Start to Finish - Curse of the Daleks

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Wrapping up this short run of Start to Finish, we come to the earliest of the Doctor Who stage plays, and the only one to lack a certain something, a certain... how should I put it? Renegade Time Lord. That's right; 1965's Curse of the Daleks does feature everyone's favourite travel machine-bound mutants(1), but not a sign or mention of the Doctor.

Remember, remember the Dalek December,
With Paris in ruins and London an ember.
In times of the future, when fears are abating,
Don't try to forget them, the Daleks are waiting,
Silently plotting, and scheming, and waiting.
Remember.

Fifty years after the devastation of the human/Dalek wars, a series of accidents force the spaceship Starfinder, with a crew of three and carrying two passengers and two prisoners, to make an emergency landing on Skaro. The planet is ordinarily forbidden, but it's perfectly safe. After all, the Daleks were all destroyed or disabled, cut off from the static electricity that they need to bring them to life. Weren't they?

The Curse of the Daleks is a real oddity. In terms of plot is has more in common with drawing room murder mystery than science fiction adventure, with most of the first act devoted to the crew and passengers trying to work out who sabotaged the radio-pic transmitter on the Starfinder. The Daleks only really start putting in an appearance towards the end of the act, and do a lot of slipping in and out unseen, a feature which required adapter and voice of the Daleks Nicholas Briggs to add a substantial amount of narration to the play in order to stick to the mission statement of presenting the work as much as possible as written.

Most of the vanishingly small number of production stills for
the play feature their five Dalek models.

That mission is also the reason that the audio version retains quite so much of the intrinsic sexism of the original production. Of the nine characters (plus Daleks) two are female. One of these is a defrosting ice maiden, the other a scrappy Thal freedom fighter who goes all submissive every time her fiance - the gruffly heroic Ladiver - tells her to do something. The villain of the piece intends to use the Daleks to rule the galaxy, but also finds time to start work on a harem. There is even a painful exchange between Marion Clements and Rocket Smith - a character heavily inspired by Journey Into Space's Lemmy Barnett - on the wonders of twentieth century feminism and the brave new world of the 22nd century, where an unexplained ratio of one woman to every 7.5 men has led to women once again becoming a fragile 'weaker sex.'

The plot is almost insanely convoluted, and relies heavily on chance. As noted above, the first half is like a drawing room mystery, while the second has something of the James Bond about it, with its diabolical reveal and a denouement witha dashing hero rescuing captives from a massive industrial plant. The science is also bollocks, beginning with the Daleks' static electric power supply, to the retrofuturism of miniature tape drives and transistor-based radio-pics, to the claim that water can't boil at light speed, while a fire would rage out of control.

Which is not to say that there is nothing good here. The performances are excellent and the mystery element is intriguing, even if the solution relies on a scifi conceit which would disqualify it under the golden age rules. While flawed, there are also some interesting attempts at world building, including slave trafficking between Venus and Mars and left-hand thread screw tops. The sexism is distracting, not least because of the contrast with modern production values. It would barely have raised an eyebrow in 1965, I'm sure. More than either of the other stage play audios, this one is a curio; a post-facto record of a thing never recorded, notable more for its fidelity than its intrinsic excellence.

(1) And how rare is it that the results of radiation-induced mutation are depicted as hideous and debilitating?

Start to Finish - Seven Keys to Doomsday

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

As the Big Finish adaptations of the Doctor Who Stageplays were released in reverse chronological order, the next one up is 1974's spectacular and well-reviewed bomb, Doctor Who and the Daleks in Seven Keys to Doomsday.

Typical young seventies couple Jimmy and Jenny - she's idealistic, sensitive and compassionate; he's a complete and unapologetic doucheyacht - are about to enjoy an evening at the theatre(1) when a blue box appears on stage and a man staggers out and collapses(2). They help him back into the box, which is of course bigger on the inside, and he regenerates into Trevor Martin.

The Doctor introduces himself, and expains that the Time Lords are steering the TARDIS to the planet Karn, where he was lately shot after finding a shiny crystal. He has to see if he can find more of them, but Jimmy decides that he'd rather stand around in a sulk than either accompany him or wait in the TARDIS, and so would Jenny(3). They are captured by some sort of resistance, let go, run into monsters, escape, find more crystals and ultimately find their way into a series of tunnels under and ancient city. Jimmy gets hold of a gun and starts acting like Dirty Harry(4), but almost gets killed by not listening to the Doctor. Then they find a computer which sounds like Deep Thought and tries to kill them because they are looking for the segments of the Crystal of All Power. Then the Daleks turn up, there's a sort of ghost wizard thing, Jenny is disguised as a Dalek and seems to be blown up(5). At the end, everyone is captured, but the Doctor does a clever thing and it's home for tea and crumpets and Jimmy sneering at Jenny for wanting to go on another adventure with the Doctor(6).

Spectacular!

