Start to Finish: 5.01 - The Guardian of the Solar System

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Series five of The Companion Chronicles opens with the final part of the Sara Kingdom trilogy, once more narrated by Jean Marsh as Sara, with Niall MacGregor as Robert.

After years in the house in Ely, Robert has just one last wish; a wish that will reveal what Sara truly wants as well. It is the end for them, one way or another, but first there is one more story to tell; a story about the most powerful human who ever lived. Mavic Chen, The Guardian of the Solar System.

Mavic Chen is a problematic villain, not least because of his almost pantomime 'multiracial' appearance (he was a white actor in simultaneous brown- and yellow-face make-up, in order to give the terrestrial villain no single ethnic background), but here he is played as the sum of his personality traits and not the physical. He is arrogant, ruthless, assured and a consummate politician. In the end, however, he is not the antagonist of this story. The enemy in this play is time; inevitability. It is a story about choice, or rather the lack of it, from Robert's feeling of being trapped by a promise made to save his daughter, to Sara's futile attempts to escape from a loop in time.

Like the other stories in the trilogy (Home Truths, The Drowned World) the framing narrative has its own story, separate from the main story, but thematically linked. The relationship between Sara and Robert and the House is as important as anything in the tale of Mavic Chen and the Earth's baroque economic linchpin, the master clock, and like the Leela trilogy, Sara's story has an open ending.

Next, Wendy Padbury returns as Zoe in Echoes of Grey.

Start to Finish: 4.12 - Solitaire

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

A new Doctor, and an old enemy, in John Dorney's claustrophobic two-hander, Solitaire; arguably the first Companion Chronicle to feature one of Big Finish's original companions (The Prisoner's Dilemma was primarily narrated by Zara, but the only companion present was Ace).

There's a new game; a game you don't even know you're playing. You don't know the rules and you don't know the aim. Losing the game will result in forfeit. Failure to play will result in forfeit. And the Doctor may already have lost.

Charlotte Elspeth 'Charley' Pollard is in many ways the Rose Tyler of Big Finish - pretty, blonde, perky, adventurous, ever so in love with the Doctor and possibly just a little bit more special than all the others - although at her worst she has never been as annoying. She accompanied the Eight Doctor from his first Big Finish appearance (Storm Warning) through a gate to a timeless universe (Zagreus) and back (The Next Life), and finally left him in Hong Kong (The Girl Who Never Lived) after 27 plays, before returning for another 7 (paradoxically with the Sixth Doctor). Solitaire was her first appearance since the last of those Blue, Forgotten Planet, and her last until her entry in the 50th Anniversary Destiny of the Doctor series, which was followed by her own spin-off, launched this year (2014, in case the future historians out there can't read the date stamp).

Solitaire has no framing narrative. Instead, India Fisher (the voice of Master Chef) plays Charlie opposite David Bailie's Celestial Toymaker (Michael Gough, the original Toymaker, had retired from acting) in a three set play with two actors. The Toymaker taunts, Charley tries to solve his riddles, before the tables are turned. The Doctor appears as a ventriloquist's dummy (voiced by Fisher) and Bailie also voices 'the Game' with its stentorian announcements.

This is a pleasing little play, and a refreshing change in style. It fits neatly with the existing mythos surrounding the Toymaker and mixes whimsy with claustrophobic horror to good effect. It also ends on a flourish to launch the Chronicles from the end of series 4 to the start of series 5, which we'll cover next time in the form of the conclusion of the Sara Kingdom trilogy, The Guardian of the Solar System.

Start to Finish: 4.11 - Night's Black Agents

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

It's time for a tie-in, with a Companion Chronicle which forms part of the trilogy (or rather, with this episode added, tetralogy) of main release plays featuring the Sixth Doctor and an older, wiser Jamie McCrimmon.

The Doctor and Jamie cross the Highlands in search of the stolen TARDIS. It's like old times, except for the kelpie and the witches and the demons.

In Marty Ross's Night's Black Agents, we join the Doctor and Jamie at the end of City of Spires, traveling from the now-destroyed anachronistic, dystopian sprawl of Grangemouth to retrieve the TARDIS, only to be attacked by a water demon of Scottish lore and taken in by the sinister Reverend Merodach and his beautiful wife Lucy.

Frazer Hines as Jamie, a man - as he reminds us - of little learning, narrates this story in a flamboyantly Gothic style. The pace and action is that of the Gothic genre, as is the dyad of a monstrous, ugly man and a pure, beautiful bride. Yet, far from being flaws in the story, these are features; not that one might realise this until, at the end of the following adventure, The Wreck of the Titan (spoilers), it has become clear that this is a story which takes place in the Land of Fiction, with supporting characters taken from the pages of Scottish literature (The Brownie of the Black Hags and The Bride of Lammermoor respectively).

Hines is a fine narrator - and manages a passable Sixth Doctor - and Hugh Ross positively revels in the role of the fiendish Merodach. The unrelated Marty Ross, a connoisseur of his country's folklore, weaves a rich, Gothic script full of vivid imagery, if lacking in pulse-pounding action. An oddity on first listening, in the context of the complete trilogy of main series plays, Night's Black Agents is revealed as a strange delight.

The final play in series four brings the Eighth Doctor to the Companion Chronicles, as Charley Pollard plays for the Doctor's life in Solitaire.

Start to Finish: 4.10 - The Time Vampire

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Okay; this is where it gets weird...er.

The dying Leela recalls a story long forgotten, of the crimes of the Z'nai and the death of a world, and a time when time itself seemed broken beyond repair.

The conclusion of the lose trilogy of Leela Companion Chronicles ends with an adventure which references both of the previous episodes, with the Z'nai emperor Humbreckle (from The Catalyst) unleashing the devastation which caused the Doctor's fear of fire (referenced in Empathy Games). The connection between the Palace of Kremnon in the first play and Mount Kremnon in the second is sadly not made clear.

Nigel Fairs' The Time Vampire is a somewhat strange play. Leela and the Doctor slip in and out of time as a result of a time vampire's presence, and the conclusion of the play involves a paradox which creates and is created by the vampire, as well as Leela's death and reincarnation. It's all very odd and while Leela at least has some agency, it feels rather as if the characters are here to watch.

Louise Jameson is once more a fine narrator, as well as recreating Leela perfectly, and the presence of John Leeson as a muddled K9 is a treat.

I'd say we're back to something more normal next time, but actually it's Satanic shenanigans in the Highlands with Night's Black Agents.

Start to Finish: 4.09 - Shadow of the Past

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Simon Guerrier's Shadow of the Past is another Third Doctor adventure narrated by Caroline John as Liz Shaw, featuring Lex Shrapnel (aka the dumb bully one from the training camp in Captain America).

Years after leaving UNIT, Liz Shaw returns to one of their vaults to check on the contents. With only a single UNIT Sergeant in attendance, she recounts how the alien ship came to Earth, and what secret caused it to be sealed away for so many years.

