Audio The third in the annual Andrew Lane-scripted Eighth Doctor stories for BBC Audio sees the regular viewpoint character, the indomitable reporter James MacFarlane, visiting a remote base at the South Pole to interview an explorer, the intimidatingly named Pentius Rochdale. Predictably, all hell breaks loose, with bodies starting to pile up and wild animals as the potential aggressors. So far, so John Carpenter's The Thing. Fortunately for the denizens of this base, the chief of medicine is the Eighth Doctor, and he's typically suspicious of the gap between what seems to be happening and the reality. Produced again by Big Finish veterans Gardner, Darlington, and Ainsworth, the Eighth Doctor—as you'd expect to hear in those rival audios—is present and correct, and well realised by Dan Starkey in his voiceover. At the length of a CD, it gallops along like the team of huskies in a BBC Four slow TV special (which is paradoxically very fast) right through to a pretty dark ending with echoes of Storm Warning and a wedge driven between the Doctor and MacFarlane. The fourth and (so far) final instalment in the series, The Force of Death, feels very ominous indeed.
Placement: The cover has the same photo of Paul McGann as the second, in a smaller circle, but it still feels like there's been a gap between the two. So, let's place this just after the Titan Comics, when his sense of humour is still intact.
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