Big Finish - Invaders from Mars

Big Finish have permanently lowered the price of their first fifty Doctor Who titles to just £2.99 a download. So there are bargains to be had and I picked up Invaders from Mars, written and directed by Mark Gatiss.

This one has it all. The Eighth Doctor, Charley Pollard, Orson Welles and a cast that includes Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson from Spaced. The story of the Mercury Theatre's infamous radio production of the War of the Worlds is fascinating enough, but throw in some real alien invaders, espionage and gangsters and how can you not get this story for a mere £3.

It's just fabulous all round. Paul McGann continue to vie for the top spot in best Big Finish Doctors. I love the character of Charley Pollard, and David Benson does a pretty good Orson Welles impression. The inevitable separation of the Doctor and his companion works quite well, especially when he teams up with a woman called Glory Bee. Clearly Mark Gatiss loves the source material and all the legends that have developed about that radio broadcast.

I have difficulty finding any faults with this production which was over too quickly for me. A short review but a great Big Finish story. 4.5 out of 5 tripod war machines.

Big Finish - Brotherhood of the Daleks

A recent Big Finish sale gave me the chance to pick up another Sixth Doctor and Charley Pollard adventure. Brotherhood of the Daleks, by Alan Barnes, directed by Nicholas Briggs.

The Doctor and Charley are expecting an ice planet but instead find themselves in a jungle, and in a war zone. The local resistance are fighting a losing battle against the Daleks, but there is something very strange about these Daleks, and about the whole situation.

So yes I bought this one just because it was cheap, and because Nicholas Briggs picked it as one of his favourite Dalek stories, and I didn't pay too much attention to the writer until I listened to the CD extra interviews. Alan Barnes is a Big Finish writer whose previous stories I have struggled with. I like what he does as the script editor for the main Doctor Who range, and I have to admire him as a former editor of The Judge Dredd Megazine but his writing has bothered me in the past. The only one I really liked was his parody of 2000AD in Izzy's story from The Company of Friends, and apparently I'm pretty much alone in liking that tale. In this take on the Daleks Barnes references the Vietnam war and draws heavily on the writings of Karl Marx and develops a branch of the Dalek empire that has adopted the principles of Communism. And the funny thing is it all kind of works, I quite liked it.

Admittedly this adventure does play with the dream within a dream, within a dream idea which has cropped up before and can be quite difficult to disentangle for the listener. It is never easy to work out exactly which reality we are in at any one point, but that didn't bother me here. India Fisher works wonders as Charley Pollard and Colin Baker is on infuriatingly accurate form as the Sixth Doctor. The rest of the cast were fine with no particular stand-outs, although there were a few problems when they are required to use the ring modulator to produce Dalek voices. Unless it is Nicholas Briggs doing them they just sound like children playing with something bought from a toy shop.

This Big Finish release is back to full price now and with their recent announcement that all of their earliest fifty stories are going to be available for £2.99 only on download it is difficult to recommend picking this up instead of a cheaper adventure. However it has restored my faith in Alan Barnes. Let me give it 3.5 out of 5 Dalek manifestos and move on to some invaders from Mars.

Big Finish - Terror Firma

This was another pick-up from Big Finish Day, Terror Firma by Joseph Lidster, directed by Gary Russell.

The Eighth Doctor and Davros meet for another of their philosophical battles. Meanwhile his companions Charley, the reptilian humanoid from another dimension called C'Rizz, and two other humans Gemma and Samson, have to deal with the Daleks and an apparently conquered Earth where the survivors just want to have drinks parties and show no signs of any resistance. Desperate days on planet earth.

Davros is one of the best opponents for the Doctor. Their grim verbal confrontations work perfectly in an audio play. It's all very well using the theatre of the mind to summon up the image of a horde of deadly Daleks, but when you hear Paul McGann and the marvellous Terry Molloy do battle with their voices it's just splendid. There is a particular edge here as Davros believes he is dying and he may also have interfered with the Doctor's memories. So the playing field is not level, and all is not what it seems. Terrific stuff.

