Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips: Dead Woman Walking by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s got worms.

Dead Woman Walking, by Roland Moore, is in many ways a thought experiment through the medium of Doctor Who. It embraces the struggle of macro-creatures like humans against micro-organisms, like viruses or worms, and asks us to examine which version of us is the ‘best self’ we could be. It encompasses responsibility, recklessness, power, manipulation and consequences, all within little more than half an hour of prime Doctor Who.

Now, if that makes it all sound a bit heavy, don’t worry – Moore’s a storyteller first and foremost, and he does due diligence by his responsibility to the listener, so what you get here is a story of Ace in a biological dilemma, being kept alive by  a biological entity which exists in symbiosis with a kind of living bomb which could blow apart the planet on which she’s standing, while a vicious civil war goes on around her. What you get here is the Doctor seemingly baffled as to how to give both her and the planet a future in which they’re not inextricably bound together, and Ace, being Ace, showing the true quality of her character. It would absolutely spoiler you to explain how that quality of character resolves itself into a solution, but in a time when fandom has been reflecting on the power and the admirable nature of the likes of Sarah-Jane Smith, this story does good service to Ace’s character, and to the way in which her journey made her better, able to affect situations merely by the content of her character.

While it has something of The Invisible Enemy about it, this story deals cleverly with the question of how far out of your comfort zone you’d go to get a good result. While Ace on-screen was very much the gung-ho teenager, reader to shout at things and blow them up to get them out of her angry way, this is an Ace that feels more mature than that, an Ace who, while by no means comfortable with it, is prepared to go the long way round a problem if it’s clear that that’s the way of least danger. An Ace prepared to suffer, to grow older, even if need-be to die to solve the problem, but in the meantime to be the best version of herself she can be, and hope it rubs off on people.

While the Doctor is forced to leave her behind on the world with the living bomb at its core, Ace’s job is to stay alive, locked into a symbiosis with that bomb, being, while still entirely Ace, a kind of still point to whom others can look, a beacon and a source of peace, and an example of the way they too could live their lives, bigger than any petty conflict to which they may be dedicated.

In many ways, the sub-structure of this story is a thank you to those who’ve written Ace over the decades, and to Sophie Aldred for giving such vivacious life to her. Hardly a farewell, it’s a story that nevertheless could stand as one of the character’s many best days, the kind of days we remember when all other days are gone – perhaps fittingly so, given both the story’s title and its central dilemma, in which Ace’s life depends on her not putting a foot wrong over an extended period. As such, there’s the fuzzy warmth of the best of funerals about it, which is somewhat thankfully undercut at the end by the relationship between Ace and the Doctor in one of its more spiky moments, one of his teachable moments putting her well and truly through the wringer.

Is Dead Woman Walking perfect then?

Not quite – in fact, the more grammatically minded among you will take a layer of enamel off your teeth early on, as the storytelling starts off in a lazy way with shifted perspectives, like ‘If Ace had been conscious, she’d have heard the tone in his voice…’

Maybe you have to be a pedant for this sort of thing to get to you. I’m led to believe there are at least one or two in the fandom, so if this sort of thing drives you screaming to your computer to write emails of complaint, take a breath. Push on through. The story itself is worth the occasional moment of grammatical seething. Especially if you’re an Ace fan, it’s a slightly more mature take on her character, where there’s more depth to her than the child who hit Daleks with baseball bats (much as we love that version). It’s an Ace who might be mad as hell at the Doctor’s hard schooling, but who knows enough to stand still and let the world, just occasionally, change around her, because of her. And because of who she is, to change for the better.

Big Finish Reviews+ Deleted Scenes by Tony J Fyler

Short Trips is an interesting Big Finish range. Sometimes the stories in the range are used to give us ‘Tuesday Adventures,’ happenings in the life of our favourite Time Lord or his companions that would never have made a full TV story. But the format also allows for little jewels that deepen our understanding of what life on board the Tardis can really be like, or moments that turn our appreciation of people absolutely on its head.

This story, by Angus Dunican…

You might need some tissues to hand for this one. It’s a bit of a tear-jerker on several levels at once.

Set in Paris in 1908, it mostly tells the story of an early filmmaker named Céline Tessier, and how the arrival of the Second Doctor, but more importantly, the arrival of Jamie McCrimmon in her life changes her path forever.

Engaged to an illusionist when they meet (the Doctor materialises the Tardis on his stage, which, to be fair, is one hell of an illusion for the first decade of the 20^th century), Céline finds herself more and more taken with the hairy-legged highlander as she strives over the course of a year to make her magnum opus, Le Serpent Dans Le Jardin – The Snake In The Garden, for any non-French-speakers, a title that represents temptation, forbidden fruit and the fall of humanity away from grace in the Biblical tradition. Her engagement is broken, and James Robert McCrimmon becomes a star of the silent screen in a small handful of films leading up to the big one. More importantly, he gets closer and closer to the director, while the Doctor allows them to stay, not forcing the decision of Céline or the Tardis on his young friend because he knows Jamie was taken with Victoria, and has been missing her badly.

