The first of two Main Range releases this month, neither of which are directly linked to anything. Muse of Fire is definitely the most interesting though, as not only is it a new Doctor / Ace / Hex story, but it sees the return of Iris Wildthyme, and even her panda teddy bear companion… Panda. All this plus 1920s Paris and Paul Magrs at the helm of the script? You know its going to be something to behold…
The last half of the first volume of the New Adventures contains what I feel is the best story of the bunch, and possibly the worst. Well, worst is harsh because it’s still perfectly good, just more generic and predictable than the other three… Want to know what I’m going on about? Read on!
The first volume of the “New Adventures” has arrived! What are they? Well, they’re new stories for the Seventh Doctor and his companions Chris and Roz from the New Adventures books and their relevant audio adaptations. So… new New Adventures, I guess. Either way, I did enjoy Roz and Chris in the aforementioned book adaptations, and if the first two stories are anything to go by, I’ll enjoy these small slices of that era too…
The trilogy originally billed as a “UNIT Trilogy”, but in reality is more a trilogy surrounding tragic UNIT soldier Daniel Hopkins, comes to a close with Warlock’s Cross, a story that also features the return of Big Finish sort-of-companion Elizabeth Klein. So how does the three-part story close itself out? The tone of the story may surprise you…
It’s the last of the trio of companion introduction stories that weren’t actually intended to be companion introduction stories, as much like Flip and Klein before her, Liv Chenka wasn’t conceived as anything other than a one off character for this story. This is an odd one though as Liv would go on to be a companion to the Eighth Doctor, rather than the Seventh, yet this is still her debut story! ANYWAY, as for Robophobia itself, it’s a sequel to Fourth Doctor TV classic “The Robots of Death”, but it manages to avoid the classic sequel pitfall by not just recycling the original but instead building a new story with the materials provided. Let’s take a closer look!
While this TARDIS team has had more misses than hits, The Quantum Possibility Engine is at least a fun story, more comic book silliness (with some actually well-written political satire) than standard Who, and given it has Dogbolter from from comics, that’s a fitting decision. Let’s take a closer look then, at the end of this most recent Doctor-Ace-Mel trilogy…
The debut story of Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor is… not great. While thankfully it’s no Twin Dilemma, it’s a bit of a mess with characters running around seemingly just to eat some screen time up. Still, I don’t hate it, in fact the next two stories are so bad that this and the fourth and final Season 24 story “Dragonfire” look like good in comparison! (though trust me, this isn’t actually good…) Let’s take a look then, at Time and the Rani.
The audio / comic companion intro marathon reaches Hex, one of the best original companions who, along with Evelyn for the Sixth Doctor and Charley for the Eighth, form a trio of great audio only companions during the 2000s / early 2010s for Big Finish. Hex’s arc is long and somewhat complicated, but it’s extremely fun (well, apart from the final trilogy of stories…) so I’m looking forward to one day running through them all again. Anyway! Hex’s debut story, The Harvest, is a great, tense story with the Cybermen being used in a really clever way. Let’s have a closer look!
The latest Main Range release, The Dispossessed, has some good ideas tucked in it somewhere, but much like Paradise Towers that it references so much, the good ideas are buried in a bunch of bad, over-the-top acting and in this case, a really clumsy amount of exposition explained via a simple conversation pattern. More info, you say? Read on!
Elizabeth Klein is one of the odder “companions” of The Doctor. She starts off as an alternate reality Nazi, ends up in our reality, and then… well, lot’s of other stuff, but concentrating on her debut story you’d probably think I made some sort of mistake. Klein’s next three stories form one of the best “trilogies” in the main range, but since this all about debut stories, we have Colditz, one of the earlier stories from Big Finish, but a great little look into all sides of World War II through the eyes of soldiers and inmates of the infamous castle, plus David Tennant’s first Doctor Who role thrown in! Let’s take a look…
Hogan Reviews 