to stop any other genocide. Only because in the history that he's familiar with, the Allies won WW2 so that's the only genocide he's willing to stop. It makes me look forward to Klein's further appearances if she calls the Doctor out on his hypocrisy even though, you know, she's a literal Nazi.

Ace's B plot is definitely less interesting as it's just her planning an escape attempt and getting ratted out by one of the other prisoners. And getting harrassed by David Tennant. It's not bad at all, just not as interesting as the meat of the time travel discussion.

Ultimately they end up leaving Klein in the 1940s, which could potentially have devestating effects. It's interesting that, when her timeline gets aborted, she doesn't cease to exist. She's a person from a timeline that no longer exists living in a time before her time. That could potentially be dangerous to to the war effort as well. Maybe if she positions herself well enough, she could help the Nazis win. Or maybe she could just get herself shot. We don't know. I'm sure we'll find out later when she's brought back.

MR 024: The Eye of the Scorpion

Huh. Who knew that it would take a Fifth Doctor audio to bring us out of this slump of bad audios. He doesn't get many W's. Savour the moment.

The Doctor and Peri change history by saving a Pharaoh to be's life accidentally. A Pharaoh that the Doctor doesn't recognize and he knows all the Pharaohs, so he says. They then save her life again in the next twenty minutes. This starts an epic historical complete with political intrigue and some light sci fi elements thrown in. I'm a little disappointed it wasn't a pure historical, but that's fine.

The assassin who tried to kill Erimem, the Pharaoh to be, said that there was another heir. Which sparks a whole debate amongst the council of priests as to whether she is legitimate. Erimem, the Doctor, and Peri uncover a whole conspiracy to dethrone her and allow a mercenary army to come in and take control of the capital of Thebes. Followed by a large chase and battle sequence that is quite fun as the forces in Thebes go to unite with the forces of Giza and stand a better chance.

The sci fi element here is that the mercenaries are subject to a gestalt telepathic entity that has taken over the minds of anyone it touches. It's inside of Peri as well and uses her as a spy. And she gets to ask a bunch of fun questions about military defenses and such. The entity wants to take the Doctor's TARDIS and escape off world. The Doctor eventually defeats it when it tries to go into one entity to take over the Doctor and gets taken down when the Doctor and Erimem question everyone the gestalt has taken over. And it ends up inside of a cat. True story. The Doctor can get his revenge on cats after nearly shooting on in Resurrection of the Daleks.

Erimem ultimately doesn't want to become Pharaoh and leaves with the Doctor and Peri. And good thing too because she's a fun character.
There's a lot of fun stuff here. Peri and Erimem already have fantastic chemistry. I see why I remember enjoying them so much. And why I remember only enjoying the Fifth Doctor when he's with these two. They're great. There's a fun little sequence where the Doctor blots out the sun to convince the priests that Erimem is indeed the true Pharaoh. The battle sequence is very fun. Just everything is a great time honestly. Not the best, but certainly an A tier easily. I enjoyed it immensely.

Like I said, the Fifth Doctor doesn't get many W's, so I'll give him this one. It really is a shame that they don't do audios with him and Peri anymore because they have great chemistry. And Erimem is good for their dynamic as well. I'm looking forward to more with them. Unfortunate that Erimem doesn't have that many audios and that they abandoned this Five/Peri TARDIS team, but what can you do.

MR 023: Project: Twilight

Uh... not sure how I feel about this one. Doctor Who's edgy emo phase I guess. Even edgier than Shalka.

During WW1, the British Empire somehow figured out how to create vampires. Of the State of Decay variety. Those vampires are now in the middle of London in 2001 trying to spread the vampire virus to all of humanity. For... some reason. The lead vampire says it's to "save humanity," but I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. Immortality I guess? They're hunted by a man named Nimrod, the scientist responsible for creating them in the first place during WW1. He became a vampire himself to stay alive and is now a vampire hunter. The Doctor is tricked in the stupidest way possible into helping them create their virus and then helps Nimrod stop them.

What I have to assume is the most important part here is that they turn a woman named Cassie into a vampire who works at their front casino. Since she's rescued and dropped off in scandinavia to hang out. Presumably to be a recurring character.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan. It's just edgy for the sake of it. Very 80s Doctor Who. Blood and guts and gratuitous violence just cause. And just like State of Decay (where vampires first originate) everyone is trying WAAAYYY too hard to act edgy. They're saying edgy one liners and trying to act all jaded and sarcastic as they saw off limbs or watch people explode or inject people with the vampire virus. Like I said, it's giving very emo. Very Hot Topic circa 2005.

That's really all there is to it. Oh and the Doctor is an idiot for falling for the vampire ruse. Dumb. I'm surprised that this audio got sequels at all. 2001 really was a different time huh?

MR 022: Bloodtide

The thing I remembered most from this audio is the way that lady says "Devils." Still pretty B tier coded, but at least Colin and Evelyn are here so that's pretty nice. It's also the first use of the Silurians. Unfortunately, it's pretty standard as far as Silurian stories go, especially classic who Silurian stories.

The Beagle is doing its tour of the Galapagos Islands with Charles Darwin, yes, that Darwin. They end up uncovering some Silurians that have been woken up from their slumber and are working on killing all of humanity with a plague. Again. That's really all there is to it. The thing that makes it pretty standard and definitely too long, like a classic who story, is that it has the Doctor get captured... and then Evelyn goes after him with Darwin and they get captured. And then the Doctor escapes and he goes after them. It's just a waste of time. It could have easily been cut down to an hour, again, like a lot of classic who.

