Reviews God Among Us Volume 3 by Tony J Fyler

Tony meets God. After the Flood.

Torchwood’s post-Miracle Day box sets have frequently fallen into the category of ‘Story arcs that leave you needing a lie down in a dark room with a soothing cup of tea.’ The God Among Us arc has had more coherence than its predecessor, Aliens Among Us though, due in no small part to an increased familiarity with the characters of New Torchwood. If all this comes to you now as a bolt from the blue, stop reading immediately, you’re significantly behind us in time, and there’s no real way to catch up except by going through the preceding box sets, because this is not the Torchwood you think you know.

Go on, shoo! Come back, by all means, when you’re up to speed and have got your head around the hows, the whys and the wherefores.

All up to speed?

Right then.

You rejoin us at the point where, at the risk of still giving listeners some sort of mental breakdown, God (or at least, a God) has been working with the Committee – a bunch of body-snatchers from Way Out Yonder who’ve previously been mostly voiced by David Warner as Old Bloke In the Nursing Home Of the Damned – to at first secure a victory for a bunch of civic-minded aliens, but then, thanks to some fairly sharp thinking and self-sacrifice by the likes of Norton Folgate, just-possibly-hologrammatic Torchwood operative from the 1960s, and alternative-universe Yvonne Hartman (See? Getting up to speed makes all kinds of sense now, doesn’t it?), were at least partially defeated. But Cardiff now is not Cardiff as we’ve known it. Cardiff – modern-day, post-industrial, high-tech Cardiff – has been the victim of a major tsunami. Hundreds of thousands have died. Straggling communities of the homeless camp out in the lobbies of swanky apartment buildings, such as that in which Mr Colchester of Torchwood and his husband Colin live. Colin now works tirelessly to try and keep the flow of supplies coming to these new indigents, alongside would-be Torchwooder and part-time turncoat Tyler Steele. Jack Harkness is about here and there, but Hartman’s Torchwood is still, at least technically, in control. And PC-cum-Sergeant Andy Davidson (last seen in a moderately disturbing relationship with Yvonne), has become director of the committee dealing with the rescue and recovery effort for his shattered city. Meanwhile shapeshifting empath Orr might or might not have formed some sort of understanding with God, Colchester appears to have been brought back from the dead by Steele, without in fact understanding as much, and Ng, the one-time-and-possibly-still herald of God who hid out in the body of, and now has many of the personality traits of, Gwen Cooper, without in any way actually being her, is somewhat unsure of her past and her future but in the meantime is saving the world as best she can.

Annnnd breathe.

This is where we come in to this box set. By the time we reach the end, there’ll have been a fairly epic sweep towards the destruction of the planet, Andy will have shot an innocent teenager, God will have given away her powers, Orr will love everyone, Ng will have discovered the inherent superpower of Welsh women, and at least one podcaster will have been torn to shreds by thin air. Welcome to Torchwood – God Among Us, Part 3.

Alexandria Riley (who also plays Ng), takes writing duties to start us off here, and delivers a powerful piece, driven at us as if to-camera for large chunks of time by the wonder that is Mina Anwar. Anwar plays Bethan, mother of a young man who’s still missing after the Cardiff tsunami, and her grief is a powerful motivator to her strength and tenacity in this episode as she tries to find out what’s happened to her son – whether he’s still alive, or if not, what happened to him. She’s our window on the world of some of our Torchwood favourites in the wake of the disaster, and she unveils a cover-up as to who was behind the orders to evacuate parts of Cardiff, who gave the orders for the military to make preparations for the tsunami strike, who did any of it. When the inquiry into the incident demands answers, all that anyone can tell them is that they…don’t recall who gave them the orders. Bethan ultimately figures out the truth – or at least a version of it – and gains at least a little piece of mind, somewhat bolstered by a random encounter with Orr, who is driven by Bethan’s pain and need to ‘become’ her son Anthony for at least a little while.

