Big Finish Reviews+ The Syndicate Master Plan Series 8, Vol 2 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’ll be over here in the corner, weeping like a loon, if you need him.

Oh boy…

When we left the Fourth Doctor he was busy being killed by a relic of his remote past – or at least a relic of his remote past: the next generation, in both a moment of personal vengeance, and an advancement of the plans of the mysterious ‘Syndicate.’ We still had very little by way of concrete evidence of what those plans might be, but they involved a planet familiar to the First Doctor, some deeply overgrown plant life, and some truly demented goings-on in the name of science.

Time’s Assassin, by Guy Adams, takes us briskly on from there, giving us more of a clue as to some temporal shenanigans, ssssort of killing the Doctor and having him have to negotiate and rebel his way back to the land of the living and oh yes – revealing something utterly mind-boggling about his new companion, Police Constable Ann Kelso, from 1978 Earth.

You’re gonna want to strap in for this one.

Time’s Assassin allows for some characters – in fact, for many characters – to reveal the full extent of their almost moustache-twirling madness and grotesquerie, and some of the cast grab that opportunity with both hands (special hat-tip to Blake Ritson as Elmore on that score), and you’re left with a sense of something in the Caves of Androzani/Vengeance On Varos mould, in that nice people, even vaguely redeemable people, are desperately thin on the ground, leaving the Doctor, Ann and of course K9 seeming bright and shiny and lovely by comparison.

Except – for the reasons that make you strap in – you’re going to be worried about the future.

Fever Island, by Jonathan Barnes, is one of those classic ‘We’ve got an ongoing crisis here, but let’s take time out to do something completely different’ episodes. The plans of the Syndicate might be gathering pace after the events of Time’s Assassin, but here, the Doctor and Ann find themselves on a remote Scottish island, with plot-narrating secret special agent Jason Vane, who’s trying to stop the evil Okulov in his tracks while mugging to the imaginary camera and being casually sexist. What this is of course is a love letter to the ITC dramas of the Sixties and Seventies, from The Avengers to more blatantly outrageous fare like The Persuaders and Department S, while acknowledging the absurdities of the sub-genre as it goes. Along the way there’s a gas weapon of mass…oddness, the Doctor turned bad, the power of imagination and some affectionate jabs at the stereotypes of strong-jawed secret agent heroes and their sexist and overly confident swagger through their fictional lives. Fever Island is a detour from the dark plotting of the Syndicate, but precisely because it takes us away from the internecine, double-knotted convolutions of that organisation, it’s probably the most fun and the quickest listen in the set. Dark fun, to be sure – but fun nonetheless.

And then, it’s eyes down and no stopping for a two-part, two-hour finale to the Syndicate storyline, The Perfect Prisoners by John Dorney.

Erm…

There’s not really any way around this. John Dorney’s gonna break your hearts. However many you have.

He’s not going to rush to do that though, he’s going to give you quite the black and white space-drama serial, updated with newish (to us) virtual reality technology and a touch of meta-fiction, as things that may have happened may possibly have happened before, and the world or indeed the cosmos as you experience it might not in fact be the way it ‘really’ is, if any such concept can be said to be valid. There’s some gloriously savage metaphor in here, in slave worlds which, in the blink of a distracted eye, seem no longer to exist, and the reality of what’s going on feels slippery under your feet for some of the journey of these last two episodes. There’s also, it has to be said, a reveal that you should, and might, guess in advance, but which will nevertheless make you gasp when you reach it. There’s redemption, and choosing sides, and winning through in the end.

And then…

And then there’s the end.

Y’know? The point where he breaks your hearts. You might be ready for it when it comes – and the cunning devil’s taken that into consideration too, and has a character speak your rational Who-fan arguments back at you.

They’re no good. They won’t fly. He’s going to break your hearts.

So…yay. There’s that to look forward to.