Overall, I think it's fair to say that Seven Keys to Doomsday (the Big Finish release cuts the title down a bit) is a better story than The Ultimate Adventure, with the only bizarre theatrical conceit foisted on writer Terrance Dicks being the companions planted in the audience, which is extra weird in an audio play, but so it goes. Where Seven Keys suffers thanks to the release order is in the 'Jenny disguised as a Dalek' scene, chunks of which were lifted whole cloth by Dicks into The Ultimate Adventure, only with Zog in the casing(7). The original show was a colossal spectacular which utterly failed to make back its money, thanks in part to overambitious design and in part to the loss of theatrical revenue during the '74 IRA campaign. For all of this, the conversion to audio is much better done here than in the previous release, with a minimum of 'look, the monster has him by the throat.'

Trevor Martin is an excellent alternate 4th Doctor in the role he first played in 1974, although it's interesting to hear people compare that original stage performance to Jon Pertwee. They always say that he seemed much older, but Martin is still performing and Pertwee would be approaching his century if he were still alive, so Martin must be the younger man(8). Jenny is a top-notch companion (played here by Charlie Hayes, daughter of Wendy Padbury who, as well as playing Zoe Heriot, was also the original stage Jenny,) but oh my is Jimmy a man of his time. All that chauvinism that Crystal complains of rather unfairly in The Ultimate Adventure is in full evidence with Jimmy, whose catchphrase appears to be: "Come on, Jenny; we're leaving."

Seven Keys to Doomsday is probably less fun than The Ultimate Adventure, but it makes for a more coherent audio play. Will this trend be continued with The Curse of the Daleks(9)? We'll find out next time.

(1) Exhibit A: Jimmy is delighted to have seats that allow maximum access to the intermission ice creams, because A Man does not like theatre.
(2) Exhibit B: Jimmy does not want to help out, and ridicules Jenny's impulse to do so when he can't talk her out of it.
(3) Exhibit C-J. He does this a lot.
(4) Exhibit K.
(5) Exhibit L: When he discovers that she escaped, Jimmy is more angry with her for scaring him than relieved that she's alive.
(6) Exhibit M.
(7) In addition, the whole crystal segment thing would later be recycled for The Key to Time (although some might say the quest format was reused here from The Keys of Marinus,) and the planet Karn would turn up as a completely different devastated hellhole in The Brain of Morbius.
(8) Wikipedia and the IMDb come up a blank.
(9) Spoilers: No.

Start to Finish - Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

With The Companion Chronicles all relistened to and reviewed for now, I'm going to take a crack at one of the weirder offshoots of Big Finish's audio empire: Doctor Who: The Stageplays, audio adaptations of the three attempts to bring the Doctor to the stage, beginning with the biggest and glitziest of them all, 1989's Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure.

As the Daleks, allied with the Cybermen and a force of space mercenaries(1) plot the destruction of the Earth, the Doctor and his companion Jason are summoned by the British PM, Mrs T, to protect a vital peace conference by safeguarding an American envoy on his visit to a nightclub. It is a mission that will take them and their new travelling companion Crystal across time and space, into and out of deadly danger, in the course of which they will face flying insect people, volcanos, lasers, romances, and songs!

Yes, songs. Buckle up, kids; it's Doctor Who! The Musical.

The Ultimate Adventure and its companions are in many ways a textbook example of why it's not a good idea to directly adapt a stage play to audio, and it's odd that a company so deeply steeped in the medium would include so many clunky 'look at that' lines as they do here. On the other hand, this was a play that was written with an eye to visual spectacle, and too great a concession to the transfer might have robbed it of some of its own charms, and for all its cheesy madness, it is very charming. The plot is bonkers: The Daleks' master plan (not to be confused of course with 'The Daleks' Master Plan',) is fundamentally broken and ultimately fails because the Emperor Dalek couldn't help gloating, and despite the attempts to make their mission feel time critical the whole thing takes a back seat for much of the second act while the story meanders through a series of set-pieces included to please the producer. The performances are mostly sound, although the American envoy couldn't sound less American if he were trying(3) and Noel Sullivan of Hear'Say is about as convincingly French as the cast of Allo Allo.

The original (apart from Colin Baker) stage cast, including Zog the Denebian.

The script was produced in a very short window by Terrance Dicks after then wunderkinds of the TV series Cartmel and Aaronovich turned in an offering that was possibly unfilmable and certainly unstageable. The Doctor was replaced part-way through the brief run due to Jon Pertwee's failing health, with Colin Baker stepping into a role heavier on action and gallantry than his usual metier. Baker reprises that performance here, committing to record a rare encounter with the sonic screwdriver between The Visitation and The TV Movie. As is the case with much of his audio work, he gets a much better crack of the whip than in his TV days.

The companions are a pretty weak pair, with Jason often reduced to comic relief, Crystal to strident fauxmenism (having your female supporting character attack the chauvinist assumptions of the male supporting character is all well and good, but less effective if the female character has been portrayed as entirely superficial, up to and including prioritising her singing career over the actual dead bodies in the room with her.) Both of them also spend a lot of time remarking in clear and specific terms about what everyone can see. The villains are a bit better, with the Daleks and the Cybermen butting heads and a couple of fun mercenary leaders in the gruff Carl and slinky Madame Delilah(4).

