Audio and radio play reviews

Well, it’s all over. I’d say, “Thank God for that,” if it weren’t for the fact that it’s Sylvester McCoy stories for the next three releases. I might just sit those out.

Anyway, brief recap: in a poorly acted, poorly scripted sequel to the Tom Baker Key to Time season, Peter Davison’s Doctor now has to go looking for the segments to the Key to Time for no well explored reason other than because there wouldn’t be any stories without it. To help him is a ‘human tracer’ who can’t act and is only human because it helps the plot of an audio play to move better.

So far, he’s nearly got Ace killed (but failed unfortunately), messed up Mars, and met up with the inept Black and White Guardians. Now he’s got to find the Chaos Pool while some giant slugs slug it out.

Oh God, surely there’s more to life than this?

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who: Key 2 Time – The Chaos Pool”

The ‘Doctor Who Unbound’ range of Big Finish audio plays is probably its most interesting. Essentially, each asks a ‘What if?’ question and then, with the assistance of a brand new Doctor and usually one of the TV companions, answers it. Sometimes the questions have been quite simple ones about events having taken a different path, while others have been more philosophical.

So we’ve had Geoffrey Catweazle Bayldon and Carole Anne Ford answer the questions, "What if the Doctor and Susan never left Gallifrey?" and "What if the Doctor changed history?"; David Collings, in possibly the most interesting play, tackled "What if the Doctor believed the end justified the means?"; controversially, Arabella Weir’s Doctor escapes the Time Lords – in the shape of David Tennant in a medallion – by getting a job in a supermarket; Derek Jacobi may or may not have been the Doctor but he was certainly the writer of some of the worst Juliet Bravo scripts ever made and might have been famous if his TV show, Doctor Who, had ever been made; while Michael Jayston reprised his TV role of an evil version of the Doctor to answer the question "What if the Valeyard had beaten the Doctor?" – well, only Bonnie Langford would be able to challenge him, apparently.

The most conventional of the plays was probably David Warner’s appearance as an alternative version of Jon Pertwee’s Doctor, exiled to Earth a few decades or so after all those alien invasions that UNIT faced, thus answering the question "What if the Doctor turned up late?" with the short response "Not much, thanks to Nicholas Courtney’s Brigadier, and the Master would have regenerated into Mark Gatiss."

Now, here he is again, partnered with his new companion The Brigadier (still played by Nicholas Courtney), answering the valuable and vital question, "What if the Daleks were, erm, reasonable?"

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who Unbound – Masters of War”