That said, there's some good ideas here. I particularly liked Darwin in the middle of having an existential and religious crisis of faith in the middle of being captured by the Silurians. Indeed, juxtaposing Darwin himself with the Silurians is a great idea. The story does the correct thing in comparing natural selection with artificial selection or animal breeding. Darwin talks about the way that animals are domesticated, becoming more calm because of human intervention. And he compares that to the finches becoming more afraid of humans over time by their presence on the islands.

It's particularly interesting because the story says that humans used to be the Silurians' food and that one Silurian decided to advance their evolution and give them intelligence. So humans themselves are a product of artificial selection, breeding by Silurians. That would absolutely send Darwin into a crisis of faith.
I also found the myrka pretty hilarious considering, you know, Warriors. Just don't drop kick it. They do manage to make it feel threatening as an actual giant sea monster rather than two guys in a panto horse costume. It just is pretty superfluous.

The Doctor gets to make some fun jabs at humanity. How can humans be intelligent when they enslave each other ect ect. How is eating humans any different than eating cattle. Stuff you'd expect of Six, which I'm here for. I enjoyed the outraged ship captain trying to come up with reasons to justify why eating humans is wrong and eating cows is ok. It is so good to finally have Colin back. It's been EIGHT audios since we had him. And not coincidentally Holy Terror was the last truly good one. And yes, I do like Paul McGann quite a lot, who doesn't, but his first four audios here left a lot to be desired.

MR 021: Dust Breeding

Well this was a rather odd story. I'm not sure what to make of it to be honest.

There's an ancient powerful entity hidden in the Scream painting. The Master is trying to lure it out by using its ancient enemy it was created to fight as bait. Hijinks ensue. There's an artist who gives this planet of psychic dust to the entity and then theres a battle of psychic wills for it between the Doctor and Master.

I'm not sure if it's good or not? I guess it's pretty ok. But ok is a huge improvement over the last run of audios. I'll take ok over terrible accents, over exposed audio, and boring, messy, and procedural scripts.

It is definitely nice to see Geoffrey Beevers' first BF audio. He's fantastic as always. He's one of my favorite Masters for a reason. I find it interesting that the story gives a definitive end to the Ainley Master here. His Trakken body got burned up by the entity in the painting when he tried to unsuccessfully control it. I'm also not sure who Bev is, I have to assume that she's from a VNA.

I also like the opening where the Doctor has an art gallery in the TARDIS where he steals works that are destroyed according to history. That's pretty hilarious.

But yeah, overall pretty ok. Pretty B tier coded. Nothing super special. I'm super excited about the return of my favorite Doctor next. Colin save me from this run of bad audios.

MR 020: Loups-Garoux

Why is the audio mixing so terrible? Literally everyone's audio is clipping like crazy. I feel like my ears are bleeding. The audio mixing was terrible in Minuet in Hell, but for a very different reason: the terrible accents and immediate cutting between scenes.

Literally the entire summary is: the Doctor and Turlough hang out with a werewolf clan for two hours and twenty minutes. Yes, there really is that little story to this thing. The werewolf clan has a lady in charge whose son is sick and is getting cured by an asian doctor who wants to cure lycanthropy in general. And there's an evil werewolf that's the original werewolf that wants to mate with her. Aaaannnnddd that's about it. 😴 🛌 💤

This audio could definitely have benefited from being cut down to a single hour long episode. But even then there might not have been enough story to sustain it honestly. And that god awful audio mixing, what the hell. If it wasn't for that, this would be pretty average, but the audio drags it down.

Mr 019: Minuet in Hell

What an apt title. This was miserable from start to finish.

I don't super care about the summary. So something something the Doctor got his mind scrambled with Nick Briggs and is in an insane asylum for most of the story. Charley gets kidnapped by a Hellfire club and is forced to wear sexy clothes and a corset. Where she meets someone with literally demon fighting magic powers from a medieval knight group who has a grandfather who is a senator who gets possessed by a demon who is literal Yosemite Sam and makes my ears bleed every time he talks. The head of the Hellfire Club is trying to start a new state, become governor, and then president while projecting a Christian image. All while summoning a literal demon. The Brig is here investigating just cause.

And most importantly, everyone, and I mean everyone, had a terrible accent that makes me hate my life. Like if every single character was Milo from the Space Pirates. Oh my God.

This story robs the Doctor and Charley of their agency and definitely is a waste of the brig. And is just painful. Not only in the terrible accents, but the terrible script and story as well. I don't know who green lit this piece of crap but they need to be fired immediately. It's incredible how the first block of Eighth Doctor stories get progressively worse. Storm Warning is pretty ok. Sword of Orion boring and procedural. Stones of Venice a messy script with no focus. And Minuet in Hell an assault on the ears. Here's hoping the next block is better. Back to our regularly scheduled Doctors.

MR 018: The Stones of Venice

Uh... it's a Doctor Who story and stuff happens I guess. Really, these first few Eighth Doctor stories aren't that interesting.

The city of Venice is sinking into the ground in the future. But there's a whole legend around the Duke, who is 100 years old, having been cursed by his lover to die when the city sinks. Because he "lost her in a card game," which is a giant lol wut to me. This is your lover, not a car. And he gives no reason for it either which is bizarre. Surely that's not legal unless the 23rd century has legal slavery. This entire premise is bizarre.

A cult has formed to worship the lover and has her tomb deep underground. But her tomb is empty because she was never dead. She is an alien of some kind who used her jewels to amplify her hatred of the Duke and curse the city to die. But to save the city something has to die in return so she forgives the Duke and they die together.

Which is so weird. Why would she forgive him for "losing her in a game of cards," which I reiterate, makes no sense. And why would she choose to die with him, throwing herself on the funeral pyre style.