There’s no untoward alien influence in Deleted Scenes – unless you count the Doctor himself, and it becomes increasingly tempting to do so, because ultimately the story is about choices, and especially about the choice between doing the easy thing and the right thing. Perhaps, in some cases, between doing the compassionate thing and the right thing. And the Doctor, for all he’s in his second incarnation, seems still to be working out where the borderlines of those choices are, both for humans and for himself in regard to his human friends. For analogies in New Who, think of the Ninth Doctor taking Rose back to see the day her dad died in Father’s Day, or the Twelfth ‘going to Hell’ in response to Clara’s demand that he find Danny Pink after he’s died. The Doctor wants to be kind, wants to give a special gift to his friends, even if such a gift is neither wise nor ultimately safe.

So with the Second Doctor, he wants to give Jamie some time with Céline, to heal the young man’s heart after Victoria’s leaving. But the longer they stay, not only does it become harder to eventually have to make the choice between the director and the Doctor, but also, the more embedded the Doctor becomes in other human dilemmas. When Céline’s film is finally ready to be made, her life savings poured into the Serpent, only for disaster to strike, the Doctor is faced with another big question: what’s the point in having a time machine if you don’t use it to help the people about whom you claim to care? What’s the point of caring if you won’t act to help them? The dilemma comes through Jamie, it’s Jamie’s Father’s Day moment, when the principle that he’s stood by the Doctor’s side through thick and thin, defeated tyrants, monsters and beasties with very few questions asked is evoked – is that just what I’m good for, or is this a real friendship? Will you do what I’m asking you to do, you brilliant mad man with your fancy box, or will you not?

The Doctor’s decision haunts him, racks him, pushes him into one of his week-long comas to think things through. To separate the right thing from the easy thing, the emotional from the purely clinical decision. And while his decision has an impact on Jamie’s life – who knows, if things had gone differently, Jamie might have stayed in Paris, made his career in silent films, rather than eventually having his memories wiped by the Time Lords – the Doctor’s decision is what he feels at the time it has to be.

The wonder of Angus Dunican’s script though is that it twists the knife in us sweetly, so we bleed for the decisions made, the reality imposed on the web of time, and yet ultimately, he rescues us, and in some ways the Doctor himself, when everything’s too late to make a difference to the world and the web, but when it still might make a difference to a couple of individuals. Even then, the Doctor has more or less forgotten about the choice he made until he’s prompted to put things as right as the web of time will stand by another, later companion. Guarantee that’ll get you sniffing too, because it’s so very like that later companion to do the thing they do. To help the lonely, wonderful, melodramatic alien be a touch more human when they can. It’s a thing of perfection.

As, come to that, is Dunican’s writing – you can tell when someone’s really thought about how they evoke an emotion in their audience, and Dunican gives good simile here – when things are ‘like’ other things in this story, the things they’re like will stick with you for their quality of phrasing. Yes, you’ll think – that’s exactly what that feels like. Looks like. Is like. Dunican gives you way more than your money’s worth here in terms of similes that stick, dilemmas that crush, decisions that’ll make you sniff, and a resolution that, if it doesn’t have you bawling probably means you’re a Cyberman. He delivers a Jamie story that deepens our understanding of the character, a crucial turning point between Jamie and the Second Doctor, and a sublime example of the Doctor’s friends looking out for his soul, making him that bit more human and heroic than the long view of the Time Lord might otherwise allow.

Big Finish Reviews+ Dead Media by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s on his Walkman.

Delivering a first person audio story about the audio medium has been done before, and with great effect – if you’ve never heard the audiobook version of Dead Air, by James Goss, go and hunt that down immediately.

There are similarities between that Tenth Doctor story and this Twelfth Doctor Short Trip from John Richards. During his time at St Luke’s university in Bristol in Series 10, but seemingly before he meets wide-eyed inquisitive chip-doler Bill, the Twelfth Doctor finds himself getting involved with the university’s Audio-Visual Club. He goes to them in search of that once ubiquitous, now increasingly obsolete device, a cassette player, having discovered a curious tape in the Tardis during the rigorous alphabetization of his Jelly Babies, and having nothing of his own on which to play it since that mad girl with the baseball bat blew it up. Or was that the Cybermen…?

Anyhow, in search of a tape deck, he meets Petra – quantum physics student by day, Audio-Visual Club geek by any remaining time, and also, tech lead on the university’s podcast, ‘The People of St Luke’s.’

When they play the tape, things get increasingly creepy and odd and nostalgic, but also – be warned – increasingly complicated. When echoes are not exact echoes, what are they? Big Finish is good at messing with your head through sound – you could say it’s the company’s stock in trade – but here, the majority of the scares are delivered both on the page and through Jacob Dudman’s performance.

