Reviews Torchwood - Goodbye Piccadilly by Tony J Fyler

Tony goes trolling along Piccadilly.

The last time Norton Folgate, Torchwood operative from 1960s London appeared in Sergeant Andy Davidson’s life in Ghost Mission, it was to act as a ‘Torchwood assessor’ and a kind of hologram. Before long, there was alien madness, goo, squeamishness, bodies and all kinds of typical modern Torchwood nastiness.

This time, it’s Andy who’s been zapped back through time, in all his fleshy reality, and the two begin this story butt naked, handcuffed together on a bed, with a corpse in the room and the building on fire.

So – typical Wednesday in Torchwood, then.

Goodbye Piccadilly is a joyful, energetic re-pairing of Samuel Barnett as Norton and Tom Price as Andy, the perennial Torchwood bridesmaid who, in recent years, has played more and more of a part in the affairs of the worst kept secret in Cardiff. When Norton came to modern-day Cardiff, it was as something of a will o’ the wisp, a menace, a tempter who might just possibly have been on the side of the angels – but who you probably wouldn’t bet on. The mess they got into was zippy and zingy and frequently nearly fatal, and it dashed along all on all its cylinders, making listeners clamour for more.

Well – here’s more.

There’s certainly plenty of zip here, but on Norton’s home territory there’s rather more reality and – dare we say it – rather less fun. Norton takes Andy on a necessary tour of bits of Sixties London – a brothel-cum-life-drawing class, a psychic alien dancer, a horrifically bad but hunky sculptor’s studio and more – all apparently to remedy a fairly standard sci-fi trope that strikes Andy not long after he arrives in the Sixties. Turns out he has something in his brain that other people need and so Andy Davidson becomes the key to a plot by a particularly repellent mob boss.

The run around London, during which Andy is required (Hand to God, love, it’s necessary for the art) to get naked very much more than he would be in the 21^st century, does a reasonable job of showing us the distinct differences between our own world and Norton’s, especially for gay people (Being gay was still illegal in Britain until 1967, and gay men were still arrested after the law changed), but the script from James Goss does feel like it’s focused more on the journey than on any particular destination. Yes, we know the alien thing in Andy’s head is important for some reason, and yes, we do eventually get to find out what it was, but it’s something entirely unconnected to everything that’s come before, so when we learn what it is, it hits us rather more like a slap upside the head and a ‘Wait, what’s happening now?’ than an ‘Aha! That makes sense’ moment, which leaves it feeling slightly like an add-on out of nowhere. Fun, absolutely, in a way that will make you want to dig out your classic sci-fi DVDs. Or your soundtrack. But still, it comes at us from nowhere in the script, and dares you to argue with it on any logical grounds.

If Norton is a somewhat frenetic host in the 1960s, dragging the 21^st century copper from pillar to post in an attempt to get him cured, or disarmed, or both, Andy shows again why he’d be pretty much at home in Torchwood, not only dealing with the mob boss in an intelligent ‘Bezzie Mates With Gwen Cooper’ style, but working out an additional twist in the tale just as the end crowds down around the story. It’s an ending that leaves plenty of questions open for a third instalment with this pairing, who are, whatever the storyline, character gold together and so demands more stories that showcase their double act. 

Goodbye Piccadilly is value for your Norton-Andy money any day of the week. Just be ready for the breathless Sixties London romp, and a conclusion that probably even TV Torchwood would not be bold enough to offer.

Reviews Torchwood - Instant Karma by Tony J Fyler

Heads explode. Tony walks by, whistling…

Great science-fiction is frequently about asking the ‘What-if?’ questions of life, extrapolating from where we are and changing one thing, making one thing possible that isn’t, and seeing what kind of world you end up in.

Instant Karma sells itself openly on that premise – what if you could make all the annoying people pay for their tireless campaign of making the world worse? What if you could repay the inconsiderate git in the supermarket or bank with the bagful of penny pieces, make them hurt for their thoughtlessness. What if you could make the driver who cuts you up at a corner feel the impact of his behaviour, feel your anger as pain.

What if the anger of a protest could hurt, could even kill, the person being protested? If instead of a satirical blimp, you could make their heart explode, or their brain melt, or you could make them tell the truth? What if you could change things on that level?

Would you do it?

Sci-fi with philosophical underpinnings? Big tick, Big Finish. Big tick, David Llewelyn, James Goss and Jonathan Morris, who, somewhat unusually, deliver instant Karma as a triple-credit.

The story itself is anchored by Tosh (Naoko Mori), seemingly shortly after the Greeks Bearing Gifts TV episode, when she’s recently become aware of how her colleagues really feel about her, having briefly gained the ability to hear unguarded thoughts.

There are two other main players that make this a solid three-hander, Johnny Dixon as Simon (bus driver by day, self-help group guru by night), and Sara McGaughey as Janet, who loves him, whether or not he returns her affection.

The triple whammy writing team of David Llewellyn, James Goss and Jonathan Morris is unusual for Torchwood at Big Finish, but here it means that as well as the strong philosophical questions at the heart of the action, there’s a lot of solid character background given for Simon and Janet, which means we understand them as very different people, united however briefly in a moment of something potentially wonderful, potentially deadly. Simon in particular has a complicated, believable history that we learn as he tries to get to know Tosh better. Ultimately though, Instant Karma blends a couple of strong messages together in its storytelling. On the one hand, you can listen to it as a parable of how anger can make you powerful, but power can turn ordinary anger into a deadly force. And on the other, you can listen to it as a parable about not letting anger change who you fundamentally are – if, for instance, hurting people is wrong in one case, the wrongness or irritation-factor of the people doesn’t change the wrongness of inflicting pain. There are moments in Instant Karma when Simon and Janet are on the same side, and moments when the differences behind them, their needs, their self-soothing methods and the ways in which they process both the anger they have and the power it brings them show them to be very different people. And that, in the end, is what brings the conclusion its power, as each pathway has a destination-point, and ultimately, while Tosh may work for the super-duper secret organisation, it’s not she who decides the outcome of events in the story. If anything, it’s she who learns the lessons laid out for her by the examples of Simon and Janet, and, we can only assume, uses them to get over her sent of violation and outrage at knowing what everyone really thinks of her, to understand that processing anger in a healthy way is a mark of individual progress, individual conquest of the hot, powerful basic instinct to repay hurt with hurt.

Instant Karma’s a very impressive three-hander, with both Dixon and McGauchey delivering the drama, the realism, and the fundamental philosophical questions in persuasive and powerful ways, and Naoko Mori working well as the actual driver of questions and learner of lessons. Pick it up, and remember, if people are being annoying, that’s on them. How you respond to them…that’s on you.

Reviews Torchwood One - Machines by Tony J Fyler

Ahhh, Torchwood One.

