Big Finish Productions

Review: Doctor Who- Sontarans vs Rutans – In Name Only

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Review by Jacob Licklider

The Sontarans vs. Rutans miniseries is the first of many releases from Big Finish Productions this year that was clearly meant to be released as a box set and shifted to a single release structure, see also the Dark Gallifrey releases being three-hour long stories released in single hour installments.  Unlike Dark Gallifrey, however, Sontarans vs. Rutans is a series where the actual arc is largely in the background for each of the releases so they can be enjoyed as individual stories.  In Name Only is the concluding installment and the one closest to relying on the three previous installments for its resolution: it’s a story where the actual explanation as to why the previous three releases occurred becomes integral.  John Dorney is responsible for writing the conclusion, and as a Big Finish veteran it’s far from the only conclusion to a miniseries he has written, but In Name Only works because Dorney knows how to strike the balance between making the three previous releases be that integral piece to the puzzle and new listener friendly.  This does lead to an issue where there is perhaps too much exposition for the single hour of the story due to a tendency from Dorney as a writer to over explain the connections instead of just letting the listeners pick up on them by paying attention.  This does mean that this becomes a script where Jonathan Carley has to do a lot of expositing about the past three adventures.

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Review: The Ninth Doctor Adventures – Star-Crossed

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

This meeting feels inevitable.

At some point we had to see Nine meet his wife, all the other Doctors have done it across the years and finally it is Eccleston’s turn to play alongside Kingston. There was a huge risk in doing this boxset, because Nine isn’t a Doctor with a romantic sensibility prior to Rose, at points in these audios being coded as a-romantic. Star-Crossed could have felt like forcing two characters together, just having them meet for the sake of finally getting round to having them all have met River. But it crucially isn’t.  Star-Crossed is a boxset worth making, with a relationship well worth exploring and tinged with tragedy and melodrama. The three stories in here feel like they have been crafted with care to show how the Doctor isn’t always someone River can love, that they aren’t always the idealised image River has in her diary. Dorney, Hopley and Foley have gifted us with three unique stories that all paint a fascinating picture of this brief meeting of the old married couple.

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Classic Doctor Who companion dies

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English actor William Russell has died at the age of 99.

Russell is best known as one of the original lead cast on BBC’s Doctor Who.

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Review: Torchwood – Disco

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

May sees the end of Big Finish’s ‘Ianthology’ with Disco, a story which allows for Gareth David-Lloyd delve into a side of the character we have not really had any information or development around; Ianto’s relationship with his estranged father ‘Disco’. There were some hints in the tv show about Ianto’s relationship with his dad but this episode and the latter two episodes of I Hate Mondays attempt to explore the effects of Disco’s death on Ianto.

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Review: Torchwood – Odyssey

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit are amongst my favourite episodes of Doctor Who; they bring a much needed sense of cosmic and occult horror to the Tennant era and the show in general with a return of the classic base under siege formula. Those episodes are always ones I tend to rewatch when I want to dip back into Tennant’s stint on the show, which I’ve been doing quite a bit in the run up to The Star Beast. So when Big Finish announced a trilogy of stories featuring survivors from those episodes I was naturally intrigued, and this first story certainly made me far more excited to hear the next two chapters of this Ood trilogy. Here we are reunited with Ida Scott and we finally get to see what exactly the Beast meant when he teased about her relationship with her father, which isn’t exactly the best.

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Review: Doctor Who – Once And Future – Time Lord Immemorial

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

The penultimate episode of Big Finish’s 60th anniversary celebrations bring us our first true multi-Doctor story of the bunch, just not with the Doctors you may have been expecting. I’m surprised it took the miniseries this long to finally get round to properly pairing up a pair of Doctors for an hour, but the choice of Nine and the Unbound Doctor does make a good bit of sense since we can celebrate Big Finish’s main bespoke incarnation alongside the man who helped revitalise the program; the reason we can really have a Diamond anniversary in the way we do. However, the excitement I felt going in to this story did feel quite misplaced as this is not the story it could have been.

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Review: Doctor Who – Once and Future – The Union

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

Spoiler Warning!!! Review contains spoilers of The Union!!!

Big Finish’s diamond anniversary has finally come to an end, except for the coda story next year but I don’t think anyone is going to count that as a true end to the narrative. It has been a bumpy ride across these seven episodes, with wildly varying quality on show with some scripts such as The Martian Invasion of Planetoid 50 or Genius For War being quite good hour long excursions and other’s (looking at you Two’s Company) being the exact opposite. The plot threads, well those that have been half built up anyway, finally come to their conclusion here in The Union and Matt Fitton has done a brilliant job. Possibly bringing us the strongest story of the run so far, although that might because it is one of the few that feels like a full story with a beginning, middle and end as opposed to just a beginning and middle.

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Review: Rose Tyler – The Dimension Cannon 3 -Trapped

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

When I reviewed the previous set in this series, I’m fairly sure I called it my favourite release from Big Finish of 2022. It was a fantastic set of really well explored ethical dilemmas in increasingly creative settings, with some of the best character work the company has put out in recent years. Naturally I was very excited to hear this third, and I assume final, set from the series. There’s been a bit of a departure from the episodic formula of the previous two sets, now choosing to tell a serialised story with Rose and new companion Danni (played by Em Thane) trying to find a way to get Rose back home and escape the Anti-life that is ravaging Danni’s universe. Now was this as good as that second set? Yes, and it might even be better in quite a few regards.

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Review: Doom’s Day – Dying Hours

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

 

The Doom’s Day event is a weird one. The last time we have a multimedia event like this was Time Lord Victorious, a story which didn’t do much to separate itself a lot of the Time War media which had come out around the event. But some of the stories stood out as being pretty good on their own, namely those two Master starring Short Trips and Genetics of the Daleks which worked because of how standalone they were. Dying Hours feels like it really needs the prior hours of the story to fully appreciate what was going one, especially in the final story. The problem is most people will do what I do and listen to this in isolation because these multimedia events always have a high buy in price. It’s a lot easier to just buy this one boxset than all the linking comics, DWM strips, novels and BBC Audio releases. So I want you to keep that in mind, I haven’t heard anything else from Doom’s Day. It might shock you to hear that this boxset is actually quite good.

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Review: Doctor Who – In The Night

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Review by Jacob Licklider

In the Night is the second of the Fifth Doctor sets with 2023 being the first year that the Fifth Doctor Adventures have decided to avoid doing a year-long story arc, meaning that this set is another standalone without prerequisites, released in the same month as the very prerequisite heavy Purity Unbound.  In the Night has an interesting premise, both stories essentially take place over the course of one night, though the first plays around with the time scale in general, and have themes of discovery of historical pasts in some very different ways.  This is balanced with the first story, the four-part Pursuit of the Nightjar being an example of “future” history concerning itself with a myth the Doctor is familiar with from their childhood, while Resistor is more concerned with the past of the Earth, though a past that would have been contemporary had it been a televised story.  It’s a set that like Conflicts of Interest before it, despite eschewing perhaps the better format, creates two incredibly complementary stories that allow some very interesting introspection and exploration.

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