And key to the emotional and science fiction dramas here is one key question - if there’s something trapped on a tape, is there a reason it’s trapped on there?

This is an interesting story of the Twelfth Doctor’s particular fallibility, his judgment forever trapped between trying to be a good man and actually being one, and how it can sometimes lead him into trouble, and sometimes cost the lives of those who stand close to him without his particular Time Lord advantages. He even references a couple of prior instances here – it was he who brought the Mandragora Helix to Earth in his fourth incarnation, and he who brought the Family of Blood to Earth in that thing that we all thought was his tenth incarnation but was technically his eleventh, which we still insist on calling the Tenth Doctor because names and stuff. The one that looked a lot like David Tennant. Alright, the first of the ones that looked a lot like David Tennant *Shakes fist at sky, yells names of two former showrunners in head.*

The point stands though – on the day the Doctor gets things wrong, he has a tendency to get them really wrong, and people tend to die as a result. So, if you see something trapped, and you let your own sense or memory of what being trapped was like affect your judgment, you could well unleash the end of the world based on little more than your need to see things free. While Dead Media came first, a very recent example of this same syndrome in the Doctor’s psychology of course was seen in Can You Hear Me? – egged on by Graham, the Thirteenth Doctor freed a sadistic god from the prison in which it was perfectly effectively trapped, and then had to undo her own rash action before the universe could sleep at night.

Here, there’s a ‘monster’ that isn’t one, but whose existence in our universe is a danger to itself and others, let loose in our dimension because the Doctor had memories of working for UNIT and trying everything in his power to break free of his exile. There are consequences here too, and if the Doctor succeeds in putting things right, it’s important to note that there are some consequences you can’t undo with a wave of your screwdriver and a heartfelt apology.

In terms of the delivery of this story, Jacob Dudman’s some sort of joyous vocal freak of nature, adding a third New Who Doctor to his repertoire, and for all it begins with a voice that sounds more like an exhausted Tenth Doctor than a realistic Twelfth, the longer you listen, the more Twelvish it becomes, so you’re completely along for the ride long before the end. There are challenges to the delivery in the way this story is structured too – rather than, as with the likes of Best Laid Plans, allowing the narrator to be omniscient, and the Twelfth Doctor merely a voice to be dropped into, here, the whole thing is in the first person, so it’s the Twelfth Doctor from start to finish, doing impressions of other voices along the way, like the Twelfth Doctor doing impressions of Petra from Port Talbot in Wales. Oh, the fun of accents.

Nevertheless, Dudman perseveres and delivers a strong vocal performance which, as mentioned, convinces more often than it doesn’t.

There are moments as we hurtle towards a solution to the problem – ideally one that doesn’t result in reality being torn to accidental shreds – when a basic grounding in either quantum physics, audio-visual engineering or ideally both would come in handy, and the solution that’s found is decidedly heavy on the geek. Because the Doctor’s relating these events in the form of a podcast, it’s probably also the only Doctor Who adventure to be interrupted by adverts for Bristolian kebab shops. Yes, really – one of the sheer delights of this story is the notion of Captain Eyebrows being forced to read out soulless advertising copy as if it has even the slightest tangential meaning or relevance to him. Bliss.

Dead Media is a story that delivers the complexity of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor to a tea – it’s grumpy, and offhand, and almost dismissive, but it’s all of those things in a way that makes you love it, and him, and the way he misses the little things in life while focusing on the bigger picture. It’s a story that’ll spark a desire in you to go back and watch Capaldi at work, reminding you of just how staggeringly good he could be – which is probably as much of a compliment as John Richards and Jacob Dudman are looking for. Between them, they bring the Twelfth Doctor joyously, grumpily back to life, and give us an adventure during his life at St Luke’s with a poignant moment of self-realisation at its end. He might be there guarding Missy in her prison, but perhaps, just perhaps, the period of enforced stillness will have a positive impact on his own persona too.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Best - Laid Plans by Tony J Fyler

Tony has a good idea

Where do you get your ideas from?

It’s a question writers get asked all the time. Politicians and dictators rarely get asked the same question but seem determined to tell everybody at length in memoir after memoir after interminable memoir.

People have a tendency to assume everyone gets their ideas from some individual place in their brain. But imagine, just for a moment, that’s not the case.

Meet Dracksil Forg, idea salesman. For the right price, he’ll imagine you any darned thing you want, from the plot of a major blockbuster novel to a way to crush your local star system under your boot heel. The plans will be detailed, precise, not always easy but always, always, foolproof. If you follow Dracksil’s recipe, you’ll get the result you want.

Every time.

And the best bit is that he’s strictly an ideas man. Strictly a service industry. Not for him the ethical qualms of an activist. He merely solves any equation you bring him for X, where X is the desired result.

