Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Chris Chapman

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: December 2020

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"It's 1793 and the Reign of Terror is slicing through the elite of Paris - but not if the Scarlet Pimpernel has anything to do with it! With a very British pluck, and daring bravado, he rescues French aristocrats from Madame Guillotine's embrace. But who hides beneath the Pimpernel’s mask? And isn’t the Scarlet Pimpernel just a fictional character?

At Highmoor House, in England, Peri plays lady of the manor while the Doctor tends to the strange wounds of her ‘husband’, Sir Percy Blakeney. As Peri prepares to host a lavish ball in Sir Percy’s name, French agent Citizen Donat, and a sinister alien force are uninvited guests, both intent on unmasking the Scarlet Pimpernel and putting an end to his heroic escapades, forever!"

WARNING: The following review contains spoilers. You have been warned!

Big Finish’s schedule in 2020 has very much been dictated by what actors have been available and able to record from home, and what has been waiting in the wings. Trilogies were discarded, a deluge of middling-to-poor Tenth Doctor plays were released, and certain writers must surely have sore wrists from all the scripts they’ve been typing. I think the shake-up of the trilogy formula has worked in the monthly range’s favour, and the technical prowess to pull off the remote-recorded plays is nothing short of brilliant. Whatever my feelings on some of the quality of the releases, I will never fault Big Finish’s gritted teeth and determination.

December gives us two releases recorded remotely according to Big Finish’s website, the first of these being Plight of the Pimpernel by Chris Chapman. Set during the Reign of Terror, the Doctor and Peri go undercover and try to work out how the Pimpernel, a fictional character, appears to be all too real and present, and just what gave Sir Percy Blakeney his nasty wound, because it looks like nothing of this Earth.

First things first: Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker are on top form in this play, and the cliffhanger to Part Three is one of the best his Doctor has had for years now. Long-time readers of my reviews for this website (if there are any long-time readers of my reviews) will know that I’ve enjoyed Chapman’s scripts but have often felt they are one draft or script-edit away from being as good as they could be, but I couldn’t lobby that criticism here for the most part.  This is a finely-tuned and fun script which is bolstered by the leading actors really gunning for it, not to mention Jamie Parker and Anthony Howell giving great supporting performances as Sir Percy and Citizen Donat respectively.

The play is nearly let down by the wide array of very bad French accents throughout the play, which may be supposed to be poor at times but just wind up being huge distractions. There are a couple of slightly fudged scenes along the way as well, such as the Doctor and Peri having a long conversation about things they themselves already know just so we the audience can get up to date, and Peri trying to be the Pimpernel and save someone’s life, only the rescued civilian is then killed… and never mentioned again! These are two blips in an otherwise very tight script, easily Chapman’s best.

Where it really succeeds, beyond the central mystery of who, or why, the Pimpernel is being quite a good one, is in how Chapman writes the Sixth Doctor. He, this most literary of Doctors, desperately wants to be the Pimpernel and buys into the strangeness around him, so much so that he turns a blind eye to the niggling issues around it all and the fact that deep down he knows something bad is afoot. It’s a really believable portrayal of this incarnation, showing how well Chapman knows him and enjoys writing for him, and it’s readily apparent in Baker’s acting that he appreciates this, too.

Sometimes, I find that I enjoy a release from Big Finish but cannot recall much about it weeks down the line. This won’t be the case here I am sure as it hasn’t been the case with any of Chapman’s stories.  Years on in some instances, I can still recall performances or beats or plot points, a sure sign that he is doing something very right, even if I’m not always entirely won over by the overall results.  Here with Plight of the Pimpernel we have a play worth remembering and we continue our run of strong monthly plays near the end of the monthly releases as we know them. Viva la Big Finish Revolution!

+ Plight Of The Pimpernel is OUT NOW, priced £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download).

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Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Robert Valentine

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: July 2020

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"The Doctor, Constance and Flip join forces with 51st-century bounty hunter, Calypso Jonze, to hunt down the Somnifax: a weaponised mind-parasite capable of turning its host's nightmares into physical reality. Chasing it through the time vortex to Providence, Rhode Island in 1937, they arrive too late to stop it from latching onto a local author of weird fiction... Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

With time running out before Lovecraft's monstrous pantheon breaks free and destroys the world, the Doctor must enter Lovecraft's mind to fight the psychic invader from within.

Can he and Flip overcome the eldritch horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos? And will Constance and Calypso survive babysitting the infamously xenophobic Old Gentleman of Providence himself?"

WARNING: The following review contains spoilers. You have been warned!

Boy, is this a difficult one to review. The Lovecraft Invasion was intended to be Big Finish’s monthly audio play for June 2020, but ended up releasing at the end of July 2020. Bizarrely, Big Finish went out of their way to not tell people it had been delayed: think of that scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with the stairless cellar and sign reading ‘Beware of the Leopard’ and you’re close to their approach. Anyhow, now it’s out the question has to be, was it worth the wait?

The answer to that should be a resounding yes… but unfortunately there are huge caveats, which we’ll come to in a bit. Before that though, let’s look at the positives because they really deserve highlighting.

The Lovecraft Invasion is not the range’s first brush with H.P. Lovecraft, having ridden his tailcoats before back in Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge, a play which was doomed from the off by following the superb A Death in the Family, but which didn’t help itself either by forgetting to be any good. This time around though, rather than pay homage to/parody the author and his creations, we tackle them head on.

We start at the end of another adventure entirely, with Flip, Constance and the Doctor joined by Calypso Jonze, a bounty hunter from the future. In the way these things often go, a terrible something, a mind parasite called the Somnifax, has escaped and travels back through time, with our heroes and Calypso rushing through space and time in the TARDIS to hunt it down. It lands in America, 1937, and latches onto Lovecraft, making his world and creations come to life. The Doctor and Flip journey into Lovecraft’s mindscape to tackle the Somnifax, whilst Constance and Calypso look after their unconscious bodies and help Lovecraft to deal with manifestations of his works in the real world.

First up, the cast: this is the best we have had from Big Finish for ages now. Alan Marriott is fantastic in his duel roles as Lovecraft and Randolph Carter, differentiating the two subtly and with nuance. The real standout though is Robyn Holdaway as Calypso. They are brilliant from start to finish and I’d gladly see Calypso back in a recurring supporting role: not something I say lightly given the overabundance of companions in Big Finish. Their performance and the character are just that good.

Secondly, the story. This one cracks along at a fair lick, with a lot of action well-executed. Little in the way of say-what-you-see clunkiness is on show and the runtime of just under two hours mostly flew by and proves yet again that less is more with episode lengths. This is Robert Valentine’s first story in the monthly range and I dearly hope he has more to give us of this strength on the evidence shown here. You don’t need to know Lovecraft to enjoy it (I’ve never read a word and only really knew Cthulhu was a big squidy god creature), with explanations feeling organic.

A good script, a great guest cast, good action and good pace. What could go wrong? Thus we turn to the elephant in the room. For the most part, the script engages with Lovecraft’s racism really, really well. It doesn’t shy away from his xenophobia but it also doesn’t milk it or make it monotonous, tackling it with maturity and recognising that people are flawed and can hold horrific views, but that in itself does not make them horrific people. It’s the best way they could have dealt with Lovecraft.

But then rewrites have clearly happened and new scenes bolted on: and I mean bolted on. The sound quality in these moments is totally different to the sound quality elsewhere, which only helps to betray their after-the-event nature, and the scenes added are so out of touch with the rest of the play and so ham-fisted that they drag you right out and had me looking for the off switch.  

Calypso punching Lovecraft on the nose in a retread of Thin Ice? Good, and followed up with a superb line about their background and characteristics. The Doctor telling Lovecraft he’s a terrible racist at the end of the play, just in case we haven’t got the point? Bad.

The worst offender, however, comes roughly 22 minutes into the first episode and has the Doctor and Flip discuss problematic authors. In theory this should be fine, but it isn’t. It’s not given the same mature approach as elsewhere. It reduces the subject of “can/should I enjoy the work(s) of ‘problematic’ content creators?” to the Doctor saying no, you can’t. By the time the Doctor is alluding to a children’s author whose work he can’t read because of their personal views (wink wink, see what they did there?), I had to pause the play and go do something else for a while lest I delete the download there and then.

It’s a simplistic answer to an incredibly complex question, reducing it to the most patronising, didactic fluff Doctor Who can possibly give us - worse still, it betrays every point made in the script elsewhere.

Do I understand why Big Finish did this? In part. There is a lot of anger and argument online at the moment around the subject, but much like a lot of Twitter outrage, it’s a far tricker subject than a Tweet or two can deal with and by falling into the trap of trying to appease this, Big Finish drag play to the lowest common denominator, badly at that. There is a healthy and serious discussion to have on the subject of artist vs. work, and everyone will have their own mileage and limits (goodness only knows it’s something I’ve thought about a lot with various authors or musicians whose work I like, or liked, not least including the alluded-to children’s author), but reducing it to “bad viewpoints make people just bad” is as reductive and poor a way of tackling this as you can get. (And to stave off any accusations now, no, I am not far-right-leaning politically or think people are ‘snowflakes’ (god, I hate that term) or ‘virtue signalling’ by wanting to discuss these things. They should be discussed, but with decent writing and scope, which was the case for the play as was, but which was not the case when it comes to these extra scenes.)

I long for the original cut of this play without these additions: it would be a far stronger work for it. They tackled the subject well, then they panicked and tackled the subject terribly. It makes it a difficult one to score. The good largely outweighs the bad, so that in the end influences the score (which would have been higher without these scenes). I just dearly hope that future releases do not settle for simple preaching as has been inserted here. We, all of us, deserve better.

+ The Lovecraft Invasion is OUT NOW, priced £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download).

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Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Chris Chapman

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: May 2020

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"July 1944. The TARDIS materialises in a small village near Rouen, where celebrations are in full swing. A joyful France is in the midst of liberation as the local population welcome a battalion of Allied soldiers – along with a colourfully dressed Doctor and his two rather excited friends.

But there are screams amidst the celebrations as an angry crowd dish out their brand of justice to one of their own that they have branded a traitor. While Constance and Flip find themselves on opposite sides of a war beyond a war, the Doctor has other concerns. 

The local community is used to the fires of battle, but a new type of blaze is burning – leaping from aircraft to aircraft, man to man – and this fire seems to be just as eager for revenge as the village mob."

WARNING: The following review contains spoilers. You have been warned!

Scorched Earth by Chris Chapman takes us back into the war, landing us in France after its liberation. It feels like you cannot move for World War II-related things when it comes to Big Finish right now. We’ve the ersatz Third Doctor and Churchill in Operation Hellfire, Churchill again bothering the Seventh Doctor but a couple of plays ago, and now this. Whether this was all done to coincide with the VE Day celebrations in 2020 or just a coincidence, it does feel like we’re riffing on the same territory time and again right now, which made me slightly sigh as the play started up.

This is unfair really as there is a lot to celebrate in Scorched Earth. The sound design seems to be back to its usual strength after last month’s notable blip, and Chapman paces the script really well. We move from action to drama to quiet character moments to big incidents with ease. Were it in print, you’d call it a page-turner and as it is, it passes two hours very quickly.

That said, there are some strange moments in here. Flip seems to be playing some sort of game where she is only allowed to talk in quips and pop cultural references, which feels forced and lacks credibility. I know the point of her character is often to contrast with Constance but we move into the realm of being unbelievable here. She also seems to be fire retardant, able to withstand standing in a burning building, smoke and all, for ages. Perhaps it’s not real fire though, as the Doctor is also able to stand in the middle of the inferno and spout some exposition before saving the day.

Elsewhere, there is drama to be had with Constance realising just where, and when in time, she is, but the Doctor’s anguish over it seems to evaporate fairly quickly so that the plot can get on with telling a story. This is probably for the best, but again it ranks as one of the play’s strange moments.

Likewise, soon after the play starts we witness a woman, Clementine, being called a traitor and singled out for punishment by a braying mob, and rather than stop this, as Flip wants to, the Doctor decides to let them be, for the sake of blending in with the locals. This leads to clashes between Constance and Flip throughout the rest of the play. Constance believes the woman should be punished if she has betrayed the town to the Nazis; Flip just sees a scared and crying woman. The clash between them both on this is not subtly drawn but works well, reminding us of their different timeframes and perspectives, and it remains a thread throughout, with the play siding with Flip and agreeing she’s in the right. Whether or not you personally agree, it is inarguably the stance Doctor Who usually takes in such matters; the Doctor, too.

On the one hand, you can see just why the Doctor does as he does, not interfering, but on the other it feels very atypical of him to just stand by and let these things unfold. It’s not like in Rosa where inaction is key, it’s just slightly strange and hard to really justify. Colin Baker clearly feels the same way as he goes to some lengths to do just that and defend the scene in the extras, but not entirely with conviction. For me, it left a slightly bad smell in the air, reminding me a little of Timewyrm: Genesys and its rather infamous excusing of sexual assault as a ‘product of the time’.

Still, it’s nothing compared to the Doctor later on thanking a couple of Nazis for their help. A notable part of this play is Chapman, rightly, pointing out that many were forced into fighting against their will and even against their own beliefs, but it’s still a slightly strange thing to hear. Nothing wrong with being a bit challenging in your content though, so hats off to Chapman for that.

We end the play with things largely resolved between the TARDIS team after Constance is able to help save the day with a nice speech (a personal grumble of mine in Doctor Who in general. It feels a very tired resolution, and almost never a convincing one), though it will be interesting to hear if actions here prove to be the first cracks in an otherwise mostly watertight team.

Is Scorched Earth perfect at all? By no means, and the WWII fatigue doesn’t help, even if that’s not Chapman’s fault but that of scheduling. However, it’s also a largely enjoyable affair with neat sound design and very good ideas in there. A definite up after last month’s outing.