The version of Torchwood based in Canary Wharf, as seen on TV in Doctor Who and as run by the vaguely fascistic, or at least distinctly imperial Yvonne Hartman, played by Tracy-Ann Oberman.

Torchwood One always seemed like an organisation in transition – in its TV appearance, it seemed to translate a Victorian imperialism into the 21^st century, and as such combine the best in humanity’s scientific broad-mindedness with the worst in terms of its nationalistic ideology of dominance, Hartman going to her death ‘for Queen and Country,’ having outlined her remit as being to horde alien artefacts not for the world, but for Britain and its interests, wherever they would ultimately lie.

Torchwood One on audio has given us the opportunity to see a little more humanity in Hartman, and a little more of that transitional phase for Torchwood One as a whole – while absolutely staying true to the post-dated yuppie culture and adding in the 21^st century elements of ‘caring commercial culture,’ especially in Yvonne herself, who knows everybody’s name because it makes for good office politics, we’ve seen Hartman as the indefatigable wrangler, the diplomat, the finder of ways to ultimately achieve her aims – even when the organisation is stolen out from under her in Torchwood One: Before The Fall. Torchwood One itself has been revealed to us as an aspirational organisation, drawing talent from all over the country, and matching the Generation Y professionalism of the likes of Ianto Jones with the unreconstructed and entirely casual sexism of Tommy the technical genius, played by Tim Bentinck. It’s an organisation that has yet to reach the pinnacle of ‘Queen and Country’ English imperialism of its TV appearance and demise.

This three-story set pitches Torchwood One against an enemy from the black and white era of Doctor Who, WOTAN (a clever computer with a superiority complex), and it does it in a way that develops and gets more interesting as the set progresses.

The Law Machines by Matt Fitton, apart from being a glorious play on words (WOTAN, when it first appeared, set about creating itself a bunch of ‘War Machines’ and linking computers together to eradicate a humanity it judged flawed by both flesh and individuality), is a modern take on the likes of Robocop – the original War Machines have been updated, given a new look and sent out into the world as a robotic police force, able to judge wrongdoing and deliver summary punishment (Yes, there was always a touch of Judge Dredd about the idea too). The ‘Law Machines’ have of course been entirely purged of any control by WOTAN, which was deleted way back in the Sixties.

Right?

Well, of course it wasn’t. Something survived on a spool, on a drive, on a data stick, something of the WOTAN machine consciousness, which is now using a new human stooge to infect an increasing number of laptops, systems and eventually of course, the Law Machines for its own purpose.

There’s a glorious moment in The Law Machines when WOTAN, which sees connectivity between machines as the key to growing its power, demands to be connected. Its stooge simply plugs it into the internet, like a baby being given a dummy. And of course, that’s part of the genius and the challenge about resurrecting this particular villain – back in the Sixties, the idea of interconnected computers that developed Artificial Intelligence was a thing to be feared. Now, it’s the most staggering of commonplaces. We’ve moved on, so making WOTAN threatening again is something of a creative challenge – but it’s one to which Fitton rises rather well, as Yvonne Hartman and the team take on the relic of Sixties computer megalomania as it learns its way around the early 21^st century.

There’s a good story here, particularly in terms of a thread beneath the surface of the Law Machines and the WOTAN awakening, with Hartman’s Torchwood advocating for something called the Vision Protocols, a kind of permanent surveillance of the civilian population. When Hartman tells you if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear, there are chilling back-references to the reality of political chicanery at the turn of the century, and there’s also a speech from Yvonne that shows her motivations and her plans – she despises the ordinary people of the UK, and yet she protects them, waiting for the day when, with her help and guidance, they can become something great, they can fulfil a big idea of a Greater Britain, setting itself apart and over the rest of the world. Until that day, she vows, the world can rely on Torchwood to preserve it in all its petty obsessions. Torchwood may not yet be quite ‘ready’ for the 21^st century, but it’s ready enough to do what’s necessary.

Blind Summit by Gareth David-Lloyd is a story you don’t want to miss if you’re a fan of Ianto Jones. It gives you Ianto’s first encounters with Torchwood One – his life in London before the organisation poked its nose into his affairs, and his first active mission for Torchwood, investigating a drug trial that seems to be creating supermen – or lunatics. Or indeed both simultaneously. There’s a lot of texture to Ianto’s life and personality here, as he makes the uneasy transition from ‘ordinary’ citizen to ‘Torchwood-aware’ operative. What’s neat is that the drug being trialled involves data from the same archive as the Law Machines, so the theme of WOTAN’s presence is maintained, but more than that, this story really focuses on the hard human choices of the life of a Torchwood operative, and particularly, Torchwood’s leader, Yvonne. David-Lloyd’s writing of Torchwood stories, while never slouchy, takes a big leap forward here and he comes closer to an urban version of the bleakness of Countrycide than the buddy movie of his last story for Ianto, The Last Beacon. Seriously, even if the return of WOTAN means nothing to you, don’t miss out on Blind Summit, it’ll help put a lot of what you think you know about Ianto into a better, darker context than you ever imagined.

9 to 5 by Tim Foley is a corollary to The Law Machines, without for the most part giving its games away. An odd temp agency sends out temps of an unparalleled perkiness, efficiency and sunny disposition. They’re not creepy-perky, just instilled with a corporate ethos of doing the best job they can do, as efficiently as possible. What could be wrong there…right?

Yvonne and Ianto couldn’t tell you – at least not at first. But when they befriend a temp named Stacey, played by Niky Wardley, things begin to unravel as more and more questions emerge without satisfactory answers.

Without giving the game away, WOTAN’s the program that just won’t die, and the story brings a cold logic to the idea of artificial intelligence – it adapts, it learns, it flows around problems and it finds resource-appropriate solutions. If The Law Machines was a gentle poke of the stick at the fact that we’ve gone beyond the Sixties paranoia of interconnected computer systems and artificial intelligence, 9 to 5 uses the idea of artificial intelligence adaptation to make WOTAN a credible, 21^st century threat (while also carrying the bonus of a villain played by the joy that is Jane Asher).

Torchwood One – Machines is an unusual, inventive set, pitting a version of Torchwood seen on TV in just two episodes against a Sixties enemy who’s at least initially lost much of their sting. What it brings though is a premise established, and then updated, with a cracking Ianto-at-Torchwood origin story to join the two together. For Torchwood fans, it also shows Torchwood One at a stage in its evolution where it’s not perhaps as nakedly invasive and paternalistic as it would eventually become, but where some seeds are sewn for its development in that direction.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips: The Siege of Big Ben by Tony J Fyler

Jackie Tyler divides Doctor Who fandom just as much as her daughter Rose and David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor. If you’re a hater of any of that, this probably isn’t the release for you.

