Who Reviews Rise of the Cybermen and the Age of Steel by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s getting the upgrade. 

When Doctor Who came back in 2005, it was keen to redevelop what had long been the show’s #1 monster in the public imagination – the Dalek – and make it a genuinely scary threat for the 21^st century. 

When the show got its second series confirmed, and with a brand new Doctor in David Tennant, it couldn’t really avoid bringing back the Cybermen (often thought of as the show’s #2 monster), and re-imagining them for the 21^st century too. 

But there was a line to be walked. With the Daleks, they were so very vivid in the general public consciousness that what you needed to do was address their perceived weaknesses – the inability to deal with stairs, their sink-plunger arm, etc – and turn them into strengths, to make the Skarosian tank-mutants into unstoppable killing machines again, and elevate them to such a position that they and the Time Lords had essentially wiped each other out, leaving only the Doctor in the universe who could stand up to them when they returned. 

With the Cybermen, there was a different problem. It wasn’t that the public was mostly aware of their weaknesses, but that they weren’t particularly aware of what made the Cybermen tick, where they were from, what made them want to convert or conquer the universe. 

So what you needed for the first Cyber-story of the 21^st century, was essentially an origin story that people could get hold of. 

Hardcore fans of course, knew the origin story. The people of Mondas, Earth’s original twin planet, had perfected cyber-surgery, replacing the organic parts of themselves over time, and eventually removing their capacity for emotions, leaving them entirely logical and bent on spreading the gift of Cyberization to the rest of the universe. 

That’s where the second balancing act came in. Without essentially re-telling The Tenth Planet with the Tenth Doctor, how did you give the Cybermen a backstory that new viewers could connect to, without ruining the ‘canon’ for the established fans by essentially retconning The Tenth Planet? 

The solution from writer Tom MacRae was more than a touch ingenious. In ‘our’ universe, Mondas was a twin planet of Earth. But perhaps in a parallel universe, it was right here on Earth that the Cybermen developed. A twin dimension, rather than a twin planet. And Rise of the Cybermen and The Age Of Steel was off to the races. 

There’s always talk of the similarities between Rise of the Cybermen and Spare Parts, the Big Finish story by Marc Platt which takes the Fifth Doctor to Mondas as the Cybermen are actually beginning to emerge as an entity, rather than a collection of upgrades. But MacRae rightly draws lines of separation between Platt’s masterpiece (Seriously, if you’ve never heard it, go now and listen, it’s absurdly good) and his own. Yes, technically, they document the same point in the evolution of the Cybermen – but that’s about all they have in common. 

For a large part of Rise of the Cybermen, in fact, we’re distracted by the potential of a parallel universe when the Doctor, Rose and Mickey more or less fall into one. While the only energy source that can recharge the Tardis is growing and getting power, the potential of that other universe is too strong for the two companions – Mickey goes to see if his nan, who raised him, is still alive there, given she had died in ‘our’ world, and Rose is brought up short by a billboard that shows her dad, dead in our universe, is not only alive in the parallel, but successful. 

In the parallel world, Jackie and Pete Tyler are still married, but they never had Rose. And Pete is connected to the activities of a mega-businessman called John Lumic. 

Lumic, we learn early, is dependent on a wheelchair and life-support systems, making him very much a re-envisaging of Davros, creator of the Daleks. But the interesting thing is that it technically makes more sense in Lumic’s case that a man who feels himself to be an almighty brain and will, almost mocked by a body decaying with age and atrophy, would focus on creating something like the Cybermen. While he wants to wait until the last possible moment, the Cybermen for him are a kind of fantasy wish-fulfilment, an immortal, undecaying body to carry around the human brain. The Cybermen have always been the ultimate fantasy of the old and the fearful – they’re a protection both from the physical decay of ageing and death, and from the mental pain of living a life with a brain that still thinks organic thoughts in a body no longer able to experience mortal pleasures in any meaningful way. 

The Cybermen have always represented this fear, but it has never been centred in a single individual’s drive to survive until the world met John Lumic (Roger Lloyd-Pack) in Rise of the Cybermen. 

At first experimenting with society’s unwanted, the homeless and hungry (literally the spare parts of the social pecking order), the Cybermen grow in number – though it’s worth pointing out that this gradual rise is somewhat counterintuitive at the end of the story, when it turns out Lumic has had hives of Cybermen stashed away for quite some time). Weirdly though, it’s almost coincidence that brings Rose and the Doctor to Pete and Jackie’s house the night they’re hosting the President of the UK. With whom, Lumic’s toy soldiers want a word. 

Graeme Harper was the only Classic Who director to get to direct in the New Who era too at the time, and what he gave us in The Rise of the Cybermen was a masterclass in angles and the delivery of menace through the choice of shots. He made the return of the Cybermen into something that had both power and a sense of size that was frightening as they crashed Jackie Tyler’s birthday party with mayhem on their minds. 

It’s possible to argue though that the new Cybermen lost some of their Classic era menace specifically in Rise of the Cybermen/The Age Of Steel, by virtue of having no weapon except a kind of electro-touch. They also gained an unfortunately undramatic catchphrase to mimic the Daleks – intoning “Delete, delete, delete” like walking incarnations of Grammarly. And for any long-term Cyber-fan, the question of how they would sound was a vexed one – the Cybermen have had a range of vocal tones throughout their on-screen lives, but for many people the best (if least logical) was that of the Eighties Cybermen voiced (and played) by David Banks and Mark Hardy, which had a deep electronic burr to it. Nick Briggs is a master in almost all things, but the monotone he gave the new Cyber-voices, while logically in keeping with the like of Troughton-era Cybermen, felt a bit flat on screen. 

But for most viewers, that didn’t matter. Either the Cybermen were back, and looking bigger and stronger then ever if you were a hardcore Who-fan, or there was a new cool monster in Doctor Who if you weren’t. 

One of the neatest elements about the Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel is how plausible the creep of Cyber-technology is in it – people at first getting ‘earpods’ which feed chosen content directly into their ear canals and brains, and from there, the information-flow going both ways, facilitating mind-reading and mind-control as and when necessary. The Doctor’s lecture about the human race always needing the next upgrade was well observed based on a society in which technology is outdated within two years of its launch. And the universality of Lumic’s ‘earpod’ technology gets lots of people walking into Battersea Power Station early in The Age Of Steel, because if the Cybermen have always been about the fear of ageing and death, they’ve also always been about the body horror or a human brain in a metal body, the flesh having been cut away and discarded. 