As ever I was less concerned about the fate of the companions. India Fisher does her usual marvellous job, I don't really have much experience with C'Rizz although he did turn up in another story I've reviewed, Memory Lane. The Daleks have marvellous Nicholas Briggs' voices but they don't do much. These are the all bark and no bite variety with lots of "Exterminates!" but no actual pressing the button. Unlike the much more menacing creatures we encountered in Dark Eyes or To the Death.

So McGann and Molloy get 5 stars but the rest is a bit dull although it is nice to hear Julia Deakin in there. There were one of two moments of dodgy sound quality but that might just be the discs I listened to. 3 out of 5 withered, claw like hands. Everything is a bit middle of the road at the moment. Can Sherlock Holmes or the Fifth Doctor ramp things up a bit?

Big Finish - The Condemned

From 2008 The Condemned by Eddie Robson, directed by Nicholas Briggs.

It's Charlie Pollard's first encounter with the Sixth Doctor. He doesn't know her yet and her answers to his questions are somewhat evasive. Meanwhile they have bigger problems when they land in a Manchester tower block right in the middle of a murder scene. Soon the Doctor is down at the police station helping Detective Inspector Menzies with her enquiries, and Charlie has been captured by less legal forces and is being held prisoner somewhere in the tower. Can she free herself and the mysterious Sam who speaks to her on the telephone?

Good stuff first. D.I. Menzies is a tough, no-nonsense police officer played with Mancunian relish by Anna Hope. She's not quite as enjoyable as she was in The Raincloud Man, possibly because she initially suspects the Doctor is the murderer, and it takes some time before they are working together. Colin Baker and India Fisher are both on strong form in this one and their suspicious and strained relationship is evident right from the start. The Doctor knows there is something strange about Ms Pollard but she's not telling.

The twin mysteries of the murder and the strange goings on in the rest of the tower block play out nicely, although the conclusion was perhaps a bit obvious even to me. There are, of course, aliens involved and I would have been quite happy without them. A straightforward police procedural murder mystery for the Doctor and Menzies to solve would have been fun. Instead we get another new alien race, another new technology that we haven't seen before, and a plot that is too familiar from too many Doctor Who stories.

Still the rest of the cast, direction and the cover and sound design are all fine. I wasn't convinced by the Doctor's escape method, or taken in for that matter, but I can probably let that one slip by. About on a par with The Raincloud Man so 3 out of 5 DNA patches from me. More Menzies would be nice.

Big Finish - The Girl who Never Was

From 2007 The Girl who Never Was by Alan Barnes, directed by Barnaby Edwards.

A ghost ship. A girl with no memory, adrift in time. An old enemy. This could be Charlotte Pollard's finest hour - or her last. Set course for Singapore, 1931. Journey's end.

This is the finale of Charlie Pollard's time with the Eighth Doctor and my habit of listening to Big Finish releases in completely the wrong order continues. In my defence I can say that I am a subscriber now I keep up with current story arcs, but I'm still sampling their back catalogue here and there. And this is the second Charlie end story I've listened to after Blue Forgotten Planet which finished her run with the Sixth Doctor. 

The script by Alan Barnes is much more solid than the last one of his stories I listened to. It has a nice eerie setting on a ghost ship that seems lost in time and may contain a great treasure or a terrible threat. The setting reminded me of a strange little horror film called Triangle which is worth checking out. I enjoyed the unstuck in time aspects of this drama and it helps to have an older version of Charlie played with such distinction by Anna Massey. There's quite a big cast for a Big Finish production here, and they are all very good. There is even another small role for Jake McGann.

Paul McGann continues to rival Peter Davison as my favourite Big Finish Doctor. I don't think this is my favourite Charlie Pollard story but India Fisher is as likeable as ever. And the whole thing is brought together nicely by Barnaby Edwards' direction.

The Girl who Never Was is a Cyberman story which is given away by the above cover image, and that's a problem. Big Finish are caught in a cleft stick here, they know that putting certain enemies on the cover will increase sales, but that will also upset fans who don't like spoilers. It is the same on television show, we all know which baddies are returning this season before the Doctor does, and I can't remember the last time the series surprised me in the way that something like Unit: Dominion did. Anyway when the Cybermen are finally revealed here at the end of episode two it shocks everyone apart from the listener. Sword of Orion had the same problem.

