Hogan Reviews

While less “Tenth Doctor, Classic Companions” and more “David Tennant and whoever else is available with recording equipment because it’s the pandemic” this boxset still appealed to me, I do like it when “Classic Who” meets “New Who”, but I have to say these two stories did not live up to expectations. “Splinters” had a fun twist that I saw coming and generally felt a bit too close to some other recent stories, and “The Stuntman” was just plain weird, and not in a good way. Oh well! Let’s take a look…

“Splinters” is yet another in a recent run of Doctor Who stories that offer a more fantasy, fairy tale slant on things as it focuses on the Spriggan that comes to take children away when they reach a certain age. We hear Peter (Joseph Millson) and Jessica Kelly (Scarlett Courtney) get visited by the creature on the day of their daughter Kathy’s birth, with Jessica resisting it and ending up killed for it. Flashforward many years and its nearly time for Kathy to be taken so the whole town has been united to fight against it by Leela (Louise Jameson). Meanwhile The Doctor (David Tennant) finds a floating K9 (John Leeson) in space who is searching for Time War damage so they go off on a hunt together, first arriving where Leela is and joining in the defence against the Spriggan (whose actor I haven’t given away for a very good reason!) There are some good scenes between the two but the big twist was overly foreshadowed and in the end their meeting wasn’t really a meeting… see the spoilers for more details!

As for “The Stuntman”, it’s just… odd. The Doctor arrives on a movie set to meet rising stunt performer “Kasey-Ann Frost” who is clearly Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) and her protective father is “Kent Novem” or, you know, K9. So it’s obvious who they are but equally obviously confusing as to what’s going on. Sadly the mystery is lost in clichéd characters and too much focus on the early days of movie making, plus villain Dr. Gommen (Jon Glover) chews the scenery bit too much for my liking, and I normally like a good bit of cheese in my villain. I’ll explain further in the Spoilers section but generally not only is it not very entertaining but Nyssa and The Doctor barely meet which is odd given the title of the story…

The Continuity:

While it can sometimes look stunning (especially with the War Doctor Begins range) this is another example of the painted covers just looking… ugly. I think its all the brown and runny effects, which was unpleasant to type let alone look at!

Not much to say directly here, as neither story directly connect to anything other than (sort of) having old companions in it. Nyssa’s story is clearly set in between her two stints with the Fifth Doctor as she is travelling on her hospital ship with the robotic Sisters. Apart from that though, nothing really.

I will say though that Big Finish has done “fairy tale monsters come to life” a bit too much recently, especially with Ninth Doctor audio stories “Station to Station” and “Break the Ice” both featuring the same kind of villain as the Spriggan. Funny how that can happen sometimes.

Overall Thoughts:

“Splinters” is fine, it has a good twist even if its easy to see coming but its otherwise a pretty generic “under siege” story with a villain archetype we’ve heard from a lot recently, and while I appreciate what “The Stuntman” was trying to do I just didn’t connect with it and found it quite dull. Add in that neither story really fulfilled the “Tenth Doctor, Classic Companions” idea and it was a bit of a disappointing start to the boxset…

Splinters:

The Stuntman:

So the big twist in “Splinters” is that the Spriggan is a corrupted alternate universe version of The Doctor and that this Leela is his equivalent Leela rather than the actual one. Sadly, while he does do a good fantasy villain voice it was still pretty obvious it was David Tennant voicing the villain and along with things Leela was saying made the revelation, well, less revealing. The Spriggan is stopped and this Leela stays behind in the odd pocket dimension they found themselves in, so technically The Doctor didn’t even meet his old companion in this story at all!

“The Stuntman” on the other hand it’s revealed it was all a virtual reality created by Gommen using discarded Time War tech that Nyssa was joined to after she tracked down some mentally-drained husks on her travelling hospital ship.. K9 hacked into the machine to try and save her (hence his materialisation as her father figure) and eventually The Doctor went in as well. They soon break down the walls, nearly lose her (and K9) to the false reality, then eventually manage to break Nyssa free, destroy the machine and take care on the real world Gommen. The Doctor and Nyssa say a few words in reality to each other, so once again it barely lived up to the name of the set and generally I didn’t find it very engaging.