Shadow of the Past is the kind of story the UNIT era did well, full of vast alien menace and a shapeshifting alien sponge that would have been hell to manage on screen. It cops out a little by having the Time Lords drop a deus out of their machina onto the main invasion, but it's not managed badly. All in all, there's not much wrong with Shadow of the Past as a play in its own right; it just doesn't quite fit with The Blue Tooth, the previous Companion Chronicle with Caroline John. The earlier play was all about Liz Shaw's disillusionment with UNIT, whereas this play - set at almost the exact same point, just a few weeks after the Silurian incident - touches that only with a brief reference to the passing of test tubes and has Shaw wondering why she left.

As I say, on its own terms it's a good play. John is a fine narrator, and Shrapnel ably supports. I just can't get away from that niggle.

And speaking of continuity, next we have chronological chaos in The Time Vampire.

Start to Finish: 4.08 - The Emperor of Eternity

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

We're back in historical territory with the Second Doctor and his companions Victoria (Deborah Watling) and Jamie (Frazer Hines), in Nigel Robinson's The Emperor of Eternity.

A meteor collision forces the TARIS to land in the nascent country of China, during the reign of the First Emperor Qin. It is a brutal land where order is maintained by the sword. When the Doctor is taken away to work on an elixir of life for the Emperor, Victoria and Jamie must choose who to trust in their quest to rescue him.

Unlike The Suffering, this isn't a true two-hander. The narrative rests with Victoria, and Hines only provides his own lines, in the conventional manner for the Chronicles. Unfortunately, this leaves Watling to provide the Doctor's voice, despite not being a patch on Hines for doing so. In fact, listening in a fairly sleepy state, I quite forgot which Doctor it was and was rather startled to hear him playing the recorder.

The story is pretty straightforward, hampered by the usual limitations of a celebrity historical. That being said, it works in a number of curious and genuine historical footnotes, including the meteor strike of 211BC, the willingness of the Prime Minister to conceal the Emperor's death in the name of stability, and the Emperor's obsession with immortality. It's pretty brutal, being a history warts-and-all type of story; it comes out to seem a little judgmental of Chinese history, but this is more a feature of Big Finish historicals as compared to the older TV serials, and it is no more so than, for example, The Settling is of British history.

Next on our list is UNIT science fiction goodness, with Caroline John in Shadow of the Past.

Start to Finish: 4.07 - The Suffering

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Time for something a little different, as Jacaueline Rayner's The Suffering provides the Companion Chronicles' first companion double act. In this First Doctor adventure, the action is narrated alternately by Maureen O'Brien's Vicki and Peter Purves' Steven.

The TARDIS lands in the bleak alien landscape of a quarry in Sussex. It is the era of the Women's Suffrage movement, but even as the women of Earth fight for their rights, a long-dead creature from another world has an altogether bloodier axe to grind.

There is very little riskier than a political Doctor Who story, especially one which touches on the politics of gender, an area which mainstream SF has traditionally handled with a wildly varying degree of success. Making this story a two-hander, with the young Vicki and Steven recording their account in its immediate aftermath, manages the issues well. Not only does the narrative split between a man and a woman, but both are centuries before their time and utterly befuddled by the idea that women wouldn't have the vote already, thus avoiding a common tap of having the woman become a didactic mouthpiece and the man a well-meaning conservative voice.

The alien consciousness driving women to violence against men is another risky play, which can easily become a broken Aesop, but Rayner manages it well, with her back story revealing that she was ultimately rejected by her own people, not for standing up for her rights, but for becoming a tyrant to both sexes, and pitting her hatred against Vicky's experiences, not only of male kindness, but also of male respect (a hard pitch in sixties Doctor Who, but it works in a way it might not have done with, say, Polly).

The dual narration is never disjointed, with supporting characters recognisable across the two. The story also, critically, does not feel overlong at two hours.

Back to regular length next, but two companions again, as Deborah Watling's Victoria and Frazer Hines' Jamie confront The Emperor of Eternity.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

In a dark future (present?) mutants and humans live under the shadow of the Sentinels, mutant hunters who have pretty much extended their own remit to most sentient life, and which adapt to counter any mutant power. To prevent this slaughter, Wolverine's consciousness is projected back into his younger self; his mission, to bring Professor Xavier and Magneto together and prevent Raven/Mystique's assassination of the Sentinel's creator, Bolivar Trask.

Days of Future Past unites, in a rough and ready fashion, the timelines of X-Men: First Class and the original trilogy, in large part through the mechanism of kicking The Last Stand to the curb and stamping repeatedly on its face, before finally flat out undoing it. It is unclear how it stands as regards The Wolverine, as despite a teaser at the end of that film, this is clearly a different timeline as future Wolverine still has his adamantium claws.

Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan pick up their pay for little more than sitting in on the future sessions to add gravitas (don't get me wrong, they're awesome, but almost underused), leaving the bulk of the film to the excellent James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, as well as franchise favourite Hugh Jackman. Peter Dinklage is an assured Trask, and Jennifer Lawrence shines as Mystique, facing her moment of destiny. Evan Peters as Peter 'not Quicksilver, honest; he's in the other franchise' Maximoff is a wonderful new addition, and gets one of the movie's stand out scenes.

Overall, the future players do less well than those in the past, with Ellen Page wasted on the little Kitty Pride has to do, and the other X-Men barely getting a line between them. Apparently some of them at least have multi-picture deals, so hopefully they'll get some more mileage next outing.

Days of Future Past has a lot of work to do to reclaim a franchise that got lost a long time ago and is basically still running in order to stop the rights reverting, but it turns out a goodun.

Start to Finish: 4.06 - Bernice Summerfield and the Criminal Code

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Professor Bernice 'Benny' Summerfield has a long history with Big Finish, a company originally formed to make audio plays based on her adventures in the Virgin New Adventures series of novels (with the Doctor surgically removed) and her solo spin offs. She has appeared in a couple of monthly releases which align slightly bizarrely with the main range, including the excellent Company of Friends, featuring four stories with different companions of the Eighth Doctor - Benny from the Virgin novels, Fitz Kreiner from the BBC Eighth Doctor range, Izzy Somebody from Doctor Who Magazine and Mary Shelley from a reference in an earlier Big Finish story - and now in a Companion Chronicle. Throughout she has been voiced by one-time cheetah person Lisa Bowerman, who has been more often involved with the Chronicles as a director.

The Doctor is mediating a failing peace summit on Sanquist, while Benny attends an archaeological conference on the same world. When Benny hears of a 'forbidden language', she is intrigued, but then the Doctor is kidnapped and she has bigger fish to fry.

Godlike machines and malevolent misconceptions are the backbone of Eddie Robson's Bernice Summerfield and the Criminal Code. It's a conceit from the New Adventures to have the Doctor throw himself so publicly front and centre, and the result is a very subdued Seventh Doctor who plays little active part in the story, even by Chronicle standards. Joining Bowerman is Charlie Hayes as a young archaeologist named Gatlin, whose job is mostly to offer exposition and at one point to turn up with a car. As occasionally happens, the second role is not well-integrated, which is a shame.

