This review is based on the MP3 download from Big Finish, and contains spoilers.

This three-part story features David Warner as Cuthbert, celebrity businessman and head of the Conglomerate. Aiming for total brand domination, Cuthbert seems to have Earth’s government pretty much in his pocket. And the character has his roots in Big Finish’s forerunner, the fan-produced Audio Visuals series, first appearing in The Destructor Contract. I have to say that despite Warner’s star turn, Cuthbert strikes me as a rather generic, unremarkable villain here. In fact, several elements of this story feel slightly predictable: it lacks the sharp structure and playful vitality of last month’s The Auntie Matter. At times, Cuthbert comes across as a cipher representing evil enterprise and General Vincent is likewise a rather standard version of the trigger-happy military figure. Hayley Atwell plays newly elected President Sheridan Moorkurk, but doesn’t have much to do in this story, while Cuthbert’s assistant Mr. Dorrick is well performed by Toby Hadoke. Like President Moorkurk, I assume this character will have a larger part to play in future.

There are some lovely dialogue and performance moments from both Tom Baker and Mary Tamm. The Doctor’s observation that “a telepathic sea-cow travelling in the time vortex, that’s unusual” is worth the cost of admission all on its own. And Romana’s acerbic aside, whilst being dragged to her doom, that she’s thinking about how to escape “among other things” is another witty little detail. Does she really need the Doctor to explain how to avoid this sandy fate, though? Her character, very much an independent force in last month’s adventure, occasionally regresses to companion-in-peril this time around.

The fourth Doctor and Romana are reunited with K9, yet the poor robot mutt is promptly left behind in the TARDIS because sand and heat will mess with his “bits”. It’s a gesture perhaps aimed at giving this audio production an authentic TV feel: after all, if they’d been filming in sandy terrain then obviously K9 would have been written out. But there’s no reason for it here, other than perhaps to raise the level of jeopardy that the Doctor and Romana face, and to sideline K9's Wikipedia-style info-dumping for a while.

‘The Sands of Life’ is self-consciously epic. Romana receives a mysterious telepathic message (you know it has to be significant, because it’s also the story title) and billions of alien Laan rapidly loom on the horizon. Threatening the Earth with such huge numbers plays to the strengths of an audio adventure, for sure, but it also raises the spectre of a Great Big Reset Button – perhaps this’ll be something to do with Cuthbert’s vague time-space experiments, or it’ll involve some capacity or other belonging to the TARDIS.

By far the most compelling thing about Nick Briggs’ script is that he ultimately avoids a standard Earth invasion story, despite so many of its trappings being present and correct. As we eventually learn, there’s something far more interesting going on, with the Doctor and Romana facing a genuinely difficult moral dilemma. Mind you, the Laan’s reason for arriving in the Sahara isn’t that difficult to guess after all the Doctor’s musings, and I think this might have worked better as a shock twist or ‘reveal’ rather than as something fairly clearly signposted.

Another incidental, fanboy pleasure is that The Sands of Life has some fun with continuity and audio clips as “time phasing” messes with the Doctor’s timeline. Some famous Genesis of the Daleks dialogue gets an outing, again implying that this may well be building to a devastating moral conundrum. Does the Doctor have the right? We’ll presumably find out across this “mini” arc of linked Nick Briggs’ stories. Continuity also gets in the way sometimes, though – a line about the randomiser being disrupted so that the TARDIS can be accurately piloted is clunky in the extreme. Yes, I know it solves a fan nitpick and allows the story to proceed, but it sticks out for precisely those reasons. “Ah”, the listener ends up thinking, “you’ve dodged a fan grumble there, well done.” Had Briggs again wanted to aim for TV-style authenticity he probably could’ve just ignored the randomiser and been done with it, but either his ‘inner fan’ couldn’t bear to knowingly introduce a continuity error, or the Big Finish Script Editor hates getting complaints.

It’s intriguing to have a major element from the Audio Visuals brought into the Big Finish universe, and although David Warner is always a pleasure to listen to, Cuthbert doesn’t yet seem an especially interesting character. Corporations are bad and powerful and corrupt… OK, but aren’t there less well-trodden paths for this sort of material? I hope that alongside its epic feel, later installments in the story arc will allow for greater characterization and greater divergence from default Who. The Sands of Life sometimes feels too smoothly engineered: a little more grit in the story-telling machinery wouldn’t have gone amiss.

This review is based on the MP3 download from Big Finish, and contains minor spoilers.