The Fourth Doctor Series 8B has more of a frantic, elevated pace to it than 8A did – as you’d expect of the second half of a series arc, where strands are drawn together, surprise reveals keep you guessing and – not that I’m bitter or anything, but – your heart is utterly, utterly broken at the end. If you bought 8A, you can’t possibly go through the rest of your life without knowing how it all turns out. Guaranteed, it’s not going to go how 8A led you to believe it would. And if you haven’t got 8A yet…you’re going to want to do that. The combined Series 8 is an episodic hymn to long ago with new colours, new ideas, Jon Culshaw playing half the cosmos, Tom Baker on fine, multi-faceted form and a great new companion from Jane Slavin. It’s the story of what might initially feel like a gang of also-rans, after the Big Bad has left the scene, and how they go about proving their villainous potential. These are villains with points to prove, scores to settle, civilisations to enslave and Time Lords to extermi- I mean, to destroy.  They’re more ghoulish and vicious than you might imagine, and they allow the Fourth Doctor and Ann Kelso to tread old ground in a new, fresh, friendly style, while they give you an adventure you can’t possibly miss.

Big Finish Reviews+ First Doctor Adventures, Vol 2 by Tony J Fyler

Tony looks better in black and white.

When you have a core cast of four people, two of whom have sadly passed away, and you’re making new stories for an entirely re-cast version of the original, tone matters.

Of course, tone always matters, but particularly when there are four new voices in the roles of four much-watched and highly-studied characters, tone reeeeally matters.

Tone is a thing the First Doctor Adventures, with David Bradley re-inventing the First Doctor, has been very particular to get right. Breathe. Relax. You’re very firmly in First doctor territory here.

What we mean by tone of course is that there’s a difference between First Doctor stories and Fourth Doctor stories, and a different difference between First Doctor stories and Twelfth Doctor stories. The kinds of stories that they told in the First Doctor’s era almost feel like a time capsule now. They did a lot of ‘evil aliens being mean to nice people, let’s defeat them’ stories, to be sure, but there was a distinct sense also that in the First Doctor’s time, the science fiction could twang off on an entirely random philosophical angle which later ages wouldn’t allow, because of all the running and shouting that had to be done. And of course the First Doctor’s time is the golden age of the ‘pure historical’ story, where there was no alien threat at all, merely the events of history themselves in which our heroes got mixed up.

There’s one of each kind of story in this set, and that’s what reinforces the absolutely unique First Doctor flavour of the set. Just as stories like The Aztecs, Marco Polo, The Web Planet and The Keys of Marinus could only be First Doctor stories, so too could The Invention Of Death and The Barbarians And The Samurai, by John Dorney and Andrew Smith respectively. All of which of course helps sell the reality of the re-voiced Tardis crew, who this time out seem to have stopped trying to be their TV counterparts, and started just being them, leading to a more convincing – and therefore involving experience all round.

The Invention of Death is an experimental mind-melter, which reminds us of The Fragile Yellow Arc Of Fragrance (Google it, or search for it on the Big Finish website), in that it’s sci-fi with a very strong sense of difference from everything that’s familiar to us. It’s like The Twilight Zone with aliens or Black Mirror with charm, and that means you listen hungrily to the full length of the story, even though if you dare to pause, you can sketch out where it goes. The point is it’s so very interesting, conceptually, that you want to find out how it gets where you think it’s going. The Tardis crew land on a planet where there are androgynous, semi-morphous people, whose life is mostly taken up with playing games. No sexes, no houses, no sickness, no want, no need…no death. No reproduction.

All could and should be well in such a world, of course, but they have their games – which they play by hurling razor-sharp javelins at each other. There are no consequences if any of them get hit – they self-repair quickly and go on with the game.

They like their games.

When there are strangers in their midst, they want to share their games with them.

See what I mean? You can sort of see where it’s going fairly early on, but it will still take a turn or two to surprise you. By bringing the very concept of ‘death’ to this world, and therefore the concept of healing, the Tardis crew set a miniature revolution in motion – things can be learned in a society where people die. Knowledge becomes a burning need in a society like that. But someone understands that all too well, and starts spreading death among the citizens. Can the Doctor and the fledgling scientists of Ashtallah find a cure for death, stop the killer, and introduce the notion of reproduction to a world on which it has never before been necessary?

John Dorney’s script is classic and does the thing that’s most coherently the province of early Doctor Who – it dares to imagine the entirely unlike, not just extrapolating from life as we know it, but in the truest terms of science fiction, asking a big what-if – in this case, what if there was no death, and never had been?

