Start to Finish: 7.08 - House of Cards

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

The eighth installment of 'season 7' of The Companion Chronicles takes us to a space casino in the distant future, with ophidian gangsters and deadly games in House of Cards. It's another two-hander, with Anneke Wills' Polly and Frazer Hines' Jamie splitting narration duty and no additional voices.

Visiting a high-tech casino in space, the TARDIS crew become separated among the bright lights. Surrounded by slot machines and snake-headed, 20s-style gangsters with laser Tommy guns, Ben is lured into gambling beyond his means and Jamie is distracted by a pretty face. Polly, meanwhile, stumbles into a time-travel swindle, and finds herself with no more than half an hour in which to keep Ben from being forced to play the deadly Game of Life, prevent the Doctor being arrested for one bit of time travel he didn't do, and elude the clutches of the sinister casino boss Fortune.

House of Cards is a decent time twister let down by its run time, which forces slightly too rapid a resolution and leaves Fortune altogether too mysterious for her own good. She is apparently some sort of psychic vampire, but we never see anything to indicate that this is harmful to her patrons, except via the very direct means of the Sidewinder Syndicate and the Game of Life. For an example of a similar concept done exceptionally well, I would point to Big Finish's own The Veiled Leopard, a fun crime caper set in the 1960s Monte Carlo, with two sets of Companions instead of active mid-story time travel.