By the end of his tenure in the Tardis, there were two Tenth Doctors, as played by David Tennant. There was the full-on chatterbox Time Lord who would go on to turn into Matt Smith through what we rather laughably call the ‘natural’ process of regeneration.

Then there was The Other One.

The one who was created from the first Tenth Doctor’s amputated hand, a bit of a zing from earthgirl Donna Noble, and a wallop of temporal jiggery-pokery courtesy of Davros.

We call it a metacrisis.

We’re not sure why.

Anyhow, this second Tenth Doctor (or Mr Blue-Suit as it will, absurdly, be more straightforward to call him) was only part Time Lord. He could, for reasons of scripting convenience, age at a roughly human rate, probably die, apparently tell Rose Tyler he loved her, and probably go off and have metacrisis-earthgirl spawn. As the end of the on-screen Tyler arc, Mr Blue-Suit, our-universe Rose and our-universe Jackie were left on an alternative universe’s Earth, while the Doctor we knew spun on to his eventual Matt Smithy destiny and beyond.

Since then, precious little has been heard of the Tylers and Mr Blue-Suit, a Doctor allegedly ‘born in battle’ and as such rather too eager to just…erm…blow the bejesus out of the enemy, rather than saving people.

Step forward Joseph Lidster to give us a peek at life in the alternate universe.

The story of The Siege of Big Ben is, on the face of it, a standard alien invasion, oh-look-it-must-be-Thursday affair. Where it grows to be so much more than that though is in the narration given to Jackie Tyler, and the wonders it reveals about life, love and alien invasions on their alt-Earth.

We said earlier that if you were a hater of the Tenth Doctor era and the Rose-Doctor-Jackie domestic triangle, this wasn’t the release for you. Lidster does his best to tempt you in though, hinting that all is not well in alt-paradise, with a Doctor who, helping alt-UNIT, may not in fact be love’s young dream, and who remains relatively untested in the business of saving planets and lives. In other words, this is not the Tenth Doctor you think you know.

It absolutely is, however, the Jackie you know. Camille Coduri returns to audio Who at Big Finish to give a powerful and subtle performance as Jackie, mixing her trademark gossipy style that’ll make you laugh out loud with that sudden drop to quiet and truth that made her part in stories like Love and Monsters so wonderful and agonising, and made you want to suddenly call your mother and live a slightly better life. Jackie has lots to be thankful for, and she is, but she’s also a stranger in a strange land, (a land without Eastenders, for God’s sake!), who misses the world she left behind, and its people, and the Doctor who made people better than they were, for all his bouncy bonkers chatter.

When the chips are down, it’s Jackie who saves the day during The Siege of Big Ben, because she has experience of the Doctor she knew (Mr Brown-Suit?), the one who solved problems, and talked, and talked, and oh-my-life talked, rather than taking the easy, explosive route that this new ‘dark’ Doctor seems all too eager to embrace. That means she’s able to think things through and use compassion in a tight spot, where his solution is a very big bang that would kill them both.

Lidster’s script has all the zing and bounce you need if you’re putting Jackie Tyler front and centre, but it makes some solid points about the difficulty of a happy ever after story where you wake up the next morning and have to serve the chips. It’s funny, and clever, and packed with extras for the die-hard geeks, and yet it tells a story that feels true both to what was shown on-screen and to the reality that happy ever afters take work, and often need people to learn lessons, to change, to grow better than their lives have demanded of them before, if they’re ever to be really happy.

Big Finish is currently on a spree of new releases, spinning off characters and worlds from New Who. From the evidence here, the company could do worse than commissioning a box set of ‘The Tylers – Earth Defence.’ After all, Rose was responsible for reminding the Ninth Doctor of all the things it took to really ‘be’ the Doctor – courage, compassion, the importance of the ‘little people,’ and the ability of anyone to make a difference. Joseph Lidster and Camille Coduri work together, under the expert directorial eye of Lisa Bowerman, to make us believe there’s no reason the Tylers couldn’t do the same for the battle-born, angry, fallible, perhaps-too-human alternative Tenth Doctor, Mr Blue-Suit.

If it doesn’t happen…well, it will in my head.

And now, it probably will in yours too.

You’re welcome.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips - The Darkened Earth by Tony J Fyler

‘Who turned out the lights?’ asks Tony.

One of the Sixth Doctor’s most recent audio companions, Leading WREN Constance Clarke, was plucked out of Bletchley Park during World War II. As such, writers of stories for her, and Miranda Raison who plays her, have been keen to balance all the characteristics that go into making a good companion – curiosity, compassion, feistiness and fun – with something of the stainless steel backbone of the time and place from which she comes.

It’s too easy these days to look back on that ‘Blitz spirit’ as a kind of hopeless naivety, a country placing its faith in its leaders and believing in an absolute right and an absolute wrong. In our world, moral relativism would cut in and short circuit any such certainty. But back then, they needed that sense of self-belief to get extraordinary things done – things which, for instance, required civilian conscription and food rationing.

Constance is a model of that spirit, a believer in goodness and evil, and of working to make the former victorious over the latter as a kind of moral duty. In The Darkened Earth, though, without especially challenging the concepts of good and evil, she certainly gets a new perspective on the wartime propaganda image of ‘our brave boys, flying off to beat the Nazis.’ It stops short of moral relativism, but it’s a broadening of natural compassion out to include ‘the enemy.’ Because John Pritchard’s script takes us to Germany during the war, to a night time full of blackouts and fear and huddling together against a threat from the skies, as British planes circle, ready to drop death on people who are, to all intents and purposes, innocent victims of the politics of their national leaders. It’s a historical reality that the air war was fought in both directions, and families in Germany took the same precautions as those in Britain, denying the enemy the chance of a target in the night. Constance has a moment of world-flipping realisation in this story, as she comes to care for a family with whom she and the Doctor join forces against an altogether more dangerous enemy.

There are some good quality scares in Pritchard’s script, and Lisa Bowerman can always be relied upon to pull them off the page. Without giving too much away, there’s a bogeyman stalking the town in the hours of darkness, who leaves people dead, and with shrivelled, useless eyes. Finding it, finding ways to communicate with it and hopefully stop it from feasting on the town, the country, and possibly the world, Constance and the Doctor have a series of logical problems to deal with, all while safeguarding a family understandably disposed to fear rather than common sense. It’s a game of blind man’s buff with a killer in the dark, and as such, there are sweaty, heart-thumping moments throughout, and Constance gets to show the goodness of her heart and the bravery that’s inherent in her by putting herself in the way of the danger to protect a family she doesn’t know, and particularly some children she comes to like, and see not as the enemy but as a hope for the future.

Is The Darkened Earth especially memorable then?