There are three songs in the show, of variable quality. Top of the pack is 'Business is Business', Madame Delilah's patter song, if for no other reason than the line 'we always maim to please.' Next is Crystal's nightclub number, 'Strange Attractor'. The first song in the show, it's got a catchy tune but the lyrics are terrible, a salutary warning of the perils of trying to adapt a scientific principle into a 1980s love song based only on its name. Finally, 'Sky High' is notable for being the only one not sung entirely diegetically, and is an eminently disposable not-in-love song about getting snuggly while high on lack of oxygen (I think.)

The Ultimate Adventure is a bizarre gem. I remain unsure if it's any good or not, but I've listened to it many times and it never fails to make me smile. It also comes bundled with a truly fascinating hour of behind the scenes documentaries.

(1) Spercenaries for short(2).
(2) Not really.
(3) He'll probably turn out to be a native Chicano whose accent was garbled through living in New England and France, but he doesn't sound convincing.
(4) A couple of fine, alien-sounding names there.

Start to Finish - 'Second Chances'

Image (c) Big Finish Productions.

The first series of The Companion Chronicles comes to an end in John Dorney's Second Chances, and aptly enough, it's about time.

Memory expert Kym - the same woman who gave her name as Ali in Echoes of Grey - has been sent to try to properly restore Zoe's memories so that she can be of use to the Company. Pain and guilt over the death of a space station called Artemis - a space station currently run by the Company - present a way in and a chance at redemption for a past mistake, but Kym has her own agenda and her determination to skip to the good parts may conceal vital truths.

Melding past and present plots, Second Chances finishes the series with a bravura exercise in unreliable narrative. The War to End All Wars still feels like it would have been a better capstone, but this is a decent way to finish, with Zoe's memory shutting up again in her moment of triumph... unless it hasn't. Emily Pithon's Kym is much more nuanced than 'Ali', bringing a rare poignancy to a largely villainous role.

So, there we have it; The Companion Chronicles from start to finish. Eighty-four tales, some good, others... indifferent. I don't think there are any real failures, but even leaving quality aside the style and tone of the plays vary sufficiently that very few people are going to get on with all of them, although conversely there should be something for most Whovians in the mix. With narrators of varying reliability, and a wide, wide range of framing narratives, including one Companion apparently transforming into a pan-temporal energy being to comfort her younger self before being reincarnated as the imaginary friend of a Victorian child, the series tests the limits of 2-or-3 hander audio to breaking point, and comes up with some interesting - and some very weird - stuff as a result.

It's taken me two and a half years to actually get these reviews out, so I'm in no hurry to leap on to the main range or anything, but I might have a bash at reviewing some of the other limited collections; perhaps the stageshow adaptations...

Start to Finish - 'The Elixir of Doom'

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

A double-bill of Katy Manning in the penultimate installment of the original Companion Chronicles, as Jo Jones (nee Grant) joins trans-temporal adventuress and habitual drunk driver Iris Wildthyme on a bus ride to the golden age of Hollywood in search of The Elixir of Doom.

In Iris's rambling way, they begin the search at a party, then stumble into an investigation of the life of horror movie queen Vita Monet, with her five ex-husbands and her five iconic movie monsters. Could she be connected to a lizardman attack on the party, and why is Iris signalling from a movie screen in semaphore to accuse Monet of stealing from her? What is Iris up to if not maintaining the Web of Time and helping the oppressed? And is what is good always what is right? It would all be simpler, of course, if not for the presence of a certain dilettante fop in a green velvet frock coat.

The Elixir of Doom comes off as an oddly damning indictment of writer Paul Magrs' metafictional heroine, whose hard-living, hard-drinking ways are contrasted with a self-confessedly selfish drive to recover the elixir on the off-chance it might let her fight back the years, since she can not regenerate as the Doctor does. Of course, this is complete balderdash, since The Wormery introduced us to Iris's equivalent of the Valeyard, but then again Iris is a woman with at least three mutually exclusive origins. Overall, this is an okay entry into the series, and Iris's 4th wall breaking contributions to the narration aptly and amusingly call into question just who Jo is narrating to in her sections.

Just one more to go then, as the series closes with Second Chances.

Start to Finish - 'The War to End All Wars'

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Far, far from home, Steven Taylor has become a king and now, deposed, lives in a secluded cell. Asked by his sole carer why he allowed the throne to be taken from him, he explains by telling the story of another time, when he was caught up in The War to End all Wars.

The last of the Companion Chronicles to be written for the initial run, this one has a suitable sense of finality to it, as Steven muses on the nature of intervention, and the feeling that led him to leave the TARDIS in the end: The feeling that one could never affect lasting change so long as one were just visiting. His reminiscence of the planet Comfort, where an ancient system drove the innocent descendants of a penal colony to engage in endless, futile conflict with themselves, provides the impetus behind his decision to stay on in the TV story 'The Savages', and later to renounce the throne in favour of democracy.

The War to End All Wars feels a lot like the story that should have ended The Companion Chronicles, although we have two more to go. It's a story about moving on, about making a lasting place, as many of Steven's Chronicles have been. It also cleaves tightly to the original format of the series, a companion telling a story, and it makes a solid bookend opposite Frostfire.

