After breaking for a few weeks to allow for the July releases, it’s time to finish playing catch up with this year’s Fourth Doctor Adventures! The Haunting of Malkin Place is an interesting story, dealing with both traditional ghost tropes and locations, as well as the old spiritual vs. science, but also deals with PTSD and the horrors of war. It’s a concept that could easily have fallen apart, but manages to instead hold together and tell a really good story. Let’s take a closer look!
Classic Doctors, New Monsters Vol.2 comes to a close with the Eighth Doctor still avoiding the Time War, but ending up in a space station full of Vashta Nerada! It’s kind of a shame that my first McGann audio is this far into his life, there are so many great audios with him that have appeared over the last decade and a bit to cover for the blog! ANYWAY, this is a good little survival horror story with some nice ties to both the Time War and the War Doctor audios. Let’s take a closer look!
Classic Doctors, New Monster Vol.2 rolls on and reaches the Sixth Doctor and his chosen “New Series” monster: The Carrionites. Now, I have to admit, I don’t remember much about them, other than they appeared in “the Shakespeare one”, so this really felt more like a bonus Sixth Doctor story, though towards the end there are at least hints as a stronger connection to the new monster’s first appearance than the others… Let’s take a look!
Classic Doctors, New Monsters Vol.2 moves forward into the Fifth Doctor era as the Racnoss make their appearance. Unlike the Tenth Doctor TV episode, this sees The Doctor end up in the heart of the Racnoss Empire itself, and tells a good one hour story in the process. Let’s have a closer look!
The long awaited release of the second volume of “Classic Doctors, New Monsters” arrives and opens with a really enjoyable near-hour of the Fourth Doctor finding out the previously-thought harmless Vashta Nerada can turn bad and watch people be stripped to their skeletons in a abandoned fun fair… It’s just as fun as it sounds! Let’s take a closer look…
This month’s main range audio is the rather Douglas Adams-y titled “The High Price of Parking”, though the actually story is less Adams-y, though very few if any story are… Anywho! It’s a fun story in places, but also a pretty generic one, once you get past some of the sillier story beats and setting, it’s pretty run of the mill stuff. Ah well… Let’s take a closer look!
The sixth series of Fourth Doctor audio Adventures continues and reaches a rare high point. Dethras is an great story, uses its runtime perfectly and does a few new and / or interesting things among a generally good Doctor Who story. This is Adrian Poynton’s first story for Big Finish, and I certainly hope it’s not his last. Let’s take a closer look!
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The Doctor, Romana and K9 arrive in 20s Hollywood, with the transition between silent and “talkie” films in full effect. This story plays with the concepts well, but I can’t help but feel in a few weeks time I’ll have forgotten about it. It’s one of those Fourth Doctor Adventures stories that just isn’t very memorable. Not bad, not great, just… alright. Let’s take a closer look to see why…
Sontarans! Zombies! … Zombie Sontarans! The Eternal Battle is certainly an odd story, but not in a bad way. It takes a possibly over-used classic villain (in recent Big Finish history, anyway) and at least puts a bit of an interesting slant on them. Let’s take a closer look…
After playing catch up with the Main Range, it’s time to do the same with the Sixth series of “Fourth Doctor Adventures”, which kicks off with this story featuring the return of Jago and Litefoot, as well as the general Victorian London theme that is… well, overused, let’s be fair. Still, a lot of fun interaction between the lead cast make this a fun, if not particularly memorable, audio story.
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