Big Finish Reviews+ The Sontarans by Tony J Fyler

Nasty, brutish, looks like a potato.

But enough about Tony.

We all know about the Sontarans – nasty, brutish and short, at permanent war with the Rutans, cloned species, insanely good at fighting, bizarrely never the same twice until New Who, used significantly as comedy relief in the New Who universe.

This is not the New Who universe.

The Early Adventures of course are…pretty much exactly what they claim to be – stories that could fit into the black and white era and evoke that sense of the Hartnell or Troughton series, while giving us stories with a 21^st century verve, and making use of ideas which either didn’t or couldn’t have existed back then.

We’re going to go out on a limb here and say you’re going to love The Sontarans.

Every fan knows the Sontarans arrived in our world in The Time Warrior, Kevin Lindsey as Commander Linx kidnapping scientists and stashing them in the middle ages so as to repair his Christmas bauble of a ship.

But the Sontarans of course are known to the Doctor when he first sees the ‘ghost’ of Lynx, suggesting that he’s either heard of them, or encountered them before.

What Simon Guerrier has delivered in The Sontarans is ostensibly the first time the Doctor encounters the Spudheaded Sons of Sontar. What’s more, as he’s travelling with two companions from ‘our’ future, Steven and Sara, it’s one of those rare occasions in Who where the companions know more about the villains than the Doctor does. For Steven and Sara, the Sontarans’ reputation in battle, and their reputation for brutality, goes before them. The Doctor appears to encounter them cold, and learn as he goes.

The scenario of The Sontarans is, if not simple, then linear, with little to get in the way of its storytelling flow. One strategically placed asteroid, one squad of human soldiers (who also know the Sontarans of old), one squad of Sontarans, one objective for the humans (a giant space cannon with which the Sontarans are causing an embuggerance to a great chunk of the cosmos), one indigenous species, seemingly benign and oppressed, and one particular Sontaran leader with more than a touch of Styre about him, keen to torture humans for their information and their responses, so as to make military progress and improve the next generation of clones. What you’ve got, when you boil it down to its essentials, is a Dead Planet-style quest for the Doctor, his companions and those humans who make it through the first battle sequence, down into the bowels of the planet, to meet up with the indigenous species of the asteroid and from there make their way to blow the space cannon to smithereens, all the while being pursued by an enemy that’s ruthless, dogged and a damned good shot. In essence then, it’s the original Terminator movie, but with asteroids and Sontarans, in a black and white style.

That style’s important – Guerrier faithfully reproduces the tone of one of those Hartnell stories that involve quite a bit of getting from A-B, usually with some abseiling or rock climbing or leaping over gaps that lead down to the planet’s molten core or some such. But he manages to do that, and bring the Sontarans in, while conjuring what feels like a really fast couple of hours of storytelling, with treats galore along the way for the continuity fan. There’s talk of the Time Destructor, of the Terranium core, and, unusually for a Companion Chronicle or an Early Adventure, the story ends with a hard, fast reference point to on-screen Who, bringing a sense that the Steven and Sara adventures might almost be coming to their end. It’s true that Jean Marsh is 82 and Peter Purves is 77, but as Who fans we’re accustomed to being spoiled by these phenomenal actors showing us what they can still do (No lying down on the job, folks, William Russell’s 92!). That means the reference point back to The Daleks’ Master Plan comes as a shock. It doesn’t interrupt the flow at all, but the reality of it, and how close Sara is to fulfilling her destiny, still shocks and saddens us when we get to the end of the story.

Long before that though, there’s plenty to love about The Sontarans. The quest, with its authentic feel, shows us at least two entirely new things about the Sontarans as we understand them, and Dan Starkey, the modern-day Kevin Lindsey, tightens his grip on the whole Sontaran race, playing at least a Sontaran fistful of the clone-boys here, as well as one of the human troopers. In particular, he channels his Inner Lindsey in the squad leader, Slite, who tortures Steven when the Tardis crew get inevitably separated (we mentioned it had the tone of those Hartnellian quest stories, right?). There’s perhaps one moment that will grate on the nerves of those who don’t think the Sontarans should be funny, ever, but Guerrier gives us a logical reason why the Sontarans would be open to humour now and again.

Jemma Churchill as Captain Papas, the leader of the human squad, is effective here, a kind of proto-Sara before she joined the Doctor, while Jean Marsh herself is used mostly for important bits of exposition about the future and why they can’t reveal it. Peter Purves though continues his presumably exhausting triple act as Steven, the Doctor and the main narrator of the tale, belying any difficulty with a fluidity of delivery that has seen him really come into his own in recent years at Big Finish.

