Big Finish

Big Finish occasionally come up with some nice ideas for subscriber bonuses. Okay, Return of the Krotons wasn’t one of them but Company of Friends was at least a good idea, even if it was poorly executed. However, every time they do it, they say it’s going to be exclusive to subscribers, don’t manage to get many people to subscribe on the strength of it (what? I get three Sylvester McCoy plays and the Key2Time season? Whoopee), so end up releasing them anyway.

So it is with An Earthly Child, a potentially very good idea, which is already available to pre-order, having been sent to subscribers in December. In it, Paul McGann journeys to the now defunct future in which the Daleks mined out the Earth’s core to turn it into a spaceship, so he can visit Susan, his granddaughter.

Yes, the Doctor not only has kids, a wife and probably a mum, he also had a granddaughter – the very first companion to the very first Doctor, William Hartnell, in the very first story, An Unearthly Child (which you can watch all of on YouTube). Played by Carole Anne Ford, she stayed behind on Earth to help rebuild the planet and married a man called David Campbell.

Ford is back as Susan for this story, set 30 years after the invasion, and she’s accompanied by Paul McGann’s son, Jake McGann, who appropriately enough plays Susan’s son, Alex – the Doctor’s great-grandson.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – An Earthly Child”

Big Finish seem to have a new plan: trilogies. We’ve had the Key2Time season followed by three Seventh Doctor stories. We’ve just had another trilogy – the jettisoning of Charley Pollard from the mainstream Doctor Who Big Finish universe, except in Companion Chronicles. There’s the forthcoming Seventh Doctor/Nazi scientist trilogy, which is going to be followed by the Sixth Doctor/Jamie trilogy which is going to be followed by the Fifth Doctor/Nyssa/Tegan/Turlough trilogy (well, it’s a two-parter so far, but…).

But for now, we have the Stockbridge trilogy. This sees the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa deal with events in Stockbridge’s past, present and future. Apparently, Stockbridge was big back in the DWM comic strip of the 1980s (I missed it somehow), so this kind of follows on. Joy.

Here, though, before we get ahead of ourselves, we have the fifth Doctor and Nyssa turn up in Stockbridge, 1899, to watch a mummers’ play. Despite being handed down word-for-word since the middle ages, somehow the Doctor, an Earl of Space and a Lord of Time, is included in the play’s storyline. How did that happen? Best go back in time and find out, hey?

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 127 – Castle of Fear”

Over the years, there’s been a surprising amount of Doctor Who scripts that were never made: stories that fell afoul of budgetary and logistical issues; stories that were too similar to others; stories that were too awful for human consumption – the list of reasons for their non-existence goes on.

However, the biggest one-off clump of unmade Doctor Who stories came after the end of Colin Baker’s first full season, when Michael Grade decided to ‘rest’ the show. Eighteen months later, it returned with the 14-part The Trial of a Time Lord and the original ‘season 23’, upon which production had already begun, never saw the light of day.

At least not on tele. Some of them were novelised by Target back in the 80s/90s, but now Big Finish has taken it upon itself to adapt some of these missing season 23 stories as full cast audios; it’s also having a go at some other ‘lost stories’ from previous seasons in a new range of plays collectively called… well, have a guess.

The first of the range is The Nightmare Fair, former producer Graham Williams’ first solo script. He was given the task of writing a story that reintroduced the First Doctor’s whacky enemy, the Celestial Toymaker from (who’d have guessed it?) The Celestial Toymaker. To make things even easier, the story also had to be set in Blackpool.

Are you feeling the thrill yet?

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – The Lost Stories – 01 – The Nightmare Fair”

After 10 years (or whatever), it’s time for Charley Pollard to leave the Big Finish range. The premier eighth Doctor companion (and possibly best companion of all, depending on who you talk to), with The Condemned she became the premier audio sixth Doctor companion as well.

So, there was obviously some anticipation as to how the final stories of the Charley/Sixth Doctor arc would play out and how she’d be written out of the series again. With the Sixth Doctor not knowing she would travel with him in the future, what would the cunning denouement be, we all wondered? Would she go without the issue being addressed? Would there be some clever bit of temporal mechanics? Would there be soul-baring and a frantic attempt to save the day?

We were all agog, since the Sixth Doctor/Charley pairing was actually very good. Ah, Charley: how we’ll miss you, you were more or less the one thing that kept me listening to these, although given the groundswell of support for these reviews – thanks guys – I won’t be quitting after this one and will be sticking with the main Whο range at Big Finish for the foreseeable future at least.

But after Patient Zero by Nick Briggs proved to be such a dud, hopes weren’t high that there would be a great conclusion to the arc, particularly when Paper Cuts proved essentially to be Charley-free. Twats.

Now we’re here, and Charley’s off. How did they write her out, I hear you ask?

Bollocks. The exact same way they did in The Girl Who Never Was except not as well. Spoilers ahoy.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 126 – Blue Forgotten Planet”

Can I ask a quick question? How valuable are these reviews of Big Finish plays to people?

The reason I’m asking is that I’m rapidly running out of patience with them. There are far more misses than hits – which are only really relative hits – and they’re actually quite painful to listen to.

I might stick around for the Missing Stories, purely to listen to Nicola Bryant (ah, Peri, etc, etc), but if no one’s desperate to know whether these things are any good or not, I think I might give up on them once I’ve dispensed with the final Charley story (play number 126).

But on with Paper Cuts, a Sixth Doctor story by Marc “I never knowingly under-write” Platt set in (or rather near) the planet Draconia. If you cast your minds back to the years of Jon Pertwee, you may recall the Draconians, a reptilian race reminiscent of feudal Japan who appeared for all of one story.

Well, now they’re back, Colin Baker’s here to help them. Unfortunately, the Emperor is dead, and Charley isn’t quite herself.

Continue reading “Review: Doctor Who – 125 – Paper Cuts”