The second episode of the Cyber-return to Doctor Who riffed heavily on this body horror and the emotional response to it. Where in Classic Who it was rarely made explicit how the emotions were removed, in The Age Of Steel it was given a conveniently vulnerable explanation. There was no Frankensteinian lobotomy action involved in creating a Cyberman, there was simply an emotional inhibitor, which, if you knew how, could be switched off. That would mean lots of Cybermen suddenly becoming self-aware inside their metal bodies and going stark, raving bonkers. 

The Doctor only discovers this through Mickey and his connection to a gang of anti-Lumic activists, the Preachers, who in this universe have a Ricky Smith among their number. Ricky is sadly killed along the way, giving Mickey an example to look up to (as well as a potential boyfriend in fellow Preacher, Jake). When Mrs Moore, a techie in the gang, teams up with the Doctor, there’s a touching scene where a dying Cyberman regains its humanity, and tells them it was getting married the next day. And while Mrs Moore too immediately pays the price, and the parallel Jackie Tyler is among the first batch of humans to be Cyber-converted at Battersea, the Doctor learns the way to defeat the Cybermen – find the code that controls the emotional inhibitor and broadcast it to all the Cybermen. 

This is both in the long tradition of Cyberman stories and yet somehow disappointing at the same time. While the Daleks have had issues that make them weak – stairs, plungers, etc – the list of things that, for no good reason whatsoever, allow you to destroy a lot of Cybermen in one go had grown ludicrous in Classic Who – from radiation to gravity to nail varnish remover to gold coins lodged in their chest. They have always had to be artificially limited in their power, and the emotional inhibitor, while it was a slightly more technical version of the trope, was the first 21^st century way to kill a lot of Cybermen in a hurry and so resolve a story. It was a trend which would probably reach its nadir in the Eleventh Doctor story Closing Time, when for all intents and purposes, ‘blowing them up with love’ became a thing you could do to Cybermen. 

While the ending is too easy, it leaves a lot of changes in the world of the Tardis crew. Rose reveals her identity to Pete Tyler, and he can’t especially handle it – especially not after losing his wife in the Cyber-factories. 

Mickey, meanwhile, decides to stay behind in the parallel universe and root out all the hives of hidden Cybermen, while also having some extra time with his nan. As he rightly says, in a world with Rose Tyler and the Doctor in it, “It’s never gonna be me, is it?”, so he decides to find his own destiny, free from the endless, hopeless hope of getting back a relationship with Rose. 

Rise of the Cybermen and the Age of Steel together are a fantastic spectacle of Cyber-reinvention, and they repay re-watching even today. The way the Cybermen are defeated may be little more than the 21^st century of the Classic show’s easy solutions to Cybermen, downgrading them as a threat, but the two-part reintroduction of Doctor Who’s silver medal monsters has a high bodycount, Cybermen marching en masse, a joyfully explicit explanation of how they came about (in at least one reality), and plenty of personal, emotional impact, both for the Tardis team and for us as viewers. This is an achievement underlined by quite how difficult it has proved to deliver an effective Cyber-story in the years that have followed. Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel – check them out again. 

They’re probably better than you remember.

Who Reviews The Beast Below by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony gets beastly. 

Of all the stories he ever wrote for Doctor Who, when asked if there was one he was least pleased with, Steven Moffat chose The Beast Below as an example of one that didn’t really work. 

It’s distinctly arguable he was a touch too hard on himself. There’s at least one element that’s patently absurd, certainly, but there’s a great deal to enjoy and admire about the Eleventh Doctor’s second story, and Amy Pond’s first real foray into the universe. 

First of all, like Wendy in Peter Pan, she follows her enigmatic friend into the wider universe dressed in her nightie – a first for Doctor Who companions (assuming Leela’s leather gear wasn’t used night and day), which makes her appeal to us immediately as a trusting ‘fan’ of her ‘Raggedy’ ‘imaginary friend. 

The story itself has some joy in its logic – and some human darkness too, to balance it. The idea that the human race, faced with extinction, got itself into a series of star arks, leaving only the UK (sans Scotland) unprepared, feels oddly resonant, somehow. The idea that decisions would be taken which go against everything in people’s natures, decisions that hurt a harmless, helpful creature, and cause people to regularly self-anaesthetise with forgetfulness – it’s darker than you might remember, The Beast Below. 

It’s also something of a triumph for Matt Smith’s new incarnation. Fresh from his regeneration story, he owns The Beast Below, from his bandy-legged Chaplin walk to his mysterious ‘Doing Of The Thing’ with the water glasses to discover a lack of engine vibration, his aching understanding of a child crying silently because no-one listens, his sliiiightly cringy self-definition as one who resists every chance they get, to his absolutely blow-the-doors-off sudden rage, declaring “Nobody HUMAN has anything to say to me today!” 

If you didn’t quite get the chills of New Doctor love from The Eleventh Hour – we’re not sure why you wouldn’t, but just say you didn’t – there is plenty in The Beast Below to make you love this quirky, funny, compassionate, old man, young body incarnation. The moment when he lets everyone hear the screaming of the star whale has resonances of the Tenth Doctor in Planet of the Ood, but it’s handled in a way that makes you somehow certain this is a very different Time Lord. It’s more an accusation here than it is an act of compassion or sharing, and you get a sense that while the Tenth Doctor was always giving people or menaces the option to turn away from their intent, this Doctor, when angered, might very well bring the roof crashing down on your head, and warnings be damned. 

Now, is it true that ultimately, it takes Amy pond’s faith in him to sway him from a ghastly course of non-Doctor action? Absolutely, but back then, they were both new and it felt like a pleasing balancing act – the new young companion challenging the old new Doctor into thinking bigger, and better, and more Doctor than the horrible options in front of him. 

Ironically of course, this is exactly the idea that Steven Moffatt would recycle in The Day of the Doctor, with Clara Oswald making three Doctors better than the options available. Here it feels smaller and sweeter, and somehow more resonant because it feels more every day. Amy Pond saving the Doctor from the box in which he’s thinking? Oh yes, we’ll have some of that, the companion showing her worth and her mettle early in her travelling time – great. 

There are other elements that work well, too – the idea of a Queen going under cover in her own realm is elegant, the heartbreaking pathos that it’s a scenario that’s been played out time and time and time again, her mask never changing because her lifespan has been artificially expanded and slowed. It all makes a kind of horrible, beautiful science-fiction fairytale sense, like Sleeping Beauty who every now and then re-sentences herself to ignorance and sleep, because knowledge while awake is too hard to bear. 

Creepy-seeming tentancles breaking through into the streets, undignified Geronimo-ing into the mouth of a giant star whale, and a subsequent hurl escape are all great fun, but fun with a dark tinge, revealing as they do another layer of the lies on which Starship UK is built. 