David Bradley…

OK, let’s put this out there. David Bradley was a truly masterful William Hartnell in An Adventure In Space And Time. He was as good a First Doctor as he was allowed to be on screen in Twice Upon A time.

David Bradley has found his home as the First Doctor at Big Finish.

What’s more, all three companions feel like viable alternative-dimension versions of the characters we know this time out, all helping to bolster the reality of what you’re listening to, and make it feel like part of the run of adventures you know. In story terms, it’s also true to the First Doctor era by giving almost everyone something to do, but leaving Susan something of a third wheel as Barbara’s injured, Ian’s on a quest and the Doctor’s involved with the scientific shenanigans of a world without death. It might not give Claudia Grant the best of deals in terms of story-threads, but The Invention Of Death is a solid slice of highly inventive, speculative and philosophically searching science fiction which holds true to the tone of the televised First Doctor.

Susan typically faired rather better in the ‘reasons for being in the drama’ stakes when the story was a pure historical, and so she does here in Andrew Smith’s gorgeously researched and sumptuously rendered The Barbarians And The Samurai. What we’ve got here is an abbbbbsolutely nail-on-head perfect First Doctor historical, but with perhaps a pinch or two of modern spice to prick up your tastebuds. Finding themselves in 19^th century Japan, during a period when no Westerners were permitted in the country, our heroes have an immediate problem – and one where their apparent ethnicity is an issue (a rare one for pure historicals, to be sure, but still one that anchors the story in the reality and the nature of the times). Finding themselves split up, the Doctor and Barbara are taken to the palace of the local daimyo (a mayor or sheriff, but with a personal army of kickass Samurai to do his bidding), while Ian and Susan are forced to hide out, and are rescued from a vicious Samurai attack by a so-called ‘peasant’ who kicks way more ass than a simple peasant should be able to. On the road to getting the team back together there are palace intrigues, mysterious men in masks, double- and possibly triple-dealing plots to break the rules of exclusion between Japan and the West, a seemingly doomed love story and a massive ‘how the heck are we going to get out of this one?’ late-game cliffhanger that forces the Doctor and Ian to turn scientific sorcerer. Smith is a master at multi-stranded drama, and this might even be considered a jewel in his already intensely impressive crown, because he balances all the elements here on a Samurai blade – the pacing is fast, the action plentiful, the intrigue elements believable without requiring anyone to be stupid to make them work, and the tapestry he creates is rich and broad, meaning you feel like you’re listening to a proper Hartnell six-parter, without it ever feeling overstretched (because of course, it’s actually just a four-parter). It’s an immersive, full-on historical that really can hold its head up alongside the likes of Marco Polo, The Aztecs and The Crusade.

Bottom line, if you’re a fan of the kind of Doctor Who that really only existed within the first three years of the programme’s history, you need to listen to this – the cast have gelled well together, the scripts are highly polished, and the overall experience is of slipping in a DVD of one of the classic black-and-white adventures, but without the budget restraints that might have lessened their visual impact. Go back and travel with the first Tardis crew again, for adventures that are broad and beautiful in a less canon-cluttered, more anything-goes universe.

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

Tony enjoys life in black and white.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Finish Reviews+ The Churchill Years, Volume Two by Tony J Fyler

  

Tony gives Churchill a V-sign.

Full disclosure time. Before Volume 1 of The Churchill Years was released, I was not a fan of the idea of using him as an anchor for a whole spin-off series. Ian McNeice’s Churchill on screen had been one of only a few highlights of Victory of the Daleks but turning him into the anchor for a series of Doctor-adjacent stories felt like stretching his capabilities as a character within the world of Doctor Who beyond the point of diminishing returns.

Then the first volume came out, and I was utterly, utterly wrong. Doesn’t happen often, but there you go, let’s never speak of it again.

So with Volume 2, what we have is a much stronger sense of instinctive reliability on approach to the box set – but does it deliver?

Yes it does, but just slightly less than the first set.

This collection of tales focuses for three of its four stories on Churchill’s war years, and brings two Ninth Doctor stories, one Tenth and one Eleventh to the party. Oh and Madam Vastra. Churchill and Vastra, side by side – that’s got to be worth the price of admission, no?