The Doctor talks about how humans make up legends and stories. But this REALLY IS a legend and story come to life. She did curse the Duke and the city to live for another hundred years and then die. There really is no reason for the cult to not worship her when she can destroy the entire city. There's also some paintings that she brought with her from space.

And an underclass of fish people who drive the gondolas. They're both supported and condemned by the story. Revolution of the underclass who force Charley into trying to fool the Duke that he is his long lost lover.

Yeah, the writing just feels all over the place here. That's the main problem. It's very unfocused and it ends up feeling like a mess of underbaked ideas.

MR 017: Sword of Orion

First use of the Cybermen... yaaaayyyyy..... Yeah, this one is fairly procedural. If you've ever seen a classic who Cyberman story, you've seen this. It's like Apocalypse Element and Genocide Machine, just standard Dalek faire that I checked out of. No surprise that Nick Briggs wrote both this and Mutant Phase, which was also pretty boring.

The Doctor and Charley go to a space station bazaar, which is definitely the most interesting sequence in the whole story... only to accidentally go onto a scrap ship that runs into a Cyberman ship. It turns out the captain of the scrap ship is a double agent in the Orion war between the humans and androids, who are trying to be treated as equals. The captain is secretly an android in disguise, looking to steal Cyberman conversion secrets to convert humans they capture in war.

It's not as interesting as it sounds. All of that comes out in the last twenty minutes. The rest of it is just by the books. There's a cybermat infiltrator and then there's a mutiny against the captain and then the Cybermen convert and mind control people ect ect ect. The bits that would make for an interesting story are not until the end, but by that point we no longer care.

It's a shame too because the idea of an android war is interesting. Like if Data from Star Trek inspired a revolution rather than tried to work legally for android rights. Ah well.

I do like seeing Charley adapting so well and so immediately to travel, though. Charley is from the early 20th century and here she is on a space station and space ship and she rides in a hovercar and she doesn't miss a beat. She adapts incredibly well, even arguing for android rights for a hot minute at the end. That's a great characterization for her as this person who has such a wanderlust that she's willing to just accept whatever. That's why we love her.

MR 016: Storm Warning

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Oh, um, excuse me. That's just me fangirling. Enter Paul McGann and India Fisher! This was so nostalgic, oh my god. This is BF's main line, current era team and it's amazing to hear it. The Eighth Doctor was such a blank slate in the tv movie that now BF basically gets to invent his personality and what a great personality it is. Yes, BF have already invented a new companion character in Evelyn and she is amazing, but this is the first time BF basically get to invent a new Doctor.

And what a Doctor he is. Paul McGann is a legend for a reason. His banter and sharp witted responses are hilarious even here. As are his scatter brained responses when he first meets Charley, which I will post below, another legendary first meeting like Six and Evelyn. His lust for life is evident even in this first story and Charley is the perfect companion for him. She, too, has a lust for life. She boards the R101 disguised as a steward just because she can, because she wants to see the world. I'm so excited to hear all their adventures again, I'm pretty sure I was starting to tear up with how nostalgic this was for me.
Now the actual story. The R101, an airship that historically crashed tragically is on its way to India, but it is on a secret mission. To return a crashed alien pilot and possibly steal the spaceship that the alien is from. The aliens turn out to have divided their personalities into logic, instinct, and free will. The engineers, the uncreators, and the lawgiver. There is only one lawgiver that has lived for a very long time and has dictated what the engineers and uncreators do, but it is dying and it needs a replacement. The man who brought the R101 here to steal the alien ship stays as the new uncreators are free from the lawgiver's dictates, but are scared off by everyone roaring because they've never seen a predator before. One of the people from the R101 steals an alien gun and in an act to keep it accidentally destroys the gas bags holding up the airship which then crashes tragically.

The Doctor and Charley then fly off on a vortisaur, a predator that lives in the time vortex, back to where the TARDIS has crash landed. There's an interesting hook, here, for BF's ongoing series with Charley. She's a time anomaly of some sort. The Doctor considers putting her back onto the R101 and letting her die because history is going to change with her alive, which would be horrible. Does he know who he is? But he can't do it. Just as he can't not let Charley keep the Vortisaur, which Charley names Ramsey.

It's a cute story, but it's an especially amazing one. The real strength in this story is hearing Paul McGann's first real story outside of the tv movie, of course, and seeing Charley's first story. They already work so well together and have fantastic chemistry. I remember adoring these two and I can't wait to hear more of them. Which, of course, I will because the Eighth Doctor stories in the early main range are in blocks, so the next three will all be Eighth Doctor. Look forward to that!

MR 015: The Mutant Phase

😴 😴 🛌 💤

Wha... what was that? Oh there was an audio here? Oh right. Uh... Daleks have a mutation that makes them into scary flying killers. More than they already are anyway. The Daleks and Thals are working together to try to stop the mutation at its source which turns out to be a wasp stinging a badly damaged Dalek during the Dalek Invasion of Earth.

It's wild to me, though, that this audio is the follow up to Holy Terror, the BEST audio so far, an absolute masterpiece. And then this one comes along and is dull as hell. The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa continue to be pretty boring here. Nyssa retains some of her combative personality with the Doctor from her previous audios, which is nice, but it's all so bland and formulaic.

The mutant phase itself is an interesting concept, but it quickly gets subverted in favor of a "changing time bad" story which then changes into a "paradox" story. The Doctor says "fate, never heard of it," which is a cool line... except for the fact that he constantly argues in favor of maintaining history as he remembers it in history books. So he absolutely does believe in fate.