Sophie Okonedo as Liz 10 adds power and pathos in just the right amount to a story that needs them to bring the science-fiction elements and the human elements together, focusing the degree to which people will forget the suffering of their fellow creatures as the price of their own life. She also brings a glorious swish of style to the role, with her delivery of lines like “I’m the bloody Queen, mate.” Terence ‘Demon Headmaster’ Hardiman is a quiet, enigmatic force as Hawthorne too, never overshadowing the drama or its more dynamic players, but exemplifying the kind of public servant who would, for instance, efficiently feed people to the lions if their emperor commanded it. It all works extremely well to create a world weighed down with secrets and sadness, that needs a release no-one’s strong enough to give it. 

So, what doesn’t work? 

Annoyingly, it’s the Smilers and the Winders. A neat idea in themselves, creatures with revolving heads that change their face from benign to horrifying when they turn, there’s almost literally no purpose for them in the script except to force a couple of chase sequences and scare the toddlers. 

When we find out the truth about the Winders – the humans with Smiler faces on the back of their heads – the sense of the thing goes completely out of the window, forcing the conclusion that really, to make The Beast Below work as well as it could, you either need to pull out the Smilers altogether and replace them with a more mundane but more explicable threat, of you need more time than The Beast Below has in which to explain what the hell they actually are, and what they’re doing on Starship UK. Are they invented? Imported? Alien? Are they somehow channels for the pain and anger and grief of the star whale, or are they, as seems most likely, just a cool-ish idea with nowhere else to live, shoved into the story as the spur to those chase scenes? 

It’s the Smilers and the Winders that give any re-watch of The Beast Below that momentary pause for breath and brace-for-impact feel of slight disappointment. While they’re an interesting idea in their own right, and realised pretty well in terms of their physical impact, there’s zero logic behind their inclusion in the story, and they act more or less as a distraction from all the incredibly cool stuff going on in whenever they’re not pulling focus. 

Take another look at The Beast Below today. Focus on the ethics, the performances, and in particular the dynamics of a newly regenerated Doctor and a companion that proves beyond any doubt here why she’s better than many humans, and why she deserves her shot at the wider universe. For both Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor and Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond, this is at least as fundamental to their figuring out their way of being, and being in the universe together, as The Eleventh Hour with its moment of trust was. This is Amy Pond saving the Doctor from the limitations he’s imposed on a situation – the three appalling options he sets out before himself. The point being, in setting out those options, he’s Doctoring on auto-pilot. By opening up the options in front of him, and making him see the universe through the lens of how others might see him, Amy gifts the Eleventh Doctor the lack of limitations – and that in itself is enough to infuse both his journey and his nature with a brand new enthusiasm. And with it, we as fans get that same new enthusiasm, flying back into the universe with a brand new brilliant Doctor.

Who Reviews Victory of the Daleks by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony claims victory with a Jammie Dodger. 

There’s an old saw in Doctor Who fandom that says that a Doctor isn’t really a Doctor, or that they don’t really reveal what kind of Doctor they are, until they come up against the Daleks. It’s by no means consistently true, of course – the Fifth Doctor didn’t face them properly until his final season, and both the Sixth and Seventh Doctors were firmly into their on-screen time before they encountered the pepperpots of doom. 

The Eleventh Doctor had no such wait for his first encounter with the Daleks. Three stories into his first series, the Tweed-suited Time Lord came across the sons of Skaro in one of their most insidious stories since Power of the Daleks, with which the parallels are both obvious and intentional. 

Winston Churchill (Ian McNiece, giving us a believable performance that has seen him anchor box sets of Churchill adventures in audio) is in his bunker during the early years of World War II when he calls for the Doctor’s opinion and assistance with an ethical dilemma over a magical new techno-weapon that could win him the war. 

The Doctor, naturally – new body, new Tardis interior, both taking a while to wear in – is a little late, so in the meantime, Churchill acts as he sees fit. A new robotic sentinel called an Ironside, built by a Scottish professor named Bracewell, is able to shoot Nazi planes out of the sky, and also serve tea to the victors once their offensive duty is done. 

The Eleventh Doctor’s reaction to the Ironsides is especially extreme when he finds out they’re actually Daleks. Yelling, demanding they admit who and what they are, and even attacking them with giant spanners, seeing the Daleks in this scenario, hiding in plain sight, shooting down Nazis and pretending to be willing ‘soldiers’ of the Allies offends everything in his hearts. Even Amy Pond seems worried about the extreme reaction he has to them, which in itself is odd – in the history of which the Doctor is aware, Amy comes from an Earth that has seen the Daleks attack, experienced the Earth hijacked across space by them, seen people exterminated by the tank-dwelling Nazi-blobs. But she has no memory of any of that – a factor in the ongoing story of the cracks in time that are the arc of Series 5. 

But when the Doctor goes spanner-nuts, demanding that the Daleks acknowledge him, and stop pretending to be subservient to the humans around them, one of the weirdest things in almost 50 years of Dalek history happens. 

His words are recorded, transmitted through space, and apparently ‘accepted as testimony.’

Almost immediately, the Daleks drop their pretence, go on a brief killing spree they’ve evidently been itching for, and, when Bracewell pleads with them, demanding that they are his creation, they shoot off his hand, and reveal that in fact, they created him as a way of getting close to Churchill – and the Doctor. And then, in the most unDalek-like move of all, they naff comprehensively off. 

The next phase of the story stretches credulity out niiiiice and thin. The last of the Daleks, it seems, have found an ancient Dalek MacGuffin – a Genesis Ark (full points to writer Mark Gatiss there for coming up with a suitably impressive Doohicky name). In the Ark there’s some primal, perfect Dalek DNA, enough to reboot the species from a fundamental template. There’s just one problem: the modern, bronze Daleks are so far from the fundamental Dalek that the Ark refuses to acknowledge them as Daleks. 

O…K. 

Instead of acknowledging their Dalekness though, the Ark will recognise the testimony of the Daleks’ arch-enemy – the Doctor. So, all the sophisticated analytical equipment you imagine would be in a Dalek Doohickey says they’re not Daleks. But the word of the species’ most eternal enemy is good enough for the Ark to open up. 

It’s really best to stop thinking too hard at this point. When you also understand that in an effort to get the Doctor to acknowledge them, the best plan they could come up was to a) create an android professor, and b) to go and hang around with Winston Churchill for a bit, serving tea in the hopes that the Doctor might just… pop along though, you ssssort of get the Genesis Ark’s point. Conquerors of time and space, they may be. Great thinkers? Nnnno. 

