The second three-part story in “Far From Home” is less a “great concept not really well executed” like the previous story and more a “good idea done alright”. It has a greater focus on Naomi at last but all that did was further demonstrate how Eleanor Crooks still doesn’t seem to know how to show a range of emotions on audio, so that didn’t really help things either. Oh well! Let’s take a look and finally put the June Big Finish releases to bed…
The story sees The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy), Harry Sullivan (Christopher Naylor) and Naomi Cross (Eleanor Crooks) arrive on the space station Opis and have a bit of a poke around only for some local robots to shuffle them into evacuation pods because a supernova is on the way to wipe out half of this galaxy. Naomi ends up in one pod first and later The Doctor and Harry are shuffled off, meaning they’re not only split up from the TARDIS (which is still on the station) but each other. Naomi is picked up by a young teen girl called Captain Rocky (Bethany Antonia) and soon meets her all teenage crew, including Engineer Fixer (Nino Furuhata) and finds out they’re essentially a group of kids having a joyride in their parent’s ship that got separated from them during the evacuation. Meanwhile The Doctor and Harry are picked up by their parents, including Queen Maylee (Indra Ové) and Doctor Thorne (Bridgitta Roy), the parents of Rocky and Fixer respectively. The race themselves live for thousands of years but without direct contact with their elders the teens will essentially die instead of growing up.
The Doctor tries to convince the Queen to turn her craft around so he can get back to the TARDIS and save Naomi but given the craft has the last of her kind on it and is barely outrunning a supernova it proves tricky, even when they “touch minds”. Meanwhile Naomi, Rocky and Fixer try and get new parts for their ship but their collective naivety leads to issues and they’re soon left running out of oxygen…
It’s a fine story though oddly it feels like it was a two-parter that had to be stretched as the actual resolution to the story comes near the start of Episode 3 and we’re left with over half an episode of everyone just hanging around and talking to each other, it was very weird…
The Continuity:
Another look at the combined cover. So many hexagons…
Nothing to speak of really. There have been plenty of near-immortal races and ships of teens doesn’t feel like a fresh concept either though nothing spring immediately to mind, but as I always say not having any continuity links is far from a bad thing (well, beyond who the Doctor is travelling with, obviously…)
Overall Thoughts:
Naomi’s Ark is a perfectly fine little story, with some good ideas and turns from guest characters, but Naomi as a character still has no character, nor is she particularly well acted, so it does drag things down a bit. Throw in a weird final episode where it feels like the plot ends with 15 minutes left to go and overall it’s not the best experience, but far from bad. Somewhere in the middle then!
Queen Maylee eventually understands all the information she got from The Doctor and allows him to upgrade their ship, allowing it to dash to the TARDIS and back without putting their race in danger and from within the TARDIS Maylee connects with it and finds the distress message Naomi and Fixer sent out, allowing them to pinpoint their location and rescue them in time. As I mentioned previously this leads to a whole bunch of talking as child reunites with parent and everyone pats each other on the back. They mention that a new award will be named the “Naomi Cross” in Naomi’s honour and ask her to stay but she declines, so The Doctor, Harry and Naomi’s adventures continue on…
Hogan Reviews 