The paradox is just as uninteresting as the rest of the plot around it. The Dalek Emperor went back in time with them to stop the mutant phase, but his using the pesticide to kill the wasp is what triggers the mutation. Because the Daleks had already identified it and were going to get rid of it themselves. Or something. Honestly, I checked out a long time ago.

I think, at this point, BF is kind of floundering with both the Fifth Doctor and the Daleks. The Fifth Doctor himself is hard to make interesting, clearly. They had an interesting story in Winter for the Adept, but not becasue of the Doctor or Nyssa. And their Dalek stories thus far have been pretty dull and formulaic. They don't really know yet what to do with them, I think. They don't have the Time War to play with either. We'll see if that trend continues.

MR 014: The Holy Terror

For real, this is a f**king masterpiece from beginning to end. What the hell. Robert Shearman does a masterful job going between comedy and tragedy and wrotes both expertly. This is simultaneously one of the funniest audios so far and one of the most horrifying audios so far. The previous audio, Shadow of the Scourge, was horrifying in a much more direct way. This is horrifying in a more psychological way, although there certainly is a fair bit of gore.

This one, definitely, requires a spoiler tag. Please don't read if you haven't listened to it, thank you.

The TARDIS lands in a castle where a highly ritualised society is appointing its next god emperor. Every time the god emperor dies, they start a new religion with the new god emperor and the scribe has to write down everything the new god emperor does in the holy bible of the new religion. A lot of the humor comes from the idea that the rituals are all completely ridiculous and tropey. The previous empresses gets executed as a heretic. The emperor to be is always unsure of himself and thinks he's not a god. The emperor to be's wife is always bitter and angry that he isn't sure of himself. The younger bastard son always plots against him with the high priest and emperor to be's wife. There's always a ritualistic assassination attempt directly after the coronation. These characters are tropey and silly BECAUSE THEY'RE MEANT TO BE THAT WAY.

Compounded to this silliness is that the Doctor's companion is a talking penguin. Or, more accurately, a shapeshifter who likes to look like a penguin. Frobisher gets named as the new god when the emperor to be gets cold feet and renounces his godship. Frobisher then tries to enact democratic reforms which don't go super well (the people would like to know which candidate you'd like them to pick).
Things start to go off script when the younger bastard son has his own son locked in the deepest depths of the dungeons. This five year old child is all powerful and proceeds to start murdering everyone in the castle in pretty horrific ways. It murders and destroys everything as the Doctor realizes what it is. What it's been all along. The child is a device meant to torture the scribe. The scribe built this place and created these characters and this society to torture himself for pointlessly murdering his own son. The child appears when the society no longer makes sense, he kills it, and then the whole thing gets reset. Only this time he's going to break the cycle, destroy the world forever.

This horrific twist is what gives such pathos to the story. The rituals were silly BECAUSE THEY WERE WRITTEN THAT WAY so that the scribe, Tacitus, could get lost in the fantasy and forget his horrific crime. The one dimensional characters get such fantastic emotional dialogue with each other. The empress who is supposed to always hate her son finally figures out that maybe she doesn't hate him after all. The evil high priest tries to not be evil for once. The guards figure out that Frobisher is not really a god when he can't help them survive. It's all fantastic stuff and very well played by everyone involved, ESPECIALLY the person playing Tacitus who plays the child and himself as the child kills him instead of him killing the child, ending the cycle and destroying the prison forever.
The final emotional stinger comes when Frobisher, who had created a digital fish at the beginning of the story, relates the suffering of the fish being hunted to the suffering of the people in the castle. They weren't real. They were holograms created to help Tacitus escape what he'd done. But they felt real. They had lives and emotions of their own. The fact that they weren't real didn't matter to them.

This story is a masterpiece, as you should expect from Robert Shearman. It's a masterclass in comedy and a masterclass in tragedy and a masterclass in how to flip that comedy into a tragedy in a believable and impactful way. All of the actors, too, were fantastic. This is the first Main Range I actually fully remember from when I heard it over a decade ago and there's a very good reason for that. Easily the best story so far and I can't wait to hear the other Robert Shearman stories in the main range again.

MR 013: The Shadow of the Scourge

Well that was horrifying. This is definitely the first real horror story in the main range and it works very well.

An eight dimensional army of beings called the Scourge emerge from another universe and feed on the fear of humans. What makes this story really horrifying is what they can do. They're so far beyond humanity that they can force humans to kill themselves or each other just by speaking to them. They come through into this universe by inhabiting and transforming the bodies of humans, preying on their fears and insecurities to push their way in. So you've got body transformation and mind control horror.

The Doctor has a plan to deal with them, but that plan fails and halfway through the story he gets transformed himself in a pretty horrific second episode cliff hanger. It's wild to see this Doctor, the one who plans and lays traps and always seems like he's in control, very much so NOT in control. We get to see the Scourge playing on the Doctor's insecurities. I love the characterization here of this Doctor being someone who constantly tests his companions to see if they'll leave because they always inevitably leave him anyway. So he pushes them away before they have a chance to hurt him. I relate to that so much cause I do the same thing.
Ace does something rather insane here. She has someone bash her ears in and thus ruin her eardrums so she can't hear the Scourge's commands. Which is certainly one way around the mind control if you can't deal with the insecurities that they cause. It's pretty wild. We get to hear her shouting and not hearing anything for most of the backhalf of the story.

Bernice also says things like "by the goddess" a lot, I assume she's from a world where they worship a goddess.

The story also starts off in a very interesting way with three different conventions going on. A mystic conference to the great god Om (which is the spark to let the Scourge in), a time travel demonstration, and a cross stitch convention. I don't know about the characterization of cross stitchers being desperate and depressed but sure. It works for what they're going for here.

