Hogan Reviews

So… this was a rare one. “The Imposters”, the latest Third Doctor audio adventure, dropped a week or two ago now and got such universal distain from pretty much everywhere that it put me off listening to it straight away. Normally I’m a “I’ll form my own opinion and check what others said afterwards” kind of guy but in the forums I visit this time opinions were unavoidable and oddly one sided, no “I actually liked it…” rebuttals or anything. Having now listened to all six parts I can say this: Yep! It’s pretty dire alright. Let’s take a look…

The story kicks off with The Brigadier (Jon Culshaw) giving a talk at an all-girls school where The Doctor (Tim Trelaor) soon finds an alien lock picking device in the pocket of a girl called Jessamine Curbishley (Grace Darling) who is the daughter of the minister of future technology. This leads Jessamine to get her dad to bring her to UNIT HQ in order to get it back, which in turn leads to The Doctor heading off to a World of Sport wrestling parody event and stepping into the ring with champion Sam Samsonson (Simon Kane) after he spots him using a “Venusian Kklak” move (okay, that reference made me smirk) while Sarah Jane Smith (Sadie Miller) heads off to investigate a rumoured hidden space radar facility and a UNIT higher up called  General Maupassant (Mark Elstob) arrives for an inspection. It’s not long before The Doctor is presumed dead by Samsonson’s hands and Sarah is being cornered by a group of simple-minded “partially melted” human experiments led seemingly by Liz Shaw (Daisy Ashford). The Doctor revives and soon Jessamine activates some sort of hidden hypnotic command to Samsonson which makes him act like the hulk and smash through a brick wall to make his exit from UNIT HQ. While The Brigadier and General Maupassant deal with that The Doctor heads to Sarah’s location, which makes Liz stop the mutants from killing Sarah as she doesn’t want UNIT attention, but upon meeting The Doctor and Sarah the former tricks her into revealing she’s not the real Liz Shaw at all so she tries to kill them with some sort of laser beam as they escape instead.

On the way out though they’re saved and taken to safety by the real Liz Shaw wearing a literal tinfoil hat, who says that her duplicate can read her thoughts if she isn’t wearing it. While that’s going on The Brig and co. follow Jessamine and her father to another secret facility where they reveal their ability to control the weather by hitting all of the Brig’s men with lightning, before Jessamine uses the same hypnotising trick on The Brigadier. THAT leads to The Brig and Samsonson (who’s still in his black leotard) assaulting the fake Liz’s base in an attack helicopter, soon destroying the facility but just before being killed The Doctor, Sarah and a fake Liz (there is more than one…) get transported away to the planet Centaurus where we find out that the Centauruns have been watching Earth for centuries as their own people have invaded the planet in three groups, the Escilons (fake Liz and co.), the Sinosaurs (Jessamine and co.) and a third faction called Frakture that had already been wiped out, and whoever conquered Earth was then allowed to dominate Centaurus as well, with it all being presented like a very modern and very cringey reality TV show, complete with an OTT female host that tries to interview the fake Liz who has had to concede defeat to Jessamine and therefore give Sinosaurs the win, but things don’t well for Jessamine either due to the revelation that Frakture still exists…

Now, I’m all for imagination in storytelling, but what the hell was this?! It had no flow to it what-so-ever, just random things that suddenly happen over and over while characters act nothing like themselves (and not because they’re Imposters!) like our writer, Big Finish veteran Alan Barnes, has no idea how to write a Third Doctor story or especially The Brig, who spends the story acting like a bumbling idiot for some reason… Even the promised “Liz Shaw meets Sarah Jane!” hook was barely utilised. It’s not “Silurian Candidate” bad, but it’s pretty close. I did not enjoy myself with this one, only the performances off all the mainstays kept me going, so I’ll praise it for that at least…

The Continuity:

Fun cover, if nothing else…. Okay, definitely nothing else.

Nothing really to say here as it doesn’t directly connect to any story.

Overall Thoughts:

“The Imposters” suffers from too frantic a pace, lots of out-of-nowhere “twists”, a whole bunch of jokes that just didn’t land (for me) and some really odd writing of classic characters. I’m absolutely baffled that it was written by Big Finish mainstay Alan Barnes instead of some young writer who had no real experience of the Third Doctor era, because that’s what the story comes off like. Extra annoying since we only get a couple of these a year… Oh well. As I said, I’ve heard worse so I’m not giving it a rare “1” but consider this a very low 2…

As the real Liz wakes The Brigadier with one of her handy tinfoil hats we find out that General Maupassant is actually the last surviving member of Frakture and by outsmarting Jessamine he wins “The Imposters” show and the right to dominate Earth and Centaurus. He reveals an army of knights comprised of clones of himself and begins his plans for Earth, and while The Doctor and Sarah try and rally the locals against their new leader (which doesn’t work) he uses the mental link between the Liz copy (or the Centaurun who made herself a duplicate of Liz, to be more specific at this point) to tell the real Liz and the Brigadier how to control the TARDIS to Centaurus, where after some false endings Liz ends up saving both planets by shooting Maupassant and his knights with a bazooka the Brig had stored in the TARDIS…

Everyone returns to Earth apart from Samsonson, who stays on Centaurus to help present their next TV-show-to-decide-who-rules-them: wrestling contests!