Actually yes, for a few reasons. Firstly, there’s some solid structural underpinning in Pritchard’s story, so it develops as it rolls on. Secondly, Bowerman’s direction is crisp, taking the material and pulling the maximum emotional investment out of it. There’s enough for the Doctor to do to prove himself – and the very particular Sixth Doctor quality of a fierce burning need to communicate with aggressors, to try and talk a way through to solutions, comes through strongly. But mostly, there’s Miranda Raison as Constance, giving one of the most crisp and distinctly ‘wartime English’ performances so far in her tenure as a companion, while showing her very human compassion, her empathy, her bravery and what, back in the day, she might have called her pluck. You come out of the other side of this story with either a newfound or an intensified respect for Constance Clarke, who keeps her head while letting her heart beat for the lives of others and opening her mind to a broader way of seeing the conflict with which she’s so intimately involved.

All for under £3! The Short Trips range frequently punches way above its price point, and in The Darkened Earth, John Pritchard, Lisa Bowerman and especially Miranda Raison deliver another cut-price cracker.

Big Finish Reviews+ Second Doctor Companion Chronicles vol 2 by Tony J Fyler

Tony enjoys life in black and white.

The second set of Second Doctor Companion Chronicles covers the length of the Second Doctor’s on-screen life, and then, thanks to a little Big Finish jiggery-pokery, goes a touch beyond it. The stories that add significantly to what we understand about the Second Doctor’s time – Dumb Waiter and The Tactics of Defeat – are almost by default highlights of the set.

But to ease us in, Julian Richards brings us The Curator’s Egg – stretching the point of a pun sliiiiightly past breaking point. It’s the Second Doctor does Jurassic Park, or rather, for the most part, Polly does Jurassic Park, as the Doctor and Ben are absent for the majority of the story. What the Curator’s Egg does is break the elements of science and commerce down and personify them in a pair of brothers, working together to create Cyber-Dinosaurs as pets and attractions for the mega-rich in post-Dalek Invasion England. There’s a bodyswapping plotline that allows Elliot Chapman (usually Ben) to go nuts in multiple roles as both Clarkson brothers and Some Other Things Too (wink, wink). And while there’s a ‘step out from your brother’s shadow and think for yourself’ plotline of character development here, for the most part, it’s a great excuse for a lot of running around, hiding in caves, and (to quote Shakespeare In Love) a bit with a dog. It works within the Companion Chronicle format, and only really in that format, because as mentioned, the Doctor’s not in it, even in terms of narrated input, for much of the story, but as a chance for Polly to show off her mettle and her caring, it’s an agreeable opener for the set.

Dumb Waiter, by Rob Nisbet, is an altogether creepier affair, taking place in the Jamie and Victoria era of the Second Doctor’s life. There’s mind manipulation, there are things being abbbbsolutely nothing like what they appear to be, there’s double-crossing and horrifying reality and a touch of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party played with a really mad host, and ultimately the story is a simple idea complicated with technical doohickery – when you find out what the Dumb Waiter of the title is, you’ll probably have to go back and re-listen to bits of the second story to make sure it makes sense to you. But, and it’s a big but, this is the Second Doctor’s life enlivened with extra Leela!

Louise Jameson takes on a double role here, as Mrs De Winter, a guest at a genteel garden party, and as Leela of the Sevateem, twanged back in the Tardis’ timeline from her adventures with the Fourth Doctor to a trip with some short, dark-haired imposter, with a boy in a kilt as his bodyguard. Hearing Leela and Jamie together, first in their antipathy and battle, and working eventually round to being comrades in arms, is a thing of joy in Nisbet’s script, especially when it comes to comparing the sizes of their…knives. If you enjoy multi-Doctor stories, this one will be right up your alley, because the fundamental nature of Jamie and Leela is the same – loyal, ready to fight to protect their friends and their mentor in a universe that’s mostly trying to kill them. Hearing them come to an accommodation with each other is actually by far the more satisfying element of this second story, with the shenanigans and mortal peril at a garden party being simply the driver that pushes them into conflict and resolution.

The Iron Maid by John Pritchard has all the makings, initially, of a sort-of Joan of Arc story, though technically without the Maid of Orleans herself appearing. It pretty quickly gets weirder than that though, with elements that would not be out of place in New Who popping up here, there and everywhere – silent stars falling to earth without an impact, special space armour that may not in fact be special space armour, mystical voices, siege engines of the angels…all is not well in fourteenth century France, and the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe get tangled up in prophecies, beliefs of salvation from national oppression and, as is ever the case, Things Not Being What They Seem To Be.

In particular, this is a Zoe story as she comes to sympathise with a local nun who hears voices, and Wendy Padbury does an excellent job of conjuring up the youth and precocity of her character alongside Jo Woodcock as Marie, the would-be saviour of France. The ultimate resolution of the story’s problems though has a New Who vibe to it, in that it’s a little slicker and more open-ended than anything the Troughton era would have been allowed to get away with, and there’s a fantastic ‘visual’ effect on which the whole thing depends.

The final story in the set, The Tactics of Defeat by Tony Jones, is one for the hardcore Big Finish Companion Chronicle junkies only. Why? Because it brings Zoe together with Captain Ruth Matheson, that’s why. For the uninitiated, Ruth Matheson’s a UNIT officer who was trusted to guard the UNIT vault in a pair of previous Companion Chronicles, Mastermind and Tales From The Vault. She’s played by Daphne Ashbrook, who played Dr Grace Holloway in the Eight Doctor ‘Movie’, and accompanied by Charlie Sato, a junior officer, played by Yee Jee Tso, who starred alongside Ashbrook in the movie. So far, so meta. The Tactics of Defeat has Ruth led to a temple of doom by a recording from Zoe that was left in the UNIT archive, and mentions Charlie’s latest mission – as detailed in the Short Trip The Turn of the Screw. Are you getting the feeling of wheels within wheels yet?

The storyline itself is one of determinism and self-governance – whether hearing someone die in a recording can help you go back and save them, or whether they in fact have to die once you’ve heard them…and whether you can in fact be certain that you’ve heard what you think you’ve heard. It’s got a certain amount of alien gubbinry, right enough, and storming performances from both Ashbrook and Matthew Brenher as enhanced super-git Deakin, but it’s essentially a kind of Saw movie in a temple of doom setting, with causality at its core, and the prize of living to see another day. Helps to understand a bit of temporal physics, or at least the science fiction of temporal physics, if you want to make it through this one with your brains intact, but there’s a solid, sweaty, claustrophobic atmosphere of potential imminent death about it that makes it stand out in a collection that has otherwise felt for most of its run-time as though it’s been filmed out on location – from caves to open air garden parties to medieval French forests. As such, The Tactics of Defeat is a more intense listen than anything else in the set, and arguably, all the better for it.