Paul Morris kicks us off with Young Winston, a tale of magic jewels, historical legends, and the volatile background of Cuba. Set in 1985 and 1899, it follows Churchill on a trip to Cuba to get a taste of war, and then, as he begins to make his parliamentary way in the world, the ghosts of hot-blooded nations and people surface in his life.

It’s a story that bristles with star power and crossover potential, with Churchill and Vastra swapping narration duties in the different tones of the Churchill Diaries and the Chronicles of the Great Detective (Now that’s an audio spin-off we’d pay good money for), but it delivers far more than a star pairing and a jewelled MacGuffin – there’s an enormous well of tenderness in the story of the young Winston (Iain Batchelor) and his mysterious Cuban friend Carmen, played with sensitivity by the gloriously-named Melody Grove, and it leaves you wanting more crossover stories between the Paternoster Gang and the future Prime Minister. Churchill and Strax for box set 3, anyone?

Human Conflict by Iain McLaughlin is a story that highlights, in a way similar to but harsher than Victory of the Daleks, the dichotomy between Churchill’s drive to win total war at any cost and his friendship with the Doctor. It’s harsher because this is a story in which the Doctor with the big ears and the leather jacket is advisor, judge, jury and rescuer as Churchill explores the potential of alien weaponry in the early years of the war.

Advised not to get involved in an arms deal that could potentially win the Allies the war, Churchill, like Harriet Jones in later years, goes against the wishes of his taciturn Time Lord friend, leading to a solid story of derring-do, stand-offs, a terrible price, and perhaps most remarkably of all, a portrayal of Churchill from McNeice that shows why, even with his war-hawk intuitions, Churchill was a man inherently good enough to earn the Doctor’s friendship. It’s moderately romanticised stuff of course, but the Churchill of Doctor Who has never been the Churchill of real life. Nevertheless, Human Conflict brings good performances to the fore, especially from Bethan Walker as Bragnar, and feels like a Sunday afternoon black and white war movie, only Doctor Whoed up.

I Was Churchill’s Double, by Alan Barnes, romps home with this box set’s ‘complicate the living bejesus out of a plotline’ prize. Into what sounds like it should be a straightforward tale of deception, doubles and associated tomfoolery, Barnes brings fairy tales, parallel dimensions, self-hypnosis through a howlaround TV interference pattern (a lovely touch, that), secret plans, two Churchills, John Logie Baird, undercover Nazis and a whole lot more. Oh, and the Ninth Doctor again, popping up having lost his Tardis somewhere. It’s a storyline you don’t want to try and follow while, for instance, operating heavy machinery, because you won’t stand a chance of working out what’s going on. You won’t if you give it your full attention either, but it will unfold for you better if you dedicate your lugholes to it for the space of an hour. McNeice is on top form in this story – which is just as well, given its double dose of Churchill – and he gets to slightly vary his performance to differentiate between the two. Compelling stuff, but you might like to have a cup of tea and a biscuit ready at the end, so as to untwist your brain.

Churchill Victorious shows us the man who led the British war on the day of its effective completion – with London, with the whole country celebrating on what rations it can scrape together, Churchill feels himself alone, and under faintly ridiculous Dad’s Army cover, he goes out looking for, if not trouble, then at least an honest communion with his people. Naturally of course, he runs into power cuts, a populace less grateful than he might have expected, an alien aggressor and a prisoner with familiar puppydog enthusiasm and demented hair. Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky are rarely writers to rush to their point, but here they give us a story that’s seemingly innocuous but eventually builds to a test of Churchill’s soul – how far will he go to ensure his personal victory, his legacy, his immortality among the British people?

There’s a line of balance to be drawn with Churchill – on the one hand you don’t want to overstud his life and career with incidents with the Doctor. For those who like him in the real world, it could potentially take away from the man’s own greatness. For those who don’t, it could feel like the Doctor’s trust was misplaced. And the ending of the second box set, coinciding with the end of the war, could work as the moment to fade out on Churchill. But there’s no real reason why it has to – McNeice is clearly in great form, and Churchill’s life was long and studded with real incidents which lend themselves to a Doctor Who treatment. On the strength of this box set and its predecessor, a third set would be no hardship at all, and with the dramatic returns showing only faint signs of diminishing so far, there’s no reason why Churchill himself shouldn’t KBO for a while yet at Big Finish.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Tenth Doctor Adventures, Volume 2 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s getting smug and bouncy all over again.

