The wait is almost over… See the Doctor explore new worlds, meet new allies and face deadly forces from beyond this universe in the trailer for Season Two, the BBC released today.
Featured in the trailer is a first look at iconic special guest stars including Rylan Clark, who will play himself, the co-host of the Interstellar Song Contest. Also featured is Alan Cumming who voices the villainous cartoon character, Mr Ring-a-Ding.
Review by Cavan Gilbey
Earlier this year we saw the release of The Quin Dilemma, a story which celebrates the rich audio history of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor. Now it’s the turn of Season 22 and 23 to get a homage with The Trials of a Time Lord, a fortieth anniversary celebration penned by the team of Rochana Patel (episodes 1 and 2), Katherine Armitage (episodes 3 and 4) and Stewart Pringle (episodes 5 and 6). Now for context, Season 22 and 23 are among two of my favourites from the classic era of the show so I naturally had a lot of expectations for this story to be a proper celebration of that era. Did it deliver? Yes, and then some!
Review by Jacob Licklider
The general thoughts going through the Big Finish side of the Doctor Who fandom when it was announced Ruth Madeley would be included as a new character in the 60th Anniversary Specials, is that Hebe Harrison would be written out of the audio series. This has happened before with audio companions’ arcs being altered due to what was going on on television, C’rizz being the foremost example. The expectation going into Purity Unbound was that Hebe would have to leave, but surprisingly that doesn’t happen in the final story, there are still more adventures to tel with this TARDIS Team and honestly the set is all the better for it. The four box set story arc has been something in my eyes with its ups and downs, the second installment being the rockiest and the wait between sets not often helping matters. Purity Unbound is the high point of the arc, mainly because the writers have found their way to a consistent theme and conclusion to this saga, using each story as a way to explore the aberrations to the timeline (and further aberrations) in different and interesting ways. Jacqueline Rayner and Robert Valentine are joined by Mark Wright in scripting this final installment, all three writers keying in on the character journeys in particular, especially when concluding this story. It should be noted that this is a story arc about a dictator heavily enforcing a eugenics program based on disability which is most explicit in this set so this review may be discussing themes that could be triggering for some. For context, I am coming to this review from the perspective of someone who is physically disabled.
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Star of stage and screen Bonnie Langford will once again reprise her legendary role as Melanie Bush as she returns to Doctor Who, this time starring alongside Ncuti Gatwa who plays the Fifteenth Doctor in the new series.
Review by Jacob Licklider
Water Worlds and Purity Undreamed comprised the start of a brand new story arc for the Sixth Doctor and Mel, ushering in the new era of box sets for the characters under the helm of producer Jacqueline Rayner and script editor Robert Valentine. Purity Undreamed ended with the “reveal” of the story arc’s villain through slightly messy means, more importantly new companion Hebe Harrison being written out of time as if she has never existed and the implication of a rewritten future timeline where a eugenics regime has deleted any sense of disability. This implication is dark and executed at least a little messily, simplifying disability quite a bit to physical disabilities. The third set, Purity Unleashed, creates an interesting setup, it’s the Doctor and Mel searching for the infraction in history that led to Hebe’s disappearance and the further development of Patricia McBride, played by Imogen Stubbs, as Purity. While the three episodes in this set only work in the confines of this being the third set in this story arc, the timing of this set actually helps lessen some of the issues I had in particular with the previous set. Purity Undreamed was a set that as the title states is the character of Purity becoming real and not just the biases, conscious and subconscious, of Patricia McBride, yet it ends without much of a sense of the character’s villainy. Purity Unleashed is quick to rectify that in the two appearances of the character in the back to stories included, making it quite the shame that this wasn’t released soon after Purity Undreamed, the nine month wait not so much keeping tension as just questioning what exactly was going on.
Season 24 of Doctor Who: The Collection is the next Blu-ray title to be re-issued in standard packaging. The set is due for release 13th Feb 2023.
