Hogan Reviews

“The Doctor and Carnacki” is a three-story anthology release featuring the Seventh Doctor meeting Thomas Carnacki at three points in his life, an interesting concept… if you’re familiar with Carnacki. Sadly I wasn’t, and in looking him up I was surprised to find that he is actually a fictional character from the early 1900s but unlike say, Sherlock Holmes who is fictional within the Who-niverse Carnacki here is just a regular character. I mean, whatever, makes no difference to me (literally!) but it was an interesting choice. Sadly though my complete lack of knowledge or enthusiasm for Carnacki kind of cuts the whole possible excitement of this boxset in half and so I just get a trio of Seventh Doctor stories with no catch, but did I get a GOOD trio of Seventh Doctor stories? Well…

The first story in the set is by far the least memorable, sadly. “The Haunter of the Shore” sees The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) arrive at an old manor house where the grieving widow Rebecca Firle (Caitlin Joseph) has been under attack from a combination of ghostly incidents and has already hired a young ghost expert in Thomas Carnacki (Joe Jameson) to help her out. The incidents are some mysterious voices in the library and… a swirling vortex of death that strips people down to their skeleton. So one is a bit more of a pressing matter than the other, and after The Doctor, Rebecca and Carnacki all meet for the first time and have a chat the latter heads down to the lakeside where the death vortex appears to take some readings and gets caught up in the phenomena himself…

The second story is easily the highlight of the set. “The House” sees a now older Carnacki (and therefore now voiced by Dan Starkey) meet his old school friend Arkwright (Harry Hart) who claims in a panic that “The House” has returned. The Doctor overhears this and is intrigued so we get a bit of background via a fireside chat as Carnacki reveals that as a child Arkwright lived near an abandoned house and that the two of them visited it after its wallpaper and furniture began “invading” Arkwright’s life, literally walls and carpets were transforming, cabinets were appearing out of nowhere, etc. Interested in the story The Doctor takes Carnacki back to the house at that time (after the current day version of the house was apparently burned down) and we see that the young Carnacki was so freaked out about the general vibe of the house that he actually burned it down. When they return to the present the house is not only back, but it seems to be spreading itself, and Arkwright, who was left on the TARDIS, has begin to infect even the Time Lord craft itself! A great and unique ghost story, though I do have to mention the attempt at a “delightful cockney orphan child” voice in the opening moments that was among the very worst voice acting I’ve heard in a Big Finish story. Didn’t ruin the rest of the story though, thankfully!

Great cover, especially piecing together a new “TV Movie era” Seventh Doctor image (even if he only looks like that in the final story!)

The third and final story “The Institute of Forgotten Souls” has a much older Carnacki relating the story of the episode to someone else (kind of killing a lot of the drama, but hey ho) and the story in question is set in a special facility for wounded WWI soldiers and has Carnacki be friends with two others also in the building in Sgt. Winston Price (Alan Cox) and Joyce Harrison (Rebecca Crinnion), but all of them are afraid of the mysterious beasts that roam the hallways. The Doctor soon arrives and is confused about a lot of things, but less the deadly creatures and more the fact that Carnacki is alive at all, as it’s apparently 1936 and he knows Carnacki is fated to die on the battlefields of World War I. The explanation for all of this will take you by surprise, only because its so extremely Doctor Who-y that anyone listing because they’re fans of Carnacki will be left head-scratching, that’s for sure.

So over all it’s a dull story, a good story, and a middling story. Nothing bad which is always good, but I’m sure I’ll struggle to remember most of this boxset in a matter of weeks… hell, it’s been a month or so since I listened to it and made the notes for this review and I can barely remember the first story in the set as I write this… (for the record it’s rare for me to leave more than a day or two’s gap for obvious reasons, it’s just been one of those turbulent times recently!)

The Continuity:

Not a lot, honestly. There have been a few sentient houses in Doctor Who, which is funny to think about, like Sixth Doctor audio “The Condemned” and Eighth Doctor classic “The Chimes of Midnight”, but that’s not really what the house from Episode 2 is. There’s also a connection between the final episode in the boxset and the Fourth Doctor TV run of “Key to Time” stories starting with “The Ribos Operation”, but I won’t say why until the spoilers…

Overall Thoughts:

“The Doctor and Carnacki” is a sandwich of great filling with two slices of bland bread, or in other words, Episode 2 is good fun but the stories either side are lacking, either due to being dull and with a lazy ending or just being a weird out-of-place story in general. Oh well, I’ll take average-good-average after the last couple of Seventh Doctor stories…

Episodes 1& 3:

Episode 2:

“The Haunter of the Shore” has the young Carnacki saved by the Doctor and then it’s quickly revealed that the voice in the library is actually a future version of Carnacki and the vortex on the shore is a time-related anomaly caused by some sort of other-dimensional force. The Doctor fixes it with random sci-fi stuff and Carnacki gets an ominous warning from his future self. It’s … not great, the first half of the story is pretty cliché but at least a good example of spooky manor house stuff, but the second half is nearly all sci-fi exposition with little action.

“The House” similarly reveals a sci-fi reason for the spooky goings on in that the titular house was infected by space fungi that tried to blend into its environment by taking the shape of a house and Arkwright being a collector of such things (fungi, not houses…) got infected by it when he was young, spreading the spores to other places he visits. It was Carnacki burning the fungi that stopped it for a while, but it came back, as it often does. The Doctor and Carnacki manage to talk to the fungi through Arkwright and pretty much convince it to stop doing what it’s doing, which it pretty much agrees with little incident. Not a super-exciting ending, sadly, but the build up was good fun.

“The Institute of Forgotten Souls” on the other hand reveals that the institute in question is in another reality completely and that Carnacki was rescued from his death on the battlefield by an agent of the White Guardian of all characters, but this agent was wrong to take him out of his destined death so she “hid him” away outside of time, but was found out. Now the White Guardian sent The Doctor to essentially pick up Carnacki and send him back to his death, something our titular hero isn’t thrilled with. He eventually does so, but swiftly returns back and takes him off to a far away planet where he can live out the rest of his life without the Guardian, or history, knowing that he survived WWI, hence why he can be relating the story to someone else. It’s a very odd story in a set that up until this point felt like a bunch of Victorian-ish era ghost stories, but there you go.