Audio Hello. We'll get to the one(ish) line reviews in a moment but your writer has been trying to get to grips with what we're supposed to consider series or lines at Big Finish in recent years. Here follows a rant about numbers. The Eighth Doctor Adventures are now covering three distinct eras: the gap between Seasons One and Two of the original Monthly releases, the continuation of the story thread which began with the Lucie Miller adventures, continued through Dark Eyes and the Time War. Except the spine labels on the boxes flow between the first and second eras and even then without really making much sense.
Here's a rundown (which could be a list but I don't want to mess up the blog's formatting). They begin with the stand-alone Liv and Helen stories apparently set in the final moments of Stranded (between the TARDIS leaving and returning), What Lies Inside? (1) and Connections (2). But then there isn't a new sequence for the new strand of Audacity and Charley stories. Audacity and In the Bleak Midwinter are given (3) & (4) presumably because they share the same release months as the previous boxes. But then Echoes (more Liv and Helen) which came out the following May is (5) and finally Deadly Strangers and Causeway are (6) and (7).
All of which means if you want to keep the boxsets in continuity on your shelf, you're left with a number sequence which is all over the place and equally, if you stick to this number, the Doctor's portrait on the top shifts between TV Movie and Dark Eyes faces. Us Doctor Who fans (and U.S. Doctor Who fans) are quite used to spines on media releases not matching (apart from the BD releases so far which still sport the Whittaker logo despite us enjoying a whole new era in between) but this feels like a very weird choice, especially since they're being created by fans for fans.
Unless both strands are going to dovetail at some point. Despite the pictures on the box, I'm still not unconvinced that these stories aren't going to be revealed to be set after The Charlotte Pollard Adventures with Eighth and Charley reunited somehow. As I've said before, she sounds more mature and there's a moment in one of these stories where they talk about Ramsay the Vortisaur as though he's a distant memory which doesn't make sense given the context in which he's mentioned in the second original series. Something very strange is going on here.
Puccini and the Doctor
Which could just as easily have been called Unfinished Business since it's exactly that for both the Doctor and his writer for this adventure, Matthew Jacobs, who wrote the TV Movie with the Pertwee logo, oh so long ago. It's a celebrity historical in which the Time Lord meets the composer again before he's written some of his greatest operas and comes face to face with a creature who wants to steal and destroy humanity's creativity. Just astonishingly good. Jacobs had apparently only heard Chimes at Midnight before taking the gig, but caught himself up and then wrote this which despite using a similar method, AI never could.
Women's Day Off
Whilst highlighting a moment in women's history I shamefully wasn't previously aware of in which all of Iceland's women went on strike for a day in October 1975, McMullin's script plays not unlike something from The Sarah Jane Adventures as a young girl finds herself infused with magical powers which she can't control and the TARDIS team can only see disparate elements of the mystery in their own parts of the story until everything neatly dovetails at the end. Thoroughly entertaining, especially hearing the time ship's translation circuits giving Icelandics various UK regional accents rather than the actors affecting Nordic vowels.
The Gloaming
Almost as Route One Who as it gets, The Gloaming features an indomitable group of human survivors in suspended animation being threatened by an alien intelligence which is trying to spread itself across the galaxy. But in choosing the Mara, the writers have found the perfect monster for audio, especially the dream world which becomes two voices, one threatening, the other scared, voiced by the same actor demonstrating their range. Because the victim can't awaken without outside help, they're simply trapped there, the evil presence using their own anxieties against them. Chilling.
Placement: Between In The Bleak Midwinter and Invaders from Mars. For now.