Still, it's not the end, and indeed at the last it isn't even the end of this story, finishing on a cliffhanger picked up when the Chronicles restarted in 2015. Still, for my current purposes there are two more to go, and next week Jo Grant and Iris Wildthyme meet an unexpected Doctor in The Elixir of Doom.

A Brief History of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

The shiny brass plaque of
professionalism.

"Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."

- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
In his brief half-century of life, the writer Douglas Adams produced both less than one might imagine given the depth of his influence on western SF culture, and more than a lot of people know. A good fifty percent of his actual published writing and at least ninety of his enduring legacy is encompassed by the multi-media, multi-canoned Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy franchise, and a good deal of the rest (of the former, if not the latter) by the two novels and incomplete fragments of the third in the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency series.

An odd beast, the original novel is a mash-up of two Doctor Who scripts - Shada, which was never completed due to industrial action, and City of Death, which was filmed in Paris as a cheap holiday for the cast or something and is remembered as one of the all-time classics - with all-new characters save only for Professor Chronotis, an eccentric and possibly immortal Cambridge academic whose rooms are in fact a time machine. Central to the narrative is Dirk Gently - originally named Svlad Cjelli - a self-styled holistic detective whose method of solving crimes by seeking the interconnectedness of all things closely resembles a mixture of grotesque emotional manipulation and dumb luck. He returned in a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and a third novel, The Salmon of Doubt was at the work in progress stage when Adams died, although it is telling of the weight of his own legacy that he had expressed doubts as to whether it wasn't actually another HitchHiker novel.

Thus the entirety of the Dirk Gently series was a pair of modestly received novels with way, way more ideas than either story or character. Not to say that they were bad, although in truth I've never got on with Adams' novels as well as I have his screen and radio writing; something about the pace of reading makes the flaws in his characters - and especially his female characters, although fair play, Kate Schechter in Tea-Time is one of his better efforts - that little bit more glaring perhaps.

The Electric Monk is one of many key concepts dropped from
most other adaptations.

It took a long time for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency to get adapted, but by heck it's making up for lost time now. First up, namesake Dirk Maggs came off his adaptation of the remaining Hitch-Hiker novels on a high and went straight into producing a radio adaptation of the two novels starring Harry Enfield as Dirk Gently (and the late Andrew Sachs as Professor Chronotis, which is slightly disconcerting as he played the villainous Skagra in the audio revival of Shada, who murders that version of Professor Chronotis, a retired Time Lord.) Debuting in 2007, twenty years after the publication of the novel, to a mixed reception, I personally felt that they did an excellent job of capturing the feel of the novels, and in fact it was only on listening that I really understood how the end of the first novel worked(1).

It was intended that the same crew would then tackle The Salmon of Doubt, but for Reasons(TM) it never happened. Either causally or consequentially, Dirk Maggs left Above the Title Productions to found his own production company, and I guess that Above the Title was left with the rights to the third series, but not the driving force.

The property then languished for all of two years, before BBC4 hit us with Dirk Gently, a pilot for a proposed series starring Stephen Mangan as Gently. This series departed dramatically from the novel in a number of ways, not least by making the bemused everyman character Richard Macduff almost as much of a dick as Gently himself, as well as removing Professor Chronotis, the Electric Monk and about eighty percent of the hardcore weirdness and front and centering Gently's secretary's pathological fixation on her employer in a way that, astonishingly, resulted in a worse-written female character than the one in the novel. There was also a bleakness to it that seemed at odds with a certain sense of wonder, or at least the search for wonder in a life that insists on making marvels commonplace, that feels key to Dirk Gently as a character.

In the series Dirk Gently, Dirk Gently runs a
holistic detective agency.

Once more speaking purely from my own perspective, I was not a fan of the pilot, although I felt that the series was improving before it got canned after three episodes, pulling in ideas from the two novels and removing some of the antagonism from the Macduff/Gently relationship to make the characters a little less abrasive. The overall response was positive, but not enough for BBC4 to overcome the BBC's natural and deep-seated aversion to producing non-Doctor Who SF programming. There's something fundamental in the BBC psyche that seems to insist that SF and fantasy programing is intrinsically silly and shouldn't be taken seriously, with the result that the Corporation produces almost nothing in these fields that is not on some level parody, and if it does will ensure that such programmes are derided as 'trashy fun' at best in their official listings magazine.

But you know who isn't ashamed of making SF? That's right; America. Thus it is that Dirk Gently has been exported, courtesy of IDW Publishing, who began running their Dirk Gently comic strip in 2015 and collaborated with BBC America and Netflix to bring him back to the screen in 2016, this time played by jobbing thesp Samuel Barnett. It is notable that in both media, Gently remains unassailably British (of possibly Transylvanian extraction,) although they are set in the US. Apparently something about the character resists characterisation as anything but a middle-class white Brit. Fair play, Barnett manages to combine wholesome and creepy to great effect. The rest of the cast are right at home in the new territory, however, and the original supporting cast are gone along with the matching plots.

That hair though...