I enjoyed the story despite all that, and the final post credits scene was good fun. Pity about the cover though. 3 out of 5 ghost ships.

Big Finish - Chimes of Midnight

A recent Big Finish special offer got me Chimes at Midnight for £3! Released back in 2002 and written by Rob Shearman with direction by Barnaby Edwards.

The Eighth Doctor and Charley arrive in a mysterious house and soon find themselves caught up in a nightmarish variant of Upstairs Downstairs. Someone is murdering the servants and unless they can solve the mystery they may find themselves trapped in this house forever.

Steven Moffat picked this story as his favourite Eighth Doctor adventure in a recent Doctor Who magazine article and the description sounded just perfect for me. It's a spooky tale of murders and ghosts in a haunted house with a clock ticking away in the background. And it turns out to be a little gem of a story. The Doctor soon gets cast as the great amateur detective who will sort out what is going on, while Charley gets to do that empathising with the working class victims that Doctor Who companions have been so good at in recent years.

Like many other Big Finish productions it has a small cast but they are used perfectly by Barnaby Edwards and even though the script requires them to repeat certain phrases over and over again they managed to do it in such a way that never becomes tiresome. McGann and Fisher lead things with aplomb. I prefer Charley as an Eighth Doctor companion rather than a Sixth and I am delighted that she will be coming back in the Big Finish 50th anniversary release The Light at the End.

I would single out one other member of the cast but that might be too much of a spoiler, let me just say that the actor who is revealed as the baddie does a a marvellous job. As do the sound design crew who turn in a lovely haunted house full of creaks, groans and that ticking and chiming clock.

I thoroughly enjoyed this play, I do like a good haunted house story. My marking might have been a bit generous of late so let's give this 4 out of 5 Edwardian adventuresses and then head for a rendezvous at Spaceport Fear. In the meantime if you know of any other good spooky Big Finish stories please let me know.

Big Finish - Blue Forgotten Planet

From September 2009 comes the main range monthly release number 126 Blue Forgotten Planet, written and directed by Nicholas Briggs.

The Sixth Doctor and Charley Pollard arrive on Earth but all is, as ever, not well. A documentary film team may hold the solution to a terrible sickness that plagues the last humans, and the mysterious Viyrans are back with a deadly plan of their own. The Doctor will need all his wits about him to get through this, and what will be the final fate of Charley?

This is a bit like reviewing the final chapter of Great Expectations without having read the rest of the book first. The rather nifty companions search function at the Big Finish website tells me that there are 34 titles featuring Charley Pollard, and I have only listened to a handful of them. Which is a shame because I like the character and love India Fisher's feisty performances. And here is her last appearance and she bows out with grace and characteristic courage.

Whether this is a fitting adventure for her final Tardis journey is perhaps beyond my critical faculties. It is clearly the conclusion of something which has been building up for some time but it all left me feeling a bit puzzled. And I can't make up mind about the Viyrans who seem to switch between behind the scenes benevolence and direct menacing villainy. I know that they were created by a very young Nicholas Briggs and I'm a big fan of his, also it's good for Big Finish to have their very own monsters to add to the Doctor Who bestiary.

I suspect that this was a story that meant quite a lot to regular listeners at the time so I'm going to limit my comments and give it a middle of the road 3 out of 5 question marked collars.

Big Finish - Paper Cuts

I've got a lot of past Big Finish releases to catch up on. Here is Paper Cuts, written by Marc Platt and directed by Nicholas Briggs, all the way back from September 2009.

The Doctor and Charley answer a summons from his old friend the Draconian Emperor, but their timing may be a bit off as the Emperor is dead and the battle for succession is taking place on board a floating space tomb. The Sixth Doctor has to put aside the mystery of Charley's identity because an army of Origami paper warriors are hacking their way in.