Overall, the Second Doctor Companion Chronicles Volume 2 is a breathtaking set – it eases us in with dinosaurs and running, takes us to creepy garden parties of the damned, ponders destiny and war in the fields of France, and then buries us alive in a temple of utter gittery. It’s all the Second Doctor would have encountered and slightly less – there’s no straightforward space adventure here, but that’s probably one for the next set. All in all though, you won’t be disappointed in the set, and it does take us to places the Second Doctor might not have been able to go, but where the likes of Captain Ruth Matheson can take us for tangential adventures in the best traditions of the Companion Chronicle range.

Big Finish Reviews+ Jenny - The Doctor's Daughter by Tony J Fyler

Tony rejoices in the lack of angst.

People either love or hate the Tenth Doctor. Played by David Tennant, he was bouncy, gobby, loud and energetic, and he ran around the universe, fixing things with a twinkle in his eye and a wave of his screwdriver, only occasionally dropping down the emotional register for a bit of a growl or a mope.

Jenny – The Doctor’s Daughter is the Tenth Doctor without the growl or the mope.

Georgia Tennant (yes, a relation – having played his daughter on screen for one episode, the actress married David Tennant) is Jenny, a newborn semi-clone of the Tenth Doctor, with all of his instincts, none of his knowledge or baggage, and a skillset all her own. When, at the end of her TV episode, she jetted off in a stolen ship, the inference of her own adventures was left hanging, and Big Finish has picked it up and run with it.

What that means is you get four stories with very little by way of sturm, drang or emotional angst. Jenny is one of the more upbeat releases you’ll hear this year, by virtue of that lack of baggage. She’s just rocketing around the cosmos, stealing one ship after another, dropping in to places, seeing what’s up, fixing it by the simple expedient of Being Brilliant, and then zapping off again.

Stolen Goods, by Matt Fitton, pits Jenny against Garundel, a camp whiny space-frog swindle-merchant (just think Michael Gove painted green), who’s crossed paths and swords with the Doctor before. What starts out as a routine space traffic accident unfolds into corruption, deceit and scammery, and Fitton gives Jenny a classic Tenth Doctor sense of playing happily along with the nonsense being told to her, and then cheerfully revealing why she understands it’s a complete con, pinning her instinctual brilliance to your ears. This story also sees Jenny acquire her very own ‘companion’ in Sean Biggerstaff’s ‘Noah’, a neophyte who, necessarily if he’s to be her companion, is even newer in the universe than she is, with no idea how or why he exists and occasional strange bursts of arcane knowledge that add an air of mystery to his existence. Adding a ticking clock to the whole thing is a somewhat miscast Sian Philips as a cyborg bounty hunter who wants to use Jenny for her own nefarious purposes. If you get Sian Philips in front of a mic, normally, you use her for rich, layered characters, and the Colt 5000 isn’t that by any means – it’s more or less a Terminator with a plan, but nevertheless, Philips is an actress to whom giving less than her all is anathema, so what you get here is a very effective Terminator with a plan, to say the very least.

Prisoner of the Ood, by John Dorney, brings back another great Tenth Doctor creation, the tentacle-faced Ood. Their chief characteristic is an extreme vulnerability to psychic influences, so they’re a kind of ready-made ‘army for the conquering’. Here, they’re conquered by Someone Interesting, but the scenario in which Jenny finds herself, running and hiding on a suburban estate alongside new resident Angie Glazebrook (Arabella Weir), is gorgeously absurd. The image of the creepily alien Ood stalking along a suburban estate, killing people while hunting for one particular prisoner is lovely and silly, and Jenny works well here, bringing her alien, ahead of her time sensibilities to the otherwise very familiar setting.

Neon Reign, by Christian Brassington, is the hardest going of the set, though it works hard early on to set up its premise – the industrialised, seemingly orientally-influenced world of Kamshassa is under the thrall of its Dragon Emperor and his Dragon Guards. The men of the planet are addicted to a drug that keeps them indolent, while the women and girls are forced to go out and work, to keep their fathers and brothers and sons in the manner to which they are instructed by their overlord to become accustomed.

It feels a touch overburdened with Men’s Rights Activist nonsense spouted by His Almighty Draggonness towards the end, but in a fairly classic Who ‘dress up as a guard, defeat the emperor, free the planet’ story, Brassington and Tennant work well together to keep Jenny quite bouncy and brave and brilliant, and clearly having none of this sort of nonsense.

And finally, in Zero Space by Adrian Poynton, Jenny and Noah find themselves in a pocket universe where nothing can exist, only to find a whacking great scientific space station, full of clones. Because…naturally. There are good reasons why they should be there though, and a solid ‘Things aren’t what they seem, go off and live your own lives’ story emerges, with the help of Adele Anderson and Anthony Calf as the clones from zero space.

Jenny – The Doctor’s Daughter sets up a world in which Jenny’s energy can burn bright and smiley and funny and brilliant, and pits her against four distinctly Doctor Whoish story-types, with which she deals in her own new, funny way at one remove from her parent. If the world is getting you down in this hot, chaotic summer, grab the first box set of Jenny – The Doctor’s Daughter. It’ll make you bouncy and happy again and reset your optimism for the world.

Big Finish Reviews+ Iron Bright by Tony J Fyler

I am Iron Man, says Tony.

Iron Bright, by Chris Chapman, promises what could be, and arguably should be, a definitive Sixth Doctor story, as it brings the man with the peacock coat face to face with a pair of Victorian geniuses – father and son team, Mark and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Sixth Doctor has form meeting Victorian geniuses – one of his best TV stories, Mark of the Rani, set him adventuring alongside George Stephenson – so there’s a frisson of hope and expectation attached to any story that takes him back into even faintly similar territory.

Chapman’s done his research – Iron Bright (the meaning of which we’re almost desperate to tell you, but won’t, so you have to listen to the story) takes us underground, into the great Thames Tunnel, where things are going wrong for the Brunels and their workers. There are cryptic ghosts that kill people, for one thing, which is going to rain on any parade you plan, and Mark Brunel (played with a good deal of bluster by Christopher Fairbank) is planning quite the subterranean shindig, to attract wealthy investors to the project. Even in this simplicity of conflicts, you’ve got a ton of story to be told, a clash of worlds to investigate, as Victorian socialites meet homicidal ghosts from Somewhere Else Entirely and try not to die underground. When the Doctor and Isambard discover where the ghosts are coming from though, the conflict takes on a whole new scale, as well as pushing us into new realms both of science fiction and of social allegory – worlds are connected together, the story tells us, and what might be seen as progress on the one could have terrible consequences on the other. It’s a notion of some relevance as our modern Earth bakes, melts and feels the fist of nature under the stress of climate change – the good times of industrial progress, if uncurbed, can lead to the devastation of a world.

