Big Finish Reviews+ The Moons of Vulpana by Matt Rabjohns

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Big Finish always seem to never run out of awesome ideas. As a huge fan of Mags and The Greatest Show in the galaxy it is a real treat indeed to be given a brand new audio trilogy where we can discover more about Mags as a character. Jessica Martin was absolutely brilliant as Mags in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, and for a fan of the character such as I this trilogy is a bit of a dream come true really. It is made even the more pleasurable by the fact that Jessica herself is willing to come back and make the character hers again after all these years! ​

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So, after the events of "The Monsters of Gokroth", which I felt brilliantly gave Mags a great intro into the audio medium, we come to what I think is a far meatier story for her character. One is instantly hooked by the way her character wants to so find a cure for the wolf side of her nature, and that the Doctor decides to take her back to her own planet, but in an earlier timeline than the one she grew up in. It’s just the kind of thing we come to expect from the devious and manipulative Seventh Persona of the Doctor. One which Sylvester McCoy of course as usual delivers with mesmeric zeal of the highest order. Mags need to find a cure for her condition makes her at once so likeable and relatable too. Indeed, there are many sides of my persona I wish I could kill and get help for but never seem to really find.

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This story truly at once feels like it belongs in the Sylvester McCoy era. The sound design and score suit the drama of the piece well. The werewolf clan of characters is utilised well and all the characters are well defined. The two squabbling brothers are rather human like in their backbiting and gnashing at each other. The Matriarch is given her own devious thread of storyline, and in the end, one feels little sympathy for her character's final demise after what she has done to her sons in the story. ​

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Mags is given some superb scenes in this one. Her constant fears of being left stranded every time the Doctor appears to have abandoned her in this story give her character a feel of frailty despite her werewolf side always threatening to take her over. She is wonderfully written, and this just adds layers and layers to my great love for the character. Jessica and no one else could play Mags with such zeal and conviction and make her character sound truly believable. ​

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The old ancestral seat setting and the aloof and fractious wolf clan are superbly realised. And their hunting of other lifeforms is also conveyed well. There are plenty of taught and political mincing and slanging matches of the highest order. The characters are all 3D, and drag you well and truly into the story. And this story is not overburdened with so many subplots so as to make one’s eyes water, so that is also a huge plus point. Several modern era TV stories do tend to be awash with subplots galore and one is always left gagging for the slightly simpler and easier to grasp stories. The Moons of Vulpana is definitely easy to follow, and is all the better for it. None of the other wolf characters in this story are very likeable either. They are politically motivated and snobbish so that the only character who you care for really is Mags. Its harrowing a little to see her thrust into a feudal and bombastic era of her own past and even blackmailed into marriage with a pious and odious and wicked wolf man. But its superb to hear her cope with these insults and for her to emerge at the end on the winning team.

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The Golden Millennium is upon Vulpana, and the Four great Wolf packs come together for their usual hunt. The themes of racial purity and acceptance are at the core of this story too. Mags embodies this totally. She is at once needing to release herself from her darker and fiercer nature, and yet she wants to be herself. And when the wolf is part of one’s nature, how can one keep it forever at bay? It’s a paradoxical notion and one that Emma Reeves's script delves into superbly well in this story. ​

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And of course, Emma has a totally firm grip on the characterisation of the Seventh Doctor. Just as Ace found out before her, she is left angry and confused about how this Doctor never informs her of his plans, and she is left upset as she has to weather his plans through and only knows what they were after she's already been forced through them like a cheese grater! This aspect of the Seventh Doctor is one of those aspects that makes his Doctor so much darker and mysterious. Why is he always so afraid to tell others his plans?! ​

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Irfan Sanji is excellent as the runt of the litter Jaks. His resentment at his brothers and his callous plan of controlling the populace with a false moon makes him a meaty and brilliant yet layered villain. The baddie role always has to be dealt with by great actors, otherwise the role won’t succeed. But here Irfan is excellent at making Jaks really unpleasant company and a worthy foe of the Doctor and even more so for Mags.

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Nimmy March is excellent too as his devious and murderous Mother too. But she does get to be more than a caricature villain in that she does at least get to redeem herself at the end of the story. Although with her actions in the story it is still very hard for one to feel sorry for her character. She plays the Matriarch to perfection.