Chronologically speaking (the UNIT dating controversy aside) the majority of the Doctor’s companions from the television program’s classic era have a fairly straightforward relationship with the Time Lord. Dodo, Jamie, Sarah Jane – they all meet the Doctor, travel in the TARDIS for a limited time, and eventually depart. Not so Miss Melanie Bush, a computer programmer from the West Sussex village of Pease Pottage, who travels with the Doctor before she meets him – at least from his perspective.

When the Sixth Doctor first encounters Mel during The Trial of a Time Lord, she has been plucked from his future, during an adventure on the planet Oxyveguramosa – a future in which she has already been his companion for approximately three months (as detailed in Pip and Jane Baker’s Target novelisations, Terror of the Vervoids and The Ultimate Foe). Thereafter, once the trial has ended, the two depart together, despite the fact that their first proper meeting hasn’t actually happened yet. What happens next in the Sixth Doctor and Mel’s temporally complex relationship forms the basis of this new Big Finish adventure (and directly contradicts the ending of the Bakers’ The Ultimate Foe novelisation, which may frustrate some purists).

The Plot:

Travelling alone, having recently bidden farewell to his former companion, Evelyn Smythe, the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) decides it’s finally time to meet Mel (Bonnie Langford) for the first time. Unfortunately, the TARDIS materialises in Pease Pottage on the same day that the Doctor’s brasher younger self is dropping Mel home after the events of The Trial of a Time Lord – despite her protestations that he should be taking her back to the planet Oxyveguramosa.

In addition to the dangers of crossing his own time stream, the Doctor – or rather, Doctors – soon discover that all is not well in Pease Pottage. Former village postmistress Mrs Muriel Wilberforce (Patricia Leventon) appears remarkably spry for a woman who supposedly died in 1964; dinosaurs roam the streets, as do a gang of violent young ruffians clad in ragged Victorian costumes and led by one Jedediah Thurwell (James Joyce); and the younger version of Mel the two Doctors discover working at the Pease Pottage radar station seems distinctly not herself...

Observations:

Written by Matt Fitton and directed by Nicholas Briggs, The Wrong Doctors has the difficult job of filling in a missing piece of a story never told on television, while also trying to avoid any major conflict with alternative iterations of Mel’s story as told in other media (in particular, Gary Russell’s BBC Past Doctor Adventure, Business Unusual, in which Mel’s first encounter with the Sixth Doctor takes place in Brighton in 1989). From this perspective it’s a success; unfortunately as a stand-alone audio adventure, it doesn’t completely satisfy.

The story begins well; its tone is light, almost playful, and characters are swiftly and easily introduced, though unfortunately Fitton fails to develop them well – all are predominantly two-dimensional, more caricatures than well-rounded characters in their own right, save for the lead roles of Mel and the two Doctors, on whose dialogue Fitton seems to have focussed most of his energies, resulting in successful and well defined evocations of the characters at different points in their own timelines.

Performances from Joyce and Leventon as Mrs Wilberforce and Jeb are strong despite the characters’ flaws; less impressive are Beth Chalmers as Facilitator Vaneesh and John Banks as Captain Ksllak, two members of an economically aggressive alien race, the Mardaks, described by the Doctor as "an entire species dedicated to one of the most despicable occupations in the entire universe".

"Robbers? Arms dealers? Pirates?" Mel asks.

"No," the Doctor replies. "Business consultants!"

Joyce and Leventon struggle to convincingly portray the faux-American accents demanded of their characters; nor is Fitton’s satire of modern business-speak particularly compelling. With the Mardaks’ talk of ‘probjectives’ and ‘incentivisation’, there’s a sense that the writer is attempting a satire of the contemporary business world akin to Robert Holmes’ spin on the British tax system in The Sun Makers; unfortunately Fitton lacks Holmes’ wit and skill, resulting in blunt, unsatisfying dialogue and thinly written characters.

Nor is the villain of the piece especially memorable. As Stapleton Petherbridge, Tony Gardner does his best with the over the top dialogue he is given, but some of his line readings are particularly melodramatic, a fault which could have been muted by stronger direction. The revelation of Stapleton’s true nature is frankly silly, though the script nonetheless scores well on the continuity front at this point thanks to its references to "vortisaurs, chronovores, pantophagens; the creeping, swarming things of the vortex". Awkward dialogue aside, references like this are still bound to bring a smile to most fans’ faces.

Despite these flaws, The Wrong Doctors still entertains thanks to its central conceit of two Sixth Doctors and two Mels featuring in the same story. Baker is in magnificent form, clearly delighting in playing two versions of himself, and in her long awaited return to Big Finish, Langford charms. Her subtle differentiation between an older, wider Mel and the ditzy younger version is impressive, and the chemistry between her and Baker is immediate and obvious.

