Sylvester McCoy’s penultimate season as the Seventh Doctor will be the next release to join the Blu-ray collection. Doctor Who fans can continue to build their own home archive on Blu-ray with an EIGHT-DISC box set of the 25th season from 1988, starring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor. Containing four classic stories, this limited-edition set is packed with hours of new and exclusive material, and will be released on 21st October 2024.
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Ace
Review: Tenth Doctor – Classic Companions
Review by Cavan Gilbey
Companions become just as much of a friend to the audience as they do to the Doctor, so seeing them return by having them reunited with Doctor after ages can be really refreshing and rewarding. However this concept is only going to really work if we have actually spent some time away from those characters, which with Big Finish is nigh on impossible because every companion is omnipresent there and you can find a new Peri audio just as much as you can a new Jamie story. Tegan and Ace returning to TV feels significant since they’ve not been seen for ages, but we have heard so many extended adventures with them so having them meet a later Doctor on audio doesn’t hit that spot. This is where we come to the main issue with Tenth Doctor, Classic Companions; it’s too much of a gimmick. Sure Classic Doctors, New Monsters is a gimmick but you can understand it more with the monsters than you can with the companions. This set feels like it exists solely to give Ten some stories with older companions as opposed to crafting interesting stories based around the way their relationships have changed, which doesn’t exactly make this an enticing listen.
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Review: Doctor Who Interludes – The Haunting of Bryck Place
Review by Jacob Licklider
The Haunting of Bryck Place is the third and final Interlude for 2022, being a bonus release attacked to The Seventh Doctor Adventures: Silver and Ice, at least as far as announced Interludes go. There could be further installments or bonus goodies with future releases, especially as none of the Doctors have had their second sets released, though their titles have all been announced. This is also the only Interlude to not make use of a new narrator, with Sophie Aldred taking the narration of the story and she does wonderfully, though with her narration you are aware that this is an audiobook and not an audio drama which has been what the Interludes have been marketed as. There is some extra music and sound design, so it is an enhanced audiobook, but still an audiobook and written as an audiobook and not as a scripted drama, using the format to great effect to tell a story cantering on Ace and her growth as a character. Now, using Ace as a character is nothing new, the Virgin New Adventures from 1991 to 1997 kept her as companion for over half the ranges run and Big Finish themselves have done several story arcs exploring Ace, but Georgia Cook’s script does something a little different, explores an early adventure for Ace where the Doctor isn’t attempting to manipulate her for one of his grand schemes.
Review: Doctor Who – The Grey Man Of The Mountain
Review by Michael Goleniewski
Big Finish’s Christmas release for 2020 sees the Seventh Doctor and Ace hoping to land in Edinburgh for the holidays but instead coming to the small village of Coylumbridge which is eerily quiet and empty. They soon meet an old friend in the area, retired Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, who is looking into a rather ominous presence on the nearby mountain of Ben MacDui that’s causing hikers to go missing and/or be hospitalised from paranoia and delusion. Naturally while Ace immediately takes the initiative in climbing the peak with a new friend, the Doctor and the Brig stay behind in the comfort of the nearby inn to learn more and wait for backup support. But soon, everyone will be up on the mountain navigating the trials of the summit while searching for answers surrounding the mysterious presence waiting for them on the windy plateau…..
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Review: Doctor Who – The Flying Dutchman / Displaced
Review by Jacob Licklider
Big Finish Production’s decision to go back to earlier story arcs and TARDIS teams for some of their Main Range releases has often been a stroke of genius; it allows listeners to experience
teams whose stories are over for a burst of nostalgia and partaking in the age old tradition of the missing adventure. September’s Main Range duo-logy is one of these; reuniting Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor with Sophie Aldred’s Ace and Philip Olivier’s Hex for some adventures early in the team’s run of adventures from two writers new to Big Finish. Gemma Arrowsmith and Katharine Armitage provide their first Doctor Who stories with The Flying Dutchman and Displaced.
Review – Doctor Who – Dark Universe
Review by Jacob Licklider
Since 1989’s Survival there has always been a question of what exactly happened to Ace? She obviously didn’t appear in the TV Movie, and the expanded universe has had several explanations for what fate she underwent, ranging from death, to becoming Time’s Vigilante in Paris, and even entering the Academy on Gallifrey. Now in my personal opinion there is a way to reconcile all of these, the Time War does allow for separate fates, and now Big Finish has released Dark Universe. 
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Doctor Who Star Discusses Reprising Her Classic Role
Classic Doctor Who fans was overjoyed back in September when Sophie Aldred reprised her role of companion Ace, 30 years after she was a regular on the BBC sci-fi series.
A specially-shot trailer for Doctor Who: Season 26 – The Collection Blu-ray set saw Aldred play an older Ace – a teenager when she first appeared, now the head of a philanthropic foundation called A Charitable Earth.
Sophie Aldred returns to the Doctor Who universe in new book
The Thirteenth Doctor meets Ace in a new book by Sophie Aldred.
BBC Books will publish Doctor Who: At Childhood’s End, the first epic novel from Sophie Aldred, who played the Seventh Doctor’s companion Ace. Continue reading
Review: Doctor Who – An Alien Werewolf In London
Review by Michael Goleniewski
‘Alien Werewolf in London’ concludes the Seventh Doctor / Mags trilogy started by ‘Monsters of Gokroth’ and continued in ‘Moons of Vulpana‘ with the pair reunited with Ace in the punk era London of the 1990’s. She’s called the Doctor about a strange estate nearby that has had an odd and rather terrified creature in confinement for a very long time. There is of course a bigger secret surrounding the inhabitants of the mansion itself who all have a nasty little blood-sucking secret hiding behind their perfect exteriors. But the question is: who is the real threat and who is the biggest monster here?
Review: Doctor Who – Muse of Fire
Review by Doctor Squee (Host of Gallifrey Stands Podcast)
In Paris in the 1920’s it should be a hive of the most talented artist to ever put paint to easel. But when The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy), Ace (Sophie Aldred) & Hex (Phillip Olivier) arrive they find artist fleeing in their droves. Irish Wildthyme (Katy Manning) is also on the scene and seems involved in the artists finding Paris a hostile environment. Can the Doctor’s old friend really be responsible for unmaking an artistic revolution?
Indie Mac User 