Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Justin Richards, Jonathan Morris, Nick Wallace

RRP: £8.99 (CD) / £6.99 (Download)

Release Date: September 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

Review Posted: 12th September 2014

“An epic adventure uniting the Doctor's friends across time and space, featuring Jago & Litefoot, Counter-Measures, the Vault and Gallifrey!

1: Mind Games by Justin Richards
In Victorian England, Henry Gordon Jago and Professor Litefoot investigate worrying events on the streets of London – which seem to be linked to the New Regency Theatre’s resident act, the mesmerist Mr Rees…

2: The Reesinger Process by Justin Richards
London, 1964, and the repercussions of Jago and Litefoot’s adventure are dealt with by Sir Toby Kinsella and his crack team of specialists at Counter-Measures. What is the Reesinger Process – and who is behind it?

3: The Screaming Skull by Jonathan Morris
Disgraced soldiers Ruth Matheson and Charlie Sato are called back into action by Captain Mike Yates, when the UNIT Vault is mysteriously locked down by a deadly force. Together they must infiltrate the Vault and get those trapped out alive. But what enemy are they facing?

4: Second Sight by Nick Wallace and Justin Richards
The actions of Mr Rees have alerted the Time Lords of Gallifrey, and Romana has assigned her best warrior. Independently, the Sixth Doctor has arrived on Earth. A power from the dawn of the Universe is about to be unleashed once more…”

***

Fifteen years ago, I had my tickets booked to attend Battlefield 3, a Doctor Who convention in Coventry.  I had been lucky enough to grab a copy of Sirens of Time on CD beforehand, and spent the night before transferring it to audio cassette so that it could be listened to in the car on the way there.  I was familiar with the concept of the show on audio: I’d listened to Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space, and I had long since worn out a tape recording of The War Games which I had made.  This was something exciting and different though; this was new Who with three Doctors and the promise of more adventures to come! I listened to the Big Finish “Talking about my Regeneration” preview CD time and again in preparation, but nothing compared to hearing Sirens on the way to Coventry.  It was a truly magical experience.

Big Finish had a buzz about it and a big crowd at its stall that year, where I purchased Phantasmagoria and listened greedily to their panel, thrilled by the hints of what was to come.

Fifteen years on, it’s amazing to see how massive Big Finish have grown as an entity, and how large it looms in the annuls of Doctor Who as a whole, and so we now have The Worlds of Doctor Who, a celebratory trawl through spin-off series aplenty.  The first thing worth noting is how beautiful the packaging for this CD set is.  The photography inside is very nicely done, the brief essays by actors are sweet, and the individual covers done for the CDs themselves are lovely, with the Jago and Litefoot and Vault ones being of particular note.

As for the story itself, it concerns a mysterious hypnotist named Mr. Rees, whose influence extends far beyond his natural lifespan.  From the Palace Theatre in Victorian England to the 1960s and the present day, his story and threat carries on worming its way through life and history, and touches the lives of many connected to that mysterious traveller in Time and Space, the Doctor.

Across the four CDs, we dip into the worlds of Jago and Litefoot in Mind Games, Counter-Measures in The Reesinger Process, the Companion Chronicles via The Vault in The Screaming Skull, and finally a mixture of both Gallifrey and Doctor Who itself in the finale, Second Sight.  What impressed me the most about this release is how all the series retain their own identities throughout whilst carrying a story thread across them all.  For example, the Jago and Vault stories are a whole world away from one another and perfectly fit their respective story, whilst they also move things on with the overall story.  Ditto comparing the second and fourth CDs.  It shows how strong a hook Big Finish latched onto here with Mr. Rees.

The only tale which perhaps lacks any real clear identity is The Screaming Skull, the but that is perhaps expected.  The previous two outings for the Vault have involved them used as a framing device for other tales, and whilst that it mostly the case here as well, it does at times feel less of an established format than is shown elsewhere, though that doesn’t stop Jonathan Morris from writing a damn good script all the same.  Despite misgivings over its format though, it also feels very sneakily like a pilot episode for a new series: the UNIT old guard, the Vault and maybe the new outfit as glimpsed in both UNIT, the original spin-off series and its follow-up, UNIT: Dominion.  I guess we’ll see, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

All of the instalments here are strong though, with Justin Richards doing the majority of the writing (he’s responsible for CDs 1 and 2 and co-writes the fourth with Nick Wallace) and showing us once again why he’s so prominent a name in the world of Doctor Who fiction.  Second Sight may suffer sometimes from its brief length (we get a lot of scenes where characters say “This could be his plan... unless... of course! It could be *this*!” which, by staggering co-incidence and ease of plot, turns out to be the case– but of course) but it wraps up Mr. Rees’s tale well and gives Leela a lot to do, which is always nice to hear.  It also makes good use of the Sixth Doctor, played as ever with gusto by Colin Baker.  It’s the Eighth and Sixth Doctors who have benefited most from Big Finish over the years, so it’s only right to see one of them celebrated and featured here.

What’s a joy over the whole release is hearing everyone in the same place connected to the same story: Ellie Higson, Charlie Sato, President Romana.  Everyone is here, present and correct and this is as fun and enjoyable a celebration of the extended worlds of Who as Big Finish could have given us.  Another triumph for Big Finish.

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Matt Fitton, Justin Richards, Ken Bentley, John Dorney

RRP: £35.00 (CD) / £30.00 (Download)

Release Date: August 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

Review Posted: 15th August 2014

“The British government has created the Counter-Measures group, a specialist team that investigates strange phenomena and dangerous technology. This box set contains four of their adventures plus a behind-the-scenes documentary.