Conclusion:

This tale of cauterised time and pocket universes, temporal anomalies and characters meeting themselves starts strongly but ends poorly. A lacklustre villain, poorly developed characters, and a muddled and over-wrought climax detract from what could have been an engaging and memorable addition to the Big Finish range; nonetheless the adventure entertains thanks primarily to the verbal dexterity and charisma of its star performers and the well-written banter between them – and between different versions of themselves.

This review is based on the MP3 download from Big Finish, and contains spoilers.

From the point of view of early Doctor Who's production history, Spain in the 1580s was what London in 1963 was to the TARDIS travellers in its first two seasons: attempts were made at several points to programme this destination into the schedule, but the TARDIS stubbornly failed to materialise there. Shortly before he left the position of story editor in 1964, David Whitaker had envisaged that he would write a story for the 1964/65 run set in Spain after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, departing the staff with BBC library books on the subject under his arm. He renewed this proposal early in 1966, only to be rebuffed by Gerry Davis. Nothing is known about the storyline, though several years ago Daniel O'Mahony made a commendable reconstruction for the website of the fanzine Circus based on Whitaker's known interests and story structuring, now sadly lost to the internet.

The Flames of Cadiz is haunted by Whitaker's idea, but if anything it is a prequel to it. Whitaker intended to set the Doctor down in a Spain troubled by the failure of the Armada, but Marc Platt places the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan in a Spain preparing for the maritime assault on protestant England. Not only does this mean that a huge fleet is being assembled off Cadiz, but Spain itself is undergoing religious purification as government, church and mob turn on the descendants of Muslim converts to Christianity. The last Islamic state in Spain, the emirate of Granada, was conquered in 1492 by the husband and wife 'Catholic monarchs' Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage brought together the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile and thus the larger part of the Iberian peninsula. Their conquest of Granada was first accompanied by a promise of religious liberty for Muslims, but this was soon withdrawn and Muslims - and Jews - compelled either to become Roman Catholics or leave. The descendants of those who converted, known as moriscos (meaning 'moorish', pertaining to a North African, especially a Muslim) were frequently suspected of practising Islam in secret and persecuted.

The theme of discrimination and violent oppression against one or more minorities was very much live in the 1960s Britain from which Ian and Barbara and from which this Companion Chronicle samples its Doctor Who. Inevitably with a production made nearly half a century later, the concept has undergone a remix. This isn't to the advantage of The Flames of Cadiz. Platt seems to interpret the persecution of the moriscos as a direct parallel to oppression of the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain or of African-Americans in the United States. Esteban is specifically described as dark-skinned in a manner which contrasts him with the surrounding population of southern Spain. The burning of his home is reminiscent of arson attacks on African-American homes in the southern United States before and during the Civil Rights campaign. It could be taken for a neat parallel, were it not misleading. The moriscos were not immigrants, but had similar ancestry to their Christian neighbours. Just as the king of Spain could justify his invasion of England on the grounds that he was bringing the country back to the true faith - Roman Catholicism - at the request of a persecuted Catholic minority, so he feared that the moriscos would assist an invasion of Spain by the leading power in the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire. There is a dramatic irony here missed, unless Ian's farewell to Esteban, “Go home to Morocco,” is intended as an echo of white British calls for the 'repatriation' of their non-white neighbours.

There's some entertainment from spotting the allusions to broadcast Doctor Who historicals. There are plot beats borrowed from The Reign of Terror and The Crusade, and the central conceit expands upon the famous “You can not change history! Not one line!” from The Aztecs, as well as underline the fallibility of the first Doctor. Problematically, though, this never gets beyond feeling like a pastiche, and while this isn't in itself a bad thing, as much of Doctor Who is pastiche, The Flames of Cadiz isn't particularly successful pastiche. If Doctor Who's strengths have included genre pastiche as commentary, then this fails on that account partly for the aforementioned misunderstanding of the historical context of the story. It plays with school history and national mythology, in the latter case to a greater degree than its 1960s inspirations, and its portrayal of Sir Francis Drake is predictably unheroic. The cross-dressing propagandist Don Miguel, who is also an agent buying provisions for the Spanish Armada, is revealed through hints of decreasing subtlety to be perhaps the greatest figure in Spanish literature. The tilting at windmills line is surely calculated to inspire a groan.

It's good to hear William Russell and Carole Ann Ford again, of course, and there are doubtless fans wondering when this reminiscence by Ian and Susan takes place. Is there a metafictional Time Lord researcher compiling interviews with the Doctor's companions, one wonders? The appropriation of aspects of William Russell's background for Ian doesn't convince, however, and it's unclear what the story seeks by its adoption of Ian's “I take things as they come” line from An Unearthly Child as a motif, beyond the confounding of the prejudices of both Ian and the Doctor. Nabil Elhouahabi as the morisco Esteban has little to do with a misconceived role.