Overall, The Criminal Code is a partial success. Bowerman is very good, and the second half of the story, where the energy picks up and the Doctor gets his game on. Bowerman does not provide a particularly strong McCoy, or perhaps it's just that the writing is so far downbeat of his usual performance as the Doctor.

Next up, a double-length Chronicle, with Maureen O'Brien and Peter Purves running a double act as Vicki and Steven in The Suffering.

Start to Finish: 4.05 - Ringpullworld

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Our next story once more revisits the Fifth Doctor and the era of unavailable (for now) companion Tegan. This time, we're a little later; post-Nissa, and thus narrated by the sneering Vislor Turlough (Mark Strickson) in Paul Magrs' Ringpullworld.

Turlough is in trouble again, and this time it's because he's trying to do something right, something heroic. He knows what it is to be trapped somewhere with limits placed on your horizons, and he won't let that happen to anyone else; even if they are the militaristic descendants of an infamous race of genocidal warlords.

The main story of Ringpullworld is a pretty stock Who yarn; a pocket universe locked away (a la Planet Krikkit in Life, the Universe and Everything, which was of course adapted from the unproduced Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen), a means to let it out and the question of whether it is wise to do so. The point of the story, in this case, is actually the framing narrative.

The Doctor and his companions have attracted the attention of three of the legendary Novelisers of Verbatim Six, who have parasitically attached themselves to the three travellers in order to record their actions for posterity. This involves narrating what they are doing in their own style, in the case of Huxley - Turlough's Noveliser - a particularly flamboyant style; a habit which maddens Turlough far more than it informs the audience. Thus, Turlough has decided to provide his own text. In the first half of the story, he recounts the events leading up to his decision to pop the 'ringpull', the seal of the pocket universe. In the second, having been captured, Huxley helps him to explore the 'best possible future', the one in which they don't die, as a flash-forward.

The interesting narrative device, Strickson's performance and the illumination of one of the Doctor's more enigmatic companions make up for the simplicity of the central plot. Strickson is allowed to have a great deal of fun with the voices, managing a fair Davidson, but providing only a deliberately broad and whiny caricature of Turlough's nemesis, Tegan. Huxley is an entertaining foil, and it is easy to see how someone linked to a Noveliser would soon want to be rid of them.

Up next, we have our first non-television companion, as frequent Companion Chronicle director Lisa Bowerman goes front of mic for Bernice Summerfield and the Criminal Code.

Start to Finish: 4.04 - The Pyralis Effect

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Fourth Doctor shenanigans, as Lalla Ward's Romana II recounts George Mann's The Pyralis Effect.

The starship Myriad has been searching for the hero of Pavonis IV, carrying a skeleton crew and a massive gene bank waiting to recreate the population of it's dead homeword. Now the crew believe that they have found their hero and his craft, the vessel called the TARDIS, but what they have actually uncovered is something far, far more dangerous.

The Fourth Doctor was one of the first to touch on the subject of the Doctor's legend, introducing in episodes such as Underworld the themes that would dominate large chunks of nuWho. The Pyralis Effect features the early version, with a specific culture who have revered the Doctor for generations.

Ward and Jess Robinson between them muster up a wide array of voices, with a special nod to Robinson's chilling Pyralis voice.

The script captures much of the series at that time, from the legend to the tendency to have the Doctor and/or Romana know a lot more backstory than the audience. There is also an odd technophobic edge, with the android and the cyborg being most influenced by the Pyralis. If I have a criticism of this story, however, it is that it overplays the Doctor's jelly babies, and if the TV series sometimes did the same, that's not much of an excuse.

Next on the agenda we have Vislor Turlough (Mark Strickson) in Ringpullworld.

Start to Finish: 4.03 - The Prisoner of Peladon

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

 It's time for another Third Doctor adventure, and another Chronicle narrated by a one-shot character. King Peladon of Peladon, played by David 'son of Patrick' Troughton appeared in The Curse of Peladon, and his world returned in The Monster of Peladon (this time ruled by his daughter) and the audio play The Bride of Peladon.

In the citadel of Peladon there is a tower; in that tower is a room where an ancient evil is held captive. When murder stalks the refugee camps of the exiled Martians, King Peladon's mind turns to that old superstition, and even the presence of his old friend the Doctor is little comfort.

Mark Wright and Cavan Scott's The Prisoner of Peladon is set between Curse and Monster, with Troughton playing an older and wiser King Peladon. The Doctor's failure - especially without the anchoring influence of a companion, as he is between Jo and Sarah-Jane in this story - to recognise this change in the short-lived humans he loves so much is a key factor in the story. In the framing narrative, Peladon tells his daughter that the Doctor is a friend and protector, yet his impatience with the Third Doctor's pucking nature is apparent in the main story.

Lying between the story which established the Ice Warriors as a noble race and the one which dropped them back to being axe-crazy psychos - and lying in between is what Prisoner does best - the play also makes mention of the explanation retconned into the Who timeline; a military coup on New Mars.

Troughton's voice work is good (his Alpha Centauri must have been almost painful to achieve), and ably assisted by Nicholas 'Monster Voices' Briggs as assorted Martians.

The Prisoner of Peladon takes advantage of the Companion Chronicles format to analyse the Doctor more critically than usual, exposing some of his flaws in the process, and for that alone is worth a listen. The whodunnit aspect is only partially successful, however, as the one-hour format makes it difficult to insert a sufficiently varied cast to maintain suspense.

Next up is a Fourth Doctor space opera, with Lalla Ward in The Pyralis Effect.

Start to Finish: 4.02 - The Glorious Revolution

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Jamie McCrimmon is back, in Jonathan Morris's Second Doctor historical, The Glorious Revolution.

The year is 1688, and King James II is about to flee to France, allowing William and Mary to take the throne and planting the seeds of the rise and fall of the Jacobite cause. But not if James Robert McCrimmon has anything to say about it.

His memory restored by an agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency (Andrew Fettes, also playing King James), Jamie recounts his meeting with James VII (to him) and his attempt to change history, and then to help the Doctor to change it back.

The Glorious Revolution belongs to a slightly odd category of Doctor Who story, neither full-blown pseudohistorical nor legitimate historical, perhaps best considered as the Paradox Stories, in which there is no external SF element, but the fact of the crew's time traveling forces them to play a significant role in events. It's also an attempt to do for Jamie what Resistance did for Polly, tying him into the history of his time, with some success.

The ending of the play is odd, however, as Jamie rejects the chance to keep his memories, which is odd both as regards possible future Chronicles and character motivation. It seems out of sorts for Jamie to reject his friends, even their memories, from fear of pain, although this is a much older man with a lot more life behind him, and perhaps he has learned more about loss.

Planetary romance next, with the Third Doctor as narrated by King Peladon of Peladon (David Troughton) in The Prisoner of Peladon.

Start to Finish: 4.01 - The Drowned World

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

So on to the fourth series of The Companion Chronicles, at which point I confess that I have previously been neglecting The Revenants, a limited release Chronicle repackaged with The Light at the End, Big Finish's 50th Anniversary release, which makes the totals 84 plays, of which 26 are First Doctor stories, as is Simon Guerrier's The Drowned World.