The escalation of the story is logical, for all there feels like some degree of padding in the middle back at the Brunel house, and the cliffhangers are above-average here, with the shift in scale feeling like it needs you to take a bigger, deeper breath than you thought you needed as it opens up the story from the small, fairly claustrophobic world of Victorian tunnels under the Thames to much broader and very different vistas, but there are parts of the mid-section that feel like a history lesson of the world from which the ghosts are coming, and while the escalation is impressive, the context-lessons continue into Episode 4 as you find out the thing you thought was happening is actually an entirely different thing that’s happening, because of the context the Doctor discovers. You could certainly argue it’s valid to include, because the context explains the reality of what’s been going on, and ultimately directs you as to how you should feel about it, but being quite so heavily layered in context even as armies are marching to an apparently unstoppable war does make for a thicker layering of story than the pace seems to demand. There are also elements of Iron Bright which strive for more than they achieve – there’s a lovely character called Tan played by Catherine Bailey, and a maid with serious companion-potential, played by Becky Wright, who, while adding some lightness to the mixture, don’t seem to have a great deal to do except explaining some of the plot and then going back and forth to tell people things. And there’s a degree here to which invention and convolution  risk losing some listeners, especially in regard to whose fault the main threat actually is, and why, so you end up having the Brunels in a story and feeling like they’re not used as well as perhaps they could have been, as you dash back and forth from one reality to another, trying to work out what’s going on, stop a war, deal with the thorny issues of whose fault any of it is, absorb the environmental message, pause for sombre reflection on what amount to gravestones with a vengeance, climb a big tower, press a big button and play a game of chicken with a leader who’s come down with a chronic case of manifest destiny.

It’s tightly packed, this story, and no mistake. There’s just a risk of you losing the will to understand it as it switchbacks and loops the loop in time, space and dimension-bridging, while dragging along a lot of backstory and contextual information. It’s just possible, when you’re done with the ride, that you’ll wonder whether it was all actually worth it.

Iron Bright is densely packed and frenetically paced, progressing from a classic Sixth Doctor oddity to a panoramic science fiction dimensional war of conquest and survival, with perhaps just a twist or two too many for some listeners to keep hold of as it careers towards its ending. It’s worth a listen, because after all, it’s Old Sixie meeting Isambard Kingdom Brunel and absolutely boggling his mind, but it’s one to take an episode at a time, pausing every now and then to make sure you understand where you are before you go on and risk getting lost in the twists.

Big Finish Reviews+ Hour of the Cybermen by Tony J Fyler

Tony tries very hard not to just say ‘Excellent.’

Hour of the Cybermen was always going to be a very special release from Big Finish.

While Nicholas Briggs, one of the Big Finish gods, has provided voices for 21^st century Cybermen, Daleks and other alien nasties, and has also given the Cybermen of older generations his vocal talents, this is the first story that sees the return of two particular actors who were the Cybermen for a generation of fans. The Eighties brought the Cybermen out of semi-retirement and made them arguably the equals of the Daleks in the programme again. The two men responsible for the Cyber-renaissance were David Banks, who played every Cyber-leader of the decade, and Mark Hardy, who played his long-suffering, button-pushing sidekick, the Cyber-lieutenant.

Because of the nature of the role, they were always most impressively vocal performances. Hour of the Cybermen re-unites the Eighties Cybermen on audio.

Run away now and buy Hour of the Cybermen.

OK, so it was always going to be a big deal. Bringing them back to battle a Sixth Doctor played by Colin Baker on the top of his form…Run away now and buy Hour of the Cybermen.

But the news on this release is so much better even than that.

They’re a canny lot, these Big Finishers. They’ve given the task of bringing back the Lords of Logic to a writer who, above all, takes care that his stories make sense on every level – Andrew Smith – which means that for once, for once in their careers, the Cybermen, ruled by logic, have a masterplan that’s actually logical. Think about it for a second – there are probably two or three stories in the whole of Cyber-history where you could run them through a basic logic algorithm and find that they made sense. This story makes sense in both its Cyber-planning, its human skulduggery, and its ultimate resolution. It’s a Cyber-tour de force. Seriously, we’re not kidding, run away now and buy Hour of the Cybermen.

In terms of actual plot details, this is the second in a loose trilogy of stories that introduce us to an Eighties version of UNIT that we’ve never encountered before. It starts very much in Jon Pertwee territory, with the Doctor, alone, arriving in an England suffering from a particularly odd calamity – a drought without an accompanying heatwave. Water-looters are afoot, but more than that, there are alien refugees in the area, and the story builds in logical increments, so you feel you have something of a handle on. In a nod to a couple of Sixties Cyber-stories which in their own terms made some sense, the Cyber-plan here is significantly advanced, and only the Doctor popping up at an inopportune moment has any chance of stopping them. The Cyber-doohickey at the source of all the trouble makes perfect theoretical sense, and the plan into which it fits makes sense in terms of the Cybermen’s universal goals. The human (and alien) heartbeats along the line make sense too, and there’s a story-strand here that brings an element of the Cybermen to the fore that should have been exploited long before now, and which Smith threads strongly through his script.

If you’re buying this for nostalgia purposes, you’re in for all sorts of treats. The Cyber-Leader gives more than one ‘Excellent,’ and there are several lines that aren’t replays of the greatest hits, but are subtle enough reworkings to both feel fresh and evoke the Eighties Cybermen in all their relatively chatty glory. In terms of the Eighties Cyber-Leader’s habit of frequently explaining the Cyber-Plot to anyone who would listen, this ticks that box too – he even stages a demonstration of how the plot will work at one point here, and you don’t hear it as a fault in the story, because now, as then, you just want to hear David Banks’ Cyber-Leader talk more.

As with all the best Cyber-stories, there’s a fairly high body-count here, and a body-count including people about whom you’ll care, which in itself underlines the difference between the listener and the villain – the scary thing about the Cybermen is they don’t care about the people who die, and we do.

There are other significant nuggets of nostalgic Cyber-glory here too – including a moment repurposed from Earthshock which will make fans smile. And before it all becomes about Smith, Banks, Hardy and Colin Baker, listening to the music in this release will also give you chills and grins if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Cyber-geek, because again while steering clear of actual riffs on previous Cyber-themes, there’s enough here to trip your nostalgia-triggers into utter geek meltdown.

Hour of the Cybermen could well be the Cyber-story you’ve been waiting for, for decades – a tight, logical story, with the Cybermen on the top of their terrifying form, incredible Cyber-voices, human peril by the bucketload, a desperate fight for survival and a Sixth Doctor that ultimately saves the day with an audaciously straightforward bit of jiggery-pokery, and an act of important compassion.

We’ve told you already – run away now and buy Hour of the Cybermen.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips: Flight into Hull! by Tony J Fyler

Tony says ‘Wake up and smell the spin-off.’

