Time Apart is taking advantage of creating a new period where the Fifth Doctor is travelling by himself and giving us an anthology of four short stories. The release gets off to a great start with the first story, but then it all becomes a bit… mediocre. Wasted potential? Maybe, but by how much? Let’s find out!
While I’ve finished playing catch up with the Doctor Who Audios, I just need to quickly run down the stories featured in the Graphic Novel “Ground Zero”, but as each story features a different Doctor I can’t group them up, so there may be a bit of a comicathon coming up!
Curse of the Scarab is set during that rare period of Fifth Doctor and Peri, a period that TV-wise was just two stories long, and also features the return of the Orsiran race. These were probably unique things back in the 90s, but Big Finish and Titan Comics of recent years have put an end to that! Let’s take a look anyway…
The Lost Stories make an unexpected return this month (as in it was unexpected when it was announced months ago…), starting with Nightmare Country, a Fifth Doctor story that was proposed for Season 21 but deemed too expensive to produce. This audio adaptation proved not only fun to listen to, but also… not really sure how it would have been too expensive, honestly. Either way, let’s have a look at Nightmare Country!
Going into this final release in the most recent Fifth Doctor Main Range trilogy I was expecting to like Conversion more based on the synopsis, but it actually ended up the other way around. That’s not saying the latter story was bad, and in fact the end scene was brilliant, but … well, let’s save the specifics for the actual review, shall we?
The Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa, along with their new companion Marc, have their first two adventures as a quartet, and sadly the two stories in question are rather unremarkable. Not bad by any means, but not very memorable. One of those “middle of the road” things, where you won’t remember them in a month or two’s time… Oh well, let’s take a closer look anyway!
Our second main range story of the month (yes, I’m aware it’s now October, so technically last month, but it’s been a busy time for me…) sees us jump backwards to the Fifth Doctor during his time with Nyssa and Tegan. The trio end up at Cicero’s villa and end up getting caught up in all sorts of Greek myths, and in the end, is that… a new companion?! Let’s find out!
To celebrate 20 years of making Doctor Who audios, Big Finish released a special, roughly six-hour story titled “The Legacy of Time”, and now I’ve finally found the time to finish it, I can say it was a fun collection of stories, but was definitely just that. There wasn’t much of an over-arching plot, which is fine, it’s just different to what I was expecting. Let’s take a closer look!
The Kamelion Empire is a story of two very clear halves, one is a moody tale going into the unique and interesting history of Kamelion’s people, and the second half a generic run-around with a very one-note sneering villain. The problem comes from the fact that this is supposed to be one story, not two like last month! Still, does the good outweigh the predictable? Let’s find out!
The first ever Big Finish story starring Kamelion is now in the books, meaning this second (and third, I guess) story in the run has a little less intrigue around it, and if anything highlights a potential flaw in writing for the character: originality. Both stories once again feature Kamelion being influenced by another powerful mind, the only real plot point he had on TV, and a plot point from the previous audio story… Still, are Black Thursday and Power Game still worth listening to? Well…
The 2019 run of Main Range stories kicks off with a first for Big Finish, despite celebrating 20 years with the Doctor Who license this year: Kamelion! The silver robot whose prop creator sadly passed leaving no one able to actually use the thing, so it was swiftly written out of the TV show… hooray? Well…