I like the Draconians, a race of reptilian space warriors whose culture is based on Japanese samurai, and the idea of a folded paper army was quite fun. It works well as an audio drama but might be a bit hard to pull off on television. After the disappointment of the first instalment of the Key 2 Time series I was hoping for a more straight forward romp and this was not too bad. It mixed a political intrigue with a classic base in peril scenario to good effect, although the rapid jumps from one aspect of the story to the other was a little jarring at times.

The other thing that jarred a bit was Colin Baker's performance. This story asks a lot of his Doctor and some of his outbursts and exclamations seemed unusually forced. Normally he is very good indeed, maybe he was having an off day. Or maybe it is that the other actors are all a little flat as well. There was nothing terrible but it just didn't stand out for me.

A solid middle of the road 3 out of 5 Origami warriors for Paper Cuts.

Big Finish - Patient Zero

Digging through the Big Finish back catalogue brings me to Patient Zero from August 2009. Written and directed by Nicholas Briggs with yet more Daleks!

The Sixth Doctor and Charley Pollard arrive in the mysterious Amethyst Viral Containment station, and their timing is not great because the Daleks are on their way. On top of that the Tardis seems to have picked up a stowaway, and then there are the enigmatic Viyrans. It's quite a heady mix for the Doctor who is also trying to solve the riddle of Charley's true identity.

Listening to two Dalek stories in a row was tempting fate for a disappointment but this was actually very good. Trying to figure out what is going on with Charley suits the Sixth Doctor's somewhat abrasive demeanour. And while he is kept busy by the Daleks and Viyrans, and has to ensure that a host of deadly viruses are not released on an unsuspecting universe, his enquiring mind means that things are set up quite nicely by the end of this story. The mystery continues and I look forward to the next instalment.

I have temporarily run out of superlatives for Nick Briggs' performances as the Daleks. I presume he does the Viyran voices as well, and they are equally impressive. Colin Baker and India Fisher spark off each other nicely, and the cast is rounded out with enjoyable turns by Michael Maloney and Jess Robinson.

It seemed like a short story after the sprawling epics of Love and War and Dark Eyes but I enjoyed it. A shorter review and a score of 3.5 out of 5 viral nasties.

Big Finish - Minuet in Hell

Big Finish number 19 - Minuet in Hell by Alan W. Lear and Gary Russell, directed by Nicholas Briggs.

The last in the initial Eighth Doctor mini-series and it is another weird coincidence caused by the strange order I am listening to all my Big Finish because this shares some similarities with The Magic Mousetrap. Once again the traditional format is set aside and we are plunged straight into three separate story strands. Charley Pollard is having problems with her memory and finds herself as well let's say a hostess in an American version of the Hellfire Club. Meanwhile Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is on an undercover mission to investigate a rogue American politician and the strange machine he is using to launch his bid for the White House.

And the Doctor? Well he is an inmate in a secure psychiatric facility and is having even worse problems with his memory. And his cell-mate, a man called Gideon Crane, claims that he is really the Doctor and that somehow their personalities have been merged. Add in a female vampire hunter reminiscent of Buffy, plus a Demon who apparently has been summoned from Hell, and there is plenty to bring the story to a rolling boil.

So there is an awful lot going on here and it does take some time for all the strands to come together. There are two problems with this, firstly the Doctor isn't really himself for most of the story. And secondly we get an awful lot of American accents, and southern American accents at that. I go on about accents a lot on this blog but they bother me, and I say that in the full knowledge that I cannot do any different accents myself and my own limited attempts at radio acting were truly terrible. I know they are hard to do properly but if they are just slightly off then they stand out and take me out of the story. The script doesn't help as there is an awful lot of mumbo-jumbo psycho-babble going on.

The main leads' performances are all fine but it is a shame that Nicholas Courtney has to spend so much time narrating the emails he is sending back to base, which is a slightly clumsy trick the writers use to explain what is going on. On the other hand the confusion between the Doctor and Gideon Crane works better in audio drama than it would on television where the visual appearance of the actors would give things away (unless there has been some mind-swap device set up in advance). And it allows Nicholas Briggs to play the Doctor which is rather lovely.

Sword of Orion remains my favourite from the original Eighth and Charley series.
Minuet in Hell gets 3 out of 5 psionic interfaces. Next up will be some Gods and Monsters.