+ Scorched Earth is OUT NOW, priced £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download).

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Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Darren Jones

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: April 2020

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"Violently ejected from the Space-Time Vortex, the TARDIS crash lands on the remote planet of Cygia-Rema, a mountainous world ruled by the bird-like Vultriss. Their newly-crowned Queen Skye is expecting first contact with alien ambassadors – Ice Warriors - and the sudden arrival of the Doctor, Flip and Mrs Constance Clarke causes confusion.

However, Skye is no ordinary ruler, she is the Fabled One gifted with the deadly power of ‘The Cry’. The queen who will enable the Vultriss to fly once again – at any cost.

But as the Doctor investigates why the TARDIS crashed, he discovers that the Vultriss are hiding a deadly secret. An ancient legacy that if left unchecked will plunge half the galaxy into an eternal living end."

WARNING: The following review contains spoilers. You have been warned!

I’ll get the awkward part out of the way now: this is not going to be a positive review. I wish it were. I always find it hard to write a review like this about something like an audio play: some people probably find it easy to do so, but I struggle. The hours that must have been put in by the writer, the director, the actors, the sound designer, the musician. Good intentions run deep in most art, and certainly here nobody has gone out of their way to create something unenjoyable. Also, what one person finds unenjoyable another will delight in, and that’s how it should be: reviews will only ever be subjective. Sadly though, this play failed to land for me in every single way.

We open with a rousing political speech given, promising a population of bird people that good times are ahead. Soon after, we join the TARDIS crew as they sail through the vortex while the Doctor is having a bit of trouble with the controls: so far, so traditional. A callback to Static reminds you how long it has been since this particular TARDIS crew (the Doctor, Flip and Constance Clarke) graced our ears, and it is undoubtedly nice to hear them back as they’ve proven to be a successful team. In fact, I would say that Flip and Constance are far better together than they ever were apart, and perhaps this is one of the play’s problems as they’re separated for much of the play. We lack their spark as they play second-fiddle to a series of uninspiring supporting characters.

Indeed, all the writing and dialogue feels uninspired. At best, it’s gracelessly functional and gets the job done; at worst, it’s overwritten and steeped in cliché. The dialogue is perhaps the greatest offender of the lot with dozens of examples of say-what-you-see writing, which is incredibly grating and unrealistic. I get that you need to paint a picture without visual aids, but it doesn’t work when someone with perfectly fine eyesight tells someone else with equally good eyesight exactly what they can both see, from the position of birds in the sky to rocks that are jutting to the size of places or the design of props. It’s audio exposition at its very worst. Perhaps, like the overall plot, it’s trying to ape a certain style, but to me it felt tired, with twists and turns in the plot flat and predictable.  I’m not sure how that is possible in a play about bird people, political intrigue and Ice Warriors, but here we are.

‘Flat’ also sums up the direction and sound design. This is unusual given how Big Finish usually excel in these matters, but in the opening episode especially it all sounded very studio-bound and lacked sparkle. Early on, the TARDIS crew is attacked by birds and we are told they are attacking from above but there is no indication of this in the sound, just loud squawking with the bare minimum of shift in the stereo field. Again, maybe it’s a feel they are going for: to make this feel televisual in its static soundscape and writing, but it’s a huge miss for me.

From start to finish I found myself clockwatching, wishing the next scene would hurry up and get here. It’s not a nice experience to be listening to a play because you have to, knowing full well that if you did not you’d have given up a long while ago and instead listened to something actually enjoyable instead.

It is tired, boring, overlong (bar the opener, every episode clocks in at over half an hour in length) and obvious, with lacklustre sound design and flat performances from many of the guest cast. I could not in any good conscience recommend this play to anyone. I am sure Cry of the Vultriss will have its fans but for me personally, listening to it made for one of the least enjoyable experiences I have had with Big Finish for quite a while.

+ Cry Of The Vultriss is OUT NOW, priced £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download).

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Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Steve Lyons

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: September 2019

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"The world is at war, and Harry Houdini wants to fight for his adoptive country. He might get the chance, when an old friend crashes his New York show.

The Doctor is on the trail of a Central Powers spy ring, which has somehow acquired unearthly technology. But he is also keeping a dangerous secret...

Finding himself on the run behind enemy lines, the world’s greatest escape artist has to work out who he can trust – and fast."

Harry Houdini’s War is the final play in the latest Sixth Doctor and Peri trilogy. Despite being pushed as pre-Trial tales, the use of Dominic Glynn’s theme tune arrangement quickly suggests things aren’t all they appear with this play (either that or someone in post-production has dropped the ball), which is either a clever clue or a bit of a twist killer. The jury is undecided.

We start off slightly on the back foot then, and pre-publicity highlighting that Harry Houdini and the Doctor have met before in Smoke and Mirrors (a play that was one of the better parts of the Destiny of the Doctor series from 2013) it may seem a little off-putting: does one need to know that to enjoy this? Thankfully not, and indeed the relationship between the two men is the most enjoyable aspect of this release.

The combination of Houdini and the Doctor is a rather neat one: the illusionist who wowed the world with the person who saves it. As celebrity and Time Lord duos go, it certainly makes for an easier pairing than the ‘Doctor and Churchill’ one which has to skirt around and turn a blind eye to numerous issues and (ironically) politics to really work, and in the case of the two Big Finish series, also decent scripts and a full cast. I just hope Big Finish resist a trilogy with this pair or an ‘enhanced audiobook’ set: there’s a fine line between being intrigued to see more and seeing far too much. Even Houdini couldn’t work his magic on this.

Aside from the Houdini/Doctor partnership, there is some nice colour to this play. Educational titbits and facts concerning Houdini are dropped in neatly in a way that would make Sydney Newman happy, and I rather like the reason that’s given for why the Doctor seems to be fighting for the opposition. All this said, the script itself feels rather flabby at times, which makes the episodes’ running times feel lengthier than they are in actuality. There is also a strange thing in the first two parts where you reach a cliffhanger... and then it goes on for another scene or two before wrapping things up with a far less effective ending.

More bizarrely, the sound design for Harry Houdini’s War lacks the usual polish which Big Finish brings to the party. There is a scene that especially stood out which cuts from people in an aeroplane to people watching the aeroplane, with what is essentially a fading down of an aeroplane sound effect to denote the transition. I can see what they’re going for here, suggesting more of a pull-back shot than a hard cut between scenes, but it’s too subtle, lacking the visual immediacy audio needs to really sell the moment and creating a slower and messier picture in the mind accordingly.

In the end, perhaps that sums the play up: good ideas and nice intentions, but the finished product is lacking. As mentioned before though, there is mileage to be had with Houdini as an occasional guest star in these main range plays, certainly more than some returning elements or partnerships we’ve seen Big Finish delve into in the past. This particular play may not have the magic one wishes, but perhaps an encore can do it justice.

+ Harry Houdini's War is OUT NOW, priced £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download).

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Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Andrew Smith

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: August 2019

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"On the planet Omnia, a young man leads the Doctor and Peri through the battle-scarred ruins of a city. Among the rubble he shows them proof that their invaders and new masters, thought to be invincible, can be defeated. The proof is the blasted, burnt-out remains of a Dalek.

But this is a Dalek-occupied world like few others. For one thing, there are few Daleks to be seen. And for another, the Daleks have appointed an Omnian, Magister Carmen Rega, to govern the planet as their emissary.

Why are the Daleks not present in force? And can the Doctor and Peri risk helping the Omnians, when the least show of resistance will be met with devastating reprisals from space?"

There was a lot of buzz surrounding Emissary Of The Daleks, the latest play from Andrew Smith, when it was first announced. Rightly so, too, as the premise sounded very promising indeed: a world under Dalek rule which ticks along nicely, just so long as no-one rises up against them. As ideas go, it's a good one. Would you dare risk killing everyone if things are actually okay as-is?

There is a lot of potential there, with the Doctor and Peri in the role of possible antagonists. Do you risk it all just because they're Daleks, or accept the planet is fine right now with them in charge?

I was therefore excited to start this play, but that soon slipped into uncertainty and quickly into being unenthused. The trouble is, the premise is never really tapped into. Instead, we have a story we have seen a hundred times before. Daleks invade the planet; a well-meaning but ultimately flawed and foolish leader acts as human / Dalek liaison and does terrible things when trying to "do the right thing"; general population is terrified and live in fear and slavery; and the Doctor saves the day.

There was not one plot point or twist that I did not see coming at least two scenes earlier. Two of the cliffhangers involve screaming and what sounds like the death of the regulars… only they're fine. The character development and family relationships are as easy to guess as the plotting.

I really wanted to like this play, and there are definitely some good parts. I like the piece of Dalek mythology which Smith gives us, about how each Dalek sucker is as individual as a fingerprint. It ranks up with Trevor Baxendale's assertion in his novel Prisoner of the Daleks that Daleks could kill you quickly, they just choose to do it painfully, as good ideas that will be forever stuck in my mind as canonical now.

The story is something you've come across before, time and again, but the plot is at least free of holes, and whilst none of the characters made an impression, the cast have no weak links or performances on show.

Perhaps it's unfair to judge this play on what it is not, but what it is is so familiar as to be a bit dull. It may be told competently but I'm not sure you'd be able to call it exciting with any real sincerity.

As it stands, Emissary of the Daleks is by no means a disaster, but it's also entirely nonessential and overfamiliar to the brink of being boring. The buzz for the premise may be justified, but any for the execution is not.

+ Emissary Of The Daleks is OUT NOW, priced £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download).

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Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Roland Moore

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: July 2019

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"What if you’d committed a truly dreadful crime but couldn’t remember?

The Doctor takes Peri to the Memory Farm – a state of the art space station where hidden memories can be harvested and analysed. To their surprise, they find the station in lock-down and all its resources dedicated to probing the memories of an elderly man. Garius Moro may, or may not, have been responsible for the deaths of billions of people many years ago, but he simply can’t remember.

The assembled representatives of two opposing factions, each with their own agenda, anxiously wait for the truth to be unlocked from Moro’s mind. But when a memory does eventually surface, everyone is surprised to learn that it is of Peri..."

Following on the heels of the Mags trilogy, we see the return of Peri to the main range after several years’ absence. Rather than follow up the plot threads left hanging from her last, post-Trial trilogy, we are instead treated to a story set earlier in her timeline, though at times it feels even earlier than that.

Roland Moore’s debut story for the Big Finish main range, Memories Of A Tyrant is a bit of an odd beast in that it’s a Sixth Doctor and Peri story that feels entirely geared towards it being a Third Doctor and Jo story, complete with a fight scene, references to The Curse of Peladon and The Green Death, central ethical dilemma, and an old friend of the Doctor who helped free wrongly convicted aliens. It gives the entire play a slightly unusual feel, being simultaneously true to the show but not really true to the era. I wonder if perhaps it started off with a different TARDIS team in mind, or if they just wanted to try something different? Either way, it can be a little jarring at times.

This air of incongruity aside, it also happens to be an unusual play for other reasons. Its central premise is interesting: Garius Moro is a tyrant responsible for the murder of billions and he has finally been captured - or has he? No visual record of Moro exists, and the man captured has no memory of his past life whatsoever. There is, therefore, a question of morality at stake here. Is it right that a man utterly ripped of his memories should suffer a punishment for his actions, actions which he cannot recall committing and finds hard to believe himself capable of? And what if they have the wrong man?

The main issue with this play is that it dodges both these issues entirely, something not down to Moore who addressed this in his original script, but down to director, producer and script editor John Ainsworth, who according to the play’s extras insisted that they go unanswered, to better retain uncertainty. All this does is neuter Memories Of A Tyrant, robbing its exciting meat and bones of weight and making the ending feel unsatisfactory. It goes out of its way to dodge the moral quandary but that just raises more questions than it answers, namely why commission a play such as this if you don’t want to fully engage with its soul?

It’s a pity as overall Memories Of A Tyrant is a fairly enjoyable listen which gives Peri a lot to do, and Colin Baker is clearly having fun pretending to be a convict. Moore has hit upon an interesting issue, has written it as a Third Doctor tale, and has had his answers removed from on high. It makes for one of the strangest releases Big Finish have put out for a while now, and certainly a tricky one to grade.

I would like to try and take a leaf out of its book and cheat my memory. I would like to recall the happy cast and the good ideas this play has, ignoring the era uncertainty and production interference. I will not succeed; the execution looms large in my mind. But trying to do so, at least, feels the done thing.

+ Memories Of A Tyrant is OUT NOW, priced £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download).

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BBC Studios continues to offer Doctor Who fans the opportunity to build their own home archive on Blu-ray. The first jam-packed release for Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor, Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 23, debuts on Monday 23rd September.

In 1985, Doctor Who was taken off the air for an 18 month hiatus. When it returned, it was with an ambitious fourteen-episode adventure, The Trial of a Time Lord. The epic story saw the Doctor on trial for his life, with the court examining his adventures with companion Peri (Nicola Bryant) and looking to his future escapades with new companion Melanie (Bonnie Langford).

This season saw the return of popular villain Sil, along with the Master, the towering robot Drathro and the plant-based Vervoid monsters. With the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham) overseeing the proceedings, it was the Valeyard (Michael Jayston) who proved the greatest threat, hiding his own sinister motives for wanting the Doctor’s downfall.

