Review by Ian McArdell
Of the many iconic moments across the four-year run of Blake’s 7, the closing moments of the Series B finale ‘Star One’ ranks high. Finally tracking down the heart of the Federation’s control system, a series-long quest, the rebels achieve their objective… only to find that they are opening the door to a larger, interstellar threat. After Travis ultimately betrays humanity, the episode ends with Avon ordering Liberator into the breach against a flotilla of alien invaders.
Review by Cavan Gilbey
Thunderbirds has been a long standing television love of mine, it was something introduced to me in my childhood and ever since and I the artistry of the show has always stuck with me. Great puppet and model work ensured that the show would stick in the mind, plus the Barry Gray music and vocal performances lend a further level of perfection. Last year Big Finish began to produce full cast adaptations of the novels by John Theydon, much in the same style as the excellent Spectrum Files which were done to bring Captain Scarlet to audio life. But Big Finish, in collaboration with Anderson Entertainment, this year started to produce full cast audio drama adaptation of the comic strips that would appear in the likes of TV Century 21. The first set, Thunderbirds vs The Hood came out earlier this year and was such a fun time for me because it took me back to watching episodes like City of Fire and Vault of Death on DVD. Now this new set, Fire and Fury, continues the quality of the previous set and makes me itch to want more stories in this style.
Review by Cavan Gilbey
Back in the early days of the Doctor Who Monthly Range we would get a bunch of audios that experimented with the medium of audio itself; Whispers of Terror, Scherzo, Special Features and You Are The Doctor to name but a few. Now that same lovingly daring spirit has been revived in the Torchwood monthly range and are often some of my favourite stories done by the company full stop, especially Cascade and Made You Look. A few months ago we got to see Ianto star in one such experimental stories and here he is again in a spooky story exploring one of the most interesting audio phenomena, the number station. Naturally for a release like this one I really think everyone should go in blind so I am going to attempt to speak as vaguely as I can so I don’t ruin the experience for those on the fence about picking up the story.
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.
Big Finish marks 60 years of Doctor Who with a mammoth eight-part full-cast audio drama series beginning in May 2023.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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