The Short Trips range of Doctor Who stories from Big Finish are famous for taking sideways angles on well-known Doctors and companions, giving us new perspectives on character we think we fully understand.

The time of the Tenth Doctor, played by David Tennant, ended with there being two versions of that character; the one we all knew and mostly loved, who went on to turn into Matt Smith, and a more human version, famously ‘born in war’ and so having a tendency towards recklessness and blowing stuff up, but with one heart, who stayed behind in a parallel dimension with Rose Tyler, her faithful mum Jackie, and the rest of her family.

Flight Into Hull! by Joseph Lidster is the second of two Short Trips to pick up the story of what happened to that stranded Doctor, and how things went in the parallel world. For Who-fans, these are precious things, little glimpses into a part of the show’s story that have been closed to us for years. They’re also, of course, a way of catching up with the wonder that is Jackie Tyler, played on-screen and performed and read here by Camille Coduri.

In the first story, we learn of a ‘Human Doctor’ who’s moody, shackled, not that happy with Rose and trying to build his own Tardis to get the hell out of alternative-Dodge to roam the stars and the time vortex like he somehow feels he should, while being ever keen to blow stuff up (including himself) in a vaguely heroic attempt to ‘be’ the Doctor he thinks he should be. That story ended with the Doctor and Jackie Tyler at serious, sulking odds, and her telling him to buck up his ideas and be the Doctor she remembers – the one who would give people a chance, the one who made people better, rather than tearing them to pieces from a rigid standpoint.

Flight Into Hull! takes the story forward, with the Doctor and Jackie trapped on a Zeppelin flying to Hull (there are reasons, just go with it), having a solid sulk at each other until confronted with an alien threat. There are interesting elements to the nature of that threat – imagine everything you know you could be if only you applied yourself…and then imagine it turning up and arguing that it’s got more of a right to your life than you have. Possibly a bit Red Dwarfy as plot elements go, but here it’s used at first to seemingly confirm the Doctor in his arrogance about Jackie Tyler and her ‘little human’ nature, compared to his own potential – this was a Doctor, remember, whose progenitor, the mainstream Tenth Doctor, was absolutely not above a sulk about his role in saving puny humans and how he could ‘do so much more.’ That sense seems to be festering in the blue-suited bosom of the Human (or Metacrisis) Doctor, trapped on one planet, in one time zone, surrounded by humans who on the wrong day would, to be fair, annoy the halo off many a human saint.

What comes in response to that is a passionate, sometimes angry, sometimes brilliantly evocative speech from Jackie about how not everyone can be Mr Brilliant, can overleap the challenges of life and ponder on the Big Questions. Some people have to face the crises of the everyday – the raising of a daughter, the finding of money for a school trip when there’s no money to be found, the establishing of standards when they seem irrelevant, and the care given to everyone, big or small, important or menial, over the little things that make life better and make the world still want to go around. It’s gulp-giving stuff, and you may well find there’s something in your eye by the end of it. In a way it’s also a heart-cry for the ‘traditional’ companion, the human who can boggle and go ‘What’s that, Doctor?’ The people who are ordinary, and who, in that very ordinariness, find what’s special about themselves through exposure to the Doctor’s example, his doing what can be done, his standing up against the bullies of the universe.

Ultimately, the alien threat in this story comes down to a game of Chicken with a Doctor who’d rather die than blink. And perhaps perversely, it’s in the wake of the alien threat, faced with certain death in a burning Zeppelin, that the Doctor and Jackie have their moments of epiphany with each other, and we get to hear what the Doctor actually thinks of Rose and Jackie both.

Coduri is absolutely faultless in a role she knows well, despite having last played it on screen over a decade ago, and Lidster’s script does lots of cool things – takes us into the Metacrisis Doctor’s emotional state, stands up for dinnerladies and other caregivers the universe over, puts out the stall for equality of humanity irrespective of brain, or job, or position in life…oh, and crashes a Zeppelin into the Humber Bridge – this is still Doctor Who, after all.

It seems unlikely these two Short Trips were commissioned with the idea of an audio series in mind, but the combination of Lidster’s vision for the troubled alt-Doctor’s life, and Coduri’s enthusiastic portrayal of the proud single mum that is Jackie Tyler show the potential of what that series could be. Maybe, Big Finish? The Tylers – Earth Defence? Seriously, it could work…

Pick up Flight Into Hull! (and its predecessor, The Siege of Big Ben) today and go back in time and slightly sideways for a new and inspiring take on the Doctor Who you think you know.

Big Finish Reviews+ Eighth Doctor - Time War 2 by Tony J Fyler

War! Good God, y’all,

this is what it’s good for, says Tony.

The Time War series from Big Finish is a brave attempt to do what was once thought impossible – to give colour to, and to at least a little personalise the Time War, a sequence of events and causes that it should be impossible to follow, a war between the universe’s two greatest, most dogmatic time travelling species, the Time Lords and the Daleks. More than that though, the Eighth Doctor Time War series exists to bridge the gap between the Eighth Doctor we have known since his TV Movie appearance – a Doctor full of bounce and fizz and Tiggerish excitement – and the Eighth Doctor we now know finally makes the choice we never imagined the Doctor could make, to become a warrior, and fight the Time War with the warrior’s conviction brought to the screen, and later to a series of audio box sets, by the wonder that was John Hurt. The box set arcs of recent years for the Eighth Doctor have seen him pushed further and further into dark places, from Dark Eyes, through The Doom Coalition and now into Ravenous, but there still feels like a distinct divide between the Doctor we know from those box sets and the Doctor who finally makes that warrior’s choice.

The Eighth Doctor Time War 1 box set felt, if anything, oddly slight and a little unprepared for the task ahead – particularly in the episode which showed us Time Lord troopers drilling like ordinary Earth-warriors. Immediately though, the second box set takes us away from any sense of flatness or ordinary chronology – in the opening story, The Lords of Terror by Jonathan Morris, we join Eight and his newish companion, Bliss, as he takes her home to her world, just to tell her parents she’s OK before they go hurtling off again.

But Bliss’ home world is…not the place it was. It’s been ravaged by the Daleks, till only one city remains. One city with a plan to retaliate.

The sheer culture shock on Bliss of this revelation would be enough to explore in a full story, but Morris by no means leaves a promising situation unpoked with sticks. Sure enough, as the title suggests, there’s more to this retaliation than meets the eye, and there are both layers of storytelling that confront the Doctor with what the war is doing to his own people’s psychology, and a handful of callbacks to Tom Baker’s early days – big rockets, cities with domes that must be climbed, and explicit references to the mission on which he was sent in Genesis of the Daleks. It’s a neat, throbbing undertone of guilt and association, but as with Bliss’ anguish, it’s not really given the time it needs to breathe and sink into us because there’s always something frantic happening – people are killed, people are revealed as traitors, people’s backstories of pain are unfurled, and reality shifts from minute to minute, culminating in a countdown clock that, in another Genesis callback, brings the Doctor face to face with the responsibilities of the actions he might take.