With all episodes newly remastered from the best available sources, this Blu-ray box set also contains extensive and exclusive special features which include:

+ Extended edits - of all fourteen episodes
+ Terror of the Vervoids - four-part standalone edition with updated Fx
+ Immersive 5.1 surround sound & isolated scores - on all 14 broadcast episodes
+ Behind the Sofa - new episodes with Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Bonnie Langford, Mark Strickson, Frazer Hines and Matthew Waterhouse
+ The Writers’ Room - Eric Saward, Philip Martin, Christopher H Bidmead & Waly K Daly discuss the ‘Lost’ Season 23
+ The Doctor Who Cookbook Revisited - brave cast members tackle their original recipes from the 1980s official cookbook
+ The Doctor’s Table - join Colin Baker and friends for dinner
+ In Conversation - Matthew Sweet chats to companion Bonnie Langford
+ Unseen studio footage
+ Rare archive treats
+ Convention footage
+ Blu-ray trailer
+ HD photo galleries
+ Scripts, costume designs & more in the PDF Archive

The six-disc box set also includes hours of extensive special features previously released on DVD.

View the announcement trailer for the box-set in the player, below:
[youtube:f-hWKv9ExtY]
Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 23 stars Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant and Bonnie Langford with Michael Jayston and Lynda Bellingham. Guest appearances include Anthony Ainley, Nalbil Shaban, Joan Sims, Christopher Ryan, Michael Craig, Honor Blackman, Tony Selby and Geoffrey Hughes.

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[Source: BBC Studios]

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: AK Benedict

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: December 2018

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"The Doctor arrives in present day Iceland and receives a frosty reception from Inspector Yrsa Kristjansdottir when he becomes the chief suspect in a murder enquiry. But the Doctor knows that the real killer is of extraterrestrial origin.

Joining forces with Yrsa, the Doctor goes in pursuit of a ruthless alien that is hunting humans for sport. Yrsa unearths a dark conspiracy which reaches back into her own past.

Determined to expose the truth and prevent further deaths, the Doctor and Yrsa soon find themselves running for their lives, prey on the hunting ground."

2018 ends in the snow for Big Finish. The wolves are running, but it’s Colin Baker and not Patrick Troughton taking centre stage for this tale of hunting, police procedure and cover-ups. Plus aliens and robots, because what's Doctor Who without a nasty monster waiting in the wings every so often? Dull, that’s what.

Things get off to a pleasingly disorientating start with a child’s bedtime story interrupted by screaming and pleading and roaring, all before the theme tune kicks in. We’re soon introduced to Inspector Yrsa Kristjansdottir and placed in the middle of a murder investigation that smells of Forbrydelsen, to the point where I kept expecting Sarah Lund to turn up in one of her trademark cosy jumpers. Again, it’s a pleasingly Doctor Who thing where you have something so familiar interrupted by the Doctor and alien activity and that’s exactly what we get. Chuck in a singing printer and unusual wolves, and you have an entertaining start to the adventure.

Despite all this good work though, the play throughout feels like it lacks a certain something. The ingredients for something wonderful are all there and the story continues to throw such things at us, from hidden spaceships to bickering bureaucrats, to car crashes to traitors, but the glue holding all these things together is web-thin. Doctor Who meeting Scandinavian crime drama is a nice idea, in theory, but there is a notable disconnect between these elements in The Hunting Ground, to the extent that it feels like the two genres are fighting for the spotlight and as a result they both feel a tad undercooked.

It’s a shame as, as noted above, there is much to praise in AK Benedict’s script. I enjoyed her crack at the Eleventh Doctor in The Calendar Man, and there is a similar blend of fairytale with normality here, too. Unlike there though, again these two things sometimes work against one another.

I really like the approach taken towards what is often dismissed as supernatural and ‘other’ in this play. People speak of elves and trolls with a shrug, as if they’re nothing out of the ordinary, which is at once unusual and refreshing. It feels like a nice and respectful blend of traditional Icelandic folklore and the show’s existing mythology, but this lack of wonder at the ‘other’ sadly bleeds over to elsewhere.

I can understand the natural extension of the police accepting magic folk so therefore not finding it a great stretch to accept that the Doctor is an alien and that alien activity may be involved with the murder case. I see, too, why this may have crossed the mind of Yrsa Kristjansdottir before, seeing as her father died in similarly unusual circumstances. However, she is then almost roundly unimpressed and surprised as time travel, alien hunters and robots all announce themselves and as such it’s a bit hard for the listener to be enthused or excited.

And then we have the very ending which hints that Yrsa may be about to become a new companion of the Sixth Doctor. I actually let out a small groan at this point as it just feels so ordinary and expected and, again, underwhelming. They’ve tried to pull off the ‘Sixth Doctor and an unexpected companion!’ trick once already in 2018, in the truly terrible release The Lure Of The Nomad, so by now it’s like a bad joke. Whether Yrsa does make it aboard the TARDIS or not seems unclear for now, but the door is open so I suspect it will be but time. I can’t say I am counting down the days.

The Hunting Ground, then...  It’s a strange story with much to praise and celebrate, but it’s also one that feels disjointed and lacking. It’s a bit of a damp end to 2018’s monthly releases from Big Finish, but perhaps you can exaggerate the peaks and troughs here to make a good symbol for how the main range has been this year: some terrific highs and some perilous lows.

I hope that 2019 provides us with a bit more consistency. More monsters and fewer people shrugging off the wonderful. A bit less of the predictable and a bit more of the surprising. We shall see. For now, let’s look at the good here and hope it’s built upon After all, what is a new year if not a chance to reflect upon the good and bad and vow to do better?

+ The Hunting Ground is OUT NOW, priced £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download).

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Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Chris Champman

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: June 2018

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"It's London, 1828, and the father-and-son team of Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel are masterminding a dangerous project - the digging of the Thames Tunnel. There's just one problem...

The Brunels' tunnel is haunted. Every night, a spectral blue lady walks the excavation.

Now, the 22-year-old Isambard, eager to step out of his famous father's shadow, finds himself dealing with not only the supposed supernatural, but a second unexpected guest - a colourful trespasser who calls himself 'The Doctor'.

Isambard would like to know a great deal more about this strange man and his mysterious blue box..."

After a couple of major lows for the monthly range, I was a little nervous stepping into this play. Big Finish and historicals usually make for good bedfellows, but the sour taste left by The Lure Of The Nomad especially made me a little wary. Please (I thought to myself, going in), please, not another one like that.

The first thing to note is the cover: it’s beautiful. The wider space for the play covers’ imagery is a welcome thing, finally ditching the awkward black bars, and the new logo? It looks superb here, really catching the eye and wowing the viewer. It all makes for a far, far nicer and more consistent ‘Who identity’ and level of design than we’ve had before and I can’t say I’ll be mourning the loss of the old any time soon. A very good move / insistence by whoever is in charge of branding.

Iron Bright is by Chris Chapman, rapidly becoming a regular contributor to Big Finish’s monthly outings. So far, he’s given us The Memory Bank, a very solid one-episode-long story that I have found myself returning to since the first listen (always a good sign), and The Middle, which I thought had some very strong ideas but perhaps didn’t quite do them justice: very enjoyable overall all the same, mind.

Iron Bright probably falls into the same category, but that’s not to slight it. Big Finish were canny when they released the first episode as a free download for newsletter subscribers as it’s a lot of fun: ghosts and history, the Doctor and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Colin Baker giving one of his best performances for a while all make for thirty minutes of drama which whizz by. The second two episodes are not quite as strong though.

When people see ‘Sixth Doctor + Historical’, the go-to story is normally The Mark Of The Rani, and this has some similarities in that the historical figures are, at times, sidelined in favour of alien goings-on. I feel, though, that this story shares most of its DNA with Timelash.

Remember how H.G. Wells is treated less as a figure of historical importance and more as a substitute companion, and historical period settings are largely ditched in favour of alien landscapes? That’s how Brunel is treated here, and indeed how the middle of this story feels a lot of the time.

When we return to Earth, I felt the story picked up a bit and I perhaps wish we’d been given a straight historical, or one with greater earthly grounding. I don’t feel the Doctor’s meeting with Brunel is wasted, in the same way his meeting with George Stephenson in Rani is not, and perhaps it was a silly and false expectation on my part to think we’d be getting something more ghostly and less... well, traditional Doctor Who.

After all this, the final episode then arrives and things really kick up a gear in quality again. The pocket emptying scene in particular is wonderful (even if Baker does note in the extras that he’s apparently hiding a key prop from the story’s opening in the process: surely a job for a script editor and not the lead actor?), and I want to stress again that the story is never bad.  Far from it.

One thing Iron Bright really has going for it is a truly excellent supporting cast. There is not one flat performance in there; everyone gives a wonderful turn. It’s one of the best ensembles we’ve had, with Catherine Bailey and Imogen Church being particularly impressive, and all credit must go to John Ainsworth for sorting it out. That said, Colin Baker’s remark that Becky Wright should return as a companion made me shake a little: surely no more companions for him? Baker and McGann between them seem to be having a competition to see who can collect the most, like a Gallifreyan game of Pokémon.

(In addition, Wright’s character, Flo, really did sound like the lost child of Flip and Ellie from Jago and Litefoot crossed with some of the backstory of Gwen from The Unquiet Dead, so I’m not sure it would be the wisest move.)

By the time Iron Bright finished, it had won me round again. This doesn’t wash away the bad taste left by recent plays, but it goes a long way to helping.

One thing is utterly apparent, mind: keep an eye on Chris Chapman. I truly believe he is one or two scripts away from writing something utterly superb for Doctor Who and I cannot wait to hear it. The Middle and Iron Bright may not quite hit all the marks, but my word do they show a promise and verve that makes me very, very excited to see his name next to a play again before too long.

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Jonathan Morris

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: December 2017

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"Deep in the heart of nowhere, near a place called Abbey Marston, there’s a caravan site. The perfect place to get away from it all. Close by, there’s a stone circle they used for human sacrifice in olden times. A little further afield, there’s an old RAF research station, where they did hushhush things in the War.

There’s only one rule: the use of radios, cassette recorders and portable televisions is strictly forbidden.

People come here to get away from it all, you see. No-one wants to hear the noise. No-one wants to hear the voices in the static…

No-one wants to hear the ghosts."

You can tell that Big Finish have a lot of good will behind this one. For months now, all we’ve heard about with regards to the ‘Main Range’ is that Static is on its way, and it’s scary, thrilling, chilling and not to be missed. Some are even saying it’s better than The Chimes of Midnight.

You wouldn’t think as whole trilogy of Sixth Doctor, Flip and Constance plays had been released, only this one. Is it any good though? Yes!

The Doctor and his friends land on a creepy campsite, to the disappointment of his companions who both want to go home (is it just me or does that come from seemingly out of nowhere? Even the actors sound a little confused in the extras on this point). The site is creepy, wet and a place where portable televisions, radios and cassette recorders are not allowed. Oh, and ghosts abound. It’s a good set-up milked for all it’s worth by Jonathan Morris, with some good, meaty drama for the guest cast to get into.

As with last month’s The Middle, the opening episode is very strong and arguably the best of the four. The sound design by Joe Kraemer and Josh Arakelian are the real stars of the show here, sweeping hiss and crackle and rain around us after a rather bizarre spoken introduction by Nicholas Briggs letting us know it’s a Big Finish play we’re listening to (or at least, that happened on my download. I can’t speak for the physical releases). The music is less good though, at times being pretty intrusive: you notice it because it doesn’t quite fit.

Now, most soundtracks for Big Finish do not really evoke the eras the stories are set in, sounding like... well, Big Finish soundtracks instead, but that’s fine. The actors don’t sound as they once did either, so you let it pass. Here though, it fails to either evoke the Colin Baker era or be its own Big Finish thing, standing somewhere between the two and falling short at both ends.

That’s okay though because the atmosphere in performance and dialogue is more than enough to make up for it.

I could niggle and point out the fact it’s steeped in cliché, but that’s rather the point at the start and by the time it’s become its own thing, it has carefully let you know its genre and made you comfortable in the surroundings. The final episode arguably is a bit too signposted with its beats and could benefit from a bit more focus on reactions from the supporting cast and regular crew (the Doctor feels especially cold at times and gets away with it, which feels a wasted opportunity), but again, everything else is working hard to make up for it.

This is Jamie Anderson’s finest hour as director, and his casting here is brilliant with every supporting character being perfectly chosen. David Graham is as good as you would expect, but Scott Chambers, Pippa Nixon and Jo Woodcock are all equally impressive and names to watch out for.

It’s a pity that, as is always the case seemingly nowadays, the extended extras for subscribers are (inexplicably) not available from the off as the interviews we do get seem to jump around and Colin Baker especially, is very enthusiastic about the play. It would have been nice to hear his and the other cast’s full thoughts instead of the rather obviously edited highlights.

It’s been a long-term grumble of mine that Big Finish run their writers dry, leading to far lesser productions than the writers would give us otherwise, and I stand by that still. Keep using the same shirt and it’ll run ragged in the end. A play like Static only ups this feeling in my mind. Morris is a brilliant writer and this is a brilliant script, and with a bit less elsewhere, you feel that other writers of his ilk could hit these high spots time and again instead of increasingly fleetingly.

Is it the Chimes of Midnight beater, others are claiming it to be? No, frankly, but then again they’re two very different plays so it’s an utterly silly and redundant comparison.

Static is its own thing, and it’s bloody good. No wonder Big Finish have been celebrating it loudly. It’s worth every shout.

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Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Chris Chapman

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: November 2017

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"It’s L/Wren Mrs Constance Clarke’s birthday - and Flip is determined to make it an anniversary to remember.

The futuristic colony of Formicia, where the pampered populace pass their days in endless leisure, seems the perfect place for a ‘Wren Party’. But all is not as it seems. Looking down from the Middle, the skyscraping tower that ascends as far as the colony ceiling, Formicia’s overseers can see that the Doctor doesn’t fit in - and it’s not just his coat that makes him conspicuous...

“The End is the Beginning,” say the propaganda-like posters all over Formicia. Because to be part of this perfect society comes at a price. And the Doctor's already in arrears."

