Big Finish

Review: The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Hidden Depths

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Review by Jacob Licklider

If you were to have come to me at the beginning of 2021 and told me that within the next two years Big Finish Productions would have released not one, but seven total box sets with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, I would never have believed you. Yet here we are, over halfway through the second series of Ninth Doctor Adventures from Big Finish Productions and with each passing day I am surprised they keep coming. Hidden Depths is the third set of the second series and like the first two of this series the title is a reference to the major theme of things under the surface both literal and metaphorical that each episode explores in some way. While Back to Earth and Into the Stars were more geographic in their themes, Hidden Depths outside of the first story leans into the lives of their characters which kind of leads to the overarching theme of the set ironically more surface level and not as the previous five sets have felt as sequential adventures under a theme.

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Audio Review: Star Cops – The High Frontier 1

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Review by Ian McArdell

It’s no revelation that I’m a massive Star Cops fan, right back to watching the show go out in the summer of 1987. While it failed to set the television schedules alight, due to a variety of factors including poor scheduling, behind-the-scenes trouble and a chilly climate for science fiction at the BBC, it won me over. The story followed traditional copper Nathan Spring as he was reluctantly transferred to command the fledgling International Space Police Force, known colloquially as the “Star Cops”. Created by former Doctor Who writer and Blake’s 7 script editor Chris Boucher, the show had smart scripts, witty dialogue and a winning cast; set in the near future, it was effectively a police procedural in space (on a BBC budget). While Star Cops only lasted for one run of nine episodes, I was thrilled to see it resurrected at Big Finish in 2018.

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Big Finish announce eight-part multi-Doctor audio drama series celebrating the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who

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Big Finish marks 60 years of Doctor Who with a mammoth eight-part full-cast audio drama series beginning in May 2023.

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Review: Unit Nemesis – Objective: Earth

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Review by Jacob Licklider

As Big Finish retired their 16 episode miniseries for the Eighth Doctor, late 2021 saw the start of UNIT: Nemesis, a revival of their New Series UNIT range specifically chronicling an escalating threat to the planet Earth in the present day. Between Two Worlds began the miniseries by setting up the threat of the Eleven and the arches, Agents of the Vulpreen chronicled the first bouts of violence between Earth and the Vulpreen, and now we have Objective: Earth setting up the conflict for a final resolution in the fourth set.

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New ‘Doctor Who’ companion announced

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The BBC has revealed who will be the first companion to Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor in the hit sci-fi show Doctor Who which returns next year. It was recently announced that the new series will be available to view worldwide on Disney+. Check out the announcement below:

Millie Gibson (Coronation Street) has been announced as new companion ‘Ruby Sunday’.

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Review: Seventh Doctor Adventures – Sullivan And Cross – AWOL

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Review by Jacob Licklider

Harry Sullivan and Naomi Cross have been interesting characters. Harry was a companion of the Fourth Doctor played by the late Ian Marter in Season 12, leaving in Terror of the Zygons with a brief reappearance in The Android Invasion and despite being a companion of one of the more popular Doctors, he only appeared as a companion in a handful of Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures partially due to Marter’s passing in 1986. Big Finish Productions has recently used Harry in stories like Return of the Cybermen and Kaleidoscope casting the wonderful Christopher Naylor in the part. Naomi Cross on the other hand is a Big Finish original companion played by Eleanor Crooks, who also travelled with the Fourth Doctor and Harry Sullivan at some point. I say at some point as the characters haven’t had their technical debut as companions with the Fourth Doctor yet and are not set to release until 2024. Further complicating the characters, they have had appearances in the spin-off UNIT Nemesis in both sets with Naomi to appear in the third set later this month. So, it comes as a complete surprise that the second Seventh Doctor set to be released this year is exploring the Doctor finding Harry and Naomi again in Sullivan and Cross – AWOL. This is set either during or after UNIT Nemesis, the writers aren’t exactly clear on how everything fits together in terms of continuity but this set spends much of its first episode focusing on Harry and Naomi in 21st century London.

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Review: The Eighth Doctor Adventures – What Lies Inside?