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is an eight-part serial, in which Dirk teams up with Todd, a downtrodden bellhop played by Elijah Wood, to investigate the murder of a billionaire, the disappearance of his daughter and all manner of associated weirdness. It has time travel, body-swapping, gunfights, a holistic assassin who follows the same pattern of beliefs as Dirk, but is possessed of a deep certainty that the world guides her to kill those who need to be killed in some way, and a shark in the body of a kitten. Once more then, the original story is jettisoned, and the writing style is sufficiently different to that of the original that it is really glaring when they drop in something lifted directly. The series casts Gently as one of a number of individuals with a unique and erratic connection with fate, which is rarely of any great advantage to him, but which he hopes may be of help to others. He's younger in spirit and less cynical than earlier incarnations, with his constant manipulation due more to deeply flawed social skills and possible autistic tendencies(2). Todd is an intensely dislikable character, which provides little contrast with Gently, but is worked for an effective antagonism as both work towards their eventual redemption.

Of course, I'm not sure that redemption really suits Gently; it sort of hinges on a sense of shame that the original character certainly never showed much sign of, given his struggles with guilt in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I'm also dubious as to whether British absurdist SF benefits from gun battles, and vice versa. I didn't hate the series, but it feels as if - and the same is true of Dirk Gently - it's not actually Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency so much as a very different thing using a lot of the same ideas.

In the series Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency, Dirk Gently does not run a holistic
detective agency.

I miss the original storylines in the TV versions, and what replaces it never has quite the same timbre of weirdness; that is, they're weird, but it's their own kind of weirdness, in an adaptation of a novel whose native brand of weirdness feels at least as intrinsic to the work as any of the characters. Neither series has been terrible, but neither series has been, deep down, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency because neither of them has, deep down, really had a Dirk Gently to its name.

Dirk Gently was born as a human expee of the Doctor, and perhaps as a result is almost as hard to get a solid handle on as the Time Lord himself. It's hard to say why some Doctors work for us and some don't, but we all(3) have distinct ideas about when a Doctor 'isn't quite right'. I'm not sure that there is yet a definitive interpretation of Gently. They all have something, but none of them have everything. Enfield was excellent, but ultimately lacked a final quality of essential vigor, perhaps a consequence of picking a proven comic talent over an untried youth. Mangan's Gently was as coolly manipulative as any Sherlock, but more obsessive in his pursuit of answers than driven by an often-inappropriate joie de vivre in discovery. Barnett's is more of an enigma, even to himself, and probably the most complex of the bunch, possibly even including the novels, which are as I say notable move for complexity of ideas than of character. The thing of it is... Dirk Gently is not a character who is an enigma to himself, at least not knowingly so. Anyone who can pursue investigations by following random strangers and have the neck to charge for it can't be consciously harbouring any serious doubts as to their calling.

For myself, and for what it's worth, I would rate the various media as follows:

1. The radio series. I like audio, and I like Adams on audio especially.
2. The novels. I know it may be sacrilege, but see above re me and Adams' novels.
3. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
4. Dirk Gently. 

(1) It helps to know that 'Kubla Khan' is a fragment, but Adams himself has admitted to not being able to quite fit the end together when he went back to it.
(2) It's not explicit, and there are few people - even fewer in fiction - who don't fit one or more criteria or definitions of autism.
(3) All encompassing here the particular subset of Doctor Who fans.

Start to Finish: 8.09 - 'Starborn'

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

With just four more entries to go in the original eight season run of The Companion Chronicles, it's time perhaps to think about where I might go next. I'm pondering working through the main series, but I don't have all of those on MP3 having bought them back when Big Finish was CD only. Maybe I'll tackle the cancelled Tomorrow People series.

Anyway, back with the Chronicles and it's another First Doctor adventure featuring Maureen O'Brien as Vicky in Starborn.

After a brief sojourn on early 20th Century Earth, Vicky finds herself locked out of the TARDIS and is approached by Madame Violet, a medium who claims that there is a spirit who wants to talk to her. The spirit claims that she is Vicky, that if she enters the TARDIS she will die, very soon and far in the past, but that she has a means to ensure that it does not happen.Vicky is skeptical, and wants to know what happened, and as Spirit Vicky tells her tale, all may not be as it seems.

While it features a well-flagged reveal and a decent twist, Starborn suffers somewhat from the relatively modest length of the Chronicles audio plays, which prevents it effectively building up Spirit Vicky's friendship with one of the local characters. Establishing BFF status feels like it needs a little more work than they are able to give, which also robs the denouement of a little punch. Overall it's a good story, however, with a unique framing narrative.

Next, we have the last First Doctor story in the series, as Steven Taylor tells us about The War to End All Wars. 

Start to Finish: 8.08 - 'The Sleeping City'

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

We begin the run down to the end of this particular project of mine with The Sleeping City, the first of three First Doctor stories in a row and the last of this original run to feature the voice of William Russel as Ian Chesterton.

Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright are in trouble, suspected of being Communist spies who helped to spirit a mysterious teenager with a fake ID out of the country. To convince the authorities of their innocence, they will need to substantiate their claims of time travel, so Ian suggests that they each tell the story of Hisk - a world on which the population engaged in shared dreaming, but were stalked by harbingers of death - and the government agents holding them can compare notes.

