Start to Finish: 8.07 - Luna Romana

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

And so I step into the unknown, with the final six installments in the original run of The Companion Chronicles (I say original because they've since restarted,) which I have not previously listened to. We begin with the climax of the Quadrigger Stoyn trilogy: Luna Romana. Sadly, a bit of a pall hangs over this one. The story features both versions of Romana, but was recorded just a few months after Mary Tamm's death, thus her only appearances are in archive recordings. Her sections are instead narrated by the third Romana, played by Juliet Landau.

During their search for the final segment of the Key to Time, the Doctor and Romana arrive in ancient Rome. The Doctor is keen to stop and smell the flowers, or at least take in a to-be-lost play by Plautus, but Romana is as goal-oriented as always, tracking the segment to a hidden machine room in a temple of Luna. In the relative and absolute future, the second Romana arrives with the Doctor in a theme park version of Rome constructed on the Moon. In both eras she encounters a man who has been waiting; waiting for the Doctor, for the TARDIS. Quadrigger Stoyn has been waiting for a very, very long time, and now he is determined that justice will be done.

The Time Lady we deserve.

Luna Romana completes Stoyn's arc. In The Beginning he just wanted to go home. In The Dying Light he wanted the Time Lords to punish the Doctor. Here, he seems intent on wiping out the universe to eradicate all traces of the Doctor's meddling. Molloy provides a decent foil, a self-appointed agent of Order more erratic and destructive by far than the Doctor whose chaos he decries. He also gets to voice all the parts in Plautus' 'Luna Romana', and Plautus himself. Ward is of course utterly assured in the role she has pwned for decades, and Landau is a surprisingly good third Romana. Turns out that she does posh much, much better than Cockney. True, her in-story turn as Romana I is a bit stilted, but that's actually a very true rendition of the character as played; one imagines that Tamm got a lot of direction telling her to be 'more proper'. The first Romana's heels also come in for a bit of a ribbing.

Luna Romana is a good finale to the Stoyn trilogy, and despite his omnicidal monomania, it's hard not to feel a little sympathy for the engineer who waited, only to discover after millennia lost in a chaotic, hostile galaxy that his job had long ago been replaced; with a self-test button. It maintains its pace for the entire extended run time (four episodes instead of two) and the three-person cast manage many more voices.