Here’s the thing – we should be taking Riley’s writing more seriously. Absolutely, Mina Anwar is a powerhouse in this episode, driving it on, giving us glimpses into the characters-under-pressure of a city in crisis. But only once you’ve gone through the box set do you sit and assess the whole thing, and only then does the intricacy, the cleverness and the natural tone of Riley’s script really hit you. It opens up the post-tsunami world to us, providing a perfect first slice of action for this box set and a satisfying whodunnitandwhy, while mostly focusing on the human emotional cost of disasters, and the contrast between human effort to help those affected by such events and the necessary but inherently soulless bureaucracy that has to deal with the world after such catastrophes on a purely logistical basis. It’s affecting, effective writing, and more from Riley in all corners of the written world would be welcome on the basis of this introduction.

Robin Bell’s ScrapeJane delivers a kind of Blade Runner horror story of modern mythology and the power of belief, in which Mr Colchester and Ng have to defeat a bogeywoman admittedly created in the last handful of years – by of all people an ‘urban explorer’ hoping to interest people online in Cardiff’s history. There is of course nothing wrong with creating bogeywomen to encourage an interest in history.

Until your fictional bogeywoman starts slaughtering not only annoying podcasters but nests full of Weevils without a by-your-leave. The quest to find and pacify the invented ScrapeJane  gives Colchester (himself now feeling like he is living on the borrowed time of Colin’s belief in him, as he’s under the impression that it was Colin, rather than Tyler, who brought him back to life) and Ng, the one-time God-herald, now-Welshwoman-impersonator and world-saver and equally uncertain of her future, a chance to go beneath the surface of their day-job and exchange some honest insecurities. It’s the kind of getting-to-really-know-you fare which Torchwood has regularly done with great aplomb, and Robin Bell adds creditably to the series’ store of character-stories, while also investigating truth, fiction, creativity, ownership and belief in a very contemporary way. There’s even a bit of brave humour in here, as Bell writes characters telling invented characters that wanting to meet – and even take revenge on – their creators is unoriginal and has been done before. Imagine the ‘meta’ nature of writing that, and then tinge it with a sad note, as Bell himself is sadly no longer with us. As with Riley, it would have been good to hear more from him at Big Finish.

Day Zero, by Tim Foley, turns up the dial on the threat noise-floor, as Cardiff runs out of drinkable water. Isolated, with no relief able to get through, the city’s hit by a poison in its water supply. If every civilisation is just three meals away from revolution, Foley’s script asks us to imagine what happens to a major modern city if, all of a sudden – thank you news blackouts to ‘reduce panic,’ and yes, you’re entirely free to slide Operation Yellowhammer into your mind at this point if you like – there’s no water. No bathing, no showering, no toilet-flushing, no drinking, surprisingly little by the way of cooking, in a city already stretched to crisis-point.

The tension in this script (ahem) boils over when it turns out there’s one place with a source of clean water, and it becomes a focal point for dissent and battles, with Torchwood on one side, thirsty vigilantes on the other and Andy’s Disaster Recovery Committee in the middle trying to seize the source and allocate the water as it sees fit. The fundamentals of a solid dystopian science-fiction story are right here – remove something crucial from society and write what happens – but this being Torchwood, there’s a handful of unexpected twists, especially as Orr exists to give people what they want. In a city suddenly very thirsty, that has distinct consequences, but it’s also this episode that shows us the character divisions of what was once a united team, and which since the return of alt-Yvonne, has been carrying on as regardless as possible, trying to paper over the colossal cracks in the fabric of the city’s existence. This is a story that feels like it should draw battle lines, but its point is rather more subtle than that. Yes, it takes us into a hell of sudden deprivation (a hell, incidentally, already faced by millions of people on our planet, not all of them that far removed from our wastefulness), but it also shows us what happens when that deprivation ends, when everyone looks away and doesn’t tackle the division of which they were part. Day Zero feels important for that lesson, for the ‘What happens next?’ question of a society divided to the death.