Changing of the Guard
Sir Toby fights for his career, while Counter-Measures leads a very different fight...

The Concrete Cage
Counter-Measures investigates strange events at a tower block under construction.

The Forgotten Village
A personal crisis for Allison turns into one of Counter-Measures' most dangerous assignments.

Unto the Breach
When footage emerges of an alien creature held in the Eastern Bloc, the team goes undercover to find it.”

***

Anyone who has read my review of The Assassination Games will know that I am rather fond of this spin-off series.  Plucking Allison, Rachel and Ian from the events of Remembrance of the Daleks and giving them their own series was perhaps a risk, but three series in, that edge of potential jeopardy is gone and you wonder instead why no-one saw the potential beforehand.

Three series in now, Big Finish seem happy enough to tweak the format slightly and give us something which is structurally perhaps more in line with Jago and Litefoot and Dark Eyes: the series’s story arc is more prevalent here than it ever has been before, ala Jago, whilst the entire thing feels at times more like the first instalment of something rather than a standalone affair, much as was the case with Dark Eyes 2 (and yet it is quite unlike that, for reasons I’ll go into later).  Whether or not that’s a good thing will depend, I suspect, on one’s views on those two series, and there is definitely an argument that what hasn’t been broken before maybe didn’t need to be fixed.  That said, it worked for me: I liked the risk it took and by the end of the fourth story in the set, I was very much on the edge, wanting more.

Let’s look at the stories in turn though, because much as I enjoyed the set overall, it’s safe to say that some episodes ranked higher for me than others.

We open with Changing of the Guard by Matt Fitton, a very capable pair of hands when it comes to scriptwriting in general and even more so when it comes to Counter-Measures.  This story has to serve two fronts: to mop up the debris of Series 2 and to set up the placement of the characters’ relationships for the rest of Series 3.  Fitton does this well with a script that takes full advantage of the 1960s setting with a tale of gangsters and ne’er-do-wells whilst counterpointing Sir Toby Kinsella’s duplicitous nature and string-pulling with the fact that he too is a puppet at times to higher powers.

Is it a perfect story? No.  There is a moment of utter stupidity for Allison that was frankly embarrassing in which she appears to forget seeing an object that the script brings painful attention to mere moments later when she sees a duplicate of it, and what should be a rousing and hard-hitting moment when Gilmore tries to round up some troops is left a bit icky and overly-sentimental as it’s reliant upon Gilmore narrating what’s going on: some things work better visually.

It’s a good opening though and leads us nicely to The Concrete Cage, the second tale in this box set and arguably the most standalone.  Written by Justin Richards, it is a ghost story that again uses the 1960s setting well, with post-war England trying to rebuild itself whilst shadows of the past loom large.  Sadly though, beyond using the era well, this episode did very little for me, with certain characters being oddly slow to reach what are fairly obvious solutions and, sadly, an air of predictability about it that renders potential surprises a bit dull.  What it most definitely does have in its favour though is a very solid guest performance from Michael Troughton as the brilliantly named Roderick Purton (Roderick Purton! Come on, that’s a great name) who manages to elevate what could be a rather nondescript and, again, predictable character with a predictable function far beyond its confines.

There was little else that really stood out for me in this story though.  Yes, the main cast’s rapport is as good as usual, but three series in now, that’s almost just expected from proceedings.  Thankfully though, things take an upswing with The Forgotten Village, the scriptwriting debut for Big Finish Productions by their go-to director Ken Bentley.  Ostensibly a character piece for Allison Williams, the story involves Allison being forced to return home to care for her sick father in his hour of need, despite her reluctance to and antipathy towards him.  So far, so usual perhaps, and certainly as the start of this episode, I found myself thinking, “Well, I can see where this one’s going...”

I was wrong though.  Potential old flames and happy reunions present themselves but Bentley is clever and knows Allison well enough to not make her do anything out of character.  We have the sprouts of clichés present themselves to us, but rather than fully blooming, Bentley subverts them.  It also gives us a truly surprising ending, something it has in common with the series finale, Unto the Breach by John Dorney.  This is probably the strongest use of the 1960s setting in Counter-Measures yet to my eyes and it reaps rewards accordingly.

Using the paranoia, cold harshness and mystery (to outsiders) of post-war Berlin as its starting point, Unto the Breach deals with the aftermath of The Forgotten Village on one hand whilst pushing other characters into truly dangerous situations with the other.  It’s become something of a cliché for press releases to describe stories or episodes as pushing ‘characters into places they have never been before’, but this story fully lives up to that hype.  Tense, clever, surprising and utterly nasty at times, Dorney ends the series on a real high and you do reach the end wondering how on earth Series 4 is going to resolve all that’s happening.  This is where it is simultaneously like and unlike Dark Eyes 2, as I alluded to earlier.  Both of them are the first instalments of something larger, but whilst a lot of Dark Eyes 2 perhaps felt like it was setting up all of which is to come, Counter-Measures 3 is less setting up than being that first episode of a two-part adventure.  I have a feeling that Series 4 will be less a standalone affair and more akin to Series 3b... but I’m fine with that.  If it can successfully build on all that has been started here and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion (no easy task) then I’ll be cheering.

It’s just a pity we have such a long time to wait before then! Time enough to watch Remembrance of the Daleks one more time and go back to where it all started, perhaps.