Where Victory of the Daleks also seems to go astray is that having established that the Ark contains primal Dalek, pure Dalek, fundamental Dalek, what emerges from it looks significantly less like a Dalek than any Dalek we’ve ever seen on screen. Big, bulky, with skirts the size of Skaro and in colour schemes not even the Peter Cushing movie dreamed of, the New Paradigm Daleks look OK in their initial emergence scene, backed by some superbly strong Murray Gold music. And there’s no doubting the fact that they sound the part, Nick Briggs making the voice of most of them deeper and more gravelly than the bronze Daleks. 

But ultimately, they look like a marketing strategy first and a universal despot second, which is one of the reasons they never especially caught on with fans. If the plan had been to replace the bronze Daleks – themselves an extremely elegant upgrading of what it meant to be a Dalek – with a new paradigm to be used in future stories, audience reaction appeared to take the wind out of the production team’s sails, and they were only included among other varieties of Dalek in future stories, before being more or less dropped altogether in the Chibnall era. 

The point about all of which is that their look makes no sense within the context of the story.

But then, in fairness, nothing much after the Doctor hits the Dalek with the spanner makes sense within the context of the story. Once the New Paradigm Daleks have emerged, the rest of the story is simply a matter of competing stakes. 

The Doctor threatens to blow up the Daleks with a Jammie Dodger… as you do if you’re the Eleventh Doctor and all you happen to have about your person is a Jammie Dodger. The Daleks, crippled though their ship might be, threaten to destroy London simply by shining a giant spotlight on it, so the Luftwaffe can do its thing. 

Bracewell, inspired by fellow Scot Amy Pond, takes some ideas he’s had for gravity bubbles and turns them from designs to fully working versions fitted to a bunch of Spitfires in what is practically no time at all – and with one working hand, no less. Spitfire pilots, used to flying sorties from England to Germany and back, have abbbbsolutely no problem flying into space to attack the Dalek ship. And in a move to get the Doctor to call off the attack, the new Supreme Dalek – presumably plugging itself rapidly into the data banks of the former Daleks it has systematically exterminated – reveals that as well as a passport into Churchill’s inner circle, the android Bracewell is an oblivion cascade (again, full marks on doohickey-naming for Gatiss). A walking, talking, thinking bomb that will take most of the earth with it into a screaming void pretty shortly as a way to give the new Daleks cover to get the hell out of Dodge and begin being simply awful to other people in other times and places. 

The Doctor, faced with his second impossible conundrum in two weeks – the week before, he’d been on the brink of killing the last of the star whales till Amy Pond talked him round – lets them go, and returns to Earth to persuade the android Bracewell that he’s a real boy after all, on the wiiiildly spurious grounds that provoking the implanted memories of a human life within him will stop him acting like a bomb and taking the Earth with him. Because… reasons. 

But of course, it’s not the Doctor who can provoke the right memories in Edwin Bracewell to cool him down and stop him exploding. The Doctor, like Bracewell, is fundamentally not human, and his efforts to get Bracewell to believe in his own humanity are doomed to fail. 

As with the star whale conundrum in The Beast Below, it’s actually Amy Pond who brings the goods, provoking memories of Bracewell’s “lost love,” Dorabella, and the ‘good hurt’ of loving someone. When Edwin stands down from his explosive countdown, all’s well that ends well, the light over London is extinguished, and Britain lives to suffer another few years of wartime uncertainty and hardship under Winston Churchill’s government. The Daleks naff comprehensively off for a second time, claiming victory. Bracewell, we learn, will probably go looking for Dorabella – and what we wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall for that meeting. “Hi honey, I’m home, and now I’m an emotionally unstable hyper-bomb!” 

The point about Victory of the Daleks, ultimately, is that it had a lot to do. It was determined to be a riff on Power of the Daleks, with sneaky Daleks seeming to serve humans. It had to act as a celebrity historical, bringing Churchill into the fold of the Doctor’s on-screen friends, though the idea that they’ve met before had long been established. It had to pitch a brand new design of Dalek to the audience, in such a way as to erase the previous iteration and if possible spark a new wave of retail Dalekmania. And, while it was at it, it was determined to get as many war movie references in as possible, more or less for the joy of it. 

It succeeds in doing a lot of that – the subservient Daleks are effectively creepy, especially when, unwatched, they turn and observe the humans. Churchill emerges as a person the Doctor can support (albeit there’s a good deal of printing the legend there). And the war movie elements are fun, if in no sense logical. 

Where it falls down is in the very thin strands of logic that hold the thing together – the Genesis Ark believing the Doctor but not the Daleks, the likelihood of Churchill as a good locus-point by which to wait for the Doctor to show up, the logistics of preparing the Spitfires for their space dogfight, etc. 

And most of all, it falls down in that the New Paradigm Daleks look, all the way through, like a desperate plea by the production team to get people to buy new Dalek models and products, rather than as anything that was fundamentally necessary to the Daleks’ ongoing story. 

So you can still get a whole lot of fun out of Victory of the Daleks, 11 years on – but the New Paradigm Daleks, in retrospect, look like an idea forced into being for the wrong reasons, and so act as the cherry on a highly illogical, if always fun, cake.

Articles Welcome to Issue 92 - The Ninth is Back!

 

Contents Guide

 

Big Finish Reviews+

Ninth Doctor Adventures, Vol 1

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/big-finish-reviews-ravagers-by-tony-j.html

Third Doctor Adventures, Vol. 7

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/big-finish-reviews-third-doctor.html

First Doctor Adventures, Vol 5

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/big-finish-reviews-first-doctor.html

Avalon, Vol 1

By Tony J Fyler

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/big-finish-reviews-avalon-volume-1-by.html

The Dalek Protocol

by Matt Rabjohns

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/big-finish-reviews-dalek-protocol-by_13.html

  

Beyond the TARDIS

Enemy of the Bane

By Andrew Allen

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/beyond-tardis-sarah-jane-adventures.html

 

Fans Fiction

Lady C Adventures – The Missing Wellington, Part One

By Samantha Stanley & Harriet Chamberlain

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/fans-fiction-new-adventures-of-lady-c.html

 

Profiles

Captain Jack Harkness

By Djak Forrest

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/profiles-javic-piotr-thane-aka-captain.html

 

Who Reviews

The Face of Evil

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/who-reviews-face-of-evil-by-matt.html

The Masque of Mandragora

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/who-reviews-masque-of-mandragora-by.html

Frontios

By Matt Rabjohns

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2021/06/who-reviews-frontios-by-matt-rabjohns.html

 

 

 

Editor’s Note 

On a morning full of hayfever and a left arm recovering from the final COVID jab, it’s the last read through before the launch of Issue 92, and I can’t help feeling a sense of excitement. The Ninth Doctor, the actual Ninth Doctor, has returned and sets the wheels in motion for a splendid if not brilliant first outing with Big Finish. I for one, cannot wait till next payday for a chance of listening to some awesome audios. 

