Who Reviews Doctor Who 1996 Movie by Alex Wylie

Director: Geoffrey Sax

Writer: Matthew Jacobs

Starring: Paul McGann, Daphne Ashbrook, Eric Roberts, Yee Jee Tso

“By midnight tonight this planet will be pulled inside out!”

It was in 1996 that my old favourite TV show was finally brought back. They say there were negotiations involving an American executive called Philip Segal as his list of demands and concessions was considered. And the shoot began. And then they made their most curious decisions: the Daleks would have a justice system, the Doctor would be half human, and the TARDIS would belong to the National Trust, only respond to humans and contain the Eye of Harmony for some reason. And I, a teenage Who fan, would take this VHS back from HMV to watch with my friends before the Yanks saw it and a pepperoni pizza was placed into the oven. But was this project a pitch that should ever have been greenlit?

Before I go further, I'll will say this: imagine if your brief is to write something that will please a) the British and Americans in general, b) die-hard Doctor Who fans of many years, and c) a mainstream global audience. And this is if one is charitable enough to pretend to ignore a still hostile BBC biting at your heels like an untrained baby pit bull. Of course, the 6 million dollar budget was something the show had barely dreamt of before and CGI had come on a bit by the mid-nineties, and while this film now watches like any number of TV movies of the era it did seem very exciting and dramatic at the time. The trailers were everywhere. Doctor Who wasn't just a cheap old show for sad weirdos anymore. Possibly. Doctor Who would at least be back in the British public consciousness for up to unto entire summer.

But anyway, the plot. Everyone has one of those days of course. You're contacted by some of your worst enemies to let you know that they just executed one of your other worst enemies, and apparently his last request was that you should be the one to return his remains home. You are very clearly aware that the latter has a means of cheating death, is evil, and wants to kill you but hey, whatever. So, you voluntary go to the home of the evil dudes who want to kill you in order to be kind to another evil dude who always wants to kill you and who never dies. Some people worry about wearing crocs or trainers. I only recently made the switch from Cornflakes to Muesli. Anyway, there's this twist, right, where everything goes horribly wrong for some reason.

After what became known as the Wilderness Years, it seemed apt at the time that Paul McGann's Doctor would emerge, resurrected from death and literally emerging from a morgue wearing a shroud. I was also studying R.S at the time and...oh yeah, the galvanisation of Frankenstein’s monster. “It's alive!”

But I have skipped on a bit here. A new (largely American) audience would have to see a middle-aged Scotsman while hearing a young Paul McGann, and then work out that the Indiana Jones/Back to the Future World was inside the whatever the that blue phone kiosk is meant to be as it spins wildly in space. They turned over to the infamously unbearable death throes of Roseanne instead, and cannot quite be judged for this decision.

Once the business of observing continuity is over with and we have the new Doctor, something like a plot emerges and we have a budding Doctor, a reluctant companion in Dr. Grace Holloway (Ashbrook) and a villain in the Roberts interpretation of the Master – Eric Roberts would go on to say he'd seen some seventies Doctor Who but seemed to have gotten camp Terminator as his inspiration. Eric Roberts as the Master at least carried on JNT's tradition of stunt casting – and Roberts does his best, poor thing.

The Master's motivation – and therefore pretty much the plot, seem to come from The Deadly Assassin and Trial of a Time Lord. So at least we know screenwriter Mathew Jacobs had seen at least two classic serials! Nobody in the editing suite had ever heard a Dalek voice of course, but then you can't expect too much.

Certain tropes you expect in an US Doctor Who – a car chase, a kiss/ love interest...well, not that bothersome and Russell T Davies would go on to keep those anyway.

So, what do we have? A promising Doctor in McGann, and many would say an actor cheated of a better opportunity but at least a string of enjoyable audio dramas which, thanks to the minisode Night of the Doctor, we may nowadays call canonical. We got the Eighth Doctor essentially, even if the film itself is Nineties kitsch fun at best.

Big Finish Reviews+ Hall of the Ten Thousand by Tony J Fyler

Tony doesn’t know much about art…but he knows what he likes.

The Ten Thousand are a glorious work of art – ten thousand would-be warriors, represented in gold and glory as a monument not to war, but to peace. They’re a symbol of everything the Doctor believes in, and everything we too would want – peace, not war. Love, not hate. Unity and common cause, not strife and violence.