Last time around, I joked that the Gods of co-incidence must have been smiling when Big Finish put out The Behemoth with its head-on tackling of slavery so close to Series 10. This month, we have suits that people wear and a faceless corporation exploiting humanity... ring any bells? I wonder if next month’s much-touted scare-fest spectacular will include a whole bunch of knock knock jokes?

Yes, it seems that someone at the branding department has been hitting snooze on their clock as of late, but pushing that aside, what can be made of The Middle? Thankfully a fair bit of good.

The first thing of note is how well the TARDIS crew of the Doctor, Flip and Constance is working. The two companions have never been as strong as they are here together, and the Sixth Doctor proves to be a nice foil to the excesses of them both. Chris Chapman, the play’s writer, ably uses the comedy potential of Flip and Lisa Greenwood as an actor to good effect, and also makes good use of Constance’s background as a Wren in the plot and its settings.

The script has some good, solid ideas behind it, but does perhaps suffer again from a case of the Co-incidences: the TARDIS crew just so happen to be talking about birthdays when they land on a planet where birthdays play a huge role and Constance just so happens to be approaching a plot-integral age. They then befriend a man who just so happens to be the father of another important regular character and knows a lot about the technology being used because of... reasons. It’s a bit too neat and co-incidental to be glossed over really.

Likewise, just as the story has echoes of Series 10, so too does the play have echoes of other plays surrounding it from Big Finish; the Sixth Doctor in an office block? See World Enough And Time (say, that would make a good TV story title one day...). Memories playing an integral, crucial role in proceedings? See Chapman’s own play, The Memory Box.

Indeed, The Middle feels like its roots are firmly embedded in Chapman’s first Big Finish outing, which is no bad thing as it was a very strong single-episode affair, but also means at times things feel a bit too familiar.

That’s not to take away from the good though, which include a strong guest cast (Mark Heap is especially fun) and a very sturdy opening episode: you can see why Big Finish were giving it away for free as a sampler.

Despite the air of having seen some of it before, the script still feels fresh for the most part, though I wish Colin Baker didn’t have to cry “Nooooo!” as often as he does here as it brings back nasty memories of Slipback.

These are mostly slight niggles though, as The Middle proves to be an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours, just not an overly original one. What it does do though it show Chapman as a writer worth paying attention to, and is a good case for this being one of the Sixth Doctor’s strongest TARDIS teams.

Overall, this one is far from a middling affair.

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Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Nicholas Briggs, Alan Barnes, Matt Fitton, Simon Barnard and Paul Morris

RRP: £40.00 (CD) / £20.00 (Download)

Release Date: August 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“A very special story which at last provides a heroic exit for Colin Baker's much-loved Time Lord. Four hour-long episodes, connected by the presence of the Valeyard, the entity that exists between the Doctor's twelth and final incarnations.”

If you’re looking for a success story with regards to Big Finish, then the Sixth Doctor is it. On TV, he was trapped at a time when there was chaos behind the scenes and whilst very few have anything bad to say about Colin Baker, who gave it his all regardless of what he was given (whatever people say about The Twin Dilemma, Baker himself is magnificent in it through and through), it’s arguable that poor Sixie, as he’s affectionately known, deserved better. The books which followed gave it a good shot, as did the comics, but it was the creation of Big Finish and getting Baker himself back into the driving seat that really worked wonders. Hearing him get his teeth into some fantastic scripts, and then being paired with Evelyn and Frobisher as well as Peri and Mel, thrust him back into the limelight and created a massive reappraisal for that most criticized of incarnations.  It was long overdue and much deserved, so it seems fitting that it’s Big Finish who are telling the story of Sixie’s demise.

Well, telling one version of it, anyway.  The novelisation of Time and the Rani threw some tumultuous buffeting our way (… no, me neither), Gary Russell had a go in Spiral Scratch and then we have Time’s Champion as well, bobbing around in the background.  The good thing, then, is that if people aren’t too keen on this version of The End of Colin, we have others to dip into, even those with tumultuous buffeting. (Whatever happened to the seatbelts seen in Timelash? There’s a story for another day…)

Big Finish’s approach to Sixie’s end (stop laughing at the back) is to give us four, hour-long stories (give or take. The final play clocks in at under sixty minutes whilst the first is closer to seventy-minutes-long). They’re set in various places in The Doctor’s life and have one link beyond the Sixth Doctor himself: the Valeyard. Considering what he was set up to be, it’s amazing really that nothing more was ever done with him on screen, so it makes sense to explore that here instead and it’s fitting that it’s the Sixth Doctor once more doing battle with him.

Sadly though, whilst all this looks good on paper, it doesn’t entirely translate well when listened to. The main issue really is one of connectivity.  This release is called ‘The Last Adventure’, so it’s not unfair to have an expectation that everything is going to slot together neatly, but no. Only the final play can in any terms be labeled a ‘last’ adventure, and it only really fits in with one other play in the release, leaving one wondering why they bothered listening to the other two.  As one-offs, they’d be fine, but as a build-up to the final hour, they fall massively short as they don’t actually build much.

Let’s look at the plays themselves in their own rights though.  We begin with The End of the Line by Simon Barnard and Paul Morris, a ghostly tale of mysterious trains and even more mysterious deaths. The mixture of trains, abandoned stations and Colin Baker cannot help but bring to mind In Memory Alone, the third story in the Stranger series, Bill Baggs’s straight-to-video series which found its lead writer and plot visionary in… Nicholas Briggs! You do wonder if the inclusion of this tale here is a nod to the roots of Briggs’s working relationship with Baker, but I am probably reading too much into things.

The story itself is fine, but nothing new.  We’ve had ghost stories in this manner in the past and the twists are, again, nothing Big Finish haven’t done before.  It’s not to say that the play is bad per se, just a bit… underwhelming.  We’ve been here before and will do again.  Likewise, one of the big selling points for this tale is something the Sixth Doctor specifically, and arguably uniquely (sorry, Clara), has experience of: the introduction of a new companion some way into their friendship.  wap Mel for Constance, and hey presto.

Again, I imagine that the parallels here between Constance and Mel both getting introduced in ‘final’ stories for the Sixth Doctor are intended, but whereas Mel came with a fully kitted-out character, Constance here is the ultimate definition of generic.  Miranda Raison is a fine actor, but she is given nothing to go with here. Her character is blander than any of the support and you wonder just why they bothered.  I imagine someone at Big Finish said “Hey! Now here’s a good idea!” and then went ahead and commissioned this without actually working out what her character is. I hope so at least, or her forthcoming trilogy is going to be painful.

Second up, we have Alan Barnes in the writing seat and The Red House. Reuniting the Doctor with Charley, it’s a tale of werewolves, scientists and afflicted villagers. It feels similar to The Doomwood Curse in that respect, with a clash of science fiction and folktale trappings, but whilst The End of the Line felt overly recognizable, Barnes’s script here feels fresh and fits in with Charley perfectly, maybe because of the familiarities. (If you’re the sort of fan who is kept awake at night by the thorny issue of continuity and placements, then fret not: we get a very clumsy introduction where Charley reels off a list of previous adventures and where this one falls. It’s painful, but is going to satisfy a certain type of fan, so it’s probably best to have it in here than not!)

This play actually ties in to what’s to come, and as such has more merit in this box set than others. It also uses Charley and her relationship with this particular incarnation of the Doctor intelligently, and at over an hour doesn’t outstay its welcome, telling a decent story in its own rights whilst also moving pieces forward in anticipation of the finale.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for Stage Fright by Matt Fitton, which reunites the Sixth Doctor with Jago and Litefoot whilst Flip is in tow.  It’s not a bad story in itself, but what Red House gets right, this gets wrong.  It barely touches upon the final installment at all, and lovely though it is to have Jago and Litefoot present and correct, there is no reason for it whatsoever other than it being a selling point for the box set. Flip, meanwhile, seems to be here purely to give us contrasts between the time period and our own (“Oh! It’s just like The X Factor! Star Wars! Other-Franchise-That-Is-Popular!”) and little else. She’s also responsible for a dénouement which makes the oft-criticized schmaltz of Fear Her look subtle.  Surely Peri, being an American in a time of colonialism and the Empire, would have been a better/more interesting fit, especially now we know that she carries on travelling with Sixie after the events of Trial? It feels like a wasted opportunity.  Indeed, the exclusion of Peri from proceedings, given how integral she was to the Sixth Doctor’s era on screen and indeed Trial of a Time Lord, feels like a massive oversight, and makes this whole set seem more a celebration of Big Finish and its various creations than representative of the Sixth Doctor’s tenure, really.

This is very apparent in the final story of this set, Nicholas Briggs’s entry, The Brink of Death, in which Mel is mostly ignored in favour of this set’s Not-Lucie-Miller-Companion, Genesta the plucky Time Lord. Ever since Lucie was a hit, Big Finish have been trying to ape her success (again, see Flip), and this is but the latest effort. No spoilers here, but it doesn’t work and she has ‘Disposable’ written all over her from the word ‘go’, and I wish they’d stop doing it.  It’s getting tedious now.

There is an attempt to use her fate to compare attitudes to death and life between the Doctor and Valeyard, but nothing really comes of it. For all the talk of the two Time Lords being Yin and Yang/one and the same, you never get the impression that they are actually the same person. You’d think there would be an attempt to show the Sixth Doctor being tempted down that path but it never materializes.

So, with Mel put to one side and a substitute companion in place, this play harkens back to The Red House and works its way towards the end.  We know from the very off that the end is approaching, so much of this is painted as a race against time: or would be, if time wasn’t continually extended and frozen all over the place, ruining any sense of pace.  No matter though, what about the plot itself?

Well, it’s reliant on two things: the Doctor having no real sense of curiosity (“Oh! So that explains that thing that happened ages ago that I probably should have looked into but didn’t because Reasons”) and the Valeyard being nigh-on omnipotent.  A big point is made time and again of the Valeyard thwarting all of the Doctor’s plans because he knows exactly what he did before and what he’s thinking, which only makes the ending– the Doctor does something that all logic and story suggests the Valeyard should see coming but, erm, doesn’t because it’s the end of the story– all the sillier and frustrating.  It’s lazy and, more importantly, at odds with everything we’ve been told so far, so what, I wonder, was the point of it all.  It certainly makes little more sense than tumultuous buffeting: arguably, that makes a smidgeon more sense than what we get here.

The end is here though, and Time And The Rani approaches. The plot of this dovetails neatly into that story (sort of. It’s never explicitly stated that it’s the Rani firing beams at the TARDIS here, but it surely has to be, or else she’d die on Lykertya or at the very least not look like Kate O’Mara).  Colin, of course, gets some final words.  Well, several.  He has a brilliant last line when talking with the Valeyard, but sadly then waffles on for a whole other scene and gets a line that is in no way as memorable or satisfying. It’s a shame that they sacrifice less for more, but that is perhaps indicative of this set overall. We could have got a series of episodes that builds up to the final end, but instead we get an advertisement for Big Finish Productions.

Final thoughts then? Tricky.  It’s an ending for sure, and the final episode isn’t awful, just illogical.  What’s most trying with this release is that you can easily see where things perhaps should have gone: a set leading to a finale, rather than a finale with almost no build-up. A set absent of Peri and largely ignoring Mel in favour of Big Finish’s own creations.  An introduction to a new assistant, but one without any characteristics whatsoever. A set that doesn’t know when to stop or, really, start.

The Sixth Doctor is surely still Big Finish’s success story, and Colin Baker still a star, but for such a flagship release, we should have got something far better than this. This is in no way the best this incarnation has to offer or even close to the best Big Finish and Baker have given us. Call this a last adventure if you will, but I’m hoping for far better to come. 

Theatre actress and 70s child star Bonnie Langford is joining the cast of EastEnders, the BBC has confirmed.

She will take the role of Carmel Kazemi, Kush's mother and will start filming her scenes this month, with her first on-screen appearance in June.

Known to Doctor Who fans for her role as The 6th Doctor's companion; Mel Bush, Langford said:

"I'm so thrilled and delighted to be part of EastEnders. I'm a great fan of the show and think the recent 30th anniversary was sensational and shows just how good British television can be. To be part of this family is an absolute privilege."

[Source: BBC News]

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Justin Richards

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: December 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“The TARDIS arrives in the CAGE – not a trap, but the College of Advanced Galactic Education, one of the most prestigious academic institutions in colonised space.

Not a trap. Or is it?

The Doctor’s here to receive an honorary degree in Moral Philosophy. But there’s something rotten at the heart of the Medical Facility. Someone is operating on the students. Someone without a conscience. Someone with access to a Sidelian Brain Scanner – a technology that hasn’t been invented yet.

That someone is the ruthless Time Lord scientist known as the Rani – in her new incarnation. But will the Doctor and Peri recognise the Rani’s hand before her trap is sprung?”

***

Ah, the Rani.  Until her triumphant lack of reappearance on TV post-2005, no-one really seemed to give two hoots about her, which is a pity as Kate O’Mara always gave it her best, and The Mark of the Rani is, for my money, one of the Sixth Doctor’s strongest televised adventures.

Suddenly though, things had changed.  Doctor Who was back, and fandom got it into its head that the Rani should be involved for… well, for whatever reason fandom had at the time.  It’s never been entirely clear, but maybe the ‘Bring Back McGann!’ brigade were on holiday.

Whilst BBV and Pudsey Bear had both tried and failed to kill her reputation for good, Russell T Davies’s stubborn refusal to include Mistress Rani in the revived series was the last straw, and then— and then! —he only went and truly rained on everyone’s parade by teasing us all, naming a character Rani who, crucially, wasn’t the Rani in The Sarah Jane Adventures, and if that wasn’t enough, the Master came back and then went and regenerated into a woman.  By then though fandom seemed to have forgotten about it altogether and were busy attacking Philip Morris for having the sheer audacity to return nine missing episodes to us all.  The bastard.