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Issak and Tob are the Alpha Males. But their childish banter and tearing and trying to outdo each other makes them rather funny. But maybe one of the stories only judders is that they are suddenly just written out of the story and it does jar one somewhat. I think perhaps a scene actually showing their deaths may have helped here, but we are left bereft of one for these characters. But with the little story they do have Peter Bankole and Sean Knopp definitely deliver the goods and make their characters spoilt brats of the best and most delightful order. ​

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Perhaps the only other likeable character of the piece is Beth Goddard's Doctor Barton. She delivers a great performance of the Doctor, and copes brilliantly when her hidden nature is suddenly brought about fiercely by the manipulations of Jaks as he attempts to make himself the king of Vulpana. She injects the role with true pathos and therefore one is sympathetic to her character. I am always a fan of the decent characters in stories, who have to cope with matters forced on them by others.

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So, in summation, this story succeeds well in all that it set out to do. Jessica Mags gets given centre stage, and is so ripely brilliant that I just want to hear more and more of her character. She is such a good fit for the Seventh Doctor. Stephen Wyatt created a brilliant character in Mags and it’s so great that Big Finish saw the potential in her character and chose to expand and build upon the wonderful bones of the character Stephen gave us The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. Emma Reeves gives us a confident and ripely characterised story that is very entertaining and very medieval in its feel. ​

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Decidedly gothic and yet with some dashes of good humour. A very good and stolid Werewolf tale. Perhaps maybe not totally mind-blowingly original or different, but very very very entertaining and diverting anyway. I may be very easy to please but for me "The Moons of Vulpana" delivers on every front. ​

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It’s also good to see the seventh Doctor having Mags put him in his place with a little bit of her own deviousness too at one point! It makes for a great scene in a roundly satisfying and so yes, this story will definitely be worthy of yet another listen. The story ends with Mags telling the Doctor to take her somewhere new...one cannot wait to see where she takes the character in future adventures. I seriously hope we don't just get given one trilogy with Mags!!

Reviews Torchwood Outbreak by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s breaking out all over.

Torchwood on Big Finish audio has been tied up with the Committee for its first two series and its first special release.

Torchwood Outbreak is, in a real sense, Torchwood breaking out of its mould. It’s free of the Committee for the first time, forced to deal with an enormous problem, while still being true to its characters. Let’s say this before we start – it’s quite a relief to free Torchwood from its internecine war against the non-corporeal aliens who take over pensioners. Torchwood Outbreak is Series 2.5 - it has the vibe of Series 2, with Jack and Ianto establishing themselves as a couple, and Gwen and Rhys very strongly in love, with Rhys just needing a smidgen of reassurance that it’s him Gwen really cares for, not the swanky yank in the damn good coat. The storytelling scale of Outbreak though is much more Children of Earth or Miracle Day than it is Series 2. Hence Series 2.5.

As you might expect from the title, Torchwood Outbreak is also Big Finish smashing a couple of ranges together – it’s Torchwood to its bones, but it brings in a Survivors-style threat, a plague virus that kills and causes havoc throughout Cardiff, and beyond. That said, there’s something altogether more creepy about the Torchwood infection than the Survivors version – imagine wires burrowing under your skin, moving, burning, making you so nuts you tear yourself open to try and pull them out. This is Torchwood, remember – there will be blood.

There’s also a really weird progression pattern to the disease, which gives you intense feelings of love for the most natural object of your affection, then turns that emotion into an even more intense need to kill that person. There are hallucinations along the way, and as Cardiff, and the Hub go into simultaneous quarantine lockdown, we learn where the infection comes from, and what the nature of the insidious plot behind the virus actually is.

Insidious plot behind the virus? Of course. This is Torchwood. There’s usually an insidious plot behind the grimness in Torchwood, and Outbreak doesn’t disappoint in that regard.

Where it might disappoint is if you stop and actually think about it too hard. There’s an old project from the Fifties which has been unearthed, in the failed destruction of which – naturally – Jack was involved, alongside cheeky Torchwood ghost chappie Norton Folgate, who seems to be here largely because of the joyful quality of Samuel Barnett’s performance. The infection, which at first seems like a random lab accident, quickly becomes something rather darker and more deliberate. While maintaining a grand tradition of Torchwood figures of authority being deeply amoral wrong ’uns, there’s something about the development of the story in AK Benedict’s third episode of Outbreak that ventures dangerously close to justifying the real-world ‘anti-vax’ conspiracy theory, which is based on little more than idiocy. Granted, in the sci-fi arena and established as fiction, it’s a solid, resonant plot device, but you might get just a little uncomfortable with it before the end.

If we’re being really picky, there’s a sense of some padding throughout the three episodes too. The mid-section, with Jack locked up in the Hub after contracting the virus, Ianto trying to work out what to do for him, and Norton switching sides almost more often than he takes a breath, means Emma Reeves’ episode has a feeling of Tochwood: The Shining more than anything that especially moves the plot along, and in Guy Adams’ first episode too, there’s quite a lot of quirkiness involved in the way people succumb to the outbreak – bus drivers suddenly imagining they’re playing the violin etc – though that does, in fairness, add to the Torchwoody strangeness of it all, and allows people not to see the true impact of the citywide apocalypse coming.

