Hogan Reviews

The latest series of Fourth Doctor Adventures continues with a doubly timely appearance of the Celestial Toymaker, after the character appeared in the TV series last year and the character’s debut story having just been completed with animation (the next Who review I’ll be getting to after this boxset, for the record!) both of which weren’t known to the writers when this was written/recorded a few years ago. The Toymaker appeared in one of my all-time favourite audios in “The Magic Mousetrap” so I had my fingers crossed we’d get another good one. Did we? Well…

The story starts off focusing on a famous toymaker and boardgame creator called Charles Pearson (Robbie Stevens) and his daughter Etta (Venice Van Someren), as the latter wants to play with her father but he’s too busy, just handing her a prototype to play with by herself. This leads to her hearing voices and vanishing without a trace, her own voice lingering in certain parts of the house for months after. Eventually Charles hires spiritualist Madame Bisset (Annette Badland) but as she arrives so too does The Doctor (Tom Baker), Harry (Christopher Naylor) and Naomi (Eleanor Crooks) thanks to the TARDIS being pulled off course. The Doctor has a bad feeling about the whole thing while Harry and Naomi begin to hear the same voices in the attic, then during a seance Bisset is soon possessed by the Celestial Toymaker himself, leaving The Doctor to face-off against his old foe while Charles, Harry and Naomi have to play a very real version of one of Pearson’s old board games, having to find specific items in specific rooms under rather unfavourable conditions…

At only two episodes long it’s not going to get too deep, but thankfully it’s also not going to drag on too long like the original Toymaker story (again, stay tuned for that one!) despite taking the same format of the Doctor and the Toymaker talking and having their own game while the companions play a bigger-scale game of their own. Charles and his daughter are pretty much the only other characters thanks to the Toymaker speaking through the other, and their simple busy-father/lonely-daughter relationship is easy to follow, so it works well really, though at the end of the day it doesn’t do anything new or interesting with the concepts on offer either.

The Continuity:

What’s that? You thought this story had The Master in it? No, I’m afraid it’s another case of the “one cover for all three stories in the set” problem…

As mentioned a few times now, the Celestial Toymaker first appeared in the First Doctor TV story “The Celestial Toymaker” before reappearing on TV in the Fourteenth Doctor TV story “The Giggle”. He has made several appearances on Audio and in comics in the years in between, the character saying here that he is meeting the Doctor out of order, confirmed by the fact that he mentions being stuck in a timeloop by a future version of the Doctor, a reference to the Sixth Doctor Lost Story “The Nightmare Fair”.

Other than that though, no continuity beyond featuring the Harry and Naomi duo.

Overall Thoughts:

“Matryoshka” is a perfectly fine two-part Toymaker story, following familiar beats from his other appearances with little deviation, but avoiding a lot of the duller pitfalls that some of the character’s longer appearances fall into. Harry and Naomi get a lot of scenes together but I’m still not really feeling the duo, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point (especially as these stories were recorded before the ones I heard originally…) so overall it was a good, if not spectacular, story.

The Doctor manages to help Harry and Naomi free Charles’ daughter from inside a titular matryoshka doll and the two run off happy, but the whole game was a trick to back the Doctor into a corner and expose him to a deadly element that begins aging him to death. As Harry and Naomi follow The Doctor’s own cryptic riddle to save him our titular Time Lord has one final game with The Toymaker: pass the parcel, which the Toymaker cheats at by duplicating himself. Naomi and Harry manage to crack The Doctor’s code in the TARDIS and arrive in time to save him from aging, while The Doctor himself tricks The Toymaker into shrinking himself to look inside a small model and then sealing him away. Very odd ending, but whatever!