Given the track record of those involved, especially Marc Platt whose Spare Parts remains one of the highlights of the Big Finish range, I feel I might have missed something about this story. The Flames of Cadiz fails to engross, but that's as much a flaw of the semi-dramatised format as anything particular to the story itself. There is much to-ing and fro-ing with little development. It's not surprising that Big Finish are retiring the Companion Chronicles format, as this blend of retelling and dramatised extract feels too much like an abridged soundtrack album, and the story is too long for this model.

Reviewing a twenty-first century reading of a twentieth-century novelization of a Doctor Who television serial set in the nineteenth century can be a reminder that perspective, as it travels through time, can become as distorted as Magnus Greel was by his precious zygma beam. When both television and book forms of The Talons of Weng-Chiang appeared in 1977, popular culture’s Victoriana was shaped by different currents of memory, nostalgia and imagination to those we know today. Most obviously, the story’s music-hall setting would have been familiar to many television viewers. The Good Old Days, where Leonard Sachs hosted an hour of music hall featuring contemporary entertainers in late Victorian or Edwardian dress, was a recurring part of the BBC schedule as it had been since 1953. Drama series set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were fashionable, Upstairs Downstairs having been followed on ITV by sagas of the great such as Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill and Edward the Seventh, with Lillie and Disraeli still to come. Television closer to Doctor Who’s viewing time included several series set in the same period, including the turn-of-the-century The Phoenix and the Carpet and the Sunday afternoon Dickens adaptation Nicholas Nickleby.

All these programmes were fed by the fact that in the 1970s the end of the Victorian period was just within or just outside living memory. Pennies and ha’pennies of Queen Victoria weren’t difficult to find in my (post-Victorian) grandparents’ house. Britain had spent most of the twentieth century trying to live up to an imperial myth largely manufactured in the late nineteenth century, of an empire where the sun never set and where British arms and British ships, military and merchant, dominated the globe. Just over thirty years before, Britain had fought, it thought, to defend that empire; by 1977 that empire was gone and with it economic self-assurance and a secure sense of national identity. However, historical dramas set in the Victorian period didn’t just compensate for national bewilderment; they were a reminder of a society from which mid-twentieth century Britain had escaped, one of poverty and disease and rigid conventions governing relations among classes, genders and ethnic groups. At the same time, the culture of British industry still owed much in the 1970s to the Victorian age; it was one where trade unions pointed both to the craft skills of their nineteenth-century predecessors and to the battles won by them for fair wages and working hours, and where managing directors still based their businesses on heavy machinery which had not changed greatly in eighty years. While for Doctor Who’s child audience, its eyes fixed on the twenty-first century, the 1890s of The Talons of Weng-Chiang might seem like ancient history, for many of the adults watching the 1890s might not have felt a long time distant.

This sense of time displacement is relevant to consideration of the book and the audio. One of the first things Christopher Benjamin’s vinicultured voice brings out is how careful Terrance Dicks was to explain the nuances of the story’s setting to his target audience of children reading Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang by themselves. With the visual element removed, the written and spoken word both rely on Dicks’s depiction of the social hierarchy of the music hall audience for initial contextualisation. This opens the first chapter and introduces music hall as something which appeals to all classes in the 1890s, but which does not unite them: ‘toffs’, ‘bank clerks and shop assistants’, ‘Labourers, dock workers, soldiers and sailors, even some of the half-starved unemployed’ are all present but all in places assigned by their spending power. The effect is more raw than that conveyed by the well-groomed audience seen on television at the Royal Theatre, Northampton. It also conveys something of the gap between the welfare state of a 1970s Britain which thought itself egalitarian and an 1890s London which had no social safety net and where class distinctions were dominant in a way easily comprehensible to the child readership.

Terrance Dicks’s attention to replacing lost visual and aural cues with new written detail friendly to an intelligent young audience also applied to characters. Listeners to Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang will hear Christopher Benjamin relate Dicks’s outline of Litefoot’s background as the rebel member of a family with aristocratic connections, and his resigned tones as the elderly waterman spitting his way through life, baffled at the expedition undertaken by the Doctor and Litefoot complete with giant fowling pistol. Dicks’s invention of Teresa’s occupation as ‘a waitress in a gambling club, in Mayfair on the other side of London’ compensates for the loss of Teresa’s costume and make-up, which some viewers have understood as representing a profession unsuitable for children’s literature. Christopher Benjamin’s falsetto Teresa is a brave attempt at youthful feminine joie-de-vivre, but his real strength is the matter-of-fact relation of events which he steadily leavens with urgency and horror as Chang presents his victims to a suitably maniacal Greel.

