Alison Winter

Review: Unit Nemesis – Masters of Time

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Review by Jacob Licklider

The UNIT range from Big Finish Productions’ latest story arc UNIT Nemesis has become the latest four box set miniseries to come to a close with UNIT: Nemesis: Masters of Time, a set that to properly review without beating around the bush, feels as if production issues and rescheduling caused the recording dates to be moved around and actor availability to cause rewrites, especially to the first three scripts.  UNIT: Nemesis: Objective – Earth ended with the big reveal that Missy is behind everything and working with the Vulpreen to take over the Earth, a great cliffhanger but sadly UNIT: Nemesis: Masters of Time takes until the final episode for Missy to actually appear, having several mentions through the first three episodes.  This is an issue that could be lessened by the use of the Vulpreen, who have been a major secondary threat throughout the miniseries, paired with the Eleven who was written out completely for Masters of Time.  The issues here is that the Vulpreen never actually come together in this set as a credible threat to take over the Earth, the first three of the stories instead focusing on the UNIT characters and then the final episode being focused on Missy.

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Review: Seventh Doctor Adventures – Far From Home

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Review by Jacob Licklider

The Seventh Doctor Adventures of 2022 were split between two TARDIS teams and it seems 2023 will be following this format, the second set being the first installment of The Last Day which was announced in the original pitch announcement for Big Finish Productions’ move to the box set model, but the first of the year continues the companion threads of Sullivan and Cross – AWOL with Far from Home.  Now, social media has made several Spider-Man jokes but I actually haven’t kept up with the MCU so insert topical Spider-Man reference here, but Far from Home is the set that wants to take Harry and Naomi away from their second status quo of 21st century London and into a past that is a very prominent shadow for both of them and into the far-flung future.  The structure of the set follows Conflicts of Interest by giving the listener two three-part stories to enjoy and once again I cannot praise Big Finish enough for going with this model, it’s a far more sustainable model for storytelling than a reliance on one hour Doctor Who stories as the short runtime often leads to overstuffing and an underbaked exploration of the idea.  With three-part stories, especially on audio where the standard length of an episode is 30 minutes instead of just the classic 25 minute format, writers can push their one-hour ideas to what they need to be without needing tot do a larger story that would suit the four-part format.

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Audio Review: Star Cops – The High Frontier 2

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Review by Ian McArdell

Star Cops is now, unbelievably, three series into its audio revival – not too shabby for a show which only managed one television run during the summer of 1987. 

Winning a small but devoted fanbase, the show sprang from the mind of the late Doctor Who scribe and Blake’s 7 script editor Chris Boucher. He transplanted a police procedural to space, some thirty years in the future, providing clever detective stories with a sci-fi twist. No aliens, just humanity with all its foibles and failings. As the show’s lead Commander Nathan Spring is told in the series’ opener “Spacemen are ten-a-penny. What they need out there is a good copper.”full (3)

The High Frontier storyline comes to its conclusion in this box set with a trio from the show’s original television cast, David Calder (Nathan Spring), Trevor Cooper (Colin Devis) and Linda Newton (Pal Kenzy), alongside Phillip Olivier’s Paul Bailey who was created for audio. Together, the team are on the trail of an insidious organised crime gang known as The Collective, but they soon learn that their enemies are prepared to strike very close to home to thwart the investigation.
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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: UNIT – Brave New World 1 – Seabird One

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Review by Jacob Licklider

Brigadier Winifred Bambera is a Doctor Who character who is interesting. Appearing on television in Battlefield played by the wonderful Angela Bruce and created by Ben Aaronovitch, had the show lasted past Season 26 there was a good chance she would reappear especially since Andrew Cartmel had what would become the ‘lost story’ Animal in his head as a story at the time. So it became puzzling that in the Virgin New Adventures, while UNIT featured heavily especially in books like Blood Heat, No Future, and Eternity Weeps, Bambera herself would only appear twice, in Head Games and The Dying Days as cameos. The UNIT stories of the New Adventures were more concerned with deconstructing the UNIT family and the Pertwee era as it was the era many of the writers grew up with and were fond of. She had a similar cameo in the novelisation of Downtime by Marc Platt, but after that didn’t appear in any of the novels by BBC Books. Then in 1999 Big Finish acquired the Doctor Who license and begun their takeover of Doctor Who dominating the early 2000s until the revival, yet Bambera only appeared in Animal released in 2011. So it became a surprise with the success of the UNIT spin-off, Angela Bruce was brought back in the second set of UNIT: Nemesis as a backdoor pilot for UNIT: Brave New World, a currently two set release giving Bambera her own UNIT team in the late 1990s post-Battlefield, focusing on incursions from Earth itself and not the standard alien invasions.

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