Dracksil Forg is a gorgeous idea in the Doctor Who universe because he’s not, in himself, evil, but he is, or at least seems to be, a kind of anti-Doctor, a profit-incentivised version of our favourite Time Lord. Where the Doctor goes careering through time and space, fixing random problems he encounters, Dracksil Forg sits perfectly still in his own time and space, and waits for problems to walk through his door. For the right amount of money, they leave with a solution. The cosmos changes as a result of his actions, but Dracksil Forg is like a ghostwriter – he never puts his name to the actions that ensue from his plans, but those who need him will know his name.

Except…

Except he’s started to come to the notice of someone else. Some lanky, grumpy beanpole with fighting eyebrows and a runaway mouth. Some would-be legend who, for instance, when paid to poison a particular dignitary at a dinner, somehow manages to ensure they go home remarkably unpoisoned. Someone who when faced with a drone army of killbots reprograms them to pick plastic out of the oceans instead. Someone who when he encounters a cut-price quantum Death Star…waves a screwdriver at it and turns it into a planetary vending machine.

The Doctor.

Very specifically in this instance, the Twelfth Doctor, as voiced by Jacob Dudman. The story is essentially a shedload of set-up and bedding in, a handful of examples of how the Doctor is causing, shall we say, radical customer dissatisfaction on the part of Dracksil’s latest clients (Can you imagine the reviews? Nobody wants to have an army of killbots turn green crusader on them just after they’ve issued their proclamation of power, it just makes you look a pillock), and then a build-up to one of those confrontations in which the Twelfth Doctor particularly excels. When Dracksil and the Doctor face each other in Dracksil’s office (like everyone else, the Doctor has to come and see Dracksil, rather than vice versa), what we get is an immensely satisfying confrontation, not because of any raised voices – the Twelfth Doctor is often most effective when he lowers his voice – but because it absolutely shines with pure distilled Twelfth Doctor tones. There’s a left-field beginning, that seems there just for the fun, but isn’t. There’s an explanation of what’s really going on, opening Dracksil’s eyes to a truth even he has never worked out about himself. There’s a fairly casual insult or two, because, after all, this is the Twelfth Doctor. And then there’s the hope. The Twelfth Doctor’s hope that the universe can be better than its default setting of grim and grasping nastiness if it just dares to be imaginative. If it dares to use its little pudding brains, and can find the better way to be. Pudding, not poison. Greenbots, not killbots. Hunger-ending vending machines, rather than planet-blasting death machines. Think, is the Twelfth Doctor’s main theme. Think. And then be kind.

Ben Tedds won the 2019 Paul Spragg Memorial Opportunity with this story, and it’s easy to hear why. The imaginative leap involved in inventing Dracksil Forg is the kind of blow-your-hair-back brilliance that seems obvious once it’s been done, but which takes a very particular energy of mind to actually invent (arguably in itself pre-empting the theme of the story). The notion of Dracksil’s business – a kind of ‘We can imagine it for you wholesale’ service industry, dealing with its clients at a long business distance speaks to both great science fiction, in the lines of Philip K Dick and Douglas Adams, and to our real world service industries today who, when things go wrong, scuttle away with their hands raised and claim it was nothing to do with them. You could arguably draw a line between what Dick did for memory and perception in We Can Imagine It For You Wholesale and what Adams did for faith and belief with his electronic monk in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Tedds does here for the creative imagination – he farms it out to a service provider, irrespective of what the intended goal might be, and Dracksil Forg is that service provider. It’s an idea that absolutely has legs in the New Who universe, and you can easily imagine how the premise and the examples of the Doctor’s plan-thwarting could have been expanded to fit a whole TV episode.

It feels like Tedds knows his expanded Who-universe, giving us a kind of Easter egg here in the form of a bird-people species from the local cosmic area of the Shansheeth, only where the funeral directors were vulture-people, Tedds gives us legal…ach, you can probably work out which birds he has working heavily in the legal profession. No?

And above all, the spirit of the Twelfth Doctor sings out from the ending of this story. He’s not against people having ideas. He’s not even against people paying someone else to have their ideas for them. But he wants to collapse the callous disregard Dracksil’s allowed himself to have for consequences, arguably echoing the ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ line of the likes of the NRA in our modern world. Guns absolutely don’t kill people if no-one has the idea for guns, and the people who do have the idea for guns can’t be separated from the consequences of their ideas. Likewise, the Doctor argues here, people who have the idea for planet-killing weapons or drone armies need to face up to the consequences of the ideas they have, and the ideas they sell to a hungry marketplace. Especially when kindness and imagination will allow them to have better ideas. Kinder ideas. Ideas that make the universe a better place, rather than a deader place.

