Audio and radio play reviews

James Robert McCrimmon (aka Jamie) was a second Doctor companion with a certain form for mucking up the timelines. A Highlander fighting during the Battle of Culloden, originally, he left the second Doctor, his memories wiped by the Time Lords, at the end of The War Games, the sixth season story that also saw the end of the Patrick Troughton era of Doctor Who. But, thanks to a sixth Doctor story, The Two Doctors, which gave us a post-season six pairing of the second Doctor and Jamie, it’s apparent that all is not what it seemed.

Back in the Companion Chronicle, The Glorious Revolution, there were hints that certain other timeline messing has been going on around our Jamie. This appeared to be resolved, but now we have City of Spires, in which Scottish history is all messed up. The Doctor arrives in Scotland decades after Culloden. The Highland clearances and Rob Roy are 40 years late. Edinburgh and Glasgow have been destroyed in favour of a ‘City of Spires’. And the old Jamie has no recollection of meeting the second Doctor at all…

Cue another one of Big Finish’s trilogies. Oh, did I mention David Tennant’s girlfriend is in this?

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 133 – City of Spires”

Time to wrap up the Klein trilogy.

When last we left blah blah, blah blah, blah blah, blah Seventh Doctor blah blah Nazi scientist for companion blah blah.

Anyway, things went a bit pear-shaped – who saw that coming? – and now the Doctor has to fix it. Now, given Big Finish trilogies can vary between awful (the Charley Pollard/Sixth Doctor concluding trilogy, the Key2Time) and gradually improving (the Stockbridge trilogy), it was a bit of a gamble as to whether the final part of this "seven years in the making" story was going to end well.

So let’s take some bets.

Hands up everyone who thinks this is going to be a classic.

And hands up everyone who thinks it’s going to be a steaming lump of you know what.

If I just add that this also features Lenora Crichlow as a companion for the Doctor, who’s going to change their minds?

Final fact: it also includes a race of intergalactic sharks who wander around in water-filled armour.

Last chance. 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…

Well, it just so happens that it’s…

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 132 – The Architects of History”

Time to wrap up the Klein trilogy.

When last we left blah blah, blah blah, blah blah, blah Seventh Doctor blah blah Nazi scientist for companion blah blah.

Anyway, things went a bit pear-shaped – who saw that coming? – and now the Doctor has to fix it. Now, given Big Finish trilogies can vary between awful (the Charley Pollard/Sixth Doctor concluding trilogy, the Key2Time) and gradually improving (the Stockbridge trilogy), it was a bit of a gamble as to whether the final part of this "seven years in the making" story was going to end well.

So let’s take some bets.

Hands up everyone who thinks this is going to be a classic.

And hands up everyone who thinks it’s going to be a steaming lump of you know what.

If I just add that this also features Lenora Crichlow as a companion for the Doctor, who’s going to change their minds?

Final fact: it also includes a race of intergalactic sharks who wander around in water-filled armour.

Last chance. 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…

Well, it just so happens that it’s…

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 132 – The Architects of History”

As has been discussed before, Big Finish are in a dilemma with these Lost Stories. Just how authentic should they be to a half-finished script that never saw the blessed red of a script editor’s pen? Should they improve them or give the fans exactly what they want – a word-for-word identical version of the script as is, no matter what state it’s in?

In the case of MIssion to Magnus, they went with the wrong choice: they left it as was and served us all a great big pile of rubbish. But Magnus did have a virtually complete script. Paradise 5 is a different matter.

Written by He Who Must Be Hallowed, the creator of Sapphire and Steel PJ Hammond, Paradise 5 is an awkward lost story since it was originally intended for the The Trial of a Timelord season in the slot that ended up in Pip and Jane Half-Baked’s Terror of the Vervoids. It was going to have lots of Time Lords in it, lots of trial stuff and the companion was going to be Mel, as played by Bonnie Langford.

Big Finish couldn’t afford that. There was no way they were going to get Lynda Bellingham and Michael Jayston to reprise their roles, for one thing. Bonnie Langford’s stopped doing the Big Finish plays, now she’s having fun dancing – and proved her point that it wasn’t her, it was the writing of Mel that was the problem.

So they stripped out all the Time Lord stuff from what there was of PJ Hammond’s scripts, which left just three episodes. PJ Hammond wasn’t free to adapt the rest of the story into an audio play, so they got Andy Lane to write an intro episode, convert Mel to Peri – since Nicola Bryant was well up for some more Lost Stories – and polish it all up. He also ‘updated’ it so that it was less 80s, which he reckoned wouldn’t wash these days.

So given all of that, do we have a PJ Hammond Lost Story now or simply a shiny new sixth Doctor and Peri story that’s a bit PJ Hammond-esque in places?

Discuss.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – The Lost Stories – 05 – Paradise 5”