Review: Doctor Who – Operation Werewolf

Posted on August 4, 2024 by indiemacuser

It’s been a while since we’ve had a dedicated Second Doctor Lost Stories release, I’ve been waiting for one ever since Lords of the Red Planet came out. Sure we had the Early Adventures with brand new stories for this era, but fans knew there was still plenty of untapped potential in those unmade script. One of the most popular amongst fans was Operation Werewolf, a pseudo-historical proposed by Douglas Camfield and Robert Kitts set in the tense period before D-Day and seeing the Doctor attempting to stop a sinister Nazi experiment which could change the course of history. It’s a narrative which I am surprised the show has never really done all that much, with some exceptions. But it was down to fan-favourite writer Jonathan Morris and the recent but reliable director David O’Mahony to bring this story to life over the span of six episodes. Did they succeed? Well this story is my favourite Second Doctor release from Big Finish so I feel that must account for something.

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Review: Doctor Who – Once and Future – A Genius For War

Posted on September 10, 2023 by indiemacuser

Review by Jacob Licklider

Big Finish Productions’ third installment of their 60^th anniversary celebratory series, Once and Future, has been released and puts degenerating Doctor into his Seventh incarnation, played by Sylvester McCoy for A Genius for War. A Genius for War is interesting because the TARDIS is intercepted so the Doctor can go on a mission for the Time Lords led by the General and Veklin, played by Ken Bones and Beth Chalmers respectively, as Davros, played by Terry Molloy, has an offer for the Time Lords. The TARDIS being taken by the Time Lords means that this is an episode that feels more like a side step for the series, and as such Jonathan Morris is allowed to tell a complete Time War story in one hour, however, there is some oddities with the characterisation of the Doctor. Past Lives characterised the Fourth Doctor as not the Fourth Doctor due to the Doctor being a future Doctor in the body of the Fourth Doctor, but The Artist at the End of Time altered the characterisation so the Fifth Doctor acted as the Fifth Doctor. Jonathan Morris doesn’t quite take either approach, A Genius for War blending the portrayal to play to McCoy’s strengths but also feel as if it was rewritten for a different Doctor. This is certainly a possibility as Morris could easily have pitched this as a War Doctor story, the War Doctor on Big Finish is at least similar in the types of stories he has to the Seventh Doctor, so the rewrites while extensive wouldn’t have been as complicated as say rewriting the story for the Fifth Doctor or Eighth Doctor for instance. Morris’ script makes the Doctor take charge of the mission to find Davros and then blends several past and future stories into a single hour.

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BBC Books to Publish ‘Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide to the Whoniverse’

Posted on June 8, 2023 by indiemacuser

BBC Books is delighted to announce the publication of Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide to the Whoniverse on 16th November 2023.

Co-written by Simon Guerrier, Una McCormack and Jonathan Morris, this official 60th anniversary celebration book will publish in November alongside three anniversary specials starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate.

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Audio Review: The Worlds of Blake’s 7 – Allies and Enemies

Posted on January 21, 2023 by indiemacuser

Review by Ian McArdell

Of all the Blake’s 7 characters destined to grab centre stage in their own spin-off, I’m not sure I had ever anticipated Arlen (Sasha Mitchell). However, in retrospect, she’s one who was begging for a backstory; the insidious Federation security officer was responsible for bringing down the errant Blake, and all of Avon’s crew, during the show’s shocking finale.

Following Arlen’s story, this boxset has a wide timeframe. In the first adventure she encounters Cally prior to the telepath’s time with Blake, the second sits somewhere in Series B, and the third brings us Jenna Stannis, after her Liberator days.

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Review: The Sixth Doctor Adventures – Purity Undreamed

Posted on August 14, 2022 by indiemacuser

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. Continue reading →

Review: Doctor Who – Emancipation Of The Daleks

Posted on July 24, 2022July 24, 2022 by indiemacuser

Review by Jacob Licklider

The Audio Novels have released their third installment and instead of continuing to stay in the classic series it adds to the rather low number of Twelfth Doctor novels with Emancipation of the Daleks by Jonathan Morris, a book set in the middle of Series 10. Jonathan Morris was brought on to write the novel and depart from the previous two instalment’s format of six, one-hour episodes. The length is the same with approximately six hours of an audiobook, but it is shifted to three, two-hour episodes roughly the same word count as a televised episode according to the behind the scenes interviews. I’m bringing this up so early since the format of this novel is one of the releases biggest issues, the length of the episodes make it so that a lot of it drags and doesn’t feel like a book. This has been a slight problem with the previous two releases but as Scourge of the Cybermen and Watchers have double the chapters and double the points where the narrative stops and listeners can take a break. And with Jonathan Morris treating each part of Emancipation of the Daleks as it’s own episode, it’s paced as if it is supposed to be a full-cast episode and not an audiobook which makes everything throughout drag. Morris structures the book as three distinct ideas each following a distinct version of Bill Potts, with the inciting incident of the story being Bill Potts from 20 years in the future showing up on her own doorstep in the present before a Dalek spaceship crashes into St. Luke’s University.

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Review: The Sixth Doctor Adventures – Water Worlds

Posted on May 21, 2022May 23, 2022 by indiemacuser

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.

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Review: The War Doctor Begins – Warbringer

Posted on December 15, 2021 by indiemacuser

Review by Jacob Licklider

It’s most definitely a coincidence that Big Finish Productions would have two releases within a week of each other that tells its story in a non-linear fashion, but it is interesting that it’s happened so soon after Stranded 3’s What Just Happened? inspired my review to be told backwards. The War Doctor Begins: Warbringer is presented as non-linear in the way each of its episodes are presented, beginning in media res, going to a conclusion, and then flashing back to the beginning to deal with a character’s amnesia. This decision assists in making the themes of Warbringer come front and centre with each of the three episodes having single word titles: Timothy X. Atack’s Consequences, Andrew Smith’s Destroyer, and Jonathan Morris’s Saviour. These titles make the set feel much like three episodes of a complete story. While Forged in Fire also acted as a miniseries, Warbringer is a three-part story. It feels like Atack, Smith, and Morris all had the time to communicate with each other in telling the same story.

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Review – The Diary Of River Song (Series 8)

Posted on February 1, 2021February 1, 2021 by indiemacuser

Review by Jacob Licklider

If you follow the reviews I have written in the past for IndieMacUser I have indulged in discussions on how Big Finish have during the COVID-19 pandemic, but what hasn’t been discussed yet is the releases which have been disrupted. Luckily Big Finish Productions rarely announce releases before recording has at the very least began, yet The Diary of River Song Series 8 has become one of those releases which had to be changed while recording was occurring due to the pandemic. Continue reading →