It’ll be interesting to see where Tedds’ career goes from here, but wherever it is, it’ll be worth watching. And any time he gets another Big Finish gig, you’re going to want to pre-order that thing, because The Best-Laid Plans punches well above the weight of a new author Short Trip, weaving some fairly hardcore sci-fi philosophy into the carpet of a thumping good adventure story with some pitch-perfect Twelfth Doctoring to give you a shot of Old Attack Eyebrows that feels like it could have been lifted straight from the screen. The best-laid plans may aft gang wherever they like, but make getting a copy of this story the best plan you lay today and you’ll end your day with a Twelfth Doctor smile. Guaranteed by Dracksil Forg.

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.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Second Oldest Question by Tony J Fyler

As fans of what it is becoming increasingly ridiculous to call ‘New Who’ will probably know, the Doctor has been haunted by ‘the oldest question in the universe’ since they ran away from Gallifrey. It was made the subject of quite a lot of enquiry and discussion during the Matt Smith era, and revolves around their name. Let’s not focus on the fact that there must, presumably, be older questions than that still floating about the universe – ‘Doctor Who?’ is apparently that question.

So – what’s next on the universes To Do List? What’s the second oldest question in the universe?

In this Short Trip by Carrie Thompson, we’re about to find out.

When we work it out, you should probably prepare your groanometer. Pack it with ice or somesuch to stop it from exploding in philosophical rage. When you find out what the second oldest question in the universe actually is, (at least according to the unusually flippant Fifth Doctor here), you’ll go ‘Ohhh… Really?’

The point of course being that no, no-one’s proposing to tell you what the second oldest question actually is – it’s a twinkly-eyed joke from the Fifth Doctor as he’s up to his plimsolls in muck, mud, the trial of Satan’s Chicken and disgruntled medieval peasants with an axe to grind and a dinner to prepare.

Because that’s where this story takes us – to a soaking wet, muddy hole in the ground in Earth’s middle ages, full of drunks, honest sons of the soil who believe bathing is bad for you, and a chicken which stands accused of murder.

The Doctor, seemingly more for mischief than for any other reason, decides to defend the bird against the calumny of the villagers, many of whom have plans to share out the corpse of the doomed beast for their pots the next day, once they’ve seen God’s justice done upon the fowl fiend (Yes, dammit, I went there – how often d’you get an opportunity to use that spelling?!).

While Nyssa spends the trial with the head jammed in a medieval armpit, the Doctor uncovers shenanigans underneath the mud and the movement of chickens. He doesn’t exactly cross-examine the winged wonder, but he does shift the culpability for the inferno onto an altogether more likely looking wrong ’un.

Which is where things really start to go wrong. Everybody in the middle ages loved a good chicken dinner of course, but if there’s a chance to root out sorcery in their village by means of a full-on warlock-burning, so much the better – they can always kill the chicken when the interfering blond bloke naffs off back wherever he came from.

So, from a premise that feels forced and seems to involve the Fifth Doctor in an uncharacteristic game of ‘Let’s mess with the peasants,’ comes a situation of genuine danger, with the Doctor on the wrong side. When he discovers what’s really going on, it’s actually the Doctor who introduces the concept of witchcraft into the minds of the peasants, apparently on the grounds that it seems like a good idea at the time. The resolution of that drama though returns to a somewhat forced and not all that sympathetic denouement from the Fifth Doctor, who essentially forces someone with an extreme germophobia to live in a pigsty – or at least a chicken coop – for the rest of their lives, without really sufficient evidence of their need to be punished in this particularly hellish way.

Ultimately, The Second Oldest Question probably seemed like a good idea on paper, and could have developed from its mid-story point of peak emotional drama into something that showed the Fifth Doctor dealing with the occasional inconsistency of his own whims and actions. Instead, he appears content to lay his sentence of torment on a criminal – if not a chicken – and walk, muddy-shoed away, content in the knowledge that at least he’s saved them from being burned to death by hungry peasants. Ultimately then, it feels like a good idea insufficiently worked through with the Fifth Doctor’s character uppermost in the decision-making process, and with an ending of ‘that’ll do’ convenience, rather than one that strives for Fifth Doctor moral complexity.

The Second Oldest Question is certainly worth picking up for completists, and there are plenty of funny bits along the journey. It’s just that both the journey itself, and the destination it ultimately reaches, feel less convincing and worthwhile than they probably should.

Big Finish Reviews+ Under Odin's Eye by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s in need of some retail therapy.

The Short Trips range allows Big Finish to tell stories that expand the universe of each Doctor, but to do it with particular challenges – they’re written as an ‘audiobook’ rather than as a play for voices. They’re short stories, equivalent to two Classic TV episodes, and the challenge is frequently to balance stories that add significantly to the legend of their Doctor or companion, while ideally saying something to make fans and new listeners think, smile and click the buy button on other stories in the range.

Under ODIN’s Eye, by Alice Cavender, gets quite a lot of this right. It’s a story that balances issues of cultural overwriting, distraction commerce, and fear of power with a couple of above-average gags at the expense of an identifiable Nordic furniture store, a missing personas plotline and a potential invasion, allowing the Sixth Doctor and Peri to both have their righteous indignation and dash about being heroic.

