Connections is the latest Eighth Doctor stand-alone Liv & Helen set and it’s a mixed bag, but while the standout story is the next one these two stories are perfectly fine. Here Lies Drax is a fun comedy and Love Vampires is a pretty standard space station under siege story with a bit of an emotional twist. Neither will blow you away with originality, but both will keep you entertained for an hour, so let’s take a bit of a deeper look.
I was looking forward to “Here Lies Drax” because I loved “The Trouble with Drax” also written by John Dorney, but I was somewhat disappointed because it felt like one of those sequels that just copies what made the first popular rather than doing some new with the material. Still, the first was fun and that does mean this was also enjoyable, and that’s better than a lot of stories that come out and are copies of boring things! The story starts with The Doctor (Paul McGann), Liv (Nicola Walker) and Helen (Hattie Morahan) receiving a package from Drax and an invitation to his funeral and despite the package being full of junk and smelling a scheme they attend anyway. There they meet Captain Miles Rozann (Jeff Rawle), Mimi (Nina Wadia) and Stern (Hugh Ross), all of whom want to make sure Drax is actually dead due to him screwing them over or being a money-dodging ex.
Sure enough The Doctor soon bumps into Drax himself (Shane Richie) and he finds out that his old school friend is on the run from the “Quantum Assassin”, the only person who can overcome Drax’s ability to be paradox-free when crossing his own time stream, and soon three Valtrassi assassin arrive to do the deed and take the contents of the package Drax sent. This leads to a fun run around as they visit each of the three funeral crashers and find out why they hated Drax and if they knew anything about the mysterious package that Drax refuses to talk about. It leads to a fun finale, but one that you knew the major reveal if you’d listened to the previous Dorney Drax story. Still, the character is a good laugh…
“The Love Vampires” is an isolated space station under siege story but with vampires who manipulate their victims by appearing before them in a mental vision as their first love. It’s a somewhat original concept, or at least its an original mix of elements anyway. The people of the space station only have numbers as names, which made me laugh given how unmemorable and disposable they are in the long run. For example Three (Jamie Zubairi) crumbles to dust when Fifteen (Holly Jackson Walters) stakes them in the heart in one scene… hmm, these character will stick with me for a lifetime! Anyway, all three of the main cast see visions of their first loves, Helen gets bitten but Liv is snapped out of it moments before it could happen. With Helen’s life on the line The Doctor hatches a plan that involves him intentionally calling out his stalker, taking the form of a Time Lady called “The Realist” he apparently loved, in order to stop them…
The Continuity:
Nice cover, especially next to the previous one… that being said it technically has very little to do with these two stories (beyond the main cast, obviously!)
Beyond Drax, who first appeared in the Fourth Doctor TV story “The Armageddon Factor” and later in the Fourth Doctor audio “The Trouble with Drax” there isn’t really anything to link this to anything else, which to be fair in the MO of these standalone boxsets!
Overall Thoughts:
While I enjoyed “Here Lies Drax” more than “The Love Vampires”, neither were standout stories I can see myself wanting to listen to again, not because they’re bad just because they’re not particularly memorable and with so, so many Doctor Who audio dramas to chose from these just won’t stick out.
In terms of “Here Lies Drax” the obvious twist was that the three funeral crashers were all incarnations of Drax and the three masked Valtrassi assassins were also incarnations of Drax (in fact, the same three) and the whole thing was a scam. That being said I liked the twist that the Drax who was with The Doctor and co. was actually the Quantum Assassin who was pretending to be the thought-to-be dead Drax in order to get his hands on the package The Doctor had, which turned out was a key to enter a vault with a vast fortune but really it was a plot to trap their foe in a “Schrödinger cage” so Drax could rid himself / themselves of the one assassin who could track them down and kill them. The money was real by the way, but the Draxs used nearly all of it to buy the locations and identities for their other selves to make the trap convincing, not to mention the cost of the cage itself. Like I said, it was fun, but it did feel remarkably similar to its predecessor.
As for “The Love Vampires” The Doctor’s plan works, the nearby star goes supernova and the flash of super-bright sunlight kills all the vampires in time to save Helen. For the record “The Realist” didn’t exist, it was something The Doctor made up to manipulate the Vampire but not but himself at risk, something he could do due to his Time Lord brain. So no big revelation about The Doctor’s past here!
Hogan Reviews 