As 1977 has receded into the past, so John Bennett’s appearance as Li H’sen Chang, a white European actor under pseudo-oriental prosthetics, has caused more and more pained expressions among admirers of the story. Terrance Dicks, in an allusion to the cultural baggage Bennett’s casting and make-up carried with it, contrasted Chang with ‘most Oriental magicians who were usually English enough once the make-up was off’. Chang’s name recalls that of Chung Ling Soo, really the American-born William Ellsworth Robinson, killed when a trick went awry at the Wood Green Empire in north London in 1918. It’s possible that Robert Holmes’s choice of name for his Chinese magician was based on the expectation that an actor of western appearance would play Chang under make-up. Bennett’s casting in this vein drew attention to the artifice of Doctor Who and its reliance on a showbusiness tradition of deception, as well as an exoticism which portrayed the Chinese as unquestionably ‘the Other’. Dicks’s reference in the text acted as a historical note and placemarker for a visual gag at the expense of both conventions which could not be reproduced on the page. However, the fiction of Sax Rohmer, whose Fu Manchu is based on the assumption that world affairs were a competition between easily-defined ‘races’, would still have been current in the childhood of many parents and grandparents watching. The film series starring Christopher Lee was a very recent memory.

Chang’s character is based as much on an understanding of the audience at home as white British as it is upon Chang’s manipulation of the prejudices of the white community. Chang is used, of course, to emphasise the Doctor’s own Otherness – ‘Are you Chinese?’ reminds the hypothetical white British viewer and listener that the Doctor does not share their prejudices. A twenty-first century restaging might seek to reinterpret Chang for a more broadly-conceived audience, but this is not an option here. Christopher Benjamin reads the speeches of Li H’sen Chang in a stage Chinese which suits the status quo, but Chang is now doubly a recreation of past attitudes, steeped in an irony which has lost some power since the 1970s. Nevertheless Benjamin recognises that for all his crimes, Chang is a person to be treated with some sympathy, and his reading of his final scene has the distance of someone dulling with opium the torment of moral self-realisation as well as his physical agony.

Admirers of Leela might feel disappointed by this audiobook. In Benjamin’s reading, Leela is more of a simpleton than she appeared on television, lacking the self-assurance Louise Jameson brought to the role. Dialogue of which Louise Jameson made the most – such as ‘You ask me so that you can tell me’ – is flattened and made more submissive than Jameson performed it on television. Benjamin, though, adequately represents Terrance Dicks’s interpretation of Leela as a childlike innocent in thrall to the Doctor’s genius, whose bravado often exceeds her bravery, difficult though that position is to reconcile with many of Leela’s actions in this story.

Christopher Benjamin’s Doctor is difficult to pin down, not least because he doesn’t seem to have a fixed interpretation. For long periods his intonation is reminiscent of Tom Baker’s deep ringing tones, without capturing them, and at other times there is a mercurial self-satisfied air reminiscent of the Doctor with which Benjamin has worked most recently, Colin Baker. (Admirers of the Jago and Litefoot double act might find that Benjamin’s Litefoot is reminiscent of Trevor Baxter.) However, there is occasionally a glimpse of another Doctor, a gruff and amiable Time Lord who casts a sometimes sternly avuncular gaze over proceedings. The portrayal of the Doctor in a performed reading of a novelisation encourages expectations in a reader and while Benjamin is always authoritative there are too many different voices there to feel one is listening to a consistent portrayal; or perhaps the legacy of Tom Baker looms too large.

Benjamin’s voice is good at conveying the self-consciously heightened sense of danger in Dicks’s economical prose. Much of The Talons of Weng-Chiang depends upon the unknown lying beneath the familiar; so there is trepidation as manhole covers are removed and a deliberate, heavy wariness as characters wade through the filthy, rat-infested sewers. Benjamin and Dicks tell of a London dark and treacherous in its diversity, which it takes the universalist outsider, the Doctor, to navigate appropriately. There are some cautious notes - there seems to be care, for example, not to make ethnic epithets as emotively-charged as they might have been performed on screen in 1977.

There are some memorable moments of sound engineering in this audiobook. The echo placed over Christopher Benjamin’s voice in the pathology lab scenes almost dispel associations with the cramped tiled room and its anachronistic electric sockets covered by even more anachronistic adhesive plastic in the television production. The giant rats are relieved of the burdensome necessity of appearing in the fabric-and-stuffing, and can rely on piercing shrieks alone to instil terror into the heart of the listener. There are not quite as many porcine grunts from Mr Sin as I expected, but care has to be taken not to undermine the reader’s performance. Instead, one can sometimes imagine Christopher Benjamin moving from pathology lab to the night streets of Limehouse, climbing down into Greel’s hidden chamber as a silent companion opens the hatch for him, or hauling himself up in the dumb waiter in an attempt to escape from Greel’s clutches. Despite the reservations above, it’s an admirable reading, with Benjamin moderating his Henry Gordon Jago so as not to overwhelm his narrator’s voice, but not obliterating it; the way he uses his delivery to highlight the differences of class and education between Jago and Litefoot when they meet is a particularly skilled performance.