So – all good there, then.

Certainly, given the Short Trips releases only cost £2.99, you get your money’s worth of entertainment here and then some. If something doesn’t click, it’s in the final layer of the storytelling that connects all the plot-dots, which should lead to a whole picture and deliver the oomph, the satisfaction of a mystery solved, a crisis averted, evil defeated and home in time for meatballs. Here, it feels as though a handful of dots are joined, absolutely, but some are missed, and their lack in the overall drive to the finish leads to an underpowered, slightly underwhelming ending.

Again though, it’s important to understand exactly how much is going on here – Alice Cavender delivers plenty of humour, a good dose of, if not exactly Nordic Noir, then at least Nordic Noisette, some solidly rationalistic politics in terms of the ethics of humungo-megastores sucking the lifeblood out of local economies and, inevitably, out of local cultures too. There’s even, in one of the connections that works, a kind of ‘rape and pillage’ Viking element in all that, because we’re not at any point actually on a planet with a Norway here – just one that has a fondness for Nordic culture, etymology and bookcases. And then of course there’s the characterisation. Plots are all very well, and if it’s fairly straightforward, there certainly is one here. Underlying political consciences are great too, and this has one of those too. But a Doctor Who story doesn’t really work without strong characters, and Cavender, by no means a novice in the realms of different Doctors, brings the Time Lord of Moral Indignation bellowing to life here, while Nicola (Peri) Bryant works hard to give the Sixth Doctor, Peri, and the cast of villains, victims, and the somewhat undecided, their personalities in vivid vocal colour.

No review of Under ODIN’s Eye would be entirely complete without a degree of comparison to the Series 11 take on global capitalist icons, so with the inevitability of a QI contestant shuffling towards the wrong-answer klaxon, let’s get the Kerblam! comparison out of the way. Under ODIN’s Eye feels rather more clear-headed and to the point in its appraisal of mega-businesses than the TV take, though Kerblam! was aiming for rather different territory, some of which was more soggy than anything here. While the Kerblam! Men themselves more potential to be memorable than the actual villains here, overall, the clarity of message, added to an ending that’s by no means as rushed as its TV fellow traveller, Under ODIN’s Eye at least draws level, and could even be said to win on points as an experience worth repeating.

All in all, for £2.99, the quibbles about a somewhat linear villainy and an ending that feels oddly inevitable melt away under the strength of characterisation here, and that clear-headed approach to the whole ‘cultural homogeneity of shopping experiences in a capitalist construct, please come again and have a nice day’ argument. Go shopping with Sixie and Peri soon, and really – try the meatballs. You’ll regret it if you don’t.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips: The Astrea Conspiracy by Tony J Fyler

Tony gets caught up in conspiracies.

Halloo, hooray! It’s Twelfth Doctor Day!

Despite in some respects feeling like only yesterday that he let the Doctor go with imprecations to always be kind, the time has come for Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor to join the audio universe of ongoing Doctor Who stories at Big Finish.

Well, not quite Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor. His Doctor, but rendered here in the voice of Madame Vastra actress Neve McIntosh, who after all helped to usher him into our presence in Deep Breath. Here, she does the same again, ushering him into his audio age by giving us the story of the Astrea Conspiracy, by Lizbeth Myles.

The Astrea Conspiracy is an interesting pure historical with a bit of a wibbly-wobbly twist. It shows us a meeting between the Man With The Eyebrows of Death and Aphra Behn, the first female playwright to make it big in the world of English literature.

Oh, and spy. Did we mention that? S’kind of a big deal.

It’s especially a big deal because when we meet Aphra she’s in her pre-playwright days, double-dealing with skulduggerous buggers to try and foil a plot to assassinate King Charles II. A former lover and co-conspirator, William Scott, appears to be the key – if she can turn him away from regicidal gittery, then all will be well.

Or will it?

It all very much depends what you feel about kings, queens, the web of time and the fabric of causality, really. When it turns out Scott’s not coming to the rendezvous, and some long Scottish loon with weaponised eyebrows is there instead, Aphra’s life gets even more complicated than it already was.

Without giving too much away, The Astrea Conspiracy is what happens when these two forceful personalities meet, at a critical juncture in not only Aphra Behn’s life, but a point from which the whole of what we think of as established history from the 17^th century onward could melt away like sugar in the rain. Lizbeth Myles picks her crisis point with a gorgeous attention to detail that makes us want to hear more Who from her, and introduces the whys and the wherefores of her historical characters with the kind of richness you’ll find in the best of the black-and-white era’s explorations into the past – this has a Highlanders/Smugglers feel to it, where you’d certainly benefit from knowing something about the period before you go in, but the history and its weight is dealt with as a fact of storytelling life, rather than overlaboured, meaning you can just get in and get on with it. That’s a style to which Neve McIntosh turns her narration with apparent ease, so you get the nuts and bolts of the thing while still allowing the characters to feel real, and bright, and witty, without ever veering into sounding forced.