Not only that, but this month, Tony has surpassed himself with not one but three more Doctor volumes to enthral you with. New volumes to salivate at and fill shelves where once paperback novels sat, but now make way for audio containers, unless, you’re more of a download freak!!! 

Andrew has set aside his own Doctor Who novel to bring us more Sarah Jane reviews, don’t miss that, and Matt returns after a long break to bring us a Fourth Doctor Big Finish review alongside some Classic Doctor Who TV episodes to recall from years ago. Some, even I remember from the off. 

Lady C returns for another adventure, this time written by two more fans of the series, Samantha Stanley and Harriet Chamberlain. Do check out this story. I can absolutely recommend it. 

Our profile this month is our illustrious leader of Torchwood Three – Captain Jack Harkness. It may seem that we’ve skirted around a few sides of his character, but believe me, if we didn’t, we’d still be writing till the sun exploded.

Tiziana has once again created a brilliant front cover for us, with the Ninth decorating the scene once again.  

So, pack a flask and some serious filling for your sandwiches. Saddle up and let the reading commence. We’ll be back next month with more exciting reviews, and hopefully a little extra. 

Stay safe and stay well. 

Djak

 

Welcome to Issue 92

Big Finish Reviews+ The Ravagers by Tony J Fyler

 

There are days in Doctor Who fandom that live and breathe in your memory forever. The first episode you saw that made you aware you were really and truly a fan. The day a new Doctor arrives, and you see them and instantly know that they’re “Your” Doctor. 

And for fans of Doctor Who on audio, there’s the buzz when something new comes to Big Finish. The day Tom Baker came on board. The day David Tennant returned both to Big Finish and to Doctor. 

With the best will in the world towards the Tenth Doctor and the actor who plays him, the release of the first box set of Christopher Eccleston Ninth Doctor stories is bigger than the Tennant return. 

It’s bigger because Tennant had history with Big Finish, and he was a boyhood fan of Doctor Who, so it always seemed like something he might want to come back to. Christopher Eccleston was never a fan of the show before Russell T Davies, and in things like turning down the Fiftieth Anniversary story, he had signalled it was unlikely he would ever return to the role. 

A combination of a softening towards conventions, an understanding and an appreciation of the love the fandom has for both the show and for his Doctor, and a year of lockdown may have helped to change his mind on a return, but just as was the case in his initial approach to Russell T Davies about the role, Christopher Eccleston has always been an actor drawn to good writing. 

That he signed on for these box sets at Big Finish then is a good sign in itself that you’re in for a treat. 

This first box set, Ravagers, is written by Nicholas Briggs, who has stood in vocally for Eccleston in the handful of Big Finish stories in which the Ninth Doctor has appeared so far, and as with Davies, Eccleston says that Briggs’ writing is a major part of what got him to re-join the universe of Doctor Who. 

So, what’s it all about? 

As you might expect given the name, the ‘Big Bad’ here is a race of creatures who eat absolutely everything they come into contact with – people, buildings, planets, suns, the universe is their menu. Seemingly implacable, unstoppable and hungry, the Ravagers are a threat that’s held in suspense for much of the box set, following the Shakespearean principle of being magnified by report in their absence (or telling, rather than showing). 

Meanwhile, in the first episode, Sphere of Freedom, the Ninth Doctor picks up a chef who’s working under indenture (slavery without the word) at an enormous immersive video game empire, and sets about the task of pulling that empire to the ground. 

Not a fan of immersive gaming, then, this Doctor? Quite the contrary – did you miss the part about the slavery? He goes out of his way to explain that he has nothing against gamers and gaming, but he has reason to believe this particular gaming empire is responsible for some real temporal eddies that are displacing people from all over time and space, scooping them up and dumping them somewhere else. Roman legionaries in Trafalgar Square during the war, that sort of thing – complete with the ensuing bloodbath. 

The Doctor knows these time eddies are more of a threat than just a bunch of displaced people, though – they’re a potential threat to the whole of the vortex, the whole of reality. And so, with the audio adventure equivalent of an outstretched hand and a “D’you wanna come with me?”, the Ninth Doctor is back, Chef Nova (Camille Beeput) at his side, trying to stop misguided gaming CEO Audrey (Jayne McKenna) from ripping the fabric of space-time to shreds, seemingly just for short-term profit. Very Ninth Doctor, very “Run for your life,” and altogether a thing of pure joy. 

It’s been sixteen years since the Ninth Doctor was on screen, and two things are evident immediately about his return. The first is that if the memory doesn’t exactly cheat, we do get used to our general perceptions of a Doctor, and set them in stone in a kind of shorthand. Patrick Troughton’s ‘cosmic hobo,’ Jon Pertwee’s ‘establishment dandy,’ and so on. 

For the Ninth Doctor, we seem to have memories of him being more taciturn, more mournful and filled with survivor-guilt than for the most part he really was. Eccleston on screen was far more animated, far more willing to be silly and funny, and to give his Doctor a bounce of energy, than our memories allow him. 

And the second thing is that were he to have been as grim as our memories sometimes paint him, it wouldn’t work long term on audio. He’d have to be shifted towards more speech, more full-on conversations, because of the nature of the medium. You can do a lot with a look on TV. It means more or less nothing on audio. 

But as we say, the Ninth Doctor was always a glorious mixture of silliness and fun and a steel-spined understanding of the universe. He was always both things, and a million more besides, and in this first box set, Christopher Eccleston gets a chance to show a lot more of that Doctor to us – the Doctor who will take a stand and then do whatever is necessary to achieve his goal, so long as it doesn’t cross his personal moral threshold. 

Why are we mentioning this? 

Simply because the Ninth Doctor here is more garrulous, more talkative than people remember him being. But he hasn’t been carbon copied from the naturally chattier Tenth Doctor at all. Partly, any potential disconnect is due to a shading out of these elements of his personality when we think back to him, and partly, he needs to talk more in audio to carry the day anyway. 

And frankly, it’s gorgeous. This more universally bouncy Ninth Doctor, in the days when he believed the Daleks were finally gone from the universe, is mischievous, persuasive and always looking to have his breath taken by the people and things he encounters, quite as much as he is a moral guardian of the universe and a sticker-up for the little people against the bullies of the universe. 

In Sphere Of Freedom, there’s a good deal of set-up, as we learn of Audrey’s empire, the temporally displaced people and what they have to do with Audrey’s empire (there is a fairly explicit link), the nature of the Sphere as a basic indenture world – think zero hour contracts, minimum wages and company ‘perks’ that do nothing to keep body and soul together – and why all this should require the creation of temporal eddies that imperil the cosmos. 