The Sleeping City rocks the concept of a critically flawed Utopia which has inspired so many Doctor Who - and other - stories. In this case, it's a central control system that commits horrific acts in order to maintain their society's perfection. So far, so seen it before, but without wishing to spoil anything for the fraction of a percent of my small number of readers who might be teetering on deciding whether to buy these audios, this one has a pretty decent twist to it (as well as a weirdly meta scene in which dream versions of Ian's fellow travelers complain in Russell's version of their voices that he can't get their voices right.)

Out next story is Starborn, with Maureen O'Brien giving proper voice to Vicki.

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.

Start to Finish: 8.06 - 'The Dying Light'

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

It's been some time since the Doctor left Gallifrey. Susan has been left on Earth and his old body finally gave out, but the TARDIS is still with him as he, in his second incarnation, accompanied by Jamie and Zoe, reach the mysterious Sanctuary in The Dying Light.

The Sanctuary is a vaguely religious community housed in the carved caverns of a vast mountain, which floats in a sea of sand. Its members were all washed up by the vast storms which rage across the planet, a dying world orbiting a dying star. The leader of this community is the Abbot, a man whom the Doctor knows better as Quadrigger Stoyn. He has been preparing a trap for the Doctor for man, many centuries, determined to find his way home, but the very world that has supported his endeavours may yet harbour a secret that will thwart them.

Narrated by Jamie, with Zoe as a second voice - a requirement which ensures that the inevitable explanation of technical matters is done in voice, Zoe to Jamie, rather than in narration, Zoe to audience - the second part of the Quadrigger Stoyn trilogy combines the trap narrative with a classic mysterious structure tale, with the ancient mountain city of the Sanctuary naturally proving far more than it seems. It's a stronger entry than The Beginning because it is more consistent, and maintains the theme of order (as represented by Stoyn) vs. chaos (as embodied in the Doctor.)

And this momentously brings me to the limit of my previous experience. Next time, we'll cover the double length conclusion of the Stoyn saga, with Lalla Ward and Juliet Landau (yes, that Juliet Landau) as the Second and Third Romanas in Luna Romana.

Start to Finish: 8.05 - 'The Beginning'

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

For the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who, Big Finish had a series of event releases, including the 11-part Destiny of the Doctor, a series of three stories for the main range Doctors all set in 1963, the multi-Doctor extravaganza The Light at the End, and a trilogy of Companion Chronicles which began - aptly enough - with The Beginning.

The seditious, disruptive troublemaker known as the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan are pursued by the Chancellery Guard into the workshops beneath the Capitol, where they steal a derelict time ship and flee the stifling confines of Gallifrey. Unfortunately, they are not alone on their conveyance. They have unwittingly dragged a technician named Quadrigger Stoyn with them, and when they encounter an order-obsessed race seeking to seed and control life on a planet called Earth, the Quadrigger might just decide that blood is less important than order.

Told by Carole Ann Ford as Susan, and with veteran audio man Terry Molloy as Stoyn, The Beginning was a bit of a disappointment for those hoping for a definitive account of the Doctor's previous life on Gallifrey, but it did provide another link between the Big Finish continuity and both the old and new TV series, with the Doctor bringing the Hand of Omega aboard the TARDIS after a brief, offscreen consultation with the time-shifting Clara. It also drops out travelers in to the origins of life on Earth, providing a vague rationale for the ship's fascination with that world.

The Beginning is a decent story, but probably the most underwhelming of the Big Finish anniversary entries. The fact that it leaves Gallifrey so soon and offers a first adventure only thematically linked to the reasons for the Doctor's departure are ballast that the story itself - given barely an episode and a half to itself - fails to overcome.

Start to Finish: 8.04 - Ghost in the Machine

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Jumping ahead after our First Doctor double bill, we go to the Third Doctor, or at least his companion Jo Grant, in Ghost in the Machine, written by Jonathan Morris and directed by Louise 'Leela' Jameson. Damian Lynch provides able support to the inimitable Katy Manning.

The Doctor has wandered off while Jo was checking out the TARDIS wardrobe, only to turn up comatose in a sealed complex full of skeletons and weird sounds. On his body is the TARDIS log recorder with a note saying 'use me', so Jo does. As she begins to learn what happened from a recording made by Dr Ben Chikoto, however, Jo realises that things are not quite right. Recordings are not quite true to their original, and something else is present on the tape; something sinister and powerful in search of a voice.

I missed a trick listening to this on the way into work instead of the way home. In the dark. The conceit of recordings that change beach time you play them back, and which begin to answer when you talk to them is creepy as hell. There's something wonderfully Sapphire & Steel about the whole thing. Manning and Lynch each have to cover a range of voices, with both actors playing both Jo and the Doctor at points, and do so superbly, and the story does something that Big Finish have always done well by toying with the possibilities of the audio format.

Next up, we kick off the Chronicles fiftieth anniversary trilogy with the First Doctor and Susan in the aptly named The Beginning.