What The Sontarans gives us then is an amalgam that shouldn’t work, but absolutely does – a black and white feeling quest story, with what sound like Classic Sontarans, but move with the speed and determination of the New Who variety. It gives us a glimpse into the recent past for Steven and Sarah, a concrete link in to the on-screen chronology of early Who, a story that for all it’s identifiable as a quest, makes sense at least most of the time, some brand new things you didn’t know the Sontarans could do, and, on top of all that, the delight of hearing the first time the Doctor ever encountered a species he would come to know well and battle comparatively frequently, whipped along at a quick marching pace, and dogged by the ever-present sensation of loss, of consequences to any failure, and of being pursued by an enemy that won’t slow down.

The Sontarans delivers a story that’s both a rollicking big tick on the fans’ bucket list, and an adrenaline-driven adventure in its own right. That’s worth a listen any day you like.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Home Guard by Tony J Fyler

We’re doomed, says Tony.

The black and white era of Doctor Who has a greater potential for totally tonto mysterious tomfoolery than the colour era. There, I’ve said it, come at me with your Talons of Weng Chiang.

I only say this because The Home Guard by Simon Guerrier is absolutely bonkers in its initial set-up, and doesn’t get particularly more sane and balanced as events unfold. But it’s absolutely bonkers in precisely the way Classic Doctor Who fans will eat up with the biggest sonic spoon in their cutlery drawer.

It’s wartime in rural England. Jamie and Polly McCrimmon (you’re free to start going doolally at this point) are in the local Home Guard, the force of domestic anti-terror designed to repel the Nazis house to house if need be, to stop them conquering the green and pleasant land. Their friend, Able Seaman Ben Jackson pops by on leave to see his old…

…Wait…how does he know them again? Did they…did they travel together or something?

No-one can quite seem to remember, but anyway, he pops by to visit. The Home Guard is run by the doddery old doctor whose mind seems to be going, and whose scruffiness is clearly a sign that he shouldn’t be in command of anything as responsible as a prescribing pad, let alone the defence of the village from the Nazi hordes. And the local vicar is a terribly nice, terribly persuasive chap who’s not at all keen on that doctor…

The thing is, there are things about a set-up like that which make you think you understand what’s going on. The Doctor being the leader of the Home Guard is curious, but it runs vaguely in time with his record of mounting resistance to a bullying invading force. What the Early Master (yes, damn it, if no-one’s called him that yet, I’m having it) is doing there, stirring up trouble, re-running scenarios of invasion against a small village full of Brits is by no means as straightforward as you might think – of course it isn’t, it’s a Simon Guerrier script, it’s more or less mandated to be odder than you can initially imagine.

What it certainly delivers is plenty of neighbour-against-neighbour semi-apocalyptic tension, akin to anything Big Finish has delivered in the Survivors range, but also strangely topical in a world where divisions over the likes of Brexit and Trump have been absorbed down to the bones, in a strange parallel of the black-and-white realities of England during wartime. When everyone is watching everyone and loose speech can be fatal at the hands of mob rule (albeit terribly genteel mob rule), there’s a hair-raising febrile atmosphere in which to move the elements of a Doctor Who plot around.

I can more or less guarantee that what’s going on is not what you think is going on. Take absolutely nothing for granted in a Simon Guerrier script at the best of times. These are among the best of times, because the reality is mad, the cliffhangers occasionally shocking, making you wonder if you can even actually trust the Doctor you think you know, and Dreyfus’ Master is in delicious form, pitching this first encounter with the Troughton Doctor somewhere between his diabolical grandiosity in The Destination Wars against David Bradley’s First Doctor, and the easygoing chicanery of the Delgado incarnation when he arrives on Earth in Terror of the Autons, with perhaps just a dash of Five Doctors Ainley to sweeten his snarl. The relationship between he Troughton trio, Ben, Polly and Jamie is rather more grown-up and complicated here than at any point on screen, because of the switch-around in what seems the usual order of things, with Polly and Jamie together and Jamie, allegedly, ‘knowing there was never anything between us.’ Murky emotional waters – certainly murkier than would have got on screen in the Sixties, but a great anchoring element for this science fiction story in human realities.

What actually is going on, it would be a crime to spoil for you, but it too has a certain cultural resonance with our day and age, and in particular the notion of a small group of very particular people, culturally speaking, aiming at separation, isolation and self-determination. While the atmosphere is a hundred percent pure black and white era Doctor Who, Guerrier manages to tap into the worries of our era, creating a story that pleases on many levels at once, while absolutely doing its job and confusing the bejesus out of listeners in its first act, only to strive, through action, reaction and eventual necessary explanation what the hell is actually going on  quite close to the end.