And finally, all these increasing tensions and agonies and strong episodes need to come together at some point and explode. In Thoughts And Prayers by James Goss, the neat conceit is that thoughts and prayers actually work, that they provide an energy for gods (or those to whom gods have delegated their powers), which is then up for the taking and using by any power big enough to effectively threaten a god. The Committee are back, and ooh, they’ve made Torchwood all spick and span again, with a rift manipulator far more advanced than even TV Torchwood ever had. Think Stargate and you’re not far wrong. As the end of the world advances, there are ever more thoughts and prayers to process, and the energy builds to a climax that looks like it’s going to go one way – the phrase ‘I was trying to do my duty’ is mentioned, to the delight of all Hartman-fans – but then doesn’t go quite the way you think it will. The aftermath of Thoughts and Prayers is vaguely familiar territory perhaps, because you can only have a cataclysm if it has consequences, and there are only so many ways you can spin those consequences, but it leaves plenty of room for creativity in terms of where to take Torchwood from here. We’re not by any means necessarily looking at another re-boot after this, but whatever’s next from Torchwood will be filled with post-almost-apocalyptic challenges to overcome.

At the end of a series of box sets that have occasionally been challenging and have occasionally included episodes which mostly focused on character without advancing the plot, Torchwood – God Among Us Part 3 is that rare thing – a roller-coaster ride with plenty of emotional highs and lows, but no drops in quality from start to finish. It’s a belter, from the highly effective, personally-driven first episode to the roaring, screaming, ‘So this is it, we’re going to die!’ conclusion. You absolutely need to have followed the new Torchwood more or less from the beginning to get the most out of this box set. But it’s a conclusion that makes the journey thoroughly worthwhile.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Eighth Doctor Time War 3 by Tony J Fyler

The very notion of a Time War is enough to give you a blinding migraine the moment you cross its threshold, because not only do all the laws of life as we understand it bugger off to the restaurant at the end of the universe at that point, but  all the laws of conventional storytelling give a bit of a hopeless shrug and trudge after them too. Cause and effect, life and death, past and future as determined by memory – everything goes immediately into flux and what you could very easily end up with is a long, loud, looping, endless scream as the walls of causality stove your head in.

This – with additional notions about budgets – is possibly why Russell T Davies, no stranger to ambition and himself the inventor of the idea of the last great Time War, regarded its events as ‘unfilmable.’

We’re a long way on from that declaration now – we’ve seen the last day of the Time War on TV, and in audio, Big Finish has been giving us angles on the conflict for quite some time and in plenty of ways – we’ve heard some of the adventures of the War Doctor, we’re gloriously continuing to hear what the War Master was up to during the days of the war, we’ve lived through some of the Time War from a Gallifreyan perspective, and in particular, alongside his adventures with at least slightly earlier companions, Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor – the last of the ‘pre-war’ Doctors, and as such the Doctor who brings the crusading moral certainties of the Classic era to their point of universal crisis when faced with unparalleled horror – is moving inexorably towards the point where his position of neutrality or sheer, dogged cheerful helpfulness becomes untenable, and he becomes the Doctor who could fight a war.

The third box set of Eighth Doctor Time War stories deals with temporal flux, the mathematics of survival, moral ambiguity, and the cost of a clear memory, while delivering some hardcore storytelling and an arc that seems designed to push the Eighth Doctor nearer and nearer to the edge of exhaustion, while giving him some solid, if slightly desperate, speeches encapsulating those old and increasingly frayed moral certainties.

No no, come back, it’s also got some really fun bits, honest!

If there’s a story that comes closest to proving why a Time War would be unfilmable, it’s Matt Fitton’s The State Of Bliss, an opening story that will absolutely leave you needing a long lie down in a dark room. Bliss, the Eighth Doctor’s companion played by Rakhee Thakrar, has always had a whiff of temporal anomaly about her – her origin story jumped about a bit at first, absolutely on purpose, and while her role in the second Eighth Doctor Time War box set was more stable, she became a person of interest for the Time Lords involved in fighting the war as a result of being a temporal oddity. They love a temporal oddity, those big-hatted devious Gallifreyan gits.

The State Of Bliss seems to explain why Bliss is such a question-mark in the primordial soup of time and space. We get to see various snippets from her life or lives, and the characters with whom she formed some of the bonds that led her to where she is. The plot underneath all this is screamingly devious and yet altogether logical and mundane, when eventually explained in words of a lowish number of syllables. Without going into too much spoilerific detail, a line from the story declares that ‘a fruit machine always pays out.’ The reason Bliss is the way she is can be expressed by the fact that it very rarely pays out the first time you pull the handle.