Except…

Except when the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard go to visit them (out of hours, naturally, because it’s the Eighth Doctor), while their beauty and sculpted skill seems undiminished, there’s something not…quite right.

When the time travellers try to blag their way into seeing the famous artist behind the monument to peace, they’re told she’s seeing no-one – fifty years on from sculpting the ten thousand soldiers of the incredible display, she’s planning something even bigger and better than the original.

This is when having a time machine comes in really handy. They might not be able to see her now, the Doctor reasons, but they might be able to see her then – back in the day when she was putting the final touches to her dazzling monument to reason and peace.

And so, displaying that delicacy of trans-temporal touch that has become the Doctor’s gift by the time he reaches his Eighth body, they do just that, popping back those fifty years to meet the artist behind the Hall of the Ten Thousand.

Except something’s still not quite right. In fact, something, in that time and place, is altogether more wrong. Jaine Fenn gives us a good deal of context for the monument when it’s a new commemoration of a peace between the north and south territories of a planet that was set to tear itself apart. But then…there’s the thing that’s wrong.

It’s Charley who spots it, and it would be utterly spoilerific to reveal it for you here – when you hear it in this new Short Trip, it’ll make you jump, and gulp, and drive a wave of nausea all the way through you.

The Ten Thousand are not, perhaps, everything they’ve always seemed. But perhaps – just perhaps – they’re something more. More, and worse, and horrifying.

The story itself is a delicate cat’s cradle of powerful emotion on the one hand – what would you do to stop a war that would cost the lives of lots of people? Where would you draw the line of suffering for peace? – and time travel tinkering on the other. When you’ve seen a grim thing existing fifty years from now, what can you do to make any damn part of it better? The Doctor and Charley dart deftly through the minefield of causality, knowing they cannot do anything terribly much to undo a dreadful act, but that maybe, just maybe, they can prevent something worse from happening down the line. And, as it turns out, that they might be able to salvage one thread of hope from a situation which, make no mistake about it, goes from beautiful to incredibly grim in a handful of heartbeats.

But hold on to your celebrations. Writer Jaine Fenn does not intend to let you off the hook quite so easily. From a premise that feels inherently straightforward – the celebration of a peace that ended a war - Fenn takes you on a trip that gets grimmer and grimmer, gives you a glimmer of hope, and then shows you the Eighth Doctor lying to Charley by omission, and reveals the consequences of their actions. There’s a kind of peace, a kind of justice at the end, absolutely, but there’s not really anything that would warrant a full-on whoop.

The Hall Of The Ten Thousand is a fitting release for November – the month in which the UK commemorates those lost in wars throughout history, particularly the wars of the twentieth century. Its story is grim, going behind the simplicity of remembrance to the reality of war, and particularly the reality of decisions made for ordinary fighters by high-handed people who thought they were acting in their ultimate interest. Whether they were right or not is almost a moot point, though it’s a reality with which the Doctor and Charley have no option but to contend. Ultimately, the story is a morally complex maze of action and restriction, of what felt right and justified to stop a war, and what will break the heart of anyone who fully understands the cost of that action. It’s a powerful piece that never shies away from conflict, power or a punch in the heart. It’s not a trip that will leave you smiling, but it’s one you need to take. Go – visit The Hall Of The Ten Thousand today.

They have a tale to tell you.

Who Reviews The Scent of Blood by Tony J Fyler

What’s that smell, asks Tony.

Dan ‘The Strax-Man’ Starkey!

Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor!

Properly gothic villainy!

Class warfare!

Downton Abbey with demonic forces at play!

In Victorian Edinburgh!

Buckle up, kiddies, the BBC has a stonking new audio story for you from writer Andrew Lane. It’s got everything you could possibly want, and a twist in the tail besides.

Victorian Edinburgh of course has lots to recommend it as the setting for a Doctor Who story – architecture, authoritarianism, a rising working class and potential strife between the old guard and the new. That gives the place and time all the essence of gothic horror it needs to thrill us, and Andrew Lane builds his story on that basis – there appears to be a monster stalking the streets of Edinburgh, and journalist James MacFarlane intends to get to the bottom of it, come what may. When he runs into a flamboyant man known only as the Doctor, and in the morgue at that, he gains a companion on his quest to find out exactly what’s going on.