Sign up for The Home Guard, and it’ll absolutely draw you in with its Dad’s Army-meets-Private-Army mysteries, its murky sense of imminent threat, its hat-tips to the likes of War of the Worlds, and its strong performances from the regulars, the guest cast, and in particular from Hines and Dreyfus as the Doctor and the Master, not yet as implacably opposed as they would become, but getting there fast in adventures precisely like this one. It’s mysterious black and white Who in the best traditions of the era, but with twists that are both timeless and shockingly relevant to our time.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s in Eleventh Heaven.

Full disclosure – it took me until A Christmas Carol to see Matt Smith as the Doctor. There are Reasons, and you don’t need to know what they are, but the point is, it took a while for his Doctor to convince me it was anything more than a collection of tics in ghastly tweed suit.

But when you watch the Eleventh Doctor now, at some distance from the weekly over-dissection of being the newest episodes, he’s a stone cold masterclass.

In which spirit, woohoo, and wahay! The Eleventh Doctor has arrived at Big Finish!

With…out Matt Smith in it…Oh.

There’s a sense about the whole ‘Chronicles’ idea at Big Finish of ‘Why would you do that?’ – they’re stories featuring New Who Doctors, without any of the actors who played the New Who Doctors in, and it’s worth bearing in mind, there are fans who are annoyed that William Hartnell and Jon Pertwee have been recast, despite the significant inconvenience of their being dead, so the idea of recasting lead actors who are still alive is enough to make them heap their Big Finish CDs together in a pile and set light to them.

Well, perhaps not quite, but almost.

For those who have less of a problem with there being more Doctor Who in the world, the Chronicles are a chance to tell full New Who stories while getting around the real-life issues of actors having post-Who careers. While both David Tennant and Matt Smith have been agreeable to the idea of returning to their Doctors at Big Finish, and Tennant has so far done so twice (or twice and a bit if you’re in the know), getting recording windows with New Who Doctors post-Who is agonisingly difficult. Step forward, Jacob Dudman, who voiced Tennant’s Doctor in the Tenth Doctor Chronicles, and here elbows out all contenders to also play the Eleventh Doctor.

Let’s get this out of the way before we go any further. The Eleventh Doctor is a role Dudman appears to have been born to play. His Eleventh Doctor goes beyond uncanny, and he could quite easily play the role for decades to come, because while he’s technically not Matt Smith, if, say, Matt Smith lost all scrap of his voice, he could hire Dudman as a replacement voicebox, to go everywhere with him and say the things he needed to say.

It would be weird, certainly, but he could do it, and apart from the whole ‘two bodies’ thing, nobody’d much notice the difference.

So with that firmly understood, welcome back to the world of the Eleventh Doctor. This first Eleventh Doctor Chronicles set takes us through the Eleventh Doctor’s life and friendships on a buffet principle – a little of this, a little of that, giving an overall picture of the Time Lord’s essential self.

The Calendar Man by AK Benedict is a classic Eleven and Amy story, with that kind of mythic fairy tale sense of their early adventures. They follow a distress signal to a colony world with a problem it doesn’t remember it has, where people go missing in the mist, and then disappear from the memories of the world, including their families. The Calendar Man is coming for them, and only one young woman seems immune.

Benedict makes the Calendar Man something rather interesting - a villain that can even scare the Doctor, in a story that captures that sense of early Eleven whimsy and darkness. The solution relies on the Doctor’s personal bravery, but equally on the actions and characters of his friends, and there’s a solid heart-punch in the forgetful people’s forgetfulness too. A classic switcheroo with a twist at the end gives you plenty to grab hold of, and also some pretty heavyweight dramatic consequences. The Calendar Man kicks the set off with a cracking mystery and some honest personality-beats, and Dudman, as mentioned, is so good as the Eleventh Doctor, it’s practically identity theft.

The Top Of The Tree, by Simon Guerrier is an exhausting, relentless, ravening beast of a story.

Guerrier brings the Eleventh Doctor and Kazran Sardick (Danny Horn reprising his TV role) into a tree-world, where there’s a strong potential for ghastliness and danger almost everywhere you look. It’s a whole ‘Ecosystem Of Death’ deal, with bravery, sacrifice, more than a touch of horror and the kind of antithetical environment that frankly only Mother Nature (and now Simon Guerrier) would create, to put living creatures through the mill in order to sharpen their instincts and force them to adapt. When Kazran and the Doctor get separated from the Tardis, run into a species of evolving humanoids and discover that almost everything they touch is either horribly dangerous or downright lethal, they’re going to have to climb for their lives. The relentlessly dangerous environment of The Top Of The Tree, and the psychological trauma of some of the things we find out on our way through the story, makes it an exhausting listen, because by the end of it, you feel like you too have been through the evolutionary mill, but Guerrier, like Benedict, gives great Eleventh Doctor – particularly in terms of having conversations in which he assumes the  most likely response of the other party, based on his own somewhat skewed but endearingly barking mad outlook on life. Horn’s return is always going to be fun, because the Kazran Diaries will always fill in the gaps in our head-canon of A Christmas Carol. The Top Of The Tree is one that you’ll take a deep breath before re-listening to, but one that you’ll want to revisit for the character-work, despite the exhaustingly vertical storytelling and the sadness along the way.