There’s a quite stunning naturalism to the performances in this story from actors of great quality, including Nina Wadia as Bliss’ tutor Professor Deepa, Anjli Mohindra as her mate and potential partner Calla, and John Scougall as her other mate and probably more entirely optimistic wannabe partner, Ryall. All these actors make for a scenario that lives and breathes like a real memory, like peering into Bliss’ diary of her student days. Most impressive of the lot though is Thakrar herself, who more than in either of her previous box sets, really comes into her own as a companion in this third outing, developing that comfort in quipping that is sometimes necessary when running alongside the Doctor, and marking out Bliss’ character as determined, able, brilliant when necessary and possessed of a strong moral sense which amplifies – and occasionally props up – the Doctor’s own. Think somewhere between a Clara Oswald and a Jo Grant, with a little of something that’s unique to Bliss herself, and you get an attractively natural, real-seeming person. Which, let’s not forget, is no mean feat when playing someone who’s less than usually sure of her own origins or nature.

The regularity with which we’re forced by experience to say lovely things about Lisa McMullin’s stories is probably sickening to some. But she will keep knocking things out of the park. In The Famished Lands, she steers away from the esoteric timey-wimeyness of Matt Fitton’s opener and demands we consider war as a real thing. The Vale of Iptheus may be far from the chrono-quivering front lines of the Time War, but the effects of the conflict are having real, horrifying consequences there. As Britain hangs on a precipice of uncertainty over the effects on trade of a no-deal Brexit, McMullin gives us a story that has the cutting off of trade routes at its core. With those routes severed, imports dry up. When imports dry up, the responsibility of feeding a mass populace falls solely of a domestic planetary government. And when there’s not enough to eat, people will end up simply starving to death.

The Doctor and Bliss arrive on Iptheus to discover happy starving people, but there’s much more to the story than that. Dealing with governmental paternalism up to and beyond the point of the death of swathes of its own citizens, there’s some solid sci-fi in the story too, with food that fills you up but gives you no nutritional benefit, and a somewhat Harryhausen twist that’s both horrifying and a geeky delight to hear. Make no mistake though, this is a hard-hitting story of the state, the individual, the mathematics of who gets to survive in times of crisis and why – and it will probably shock you. Science fiction at it’s best is supposed to shock you and make you think about your own world. Lisa McMullin’s story in this box set will do just that. It’ll also give you possibly the most memorable McGann Doctoring in the set, in his response to questions about why he’s doing a particular thing. Just listen – you won’t miss the moment.

Roland Moore’s Fugitive In Time has a somewhat Pertweean feel – the Doctor on a mission for the Time Lords, and accompanied by a Time Lord, Adele Anderson’s superb new take on Tamasan, a more scorched-earth strategist who’s followed the Doctor through the Time War arc. A planet locked off by virtue of an unfriendly atmosphere, the Daleks in orbit waiting to come and seize a particularly juicy piece of techno-kit, and the Doctor and his friends going undercover in a semi-feudal land to find a special visitor from the stars. Any story which can feature the legend that is Wendy Craig as a genetic scientist from a species so morally dodgy as to be faced with eradication from the timeline by the Time Lords has got to be worth a listen, and here, we see very clearly the difference between Tamasan’s straight down the line Gallifreyan dedication and the more freewheeling, open-minded, open-hearted approach of the Doctor to people and species the ‘official’ history would cast as villains.

And then there’s the Valeyard.

Michael Jayston. As the Valeyard. During the Time War.

I know – shut up and take alllll the money, right?

The War Valeyard, by John Dorney, is more or less everything you think you want in a Valeyard story, with a dollop of something extra-interesting on top.

The delicacy with which you need to write a Time War Valeyard story should not at any point be underestimated, especially when aiming at an audience which has already experienced the more morally ambiguous War Doctor, and the War Master, somewhat driven by the war towards the dark side of the status quo. What space, in all that moral tapestry, exists in which to write a particular Time War Valeyard story? How can he be different, if at all, from the Trial of a Time Lord Valeyard? How can he even be there during the Time War?