The most interesting thing, from a motivation point of view, is that the Doctor has rather tripped over his own trans-temporal feet in this story – there’s a certain amount of recursive logic at play, in that he only realises he needs to go and see Aphra because of a thing he experiences in her future and his past, and then – well, then, cue the Back To The Future shenanigans, because once he’s a part of events, he alters things that perhaps could have done without being altered, and has to play the timeline out in such a way as to set it to rights.

Between the modern pacing and temporal twistedness and the old-fashioned character quality and involving storyline, you get a lot of Doctor Who goodness for your money with The Astrea Conspiracy, and while in terms of universal threats it’s distinctly on the lighter end (as every pure historical is likely to be), the sense of enlightening a particular era and a specific historical person for the audience feels like a definite nod to the original remit of the show, and you come away with an appreciation that everything we think of as inevitable history is actually a web of such crisis points, from which things could have unfolded in entirely different ways.

Get involved in The Astrea Conspiracy – it’ll hook you quickly, whisk you along, educate you gently and leave you smiling as you enjoy an adventure with Aphra Behn, and welcome the Twelfth Doctor to the audio universe of Big Finish.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips The Mistpuddle Murders by Tony J Fyler

When in doubt, kill a bunny, says Tony.

This world is divided into two kinds of people. People who read the stories of Beatrix Potter and go ‘Awww,’ and people who read the stories of Beatrix Potter and want to claw their own eyes out while simultaneously giving each and every cutesy-wutesy properly-dressed little fluffball a right good drubbing.

Simon A Forward, writer of The Mistpuddle Murders here contrives a story which smashes talking, properly-dressed human-sized woodland creatures together with a touch of biomechanics and a heaping helping of the likes of Agatha Christie or The Midsomer Murders (from which the title seems gloriously stolen and twisted), to give us murder among the cutesy-wutesies.

Not just murder, as it turns out, but rather a cunning, devious murder, with Tegan and Nyssa playing Poirot, gathering a roomful of furry, flappy and prickly suspects and reconstructing the reality of boiling passions and tensions among them, leading up to the murder.

It’s very much a Doctor-lite story, and it doesn’t stray far beyond the tight, claustrophobic, twitchy-nosed remit it sets itself, but there’s tremendous fun to be had here, with Sarah Sutton giving the reading a headlong run as she delivers not only Nyssa but a not-half-bad and likely-to-get-her-glowered-at Tegan, as well as the full range of cosy-crime stereotypes – the timid village lady, the bumptious military man, the blinking academic or scientist etc – all within the cute-creature concept.

From Beatrix Potter to Alison Uttley, to Wind In The Willows, to Rupert the Bear and Paddington Bear and onward, children’s fiction is littered with anthropomorphic animals. Simon Forward takes us beyond the cute, to give us a laugh while examining what it would be like if animals really had human characteristics.

In a village seemingly created or at least populated by author and bio-engineer Lyndsay Wood, the animals are particularly human – there are burglars…burgling, clandestine affairs to keep quiet, dark double-dealings and seething resentments, all among the fluffy folk. Wood herself has passed on – and who, retrospectively, can say whether that was all it seems? - but her cottage has been bequeathed to Ginger Hopkins, smart bio-bunny of the parish.

The Doctor has gone bounding ahead to meet the multi-talented Ms Wood, unaware of her premature demise. Nyssa and Tegan, in an effort to catch him up, almost run over the hedgehog Professor Pricklethwart with their car. Concerned they’ve turned him into roadkill, they take him to the nearest cottage they can find, and meet Ginger, who offers them help, tea and biscuits.

Minutes later, Ginger Hopkins lies dead in her chair.

Is there bryony in the biscuit barrel? Cyanide in the sugar bowl? Or is something altogether darker going on in the village and its surrounding woodlands?

Without the mysteriously absent Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa investigate – Nyssa analysing the body of the bio-engineered bunny and the toxin that undoubtedly killed her, and Tegan…well, being Tegan.

But who among the locals has the motive for murder?

Colonel Fortingbrush, the fox with a penchant for grouse-shooting?

Professor Pricklethwart, the scientist who wouldn’t say boo to a goose if there happened to be one?

Miss Tabitha Nutkins, the squirrel who keeps herself to herself – or does she?

Reverend Brockley, the badger keen to minister to his flock?

Or Miss Felicity Nightheart, the bat with a very precise sweet ‘tooth’?

It could be any of them – but who has abandoned the morality with which they were written and bio-engineered?

It’s all gloriously tongue in animal cheek, this story, but Forward does his job with care – he creates a murder mystery with motive, complication, misdirection, touches of darkness and an unusual problem, to which the Doctor, emerging when most of the hard work’s already been done, provides a rather straightforward solution – though whether he actually does or not is another strand of philosophical pondering altogether.