Ohh, Dorium Maldovar. Who doesn’t love Dorium Maldovar? He’s clever and waspish and blue, for goodness’ sake, not loving Dorium Maldovar should probably be illegal.  

Hardly surprising then that bringing Simon Fisher-Becker, the man beneath the Maldovar, into official Big Finish stories is one of the better decisions the company’s made this year. He’s absolutely one of the best things in The Light Keepers, by Roy Gill. 

There are some pretty interesting issues tackled in the story – you could argue there are comments on fracking in there, as well as the rights of indigenous people. Mostly though, if we’re honest, it’s Fisher-Becker’s Dorium and the chance to learn more about him, while having him be spectacularly cross with the Eleventh Doctor, that will nail The Light Keepers to your ears and make you want to come back to it. Dudman and Fisher-Becker together are superb, a galactic odd couple whose dialogue is both beautiful and hilarious.

The actual Big Bad in The Light Keepers is a returning enemy, and it’s learned a new trick since the last time we heard it. Whether it works or not partly depends on a) whether you heard the stories in which it appeared previously, and b) whether you thought it worked originally, but Gill certainly gives the new twist enough vigour that it feels like it has a reason to be at the heart of things here either way, giving the villain probably its strongest showing to date.

‘Jane Austen. Amazing writer, a brilliant comic observer, and—strictly amongst ourselves—a phenomenal kisser.’

So said the ever-incorrigible Clara Oswald.

If you ever wanted to hear the story in which Clara kissed Jane (at least for what seems the like the first time)…buckle up, space-babies, because Alice Cavender has you covered in False Coronets.

This is not, however, some internet fan-fiction where Jane and Clara get their smooch on for the sake of it. It’s a kickass ‘time’s gone wrong’ story of Regency alien nastiness, and what might have happened if England had followed France’s lead and lopped off the heads of its aristocrats in a big revolution.

Anti-revolutionary propogandist-in-chief? Your own, your very own Jane Austen, locked in a cell and awaiting execution, before she had a chance to write all the books that Clara loves so much. And so, as much to put right this affront to literature as to do the history-saving thing, the Eleventh Doctor and Clara skip back to try and find out what’s gone wrong, collapse the living botheration out of the revolutionary timeline and get home in time for tea and Persuasion.

It’s a complicated one, this, but that’s what you get with alternative timeline stories. Nevertheless, the combination of Cavendar’s relentless commitment to never be boring, Dudman’s continuing quest to put the actual Matt Smith out of a job, and the bright, engaging voice-work of Nathalie Buscombe as Miss Austen means you feel like you’re in a sparkling quadrille – there may be twirls and partner-swapping and bowing galore, but it’s always bright, and controlled, and going somewhere interesting. In a more run-of-the-mill collection, False Coronets would be an eeeeasy stand-out. Here though, with more than something to recommend every story, it punches at least at the weight of the other three. And then, y’know, it has Clara kissing Jane Austen. So…there’s that too.

The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles is, for our money, the brightest, most energetic, and most fun of the Chronicles sets so far, and while Dudman is a scarily convincing Tenth Doctor in the absence of David Tennant, his Eleventh Doctor takes personification to almost absurd new levels. More Eleventh Doctor Chronicles might conceivably hurt somebody’s feelings, somewhere.

They wouldn’t hurt ours in the slightest. 

*Cough, cough* Eleventh Doctor and Strax, anyone?

Who Reviews The Slitheen Excursion by DJ Forrest

Written by Simon Guerrier

For BBC Books

Published 2009

Starring 10^th Doctor

‘1500BC – King Actaeus and his subjects live in mortal fear of the awesome gods who have come to visit their kingdom in ancient Greece. Except the Doctor, visiting with university student June, knows they’re not gods at all. They’re aliens.’

The Slitheen Excursion has been one of the better Simon Guerrier novels starring the 10^th Doctor – mostly because The Pirate Loop, in my opinion, was catered towards a much younger audience. It was sweet and enjoyable, but it lent towards a far younger age group than the Slitheen novel.

It took me a while to get my head around the ancient Greek background, given that during school history lessons, we covered barely, nothing of that era, and I had to pull in what I’d seen of slaves versus masters in films, from Ben Hur, Spartacus and Gladiator to get a feel of the actual era and the arena with which the Doctor and June found themselves in, in the novel. Once this was visualised, the story played really well, and I only wish, June had been a regular character travelling with the Doctor. She had none of the clingy love interest, but she did depend upon the Doctor during the novel, if only for the sake of him helping her get back to her own time.