It’s rather more complicated than even he suspects.

In The Scent of Blood, Andrew Lane delivers on both the initial gothic premise of Victorian horror, drenches the listener in Doctor Who history – this is very much a sequel story in some respects, so you’ll need your Doctor Who Reference-Spotter’s Guide - and takes us into a new way of thinking about a classic villain, and the classic response to them, all while on a darkly-tinged romp round the streets of a Victorian city with an increasingly febrile atmosphere of class warfare boiling away. There are lords and ladies in Edinburgh, to be sure, and there are frightened urban peasants – but that’s not the whole story either.

Everything we know about the particular villain features here suggests a symbiotic relationship between at least two creatures, but if that relationship is broken, can either survive alone, and if so, how would that be possible? Lane tackles what we think we know and adds new dimensions to it, which makes The Scent of Blood rather more satisfying than it would have been had he been determined to simply re-tread familiar ground in a different time and place. Here, he also takes aim at rigid notions of good, evil, and what people will be prepared to do to save their own from dark and dangerous fates. It’s like a Scottish Downton Abbey, but with secrets, important portraits, and a raving mob in the town square.

Dan Starkey, TV and audio Sontaran Supreme, has lent his voice to a solid handful of different Doctors now, and his Eighth Doctor is pretty convincing – it’s by no means an impersonation, but it has enough of a tinge of Paul McGann’s tone and manner to be an active help in convincing you you’re listening to an Eighth Doctor story, while Lane’s writing conjures a bouncier, earlier Eighth Doctor than his later, Time War-troubled version. This is a Doctor looking for interesting things and answers to mysteries, and finding them – and then having to decide where his lines are drawn. After all, there are rules about what he should do in the circumstances in which he finds himself in The Scent Of Blood.

But then, the Doctor and rules have rarely gone together with any particular comfort. When he uncovers the truth about what’s happening on the streets of Victorian Edinburgh, the lines he has to draw are rather less clear-cut than they were when he met this villain before, because the lines of harm, of damage are more blurred now too.

The Scent of Blood is a vivid replaying of a particular scenario, with more complication, more complexity and more of a sense of moral ambiguity than before. In its tone and location, it channels traditional gothic horror very effectively – but as the Doctor and MacFarlane discover here, sometimes you have to look beyond the tone of a thing to find out what’s really going on.

What’s really going on in The Scent Of Blood will surprise you, make you give a little cheer at its references to Classic Who mythos, and sweep you briskly through its newer elements to a satisfied smile at the end.

It’s an audio story that feels fundamental to the Eighth Doctor, to what he’s learned and how he approaches the universe. Give it a listen and revel in Lane and Starkey channelling the McGann Doctor’s enthusiasm, open-heartedness and sudden seriousness as he deals with a most unusual problem.

Big Finish Reviews+ The War Master Vol 3 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s feeling the rage.

Derek Jacobi’s War Master is a character who had just a handful of heartbeats of time on TV, having hidden for the length of an episode behind the mental and physical disguise of ‘nice old genius’ Professor Yana. This is Derek Jacobi, so needless to say he made his mark even in that brief time on screen, but the War Master is a character, not unlike Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor and John Hurt’s War Doctor, which has been so far mostly unpacked and explored in Big Finish audio. With River Song, with UNIT, in the Gallifrey series, and in his own box sets, the War Master has had far more time to flap his wings of villainy in the audio environment. But in box set 3, Rage of the Time Lords, there’s a feeling of renaissance at play. A renaissance literally means a looking back to go forward, and while the first box set gave us a tight handful of creepy, powerful but mostly unconnected stories, and the second set gave us the War Master as a patient, precise malevolence, this third series is proper, bedded-in Mastery – there’s an enormous plan that’s taken almost a lifetime to construct and bring to fruition, as the War Master constructs the Ultimate Doohickey Of Death, a weapon that, he feels, will not only give the Time Lords victory in their wretched war against the Daleks, but might just possibly put him where he feels he belongs – among the pantheon of Time Lord gods.

This is ambition on a scale that was only delivered from time to time throughout the Master’s on-screen career – Colony In Space, The Deadly Assassin, maybe the end of Logopolis. And this is a very different Master to any of the on-screen variants. One who has anticipated every move, crossed every t, dotted every i, and accounted for every counter-stratagem even of his old enemy, the Doctor. This is the War Master at his most devious, his most grandiose, his most brilliant and organised and vicious.

