The second story of the latest Fifth Doctor boxset sees the return of the “Dream Crabs” from the Twelfth Doctor Christmas Special “Last Christmas” as well as a couple of audios a year or two ago, and its safe to say that there really isn’t anything new you can do with them beyond repeating the same story beats from their first appearance. Most returning monsters you can put some sort of spin on but here its more dreams within dreams sequences and fake-outs, with only a little wrinkle in why they are where they are. Still, unoriginal as it may be, what was it like to listen to? Let’s find out!

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The latest Fifth Doctor boxset continues the trend of well written genre pieces with “The Merfolk Murders”, a great example of Doctor Who doing the classic “whodunnit?” story, with a 1940 Scottish historical setting to finish it off. In fact this is a full-on historical in that beyond our time travelling protagonists there are no sci-fi elements at all. So let’s take a look at this murder mystery and keep in mind that the spoiler section is perhaps more important than ever in terms of not looking at it if you intend to get the most out of the story!

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The Quin Dilemma, as well as being one letter away from an entirely different and rather ruder dilemma, is a celebration of forty years since the Sixth Doctor made his debut, which you could probably guess given the title is also a play on his first story, which was frankly awful but at least this was really good! It’s set out with a framing device episode, then a single part story, then a two part story, then another single part story before everything comes together for the sixth and final part, but it’s all so strongly connected that it didn’t make sense to break this into four or five reviews, so… let’s take a look!

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We cap off the Classic Doctors, New Monsters: Broken Memories boxset with this two-parter that oddly starts with the Eighth Doctor and then concludes with the Seventh, but then when they key monster’s power is to remove themselves from people’s memories whenever they look away it’s not hard to grasp how they’d use the idea! Sadly the story suffers from some extremely cartoony voices that rob a lot of scenes of any drama, but at least they use the “Silents” really well, even including some of the convoluted lore to boot. Let’s take a look!

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The next story in the latest “Classic Doctors, New Monsters” box is our second of three new Sixth Doctor releases this month and in this case features the duo of The Doctor and Mel coming up against the Clockwork Droids, so much like the previous one not super-exciting on the surface but even more than the last one writer Jacqueline Rayner took the simple enemy concept and ran with it, creating a genuinely fun and interesting story. Let’s take a look!

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The latest “Classic Doctors, New Monsters” set has arrived and with it the first proper original Fourth Doctor / Sarah Jane solo story, which is nice as Sadie Miller does such a great job with her mother’s role. Sadly, I guess, the villain of this story is the Harmony Shoal, the brain-looking aliens from the rather weak “Return of Doctor Mysterio” Christmas Special. Can they be redeemed?! Well, no… they’re just your standard body-stealing parasite sci-fi cliché, it’s hard to do anything too original with them, but at least you can craft a fun, if not predictable, story though…

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The next Sontarans vs. Rutans story has a lot in common with the first one as it also uses a Doctor / companion combination we haven’t heard from in a long long time, in this case the Sixth Doctor and Charley, back when she thought the Eighth Doctor was dead and ended up travelling with an earlier incarnation. This works out well as she now has prior knowledge of Sontarans and Rutans so the whole “she can’t let on how she knows this stuff” plot works well. How is it in general though? Well, let’s take a look!

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The “Storm of the Sea Devils” boxset concludes with this entirely Sea Devil-less two parter that more than most stories really suffers from not having its own cover… Well, anyway, as with a lot of the under-one-hour stories there isn’t a lot of time to get know new characters which is why this story very cleverly focused almost entirely on the TARDIS team themselves. Let’s have a look…

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This year’s Fourth Doctor series finally gives us the debut of the Harry Sullivan / Naomi Cross duo that has had adventures after their time with the Fourth Doctor already released, thanks to the Fourth Doctor stuff being banked so far in advance. In their further adventures I’ve been critical of Naomi being really plain and her actress not emoting very well, and unsurprisingly I can’t say she started off great and got worse, let’s put it that way. Oh well, what about the rest of the story? Let’s find out!

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