Of all the eras to find yourself in, it was perhaps not facing other Gladiators in a ring, entertaining the lords and masters high above in the balconies. Then I was reminded of The Hunger Games, when Katniss was entertaining in the arena and harpooned the apple from the pig’s mouth, so that was another visual.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story. I’m not totally a fan of the Slitheen but they do make such interesting enemies. They do enjoy a good hunt.

There were several elements to this story. You had the Doctor, who was doing his usual ‘not getting involved’, but getting involved anyway. There was June, who saw something unusual before she was heading back home after her holiday, and spotting the Doctor, equally another unusual sight. There are the Slitheen. There’s the multitude of alien species, like happy snappy tourists, with tales to tell and see humans displaying behaviour in the arena as if this is typical human behaviour throughout the eras.

Then you have the human element, the ancient Greeks which the Slitheen are manipulating in order to alter human history, forever.

There are different alien characters, some you’re sure you’ve heard of in other worlds and realms, and some you know you’ve read about in other novels. They’re an interesting bunch of creatures, whose feelings move back and forth like a ball in a tennis match. They’re always swayed by the bigger argument – or who shouts the loudest!

This story is an interesting read, and one that kept me hooked while I worked through several lunch times, sat in my car, for ultimate peace and quiet.

The 10^th Doctor stories, of which I only have a few more to read, have been an enjoyable journey so far, and I’m going to miss reading about his adventures.

Who Reviews The Pirate Loop Book Review by DJ Forrest

Written by Simon Guerrier

For BBC Books

I was expecting a jolly good read of pirates and the high seas, so I guess, I shouldn’t have been too disappointed in that, but I was. Although looking back on it, a few weeks after I initially put pen to paper to write my review, seeing badgers as pirates, would have been nothing unusual, when, if you think about it, I’ve been enjoying the pursuits of a raccoon bandit in Guardians of the Galaxy.

The Doctor and Martha visit the star ship Brilliant at least a week before it vanishes without a trace, to find out what had caused that to happen. They discover a ballroom full of 8 legged creatures who enjoy the high life a little too much, and aren’t afraid, at first, to air their opinions at being controlled by a bunch of Badger faced bandits, there to steal the experimental drive in the engine room.

When Martha and the Doctor first arrive, they encounter creatures without mouths, which I could only envisage as creatures from Monsters Inc (now who’s being a child?). They at first look menacing, but then I suppose if you don’t have a mouth, it would be as frustrating, or creepy as if you wore only a mask - no facial expression.

The Badger faced pirates (not bandits) are caught up in some kind of space fugg that stops them advancing onboard the ship, unlike three who manage to land before the scrambled egg stuff blocks the rest of the fleet. They can’t attack the ship, unlike the first three, so don’t reap the rewards of finger foods, unlike Archibald, who learns that cheese and pineapple on sticks is the best thing he’s ever tasted. However, when his comrades locate him, it’s a different story, they become menacing and shoot at the prisoners they’ve now collected. And this is where the story bends – people don’t die. It’s as if the ship is protecting them, resetting the game play, restocking plates of food, sending people back to the start, but it only happens when you take your eye off the game.

Of course, when poor Martha is stabbed by Archie, and promptly dies, she doesn’t come back to the ballroom like the 8 legged creatures. In fact, she doesn’t come back at all, and Archie feels terrible.

The Doctor is hell bent on finding out what happened to her, is overjoyed when he does, and sets about trying to fathom why things happen the way they do onboard the ship, and more to the point, where the crew are, who leave the prisoners, I mean, guests, to their own devices.

Although I have reservations with the story, it is still quite entertaining. There are plenty of characters to keep you amused, and many to root for, even those you wouldn’t have considered rooting for in the first instance. Of course, the ending is a little lame, but then, it depends on how you like your endings. I found it too clean, to easily wound up, too much like ‘…and they all lived happily ever after.’

I’ve heard great things about Simon Guerrier, so I’m hoping the next novel of his I read, will keep me entertained till the end, instead of searching for a teleport out of the good ship Brilliant!

Big Finish Reviews+ The First Wave by Tony J Fyler

Tony waves goodbye to Oliver Harper.

The Oliver Harper trilogy of stories is a remarkable insertion into the First Doctor’s history – adding a whole ‘previously unseen’ companion to the roster and hugely building up what we know about one of the TV show’s least developed companions, Steven Taylor, in the process. Oliver transforms, over the course of three audio stories by Simon Guerrier, from a nervous man haunted by the legal realities of his time and place (1960s London and the cut and thrust of the city’s commodities market) in The Perpetual Bond to an enthusiastic puppy-dog citizen of the universe when freed from its restrictions in The Cold Equations. The combination of Steven and Oliver becomes fascinating in The Cold Equations, because Steven, wounded by the deaths of The Daleks’ Master Plan, feels almost defeated by the inevitable crushing eventuality of death in the universe, while Oliver, fresh and deathless in his adventures, is full of bouncy positivity and a refusal to give in to Steven’s inevitable logic.