A release of a science fiction or fantasy story set in Victorian London in 2013 raises a question of genre unknown in 1977. Can Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang be described as steampunk? If steampunk depends on a situation where ‘anachronism is not anomalous but becomes the norm’, as Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall wrote in their introduction to volume 3, part 1 of the journal Neo-Victorian Studies (available free at www.neovictorianstudies.com), then novelisation and audiobook perhaps score less highly than the broadcast version. Terrance Dicks describes Greel’s organic distillation equipment simply as ‘ultra-modern’, which isn’t adequate to the baroque eclecticism of the machinery seen on television. Mr Sin and the Eye of the Dragon fuse the futuristic with cultural signifiers of the ‘old’ in book form as well as on television, though the audiobook’s blaster sound effects probably reinforce the high-tech connotations at the expense of the image of the gold dragon from which the blaster is fired. Even as a digital download in 2013, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang remains the product of a mechanical age when the dissonance between inexplicable futuristic technology and Victorian machinery was more powerful than the imagining of impossibly world-transforming engines; its lacquered Time Cabinet is a gateway for a generic reading which from the book’s own point of view in 1977 has yet to emerge from it.

Whatever the problems it inherits from its source, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang remains a hugely entertaining story and there is much to discover in Christopher Benjamin’s reading. Linger over descriptive passages and muse on how Magnus Greel’s ramblings about time agents and the Doctor’s counter-revelations about the battle of Reykjavik came to influence the programme’s mythology. Hear how both the Doctor and Leela confound the Holmes-Dicks pastiche of late Victorian manners which for all their assumed superiority are no match for the foe from the future. That the story measures its imagined past against a present day which is now very much our history, however recent, only adds another level of curiosity to one of Doctor Who’s pivotal tales.

This review is based on the MP3 download from Big Finish, and contains spoilers.

In televised Doctor Who episodes, we rarely see the after-effect of the Doctor’s travels on the planets and peoples he visits. There are notable exceptions, of course, including the rise of the Monoids in The Ark (1966); Xoanon, the computer left with a split personality after the Doctor’s previous attempt to repair it in The Face of Evil (1977); the damaging consequences of the Time Lord’s visit to Satellite Five in The Long Game (2005); and in A Good Man Goes to War (2012), Lorna Bucket’s ultimately fatal devotion to the Doctor years after meeting him briefly as a child. But usually, once the Doctor has stepped through the doors of the TARDIS, he leaves any repercussions from his latest adventure behind him.

Not so in Big Finish’s recent Drashani Empire trilogy. Beginning with the Fifth Doctor story, The Burning Prince, continuing with Sixth Doctor adventure The Acheron Pulse, and now concluding with Seventh Doctor story The Shadow Heart, these three audio adventures allow us to witness just how drastic the Doctor’s meddling can be, not just for individuals, but entire civilisations – making the Time Lords’ notorious policy of non-intervention seem rather justified.

The Plot:

Written by Jonathan Morris, The Shadow Heart is set some 50 years after the events of The Acheron Pulse, making it 80 years since the Fifth Doctor first blundered aboard a Drashani spaceship bound for the swampy planetoid, Sharnax. Much has happened over the intervening decades, including the destruction of the Drashani Empire itself, at the hands of the alien marauders known as the Wrath. Despite (or more accurately, because of) the Doctor reprogramming them as a force for good at the conclusion of the previous adventure, the Wrath have since spread out across the stars, maintaining their own strict definition of justice and destroying any planet which does not live up to their own exacting standards. Now the Wrath are expanding into new territory, and only the Earth Empire stands in their way.

On the planet Temperance, the TARDIS materialises in the midst of a sleazy bar known as Starbaff’s, much to the displeasure of the publican, who dogmatically maintains (despite evidence to the contrary) that his is ‘a respectable establishment’. Moments later the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) staggers out the TARDIS doors, chest smoking from a laser blast, and collapses at the feet of scrap merchants Talbar (Eve Karpf) and Horval (Alex Mallinson), a pair of loveable rogues reminiscent of Garron and Unstoffe (The Ribos Operation) or Glitz and Dibber (The Trial of a Time Lord). The conniving pair take the injured Time Lord to safety, only to learn firsthand that involving oneself in the Doctor’s affairs is to invite trouble – which in this instance comes in the determined form of bounty hunter Vienna Salavatori (Chase Masterson).