The Tenth Doctor divides audiences but for some, the rent-a-gob cheeky chappie with a spine of steel will always be their ideal, go-to incarnation of the world’s favourite Time Lord.

The second series of modern Doctor Who, which paired incoming Time Lord David Tennant with Rose Tyler, is loved and loathed by hardcore fans in equal measure, bringing a soap opera quality to the drama, and a hip, flip, bouncy, smug energy to bear on the format of Doctor Who.

Big Finish, for its second set of Tenth Doctor adventures, has paired Tennant back up with Billie Piper as Rose and thrown Camille Coduri’s Jackie Tyler into the mix just for fun.

Tennant pours himself back into the Time Lord’s gym-shoes easily, and Piper recaptures the chirpy, occasionally snide but always courageous, running-away-from-home-to-see-the-universe voice of Rose Tyler, so there’s nothing about their performances that feels off-kilter – itself a remarkable feat ten years down the line.

Scriptwise though, things are a little less perfect.

There are three tales here, one in the ‘present’ of 2007, one in the past, and one in the future, and the box set grows less effective as it goes on.

Infamy of the Zaross by John Dorney, is an idea that works well in 2017 – alien invaders who aren’t what they claim to be, but want the infamy the invasion will bring them. It’s a parable of modern celebrity which allows Tennant, Piper and Coduri to each have moments of power and purpose – there’s Tenth Doctor ranty, ‘I am angry now!’ speech here, while Jackie Tyler gets to punch an alien, and Rose gets to Be Sympathetic to a fellow human who feels they need celebrity to be something. As audio adventures go, it’s a full-tilt energetic run that feels in keeping with some of Russell T Davies’ bouncy stories from back in the day.

The Sword of The Chevalier, by Guy Adams, does everything you could really want of it, and still ends up feeling too long. In Adams’ adventure, we get to play at chivalry and transgender politics with the Chevalier d’Eon in 1791. This is actually a celebrity historical story, and the Chevalier is the celebrity – someone who was classed by society as both a man and a woman at different times in their life, and who was also a master swordsman and spy, well worth a Google if you have the time. Into the Chevalier’s world comes the Consortium of the Obsidian Asp – a gloriously Russell T Davies name for a villain with an interesting nature, an arch sense of its own superiority and a penchant for slave trading. Rose, the Doctor and the Chevalier set themselves to the task of exposing the Consortium, and there’s a logical reason why the adventure turns into an all-out sword-fight in its later stages.  Nevertheless, the Consortium has a fairly obvious weakness, and it’s one the Doctor knows before they arrive on 18^th century Earth, so much of the toing and froing and dying in The Sword of The Chevalier could have been avoided by the Doctor opening his mouth earlier than he does, giving the story a sense of being ultimately much touche about nothing.

The Ice Warriors are back in the third story, Cold Vengeance by Matt Fitton, bringing their eternal dilemma with them: how do you do something with an Ice Warrior beyond what it’s good at. They’re excellent at waking from hibernation and killing people. Doing more than that with them, particularly in a closed-off environment, is tricky. Cold Vengeance stays close to their comfort zone, giving us a base-under-siege story of a giant space-based frozen food centre, awakening Ice Warriors, third generation space pirates, quite a lot of running around and a faithful management computer. As an example of the art of the base under siege, it’ll keep you entertained for an hour, and there’s a twist in the ending which plays with the Ice Warrior honour-codes to good effect, while acting as a poignant satire on hardened attitudes to immigrants in our own society. All of which works well, but leaves you with the sense of Ice Warrior déjà vu in terms of its central plot.

The Tenth Doctor, Volume 2, is a blend of the innovative, the satirical, and the classical. It’s by no means without its flaws in terms of its scripts – which according to the Behind the Scenes interviews were put together in a hurry, but as an evocation of the spirit of Series 2, with the bouncy happy Doctor and the London teenager, it’s dead-on. If you like the particular Tardis team of the Tenth Doctor and early Rose, you’ll love it in spite of its storytelling shortcomings.