In The First Wave, his third and final story, the difference between Oliver and Steven is sharply delineated all the way down the line, from the fact that the Doctor only takes them to the planetoid Grace Alone because in The Cold Equations, the Tardis crew learned they would go there and commit a crime – historical inevitability coming to kick them in the destinies – to Steven’s increasing exhaustion, when pursued by an alien aggressor. He’s convinced it’s simply his ‘time’ to die, and so is prone to giving up to that inevitable fate. He feels, in a theme that runs throughout The First Wave, that they’re all on ‘borrowed time.’ Oliver though has no concept of that borrowed time, and so saves Steven’s life in this story when the space pilot wants to literally just lie down and die.

In terms of the actual alien threat on Grace Alone, it’s something that terrifies at one remove for most of the story – Steven and Oliver spend the first half of the story running away from an implacable and unnamed menace they believe is following them, and has already killed the Doctor.  

It’s only when we go back into their memories that we discover exactly what that pursuer is, and how it ‘killed’ the Time Lord – and when we do that, you’ll be go from fascinated to punching the air, because the villain of this piece is one that features in much later Who than Hartnell’s, and is dreadfully realised on screen. That means there’s a double thrill here, hearing this particular villain encounter the Hartnell Doctor, and finally fulfilling the potential of their nature and psychology on audio, getting a breath of fresh air in a story that doesn’t especially reboot them, but simply does them right.

Guerrier delivers a story that comes down to the difference between Oliver’s and Steven’s point of view.  When the Doctor, with his somewhat hardline ‘We can’t rewrite history, not one line’ stance, comes down on Steven’s side, preferring to take the consequences than allow them to go untaken, Oliver shows him, for the first real time in the Doctor’s life, that there is another way – a more actively meddlesome way, a way that involves telling the universe that while you’re there, you have as much right to a say in what happens as anyone else. You could make a fairly bold case for this story to fit perfectly into the Hartnell Doctor’s history as the point at which his meddling with the web of time became rather looser and more free, inspired by the actions of the young puppy dog from London who decided the future could go hang because he was there, and could rewrite what happened simply by his actions.

While The First Wave impresses throughout, as all the Oliver Harper stories do, it’s actually not until what is essentially its epilogue that it reaches the same emotional ‘No no, I’ve just got something in my eye’ pitch as The Cold Equations. Without spoilering the ending for you, it’s a sequence that extends beyond the end of the story, and forward throughout a handful of Hartnell’s, to almost the closing moments of The Tenth Planet.

Peter Purves, throughout the three Oliver Harper stories, delivers us Steven Taylor in spades, according to Guerrier’s playbook. It’s a Steven who is all the things he should have been on-screen, but rarely got a chance to be. The traveller ready for anything, the trained space pilot, the man haunted by recent deaths, and keenly aware of his own inevitable mortality alongside the Doctor (a sense which, to give the sixties writers their due, they did deliver in a blistering scene at the end of The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve). In The First Wave, he continues his unbroken streak of fine work at Big Finish, adding real human flesh to Steven’s bones.

Tom Allen as Oliver gives us a great, believable new companion for the First Doctor, who in The First Wave completes an evolution from being too scared to say boo to a goose to being the teacher, the one among the all-male Tardis crew to grasp the nettle of the future with both hands and declare his own importance, saving the Doctor and Steven’s lives in the process.

The Oliver Harper trilogy is a run of three stories you’ll listen to again and again, as each has its own joys – The Perpetual Bond has a return to sixties London, a monster that’s not a little mad but still creepy, and a plot that makes us ask uncomfortable questions about the business ethics of banks, traders and the like. The Cold Equations is an absolute love letter to Steven, his training, his actual skills, and the difference that both the Doctor and Oliver Harper have made to his outlook on the inevitabilities of the universe. And The First Wave gives us a thrilling, saddening, epic conclusion, and the first encounter between the Doctor and a villain that has gone on to be rather better served on audio than it ever was on screen. It gives us a lesson in the importance of standing up for what you believe is right, whatever even your clever friends think. And it gives us the sense of being a previously unseen turning point in the Doctor’s life, as he learns from the example of the city trader-cum-citizen of the universe that is Oliver Harper.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Cold Equations by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s running out of air.

The three Oliver Harper stories by Simon Guerrier introduced and delivered the Tardis lifetime of a brand new First Doctor companion on audio. Having established Oliver as a sixties London commodities trader who needs to escape from the police in The Perpetual Bond, second story The Cold Equations frequently has a claustrophobic feeling to it.