John Dorney gives Jayston room to play, both in terms of the sharp, verbose Trial Valeyard, and the new and noticeably different Time War Valeyard, in a story that conflates issues of memory and identity. ‘A man is the sum of his memories, you know; a Time Lord even more so,’ said the Fifth Doctor in The Five Doctors. And in a space and time in which even the Doctor will later repudiate his own claim to the name of the Doctor, putting heroism behind him, Dorney creates an identity issue that might help the Valeyard find a different way to be.

You can, if you’re a fan of transposing personal issues into your science-fiction, see The War Valeyard as an examination of memory in the face of something like dementia – if you’re not who you think you are, but you act as you believe you would, what is the ‘reality’ of your life and circumstance? And is it kinder to snap you out of a comfortable, pleasurable fiction or to leave you in a state of confusion and medication if it makes you happier than any colder, darker reality would be?

If you don’t want to do any of that of course, you can enjoy The War Valeyard as a cracking meet-up between the Eighth Doctor, the Daleks, and the Valeyard in a time and space that allows him a freedom he’s never previously had. Oh and you’re going to want to listen to the ending. Many, many times. The ending is guaranteed squee-fodder, and will get you writing pleading tweets to Big Finish to beg for some kind of sequel. (Note to self – would that make it a squeequel?)

(Second note to self – never, ever say that again…)

All told, there’s a balance across the four stories here that gives the set a distinctly Time War feel – mind-melting alternate timeline-bleed in The State Of Bliss, socially conscious sci-fi with some really hard hits in The Famished Lands, a daring quest into unknown territory with dubious allies, implacable enemies and a hearty line in double-crossing and chicanery in Fugitive In Time, and a joyful dissertation on memory and character in The War Valeyard. Along the way, a cast of impeccable quality – Jayston, Wadia, Mohindra, Craig help the regulars to achieve a level of naturalism which anchors their adventures in human, understandable emotions and reactions, even as increasingly the universe is falling to pieces round their ears. You might have to push harder than you’re used to just to get through The State Of Bliss because of its reality-shredding premise, but it pays you off for your effort, and acts as the gateway to what is probably the best set in the Eighth Doctor Time War series so far.

Big Finish Reviews+ The War Master Vol 3 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s feeling the rage.

Derek Jacobi’s War Master is a character who had just a handful of heartbeats of time on TV, having hidden for the length of an episode behind the mental and physical disguise of ‘nice old genius’ Professor Yana. This is Derek Jacobi, so needless to say he made his mark even in that brief time on screen, but the War Master is a character, not unlike Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor and John Hurt’s War Doctor, which has been so far mostly unpacked and explored in Big Finish audio. With River Song, with UNIT, in the Gallifrey series, and in his own box sets, the War Master has had far more time to flap his wings of villainy in the audio environment. But in box set 3, Rage of the Time Lords, there’s a feeling of renaissance at play. A renaissance literally means a looking back to go forward, and while the first box set gave us a tight handful of creepy, powerful but mostly unconnected stories, and the second set gave us the War Master as a patient, precise malevolence, this third series is proper, bedded-in Mastery – there’s an enormous plan that’s taken almost a lifetime to construct and bring to fruition, as the War Master constructs the Ultimate Doohickey Of Death, a weapon that, he feels, will not only give the Time Lords victory in their wretched war against the Daleks, but might just possibly put him where he feels he belongs – among the pantheon of Time Lord gods.

This is ambition on a scale that was only delivered from time to time throughout the Master’s on-screen career – Colony In Space, The Deadly Assassin, maybe the end of Logopolis. And this is a very different Master to any of the on-screen variants. One who has anticipated every move, crossed every t, dotted every i, and accounted for every counter-stratagem even of his old enemy, the Doctor. This is the War Master at his most devious, his most grandiose, his most brilliant and organised and vicious.

You’re going to want to strap in.