Step forward Big Finish, professional fanboys who had undertaken the steady resurrection of the Voord, the Mechonoids, the Rutans, the Nimon, the Nucleus of the Swarm and even some of their own characters such as Hex and Hex and… erm, Hex.

It was time to bring out the big guns; it was time to bring out the Rani.

The Rani Elite is the first Big Finish outing for the character, pitting her once again against the Sixth Doctor and Peri, albeit in regenerated form this time around due to the sad death of Kate O’Mara.  You can feel its shadow looming over much of this production, largely due to the dialogue being very clearly written for O’Mara and her portrayal of the role.  In much the same way that the Doctor is the Doctor but just swapping, say, mentions of Bessie for mentions of Jelly Babies won’t paper over all the cracks (yes, BBC Books, I’m still looking at Drift all these years later), so it is here.  Siobhan Redmond is wearing the tyrannical Time Lady’s shoes now, and she clearly has a lot of fun with it, but I felt throughout that I wasn’t hearing her interpretation of the role, just her reading someone else’s lines.  I would love to hear Redmond do her own thing with it in later appearances, as what we get here is fine, but not a whole new Rani.  More a Rani 1.5 affair.

As for the story itself, it’s not bad at all.  Justin Richards is always a very safe pair of hands in which to place a slot in the schedule, and there are enough twists and turns along the way here to keep you guessing and feel very true to the era, arguably far more so than any other story in these past few Sixth Doctor/Peri releases (though references to Time and the Rani make this very firmly Big Finish territory).

Set on a school with the Rani pretending to be one Professor Baxton, Richards’s script treads territory walked on by The Unquiet Dead previously, but with enough flair and difference to hold its own.  The questions posed are big ones: at what point does living become a privilege and not something one simply does? Is there a hierarchy over who should live and who should die?

Being Doctor Who, I think you can answer those questions without hearing the play, but all the same the script, and characters within it, handle them well and it helps the four episodes to move along nicely.  As a play in its own right, it’s not bad at all.

As a conclusion to this latest set of Sixth Doctor and Peri plays? Well, it hints at things to come briefly with regards to Peri and her health, but is mostly a standalone play, which is a blessing, really.  The trilogy format has grown increasingly stale as of late, with arcs being imposed on them rather than feeling like natural states of affair, and it’s nice to have heard three mostly standalone plays that just happen to feature a particular Doctor and Companion(s) pairing.  I’d love to see a return to the days of alternate Doctors and no big arcs month on month, but maybe that’s just me.  As it is, I’d like to see fewer arcs with no real cause to be there, and more individual releases such as this has been.

Lastly though, as a reintroduction to the Rani, I think it only half works.  It gives us her amorality writ large and some nice scenes to play with alongside Colin Baker’s Doctor, but as I have already said, it’s a story for O’Mara and not Redmond.  As such, we’ll have to wait a while longer to see what her incarnation brings to the table.

Whatever else though, it’s nice to have the Rani back with us, whatever face she decides to wear.

Now, let’s start moaning about Philip Morris again.  How DARE he only return nine episodes! Who does he think he is…? 

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Mark Wright and Cavan Scott

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: November 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“The year is 2163. Ten years since the Daleks invaded the Earth. One year until the Doctor, in his first incarnation, will help bring the occupation to an end. But for now, their reign of terror goes on.

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Peri to Scotland – enslaved, like everywhere else on the planet. But there are rumours of Dalek-free islands off its coast. Places where resistors and refuseniks are coming together, gathering arms and armour, preparing to strike back against the enemy.

When the Doctor falls in with an unlikely group of freedom fighters making that dangerous journey to Orkney, he finds himself trapped – but not only by the Daleks, their robotised henchmen and their human collaborators.

By history.

Because history shows that for another year, resistance is useless...

The rebellion must fail – and as a Time Lord, the Doctor can do nothing to help.”

***

There are certain things that Big Finish do which could be seen as fingerprints across the main range: the return of characters from the past, the use of actors more recently seen in Doctor Who on TV, and sequels to stories from the original 1963-1989 run.

There are more, but these three often stand out, and it is the latter which is present and correct here in Masters of Earth.  Coming straight on the heels of a story that was simultaneously a sequel to Peri and the Piscon Paradox and Mindwarp (or The Trial of a Time Lord if you prefer), we get another sequel, this time to The Dalek Invasion of Earth.  We’ll be ticking the ‘return of characters’ box with the Rani next month, but there is at least a few weeks’ pause between them both.  This time, it feels rather… brave to have sequels so close together.

Written by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, this play starts with a light recap on the last story, though not so much that no newcomers couldn’t jump right in, before we’re plunged into Dalek-invaded Earth and all the horror that entails.  The Doctor wants out, having been here before and ended up integral to the Daleks’ defeat: the web of time has to be maintained, and the usual get-out-of-jail-free clauses which so pepper the series, but of course, things don’t end up like that and before he can stop it, both the Doctor and Peri are involved.  But of course they are.

Before I go any further though: The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

I must confess that my love affair with that tale started rather late in the day, with its DVD release.  I had always liked the Peter Cushing take on the tale, but the TV version had left me cold on VHS… and then we got the DVD, with its incredibly clear sound and remarkably clear picture, and I could suddenly appreciate the drama in a way I had never quite grasped before.  Years later, we got the audiobook recording of the Target novelisation, and the combination of good sound design and CD production, great narration from William Russell, and a stellar adaptation by Terrance Dicks made me fall in love with it all over again… and then! Then we got Big Finish’s own take on the tale’s mythos with An Earthly Child, Relative Dimensions, Lucie Miller and To The Death, all of which were stunning.

It’s fair to say then that I was both hopeful and fearful of this story: Big Finish have previous for doing good things with this setting, but Invasion of Earth is particularly good, so I didn’t want them to mess up.

Scott and Wright are old hands at Big Finish though, and whilst their Project plays concerning the Forge may not have been my cup of tea, I could always recognize that they were well-crafted plays, just not in a genre I especially went for.  Scott has since helmed Iris Wildthyme and I must admit that I was heartened to see their names linked to this play months before: they’re good writers and, as Scott as proven, a safe pair of hands, and perhaps their slightly grittier take on Who would suit the era in which this was set.

I’m going to spoil this review now by revealing my rating now: it’s a nine out of ten.  I don’t want to keep you all in suspense for no good reason.  The truth is, it’s damn close to getting the full ten, but something in particular let it down for me.  Let’s get to that in good time, though.

Despite my preconceptions about this being potentially gritty, Scott and Wright don’t really go down that route, instead telling a good adventure yarn instead, but with an air of hopelessness due to the struggle which the guest cast are undertaking.  The Daleks are brutal, the resistance weaker than they realize, the tension high, and the setting surrounded by familiar Dalek tropes: Varga plants, Robomen, saucers, traitors ready to betray their fellow human… it’s all here.

It doesn’t feel like a slog or box-ticking exercise though, but something that flows nicely and uses the 1960s Dalek trappings well.  It almost should feel tokenistic and cluttered, but no, Scott and Wright prove their worth yet again, with Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant and Nicholas Briggs all giving their all as well, elevating an already good script to higher places still.

What about that one point, though? Why only nine of out ten?

Well… sadly, because another Big Finish cliché, and frankly a Doctor Who cliché through and through, is someone getting irreversibly possessed by an alien creature or parasite, but being able to beat it by thinking really, really hard about it. (“No! No, I won’t become possessed because my mind is too strong!”)

It’s probably just a personal taste thing, but it’s a plot device that irks me a lot.  It makes me wonder how dull a story such as Inferno would have been if to stop becoming a Primoid, all they had to do was believe in themselves.

The trouble here is that it’s a big deal and a major part of the final act, and so, to my mind at least, it cheapens the tension and drama by giving us a fairly lazy plot device to wriggle out of a blind alley.

It’s not a minor quibble but a big one, and yet there is enough good elsewhere for me to still be giving this a firm nine.  It’s a far stronger play than this trilogy’s opener, and once again, the reputation of The Dalek Invasion of Earth remains pure.  Good on Scott and Wright, and good on Big Finish.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Sixth Doctor Overview

Dear diary,

These modern Doctors. Just no sticking power, is there? If I thought the Fifth Doctor era was over quickly, it did nothing to prepare me for this - Colin Baker's only been with us for about a month, and now that's the Sixth Doctor gone, too! This is the first time that I've had to write an overview post before the regeneration has occurred, but I thought I'd let the Sixth Doctor bow out with Colin, rather than with the outfit and a wig in the next episode. 

So, just how has this very short era stacked up against everything that came before it? There's a common conception within Doctor Who fandom that the mid-to-late 1980s are rubbish. When I first took my steps into the world of fandom, it was a fairly strong message that almost gets drummed in to you - everything is great in the 60s and 70s, and the early 80s aren't awful, but don't bother with either Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy because they're rubbish and a taint on the great tapestry of Doctor Who. Actually, though, I've always found a lot to enjoy about this period of the programme's era, and I'd choose to re-watch it sooner than a lot of others!

I'm not entirely blind to its faults, however. The Sixth Doctor stories on the whole, from The Twin Dilemma through to the end of the Trial rated on average 5.77 - which makes it my lowest rated era for any Doctor. I can pinpoint exactly why that is, though, and it's two culprits from Season Twenty-Two. Both Attack of the Cybermen and Timelash averaged just 2.5, bringing them in as my lowest rated stories on average from this entire marathon. Both of them rated only a 2/10 for an episode, and only a handful of other episodes from the first twenty-one years of the programme have done that. Something about them just left me entirely cold, and that's really harmed the era overall. It's perhaps telling that if you were to take out the four episodes that comprise those two tales, the average for the era would be a far nicer 6.25 - a massive improvement.

At the other end of the scale to those two stories, the story I've rated highest for the Sixth Doctor, with a score of 7.5, is The Mark of the Rani, which really captured me right from the word go. A combination of stunning direction coupled with an interesting new villain in the form of the Rani, and a beautiful location really came up trumps. Next in line from this is The Mysterious Planet, coming in with an average score of 7, and then a score of 6.5 for Vengeance on Varos, Revelation of the Daleks, and The Ultimate Foe.

I'm quite pleased to see two of the four Trial of a Time Lord segments so high up the list, there, because it's another season that isn't thought of very highly in general. Terror of the Vervoids came in with an average of 6, while Mindwarp really failed to connect with me and only mustered an average of 5. Taken as a whole across the fourteen episodes, The Trial of a Time Lord garnered 6.07.

If there's one thing to have come out of this era of the programme, it's a realisation of just how good Colin Baker is as the Doctor. I've always rather liked him, and I know he's had something of a reinvention on audio, where people have been better able to appreciate his talents, but he shows so much promise in these two seasons. I genuinely think that Colin's sacking after Season Twenty-Three may well be one of the biggest missed opportunities in Doctor Who - I'd love to see how he would have continued to develop the role as the seasons went by...

...And under a different stewardship. I'm still something of a fan of John Nathan-Turner, but I really do think that it's incomprehensible to take the programme off the air, publicly state that it's no longer as good as it used to be... and then let the same producer and script editor carry on with it! The powers that be now claim that there was no one else to do it, but it just seems so bizarre not to get a new team in to replace the one they felt wasn't working. The events surrounding the end of the season, with Saward's resignation, show that the team was being pushed to breaking point, and it's a real pity that we never got to see Colin shine on screen with a better set of stories around him!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 681: The Ultimate Foe, Episode Two (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Fourteen)

Dear diary,

The problem with doing an epic, 14-part Doctor Who story is that the payoff in the final episode has to be worth paying attention to the preceding weeks. You have to feel as though you've been given adequate entertainment for the time that you've invested in the programme. The problem with this episode in particular, is that it's possibly got the most tortured journey to screen of any episode the programme has ever produced. Forget your Shadas , your Greatest Shows and your TV Movies, they're still in the nursery compared to The Ultimate Foe. Originally scheduled to be written by Robert Holmes, tying up all the elements he started putting in place at the start of this season, it ended up being taken over by Eric Saward when Holmes fell ill and later died. While all of this was going on, Saward and John Nathan-Turner finally came to the end of the road, and Saward left the programme, refusing permission to use the completed script. Ultimately, writing duties were taken over by Pip and Jane Baker, who JN-T felt could provide an adequate episode on time and using sets, actors, and costumes already budgeted for and contracted.

Now, I'm not going to go out and claim that this is a fantastic episode - because it isn't. I am, however, going to claim that it's not a bad one. It's not even the worst episode of the season, as far as I'm concerned, and there's an awful lot crammed in to this episode that I know would have entertained me as a child watching at the time. There's so much in there, that the episode is actually extended from the usual length, to create thirty-minute extravaganza! I'm not going to go in to detail about everything that I've enjoyed here, but in brief; the cliffhanger to yesterday's episode is fantastic, and the resolution here as the Doctor emerges clean from the sand is equally good. The exploding quills. The interaction between the Master and Sabalom Glitz. The fake trial. Even the often ridiculous dialogue has been rather fun, and I can't help saying 'There's nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality' to myself, and I'd imagine it's something that I'll be doing for a while, yet!

I will say that you can tell the difference here between the half of the story written by Robert Holmes - yesterday's episode - and this one. I think being out on the same locations and with the same characters makes it more apparent than it would normally be going from story to story, with completely different settings and different casts. Yesterday's episode was filled with an awful lot of bokum, but today's episode suddenly has people talking as though they're in a science fiction programme - it's especially noticeable with the Doctor during all the beach scenes, because he's not talking properly any more. Don't get me wrong, it sounds perfectly fine coming from the Doctor's mouth (and this Doctor, in particular), but it's not as natural as the lines Holmes gave him.