That’s mostly down to the nature of some of the story, which has Steven Taylor and Oliver Harper, the First Doctor’s companions, drifting in a vacuum, protected from the obliterating frozen airlessness of space only by space suits, their air running out, every word of this mostly two-handed spoken-word play hastening their death by suffocation. There’s lots of increasingly intense breathing, and if you’re claustrophobic or asthmatic, go into this one preparing for the kind of ride that breaks the sweat out on your forehead.

The Cold Equations of the title refers to the staggering unlikelihood of their surviving this predicament. As Steven says, when it comes to surviving in space, ‘They made us repeat it. Space is a vacuum, it doesn’t think or feel. It doesn’t have it in for you. There are simple, cold equations about what you can and can’t do.’

This is how this tense hour-long Companion Chronicle begins. Two companions, no Doctor, very little air left, and with Steven asking Oliver to tell him his secret, because there won’t be another chance.

As with The Perpetual Bond, the set-up of this story never tries to do too much. For his first trip through time and space, Oliver gets a peak at the future, at a planet surrounded by a massive debris field – a junk yard of discarded technology thrown into orbit around the world – and a bunch of fiery-skinned aliens called the Callians who are here to salvage it, to sell the scrap for whatever it may be worth.

There’s much more underneath the surface of The Cold Equations though than a kind of Steptoe And Son In Space. There are people living on the planet, and events are spun out of control when it turns out they’re humans, giving Oliver and Steven, under the labyrinthine meanderings of galactic law, prior claim to the band of space-junk.

And then bits of it start colliding at incredibly dangerous speeds. The hows and the whys of Steven and Oliver ending up marooned in space form much of the action of the story, interspersed with those breathless sections of speech between the two of them, wearing out the air against the hope of defeating the cold equations of life and death.

We think of The Cold Equations as the second Oliver Harper story, but really, for the most part this is a cracking Steven Taylor story. On screen in the sixties, Steven’s role was to be a younger Ian Chesterton – to fetch and carry and ask intelligent questions and hit the right people with something hard when the Doctor couldn’t or wouldn’t. In the world outside the storytelling, Purves’ role was also to keep an increasingly distracted William Hartnell focused and on-track so that recording could be completed within the punishing schedules of 1960s TV production.

In the hands of Big Finish, it would be difficult to find a companion who’s undergone such a thoroughgoing deepening of their character as Purves’ Steven, and in stories from Mother Russia and The Suffering all the way through to The War To End All Wars (showing Steven years after the events of The Savages, a king deposed and discredited, with a difficult relationship with his family), the audio medium has sought at every turn to add some flesh onto Steven’s televisual bones.

The Cold Equations pushes the envelope of Steven’s character development, reminding us very forcibly that he’s a space pilot, well versed in moving objects through both the vast tracts of empty space, and the debris fields than sometimes clutter them up.

This is Steven in full space pilot mode, meaning the introduction of spatial geometry into the adventure. Guerrier had to promise his tutor to take a class in astronomy in order to get some of the explanations of rotating and moving bodies in space laid down in this story, and how, for instance, sometimes to go faster in space, it makes sense to slow down. The hard, factual, scientific rightness of all this means you could be forgiven at one point for thinking you’re listening to Purves read a transcript of an Open University programme from the seventies, imagining cones, cutting the tops of them and working out angles of planetary rotation and a host of other calculations for six separate ‘elements’ of various objects moving at speed simultaneously. And let’s be absolutely clear – you wouldn’t want Steven to be like this all the time. But once in a while, it really enriches our appreciation of the character to hear him be able to do all this in his head, when it really matters, when everyone’s lives are at stake. It’s a sequence that reminds you ‘no really, he is a space pilot, which is handy to have around.’ Steven also surprises everybody in this story by refusing to think small, refusing to focus on just saving himself and Oliver, but pitting his increasingly oxygen-starved wits against the cold equations of the universe and taking a shot at a bigger victory. Whether such audacity is simply a key part of his personality, or whether this largeness of scale is something of the First Doctor rubbing off on the space pilot, we’re less sure, but we like to think it’s a little of both.

Oliver too, despite lacking Steven’s mathematical nous when it comes to drifting helplessly in space, has a vital role to play in this audio, and Tom Allen gives the young trader the bounce of a Labrador puppy, having escaped from the consequences of his actions in London. He’s a Donna Noble companion here, eager to experience everything there is out in the wider universe, to take his place alongside Steven and the Doctor as a citizen of the universe of time and space. It’s an infectious enthusiasm, tempered by the fact that we know from the beginning that their adventure above the world ringed in garbage and metallic junk leads him to be floating in space, at the mercy of Steven’s ‘cold equations’ – the realities that space inflicts. The unemotional stacking of the odds in a battle they mathematically, logically, can’t win.