The Survivor, by Tim Foley, kicks things off with a nostalgic feel. Mr Magister, the new vicar of a village in the Second World War, befriends Alice Pritchard, a local Land Girl who can…do things with her mind. Move things. Change things. Possibly even hurt people. As he at first guides his new pupil, and then deals with her disobedience, the situation in the village becomes charged with suspicion, and fear, and finger-pointing, in a classic, claustrophobic Hammer Horror style as the tight nerves of wartime and privation and the potential of German spies everywhere turns the village into a replica of a medieval witch-trial. This is Carrie meets The Witchfinder-General…in World War II. Only at the end are we entirely sure what the Master aims to gain from turning a harmless village into a bunch of witch-killing savages, and of course, with no Doctor to step in and stop him, the War Master wins. He succeeds. He skips away from all the melodrama having achieved his aim – step one in very, very many in the building of his grandest ever Doohickey Of Death.

David Llewellyn follows suit in a very different setting in The Chameleon of Coney Island – we’re down among the circus folk, the ‘freakshow’ people, and in particular, the Chameleon – a young woman who can change her skin to match whatever background she’s against, and her patron, protector and arguably profiteer, Guiseppe Sabatini. A gentleman named TS Mereath (take your time, we’ve got all day) offers to buy the Chameleon from Sabatini, and on his refusal, uncanny levels of bad luck start to plague the showman and his Chameleon. While there’s a similar central thread in the first two stories – the Master collecting people with extraordinary, unusual abilities for some dark design of his own - you get a feeling for how the first story will go as it descends into claustrophobic, demented, threatening energy, where in Llewellyn’s story, there’s a final twist in the tale that you more than likely won’t see coming. In fact, it feels so much like a U-turn precisely because the clues that in retrospect do lead up to it are very subtly placed, and because Derek Jacobi’s Master almost brushes it off in explanation, as though of course that was going to happen, and it’s not his fault if you stupid apes are too dull-witted to see it. Again, the first two stories share a fundamental point – showing us the War Master on a mission, and the lengths to which he’s prepared to go to get that mission accomplished. In The Survivor, he’s absolutely willing to plunge a group of hapless humans into torment and turmoil to get his purpose achieved – of course he is, they only matter as instruments of his malign will. In The Chameleon Of Coney Island, there’s rather more personal viciousness involved – including a scene reminiscent of an early Omen movie, where he exerts his mesmerising will to deadly effect, and a full-on hideous Master cackle when delivering some humans to an early grave. It’s powerful stuff in both cases, and there’s some high level War Mastering there for most kinds of fans.

In The Missing Link, again by Foley, we spool ahead significantly. We’ve seen the Master in two instances of the short game, going undercover, mingling with the minions to get the things and people he needs. Now, for The Missing Link and David Llewellyn’s Darkness And Light, which work together as a two-parter in the same location, we hear and envisage the end product of the War Master’s grand conceit – an unstoppable superpowered smoothie of hate. This is a very New Who interpretation of the Delgado and Simm Master concepts, with more than a touch of Big Finsh’s own Alex MacQueen middle-management Master thrown in for good measure. This is the Master as a scientific innovator, funding research, building teams, funnelling breakthroughs towards what, on the surface, looks like a goal of which at least the War Doctor might approve – something to put an end to the Time War. In these two episodes, the trick is that nothing you think is happening is random. Foley and Llewellyn here do the cheeky thing – they throw seeming obstacles and curve balls at their War Master, only to have him be the cleverest life form in the room, and have thought it all through ahead of time.

When things finally do go wrong, though, only a Pertwee-Delgado compromise and a hell of a lot of luck stands a chance of letting the Master and the Doctor survive this adventure. Pitting Jacobi and McGann together in an inevitable ‘We’re going to forget all about this once it’s over’ storyline is genius, because the sparks you get from them are completely unique to this pairing. The Missing Link is for the most part a ‘hideous creature let loose in a scientific complex’ chase story, complete with lycanthropes (or werewolves to the likes of you and me), while Darkness And Light continues the chase, ups the stakes, reduces the likelihood of a happy ending, throws in enough double-crossing to satisfy the wildest conspiracy theorist, and brings the whole thing to a rolling character-boil at the end, the future of the Master, the Doctor, the Time Lords, the Daleks and – oh yeah – the whole universe of space and time coming down to whether the War Master can make a deal with the devil of his own ambition.