On the whole, I've rather enjoyed the Trial of a Time Lord season. I won't go in to great detail about the way the story has come out ratings-wise, because we're at the end of another era, and I'll be doing that in my Sixth Doctor Overview post, which will be a post above this one of the Doctor Who Online news page. I will say, however, that I'm not against the idea of the trial format as I know some people are. It doesn't work quite as well as the production team think it does, and I have a feeling that it's largely down to the three main bits of 'evidence' not really filling the roles they're supposed to properly. The concept is a rather good one, but the execution has left a little to be desired, I think. The programme has returned from an 18-month break with a good series, largely, and I think I would have enjoyed it as a kid on first broadcast. It's been bright and colourful, with a Doctor who can be taken to much easier than last year. I don't think I could have asked for much more!

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 680: The Ultimate Foe, Episode One (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Thirteen)

Dear diary,

I don't think I've ever really understood the Matrix in Doctor Who. It seems to be too many different things all at once. It's a whole pocket universe. It's a virtual reality. It's the place where Time Lord consciousness is uploaded when they die. It's a communications network. For the last twelve days, it's been a DVD collection of the Doctor's adventures. In The Deadly Assassin and in this story, it's playing the part of a virtual reality that can be bent to the will of the strongest inhabitant… I just get lost in trying to keep up with it. Today adds an additional complication in that not everything is an illusion in the way the Doctor expects it to be - somethings, like the harpoon thrown at Glitz, are decidedly real!

I'm also confused about the way that you actually enter the Matrix. In this episode, we're introduced to 'the Keeper', who announces that you can only enter the Matrix with the Key of Rassilon, which is always kept in his possession (unlike the Key of Rassilon which featured in The Invasion of Time). He says that people are very rarely allowed to enter the Matrix, and it happens perhaps once a millennia with him blessing and the key. And yet, in The Deadly Assassin, the Doctor simply needed to be wired to a machine to enter the realm, as did Goth, whose equipment wasn't exactly up-to-scratch! We then enter the Matrix here through the 'Seventh Door', which happens to be on this space station (that I can buy, the High Council would have ensured it).

What's lost me about all this is… did the Valeyard actively go in to the Matrix to alter all the footage we've been watching? While the Doctor was off reviewing the events of Terror of the Vervoids, was the Valeyard skulking around in a Matrix-version of the Hyperion III, altering events behind the Doctor? And if you only need someone to physically enter the Matrix once every thousand years or so, then why do you need to have a minimum of seven doors? Surely that's just Inviting a leak of the contents?

Then we've got the revelation that the secrets Glitz was hunting in The Mysterious Planet were leaked scientific advancements from the Matrix itself. Right. Okay. So now, the Matrix is also a Dropbox file, where the Time Lords can store all their scientific information, when they're not slipping in to the pocket dimension to play a game of cat-and-mouse? Please tell me that I'm not the only one who can't quite wrap my head around all of this?

All that said, I do like the idea that Glitz is trading in Gallifreyan secrets. There's something about it which feels again as though it could fit quite neatly in to my vision of the Time War drawing closer, with the Daleks trying to hack in to the Time Lord's great big databank, and the 'lesser species' all flocking to the breach to try and swipe some of the secrets for themselves. I've mentioned before how much I enjoy these odd little hints of Gallifreyan mythology to seep in from time to time, and this is a perfect example. I also love that the current High Council is so utterly corrupt, and that they'd made a deal with the Valeyard to set up this whole trial, and to use the Doctor as a bit of a scapegoat.

It then raises the interesting question of which High Council this may be. Is it the current one, back on Gallifrey? I'm almost tempted to think of it as being a future High Council (possibly even the one we see in The End of Time, headed by Rassilon himself?), who have opted to come back in time and put the Doctor on trial in this particular incarnation because he's a) the most violent of all the Doctors up to the point where the Time War kicks off, and b) the next Doctor is the one who helps to kick it all off, when he blows up Skaro! There may be a bit of fudging to be done in the next episode, but I think it's a theory which can just about hang together, so I think I'll be accepting it into my own 'head canon' from now on!

Today is probably the best moment to actually discuss the Valeyard, too. There's been lots of talk about him within fandom in the last year or so, with it being revealed that the Matt Smith incarnation of the Doctor is the final one in his current life-cycle. The general topic that keeps being raised is that we should have therefore seen the Valeyard come in to being when David Tennant became Matt Smith, with some people actively suggesting that the Meta-crisis Doctor could well be the birth of the Valeyard, because it fits in with the timeline. Actually, it's simply that these people aren't listening to what's said in this episode! I saw lots of complaining that the Valeyard is supposed to appear between the Doctor's twelfth and thirteenth incarnations, but that's not what the Master actually says - he specifically describes it as being between the Doctor's 'twelfth and final' incarnations. Now, at the time, this was intended to mean between twelve and thirteen, but in hindsight, not knowing that the Doctor's life has been extended with a new regeneration cycle, it opens up one or two more interesting possibilities. For what it's worth, I don't think that we'll ever see the Valeyard in the programme again, but I don't think we've missed the boat recently in the way that some people seem to claim!

I really do love the way that the revelation of the Valeyard's origins comes about, too. It's not made a bit thing of, there's not massive reveal, it's simply slipped out in the middle of the Master's sentence, and then he carries on talking. That works so beautifully, because it leaves you almost not listening to the rest of the conversation - you're too busy trying to work out if you've understood what was said properly or not. The Doctor then picks up on it a moment later to help confirm your suspicions. It's very cleverly done, and I'm glad that in his final episode, Robert Holmes could slip in something as beautifully executed as that.

The Doctor himself is on fine form again today. During The Mysterious Planet, I picked out his speech about stars dying as a real highlight moment of his era, and I think that we've got another one today. It comes as he decrees the assembled Time Lords in the courtroom for their part in events on Ravalox;

THE DOCTOR

In all my travellings throughout the universe I have battled against evil, against power-mad conspirators. I should have stayed here. The oldest civilisation, decadent, degenerate and rotten to the core. Ha! Power-mad conspirators, Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, they're still in the nursery compared to us. Ten million years of absolute power, that's what it takes to be really corrupt.

It's such a grand speech, and it works especially well for this most grandiose of Doctors - I think a few of the earlier incarnations could have pulled it off (Pertwee and Tom Baker especially), but it seems very fitting for the Sixth Doctor, and it gives Colin one more chance to shine before he bows out tomorrow…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 679: Terror of the Vervoids, Episode Four (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Twelve)

Dear diary,

I'm sorry, but the Doctor deserves to lose the trial after that, I'm afraid. What on earth was he thinking, showing Terror of the Vervoids in his defence? I mean, sure, the Matrix has been tampered with to make him look even more guilty, but it's still a story in which the bodies pile up (am I right in thinking that there's only about two characters left alive at the end?), and he does finish up by committing genocide! I can take his point about not letting a single Vervoid leaf touch the soil of a planet, but surely he must have realised how that might look to a court who suspect him of being a violent meddler, and when he's facing down a prosecutor who will turn anything against him? I mean.. come on!

He seems to have two arguments about this adventure - that he becomes a better person in the future (and, in fairness, he's a lot more like the traditional 'Doctor' in this story than he was through Season Twenty-Two), and that he was specifically summoned to the Hyperion III, and asked to help. Well, right, okay, I can sort of see the argument he's making with that last one, but surely there must be another example of him being specifically asked to help with something, if that's enough to get him off these charges? Why not show one of the many times that the Time Lords have swanned in an asked him to go and meddle? Or - even better - the time that the White Guardian - a being whose authority exceeds the Time Lords - chose him to undertake the most dangerous mission in the universe, because he was deemed to be the most capable? It just seems like he's really not doing himself any favours by choosing this particular story in his favour, and I'm actually a bit annoyed about that! It would have worked better if the Doctor had been shown this evidence by the Valeyard - an example that if he's left unchecked, then in the future he will go so far as to commit genocide!

You can probably tell that this has wound me up a bit. It just seems so stupid of the Doctor to have chosen this one to show in his favour, and then seem so pleased about it! If the charge here is that he's been meddling in the affairs of other planets, then surely this isn't the best example of showing that you don't always do that! I think he's trying to make the same argument that he did in The War Games - that sometimes getting stuck in and fighting for the side of 'good' is better than standing by and letting evil take control - but he's not actually said anything along those lines yet! It's simply the only way I can make sense of what he's thinking with these four episodes!

Oh, but that's only one side of it, and I have to admit that I've enjoyed Terror of the Vervoids on the whole. I think that stripped from its Trial of a Time Lord trappings (and despite what I said the other day, I think it actually could be done - I suppose we don't need to see who destroyed the communications room, only that it is destroyed when Mel and co enter to send a message), this could be a fairly nice little story, probably condensed down to three episodes once all the courtroom stuff has been removed. I'm assuming that someone has tried this type of edit before? Surely? The only real problem that I can foresee is that the Doctor explains how he knows one of the Mogarians isn't real in the trial, but otherwise…

And now we're off on to the final couple of Sixth Doctor episodes! It does seem to have come around ever so quickly this season - even though we're an episode longer than we were for Season Twenty-Two, you really do feel the fact that the episodes are back down to the regular 23 minute length. I vaguely recall the ending of Trial not making a great deal of sense when I watched it before - much like the whole Matrix sequence of The Deadly Assassin, I suppose - so here's hoping that it stands up better this time, because I'd dearly love to see Colin go out of the programme on a high…

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 678: Terror of the Vervoids, Episode Three (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Eleven)

Dear diary,

I'm a little bit disappointed with the actual Vervoid creatures in this one. The tension and menace was effectively built up over the first two episodes, but now that the killer plants are awake and carrying out their own nefarious schemes, they're just a bit rubbish, aren't they? I mean, there's lots about them that should be interesting to me (an especially so to a young audience) - they've got the ability to poison you, they can fire a noxious gas from their 'mouths', and they're humanoid plants! It's a concept that the programme has been playing with since right back in the 1960s, and has already done very well in The Seeds of Doom, but here it's just being done so poorly.

It all starts from the moment we first hear one of the creatures speak. It's a low, rasping, whispery voice, the kind that has previously been so effective for the Ice Warriors and the Zygons, but here it's being applied to such mundane dialogue. The first line we hear a Vervoid say is 'help me with this', as he drags a body! It's hardly the most menacing thing to ever come out of a monster's mouth in Doctor Who! Later on, they also get such stand-out lines as ''congratulations must be delayed', and they get to stand around discussing their plans like… well, like any other bargain-basement monster. We've spent two episodes building up to the reveal of these creatures, and two very good cliffhangers that has led to them, and they just mill around as though they've something better to do. It's a massive anti-climax, and I can't help but feel a little annoyed by it.

As for the design of the Vervoids… it's something of a long-standing joke in Doctor Who fandom that they look a little bit like genitalia, but that no one can ever decide which bit! Again, on paper they should be quite a good concept - humanoid plants which are more humanoid than either the Krynoids of the Varga Plants - but they just come across looking like actors stuck in somewhat ill-designed monster costumes. I don't think it's helped by the fact that they're being given so little of interest to do, so you spend more time than you perhaps should looking at the costumes and spotting the flaws!

There's so much potential for a tight, tension-filled mystery here, with a finite number of characters all trapped together in a confined space as they start to get bumped off one-by-one, starting - it seems - with an investigator… there's amoral experiments, and killer plants, and as if all that wasn't exciting enough, the space ship is now being plunged right into the jaws of a black hole! All the ingredients are here for a great story, but they just aren't hanging together for me.

People have often said that this is the segment of the Trial season which would work the best being completely stripped of the courtroom segments, but I'm honestly not sure how it would work. I do think that they'e becoming boring and repetitive again (there's one today which seems to be there purely to remind us that Michael Jayston and Lynda Bellingman have been contracted for 14 weeks), but at the same time, there's a few which are absolutely vital. We've gone beyond simply having the Doctor claim that things have been 'tweaked' slightly to alter the facts, and we've got him reacting today to a whole scene - himself destroying the communications array - which he claims never happened. With so much in this story possibly not being quite as it seems, would it be all that feasible to do a re-edit?

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 677: Terror of the Vervoids, Episode Two (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Ten)

Dear diary,

There's something that I don't understand about Terror of the Vervoids, and it's the way that this 'evidence' fits in with the rest of the trial. The Valeyard presents two cases against the Doctor, as evidence of the way he meddles in the affairs of other peoples and planets. Okay, I can go along with that, although I'm not sure that he's actually chosen the best examples of such things (surely showing something like Frontios would be far more damning if it's the case that all adventures are recorded in the Matrix - after all, there the Doctor claims that it's expressly forbidden for him to even be there, and although he feigns protest, he's soon helping the colony out), and I'm also not sure why he chose to show one example that needed careful bleeping to stop High Council meddling from being seen, and another which shows the High Council directly influencing events by ensuring Ykarnos can kill everyone…

No, it's these four episodes which really confuse me. The Doctor has chosen to present an example of his adventures… from his own future. I think I can just about buy that the Matrix may have scanned such things (though if its recorded adventures that have yet to happen to the Doctor, then shouldn't the Valeyard be showing the War Doctor blowing up their own planet as his most damning evidence?), but I really don't understand why the Doctor has chosen this specific adventure to make his case! In the first Episode, even without the bits of the adventure which have been altered, the Doctor agrees when someone comments that the bodies start piling up as soon as he arrives! I'd also like to touch on this idea that the Matrix has been tampered with. Throughout the previous nine episodes, it's been clearly stated on several occasions that the Matrix simply cannot lie. The Doctor claims that events aren't being played here quite how he remembers them. He claims that they've been specifically edited to paint him in a bad light. In both examples (and at least the first of those is brought up on several occasions during both The Mysterious Planet and Mindwarp), the Valeyard and the Inquisitor point out to the Doctor that it's utter nonsense, as the Matrix can't be edited in such a way.

