The Ninth Doctor is back and this time he actually has a continuing storyline he needs to tie up! Yes he’s still travelling with Callen and his talking dog Doyle, looking for a place the two can settle, and would you believe he ends up in a place that’s repeating a mistake from his distant past? What are odds?! Let’s take a look!
While the Green Gift comes off better than the two stories that follow it (more on those next time!) it’s still not exactly amazing. The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), Callen (Adam Martyn) and his dog Doyle (Harki Bhambra) arrive on a luscious forest in the middle of a massive spacecraft called “The Greenwood”, which is an ark containing Earth’s species and biodiversity constantly doing a circle until Earth is once again inhabitable. There they meet happy young girl Tay (Maddison Bulleyment) and her non-talking dog as they’re attacked by a suspiciously large maggot. Tay takes them to meet the leader of the Greenwood’s mission Fiacra and this is where the story took a down turn as she is played by Louise Jameson, you know, the actress who has played Leela on a thousand audio dramas at this point and therefore has a very easily recognisable voice? Took me out of the story completely, no matter how much she tried to put on an accent the moment she had to sound alarmed or act possessed (I’ll get to that) she just sounded like Leela. What an odd decision, it’s not like there aren’t enough actresses to go around!
Even though they’re not doing the vinyl releases any more, I’m happy to see individual covers are still a thing for the Ninth Doctor! Hooray! (for now…)
Well, anyway, while The Doctor takes a tour of the ship Callen and Tay head into the woods and find a battery farm full of giant maggots and at around the same time The Doctor hears that the Greenwood has a complete archive of human efforts to create new power sources and one of the ones they went with was the very same one we saw in the Third Doctor classic “The Green Death”, hence the giant maggots. That actually would’ve been a fun and logical way to do a sequel but they sadly went one step further and also reveal that Lee-, I mean, Fiacra is under the control of the B.O.S.S. AI from that story, also somehow recreated from the archives. Tay sets the maggots free but is bitten leading to things looking grim…
The story is … fine. As a sequel to Green Death it works but did we really need a sequel to Green Death? Take away the nostalgic connection and the story is mostly talking, with a lot of that talking coming from someone who is far too recognisable as another character in Who history. Not a great start to the box then…
The Continuity:
The overall box cover, oddly featuring Louise Jameson who doesn’t otherwise appear on this story’s individual cover. I guess they’re trying to catch people out who just see the cover on shelves! Naughty.
This directly continues on from the previous Ninth Doctor audio story “Red Darkness”, with Callen and Doyle still on board. It’s also unashamedly a sequel to Third Doctor TV classic “The Green Death”, the very first Third Doctor story I reviewed on this site.
Overall Thoughts:
While Callen and Doyle are still a really fun pairing and I enjoyed some of the Ninth Doctor exploration at the very end, the story is mostly talking and a lot that talking sounded annoyingly like Leela. A middling score it is.
As you’d imagine the Doctor uses the same archives to find Cliff Jones’ cure for the maggot’s poison in order to cure Tay and then manages to break Fiacra out of the B.O.S.S.’s control, once again wiping it clean off of the local computer systems. He then finds a nearby planet that’s Earth-like and suggests they create a new Earth instead of searching for the original one (as B.O.S.S. had apparently stopped them from finding for a long time now)
In about the only highlight of the story The Doctor is approaching his TARDIS and Tay calls him out on leaving without saying anything to Callen, and that maybe The Doctor would prefer to travel with people. The Doctor refers back to Liv from a few episodes ago saying the same thing but half-heartedly claims to not be ready. He goes into the TARDIS but instead of leaving comes back out happily greeting his friends, only to hear Callen has decided to stay with Tay and help create the new planet. It’s sort of left open as to whether this upsets the Doctor or not, but he gives a talking device to Tay’s dog much like Doyle’s and then heads off, by himself once again. It’s nice to see The Doctor’s loneliness addressed a bit more directly…
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