Review by Jacob Licklider
*** Warning: Spoilers Ahead ****
Let’s cut to the chase, Purity Undreamed is a set with a very weird starting point as an audio drama. Following on from Water Worlds and continuing on the development of Hebe Harrison it sets out to introduce several side characters who are attempting to recur, a new villain for the series, and end by setting up next year’s box sets for the Sixth Doctor and Mel (or at least that’s the assumption since they have not been formally announced yet to feature Mel). It’s a three-hour box set that is almost entirely setup from three different writers: Paul Magrs, Jonathan Morris, and Robert Valentine. Valentine is also serving as script editor with producer Jacqueline Rayner, both contributing as guides for the overarching story arcs. The biggest issue with Purity Undreamed comes from something that happens in the third story, setting up the villain which will be spoiled in this review, if you want non-spoiler thoughts then listen to this if you enjoyed Water Worlds as it maintains a lot of what went really well with that set although is a bit inconsistent. The behind the scenes for the second story, Reverse Engineering, reveals that Jonathan Morris had less time to complete the story, implying that another story may have fallen through. Because of this there is a disconnect between how the character of Patricia McBride, played by Imogen Stubbs, is characterised. This is not an issue of action, but of the character’s beliefs as the third story, Robert Valentine’s Chronomancer is a character piece meant to reveal that Patricia McBride is a woman harbouring bigotry going so far as to advocating for eugenics so the future is “better” and without disability.
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Review by Jacob Licklider
18 months. It has been 18 months since Big Finish Productions has released a solo Seventh Doctor audio with Sylvester McCoy in the role. The Grey Man of the Mountain was released in December 2020. It is now June 2022 and in between we had one small cameo in The End of the Beginning and a Short Trip read by Sophie Aldred, but that has finally changed. Silver and Ice has been released after a long time coming and it’s honestly not entirely what I expected. While every other Doctor’s set has been tied around some theme with Forty, Water Worlds, and Beyond War Games all work around a theme with The Annihilators and The Outlaws featuring central stories. Silver and Ice is odd as the two stories it contains, Bad Day in Tinseltown and The Ribos Inheritance really have no connection outside of being two stories featuring the Seventh Doctor and Mel. They almost feel as if there was an intention for them to make up a Main Range trilogy, especially if the second set, announced to be Sullivan and Cross – AWOL, continues the format. This disconnect makes me feel a bit odd about giving the set as a whole a rating as these are essentially two stand alone stories and perhaps would have been more effective had they been released as two single releases.
Review by Jacob Licklider
Disability in Doctor Who has never been it’s strong suit. Perhaps the most prominent disabled character has been Davros, a genocidal maniac who created the Daleks, aka space Nazis whose purpose is exterminating all other life. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s there was a streak of characters with physical disfigurements as a mark of villainy, though by 1989 there was some small instances of complexity with disabled characters in Battlefield and The Curse of Fenric while the New Series has been mostly neutral in disability representation with some exceptions (Under the Lake/Before the Flood comes to mind for deaf representation). Oddly enough the 1960s were more progressive than much of the 1970s and 1980s with serials like Galaxy Four where the monstrous Rills being the good guys and The Dalek Invasion of Earth including a good scientist in a wheelchair who dies at about the halfway point of that story. So, here we are in 2022, and Big Finish Productions are once again making a push ahead of television series in terms of representation by introducing the first disabled Doctor Who companion in Dr. Hebe Harrison in The Sixth Doctor Adventures: Water Worlds, a marine biologist who uses a wheelchair. Like their push with trans representation in Rebecca Root’s Tania Bell, Hebe is played by disabled actress Ruth Madeley and producer Jacqueline Rayner worked closely with Madeley to ensure all three scripts from this set reflected disability representation well.
Review by Jacob Licklider
There isn’t often the opportunity to see some of the first work of an author that has gone on to make an impact. Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson had both early works published in some form (Jordan’s being published by hid wife and Sanderson publishing a first draft as a Kickstarter reward), yet with Big Finish it’s almost surprising that something like Mind of the Hodiac hasn’t happened sooner. Russell T. Davies found the initial script for Part One and storyline for Part Two in a box in 2020 when Emily Cook was doing the Lockdown watch-alongs on Twitter which he wrote at some point between 1986 and 1987 before even making it into TV, the first script he sent to the Doctor Who Production Office which was, of course, rejected. In finding the script, pictures were posted on Twitter of some of the pages as a treat and in Davies’ mind that was the end of that. But then Scott Handcock, director and writer for Big Finish, contacted Davies with Emily Cook in tow as one of the newer producers to acquire a copy of the script (apparently physically and not just scanned into a computer if the behind the scenes interviews are correct in its implication).
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