You know, when Steven Moffat sat down to work out how the next series of Doctor Who was going to work, I'm sure he had many, many things to consider. Not least of these was the kind of companion who was going to accompany the Doctor.
Now Big Finish can be a little off the wall sometimes, but usually they're quite conventional. However, this time – for three plays only – they've done something that I bet Steven Moffat never, ever considered: they've given him a racist, fascist, time-travelling Nazi scientist as an assistant. Yeah, beat that Stevie, you no-talent hack.
For those of you who haven't been listening to the Big Finish plays for the last decade or so, Colditz has probably slipped under your radar, especially since it's a Seventh Doctor/Ace play, so likely to be languishing at the bottom of any collection/bargain bin. Just to jog your memory, it's the one with David Tennant doing the bad German accent.
You probably won't recall the actual plot, however, so let me remind you: the Doctor and Ace land in/near Colditz; they do lots of dumb things; the Nazis capture them and the TARDIS; a Nazi scientist called Klein takes the TARDIS into the future where the Third Reich have won the Second World War; through timey-wimey machinations the alternative future gets undone, Herr David Tennant gets killed off, and Klein is left lurking around somewhere in the world, possessing knowledge of science and the alternative future that she shouldn't have.
A Thousand Tiny Wings picks up where Colditz left off by plopping the companionless Seventh Doctor down into 1950s Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau uprising. Here he comes across a bunch of posh English people stuck in a house and slowly being killed off by a mysterious poison. And Dr Elizabeth Klein.
Sounding good yet? No? Thought not.
Yet, despite sounding extremely bad on paper, it's actually a pretty decent play in practice.
Continue reading "Review: Doctor Who - 130 - A Thousand Tiny Wings"
Typically, the Big Finish Companion Chronicles try to fit in with the writing style of the Doctor Who era in which they're set. So the Hartnell stories tend to be (waves hands a bit, since it's a bit more complicated than this) a bit hardcore sci-fi or historical, the Troughton ones have veered towards daft sci-fi and historicals, the Pertwee ones to monster stories and so on.
As promised 
When first we met James Robert McCrimmon, he was fighting the Battle of Culloden in one of Doctor Who's last few purely historical stories, The Highlanders. He left at the end of The War Games, his memories of his time with the Doctor wiped by the Time Lords - who then ended up using him and the Second Doctor as time agents during the mythical "season 6a" that the Sixth Doctor story The Two Doctors appears to reveal.
Yes, yes, I know. It's been out for over half a year now. But what the hell, I might as well play catch-up with the Companion Chronicles. I'l be steering clear of obviously "taking the piss" releases, such as Prisoner of Peladon, which stars precisely no companions at all, only David Troughton as a King of Peladon who appeared in a 
Big Finish are in something of a quandary when it comes to these Lost Stories. The idea behind them is to do a "full cast" production of a script or story that for one reason or another never got made, so that fans can finally have something like what was supposed to be on screen (but wasn't). 
And so it is that we come to the end of the Stockbridge trilogy, in which the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa travel to the past, present and future of Stockbridge because Big Finish love continuity and it was in the comics in the 80s or something.
Big Finish occasionally come up with some nice ideas for subscriber bonuses. Okay, 
Big Finish seem to have a new plan: trilogies. We've had the 
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