The echo of a woman named Sara Kingdom tells stories for her life in her guest house on the isolated, abandoned Isle of Ely. Her questioner asks for one particular tale which might influence the courts in her favour, but will his trust in her remain? And if broken, what would it take to bring him back?

As with Home Truths, The Drowned World is a claustrophobic story - confined to a sealed complex of mining pods assailed by a mysterious, aqueous attacker - and narrated by the thousand year old 'ghost' of Sara to Robert (Niall MacGregor), an officer of the law in a post-apocalyptic Cambridgeshire. Its purpose is to further define the originally scant persona of Sara Kingdom. Last time, the focus was on Sara as an investigator, seeking to make things right by uncovering the truth; this time, it is on her role as protector, willing to give her life for others.

The framing narrative is unusually complete, carrying its own story forward as well as the tale within a tale; a feature shared with the Leela Chronicles. Once again, Jean Marsh invests her performance more with the emotional weight of her relationships than with mimicry of her former companions. It's not quite as affecting as Home Truths, but it's pretty good.

Next, Jamie McCrimmon faces his own past, as a trip to 1688 lands the TARDIS in the middle of The Glorious Revolution.

Godzilla (2014)

1998 was a bad year for fans of kaiju, the Japanese monster movie genre, as America made a Godzilla movie that sucked.

Now, I'd be lying if I said that it was all bad. Sure, the movie was an unmitigated disaster, featuring a giant iguana with halitosis and the (heavily contested) worst performance in Matthew Broderick's career, but it did have a pretty awesome spin-off cartoon, so there's that. Regardless, it was with some trepidation that fans of the old received the news of a new US Godzilla movie.

I still went to see it, not least because my daughter was so fascinated by the poster during Noah. As a result, my main impression is that the decision to devote a large proportion of the running time to close up footage of an adorable baby girl toddling as best she can around a darkened cinema was, while not unappealing, ultimately unhelpful to the story they were trying to tell.

Beyond that, however, these are my thoughts on the movie.

It's good.

Moving away from the spoiler free, I think that it got a lot of things right. The human drama was never allowed to completely eclipse the monsters, achieved in part by making the drama about the monsters, and the effect that they have on people. There's no tacked on romance; the father and son make leads are a widow and a married man, and the wife is largely off screen; the female scientist mercifully doesn't snog her boss in the bit at the end of the film where they all cheer.

In fact, I don't think that there is a bit at the end where they all cheer.

Despite the fears of early Japanese commentators, Godzilla himself is a) referred to as 'Gojira', thanks to Ken Watanabe's Dr Serizawa and b) basically the hero. The film takes itself very seriously, perhaps too seriously, but that is clearly in the mould of the original Gojira, and for my money more witty banter would have just shifted the focus too far towards the human.

Oh, and Big G is awesome, from the look to the roar to the atomic breath. I presume that they're saving the tail slide for a sequel.

Start to Finish: 3.12 - The Stealers from Saiph

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

We wrap up the third (and first full) series of The Companion Chronicles with a Fourth Doctor story set in an interlude of the Key to Time arc, featuring Mary Tamm as the First Romana. The story is Nigel Robinson's The Stealers from Saiph.

In an exclusive riviera hotel, Madame Arcana says that the stars are not shining as they should. Petty thefts and uncharacteristic behaviour are just the start of a mystery which could spell disaster on a planetary scale.

Tamm recaptures the First Romana effortlessly; glamorous, superior and poised. The script contains some gems, including Romana's references to a thesis on 'the Doctor's favourite species' and the two Time Lords' impish attempts to set each other up, the Doctor with the elderly astrologer Arcana and Romana with eager bright young thing Tommy. With a slightly deeper voice, Tamm captures Tome Baker's Doctor a little better than Lalla Ward in The Beautiful People, and it is notable that the absence of a second voice (for the first time in the Chronicles' run) is hardly noticeable.

The story is a staple of the Baker era, as an alien operating within and practicing on an elite social group threatens to unleash armageddon. The Saiph are a particularly unpleasant bunch who could never have been done justice on TV, but work well as a cthuloid monstrosity in audio, and Mary Tamm's performance lends emotional resonance to the play. In all honesty, this is a story I had all but forgotten, but I'm glad to have rediscovered it now.

So, that's series 3 of The Companion Chronicles, and only one pay so far that has proven a let down to me (The Great Space Elevator), and one which was disappointingly, but unsurprisingly, short of my relatives. Next time, we launch into Series 4 with The Drowned World.

Start to Finish: 3.11 - The Mahogany Murderers

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

The first 'Doctorless' Companion Chronicle harks back to the Fourth Doctor's Victorian Gothic outing, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, as Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter bring theatrical entrepreneur Henry Gordon Jago and pathologist Professor George Litefoot back to life in Andy Lane's The Mahogany Murderers.

A wooden body on the slab at St Thomas's hospital; criminals who died in prison walking the streets. What sinister scheme is the mysterious Dr Tulp hatching in his warehouse full of electrical paraphernalia?

Jago and Litefoot appeared in one story of the original TV series, acting as a composite Watson to the Fourth Doctor's Holmes and never entering the TARDIS. In The Mahogany Murderers, they investigate a mystery without the aid of the Doctor, with only barmaid Ellie (played by director Lisa Bowerman), framing the story as the mismatched friends compare notes over pale ale at the Red Tavern.

The plot is slight, if inventive, but the heart of this story is the chemistry between its leads. Baxter as the well-to-do Litefoot and Benjamin as the ebullient, upwardly striving Jago are a classic odd couple and their banter (through a happy blend of actors and a good script) sparkles. The minor character voices are delivered either as broad caricature from Jago or - by request - without accents by Litefoot.

The story ends on something of a cliffhanger, which would later pay off not as a sequel, but as a spin-off series which has now run to 28 audio plays, with 12 more already commissioned. Such is not undeserved, as The Mahogany Murderers twinkles its way out of the conventional mode of wistful nostalgia and allows its leads to be part of something present and ongoing. With this play, Jago and Litefoot, Investigators of Infernal Incidents, had arrived.

A more traditional Chronicle rounds off this series, as Mary Tamm's First Romana narrates the story of The Stealers from Saiph.

Start to Finish: 3.10 - The Magician's Oath

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Scott Hancock's The Magician's Oath is another Third Doctor UNIT story, this time narrated by Richard Franklin's Mike Yates.

Freak weather conditions are harmless enough, until a sudden freeze in Hyde Park results in the deaths of hundreds. The only possible witness is the street magician Diamond Jack, the only clue an energy signature from Highgate Cemetery, and bringing the two together might be enough to doom the world.

It feels odd for Mike Yates to be recounting a story to UNIT when his last appearances in the TV series saw him pushed into retirement after a breakdown and his involvement in a plot to exterminate 99% of the human race, but other than that one wrinkle  Franklin drops neatly back into the role. Once more we're back with the melancholy nostalgia theme, as Yates recalls his largely unrequited (as a result of underwriting) crush on Jo Grant, and his dependence on the Doctor to provide the solutions.