Then, in today's episode, the Valeyard accuses the Doctor of that type of meddling with the footage… and the Inquisitor points out to the Doctor how serious it would be if he were doing that! How come we've suddenly gone from it being an absurd notion to being something that's just frowned upon? The Doctor's claim that events being shown aren't quite as they were before was brought up as recently as yesterday, so it's not simply Pip and Jane Baker misunderstanding things…! I don't think I've lost track along the way, but I think the production team might well have done. I'll be keeping a close eye on the remainder of the Trial season, to see if this is now a permanent shift in attitude towards editing the Matrix. I'm also half wondering why they didn't include as a part of the Doctor's defence a flashback to lots of other stories, in which his meddling has been for the greater good. An annual flashback was common during the Peter Davison era, but this feels purpose built for one!

I'm a little saddened in today's episode that the direction isn't always as fantastic as it was yesterday. We seem to lurch from being really very good (the continuation of the explosions and sparks from the cliffhanger), to the very bad (the CSO starfield. It's not so much the starfield that doesn't work, it's the way that it's cropped out around Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford's hair! Yikes!). By the time we reach today's cliffhanger, things have perked up considerably, and the make-up of the half-human-half-plant creature is one of the programme's more successful alien prosthetics! I'm hoping things settle back down tomorrow into the 'good' camp! 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 676: Terror of the Vervoids, Episode One (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Nine)

Dear diary,

Largely inspired by the gorgeous staging and camera work during today's cliffhanger, I watched on in the credits eagerly to see who the director was. It's Chris Clough's first work on Doctor Who, and I'm pleased to know that he'll be back for several more outings over the next few seasons. That final shot today is beautiful, as Mel's scream fades into the closing theme, and the camera pulls back past sparks and explosions, and giving us the brief look at something bursting out from the pods… this sequence wouldn't be out of place at the height of the Philip Hinchcliffe era, when the programme is supposed to be 'scary'. Not many of the cliffhangers during The Trial of a Time Lord are anything other than a close up of the Doctor's face, so it's nice to see that this one has used the break from the current norm to do something really interesting and different!

I think it's helped, too, by the fact that the Hydroponics Centre set is so beautifully done, and the same can be said for the hold outside. Some people write off all 1980s Doctor Who as being poorly lit like the Myrka sequences from Warriors of the Deep, but this is the perfect example that the programme can still get it right in this era! This episode is also a good one for showing off the full sale of the trial room setting - it's another huge set, and when shot from interesting angles, there's lots of little details to pick out. Sadly, not all the sets in this story are as effective, and I don't really much care for the main passenger quarters of the space liner. I think they're supposed to look a bit cheap and tacky, but they come across as terribly dated now, too. There's one or two shots where I can sort of see what they were aiming for (with some nice shots of the stars passing by the windows overhead), but I'm afraid that I'm not being won over by them.

Today's episode also sees the introduction of a new companion for the Doctor… and I think it's fair to say that it's the strangest introduction we've ever seen for a new regular to the programme. Forget Dodo bursting in and giving us her life story, here, Mel just happens to be stood around with the Doctor in the TARDIS, forcing him to work out on an exercise bike! Something I've not missed this season is the lengthy TARDIS scenes which so dominated Season Twenty-Two. We've not had any sight of the Console room now since Timelash, which has been a refreshing break. When we catch up with this pair in there today, it feels as though it should be a fairly fun scene, with the Doctor and his companion getting on with something a bit more mundane in between adventures, but…

Well, I just don't care about Mel! Not yet, anyway. Were this the Doctor and Peri opening the episode with this scene, I think I'd be more willing to buy it - they're clearly written and acted as two people who have spent a lot of time together and become great friends, but because this is the first time we ever set eyes on the girl, it's very hard to muster up much enthusiasm towards her! That said, her enthusiasm is infectious, and it's hard not to quite like her when she sets off exploring. She clearly works very well with Colin's Doctor, too, which is quite fun, and they're already at the stage here that Peri took until The Mysterious Planet to reach in the Doctor's attitude! 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 675: Mindwarp, Episode Four (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Eight) 

Dear diary, 

I've never been overly fond of Peri's exit from Doctor Who, in either this form, or the alternative that gets offered during the end of the Trial season. I'm not entirely sure what doesn't sit right about it with me (it certainly not the fact that a companion dies, because I think that works wonders in the cases of Katarina, Sara, and Adric), but I've always thought that it stick out as simply being wrong somehow. 

Watching the episode today, though, I can't help but realise just how effective it is! I mean... it's brutal. I think the moment that it really starts to turn and you suddenly realise how much you fear for Peri is when Crozier orders her head shaved, and it feels so out of nowhere, and something that we can relate to so easily, especially given that Peri's hair has been allowed to grow out this season, fuller than we've seen it before. 

It then also shocked me when we cut back to the laboratory a little while later, and it's been done! I know from seeing the story before that Nicola Bryant goes out wearing a bald cap, but I'd sort of forgotten just how effectively it works, and I love that they don't make a big deal of it. We cut back to the action, and Peri's laying there bald. If anything, I think that's more scary than when she sits up at the end and starts talking in a deep, scary voice. No matter how much I'm enjoying it here, it still doesn't sit quite right in my mind, and it sticks out too much as a companion departure - not necessarily in a good way. 

People often complain that the effect of this ending gets entirely undermined come the end of the season, when it transpires that she's actually living happily as a warrior queen alongside Yrcanos, and I'm sure I'll make my own mind up about that when I get there. That said, I can't help but think it's been clearly signposted throughout the story - especially in these last couple of episodes! I'm sure Colin Baker tells the story that they only addend the 'happy ending' for Peri later on when he wondered what was real and what had been faked in the trial, but I think it's clearly set up that Peri should be going off to rule with this man! Oh, I don't think it's something that she would ever do by choice, and she'd never purposely give up life in the TARDIS for that particular fate, but I don't think it feels too out of place in retrospect. 

Brian Blessed has actually impressed a great deal throughout this story - far more than I was expecting him to! I mused the other day that you hire him to simply be Brian Blessed on screen, and while there's plenty of that on display in Mindwarp, he actually has lots of rather nice little moments alongside Nicola Bryant in particular, and I'm very impressed with him on the whole. 

Today's episode has continued to take the aspects I was finding scary yesterday - the Doctor not being able to remember what happened - and ramp them up a gear, making things even scarier in the process. I love (and I can't stress that enough, love) the way that the TARDIS appears in the corridor right in the middle of all the chaos, and the Doctor is compelled to walk backwards in to the box. There's something genuinely scary about the Doctor being taken away at just the moment everything comes to a head, and that works so well. I think my only slight criticism about this sequence is that the chaos isn't quite enough for me! You've got lots of supporting artists spinning around in corridors, but I want explosions and people tearing the set apart! Really up the stakes! 

So with that, we've said goodbye to Peri, and we're off on the next stage of the programme's life. I think I like how much you couldn't predict Peri's departure from the way she joins the series back in Planet of Fire, and I'm not sure if I can remember the last time the programme had been shaken up this much between a companion's arrival and departure, either. We're deep in to the period of Doctor Who that many people consider to be the weakest, now, and the introduction of Mel in the next episode is something that many consider to be another step towards death. If I can enjoy her as much as I've enjoyed all the other things recently that I'm not supposed to... I think we're in for a treat! 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 674: Mindwarp, Episode Three (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Seven) 

Dear diary, 

The thing I'm liking most about Mindwarp is the idea that the Doctor can't really remember anything that's happening here. There's something genuinely unsettling about the moment when he first interrupts the episode to tell the court that he can't remember what he's seeing - and Colin plays it as calm and a little bit scared. He shouts and gestures again only moments later, but suddenly it's because he's genuinely worried by the event,s not because he's putting on a show for the sake of the trial. I love that even he isn't entirely sure that this isn't just the way he behaves, and when he's trying to convince the Inquisitor of his innocence, it comes across as the man trying to convince himself more than anything. This is then all turned back on him. when he does get back the odd pocket of memories, and the Valeyard points out how convenient it is for him to remember now... yeah, this is probably my favourite thing about the trial so far. 

Sadly, though, the episode itself isn't grabbing me at all. I'm getting on better with it now than on previous viewings, and I actually understand better what's going on this time (I'd somehow convinced myself that the sandy-coloured Mentor in this story was a separate character to either Sil or Kiv, and forgotten that he was Kiv's replacement body), but I'm still not enjoying it half as much as I did with The Mysterious Planet. I'm beginning to wonder if it may just be that I don't get on with Philip Martin's style of writing. Vengeance on Varos is often hailed as a total 'classic', and yet I'm not as fussed on it as some people seem to be, and while I've often seen this episode trumpeted as being the best of the Trial season, it's leaving me completely cold! 

A few years ago, I did a different kind of Doctor Who marathon with my friend Nick Mellish, who provides many of the Big Finish audio reviews here on Doctor Who Online. We made our way through all of the Paul McGann audio plays from Storm Warning through To the Death, which comprised ten years of adventures for the Eighth Doctor. We wrote our thoughts about each episode and emailed them to each other, eventually putting together a book which followed the marathon. For a brief period, the Eighth Doctor's companion Charley ends up going off on travels with the Sixth Doctor, and we dutifully followed her for a few weeks, in adventures with Daleks, and Draconians, and even the odd Kroton or two. 

Once we'd finished the marathon, and started to get withdrawal symptoms from not hearing a new episode every day, we decided to do it all over again with a different Doctor. The Sixth incarnation seemed to be the obvious choice, having already been through a few adventures and really enjoying them, and we decided that we'd start with the season of 'lost' stories from the originally planned Season Twenty-Three. Over the last five years or so, Big Finish have dramatised lots of stories originally written for the show and at some point left behind, but when they did this first set, it was something of a novelty, picking up stories that have grown up their own reputation within fandom. Stories like The Nightmare Fair, which would have pitted the Doctor and Peri against the Celestial Toymaker on a holiday to Blackpool, The Hollows of Time, a rematch between the Doctor and the Gravis (and the Master), and The Space Whale, which has been a 'work in progress' story for so many Doctors that it's hard to keep track. And then there's Mission to Magnus. 

Magnus is the story originally proposed by Philip Martin for Season Twenty-Three, long before the format of the trial was imposed. It was to feature the return of Sil, alongside the Ice Warriors, and has always been one of the 'lost' tales that people know a little bit more about. But we didn't really much care for it. We never managed to finish our Sixth Doctor marathon, as real life got in the way slowly, but looking back over the entries wrote to each other for that story... I was mostly just left a bit bored by it, and it's perhaps telling that I don't mention Sil anywhere in my write up. He obviously made very little impact on me! Nick was somewhat less forgiving, because of the way that Martin's scripts tend to treat (and talk about) their female characters. Thinking back to the Eighth Doctor book, neither of us were very keen on Martin's The Creed of the Kromon, either (that's putting it mildly), and so I think this story has decided it once and for all for me - I simply cannot get in to his stories. Here's hoping that the one final episode may well be enough to bring things around...  

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 673: Mindwarp, Episode Two (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Six) 

Dear diary, 

I seem to be saying it an awful lot of late (he's not around for long - I'm glad I can make the most of it here and now), but Colin Baker really is fantastic, isn't he? He's got that perfect quality for an actor to play the Doctor, where he can salvage anything, and you really perk up when he's on the screen - and not just because you're looking directly at that coat! In this episode, when tasked with playing a Doctor who's brain has been fried, and isn't quite acting himself, even by this incarnation's standards, he really relishes it and runs with it - there's a few shades of Troughton-as-an-androgum in the performance, and I'm becoming more and more saddened that we've only these two seasons of Colin to watch. I've heard various Big Finish adventures with him in over the years, but I have a feeling that I'll be seeking them out a bit more thoroughly once this marathon is over. People talk about the fact that he had a renaissance on audio, but I love him here and now on screen! 

It's perhaps a good mark of his skill that he's able to stand out so much in this episode... when Brian Blessed has been woken up (oh how tempting to simply write that name in capitals...)! Blessed has become something of a national treasure over the years, and you can sort of see here that he's already started to become a parody of himself. That's not a criticism, mind, because Blessed has managed to go so far into being his own parody, that it's no longer even that - it's just what you want! Philip Martin has said in the past that he was thinking of Blessed for the part and was overjoyed to hear that John Nathan-Turner was thinking along the same lines, and it's not hard to see why, is it? King Yrcanos has been written to be played by Brian Blessed, and you almost get the sense that they've stuck him into a costume, placed him on the set, and told him to just get on and do whatever he wants! 

The actual story today is interesting me a little more than it did yesterday, but only marginally. I can't honestly claim to be enjoying it. Oh, there's lots I am liking here - those aforementioned performances, along with the sets on the whole (there's a story that Colin Baker saw the invoice for that big round door in the set and loudly declared to the rehearsal room that it cost more for these four episodes than Nicola Bryant did! You can almost believe it, though, because the door is a great piece of set, and I'm surprised the cost wasn't deferred by being used lots more in Doctor Who after this, like the modern series does with particularly expensive sets! - on the whole, though, I'm just not all that invested on the events here. 

I wonder if part of it may be that I know Peri will be bowing out in a couple of days, and I've never been fond of her exit (either of them)? There's a vague sense of simply wanting to get that over with, so we can bring in Mel and start the programme off on another new phase. I'm also having what I can only describe as 'Sabalom-Glitz- Withdrawl-Symptoms'... none of the supporting cast in this story are anywhere near as entertaining as Glitz and Dibber! When I was watching Vengeance on Varos, I found myself being rather taken by Sil, and he was often the thing I was enjoying most about the story. Here, though, he's simply boring me, and I can't really decide why. I think it's a combination of the costume not working quite as well here as it did back then (there's a few instances where you can see it's clearly slipped down his face a little), and Nabil Shaban seeming to give a slightly different performance, which just isn't quite working for me. Maybe being surrounded by all these other people in charge of him is lessening the character a bit, where he could be so thoroughly unlikeable the last time around, coming across as being 'the boss'?  