Big Finish - The Raincloud Man

Big Finish 116 - The Raincloud Man by Eddie Robson, directed by Nicholas Briggs.

This is a sort of sequel to an earlier story The Condemned which I have not yet heard. The Doctor and Charley return to Manchester and help the no nonsense D.I. Menzies solve a series of baffling murders. While the mysteries pile up the Doctor is obsessed by a pound coin that seems to have travelled back in time from 2012 to 2005.

If I can't have a ghost story then a good murder mystery will do nicely. And this has a splendid performance by Anna Ford as the tough police detective who, through her previous contact with the Doctor, has become used to cases with a certain degree of alien involvement. In fact I enjoyed her and Charley as an unlikely detective duo so much that I could have done with more of their investigations of the strange string of events that follow the unfortunate Raincloud man around. The other stuff about a floating casino ship and some warring aliens was rather less interesting but was probably necessary to drive the story on, and keep to the four act structure.

The mystery of Charley's timeline and the Doctor's memory deepens, and hopefully will be explained in the other dramas I have queued up on my iPod. 3 out of 5 time travelling coins for this one and on to The Magic Mousetrap.

Big Finish - The Stones of Venice

Back in time again to release 18 from March 2001, The Stones of Venice by Paul Magrs, directed by Gary Russell.

Charley Pollard joined the Eighth Doctor because she wanted travel and adventure, so it seems appropriate for the Doctor to take her to Venice. However this is a future Venice that is on the point of sinking beneath the waves for ever. Meanwhile party-goers celebrate the last days, a religious cult search for their most precious icon, and a mournful Duke waits and hopes for his lost love to rise from the dead. Of course the Doctor and Charley are soon up to their necks and while the Doctor investigates some strange artwork is it possible that Charley may somehow be the actual reincarnation of the long dead Lady Estella?

Unfortunately after the high points of Sword of Orion this story is all over the place. Only the Doctor and Charley seem to be speaking sense, and in Charley's case that is only when she hasn't been drugged. The rest of the cast spout portentous nonsense with perfectly annunciated received pronunciation. It sounds like a bad village hall Shakespeare production. Not even the talents of Michael Sheard, Barnaby Edwards and Mark Gatiss can save it. There is a fair bit of running backwards and forwards and the good old capture - escape- recapture game that was so beloved of Doctor Who writers on television.

I just didn't care for it. It never captured my imagination and has to go down as a bit of a dud really. 2 out of 5 Venetian masks. What I need is either a really good ghost story, or some Daleks. Any suggestions?

Let us see how I get on with The Raincloud Man.

Big Finish - Return of the Krotons

A bonus release from December 2009 - Return of the Krotons, written and directed by Nicholas Briggs.

The Sixth Doctor and Charley Pollard find themselves on a planet that is being mined by a group of survivors from a generational colony ship. But there is something very strange about the crystalline material they are digging out of the rocks, and deep in the mines something is reawakening.

One of the great advantages of audio drama is that it gives the writers a much broader canvas than the original television series ever had. And it means that monsters that seemed a bit silly on the small screen can be reinvented to sinister effect. So the original Krotons that went up against Patrick Troughton's second Doctor become much more menacing monsters for Colin Baker and India Fisher. It is neatly handled by Nicholas Briggs whose love of the original series shines through this script while he updates the threat level for a modern audience.

This is the first adventure I have listened to that pairs Charley Pollard with the Sixth Doctor and it is slightly confusing. As far as I know Charley first met the Doctor in his eighth incarnation on board the R101 in Storm Warning. So how the Sixth can be travelling with her and then not remember meeting her in 1930 raises some continuity problems which, I have no doubt, are explained somewhere else. But as I have hinted at before I don't get too hung up about this. The timeline of Doctor Who stories in the Big Finish universe is so long and convoluted that I am quite happy to ignore continuity glitches as long as the stories are good. And this one is pretty good.

Baker and Fisher are as good as ever and there are two other star performances to mention. Philip Madoc had a long and illustrious association with Doctor Who and this was his last role with Big Finish before his death earlier this year. He had a fantastic voice for a villain and it was great to listen to him here, and to hear him being interviewed by David Richardson in the CD extras. And as the voice of the Krotons themselves Nicholas Briggs manages to make the slightly silly mechanical voices from the 1960s sound suitably creepy.