In the end, the Doctor pushes back by crawling to the top of the Scourge hive mind after he's been transformed. And when he's about to succumb to the Scourge entirely, Bernice comes back for him and pulls him out of it. They get the humans to push back, to not be afraid, to admit their insecurities and failures and not be afraid of hiding them anymore. It's a great ending to a great story.

Also, this cover does not in any way do the Scourge justice. Not sure what they were thinking with preying mantis people. Does this scream "the embodiment of human fear and insecurity and the conception of hell" to you? No. No it doesn't. Nice shades for Ace though. Still, great audio, easily the Seventh Doctor's best so far.

MR 012: The Fires of Vulcan

Now this is more like it Mr. Seventh Doctor. This one covers on a lot of topics I find interesting about Doctor Who. The idea that your fate is set in stone by having foreknowledge of events. The idea of changing history and what that might mean. And just a really interesting setting.

Not to mention this is the first appearance of Mel in a BF audio! That's very exciting. Mel gets to be in a story that isn't a panto for once! And she does a fantastic job here. She's every bit as friendly and full of life as I know her to be just with 100% less top of the lungs shrieking.

The TARDIS gets found at the site of Pompeii in the 1980s while the Doctor and Mel land in Pompeii where the Doctor thinks he's just met his fate. It's an interesting idea that foreknowledge of events will lead to a different event in the future. If the Doctor just immediately leaves then he won't know that the TARDIS is found here in the future and thus won't immediately leave, leading to the TARDIS being buried here. It implies that time is constantly happening over and over and over again and would create a double time loop. It changes into something different each loop. Instead the Doctor creates a single loop by letting the events play out.

This itself is an interesting idea because the Doctor often does this: he makes sure to avoid as much foreknowledge as possible. It means that time travellers should NEVER study history either. Because when they go to that time period they can't change anything because they'll create the double time loops.
Speaking of which, this audio only lightly touches on the idea that we can't save people involved in historical events. Which, to me, always felt arbitrary. The Doctor is a time traveller and so there's no reason why he wouldn't have foreknowledge of, say, the Margaret Thatcher government in The Happiness Patrol or not have foreknowledge of Pompeii. These are just events to the Doctor, equally part of history, but because the audience knows about one and doesn't know about others, we can't alter one of them. It's really less so the time traveller having foreknowledge and more the audience having foreknowledge of historical events that makes them unalterable.

I quite enjoyed the setting as well. The idea of the Doctor and Mel being messengers of Isis was said at the beginning, but it has drastic political implications throughout the story. Isis is a foreign goddess to Pompeii, and the Roman priestess sees this as a heretical religion. So you have the priestess wielding her influence in trying to discredit Isis and thus attacking the Doctor and Mel. It then comes out to look like Isis is punishing Pompeii when the Doctor and Mel get arrested and attacked because they are supposed to be her messengers.

There's also another plot thread where the Doctor is constantly getting challenged by a gladiator after the gladiator loses to him at dice which is kind of hilarious. Again, making it look like the goddess Isis is smiting the city for her messengers being attacked. McCoy gets some good stuff here as well when he's yelling at the gladiator about how it won't matter because they'll all be dead soon anyway.

I like that, in the end, we don't actually see the fate of any of the characters. We don't know if they've managed to evacuate or if they've died. And that's better, I should think. It does make me wonder, though, how much history could bend, just a little, if the city was evacuated before the eruption. Hmm...

MR 011: The Apocalypse Element

The Daleks enact a rather overly complicated plan to cement their own powerbase in this overly long epic. Oh dear. I figured that not all Six and Evelyn audios would be good, but I didn't expect it to drop off so soon when all the Sixth Doctor audios so far have been bangers.

The problem is that the story is just too complicated for its own good and that's because the Daleks' plan is too complicated. Not to mention the usual Time Lord stuff is too complicated.

The Daleks piloted a planet (The Dalek Invasion of Earth!?) into another universe or some such and dumped hundreds of the people who were on that planet as dead bodies on another planet. So there's a conference of time travelling empires to determine what happened.

It turns out the Daleks wanted this planet because it has a rare element, more on that later. It also turns out that Romana II, on official business as the new President of Gallifrey, was on the planet when it disappeared and has been a slave to the Daleks for twenty years. As far as I know, this is the first time Romana has ever been seen to be President or as having left E Space. It's also her first appearance on audio. So that's exciting.

The Daleks steal a bunch of time travel secrets from the delegates at this conference and then crash their stolen planet into the planet on which the conference is taking place, killing everyone.

That's the first half. Yeah. The Second half involves the Daleks tricking Vansell, an agent of the CIA, into letting them onto Gallifrey by pretending to be refugees from the conference. And Vansell, being from the CIA, wants to steal the refugees' time travel secrets. Kind of the most obvious trick in the book, but sure.
The last hour and a half consists of running around while the Daleks invade Gallfrey and enact their final phase of the plan. They have a giant weapon, the Apocalypse Element, which they detonate to destroy a galaxy. It will extend to destroy the entire universe if it isn't contained and they believe the Time Lords have the ability to contain it.

Only it was a trick. It's not a general purpose weapon. Obviously they don't want to destroy themselves. They want to destroy and remake an entire galaxy leaving it easy and ripe for Dalek invasion, building up their own galactic power base right on Gallifrey's doorstep.

The thing is that for most of this plot I had to read the wiki's summary to understand what was happening because it's overly complicated as it is nevermind the writing. It makes sense as the writer of this one also wrote The Land of the Dead which had an overly complicated monster for no reason.