You’re going to want to strap in.

The Survivor, by Tim Foley, kicks things off with a nostalgic feel. Mr Magister, the new vicar of a village in the Second World War, befriends Alice Pritchard, a local Land Girl who can…do things with her mind. Move things. Change things. Possibly even hurt people. As he at first guides his new pupil, and then deals with her disobedience, the situation in the village becomes charged with suspicion, and fear, and finger-pointing, in a classic, claustrophobic Hammer Horror style as the tight nerves of wartime and privation and the potential of German spies everywhere turns the village into a replica of a medieval witch-trial. This is Carrie meets The Witchfinder-General…in World War II. Only at the end are we entirely sure what the Master aims to gain from turning a harmless village into a bunch of witch-killing savages, and of course, with no Doctor to step in and stop him, the War Master wins. He succeeds. He skips away from all the melodrama having achieved his aim – step one in very, very many in the building of his grandest ever Doohickey Of Death.

David Llewellyn follows suit in a very different setting in The Chameleon of Coney Island – we’re down among the circus folk, the ‘freakshow’ people, and in particular, the Chameleon – a young woman who can change her skin to match whatever background she’s against, and her patron, protector and arguably profiteer, Guiseppe Sabatini. A gentleman named TS Mereath (take your time, we’ve got all day) offers to buy the Chameleon from Sabatini, and on his refusal, uncanny levels of bad luck start to plague the showman and his Chameleon. While there’s a similar central thread in the first two stories – the Master collecting people with extraordinary, unusual abilities for some dark design of his own - you get a feeling for how the first story will go as it descends into claustrophobic, demented, threatening energy, where in Llewellyn’s story, there’s a final twist in the tale that you more than likely won’t see coming. In fact, it feels so much like a U-turn precisely because the clues that in retrospect do lead up to it are very subtly placed, and because Derek Jacobi’s Master almost brushes it off in explanation, as though of course that was going to happen, and it’s not his fault if you stupid apes are too dull-witted to see it. Again, the first two stories share a fundamental point – showing us the War Master on a mission, and the lengths to which he’s prepared to go to get that mission accomplished. In The Survivor, he’s absolutely willing to plunge a group of hapless humans into torment and turmoil to get his purpose achieved – of course he is, they only matter as instruments of his malign will. In The Chameleon Of Coney Island, there’s rather more personal viciousness involved – including a scene reminiscent of an early Omen movie, where he exerts his mesmerising will to deadly effect, and a full-on hideous Master cackle when delivering some humans to an early grave. It’s powerful stuff in both cases, and there’s some high level War Mastering there for most kinds of fans.

In The Missing Link, again by Foley, we spool ahead significantly. We’ve seen the Master in two instances of the short game, going undercover, mingling with the minions to get the things and people he needs. Now, for The Missing Link and David Llewellyn’s Darkness And Light, which work together as a two-parter in the same location, we hear and envisage the end product of the War Master’s grand conceit – an unstoppable superpowered smoothie of hate. This is a very New Who interpretation of the Delgado and Simm Master concepts, with more than a touch of Big Finsh’s own Alex MacQueen middle-management Master thrown in for good measure. This is the Master as a scientific innovator, funding research, building teams, funnelling breakthroughs towards what, on the surface, looks like a goal of which at least the War Doctor might approve – something to put an end to the Time War. In these two episodes, the trick is that nothing you think is happening is random. Foley and Llewellyn here do the cheeky thing – they throw seeming obstacles and curve balls at their War Master, only to have him be the cleverest life form in the room, and have thought it all through ahead of time.

When things finally do go wrong, though, only a Pertwee-Delgado compromise and a hell of a lot of luck stands a chance of letting the Master and the Doctor survive this adventure. Pitting Jacobi and McGann together in an inevitable ‘We’re going to forget all about this once it’s over’ storyline is genius, because the sparks you get from them are completely unique to this pairing. The Missing Link is for the most part a ‘hideous creature let loose in a scientific complex’ chase story, complete with lycanthropes (or werewolves to the likes of you and me), while Darkness And Light continues the chase, ups the stakes, reduces the likelihood of a happy ending, throws in enough double-crossing to satisfy the wildest conspiracy theorist, and brings the whole thing to a rolling character-boil at the end, the future of the Master, the Doctor, the Time Lords, the Daleks and – oh yeah – the whole universe of space and time coming down to whether the War Master can make a deal with the devil of his own ambition.