Diamond Jack is a dizzyingly mercurial character, spinning from showman to rogue to megalomaniac, while Franklin does a fine job of capturing the various voices of his old comrades.

The Magician's Oath is a good story, but suffers for me in that the Hyde Park tragedy is so similar to the Lake of Eratoon massacre in The Prisoner's Dilemma, and that the involvement of untold numbers of children in each hits me hard as a parent.

The next story in the sequence is a real treat; the Chronicle that launched a spin-off (28 plays and counting) and three reappearances in later Doctor Who plays. Not bad for 'companions' who never set foot in the TARDIS: It's Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter, as Jago and Litefoot in The Mahogany Murders.

Start to Finish: 3.09 - Resistance

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

We move on now to another pure historical - purer even than The Transit of Venus - with Steve Lyons' Resistance, a tale of wartime espionage narrated by Polly (Anneke Wills).

When the TARDIS crew become separated in wartime France, Polly and the Doctor are forced to join the evaders' trail towards neural Spain. What has become of Ben and Jamie, meanwhile? And what connection does a downed pilot have to Polly?

Part-narrated by John Sackville's 'pilot', Resistance lacks a strict framing narrative, and contains a twist which actually calls into question the nature of Sackville's contributions; whether they are drawn from some secret log or merely Polly's extrapolation.

The first of two main emotional hooks lies in the fact that Polly and Ben, taking over from Dodo Chaplet as the 'contemporary' companions, have vague memories of the war, and in particular that Polly's uncle died in a POW camp. The second lies in Polly's feelings of helplessness, related to her under-use in the original series and lack of a developed skill set. In the latter instance, the play provides some resolution with the suggestion that her abilities are empathy, compassion and a willingness to act that provokes positive action.

Wills manages a passable Doctor, and while her Ben and Jamie verge on caricature, this is more from the presentation of the voices as the affectionate parodies of a good friend, rather than any lack of acting skill. Sackville's pilot is a bit of a cipher, as the plot requires, and terrible proper and reserved, but this too fits the role.

The play changes the usual tune of wartime adventures with its French setting and the use of the local Millice in place of German Gestapo, but retains the sense of claustrophobic fear necessary to such a story. It is an oddly hopeful piece, given the setting, as suits Polly's generally upbeat personality, but manages not to be jarring.

Our next title is The Magician's Oath, with UNIT's Mike Yates.

Start to Finish: 3.08 - The Prisoner's Dilemma

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

The first Seventh Doctor Companion was released as a tie-in to the successful but woefully named 'event' series, The Key 2 Time, in which the Fifth Doctor once more pursued the Key to Time in order to fix the universe (having actually broken it in the first place). The series followed the Fifth Doctor and his companion Amy, an artificial lifeform sent to track half of the pieces of the Key; Simon Guerrier's The Prisoner's Dilemma features Amy's 'sister', sent to track the rest.

Ace has been arrested and is facing the erasure of all her memories; all that makes her her. She has a chance, if she and her fellow prisoner can work together. That other prisoner, however, has many secrets, and may be more dangerous than anyone Ace has ever met. This may be the story that Ace doesn't survive; after all, it isn't even her story.

The Prisoner's Dilemma hits us with a bait and switch right out of the gate, as Laura Doddington's as-yet-unnamed tracer (who will later become Zara) takes up the narration instead of Sophie Aldred's Ace. Aldred only comes in on the act in the framing narrative and the second half of the narration, which spits about fifty-fifty between the two.

There is a scene in here, the first of two within three stories, where a callous use of power causes carnage in a public space, killing families and children, which is something that hits a raw patch in me, more than ever since being a teacher and now a father. This probably colours my opinion somewhat, and is part of the reason that I couldn't get into Amy (renamed Abby to avoid confusion with Amy Pond) and Zara's spin-off series, Graceless. Zara is simply put an unlikable character, and while The Prisoner's Dilemma provides a good description of how she became that way, I am ultimately not interested in her story after this.

That being said, as a start of darkness this is an excellent story, in which Zara's malformed callousness provides a chilling juxtaposition to Ace's eternal optimism and selflessness. Aldred, as ever, brings an energy to the role which defies the years since first appeared in Dragonfire.

Next up, Anneke Wills' Polly takes to the stage of history in the Second Doctor play Resistance. 

Start to Finish: 3.07 - The Transit of Venus

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

In the fifth of the First Doctor's Companion Chronicles, it is the turn of William Russell's Ian Chesterton, science master and future headteacher of Coal Hill School, to take up the narrative, in Jaqueline Rayner's The Transit of Venus.

When the Doctor tries to eject his unwanted passengers, Ian and Barbara, the resulting misunderstanding leaves Barbara and Susan trapped in the TARDIS and thrown overboard, while Ian and the Doctor are taken aboard the Endeavour, bound for the southern oceans under the command of Captain James Cook. But Ian begins to suspect that all is not right, as the ship's scientist, Joseph Banks, begins acting strangely.

The Transit of Venus is the first Companion Chronicle to feature a purely historical story - although it teases at the pseudo-historical - with no science fictional elements apart from the TARDIS travelers themselves. It casts Ian out of his element - in order to provide access to the stories, Barbara was the historian and Ian the scientist, but Ian is lost without Barbara to give him context - and also focuses - as did Here There Be Monsters, although that to a lesser degree - on the relationship between the two teachers, which has become the OTP of early Who.

Russell provides another splendid First Doctor, an Ian Hallard's Banks is by turns warm and creepy, as required. The story is an oddly minimalist one, and with no chases or fights and a wealth of historical detail, it belongs squarely in that very early era of Who when the remit to inform was still a driving force.

Now, if I am honest I am not a huge fan of 'celebrity' historicals; I find that the story ends up constrained by the need to preserve historical adherence. As it goes, however, this is a good example of the subgenre, focusing on the historical second-fiddle Banks instead of the more famous Cook. I was also, and remain, disappointed that the ship sailing to Australia for the transit of Venus wasn't the one that carried my great-great grandfather a century and a half later, but that's not really anyone's fault.

Hardcore SF next time, with a Seventh Doctor story featuring Sophie Aldred as Ace in The Prisoner's Dilemma.

Start to Finish: 3.06 - The Darkening Eye

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

 For the sixth release of the third series, The Companion Chronicles revisits an era not of Doctors no longer available, but of companions. This Fifth Doctor adventure features Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, in the period when the Doctor also traveled with Tegan and Adric, played by Janet Fielding and Matthew Waterhouse, both of whom had at the time ruled out ever returning to the roles, although both of whom have now recorded audio plays for Big Finish.

On board a crippled starship, the TARDIS crew encounter the sinister Dar Traders. The traders salvage the dead, and they have a peculiar interest in the Doctor. Yet they may not be the greatest threat present, as Nyssa and her comrades encounter the immortal assassin Damasin Hyde, who also has an interest in the Doctor.