It probably shouldn’t work, this smashing together of anthropomorphic animals and cosy crime. Forward almost dances you through it though – clue by clue, motive by motive, suspect by suspect, ending with perhaps the best image of Tegan you’ll have had in a while, and the Doctor throwing in a dark dilemma: if you know you’re a created creature, where does your morality lie? With your creator’s example, or in your own self-determination? Do the animals of Lyndsay Wood have free will? And if they do, where does the animal end and the human begin?

The Mistpuddle Murders is terrific fun with a thought or two provoked at the end, just to give you something to ponder after you finish it. With his previous Short Trip, Mel-Evolent twisting Disney, and this story taking the traditions of anthropomorphic animal stories and cosy villain crime novels and smashing them together till they blend, Simon A Forward’s becoming a go-to writer for pithy social and philosophical shenanigans, but always with a perfectly Doctor Who-appropriate story underneath. Get yourself The Mistpuddle Murders today – it’s the right thing to do.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips: I Am The Master by Tony J Fyler

Tony pops in for tea and Custard Creams with the most evil being in the cosmos.

This Short Trip had a lot to live up to.

Big Finish has done master-driven stories from his point of view before, and they’ve almost always been absolute belters. Both Master, by Joseph Lidster, and the Companion Chronicle release Mastermind, by Jonathan Morris, blew the skulls off most listeners, because they allowed the Geoffrey Beevers Master to stop and chat, to reveal his outlook on life, the universe and its utter domination.

Now we get another chance to sit and chat with the Beevers Master, this time written by, as well as starring Geoffrey Beevers. And this time, more than ever, he’s in a reflective mood.

So does I Am The Master measure up?

Well, yes…and no.

No perhaps mostly because the example of Mastermind has taught us that any time the Beevers Master stops to chat, there’s an ulterior motive, and while that motive changes throughout the course of this story, the initial reason he deigns to talk to us this time round is easily guessed, and borrows a dramatic touch from the likes of Sleep No More in terms of its meta-purpose, giving us a drama that entertains while using the listener themselves as a tool. It’s a technique that was effectively used by James Goss in the Tenth Doctor audiobook Dead Air, too, and the reason people keep coming back to it is that it works to involve the listener in the plans of the theoretically fictional villain. The reason it doesn’t quite work so well here is because it’s become something of a trope in and of itself, so this time round, we hear it coming.

No also possibly because Beevers’ writing of his Master sometimes errs a little too much on the side of Beevers the man – he is, reputedly, among the singularly nicest of human beings, and his Master here is rather more cosy and chatty and colloquial than he’s generally been painted by others, dropping into the darkness of the character usually with an audible octave-drop. On the other hand, there’s something that lifts the Beevers Master here too, in that the actual words he says are ghastly, hideous, talking about the poison, the torture, the destruction of worlds, with all the lighthearted aplomb of a man in a dog collar holding out a toasted crumpet on the end of a very sharp fork. You know you probably shouldn’t take it from him, but you also know you’re going to.

Should you wish to pick the story apart, you could also make the case that the Master here is overly simplistic, and overly concerned with the apparently inevitable cyclic victories of the Doctor whenever they meet. It smacks a little of someone aware they’re speaking to fans of the Doctor, rather than of someone who honestly believes themselves to be the cleverest life-form in any room.

That’s it. That’s all there is to even vaguely claim against this story.

What it gives you though is awesome.

What it gives you is exactly the kind of fireside chat you were hoping for. If Mastermind was a kind of Interview With The Vampire experience, the Master sharing his untold history with the UNIT staffers, and so with us, I Am The Master is a kind of elegy on how to kill planets and influence people – it’s him waxing poetical and preachy and philosophical about the various ways to bring a planet and its people to dust, many of which we’re notably doing for ourselves as we speak. And it’s all delivered with the trademark Beevers Master charm and calm and light-as-a-feather whimsy that drops out from under you and plunges you to Hell. That trademark Beevers Master warmth, earworming its way into your mind and laughing that laugh.

And yes, of course, it’s a trap. You knew it was a trap the moment you set it running. And so did the Master, because that’s what he does – he shines his mind through a magnifying glass and burns the universe to dust. And he and you both know you’re going to listen to I Am The Master more than once, despite knowing the ending. You won’t be able to stop yourself. You’ll want to feel the beats of the story’s progression, and of Geoffrey Beevers’ sibilant insinuation into your brain, a second time. And then a third.

I am The Master earns itself a special place in your Big Finish collection by virtue of the inevitability of its plot-twist, the philosophy of the Master revealed by the man himself, and the moments of casual psychopathy that lighten his lessons of planetary destruction. It’s the Beevers Master at possibly his most insidious to date, being friendly, being casual, being the Master you most want to trust, and the one you can least afford to. Pop this earworm in your lughole – you may never be quite the same again.

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.