That said, all the key figures here get interesting things to do. The Doctor gets to shout. Evelyn gets to act as a key when the Doctor uses her eyes as the only retinal scan that will open any doors on Gallifrey. Vansell gets to be all sneaky. The President gets to have his moment of trusting the Doctor and then getting double crossed. It's just... not very interesting. I'm sorry, I just don't think Gallifrey is very interesting as a setting. It's a boring and stuffy place and the Doctor left it for a reason.

MR 010: Winter for the Adept

Well I did say for the Fifth and Seventh Doctors to get their act together. And it seems they did. This one is quite good. I also have been known to say that Doctor Who can be dropped into any story and it can work. This is a great example of that. This is a straight up ghost story. There's a psychic, a telekinetic, poltergeist activity, and a REAL ghost.

An evil alien from another dimension has been opening up a portal for an invasion fleet with the use of human psychics and a human ghost. Yes. That's the summary. And it's not super important.

The important thing is that the atmosphere is quite well done here. The haunting music, the sound effects of things moving about, the piano playing on its own. It sounds like a haunted house. And what a great setting for a haunted house too: a super expensive finishing school in the middle of the Swiss Alps in a blizzard. Totally isolated. A lot of it reminded me of Luigi's Mansion because that was one of my favorite games as a kid.

This story also features India Fisher in a pre-Charley role, which was wild. Her voice is so recognizeable that I was thrown off for a second. This is also probably the first time I've ever had Nyssa in a story and felt like she had a personality. She's actually on the Doctor's ass. Constantly berating him for accidentally teleporting her here and being sarcastic about his failures.

I'm also, hopefully, kind of starting to understand the appeal of the Fifth Doctor as well. He mumbles a lot, he's very easy to push around, he seems very unsure of himself, and he stutters a lot. Maybe that's the appeal? He's someone you want to protect? Regardless, this was a very fun story. Definitely the best Fifth Doctor story so far and the best non-Sixth Doctor story so far easily.

MR 009: The Spectre of Lanyon Moor

Kind of wild how all the good stories so far are Sixth Doctor stories. Coincidence? I think not! Am I saying that the Sixth Doctor is the best Doctor? Well yes, obviously. That's just an objective fact. But am I saying the only good Doctor Who stories are Sixth Doctor stories? I feel like we'll just have to let history decide that one.

Speaking of history, this story has a real sense of it. An alien that looks like an imp of some sort has been stranded on earth by his shipmate for 18,000 years, well outside of human recorded history. It can't really do anything because its ship has gone and it draws its psychic power from its ship. The most it can do is cause manifestations of itself and use those to influence people. Which it does.

This is just a fantastic little adventure. I don't normally like the Brigadier, especially not on the show, but here he's fine. He gets a nice little "get off my world" moment at the end when he fights the alien. And I'm glad he got a story with the Sixth Doctor.
There's a really interesting cast of characters here as well. An archeologist digging up the moor and getting more than he bargained for. An eccentric rich guy funding the dig who is more than he seems. The archeologist's assisstant who is secretly working for the rich guy. The assisstant to the dig who has been influenced by the alien. And all of these characters have their own backstories and quirks and are really enjoyable to listen to and digest their stories. Not to mention that Evelyn herself is ridiculously comfy to listen to.

I particularly enjoy the rich guy's arc here. He thinks he can harness the alien's power and use it to take over the world. But the alien kills him with a thought for daring to try to use his power. The alien does the same thing with the woman who he's influenced to help him.

In the end it turns out that the alien accidentally shot his shipmate instead of the shipmate having left him. So he decides to take out his revenge on the Earth for having been trapped there for so long. But that's when the Brigadier tricks him.

It's genuinely a fantastically engaging story from start to finish. This is the first story that really FEELS like a classic who serial in the way it's presented. Wandering around the Moor. The mad rich guy. The archeology dig. The alien manifestations. I could see this on the classic show easily. Definitely not during Colin's actual seasons, probably more during Tom's early seasons. Great story all around everyone. It's wild how this is Nicholas Pegg's ONLY writing credit for BF considering how good it is. Pull him off operating Daleks and have him write some more please and thank you. It makes me more than excited to continue to hear Six and Evelyn. Come on Five and Seven get your act together. lol

MR 008: Red Dawn

A fairly straightforward story of humans coming into contact with the last ice warriors on Mars. A corporation funds an expedition to Mars with NASA. Naturally, of course, the corporation has other motives than just putting a human on Mars for the first time.

This is also the first time we're getting a Five/Peri story! That's actually pretty exciting. I think Peri makes Five more interesting. Much like he is most of the time, the Fifth Doctor is very passive in this story. He's led around by the nose, observing what's happening while other people do things and then ultimately getting kidnapped. It's Peri who actively participates in the plot. And she's a queen. She takes control of the situation when she's kidnapped by the evil corporation rep. She helps land a shuttle. She negotiates with the Ice Warriors.

The corporation is here because they've already found evidence of alien habitation on Mars and they want even more. They ideally want an alien to bring back and dissect with the ultimate goal of making Human/Ice Warrior hybrids. Like with a lot of Ice Warrior stories, the Ice Warriors themselves are not at fault here.

It ends up being an average "humans suck" story, and I'm generally here for those kinds of stories, particularly when the human that sucks is doing it for a corporation. He kidnaps one of the Ice Warriors and then when that doesn't work he plants a bomb on the remains of a warrior that the other Ice Warriors are guarding.
He gets away with hostages and agrees to a hostage swap with the Ice Warrior commander. The other Warriors will not fire to kill their commander and so the commander sacrifices himself in the "Red Dawn." The atmosphere is too thin to protect from UV radiation which kills him as soon as the sun comes up. Thus leaving the warriors open to attacking the shuttle. It's a nice ending and fitting for Ice Warriors.