The framing narrative of Stewart Sheargold's The Darkening Eye is superficially simple, picking up an older Nyssa working to cure Richter's Syndrome, as per her departure story in Terminus, albeit with something of a twist ending.

The story itself revisits a number of ideas from the original series - Damasin Hyde's capsule is made from dwarf star alloy, first seen in Warrior's Gate and making a guest appearance in The Family of Blood in the new series; Adric's non-human biology; and the strange abilities of the Trakenites - as well as tying into Big Finish's own The Death Collectors. It skirts the borders of the mystical in that way that a lot of material involving Nyssa does, positing a technology that borders on magical.

Having worked with Peter Davidson on numerous audio plays, Sutton catches his tone well without attempting to mimic his voice, and invokes Tegan and Adric convincingly. Derek Carlyle plays the terminal patient she is speaking to, as well as the wheezing Dar Traders. The Traders are wonderfully sinister, but Sutton matches them with the silky, amoral poise of the deadly Hyde.

There is a lot going on in The Darkening Eye, almost too much, as a bloody planetary war slides by almost unnoticed, but the meat of the adventure is good. It works better in the claustrophobic confines of spaceships, the close nature of the story losing something in the open sweep of a planet surface, but the core story is tight and effective.

A bit of a blast from the past next time, as The Companion Chronicles assays its first pure historical, as William Russell's Ian Chesterton recounts how he almost saw The Transit of Venus.

Start to Finish: 3.05 - Home Truths

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Some statistics about The Companion Chronicles. Of the 83 audio plays, 3 do not include the Doctor at all, while 25 feature the First Doctor and his companions. The Second and Third Doctors get 17 and 18 each (including one of the specials, which they share) and none of the later incarnations get close. Episode 3.05 is one of the cool kids, a First Doctor adventure by Simon Guerrier called Home Truths.

Sara Kingdom travelled with the Doctor only briefly before she died. In one of their journeys, they encountered a house in Ely, where two people had died in mysterious circumstances. Centuries later, an officer is sent to ask after a strange story, a tale of supernatural occurrences in a guest house in Ely, run by a woman named Sara Kingdom.

Sara Kingdom presents an even more difficult prospect for a framing narrative than Jamie and Zoe, as the third of four classic TV companions to die during their travels with the Doctor. The result is a slightly unsettling narrative with an open conclusion, in which 'Sara' is revealed to be effectively her own ghost. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the melancholy air of the earlier stories is here in spades.

It's hard to say, given how little of the original material remains, how well Jean Marsh recreates Sara Kingdom. Her additional voices are quite close to her own, with just a trace of distinction, but that actually makes a great deal of sense in context. The narrator Sara is old and tired, and the story's force is not in mimicry but in the emotion she invests in the other characters. Niall MacGregor's Robert is present only in the framing narrative, but provides a good foil for Marsh's Kingdom.

Home Truths is an interesting expansion on a pretty sparse chapter of the Doctor's story. In many ways, it is hard to judge it alongside the series, but by its own lights it is a powerful, effective SF presentation.

Next up, The Companion Chronicles goes modern, as Sarah Sutton narrates the first 'active' Doctor story in the range, a Fifth Doctor adventure through The Darkening Eye.

Start to Finish: 3.04 - Empathy Games

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Back to the Fourth Doctor, back to Leela of the Sevateem, and back to scribe Nigel Fairs for episode four of series three, Empathy Games.

Pax Majorica, the capital of Synchronis, is a closed environment, free from crime, violence or want, and yet no sooner have the Doctor and Leela arrived than a vicious animal attack leaves Leela in hospital and the Doctor in an apparently self-induced coma. While she waits for the Doctor to wake, Leela is invited to take part in the Empathy Games, an annual hunt, but is the event more than it seems.

This play has perhaps the most existential framing device to date, as Leela - now alone in the Z'nai prison, with her guards and their race now wiped out by the virus she carried, kept alive only by their torture machines - recounts a tale to a crying child who is in fact her own younger self experiencing loss for the first time.

The story itself is equally existential, with the Empathy Games framed as an annual sin-eating for the society of Synchronis. It's a story about fear, and about responsibility, and shows a Leela who is beginning to know that she should not kill in first resort. it follows in the path set by The Catalyst in establishing Leela's path from savage to an enlightened being. In the first play, she showed her defeat of the fear of death, in this she confronts her fear of isolation.

Interesting side note, Empathy Games was released less than a month after the first publication of The Hunger Games, which also features a public spectacle of battle, contestants standing on a ring of platforms and genetically engineered animals with the faces of the competitors. Synchronis is well named.

Louise Jameson's Doctor-voice is developing, with Tom Baker's darker and warmer vocal traits now coming through well, and her secondary voices are excellent again. Our extra voice is a treat this time, with the superb David Warner as the ever-so-sinister Coordinator Angell.

Empathy Games develops the story of Leela, which was so nearly finished in The Catalyst, and does so with assured panache. Fairs shows a strong grasp of Leela's character, and of the Doctor.

It's the weekend now, which means family time, so next week, we'll pick up with another for the First Doctor, as Jean Marsh brings short-lived companion Sara Kingdom back to life in Home Truths.

Start to Finish:3.03 - The Doll of Death

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

For now continuing to work through the Doctors in numerical order, series 3 continues with Marc Platt's The Doll of Death, with Katy Manning narrating a Third Doctor adventure as Josephine Grant.

Time is out of joint, the Doctor declares; events are running backwards, and soon Jo Grant, Agent of UNIT, is caught up in it all. But why is everything centred on Killebrew's Toy Hospital, and if once dislodged from time, can Jo ever find her way back into it?

Jettisoning any uncertainty as to the era in which it is set, The Doll of Death is as much a love letter to the seventies milieu of the Third doctor's earthbound adventures with UNIT as anything else, with 21st century environmental campaigner Jo Jones - writing up an old encounter on her blog while fighting off a tummy bug - waxing nostalgic for Sergeant Benton's purple flares, dining on unashamedly seventies cuisine with Mike Yates, and eyeing up red, platform boots in Oxford Street. Through this, Manning brings the necessary energy to recreate the young Jo Grant, as well as a host of other voices, including a decent stab at Sgt Benton, the Brigadier and the Doctor. Jane Goddard is suitable creepy as the angry class warrior Mrs Killebrew and her benignly psychotic transtemporal alter-ego, HannaH (as is Manning when jo is under HannaH's direction).

The story leaves a few key questions unanswered, but overall it manages what the best of the Chronicles do; recreating the era and the characters it is portraying, but with bigger and flashier 'visuals' than could ever have been done on television. Also, the repeated use of a flat, echoing 'ma-Ma' from an old doll's speech box is especially creepy.

Next up, we return to Leela's dying moments for The Empathy Games.

Start to Finish: 3.02 - The Great Space Elevator

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Sooner than anticipated (thanks, insomnia!), Start to Finish returns with the second release of series three of The Companion Chronicles, Jonathan Morris's Second Doctor story, The Great Space Elevator.