What’s excellently done throughout is the relationship between Gwen and Rhys, which is thankfully allowed to drive quite a lot of the plot forward. With Gwen trapped inside a hastily-erected ‘ring of steel,’ Rhys has to use his nous to break through and reach her, and as the episodes unfold, their chemistry together is beautifully…Welsh, Eve Myles and Kai Owen working if anything better together on audio even than they did on screen, creating a real force of optimism and brute bloody-minded force to stand, and occasionally smash things, against the cynical forces of darkness behind Cardiff’s outbreak. PC Andy’s a force to be reckoned with here too, the writers continuing Big Finish’s campaign to give Andy a fair crack at rounded, deepened characterisation, and Tom Price delivering on the character’s potential. He’s the voice of ordinary coppers here, faced with a (fairly literally) demented situation, and only his own resources of ingenuity to call on to deal with it. In many ways, he’s the voice of human reason, outside the scope of Torchwood and its world-saving mission.

The ending of the story is just a touch anti-climactic, and dependent on Jack – who uses up one of his infinite number of deaths here (because after all, it almost wouldn’t be an epic Torchwood story if he didn’t) – pretty much ‘deleting’ the virus, as he can, because he’s Jack, leaving the story powering on, and on, and on, and then, suddenly, not powering anywhere any more.  While not detracting from the power of the story overall, or its sense of worth, the relative ease of the eventual ending is discomfiting given that people have died to get us to that point.

For all the Shining-padding, and the anti-vax closeness (as we say, that does at least give the plot here an extra dimension of breathtaking cunning and evil bastardy), and the ‘Oh, that’s sorted then’ ending, Torchwood Outbreak is an engaging story, that powers through its run time with a combination of growing weirdness, panic, retaliation and cynical evil, as the forces of goodness, personified by Gwen, Rhys, Ianto and Andy (Jack optional) battle to keep control of their sanity and their city. Is it up there with, say UNIT: Extinction or Survivors, Series 1? No – but it’s as good a way to spend some hours as UNIT: Shutdown or Survivors Series 2. On that basis alone, it’s worth your money. The extra bonuses here of freedom from the Committee, great written chemistry between Gwen and Rhys and great performances from Myles, Owen, Price and Barnett make Torchwood Breakout more than a solid addition to your collection, and more like the must-have it’s striving to be.

Reviews Torchwood: Forgotten Lives by DJ Forrest

Produced by James Goss for Big Finish Audios

Directed by Scott Handcock

Released November 2015

It’s been four years since the Miracle, Gwen and Rhys have a ‘normal’ life, looking after young daughter Anwen, and have a huge pile of laundry to work through. Rhys is no longer working haulage, and the pair live out their existence, off the radar, so about as normal as anyone who used to work for Torchwood.

Gwen receives an odd phone call from a resident at Bryn Offa nursing home in North Wales, informing her that Jack is in trouble. So, naturally, Gwen is intrigued.

It’s an amazing story and one I had to listen to properly, because it took that level of concentration to understand what the story was about and how well it linked into everything that Torchwood has been involved in. I liked that connection. It’s a wonderful tie in, and I did wonder at first how this was all going to pan out.

It’s also taken me a while to get used to Kai Owen as Rhys, having seen him play the role of paedo Pete in Hollyoaks. But within a few minutes of that lovely Welsh accent, and his formidable Rhys Williams vibe, I had soon settled. I’ve missed Rhys!

I also have to admit to getting somewhat excited about this story because Bryn Offa, and Wrecsam are very close to my place of birth, and it was so nice to hear the Welsh language in snippets in the story.

I am so glad that Big Finish rescued Torchwood and brought it back to us in tip top condition, with new stories with a tie in to the past, including new cast and crew, which include many of the old and familiar.

What’s even more exciting is learning that there’s a Series 2 in the making, having glimpsed at the list of Torchwood stories still to come.  And more audios still to purchase.

I am beyond happy right now!

As always, the end of the audio is the interview with Scott Handcock with the cast, writer and producer of the story. Stick around for that. These interviews are invaluable information.

The exciting thing I love about Big Finish Torchwood audios are the attention to detail in the artwork by Lee Binding and the photos inside of the cast and crew. So it’s no surprise to see the happy smiling faces of Eve Myles and Kai Owen with Philip Bond, Emma Reeves and Sean Carlson on the inside cover for this story.

The 21^st century is when everything changes and Torchwood is ready!