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 672: Mindwarp, Episode One (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Five) 

Dear diary, 

More than once over the years, I've heard Mindwarp described as being the best segment of the Trial season, and yet when I've seen the full series before, I really didn't much care for it, and think I remember it as the opposite end of the scale - as the weakest of the stories here! I'm not sure what it was about the story that I didn't like on the last occasion, but I think I can guess from watching this episode; I'm just a little bit bored. 

I'm not even entirely sure why that should be, because there's certainly a lot going on in this episode. You've got an alien world that's looking very alien (more on which in a minute), two 'monsters' attacking our regulars, plus the regulation guards chasing after them and taking them as the 'villains' in the situation, the return of Sil, and lots of action in the trial room itself. The episode is positively bursting with things happening, but almost all of them are failing to grab my attention. The big selling point is surely the return of Sil to the programme, having featured in Vengeance on Varos last season... but that story didn't excite me in the way most people enjoy it, either, so I'm not terribly bothered by his return! 

The one area which I do rather like is the planet's surface. A sea of pink, which washes against rocks of blue under a green sky... and all in the most florescent hue they could possibly achieve. It's ridiculously garish, and incredibly of its time, but I'm really rather impressed with it. This feels like the programme really going out of its way to present us with a truly alien world for the first time since... well, in quite some while, anyway. Often enough, alien planets in the series have settled into being a standard quarry/jungle/only seen from the inside/studio set, and while this is shot out on a simple beach, the effects added in post production really make it look like something a bit special. When you compare this to some of the original location footage in the extras on the DVD... you can see how bland it might have looked otherwise! Did it stand out as much on first broadcast as being this garish, or did it just seem fittingly 'of the time'? 

I seem to be flip-flopping in regards to the actual trial scenes as each episode goes by. A few days ago, I started to find them irritating, before Colin Baker giving a rather brilliant performance managed to win them back around for me. Today, they seem to be perhaps a little over-bearing - I'm sure there's more in this episode than any of the others so far? We seemed to be cutting back and forth every few scenes. 

I'm starting to wonder if I may not mind this so much were we given a bit more going on in each of them; there much have been four or five so far this season which boil down to the Doctor asking if what we're seeing is relevant, and the Inquisitor musing that she's been wondering the same. If there's not much to actually say in these moments, then would they perhaps be better left out? Or, at least, confined to the start and the end of episodes, if they need to be included to remind us of the on-going narrative of the season. I thought that the opening of this episode, for example, was rather good, summing up the story we've just watched, reminding us that there's still some lingering questions about it, and then setting the scene for the next adventure. It's only when we start popping back for the odd line here and there that I start to lose patience... I bet all those supporting artists in Time Lord collars got bored of it, too, having to swivel back and forth on those chairs every three minutes! 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 671: The Mysterious Planet, Episode Four (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Four) 

Dear diary, 

I've said it before during this story, but I really do love Sabalom Glitz. What's surprised me is how much I've enjoyed him being partnered up with Dibber - I' always thought of Dibber as being a weaker link to the character. They're absolutely brilliant together, and it's a bit of a shame that we don't get to see them paired up again in any other stories. There's just so much to love about them, and a certain amount of that needs to be placed at Robert Holmes' door, filling their mouths with plenty of dialogue which has made me smile and laugh almost all the way through their scenes. I'm genuinely hugely surprised that the pair haven't been brought back in any of the Big Finish audios - Tony Selby and Glen Murphy are still working actors, and surely I can't be the only one who would love to hear them back against either the Sixth or Seventh Doctors? I'm going to cross my fingers tightly, because I think this may be my number one thing that I'd love to hear happen! 

These two aren't the only ones to impress me in The Mysterious Planet, either. I've already praised Colin Baker's performance once in the last few days, but it really does bear repeating again here - he's really a very good Doctor. Today's highlight from him comes in the form of his courtroom outburst, in which he riles against the Valeyard and the situation he's found himself in. It's a very over-the-top performance, full of gusto and bravado... and it's perfect for the moment. This incarnation of the Doctor, perhaps more than any other, is prone to being a bit theatrical, and he shows that perfectly here. What makes it all the more compelling is the sheer rage underneath it all. Colin completely goes for the scene with all that he can muster, and it's simply electrifying to watch. We're drawing ever closer to his all-too-brief time in the programme, now, and I really am going to miss him when he's gone. I'd so dearly love to see what this man could have done with the part given a few more years to expand and grow with the character. 

We're also getting nearer to the departure of Robert Holmes from the show, with this being his final complete story for the Doctor. He'll be back again for Episode Thirteen of the Trial season, but we won't be getting any more full stories from the man. Before I’d embarked on a big Doctor Who marathon, writers were largely interchangeable in my head. There was no real sense of ‘[X] writes very good stories’ while ‘[Y] writes very bad ones’, I just had a list of names floating around who had written stories at some point. Even then, though, I knew of Robert Holmes being considered the ‘bed tot the best’. So many other writers for the programme over the years have singled him out as the man who knew how to do it, so it was hard to miss his contribution. I couldn’t have told you much about my own thought’s to Holmes’ stories, because frankly they’d all blended in to the big pot of ‘Doctor Who tales’ in my head. 

But actually, having now sat through all of his contributions to the Doctor Who mythos, I can quite clearly see why he's considered to be such a luminary. Several of his stories have ended up towards the upper end of my ratings since he first cropped up in The Krotons, and I’m going to miss him being a part of the programme. 

And with that, we move on to the second segment of the Trial season - Mindwarp. From a previous viewing, I think of these next four episodes as being my least favourite of the season, but I've found plenty of new things to enjoy about The Mysterious Planet, so I'm hoping that the same will be true as we move forward... 

While I'm here, a quick note about how I'm rating The Trial of a Time Lord. You may have noticed that I'm referring to the different segments by their commonly-agreed-upon titles - The Mysterious Planet, Mindwarp, Terror of the Vervoids, and The Ultimate Foe. I'm really doing this because it makes it easier to discuss them here without you having to think about which part of the Trial, say, Episode Six might be, or Episode Ten. When it comes to rating the story as a whole, I'll be including it as one story (it is, after all, one big story - the credits say so!), but including the scores for the individual segments, too, so we can better see how they fit in to the Colin Baker era on the whole. And to make the 'average rating' list for his era a bit longer - it would be horribly short otherwise! 

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Nev Fountain

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: October 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“Once, long ago, in a land of monsters and corridors, a fair maiden was captured, and placed in a deep sleep.

She was used to being captured, and she had a hero who rescued her on just such occasions. But this time the hero never came.

And the fair maiden slept on.

Eventually, a King rescued the maiden, and made her his bride, which many wise old women might tell you is just another way of capturing fair maidens.

And still the fair maiden slept on.

Then, the hero had another stab at rescuing the maiden from her prison, but he was too late. And, more importantly, he had forgotten the rules of fairy tales.

He didn’t slay the dragon.”

***

It feels like this story has been waiting to be told by Big Finish for a while now.  Their fascination with a post-Trial of a Time Lord Peri goes way back to Her Final Flight, a subscriber special and one of those oft-forgotten plays which I always enjoy whenever I revisit it.  We then change ranges and ping over to The Companion Chronicles with Peri and the Piscon Paradox, which is every bit as good as reputation would have it.  Its writer, Nev Fountain, clearly really cares about Peri as a character and has given her ultimate fate a lot of thought, and Nicola Bryant has rarely been as good as she is throughout that play, squeezing the script for every drop of drama, heartache and laughter she can.  It felt like a decent conclusion to things: open-ended enough to maybe exploit further down the line, but with the option to simply move on now and leave things as they are. (I am desperately trying to not spoil that play here!)

We then switch ranges again, this time to the Main or Monthly Range, depending on what it’s being called this week, and have the Sixth Doctor travelling with Flip, but his heart(s) belong to someone else: Peri.  He simply has to see her; to know how she is doing.  It was clear from the very off how that trilogy was going to end: farewell Flip, prepare for Peri.

And now we are here with The Widow’s Assassin: Peri is back, Flip is gone, the Sixth Doctor is patiently waiting for things to click into place, and Nev Fountain is back in the hot seat, writing the follow-up-in-all-but-name to Piscon Paradox.

The first question is: is it as good? The answer, predictably, is no.  Let’s be honest though, it was never going to be.  Peri and the Piscon Paradox is about as perfect a play as Nev Fountain, and indeed Big Finish, have ever done, so it was going to be hard.

The second question is: is it satisfying for Peri? The answer is… debatable.  For Peri with regards to lines/action here and Bryant’s performance? Yes, it’s very good indeed.  As a continuation of her tale? Not so much.  It takes a rather easy way out, a way which avoids future complicated arguments between the Doctor and Peri about how things ended between them, and whilst that is perhaps understandable, it still feels like it robs us of some weighty drama further down the line.  It just doesn’t feel right or fair after all this time and fanfare.

The third question is: is it a good play? The answer is yes, it is good.  Not brilliant, but higher than average.  It is good.  Fountain is great at writing comedy and there are some genuine laugh-aloud moments across Widow’s four episodes, often in the guise of the hapless prison guards who so ineffectively guard the Doctor.  Halfway between the two guards from children’s television classic Maid Marian and her Merry Men and Evans from The Web of Fear, they sing whenever featured, and a whole host of alien delegates do likewise.

As with Piscon Paradox, there are some twisty-turny plot elements involving time here as well, though I must confess that I saw some of the larger twists coming a while off this time.  I think, in fairness to Fountain, that it is perhaps the result of a lot of twisty-turny plot elements involving time being prominent in the show on TV in recent years, not to mention in Big Finish plays such as Dark Eyes 2, The Light at the End and, indeed, Peri and the Piscon Paradox itself.  It just makes them slightly easier to spot than would otherwise be the case.

Still, Peri is back, and Bryant seems to be having fun alongside Colin Baker.  We’ve Daleks coming up next and the return of the Rani, so things look promising.  Even better, the irksome cliffhanger ending regarding Flip is resolved with an off-hand comment near the end of this play, which genuinely had me cheering: the best move Big Finish have made for a while now!

I am not going to pretend I thought this was the best play ever; in some ways, it disappointed me a bit.  It’s not Fountain’s finest, nor is it Peri’s, the Doctor’s or Big Finish’s.  It is, though, another decent monthly release after the recent Seventh Doctor/Ace/Hector-Hex trilogy, and that bodes well for the rest of 2014.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...

Day 670: The Mysterious Planet, Episode Three (The Trial of a Time Lord, Episode Three) 

Dear diary, 

I'm somewhat surprised just how much I'm enjoying the design in this segment of the trial. I've often looked back on The Mysterious Planet as being just a little bit... rubbish, when it came to the look of the piece. I think I was mostly thinking of two areas - the set of the underground areas, which comes across as very plastic-looking, and the design of the cell in which our heroes find themselves locked up on the surface, because there's a few behind-the-scenes photos of that set which make it look very poorly painted. Actually, though, I'm wrong on both counts. Well, sort of. The cell actually comes across as much better on screen than it does being seen as a set in a studio, and it even looks rather good when the L1 robot is crashing through the wall to kidnap the Doctor. All the underground areas do still look as plastic-y as I remember them being... but I think that actually acts in its favour, giving the set its own unique feel. 

The piece of design I'm most keen on, though, is the big L3 robot - the Immortal One himself. There's something about the sheer stature of the creature which makes it look imposing, especially when he's towering over the two human servants in his control centre. It seems strange to think that this story comes more than ten years after the last big robot like this (in, um, Robot), and I think this one is possibly better. Oh, don't get me wrong, the design of the K1 robot is gorgeous, but it's perhaps that bit too designed. That doesn't take away from it on screen, but it doesn't really come across as being scary. The L3, in darker tones of grey, and with that big pointy 'head' really seems to be a bit more frightening, and I rather like that. 

I'm not so sure that I like the L1 as much, but that's possibly because it's in competition with this bigger older-brother. Do we actually see the L2 at all in this story? I don't think we do. Wonder what it looks like? I've mentioned it a few times in this marathon so far, but I'm a big fan of vintage Blue Peter, and the clip on this story's DVD, introducing the entire Trial season is a particular favourite of all the who-related segments. We get to see how both of this story's robots are controlled ('people power'), and I think it even helps to improve my admiration for the L3 - the poor controller trapped inside the costume has to peer out through the insignia on the chest, which helps to really sum up just how tall it is! 

During yesterday's episode, I complained that I was starting to see the irritation that could be caused by the constant flicking back to the trial room to catch up on the proceedings in the courtroom. I'm thankful to say that today's episode has been the complete reverse of that, and I've positively welcomed the inclusion of these moments. There's a point very early on - pretty much just as we see our characters escape from the cliffhanger - where we revert back to the 'present', and it felt entirely right that we should take a quick break from the main narrative here. I'm also impressed to see mention of the footage being excised at the request of the High Council, as I didn't think that revelation came until later on in the story. I'm already trying to think up ways that I can tie this somewhat more devious version of the High Council in to the Time War. 

While I'm briefly on the subject, I didn't mention the fact in Episode One that the Doctor has been deposed as President of Gallifrey, because of a degradation of his duties. I absolutely love this idea (especially since the Doctor even called on his official status last season in Timelash to help save the day), and I can easily tie this in to the Time War - the High Council know that even the Doctor, with his hatred of the Daleks, wouldn't risk plunging the planet into total war across all of time and space - hence removing him from a position of power, and putting him on trial in a further attempt to reduce his standing... I think this season could prove interesting if viewed from certain angles!