Landing on Sumatra in the not-so-distant future, the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are captured by the security detail for a space elevator, a marvel of engineering that the Doctor is keen to see first hand. But something is afoot in the space station at the top of the ascender; something that could endanger all life on Earth.

The Great Space Elevator is one of the first Companion Chronicles to feature no particular framing device, just the older Victoria narrating a story, pretty much to herself. The nearest comparison to date is Old Soldiers. It features Deborah Watling as Victoria, one of the more infamously screaming companions, and works well to give her some depth by interpreting her often passive role as the result more of the unwanted gallantry of her fellow travelers than of her own apathy.

Watling's vocal range is impressive, but her Second Doctor has only a touch of Troughton and her Jamie barely an accent. The minor characters are distinct, however. Helen Goldwyn as security officer Tara Kerley has a fairly minor role.

Sadly (or not, as we're ten titles in, so the average is still good) this is the first of the Chronicles that hasn't really impressed me on this run through. The title and setting promise a story intimately associated with the orbital ascender, but the space elevator proves to be largely window dressing for a fairly stock single point of entry invasion story, and the weather control functions of the sky station are ultimately more relevant than the elevator. It isn't a bad story, but there are, I feel, shades of something that might have been more interesting.

Our next port of call is the Third Doctor, and the Companion Chronicles debut of Katy Manning as Jo Grant in The Doll of Death.

Start to Finish: 3.01 - Here There Be Monsters

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd.

With its third series, The Companion Chronicles was expanded, each future series consisting of not four but twelve monthly releases in a round the year schedule. The series also began to feature adventures for companions of the four 'working' Big Finish Doctors, presented in the enhanced reading format. For the first story of the series, it was back to the beginning, with the Doctor's earliest companion, his granddaughter Susan, as played then and now by Carole Ann Ford.

Struck by some great force in the Vortex, the TARDIS, crewed by the Doctor, Susan and reluctant companions Ian and Barbara, lands aboard a spaceship filled with lush vegetation. This is the Earth Benchmarking Vessel Nevermore, and its mission of galactic mapping and navigation could prove the undoing of the universe.

In the framing device of Andy Lane's Here There Be Monsters, an older Susan narrates the story to a voice in her head, that may or may not be the literal remnant of a being she once encountered. The First Mate (Stephen Hancock) is a reflection of the Doctor, a righter of wrongs from another universe seeking to prevent incursions just as the Doctor does, and in a way his influence on Susan to move on with her own life echoes the Doctor's own words at the end of the Dalek Invasion of Earth.

Young Susan's viewpoint is interesting in part for its handling of the difficult interface of the First Doctor with the later mythology of the series, presenting a teenage fascination with the love lives of the adults around her, even as she muses on the fact that she is older than both of her teachers combined. It is the relationships with the Doctor and the First Mate that are most touching, however; her need to care for her grandfather, and vice versa, and the influence of a stranger who understands her only too well.

Ford presents an effective Doctor (like Peter Purves, she makes us of Hartnell's characteristic vocal tics) and a range of other voices, while Hancock's fellow traveller convinces as a slightly warmer and self-sacrificing version of the Doctor; something a little more like the character that Hartnell's time traveller would eventually mellow into.

Here There Be Monsters is another of the Chronicles that I did not rate highly on first listening, but which has grown on me with repetition. There is a lot here to like, from the ambitious story - in broad strokes it fits the First Doctor's era, but with a scope and scale that the budget would never have stretched to - to the character notes.

This month's releases are out now, so it may be a few days before we come back to episode 2 of series 3, when Victoria Waterfield will tell the story of The Great Space Elevator.

Start to Finish: 2.04 - The Catalyst

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd.

The second series ends with Nigel Fairs' The Catalyst, a showcase for Louise Jameson's savage warrior Leela.

The Doctor takes Leela to meet an old friend, and to see his trophy room. Why would the centrepiece of the Doctor's collection be a living being? What really happened to the Z'nai? And what will that mean for Leela in her future?

The Catalyst is easily the darkest of the Companion Chronicles to date. The framing device has Leela, not merely old, but dying, her life - artificially extended by life on the now-destroyed Gallifrey - ebbing away at a year each day; not merely dying, but imprisoned and tortured, yet facing her fate with calm acceptance.

The story within the story is also dark, with hints of the Doctor's past misdeeds in the service of the Time Lords, and a great deal of death surrounding our protagonists. As ever, the companion spends about half of the play apart from the Doctor, and uses this as an opportunity to explore the doubts that Leela has about the Doctor, a man with more life and secrets than her young self could imagine. It is also another claustrophobic tale, the action essentially limited to a single house.

Louise Jameson's vocal range is impressive, although even she struggles to match the Fourth Doctor's depth of tone, and Timothy Watson is by turns appealing and terrifying as the Z'nai.

The Catalyst is the first part of a trilogy of stories told by the dying Leela, and the ending feels like a to be continued, not just for the framing narrative, but for the story itself. It is a good opening, however, and the TBC is compelling enough.

This brings us to the end of the experimental phase of The Companion Chronicles, a mixed bag so far and, interestingly, stronger on re-listening than I had recalled. Next time, we begin the first full series of Chronicles with Here There Be Monsters.

Start to Finish: 2.03 - Old Soldiers

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

In the first series of the Third Doctor's adventures, the Doctor was challenged by his companions in a new way. Liz Shaw was a brilliant scientist, less easily impressed by the Doctor's genius than others had been, but their clashes were moderated by the presence of a mutual antagonist in the military mind of Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. It's sad to think that Caroline John and Nicholas Courtney are both gone now, and pleasing that they were each able to make a final mark on the world of Doctor Who through the Chronicles.

In the aftermath of an argument with his scientific adviser, the Brigadier travels to Schloss Kriegskind to help out an old friend. What he finds there tests him to the limit, and he soon finds himself in need of the Doctor's help; if he will even answer after the business at Wenley Moor.

If Jamie is a character ill-suited to melancholy, the Brigadier was made for it. Narrated by an older, more introspective Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart to a silent, perhaps absent, listener, James Swallow's Old Soldiers is a reflection on the nature of war, and of UNIT's battle against the bizarre in particular. The story is bookmarked by the Brigadier's toast - 'to absent friends; old soldiers' - and offers a rare look behind the officer's mask of certainty.

Nicholas Courtney is not one of the great mimics, but his Third Doctor has just enough of Jon Pertwee's more nasal delivery to mark him. He is assisted by the presence of Toby Longworth in a dual role as Colonel Heinrich Konrad and his second in command Major Schrader.

The story is textbook UNIT weirdness, with ghosts that aren't ghosts and perils that humanity brings upon itself, with a claustrophobic setting and a deeply affecting delivery from Courtney to lend weight and pathos to the proceedings.

We wrap up series 2, and the 'experimental' phase of The Companion Chronicles with Louise Jameson's Leela in The Catalyst.