The War Master #3 – Rage of the Time Lords takes us from dark satire, through vicious Godfather-style crime among an indigent community, to a soaring opera of horrifying ambition and power, only to bring the ‘hero’ crashing down in his own hubris for the sake of there being a universe to exist in. It’s cheesy as hell to say, given the character’s name, but it’s a masterpiece of storytelling over four hours. What’s more than that, it’s the latest instalment in a series that is consistently among the best that Big Finish has to offer, and far from dropping the ball, it pushes our understanding of the character considerably forward, while entertaining every step of the way. Feel the Rage of the Time Lords at your earliest opportunity. It’ll make your ears very happy indeed.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Tenth Doctor Adventures, Vol. 3 by Tony J Fyler

 Tony’ll have a salute, since you didn’t ask.

Chemistry.

That, in case you’re wondering, is what sets the Tenth Doctor’s time with Donna Noble and her family apart in the annals of 21^st century Doctor Who as the high point. The chemistry of comic timing, chiefly between David Tennant and Catherine Tate, but with satellites of sharpness from Jacqueline King as Sylvia Noble and of adorable warmth from Bernard Cribbins as Wilf, all blending into a whole that makes them an utter joy to watch, and now to listen to as the Noble family takes its place firmly alongside the Doctor-Donna in the world of Big Finish audio.

That said, the whole family are only onboard for the first of the three stories in this new collection, No Place, by James Goss. Even so, they give serious value for your comedy money, in a story that smashes two reality TV formats together and ends up with a story about as grim and scary as the original Poltergeist movie, leavened by that comedy chemistry of the Tenth Doctor and the Noble family.

The formats are ghosthunting shows (or as the Doctor puts it here, ‘Carol Smilie screaming and pointing at dust’) and home makeover shows. The worrying thing is that the resultant show Goss invents, where so-called ‘haunted houses’ have their suspicious knocks and bangings and spooky light-flickers fixed by updated plumbing and electrics is staggeringly plausible. Opening the door of a haunted house and being confronted with the Nobles and the Doctor though is rather a Cruel and Unusual Punishment for presenter Justin, and James Goss goes on to front-load the story with glorious comedy of a kind it would be unsporting to spoil for you, while the horror of the story, by contrast, creeps up on you slowly, subtly and despite a number of absolutely full-on jump-scares which, remarkably, don’t diminish the tension but build it, Poltergeist-style, into something your brain would quite like to run the hell away from – except the Doctor’s there to see you through it. And Donna’s there to comfort you. And Sylvia’s got the kettle on and the biscuits out. And Wilf’s always ready to listen. That’s the balancing act at the heart of No Place – building to some pretty prickly, skin-crawling horror, but using the relationships of the Doctor and the Nobles to reassure you, and indeed Justin, that everything will be alright, no matter what it looks like or sounds like or whatever’s buried in the garden and maybe, just maybe, wants to return…

It’s the kind of gamble that could go spectacularly wrong in inexperienced hands, but James Goss writes the story so it doesn’t shoot its bolt of creeping horror with every jump-scare, and director Ken Bentley keeps a rein on the reveals too, so that you don’t want the story to let you go until everything’s safe and good again. The cast slip back into their roles as the Nobles and the Tenth Doctor with a tone that instantly takes you back to their on-screen time, and in particular the back-and-forth between the Doctor and Donna is a thing of pure joy, leaving you with a perfectly balanced horror-Who story, saved from the weight of its own grimness by the particular Doctor-companion combination who take us through the storyline of No Place.