An entertaining short story from Big Finish that gets 3.5 out of 5 Kroton teaching machines. Next I follow Charley back (or forwards?) to the Eighth Doctor in The Stones of Venice.

Big Finish - Storm Warning

Big Finish release number 16 from January 2001, Storm Warning. Written by Alan Barnes and directed by Gary Russell.

It is October 1930 and the Eighth Doctor finds himself on board the airship R101 where he meets the young adventuress Charley Pollard. There is a mysterious passenger in a locked cabin, a storm is coming, and the Doctor knows that the R101 has a terrible date with destiny.

This was the first time Paul McGann returned to the role of the Doctor since the 1996 TV movie, and he instantly slips straight back in to the part with no difficulty. Obviously McGann has the advantage over the other actors in that he had the shortest gap between his television appearance and his Big Finish audios. So his voice has changed the least, but McGann may be the most natural sounding of the actors and is completely convincing as the mysterious traveller in space and time. He is ably backed up by India Fisher in the first of her several appearances as his new companion Charley. There was another performance that stood out for me but for a while I could not place the voice until I realised that the actor playing Lord Tamworth was Gareth "Blake's 7" Thomas.

The story itself is a tricky one and I was perhaps spoiled a bit by having recently listened to Cryptobiosis which has a similar set up although it was written much later. In both adventures the Doctor is on a ship which is heading into a storm and cannot escape because his Tardis has been, inconveniently, lost over board. Both have mysterious passengers in locked rooms who require special equipment to keep them alive, and again the two stories involve the Doctor negotiating a settlement with some form of alien race. It may be a little hard on the writers but I would quite like a story which doesn't involve a meeting with a new set of aliens. There are plenty of existing creations in the Whoniverse that could be used. Likewise I am getting a little bored with writers creating new forms of radiation or particles for the Doctor to encounter but that is an argument for another time.

I also had a few problems with anachronistic language in this episode. In particular I am not sure that an Edwardian adventuress who was travelling to Singapore for an assignment with a young man would refer to it as "a date", but that is just minor quibbling on my part. At least the inevitable destruction of the R101 with the tragic loss of everyone on board provides an acceptable explanation for why the alien contact does not have lasting repercussions for the British empire. It was also nice to hear the Doctor quip about Mary Shelley knowing that she will later turn up briefly as a companion.

A slightly variable story but a great reintroduction of the Eighth Doctor, and a promising start for Charley. 3.5 out of 5 Vortisaurs. Now back to Ace and Hex and the problem of the two Tardises.

Big Finish - Neverland

This is Big Finish release number 33: Neverland starring Paul McGann as the eight doctor and India Fisher as Charley Pollard, written by Alan Barnes and directed by Gary Russell.

I've jumped back to a much earlier release in the Big Finish line because this story sets the scene for the huge adventure of Zagreus that marked the 50th release for Big Finish. I picked up Zagreus and some other stories in a cheap eBay package but more of that another time.

I'm really enjoying Paul McGann's Doctor in these audio dramas. He is an excellent actor who seems to understand perfectly what is required in a radio play. He is on fine form again here in an adventure that takes him back to Gallifrey and to dark events from the history of the Time Lords. Lalla Ward reprises her role as Romana and Don Warrington turns up in an important role.

There's a mystery that can only the Doctor and the Tardis can solve and it may relate to a mysterious figure from a nursery rhyme known only as Zagreus. Can this character from fiction and fable actually exist? And how is the Doctor's companion Charley Pollard mixed up in all of this? She goes from being a peripheral observer to becoming the central figure in a maelstrom that may affect time and space forever. I was reminded of Rose Walker in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics who finds herself as the unwitting nexus of a huge disaster.

All in all this was another great Doctor Who audio adventure with all the actors giving good performances. I'm going to give this 4 out 5 R101 airships. Next up is the madness of Zagreus with, by my reckoning, five Doctors and at least twelve of his companions.