In the second of a strange makeshift “Seventh Doctor travelling alone meets a renegade time lord” trilogy, The Psychic Circus is actually, as you’d imagine, far more a prequel to the McCoy TV story “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” than it is anything else, which is fine if you have a fond attachment to the serial… me? It’s alright, but did I need a two hour drop of backstory? Let’s find out!
I was really looking forward to this release. As you may know from previous reviews here, I love The Eleven, he’s always good fun, and to see how he got captured before the opening to Doom Coalition was exciting. Then they throw in an older Ace, which is an interesting new string to the Doctor Who bow, and man… Really excited. *sigh*… A shame really…
So this past Sunday’s new Doctor Who was the first half of a two-parter, so … here’s a new Doctor Who review anyway! Yes, Season 26 was released on Blu-Ray a few weeks ago and so it’s time to review a story from the set, in this case: The Curse of Fenric. Set during WWII, with priests, soviet soldiers, weird vampires and Lovecraftian all-powerful ancient beings (and tentacled ones, too!) it’s quite the story. Somehow though, it all comes together in the end! Let’s take a look!
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 first two stories in this “Mags Trilogy” scored a three, then a two. Does story number three hold up any better? Well… no, not really. After the disaster that has been the Ace/Mel stories, these have sadly continued the trend of poor Seventh Doctor audios, which is a shame because that particular Doctor used to be the highlight of the Main Range. Well, let’s take a look at this one, anyway…
Last month’s Monsters of Gokroth was an average affair, but did at least give us a new combination of Doctor and companion thanks to the reintroduction of Mags… sadly, Moons of Vulpana is, well, not very good. A not very interesting setting full of incredibly dull characters that you don’t even remotely care for, this is not worth going out of your way to track down… Let’s have a closer look anyway!
It’s time to finish catching up (pretty much) with the Titan Comics releases by covering “Year 3”, starting with… a story that came out at the end of the run, but as it stars the Seventh Doctor I thought I’d read the stories in Doctor order, rather than release order. Operation Volcano shares a lot of similarities to the Third Doctor Titan story I raved about last year, especially with accurate drawings of the lead cast, but does the story hold up on its own? Well…
This is what happened a few months ago: Big Finish – “Hey, Mags is back for a new trilogy with the Seventh Doctor!” Me – “… Who?” Yes, I didn’t recognise the name, and even when someone said it was the werewolf girl from “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy”, I thought “Oh her… right. Okay then?” Still, as unnecessary a reunion as it is, has it produced a great story? Not really, but it did at least give off a fresh feeling, hearing the Seventh Doctor with a companion other than Ace is a rare thing, if nothing else. So let’s take a deeper look into the Monsters of Gokroth and see where this new trilogy could lead…
Original Sin introduces us to Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej and is an adaptation of the novel of the same name from back in the 90s “New Adventures” range. Given their final stories haven’t been adapted into audios I wasn’t going to include them in this marathon, they’re really Book companions rather than Audio or Comics, but Big Finish have started releasing new, audio only stories with The Doctor, Chris and Roz so that made them… straddle the line. Given their intro story has been adapted into audio though, I thought it’d be fair game! So let’s take a look!
Unlike the next story in the Audio / Comic Companion Debut marathon, this novel adaptation certainly makes sense in the audio category as Bernice Summerfield has made more audio appearances than she did during her initial novel run. Love and War is suitably dramatic and does a great job of introducing Benny, but the main thing was a rather nasty turn for Ace that sees her leave The Doctor is a huff… So let’s take a look!
Hogan Reviews 