Start to Finish: 8.03 - Upstairs

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Rounding off a double dose of Doctor Number 1 - and he's back after the next story - our trip through the Companion Chronicles brings us to Mat Coward's claustrophobic Upstairs. The play is narrated by Maureen O'Brien's Vicki, and has no other voices except for Peter Purves providing the voice of second companion Steven.

The TARDIS materialises in an attic in London in the late nineteenth century. A little exploration reveals that it is part of a vast network of rooms, with no stairs down and a serious fungal infestation. Then they try to find their way back, and realise that they are moving in time as well as space, through a near-infinite complex of identical rooms in the attic spaces of Downing Street. That would be bad enough, even if they weren't sharing the space with a conspiracy of deferential servants intent on moulding (sorry, not sorry) a pan-temporal fungus into the God-Prime Minister of the Eternal British Empire.

Yeah, so this is a weird one. Not The Time Vampire weird, but definitely off-kilter, with its time fungus and wacky conspiracy of the self-loathing servant classes. O'Brien and Purves bounce off each other nicely, and the Doctor is done well, deep in his most know-it-all phase. The opening half is more effective than the latter, with the claustrophobic reveal of the infinite attic working better than the sinister servants, who are a little too reflexively deferential to be truly menacing. As so often has happened, I found it better on a re-listen than I remembered it being.

Next up, Jo Grant is a Ghost in the Machine. As we close in on the end of the series, I begin to ponder tackling some of the other Big Finish releases, not least to keep getting my money's worth from them. Perhaps the main range, as far as I was able to stay up to date, or maybe the also-finished (rather abruptly) Tomorrow People audio series.

Start to Finish: 8.02 - The Alchemists

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

We're going back to basics for the next Companion Chronicle, as the Doctor and his granddaughter pay a visit to Earth's history in The Alchemists.

The TARDIS puts down in 1930s Berlin as the Doctor searches for somewhere to hide the Hand of Omega, and the Doctor is immediately distracted by his desire to visit one of the struggling city's famous colloquia and speak to the great scientific minds of the day (even if he does know their theories are bunk.) Unfortunately, his appearance carrying a bag of gold from his travels draws the wrong kinds of attention, and soon Susan is on her own, trying to trace her kidnapped grandfather in a city where she had no friends.

Framed as a letter from Susan to Barbara to explain why she wants someone there to look after the Doctor if she ever leaves, The Alchemists is a fairly simple story, which ends with Susan pointing a gun at someone, which is pretty left field. It's also another pure historical, resisting the urge to drop aliens into the setting of Secret Hitler, instead choosing to use spies as the enemy and a real-world scientific cul-de-sac in place of alien tech.

Don't worry; next time we'll have weirdness, in the First Doctor story - and I believe this is the first time we've had the same Doctor twice in a row, although I could be wrong - Upstairs.

Start to Finish: 8.01 - Mastermind

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

The final season of the initial run of Companion Chronicles begins with a return to the UNIT Black Archive and its custodians, Captain Ruth Matheson and Warrant Officer Charlie Sato, joined by the totally surprising antagonist - or perhaps villain-protagonist - of Mastermind.

Deep beneath Gateshead, something is stirring. A grandfather clock chimes midnight, signalling that the Prisoner, the most dangerous artefact in the 'Museum of Terrors' is about to wake up. For Ruth and Charlie this means that they will have the chance to talk to, interrogate, and try to recruit the most dangerous being on the entire planet, the Gallifreyan supercriminal known only as the Master. They want to pick his brains, he wants to control theirs, and before they are finished, we'll learn a little bit more about everyone.

In a clever reversal, Mastermind brings back non-Companions Ruth and Charlie, and as in Tales from the Vault they are both the protagonists of their own little bottle episode and the audience for the main Chronicle, as they seek to learn how the Master came to be discovered in a sealed penthouse apartment in Las Vegas. Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso are once more solid support, but the star of the show is Geoffrey Beevers, if not the most prolific Master (four episodes on TV and a couple of dozen on audio compared to Roger Delgado's 43) is the longest running, on and off from his debut in 1981.

The story plays with the idea of the Master, not as a diabolical pantomime villain, but simply as a highly effective criminal mentalist; and of course as an unreliable narrator. After all, how can you trust anyone who uses a phrase like 'deathworm morphant'?

From the present to the past, and from science fiction to historical, we move on to the First Doctor story The Alchemists.

Start to Finish: 7.12 - Council of War

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Action! Adventure! Romance! The oft-overlooked quiet man of UNIT is back, as John Levine performs Council of War in the character of sturdy, dependable bringer of tea, Sergeant John Benton. Sinead Keenan provides backup as Kettering Councillor, Margery Phipps.

A series of ghost sightings and a mystery disappearance attract the attention of the Doctor, and with Mike Yates laid up it's down to Sergeant Benton to go undercover at Kettering Town Council's Christmas Dinner and Dance. Here he meets militant enviromentalist councilwoman Margery Phipps, who turns out to be the target of the abduction attempts, as the inhabitants of the planet Kettering want to put her on trial for laying out the principals of pacifist, environmentally sensitive government which created their civilisation and then left it vulnerable to the depredations of ravening star groaties. It's up to Benton to form a ragtag band of pacifists into a convincing fake militia, and Margery to inspire them to put off the coat of non-violence and stand up for what is right.