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Review by Jacob Licklider

So what happens when your production company switches to a box set structure but doesn’t necessarily have themes for every set?  Well that has been something that the past ten months of Big Finish Productions’ output has been, switching away from numbering their sets as to not overboard potential new listeners with so much content they would have to catch up on.  It is with this in mind that the Eighth Doctor Adventures range was changed from the four box set arc model to integrate it with the other releases which had some interesting side effects.  This meant that this year Big Finish have scheduled four sets featuring the Eighth Doctor, the conclusion to Stranded, the two now standard 3-disc Eighth Doctor Adventures, and a special fourth set featuring Charley Pollard.  The two standard sets were scheduled for the last two months of the year, most likely to have a gap for actual production of the sets, the first being What Lies Inside? released this month while the second, Connections, is out in December.  What’s especially intriguing is that while there isn’t any sort of story arc, Rafe Wallbank crafted connected covers almost reminiscent of the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels covers (Interference in particular comes to mind).  What Lies Inside? is the first set that falls into the category of 2022 sets where each of the stories has been completely standalone, following Silver and Ice and The Outlaws, and like those sets the structure is a two hour adventure and a one hour adventure, though here each episode is an hour long.

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Audio Review: The Confessions of Dorian Gray – The Anniversary

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Review by Jacob Licklider

The Confessions of Dorian Gray is a range from Big Finish Productions which had its start in 2012 using the public domain character from Oscar Wilde’s novel with the premise that instead of destroying the portrait with a knife Dorian kept on living throughout the century.  The range ended after five series in 2016, with an audiobook revival in 2019 reading three unmade stories, a quick free story during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and now one special anniversary release on vinyl, The Anniversary.  Ordering The Anniversary from the Big Finish website also includes behind the scenes interviews, a music suite, and a reading of Scott Handcock’s 2012 story, Gray Matters.  While Gray Matters is a story, it does not share continuity with The Confessions of Dorian Gray and will not be discussed in detail for this review, though I will say it is an excellent piece of short fiction as long as you separate it from the typical continuity due to the characterisation of Dorian as a character being more lonely and detached. Continue reading →

Review: Rose Tyler – The Dimension Cannon – Other Worlds

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

I am by no means a Rose Tyler fan. She isn’t me least favourite companion, not by a long shot, but she isn’t one I’m really that enamoured with. So when Big Finish got Piper back to do some audios with Tennant a few years ago it took me a while to get round to them, I wish I had gotten to them early as Infamy of the Zaross and Sword of the Chevalier are both tons of fun. Now I haven’t heard the first Rose Tyler boxset, so I had very little to go on when I went into this second instalment in the series. I wish I had heard that first set because I think Other Worlds might be my favourite spin-off release of the year, a fact I am extremely surprised by because I didn’t think the Rose Tyler boxset would offer three nuanced and impressive dramas which handle some really mature topics like parental estrangement and government crack downs on protests.  I’m going to say up front that you should buy this boxset now, I had an overwhelmingly positive time with this set and I can see a re-listen coming quite soon.

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Review: Doctor Who Third Doctor Adventures – Kaleidoscope

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Review by Jacob Licklider

Six-part Doctor Who serials are often particular favourites of mine, simply because in storytelling there is quite a lot you can do in six episodes.  The 1970s revolutionised the six-parter by essentially dividing them into a four part story and a two part story which I have discussed at length on the Internet before because it allows for more exploration of characters and a plot that needs to be able to go through the length with at least one big twist at a point in the story to send things off in a different direction.  Big Finish Productions have done six-part stories before, ‘The Next Life‘ and ‘The Game‘ were the earliest, and several of the Lost Stories range were allotted six episodes as that is how those scripts were pitched and often written which worked especially well for stories like ‘Farewell, Great Macedon‘ and ‘Lords of the Red Planet‘.  This year they’ve dipped their toes into a single seven part story with The Annihilators which I enjoyed and reviewed, but as the rest of the Doctors got two box sets, the second set for the Third Doctor continues the trend of longer stories with a single six part adventure set during the middle of Season 11 dealing with some of that season’s major themes written with a more modern sensibility from Alan Barnes.  Kaleidoscope at one point directly references similarities to ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs‘ and while there isn’t Malcolm Hulke’s ecological message, it does deal heavily with governmental conspiracy and how the 1970s Cold War mixed with pop culture.

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