Yes! Yes, yes, a thousand times yes and thank you Jenny T Colgan for One Mile Down. Not only does it take the Tenth Doctor and Donna to the thoroughly detailed underwater world of Vallarasee, not only does it deliver an eloquent discourse on the impact of tourism on indigenous populations, frequently bending a previous reality into an uncomfortable falsehood for the sake of those who wish to look at it through their preconceived notions of its purpose or beauty, and not only does it introduce us to the cutest Judoon it’s yet been our privilege to encounter, but arguably more important than all these things, it draws a line between interstellar, intertemporal coolness and a particular kind of plastic shoe with holes in. These are without any real-world justification in their appalling naffness and are, if there’s any justice in the world, probably the Nestene advance guard to destroy trendy people. Donna, naturally, loves them, but the Tenth Doctor is firm – no companion should wear plastic shoes with holes in. End of. Case closed. The End – Jenny T Colgan and the Tenth Doctor have spoken. Next!

Beyond the statement on plastic hole-filled shoes, about which it’s possible I’m slightly obsessing, One Mile Down feels like the kind of story it would have been possible to deliver during the Tenth Doctor and Donna era, though there are more immediately modern influences too – there’s a racist who happens to be quite good in a crisis, a cross-species couple with privilege clouding the vision of one of them, there’s an act of unbridled terrorism tied to what otherwise feels like a good cause, and there’s an eloquent example of how people driven principally by profit, rather than by beauty, or concern for their fellow creatures, tend to make nothing but fakery and mess.

Along the journey of the story, which has its beats as well placed as you’d expect from Jenny T Colgan, there’s an effective Doctor-Donna split, as they each have a strand of the adventure and distinct things to do in order to try and save thousands of people from an imminent disaster as nature takes back its own – with a little help from its more radical friends. That means you get the fun of Donna having to deal with the useful racist, while never being shy of telling him what he is, and the Doctor and the Little Judoon Who Could finding ways to turn the Judoon’s rigid adherence to rules of law into both an excuse and a methodology for saving the lives of non-Judoon. While opportunities to do so seem distinctly limited, it would be rather fun to follow this Judoon-in-training through its ongoing career, so see the difference that an early encounter with the bounciest of Doctors could make on even the most dogged of species.

You…probably don’t need me to tell you that The Creeping Death, by Roy Gill, is a bit of a spooky one. Aiming for rock and roll, the Doctor and Donna land in London in 1952, during the most deadly smog ever to hit the capital. Death suddenly stalks the city in a positively Victorian, wispy way – and then there are the aliens.

Roy Gill’s script has a distinctly Horror of Fang Rock feel – a bunch of disparate people, some of whom are grouped and know each other, some of whom don’t, are trying to find their way to home and safety, but between them and their everyday dreams lies predation, mystery, horror and death. And the Doctor. And Donna. Again, Gill skilfully splits up the Tardis team early on – easy to do with a handy smog – and sets them about comforting and helping those they meet along the way. When a people-possessing alien force reveals itself, the focus shifts from the simple aim of getting home to the rather more complicated and difficult business of doing everything that’s necessary to stop the alien’s malicious intent, and it builds with the trademark rising pulse of memorable Doctor Who to a climax that will satisfy, for all its vaguely familiar beats.

All told, the third set of Tenth Doctor Adventures touches three solid Russell T Davies gracenotes – a story in the here and now, bringing in the companion’s family to help defeat an alien menace, a planet that’s very alien, with an environment that makes it a subtle take on the base-under-siege genre, and a historical alien escapade with plenty of creepiness and no fear of killing off characters just as we’ve got to know them. Each of the writers is clearly on impressive form here too, which makes it extremely hard to pick a favourite among the stories – the comedy and the insane balancing act in No Place probably makes it the most friendly for repeat listening, while One Mile Down has the feeling of only lacking the visuals to make it a full-on televised story. Then again, the persistent, Jaws-like pulse of creeping death in…erm…The Creeping Death makes you want to brave it again, and it does come with perhaps the largest cast of ‘genuinely quite nice’ people aside from the Tardis team and Donna’s family(!).

In essence then, there’s not a bum note here, and each of the stories will reward replaying on a semi-regular basis. Pick up The Tenth Doctor Adventures #3 and remember the days of that pinpoint, whizz-bang comic chemistry, the compassion of Donna, and the doing-what-needs-to-be-done dedication that forged the friendship of the Chiswick Temp and the Time Lord, underneath all their glorious bluster and laughs.