Events quickly escalate. Salavatori has not one but two employers, and is intent on playing them off against each other for her own gain. One of her employers is the Wrath – the other is a shadowy figure from the Wrath’s past whom they also seek revenge upon. The fate of all will be decided within the walls of the Imperial Fortress on the Wrath’s homeworld – the Shadow Heart.

Observations:

Just as the first two stories in this trilogy were dramatically dissimilar to each other, The Shadow Heart is different again to its predecessors. Whereas The Burning Prince was a fast-paced action/survival story, and The Acheron Pulse was a somewhat underwhelming space opera, here Jonathan Morris has given us an inventive, playful, and chronologically convoluted story that acknowledges and incorporates the popular perception of the Seventh Doctor as puckish, inquisitive, and manipulative.

Obviously a writer who delights in language, Morris peppers his script with smart continuity references, such as a comment about the marsh-moon of Magros 5 stinking like ‘an Ogron’s armpit’; narratively, this adventure should appeal to viewers who enjoy the timey-wimey structure of Steven Moffat’s television screenplays – the Doctor experiences the events of The Shadow Heart in a very different order to the listener, and is usually, though not always, one step ahead of the other protagonists.

Of the many highlights in Morris’s detailed vision of the Doctor Who universe, his most engaging creation in this story is Talbar and Horval’s unique means of transport – Hercules, a stellar ammonite, or ‘space snail’ in layman’s terms. A giant space-faring gastropod about the size of a lunar shuttle (perhaps inspired by the Great Glass Sea Snail from Hugh Lofting’s 1922 children’s book, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle), Hercules has a control cabin implanted in his stomach, entered via a catheter, from which Talbar directs his flight. It’s a wonderfully daft idea but makes perfect sense in a universe that’s already home to star whales, megalomaniacal cacti, and bad-tempered, hermaphroditic Chelonians.

Talbar and Horval themselves are well written characters who quickly transcend the stereotype of slightly dodgy confidence trickers-cum-scroungers thanks to strong writing and excellent casting; Karpf is particular gives a throaty, cynical performance that is especially engaging. In contrast, bounty hunter Vienna Salavatori comes across as unimaginatively written and rather two-dimensional, an impression not aided by Masterson’s underwhelming performance in the role. Clearly, however, Masterson has already impressed the powers-that-be at Big Finish, with a spin-off series for the character already in the works (The Memory Box).

Wilfredo Acosta’s sound design and incidental music are solid (Star Wars fans should enjoy his musical homage to the famous Cantina sequence) and work well to advance and enrich the story, though the voices of the Wrath are frustratingly over-produced, and consequently often difficult to decipher – a flaw which becomes especially frustrating in the later stages of the story when the action shifts to the Wrath homeworld.

The first two episodes of The Shadow Heart advance at a cracking pace, and introduce a range of additional characters, including Captain Webster (John Banks) and Lt Dervish (Jaimi Barbakoff) of the Earth Empire spaceship HMS Trafalgar, as well as shifting the action between multiple locations. Episode three is slightly slower, and suffers a little from the now-traditional third act exposition which often plagues Doctor Who adventures, but still impresses, thanks in part to some striking imagery from Morris and a strongly written balcony scene evoking Romeo and Juliet – which ties in nicely with first impressions of The Burning Prince, the first story in the Drashani Trilogy. The fourth and final episode ends strongly, and surprisingly emotionally, though not without some classic Seventh Doctor deus ex machina, which once again reinforces the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey nature of Morris’s script, and the manipulative personality of this particular regeneration of our favourite Time Lord.

Conclusion:

As a stand-along story, The Shadow Heart is engaging, intelligent and generally well-written. It successfully balances a lightness of tone with an expansive vision and engaging characters, and features original world-building and some truly memorable additions to the Whoniverse. But what of the trilogy as a whole?

With each episode so tonally different from the story preceding it, the Drashani trilogy feels somewhat lacking in cohesion, despite the unifying presence of Ken Bentley, who directed all three stories. Story elements designed to carry on through the following adventures feel somewhat tacked on to The Burning Prince, while in The Shadow Heart, there’s a sense that Morris was slightly underwhelmed by the plot threads he was required to incorporate from the first two stories in the series. The Acheron Pulse, as previously noted, just felt cumbersome. Given that each of these stories were scripted by different writers, it’s perhaps not surprising that they don’t cohere as strongly as one might expect – a problem the television series has long been able to fix thanks to the presence of such dedicated script editors as Robert Holmes, Helen Raynor and Terrence Dicks.