The War Master #3 – Rage of the Time Lords takes us from dark satire, through vicious Godfather-style crime among an indigent community, to a soaring opera of horrifying ambition and power, only to bring the ‘hero’ crashing down in his own hubris for the sake of there being a universe to exist in. It’s cheesy as hell to say, given the character’s name, but it’s a masterpiece of storytelling over four hours. What’s more than that, it’s the latest instalment in a series that is consistently among the best that Big Finish has to offer, and far from dropping the ball, it pushes our understanding of the character considerably forward, while entertaining every step of the way. Feel the Rage of the Time Lords at your earliest opportunity. It’ll make your ears very happy indeed.

Big Finish Reviews+ Ravenous 3 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s feeling peckish.

You’re going to need a nice lie down in a dark room after Ravenous #3.

And possibly even before it. It’s that kind of timey-wimey effecty-causey rollercoaster ride.

There are three things to keep in mind about the Ravenous, which we’ve heard before, but which come into much clearer audio focus in this box set.

1.    They’re the Time Lords’ natural super-predator, and therefore Time Lords, used to swanning about the fiefdom of time and space like they own the place, are actually, intrinsically scared enough of these things to make impetuous mistakes.

2.    For reasons more or less of ‘Well, why wouldn’t they?’, they naturally look kiiiiind of like Pennywise the Clown. Creepy clowns, certainly, is their go-to physicality and style. So, yeah, good luck with the sleeping.

3.    And of course, they earn their name by being permanently starving, with Time Lord the absolute ribeye steak of their menu.

So, let’s play our game.

We kick off this time out with a Time Lord research station, mining dark chronons (time particles) as a theoretically limitless power source in the event of anything beggaring about with the Eye of Harmony. Because why the hell not? When a Ravenous nabs Time Lord researcher Brallix and frightens him into regeneration, an altercation means the station has a dead Ravenous to autopsy and a regenerated Brallix on hand to continue mining operations.

If only things were that simple in the Eighth Doctor’s universe.

Rule 1: things are never that simple in the Eighth Doctor’s universe. Without spoilering you, the encounter on Deeptime Frontier opens up the door for the Alien­-style ‘one creepy thing following us round a dead Tardis’ scenario of Seizure, the final story of Ravenous #2, to become a full-on Aliens-style Ravenousfest in box set 3, and others to come. What’s perhaps most striking about Deeptime Frontier is that it hammers home the notion of the Ravenous as Time Lord predators – creatures that especially love to hunt the time-travelling folk in the stiff collars. And that one of the ways they do that is to literally make Time Lords frightened to distraction. The Doctor’s been frightened before, his exposure to the universe has arguably prepared him rather better than most Time Lords to deal with bladder-weakening terror, but here, he’s seen making irrational decisions and mistakes – rather more than his human companions do, because the humans aren’t part of this particular evolutionary battle of predator and prey. It’s taken a while to really get a handle on why we as an audience should care about the Ravenous (almost £60sworth of time at even the download prices by the time we get to Ravenous #3), so Deeptime Frontier is a big step forward in helping us appreciate why we need all the box sets, and what particularly is the USP of this Big Bad.

Having said all which, Companion Piece by John Dorney ignores the Ravenous – and the Doctor, come to that – more or less entirely. It’s largely a fun, fan-serving piece, which has the Nine (Yes, the villain we’ve come to know as the Eleven, or the Twelve, just earlier in his lifetime) happily capturing friends of the Doctor, like he’s some demented action-figure fan, who has to get the whole set. No-one really seems adequately able to explain why precisely he’s collecting the set, though it seems to be an idea seeded by River Song. Yep, she’s here, furiously not meeting the Doctor but throwing a spanner in the works of the Nine’s plans more or less on principle. What this allows for is a handful of one or two-line vocal cameos from a host of companions, plus the return of Charley Pollard into an Eighth Doctor timeline – albeit, as with River, one from which he’s conspicuous by his absence – and the arrival of a companion who isn’t, at this point in the timeline, a companion.

We mentioned the part where it’s probably a good idea to have a nice lie down in a dark room, right?