With only a brief appearance by the Doctor in the final act, this is another two-hander with no particular audience, although I find I mind less. Perhaps that's because so much about it is new: New old companion, and a wonderful mix of James Bond espionage and civic bureaucracy. There are some awkward spots as Benton clumsily negotiates the unfamiliar waters of 1970s feminism, but all in all the leads complement well, and the story is a delight. It's almost a shame that the Doctor has to show up and hog the glory in the end, but I guess it is his series.

Another short break now, before I come back and take a swing at the eighty and final season of the original run of The Companion Chronicles, beginning with Captain Ruth Matheson and WO Charlie Sato of UNIT, as they face off against the totally and one-hundred-percent surprise antagonist of Mastermind.

Start to Finish: 7.11 - The Apocalypse Mirror

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

The second half of season 7 of The Companion Chronicles has an odd cyclical quality. Seven and Ten are broadly historical First Doctor stories, each followed by a full-on scifi two-hander for Jamie and another Second Doctor companion, and a virtually solo mission for one of the Third Doctor's mob. This is the middle part of that cycle, with Jamie and Zoe recounting the tale of The Apocalypse Mirror.

The TARDIS makes an emergency landing in the last city on Earth, after an accident with a football (that damages the TARDIS, rather than destroying the other cities.) The population is dwindling and lives in fear as the city stagnates around them and their neighbours are periodically swept away by robot birds with built-in teleporters. Zoe discovers that there is a meteorite on a collision course with Earth, and then vanishes herself, and the race is on to find her, and solve the riddle of the visions of another, better city which periodically appear, before the city is destroyed for good.

The Apocalypse Mirror, like many two-handers (including The Flames of Cadiz and House of Cards,) lacks a true framing narrative. The two Companions are just telling a story, and it's not clear to whom, if anyone. The story itself has an intriguing conceit, but for my money the best Companion Chronicles manage to be more than just short-handed audio plays and make active use of their format.

It's arguable whether the last entry in season 7 does that, but on the plus side it's an entirely new voice for the Chronicles and for Big Finish, as John Levine returns to the role of Sergeant Benton, for Council of War.

Start to Finish: 7.10 - The Library of Alexandria

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

William Russell bolsters the old retirement fund again this time out, with stealth pseudo-historical holiday story, The Library of Alexandria. Susan Franklyn adds everyone's favourite science martyr of the ancient world to the mix.

The TARDIS crew opt to take a break at the famed Library of Alexandria, with Ian joining the Library Guard to pay for the others' keep. Barbara gets pissy when Ian starts hanging out with rock star Alexandrine academic Hypatia and the crew get ready to leave before the historically vague destruction of the Library, but things go a little awry when a stock of smuggled books is found to include a modern-style bound volume in an alien language, and its owners decide to avoid messing with history by stepping on the city of Alexandria.

The revelation that this is a pseudohistorical comes a bit out of left field, with the set-up being a standard historical holiday story and leaning heavily on a Big Finish favourite, the relationship between 'good friends' Ian and Barbara. Slightly clunky writing - unexpected from an old pro like Simon Guerrier - and perhaps a slightly off-base delivery makes Ian come off as a bit clueless and Barbara as a little too catty. I suspect that she is genuinely supposed to be upset because Hypatia presages the fall of the Library, rather than because the head of the Neoplatonist School is getting her claws into Barbara's man. Honestly the Mim are a relief from this brief digression into soap opera, although a twist more apt to the modern series than the First Doctor.

Up next, yet another double act, as Jamie and Zoe relate the events of The Apocalypse Mirror.

Start to Finish: 7.09 - The Scorchies

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

What price quality television? It's a question that Jo Grant must ponder when she finds herself on air. Live from Television Centre, it's The Scorchies Show!

There's a new show storming the ratings, an addictive blend of puppets, music, slapstick and alien mind control that's taking over the world, and that's just to begin with. The Scorchies are a race reduced to mental patterns and trapped in the bodies of puppets, but that hasn't stopped them leaving a swathe of destruction across civilised, television-watching space. Now the Doctor is missing and only Jo stands between these malevolent Muppets and the destruction they crave. She'll have to dig deep if she's to stop them, as well as singing a song, telling a story and making a thing.

One of the things that The Scorchies reminds us is how difficult it is to get a parody of the Muppets spot on. It's not a bad effort, but probably better in itself than as specific parody, and the Magic Mice in particular feel far more like anarchist rebels against the Mouse Organ of the state than anything Henson. Of course, it is also reminiscent of Angel's classic 'Smile Time' episode, which aired almost a decade before this audio play was I AM SO OLD.

Ahem.

Yes, there's definitely something of 'Smile Time', just with aliens instead of demons, but by focusing on the show itself instead of behind the scenes the presentation is entirely different. It's a fun and slightly sinister entry in the series, and old hand Melvin Hayes turns in a range of creepy puppet voices, with a few more from Katy Manning.

Back into history next week, as The Companion Chronicles salutes the show's very first ship as it calls at The Library of Alexandria.