What the trilogy does succeed in doing, albeit in broad strokes rather than in fine detail, is an examination of the impact of the Doctor’s involvement upon the planets he visits – an impact which in this instance is positively cataclysmic. In Episode Three of The Shadow Heart we learn that ‘hundreds of worlds boiled in flame’ thanks to the Doctor’s meddling in the war between the Wrath and the Drashani Empire – no wonder the Time Lords once banished the him to Earth for the crime of meddling in other civilisation’s affairs!

This review is based on the MP3 download from Big Finish, and contains spoilers.

The Auntie Matter reunites the fourth Doctor and the first Romana, albeit under sad circumstances with Mary Tamm having passed away not long ago. It’s a tragic turn of events acknowledged by the tribute contained on this release, and it’s something that casts an inescapable shadow over the otherwise light, frothy tone of Jonathan Morris’s P.G. Wodehouse pastiche. Morris is also, of course, pastiching the appropriate era of Doctor Who, as well as firmly playing to Tom Baker’s flamboyant persona (one section of dialogue even sounds suspiciously like an infamous Baker anecdote). And though the ‘behind-the-scenes’ feature reveals a number of Baker gags that failed to make the final release, I suspect the Doctor’s mistaken addressing of housemaid Mabel as “Mary” was a Tom ad lib. There are also some very amusing riffs on well-known Who dialogue: “take me to your leader!” gets a make-over, and at one point Time and the Rani is unexpectedly, wittily brought to mind.

But if Jonathan Morris is playing with audience memories of Who, he also takes this story a step further than televised Doctor Who ever managed, giving Romana far more to do – in story terms – than was often the case on TV. Here, there’s a real sense of Romana’s capabilities, independence and resourcefulness: she’s very much a Time Lord in her own right rather than a companion. And by splitting the story into dual strands, following the Doctor and Romana, this adventure also takes on a sharp comedic edge as the two time-travellers continually fail to spot one another’s involvement.

The Auntie Matter is cursed with a lumberingly daft title, however, even if its basic formulation isn’t so far away from something like The Armageddon Factor. But whereas the culmination of season 16 had an earnest, portentous identity, this time around we’re treated to some pretty facile punning. And the story’s guest star – Julia McKenzie – goes so far over the top that she’s close to stratospheric on a few occasions.

Given the broad satire of some of what’s on offer, I think a few other performances could have been profitably toned down by Ken Bentley's direction: for example, Reggie (Robert Portal) is such a cartoonish figure that it’s difficult to care about him, or to believe that Romana would decide to accompany him anywhere. By contrast, housemaid Mabel (Lucy Griffiths) and factotum Grenville (Alan Cox) are performed more naturalistically, creating a sense of realism and stylization rubbing up against each other in a rather indecorous way. Perhaps the story's mildly schizoid nature comes from Jonathan Morris trying to second-guess which antics might appeal to Tom Baker, and which different tonalities might appeal to the nostalgic listenership. As it is, the play’s centre of gravity shifts around, veering from P.G. Wodehouse to G. Williams and back again.

Mabel gives the story some genuine heart; she’s an inquisitive housemaid who plays an unusual role for Doctor Who: in essence, she’s a multi-companion, being paired up with both the Doctor and Romana at different moments. But despite excellent, unshowy work from Lucy Griffiths, there’s little room for the character to be fleshed out, and her eventual fate seems implausible, with conventional sensibility triumphing over story sense.

Tom Baker seems to be enjoying himself immensely throughout, and the same can be said of Mary Tamm’s return to the role of Romana. Post-Key-to-Time, we hear a Romana who’s surer of herself, and who enjoys the Doctor’s banter whilst pointing out his lapses in logic. K-9 is missing from this release, though, meaning that we'll have to wait for The Sands of Life for a full-scale TARDIS crew reunion. (On this occasion, the Doctor doesn’t seem at all bothered about sending his canine computer off on a randomized tour of a thousand worlds… you’d almost think he wanted to spend some quality time by himself with Lady Romana).

As always with Big Finish, sound design is top notch and unobtrusively contributes to this tale’s realization of a 1920’s stately home and gardens. But clever plotting and sharp structuring are the real pay-offs here, once all the Wodehouse window-dressing has been tidied away. What makes this drama most compelling is the fact that it so obviously rewards its two returning leads, giving both Tom Baker and Mary Tamm something interesting to play. The Auntie Matter is surely an ‘actor matter’: written to please its stars as much as its listeners. And if such a strategy was instrumental in reuniting this particular Time Lord team, then Big Finish and Jonathan Morris have done us – and them – proud.