Start to Finish: 2.02 - Helicon Prime

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

The series 2 Second Doctor story sees Frazer Hines return to the role of Jamie McCrimmon for the first time since The Two Doctors, for a space-bound whodunnit set in the period when he was the Doctor's sole companion: Helicon Prime.

The Doctor lands the TARDIS on Helicon Prime, the ultimate luxury resort, housed in a great space station surrounded by the calming influences of the Golden Section. Nothing bad is supposed to be able to happen here; and then someone is murdered. The Doctor and Jamie, accompanied by singer and sonic sculptress Mindy 'Voir, seek to find out why.

In one sense, this is another of the melancholy Chronicles, as Jamie narrates the tale to a nurse during a brief moment of recollection, but in another it is a much more straightforward adventure story, as Jamie is a character ill-suited to melancholy. In telling a story of his past, he is enlivened by recalling the danger and excitement, rather than purely nostalgic. As with Mother Russia, the framing device is brought in as the denouement for the recalled story.

Frazer Hines provides an impressive set of voices, with a little help from Suzanne Procter as Mindy 'Voir and a few vocal effects for the more alien characters, but it is his performance as the Second Doctor that sells the piece. Hines brings his deep regard for an old friend to the role and recreates Patrick Troughton's tone and intonation to the life, and makes a fine stab at the voice. As in Mother Russia, his understanding of the original actor, coupled with Jake Elliot's script, makes for a truly convincing Doctor.

The story, unfortunately, is less strong than the characters, with the final twist in particular less convincing than it should have been. It's a good romp, however, with a strong collection of science fiction conceits.

Episode 3 of the series brings one of my favourites to the fore, as the late Nicholas Courtney brings the Brigadier's point of view to bear on a tale of Old Soldiers.

Comic Book Adaptation - Not Falling, but Doing

Warning: This post is likely to contain a lot of spoilers.

Say what you like about the yellow spandex, at least you could tell who was
on which side.

"It wasn't like that in the comics" is a common enough rallying cry for the aggrieved geek community these days, but increasingly I start to ask myself if it isn't a good thing sometimes when an adaptation breaks away from the original text, especially in an original text as convoluted as a comic book continuity. After all, it isn't as if the comic books themselves haven't cleaned house from time to time, with either a universe shattering Crisis event or an outright reboot. It's needed too, with the two main continuities - DC and Marvel - each spanning dozens of titles and decades of publishing history, including a lot of highly contradictory, controversial, and on occasion just plain dumb stuff.

So, what change is okay when adapting a comic book for the screen? What change is too much change?

Here's my opinion: Any change is acceptable that is not to the detriment of the characters or story being told by the movie, and which does not alter the characters to the point that the adaptation is in name only.

Some examples:

Complaints about the X-Men franchise are legion: That Storm's claustrophobia was ignored; that Wolverine was too tall; that Magneto was too old. Spider-Man brought us the controversial organic webshooters (and the Amazing Spider-Man was criticised for making them mechanical again). Do these matter?

Well, Storm's claustrophobia, while an important part of the character's personality in the comics, is not intrinsic. The character in the film does just fine without it, and to throw that in would have been a) completely out of left-field for movie viewers, and b) rendered the character ineffectual at a key moment without any build-up. Wolverine's height is the definition of a non-issue, and Magneto's age an unavoidable consequence of the march of time. The nature of Spider-Man's webshooters really only matters in as much as it impacts on his character, although I prefer the mechanical, largely because the 'performance anxiety' jokes about them in Spider-Man II annoyed me.

On the other hand, there are changes that do matter, usually because they make the film or at least the character weaker.

A case in point is the removal of the Phoenix Force from the X-Men movies. I understand why it was done; it introduces a huge amount of backstory that is just too much for a single movie. Unfortunately, the consequence of removing it is that instead of Jean Grey being a woman fighting - with the assistance of her mentor - against the influence of an external force that wants to manipulate her powers for its own alien purposes, she becomes a woman unable to control her own strength without her (male) mentor performing psychic surgery on her without consent. This is not good for her character, and it is not good for Professor Xavier's character; she is made weak, he is made... well, pretty damned evil.

Strong women are the purpose of this post, or a strong woman at least, and a change that ought to have been made.

The Sam Raimi/Tobey Macguire Spider-Man trilogy gave us a Mary-Jane Watson who was feisty, but basically useless. In her place, The Amazing Spider-Man (and II) delivers Gwen Stacy, a brave, brilliant, strong-willed young woman, whose drive, intelligence and courage enable Spider-Man to defeat both the Lizard and Electro.

And then they killed her, because that's what Gwen Stacy does. Gwen Stacy falls, Spider-Man catches her, but she dies anyway. It's how her story ends, because it's how her story ended in 1973.

In this case, in my opinion at least, the film needed to be different from the book. Much of the tension of the films comes from Peter Parker's fears that associating with him will get Gwen hurt, and Gwen's determination that, with or without powers, she is capable of helping him and achieving something important in the world. Having presented Gwen as a strong, smart, competent woman, by reverting to the narrative of 1973 the film then tells its audience that the answer to this dilemma is that no, a woman - especially one without powers - can't be a hero, and that a lover is a burden Spider-Man can not afford to carry.

This is crap.

But what about Ant-Man?

It's 2014 and Marvel Studios have been showing for years with the MCU that you can reinvent your characters and setting in a cinematic form in just the same way, and at least as successfully (given the level of criticism leveled at much of the Ultimate universe and the New 52) as you can in comics. The MCU's Black Widow has yet to succumb to her often terminal early-onset chronic backstabbing disorder, so why must we accept the ugly, wholly-negative assertion that Gwen Stacy was doomed from the start?

Even if it were true that Gwen Stacy had to die - which it isn't - then I still have an issue with how it happened. This Gwen Stacy was brilliant, bold, proactive. She chose to be the one who broke things off with Peter rather than mope after him when he couldn't commit to her. She chose to pursue a bright educational future instead of staying where her ex was. She had conviction enough that Peter was willing to go with her and set an episode of the franchise in London.

Just take a moment to absorb that dialogue before you
decide that this is a sacred moment that has to happen.

And this woman, this incredible woman and amazing, positive role model, because of what someone wrote before I was born, died not doing, but falling. If she truly had to die, this Gwen Stacy deserved to go down swinging, if not defeating the Goblin then creating the opening which enabled Spider-Man to do so. Instead, she fell. From her crowning moment, when she not only helped Peter overcome a problem that had defeated him as a scientist, but then unhesitatingly sent a bajillion volts into Electro and trusted Peter to get out of the way, rather than agonising over how he might get hurt, to her ignominious death as a fridge-bound victim, took less than five minutes. Five minutes to tear down a wonderful, inspirational hero and make her into a damsel in distress.

It's lazy writing, it's against everything the film was building up (and not in a good, twist ending kind of way) and it was done from some misplaced devotion to the continuity of a forty year old comic. Yes, the death of Gwen Stacy was an iconic moment that possibly changed the course of comic book history, but it's not a fixed point that has to happen to every Gwen Stacy, and it should not have happened to this Gwen Stacy; not like that.