In essence, The Lords of Terror is an expression of the Orwellian idea that if you have an enemy, and you use the same tactics as that enemy, you become almost indistinguishable from them, especially in the impacts you have on others. That’s an idea which had its full TV flowering in the era of the Tenth Doctor, when the Time Lords themselves, hardened, blinded and ravaged by war, become a bigger danger to the universe than the Daleks themselves – this story is not by any means that wholesale fall of a society’s standards, but it is a gracenote on how such things can happen, one life at a time.

Planet of the Ogrons, by Guy Adams is somewhat lighter fare, as long-term fans will expect. The Ogrons, bless them, are burly ape-like creatures of very little brain but plenty of brawn, who worship carnivorous rocks and hire themselves out as muscle to any galactic bullies who can pay.

They’re not by any means the universe’s most interesting creatures, and there’s a sense in which the story they’re used to tell here feels like oddness for the sake of it – we meet a new non-Dalek Dalek who likes to tinker, and we meet one very particular Ogron that really feels like its story needs a resolution which fails to come within the scope of this box set. But put all that behind you, because this story also introduces us to the Twelve.

The Twelve is a ‘future’ incarnation of the main villain of The Doom Coalition and Ravenous, known with a certain numerical inevitability as the Eleven. A Time Lord whose regenerations are all permanently with him, the Eleven is a tortured creature, trying to drive the vehicle of his body with ten backseat drivers at any time trying to wrest the wheel from him.

The Twelve is Julia McKenzie.

For people who don’t know, Julia McKenzie’s a phenomenal actress, now of an age to dominate the ‘little old lady in whose mouth butter wouldn’t melt’ category of roles. She also has an absolutely audible eye-twinkle, and, when necessary, can deploy a voice like a stiletto. She plays the Twelve as an incarnation who finally has her other selves under control (at least to begin with), and working on the side of what can still loosely be thought of as good – the Time Lords. Casting McKenzie is one of those scarily frequent strokes of genius from Big Finish, and the combination of her and Paul McGann, buffered by the mellifluent peacekeeping presence of Rakhee Thakrar as Bliss, is a stand-out reason to buy The Time War 2, irrespective of your ability to commit to the storytelling journey of the set. You simply need to have heard some things in your life, and this is one of them. Jon Culshaw as the Very Special Ogron doesn’t hurt matters in the slightest, either.

If Planet of the Ogrons deals with personality in terms of the Very Special Ogron and the Twelve, In The Garden Of Evil, Adams’ second contribution to this set, is a very different philosophical exploration of similar ideas. A garden filled with lethal creatures that kill if prisoners stray off the paths is filled with people who have no memory of their identities. They remember things, words, skills they have, but not who they are. And every now and then, they get teleported for interrogation by…whoever it is that’s keeping them there. When they arrive for questioning, they remember, but when they get sent back to the Garden, their memories are wiped of their personality again. And then there’s Prisoner Alpha, separated from the rest in a prison-dome all of his own. Is he, as he surmises, the most evil man in the universe? Or is there more to the Garden than meets the mind?

Adams’ tale is highly engaging, because it makes you wonder how you would cope in a similar situation – would you simply accept your imprisonment? Try to make friends? Try to test the boundaries of your confinement? What would your fundamental personality reveal if you didn’t have the understanding of yourself that you carry around with you? It’s a mystery, and Bliss shows a very rational side to her nature in working through the issues, while ‘Alpha’, despite his brilliance, wonders about his guilt, his culpability for crimes resulting in this incarceration. The Twelve though steals this story too, showing an inquisitive intellect, and a ghastly ruthless streak which frankly Julia McKenzie was born to express. There’s extra help in this story too in the presence of Victor McGuire (as he describes himself, ‘Jack in Bread, Ron in Goodnight Sweetheart, surprise star of West End musicals at the age of 44’) as Borton, another prisoner in the Garden whose reasons for being there are surprisingly never discovered, but whose personality reveals itself as amiable and curious, the very kind of person who might help solve the mystery of the Garden of Evil.

Episode 3 cracks along at a pace that feels punchy but not overcrowded, with its single key objective for our team of getting out of the Garden and regaining their memories. And while most of the episodes of this set are standalone but close in time, there’s a connection here that leads us relatively smoothly into the fourth episode, Jonah, by Timothy X Atack. Episode 4 is an unusual one, bearing some resemblance to the Beneath the Viscoid episode of the first War Master set – it’s all submarines chasing beneath the surface of a sea that negates the operation of time travel capsules. The story welcomes back the imperious Cardinal Ollistra, played by Jacqueline Pearce, and here there’s a definite sense of racing to find a prize that could turn the tide of the Time War, and there are three very strong female characters in the hierarchy of the Doctor’s sub-crew - Chief Panath, played by Tania Rodrigues, Executive Officer Omor, played by Surinder Duhra, and Ensign Murti, played by Anya Chalotra. Between them, these three women drive a lot of the story, and give the planet its personality, its culture, its character and values – and you end up with a world that you’re genuinely sorry the Daleks have ravaged. Plotwise, it’s high-stakes adventure on a race between the Time Lords and the Daleks for The Thing that can change the fate of the war, but there’s ultimately more to it than reaching the objective first. Atack crafts a story that has satisfaction bells strewn throughout it, and rings every one along the way. Meanwhile, there’s not a single dud note from the cast in Episode 4 – the three locals act their socks off to build the world, McGann, Pearce, Thakrar and McKenzie add streaks of personality and character-colour throughout, and the whole thing hums with a quality you can only let engulf you.

The Eighth Doctor Time War 2 is four individual episodes with some connection, rather than a heavily linking arc of darkness, but there’s good stuff to be gotten out of each and every one, and there’s more of a feel of the war becoming an inevitable reality for the Eighth Doctor in this set than the last. There’s also, thanks to events in Episode 1, a new, vaguely Charlotte Pollardy conundrum with which to contend going forward – people who exist when they shouldn’t, the laws of time having been put into abeyance.

There are some clever ideas here, around which are woven some staggering performances – McGann on form as ever, Thakrar really getting to show us more about the character of Bliss, and McKenzie stealing every scene in which the writers dare to put the Twelve. Like all the best of treats, we’d really like to keep her for a while before there’s any hint of the Thirteen stealing her thunder.

Grab The Eighth Doctor Time War 2 – it’s a solid progression for the Eighth Doctor as he inches ever closer to the war, a richly character-driven set of stories, and quite apart from all of that, you absolutely need the Twelve in your life, as soon as you possibly can manage.