Eccleston, coming back to the Ninth Doctor, is a tour de force – but you knew that already. We also need to pay huge respect to Camilla Beeput, who as Chef Nova gets the companion energy note perfect immediately, while also subtly hinting that there’s more to her than meets the ear.  Jayne McKenna as Audrey spends much of the episode in shadow, but gives us just enough towards the end to pull us headlong into Episode 2, Cataclysm.

This is where the story of Ravagers goes properly Nick Briggs tonto. Nova gets separated from the Doctor and meets an army of drones who want to turn her into fuel, while we begin to suspect that things might not be all we thought they were. 

Is the Doctor in an immersive video game himself, his dreams of being the universe-saving hero playing out around him like memories of a life long gone? Or are he and Nova really experiencing this timeline in slightly the wrong order? It seems they might be as they turn up to stop Audrey too late, only to be told they’ve just left, and they failed in any case. 

This is a much more reflective episode in some ways, but the pace remains relentless – and actually, somewhat breathless. You may need a pin board and a load of Post-It notes to keep track of the careering path of this story, especially as in Cataclysm we see the Doctor seeming to ‘haunt’ Audrey at various points in her earlier life, an idea that, pleasingly, has been used before at Big Finish, with the Seventh Doctor ‘haunting’ the life of complex character Elizabeth Klein. The idea gets a neat re-use here, and it feels true to his character that the Doctor will still essentially ‘stalk’ people if he feels they need watching to stay on his version of a positive pathway.

There’s a solid MacGuffin responsible for a lot of what happens in this first box set – a Time Lord MacGuffin, nevertheless. And there’s some degree of story involved in tracking it through Audrey’s life as she discovers the Ravagers and the impossible threat they pose, and then begins to build her defences against them, creating time eddies and displacing people in direct response to what she sees as an imminent threat. 

Cataclysm, while rarely pausing for breath, feels like both a more active story than Sphere Of Freedom and a more reflective one as the ‘Ghost Doctor’ haunts Audrey’s younger life through her disappointments, her rise, her last ditch creation of a solution to the Ravagers problem – even though it may eventually destroy the universe. 

Episode 3, Food Fight, is all revelation and resolution, but that’s not to say it’s at any point easy. The true scale of the storytelling arc is revealed in this episode, and it’s much bigger and grander and more impressive than you may have cottoned onto before you get there, because you’re more or less constantly running to escape from things throughout the first two episodes. 

There’s a lot more calmness and talking in episode 3, because the big threat that is the Ravagers is not only revealed, but eventually understood. There are changes that need making if the universe is to be saved from both the Ravagers and from Audrey’s suicidal plan to keep them at bay. 

When the Ravagers are finally released, it works with the same sort of dramatic impact as, for instance, a swarm of 21^st century Daleks flying out of the sun to come and kill us all – you’ll bite at least a nail or two when it happens – and the solution the Doctor improvises to their phenomenal hunger depends on a last-minute paradigm-shift in what we’re dealing with. 

And when it happens, you’ll punch the air, because it’s so very Ninth Doctor you could squeal – compassionate, caring, revolutionary and universe-saving all in one. It’s a moment of glory that the return of Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor deserves, and you’ll go around with a stupid, blissed-out grin on your face for the rest of the day once you hear it.

The return of Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor is sublime. Breathless sometimes, head-scratchingly (ahem) timey-wimey at others, but with everything from immersive games, omnivores screaming across space to devour the universe, Dan Starkey giving us Latin lessons as a Roman soldier, a full-on Ocean’s 11 style heist-cum-revolution, a bunch of reprogrammable drones and the adventures of an immensely enjoyable indentured chef, it has more than you could possibly have dreamed of asking for. 

But mostly of course, it has Christopher Eccleston, getting the chance we’d always hoped for, to add new words to his pre-Rose Tyler Doctor, to have new adventures and be the Doctor again, with all the energy and verve and interstellar brilliance that made Doctor Who a world-beater again in 2005. 

That’s not just brilliant. That’s ffffffflippin’ marvellous.

Big Finish Reviews+ Avalon, Volume 1 by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s resistant. 

Expanded universes are all the rage in cult TV and movies. 

They’re what Marvel’s been up to for a while now, conquering the world with new adventures for characters inhabiting the same fictional universe as its major movie players. The Star Wars expanded universe is, let’s face it, significantly more gripping than the last few episodes of the main movie franchise were. 

Big Finish is already a past master at expanded universe content. Everything from Jago and Litefoot to the Paternoster Gang, the Adventures of Jenny, and River Song, and Lady Christina, Gallifrey, the War Master, Missy, and even UNIT, it all expands the main parent-universe of Doctor Who. 

We mention this because some people have raised their eyebrow at the launch of Avalon, Volume 1, and questioned whether it was either wanted or needed. Big Finish is expanding the universe of Blake’s 7 now? 

Well…erm…yes. Yes, that’s precisely what it’s doing. And there are sound in-universe and ex-universe reasons for doing it. 

In the real world, it’s sad but true that to keep running Blake’s 7 full-cast adventures when the actors who gave us Blake, Avon and Servalan are no longer with us becomes ever-increasingly difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. 

Meanwhile, in the world of Blake’s 7, the viability of this expanded universe was set up by the show itself – Blake was relatively frequently tripping over ‘other rebel leaders’ and ‘other resistance cells.’ And the thing very few people ever talk about is quite how exceptional the Liberator crew were – they had the fastest ship in the sector, they had the ability to instantly teleport down to a remote location (and back up again), and they had Orac, the ultimate computer hacker’s toolkit. For all they got into scrapes and scraps along the way, the Liberator crew had it relatively easy when it came to resistance fighting. The fictional universe has plenty of space for those other resistance groups that didn’t have anywhere near as comfortable a time fighting the power of the Federation. 

So – Avalon. Avalon was a resistance leader in the TV version of Blake’s 7, and has subsequently appeared in a Big Finish continuation of her story. More to the point, she is a relatively strong starting point for the expanded universe of Blake’s 7. 

In this first box set of three stories, there are all the hallmarks of that expansion – we don’t get an Avalon origin story as such, but the first story, Terra Firma, by Steve Lyons, bristles with Blakeness, as it’s set during the time of the first episode of Blake’s 7. We hear mention of his trial on child sex offences, we deal at length with the issue of the resistance group meeting he attended where, betrayed by undercover Federation agent Dev Tarrant, the group was massacred, and in fact Tarrant features prominently in this set, with Malcolm James slipping back into the slimy shoes of TV Tarrant, Jeremy Wilkin. 