But there’s always room for a little Doctorish miracle within the framework of Doctor Who – if the universe were ruled entirely by the cold equations, it would be run…well, by the Time Lords, and the Doctor is the archetypal anti-Time Lord. He will always put himself between his friends and the cold equations of certain doom in the unfeeling universe, and here, powered by so many recent losses (this story’s inserted in a run of three in the immediate aftermath of The Daleks’ Master Plan, one of the most shockingly blood-soaked adventures in the Hartnell era), and empowered by Steven’s bravery, sacrifice and mastery of his own equations, the Doctor is able to pull a little something twinkly and mischievous out of the bag. That, after all, is what he does – with a little help from his friends.

This story is richly textured, and you won’t believe how few voices are actually in it, Purves conjuring a very twinkly, happier version of the First Doctor in this environment than was called for in The Perpetual Bond. One thing that distinctly survives from that story though is the idea that these adventures could well have been a great addition to the on-screen show at the time. That’s a fanciful notion – the on-screen Who of the sixties would never have allowed Oliver, with his particular secret (which is revealed here) on a show aimed at families and children, and the geometry that gives this story both its learning and its sense of drama would have been considered too wordy for the show back in its early years, too complex and taking too much time out of an adventure. Be thankful then for the expansion of the First Doctor’s world at Big Finish, and for both a tightly written but simply stated adventure from Simon Guerrier, and top-notch performances from Peter Purves and Tom Allen to bring it to life in all its joie de vivre, its gasping tension, its bleak scientific rigour and its Doctorish wink at all that’s impossible in a sensible universe.

Pick up The Cold Equations for a masterclass in companion-writing, and an object lesson in delivering an uncluttered story that still has plenty of suspense, world-building and personality.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Devil in Ms. Wildthyme by Simon Mallinson

Written by Stephen Cole

Released December 2005

Katy Manning (Iris Wildthyme); Ortis Deley (Tom); David Benson (Panda); Michael Hobbs(Doctor Marwick); Lizzie Hopley (Alice Elbaum); Simon Guerrier (Spectres)

Iris, Tom and Panda find themselves facing demons from Iris' past, as a spooky and other-worldly presence makes itself known...

Another great outing for this trio, with lots of funny moments which will have you snorting with laughter.  If you are of a certain age you may get the joke in the title, have to admit I got it straight away but I have too much time on my hands.

Katy again pulls off another great performance, ‘ooo you are norty but I like you’ (pulling self together now).  I guarantee by the second story, Panda will be a firm favourite and you’ll been wanting more.

So may I say thank you to the gang for two wonderful episodes in Iris’s life which will have cheer you up.

Well done Paul for bringing this wonderful character to us and thank you Katy and David for making my life the better with listening.

Please buy this from Big Finish and maybe flood their boards, for maybe a Christmas special.

We say Eldrad must live, but I say IRIS MUST LIVE.

Big Finish Reviews+ Iris Wildthyme Series 1 by Simon Mallinson

Iris Wildthyme Series 1

Written by Paul Magrs

Starring Katy Manning, Ortis Deley, David Benson, Ann Bryson, Stephen Chance, Duncan Wisbey, Simon Guerrier, Michael Hobbs and Lizzie Hopley.
Reviewed by Simon Mallinson

Released November 2005

Now this month is dedicated to Katy Manning, whose warmth and genius is taken for granted.  This actor in Doctor Who tends to have a hard time.  Okay, but I tell you watch her stories again, and really listen and watch and you will start to see a whole new side which is more than screaming (though Katy is a master or mistress of this).

Katy in Big Finish has found an ideal medium, her silky smooth voice lures you in and her passion smacks you on the lips.  Katy gives Jo Grant a new life with Big Finish and aren’t I glad.  So Big Finish gang we want more Jo.

This month instead of doing two Jo stories, one in Zone and one here I have decided to treat you to another side of Katy.

A side where, the words Panda, Gin and Bus figures heavily, specially Gin. 

Tom and Panda are living a relatively quiet life back on Earth, as a successful novelist of science fiction adventures and his toy panda, respectively, when Iris Wildthyme makes a re-appearance!

I have to admit I had to listen to this three times before I could stop laughing enough to write anything.  The interplay between Iris (Katy Manning) and Panda (David Benson) had me in tears, almost to the point of choking on me gin.  The northernish accent of Katy was so damn good I can’t stop saying eh up chuck pass the gin, and David’s constant rant of Bear, BEAR has me wishing I could see this in cartoon form.

Also Ortis Deley had me feeling sympathy, cos I admit we fans are a really damn weird bunch.  Special mention goes to Simon Guerrier who played the fan perfectly (wonder where he got the motivation).