If dark chronons didn’t get you, you should probably start at about this point.

Anyone who read the IDW comic Prisoners of Time might have a touch of déjà vu about this story, but the chance to get some of the Doctor’s friends together is never a particularly bad thing, and getting them to both realise what he sees in and gets from each of them, and then work together to defeat the frankly rather low-powered villain, is fun in and of itself. It ultimately feels like a bit of a Doctor Who pantomime where the Doctor only arrives in the final moments, and it seems to have very little, if anything, to do with the ongoing storyline of the Ravenous, but is it a fun listen? Absolutely, if you’re happy weaving timelines and listening to River be witty in the face of torture.

And be honest – who isn’t?

Episode 3, L.E.G.E.N.D., is the now semi-traditional ‘fairytale episode.’ Last time, the idea of the Krampus in Salzburg took us through the mid-section of the set, but here, we’re hanging out with the Brothers Grimm, at least one of whom manages to remain mostly conscious through most of the story. Again, there’s a fairly tangential connection to the overall Ravenous story-arc, in that it centres on the actions, and indeed the ego, of an alien professor who specialises in myths and folklore – the Ravenous are the folklore of Gallifrey, and she knows a lot about them, but that never really comes to the fore, because she’s decided to go and hang out with the Grimms, who of course are experts in the folklore of their own  little corner of space-time. Unfortunately, she comes along with an intelligent and oddly aspirational AI, which has the power to make the world in its own image. Before you know where you are or largely why, Helen Sinclair’s turned into a fish, spell-rhymes change reality, and the Doctor and a new travelling companion are having to gnaw their way through a whole lot of gingerbread to make sense of a world gone mad. It’s a nice touch of satire from Matt Fitton that the havoc of this episode is unleashed by an AI earnestly trying to make the world ‘better’ – a touch of manifest destiny which of course, like all such destinies depends for its usefulness on how one determines what is ‘better.’ If you determine that ‘better’ means ‘more like a Grimm fairy tale,’ you’re in a world of really pretty dark, unDisneyfied folklore, from which escape is often deeply at odds with how we understand the actual world to work. As such, L.E.G.E.N.D. is rather a fun detour from the main thread in and of itself – it only becomes problematic when you’re paying for the Ravenous and the two mid-section stories have only a tangential connection to them.

Finally this time, John Dorney’s The Odds Against is…well more or less the Eighth Doctor meets the Riddler from Batman, but with a deeply interesting twist. Near the portal where the Ravenous were first imprisoned, there’s a gang of very understanding but mostly silent monks, and a dead body. The monks, naturally enough, being monks, have secrets, the Doctor extends his trust, Liv patently doesn’t, and an enemy does that so very Doctor Who thing of having everything in their sights, and then arguing themselves out of a small revenge, in order to play the longer game and necessitate a fourth box set. Oh and there are clues. Listen out and you can pick them up, thought to be fair, you could probably just leap to one big conclusion and be just as right. Along the way, there’s a very particular revelation which takes us all the way back to the events of Deeptime Frontier, and how exactly the Ravenous eat their Time Lords. Trust us – that’s gonna be important going forward.

Overall, Ravenous #3 delivers a lot of information pay-off for fans who’ve come three box sets in without any particularly clear idea what these uber-predators actually are, or why they should care. Absolutely, it delivers that in two of the four episodes, leaving the mid-section as entertaining sub-stories in their own right, or diversionary padding, depending on how kind you feel. There’s certainly enough in the middle two episodes to let you enjoy them. You just have to get over the slight sense of dislocation from a plot-arc to a couple of distracting adventures and back again. This time out though, there’s certainly more meat on the bones of the Ravenous to help you through, plus a companionfest, River Song being monstrously confusing with time and smart-alecry (smart-Alexry, even?) and fun with gingerbread cottages. There’s also significant evolution for one major character, along lines that could, just possibly, help explain a thing or two in the Eighth Doctor Time War range.

Have a dark room and perhaps a cup or two of soothing herbal tea on standby, because your brain may rather hate you once you’ve made it through the mayhem of Ravenous #3 – it’s as confusing as a River Song timeline, only with a couple of Time Lords, each of whom have a number of voices at various stages of their lives. But crack on with it – there’s enough here to make it worth the trip on its own merit, and without it, anything that follows is likely to make absolutely no sense whatsoever.