Olivia Poulet returns to the world of Blake’s 7 as Avalon too, so in terms of continuity with prior Big Finish toe-dips into this resistance fighter’s life, as well as tying the series in with original Blake’s 7 chronology, this set has done its homework and is here to deliver.  To tie everything together, Terra Firma gives us the story of the first encounter between Avalon and Jenna Stannis, later of the Liberator, as mentioned on-screen. 

It’s perhaps not a legendary tale, Terra Firma, but it never stops making sense – in the wake of the resistance massacre and the trial of Blake, Avalon, who’s been working her revolutionary magic on other planets within the Federation, is driven to come home to Earth, if for no other reason than to prove to both the Federation and the people that the resistance is still alive there. She teams up with an old friend who’s not quite old enough to be old yet, Fay (played young by Becky Wright), and the two tangle with a smuggler who – much to Avalon’s dismay - is getting a name for herself. Jenna (Sally Knyvette) is very much at a pre-Blake stage here, increasingly aware she wants to follow someone into battle against the Federation, but that she has some pretty high standards for what they need to be able to achieve. By the end of the episode, Jenna’s decided that Avalon’s not it – at least, not yet – and headed off to her destiny. Fay gets an interesting introduction and we’re never entirely sure what the relationship between her and Avalon is, whether they’re related or simply sisters in the resistance. Certainly though, Fay looks up to Avalon in this first story, and is breathlessly eager to please and impress her leader. 

Much of the plot of Steve Lyons’ story is workaday Federation grimness, but in a way, that’s the point – away from the Liberator, there’s a lot of workaday Federation grimness - including here a feud between ex-con Krask (Nicholas Asbury playing a role that back in the Eighties would have pretty much belonged to Stephen Yardley or Michael Attwell by right), and Federation goon-with-attitude Gryson (played with toe-curling officiousness by William Ellis). It all serves the bigger point of Avalon’s return, her re-uniting with Fay, and her testing out of Jenna Stannis as a potential resistance fighter. It’s a useful place to start this reimagining of the Avalon backstory, and having a member of the Blake crew there to bolster the connection between Blake’s universe and Avalon’s is a clever idea that helps us get to grips with the parameters of this new series quickly. 

What’s a little odd about the second story in the set, Throwback, by Gary Russell, is that Avalon’s barely in it. 

Sure, she’s a prime mover of the story, but really, this is an origin story for a new member of Avalon’s crew, super-civilized dome-dweller, Argo Madison. 

Madison, played by Cliff Chapman, has quite a backstory – his parents should, according to all the social pressures in the Federation, have aborted him, but they refused. Madison grew up fussy, clever, always in need of the status quo – and with a prodigious memory. His work as a data clerk was both inevitable and also strangely necessary to him, setting his world in order. 

When Avalon and her crew come to blow up his corner of the records archive, it ruins a lot of his life. 

Being interrogated by a man named Travis doesn’t exactly brighten up his life either. But what that gives you is a tight mostly three-handed episode of torture and memories, as Travis (Stephen Greif) and Madison (Chapman) trade words, memories, and probing questions, with occasional input from Travis’ helper, Dag (Dawn Murphy). It’s soon apparent that Madison has an ulterior motive and a mission of his own, but which will be able to out-think the other – Travis or Madison? 

If you want a mood, think Clarice Starling meets Hannibal Lecter for the first time – if Starling were strapped to a pain-inducing lie detector, and Lecter were in control of the dials. It takes a fair amount of gumption to play a scene like that with an actor of Greif’s calibre and vocal quality, but to give him his due, Chapman more than holds his own, making the story a subtle battle of wills and words and making us invest in Madison’s future, despite the fact that as a character, he’s difficult to warm to – a fact not lost on his fellow resistance members as time goes on.

Not to set episodes against each other, but it’s quite possible Throwback takes the laurels of this set, simply for the intensity of the truth-or-torture setting, and pitting Greif and Chapman against each other produces something powerful, the kind of audio you can eat a hell of a lot of popcorn to. And probably a few fingernails too. 

Black Water, by Trevor Baxendale, rounds off the set with a story that sees Avalon and her team plan to disrupt the hydroponics centre that supplies a lot of Alpha grades. There’s some Star One energy here – what happens to the little people when you’re busy fighting the big empire? They suffer, they might even die, as collateral damage in your war against the State. And there’s a pleasing amount of command blindness on show in Avalon’s personality in this episode, bringing the ‘greater good’ argument to bear, while preparing to hurt a lot of the ‘little people’ – however Alpha grade they are. While it’s not the first time in the set that Olivia Poulet gets the chance to stamp her voice on the role, it’s probably the episode in which she gets to do the most interesting things – including a little double-crossing, and the exposure of a traitor in her midst. 

In something of a spoiler, we can tell you that that Madison is a strong presence in this story too, and a gloriously whingy one, having been whisked out of his safe life in the dome and forced to deal with sleepless nights, unfiltered water and protein derived directly from animals. Or meat, as we 20^th century barbarians would call it. 

More though, this story shows the first strike of Avalon’s new group against the mechanics of the Federation, and brings the connection between Avalon’s group and Blake’s friends on Earth to a conclusion, as Dev Tarrant is, not to put too fine a point on it, rumbled. But is he rumbled in time to save both the group and the plan, or will Tarrant bring another resistance group to its knees? 

It’s a close-run thing and there are casualties along the way, leading Avalon, at the end of this set, to head back out into space, having made a point there on Earth, to keep the resistance fighting in the heart of the Federation. 

Just as the first story-bloc of Blake’s 7 dealt with the corrupt Federation on Earth, and was extra-specially bleak as a result, so Avalon’s first box set focuses on keeping the resistance alive at home. There’s a cogency to the set as it moves from her return home to her bolstering a new team, and then, having attempted a major strike, having to run back to the stars. The first set leaves you with a sense of something completed, and looking forward to whatever’s coming next. Olivia Poulet gets to show some of the steel and some of the compassion in Avalon’s character, as well as how – at least at the beginning – she deals with the pressure of being a known ‘legend’ in the resistance. 

The universe of Blake’s 7 is expanding. Avalon is taking up the fight. And with the likes of Stephen Greif providing a bridge between this world and the world of Blake, and the likes of Cliff Chapman and Becky Wright supporting Olivia Poulet’s confident central figure, Avalon, Volume 1 is a great way to start opening up of the Federation’s universe. The resistance is back – and it sounds brilliant. 

Big Finish Reviews+ The First Doctor Adventures Vol. 5 by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s feeling ruff.