There's also an Ice Warrior/Human hybrid already that had been cloned in a lab. The corporation brought her as insurance for when they needed to use the Ice Warrior technology. She decides to stay as an ambassador to humanity, which is also a nice ending.

Despite it being fairly straightforward and average, I still liked it. Just a nice little tale about human greed running headfirst into the honor of the Ice Warriors.

MR 007: The Genocide Machine

This one was pretty meh. I'll be honest, I kind of checked out about halfway through it. This is BF's first Doctor Who use of the Daleks though! So that's exciting I guess.

There's a library with all the knowledge of the universe in it and the Daleks are after it. They want to assimilate all of that knowledge into one single test subject Dalek. That said, most of this story is just standard Dalek faire.

I did enjoy the inclusion of an Ace duplicate so we get to hear Sophie Aldred playing her evil clone. I wasn't too sure what the point of the theives trying to steal the zigguarat that the Daleks came out of was. Just to have other people in the story to get killed off I suppose.

There were a couple actually interesting things here. Firstly, when the test subject Dalek actually comes out, having assimilated all knowledge in the universe it comes to the opposite conclusion of the Daleks' fascist philosophy. It believes that all life must be preserved. I like this a lot. It has a real "reality has a liberal bias" feel to it.

The other thing I liked was that the librarian has been systematically genociding an entire species of natives to this planet the entire time the library has existed. It created aqueous storage facilities for knowledge, but every drop of water is a sentient being. The library has been erasing their minds and using them to store data without knowing or caring that they were sentient. That's wild.That means that these beings are inherently nomadic. They have to be with the water cycle. Goodness knows what happens if you drink water on this planet.

Definitely not the greatest Dalek story of all time, but it's pretty ok. I liked McCoy's reaction to finding out about the water people genocide and how he chastises the librarian.

MR 006: The Marian Conspiracy

Oh wow, this is more like it. This is genuinely fantastic, the first I would call a classic. Jacqueline Rayner is the goat, as we all know. I don't think I've met a story from her that I disliked. It's amazing how the quality has jumped so dramatically from the first five. Is it any coincidence that the first really good one is the Sixth Doctor? No, no it isn't. The first halfway decent story was also a Sixth Doctor story: Whispers of Terror.

And what a companion Evelyn makes as well. I always considered her my favorite companion, and in her first story we immediately see why. A college professor with a no nonsense attitude: she's on top of everything the Sixth Doctor is doing. She doesn't let him go on ranting, she's just as belligerent and sarcastic as him, she can rant just as much as him when she gets on her history subject. She's great.

And what a great story to start her out on. There's apparently something wrong with time where Evelyn is starting to fade out because her distant ancestor, an advisor to Queen Elizabeth, doesn't exist. The Doctor figures out what's going on and then Evelyn insists on going with him, packing a bag before he even has a chance to say no.

The twist, though, is that this story is about Queen Mary and not Queen Elizabeth. Evelyn accidentally praises Elizabeth, which is treason in Mary's England and gets wrapped up in a potential plot. While the Doctor gets invested in the court of Mary and gets to know her.

The whole point of the story is that the protestants and the catholics both wanted to burn the heretics, but that we see Elizabeth as good and Mary as bad because England was never Catholic again after Elizabeth became queen.
It turns out that Evelyn's ancestors were involved in the plot to assassinate Mary and that the Doctor and Evelyn beg for the mother's life, thereby saving the child, Evelyn's ancestor.

The ending has a Fires of Pompeii feel to it where the Doctor says they can't save everyone, but Evelyn gets him to save just the two Protestants she met. And their families.

Just as before, Evelyn forces her way into the TARDIS as a proper companion as well. They have a good talk at the end where the Doctor says he's caused people to die, but not intentionally trying to kill them and he isn't sure if that's the same thing. Evelyn is glad to hear that he doesn't intentionally cause people to die or she wouldn't want to keep travelling with him. Which the Doctor is surprised to hear because he didn't invite her in, but Evelyn will not be moved. She is going with him. And she'll find a good place to get coco and make her chocolate cake.

This is definitely the first banger in the MR and the first I'd recommend to other people, even if they didn't know anything about Doctor Who. It's that good. And that's because Evelyn is that good. She's the first of the BF original companions, but certainly not the last. She started a fantastic trend and I can't wait to keep hearing her stories.

Oh. Oh no, this is just sad. There's a monster that causes fear on the loose inhabiting a fascist politician. And an assassination attempt against said politician. Rather topical in today's world, wouldn't you say?

I thought that it was going to be a deconstruction on how right wing politics cause fear and loathing of the other. Instead, it was a South Park style "both sides are bad" argument. It sets up a radio shock jock and a terrorist group in OPPOSITION to the fascists, which is not how reality works. Both of these elements are overwhelmingly right wing in nature in reality.

After having invented the threat of a left wing terrorist group, the story then proceeds to condemn both sides as causing fear and loathing in the other side. The Doctor even says to the would be assassin that he was too afraid of the fascist politician to see that maybe she wasn't a monster after all:

DOCTOR: You were already scared of Harper, even before you heard the voice, and then you were willing to kill her, to kill lots of people to get at her. If someone like that told you they were hearing voices, what would you think?

WALTER: No! It was real.

DOCTOR: You don't really want to think about being wrong, do you. If she wasn’t a monster, then you weren't justified, and maybe you’re not all right. Maybe you do need help.

The story even ends with a member of this left wing terrorist group having collaborated with a high ranking member of the fascist party. Very "both sides are bad" indeed.

It's pretty cowardly, I have to say, especially for the Seventh Doctor and Ace, revolutionaries on tv. The Doctor even goes out of his way to say that he's not going to bring down the fascist government/candidate for no real reason at all despite saying he's taken down fascist governments before. It's the type of thing that could only have been made at the time with liberal centrism as the primary ideology. Today it would be looked at as feckless and naive. And it is.

Well this... uh... certainly was a serial of Doctor Who. There's a primordial creature made out of bones awakening from the dawn of time and turning everything into amalgamations. Sounds interesting right? Not really. It's all a pretty straightforward base under seige story with an overly complicated monster for no reason.

It's a shame, too, because the first part was quite atmospheric. The concept of this house built with different Alaskan environments inside of it was quite interesting. As were some of the characters, although one of them becomes a Native American stereotype pretty quickly.

Five gets some nice stuff to do at least, he's muttering a lot less. He mostly takes charge of the situation and goes on with Nyssa about the history of Alaska, which is fun. The psuedo companion they give him is interesting, talking about her phases in a crisis. It's a bit different than his normal passivity. He gets a nice line when the owner of the house says "Aren't you being a bit proprietary with my property?" And he says "Aren't I just?" before moving on. He's still quite boring, though most of the time.

As is Nyssa. Nyssa's voice is just as monotone and lifeless as the Doctor's. I talked about it when I watched Classic, but Nyssa has the most interesting potential of all the companions and not much is ever used. In this audio there's a bit about her relating to one of the characters by saying she lost her father and her world, but that's it.

Also rude that Five gets a second audio before Seven even gets his first.

Well I'm surprised it took them this long. I know it's only the third story, but I feel like they would have gone for an audio based monster immediately, considering this is the audio medium. The setting is quite good as well. It's an audio museum with a curator who is aptly blind. They're collecting the speeches of a recently dead politician. But the speeches seem to be altered somehow. His presumptive nominee for VP is coming to broadcast the speeches in tribute.

Naturally, though, all is not as it seems. The speeches have been altered to praise the VP pick. And the recording of the politician's death was indeed altered to make it seem like he killed himself. In actuality the VP had him assassinated. Because, naturally, she is a fascist and the politician she had killed was a liberal.

This is all makes for a thrilling story particularly because the politician survived being assassinated by uploading his consciousness into sound. He exists as a sound pattern and alters the museum's sound pieces to communicate. He works against the VP and alters the speeches to what he originally intended, denouncing her and bringing her down.

This one is good, and not just because it's the Sixth Doctor. The Doctor here is still squarely in his season 22 pedantic asshole phase before he mellows out. Crucially, though, Peri gets some jibes in at him and he doesn't seem like he's constantly on the verge of murdering her. Peri seems a lot less scared that she's going to die at any moment than she did in season 22. And she's not simpering as much. That's progress I guess? He's still dismissive and arrogant towards the villain, as he should, and he's taking baby steps towards being better. I see why, though, that the next Six audio they did was with Evelyn, just the companion he needed to mellow out.

Well we're not off to an amazing start after Sirens. I wasn't particularly impressed with it. It's a Mark Gatiss script and it shows.

The plot is a very basic one of an alien warlord kidnapping people off the street in 18th century London to escape the Earth. There's nothing super interesting about it except for another alien who is both a highwayman and a lady servant in an antiquarian's house.

Peter Davison gets his first real audio but I wasn't super impressed. He has a tendency to mutter his lines a lot and it makes him hard to hear. I'm not sure if that's purposeful or not. He's still a very passive Doctor, letting the plot happen to him and waiting to see what happens before jumping into action. He does trick the villain into touching his own playing card which links his biodata to the system which is cute. In the first audio he was being tricksy as well so maybe that's what they're going for with him? I do like how he gets very interested in the antiquarian's collection when they land.

It's interesting that they went with Turlough as the first companion from the show. Maybe he was just the only one they could get. But he doesn't really have his usual mischievous/trouble making personality here. No "Face it Tegan he's drowned!" to be found here.

Also, I don't know if I'm racist against white men or the 18th century period accents through me off or what because it's kind of hard to keep track of which character is which. I'm also surprised the villain wasn't the Master. It feels like he was meant to be.

It's kind of wild that BF built an empire on the back of this story. It's mostly just a showcase for the three Doctors, but curiously Seven has the least interesting story and personality out of all three little mini adventures. Usually I think of Five as the most personality-less but here we are. Five actually gets a fun little time trying to pretend to be a German spy and then distract the siren. Six gets to solve the plot at the end, of course, saying that he's the most practical of his incarnations when he condemns a giant time whale to eternal torment to fight the sirens (something the time whale asks him to do). He even gets to be a little rude and confrontational, though he's already massively toned down from his TV episodes.

This also functions well as an actual argument for why changing time is bad. Instead of just "laws of time" or "fixed point" there's actual consequences that are felt by the Doctor's accidental changes. That's how "changing time bad" stories SHOULD function but often it comes off as lazy to not give a real reason. I also find it interesting that the pseudo companion the story gives them all is the same person every time but also the villain.

Even though it's about changing timelines, it's a relatively simple little story about the Doctor accidentally changing history so that the Time Lords get destroyed. Not bad, just not great. Still, a decent little start. Makes me look forward to the great stories I know that are to come.

I find it interesting that Paul Cornell brought this sirens that eat changes in time back for Father's Day. In that episode there's no real reason why saving Rose's father is bad other than the sirens will eat them. But here there's actual reasons given and the sirens are incidental, manipulating bad changes in time, which I like.

Also, I just find it funny that they use the "contact contact" sound effect from The Three Doctors. I didn't expect it and it made me laugh.