The First Doctor Adventures sets with the David Bradley cast have often followed a tried and trusted formula – one space or futuristic story, one Earth historical, more or less by way of capturing the spirit of those early black and white years before the historicals were largely phased out. 

It’s a combination that works well on audio, because it shows how the medium can deliver the drama, meeting both challenges with the same central cast. 

Volume 5 sticks with this winning combination, giving us For The Glory Of Urth, by Guy Adams – and no, that’s not a typo – and The Hollow Crown, by Sarah Grochala. One space, one history. Everybody clear? Good, let’s go adventuring. 

Doctor Who has almost always been a great platform for satire and allegory. By spinning events on our recognisable Earth off into a science-fiction setting, it’s been able to entertain and inform at the same time. It’s also been able to let writers a little off the leash and give their take on things. This sort of freedom is what brought us Terry Nation’s views on the idiocy of Nazi ideology, wrapped up in a personal tank and called a Dalek. It’s what gave us Kit Pedler’s fear of a lost humanity through organ replacement surgery, wrapped in bandages and called the Cybermen. It’s what gave us Robert Holmes’ scathing indictment on commercialism culture, the shop window dummies who fought back, known as the Autons. Holmes, again in a scathing mood, created the Sontarans as a satire on big-minded militarism. And let’s not forget what happens if you send Robert Holmes and excessively high tax demand – you end up being mercilessly parodied in the Sunmakers, that’s what.

If there’s a writer in the audio world of Big Finish who most precisely channels Holmes’ ‘better writing through satire’ abilities…it’s probably Guy Adams. There are other great comic writers in the Big Finish ‘stable,’ but no-one quite sticks the knife into modern life and makes it bleed pure science-fiction satire like Adams. 

Strap yourself in when you listen to For The Glory Of Urth – it’s almost too close to the bone of real life in the 21^st century bone, while simultaneously being a highly effective futuristic science fiction story. 

The Doctor and his friends materialise on Urth, where all that remains of the human race suffer a godawful life under the grinding rule of an arrogant upper class who make regular proclamations of love for the proles, while demanding they go without more food, work harder, or take the option of being destroyed, to – in almost as many words – decrease the surplus population, for the good of Urth. This is a society in which the upper crust is so singularly, pointlessly pleased with itself, it strives to maintain nothing less than species purity – there are regular scans for people with any alien DNA, and if it is found, they are immediately part of the underclass, or possibly just tortured and killed for their outsider nature. 

There is also a generic, uncomplicated, shamefully recognisable ‘fear of the alien,’ on the grounds that Urth is the last outpost of the ‘inherently superior’ human race, and that aliens want to come and destroy that precious, proud heritage, either directly by war, or through underhanded co-mingling. 

In a sense, Urth is an outpost of fascism for cretins, and pleasingly, both the Gallifreyans and the 1960s humans are revolted by what they find there. The story develops in ways that are simply sublime in the second half of the running time, but to tell you much about those developments would be very much a spoiler. Suffice it to say that the assumptions on which the first half of the story is based are perhaps not as sound as they’re made out to be, and when Guy Adams’ story blossoms and we get to meet some actual potential alien invaders, the parallels between the current world of Brexit Britain and the world of Urth and its tin-pot little ‘Feel sorry for me with my burden of command’ rulers become positively “chef’s kiss” perfect. 

Clive Wood as Daddy Dominus, the self-important, self-pitying is perfect in terms of being jussst far enough from observable reality to be a legitimate science fiction performance, and the double act of horrorshows that are Mummy Martial (Amanda Hurwitz), the chief strategist of Urth, and Sissy Cruciatu (Susie Emmett), its chief scientist and torturer (Err…yes, it’s that sort of a world) are the kind of venom-spitting odd couple that made some of Eric Saward’s sharpest stories zing. 

Be aware, the world of Urth is no fun. Spending too much time there would be nauseating in the extreme, like living in a UKIPtopia. But the writing and the performances that make Urth come alive are so sublime, you’ll go back for many a re-listen to this story. You won’t be able to stop yourself, it’s just that cathartic, like squeezing a really ripe spot. 

And speaking of “Out, damn spot!,” after what seems like a solution to all the early First Doctor’s navigational troubles, in The Hollow Crown, the Doctor manages to get Ian and Barbara back to Shoreditch. 

Just…under the rule of the wrong Elizabeth. 

Yes, we’re back in Elizabethan London here, in the company of William Shakespeare. There are delicate Doctor Who timelines not to disturb on both counts this far into New Who territory, especially as the First Doctor won’t be aware of any of them. 

Sarah Grochala’s story navigates these elements with a seeming ease, without at any point ducking them. Also, unlike celebrity historicals in the Tennant era, when those elements were set up, there’s no wink to ‘camera’ about these things here – they’re just presented as the standard perils of time travel, while the story itself digs deep and hooks you in. There are rogue plays, rabble rousers, cross-dressing red herrings, a friend of the queen and an ill-fated rebellion here, all of which the Tardis crew have to navigate. 

Add to that some really sparky crew dynamics, with Susan doing her best ‘sulky Earth teenager’ act in the company of a son history says Shakespeare doesn’t have. Barbara, meanwhile – relatively fresh from her experience with the Aztecs, and similar experiences in recent audio adventures too – is determined to stick her neck out and tell the rebels that they’re doomed. And for once, it’s Ian who’s equally determined to see exactly what might be changed about the history we think we know. It all makes for a heady, involving drama that zips by much faster than its run time will have you believe. 

Oh, also, it stars Wendy Craig as Elizabeth I, than which nothing better exists in this vale of rampant what-the-hellery. 

Bradley’s Tardis team has long settled into their roles, and with the always slightly unnerving fact that Claudia Grant sounds more like Susan when she’s just being Claudia Grant than when she’s acting as Susan understood, they’re a highly enjoyable team. It’s worth giving additional props to Jemma Powell as Barbara this time out too, especially in The Hollow Crown, where Barbara’s role is superbly well-written and realised. 

All in all, For The Glory Of Urth and The Hollow Crown are extremely different stories, with similarities in their underpinnings. They each make us look at some things we think we understand from a brand new angle, and they both do so while very firmly determined to tell a great story first and foremost. 

They succeed all along the way, which means the First Doctor Adventures, Volume 5 can stand proudly alongside its predecessor sets – which, given the quality of this range, is both never necessarily a given, and is really saying something. You have to work almost ridiculously hard to turn out stories this engaging while being true to both the spirit of early sixties Who, and to the spirit of enhances adventure that 21^st century audio allows. Everyone involved in the First Doctor Adventures, Volume 5 works that hard, and the result is a set that delivers on every level.