Laura Rollins

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.”

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 by Cavan Gilbey

It feels like only yesterday when Eccleston joined the team at Big Finish to star in a batch of new adventures, 8 boxsets later and we have reached the end of what we know the company had planned for the Ninth Doctor Adventure range. It’s been a range with some genuinely spectacular stories, reuniting this Doctor with old friends and old enemies in ways that feel new and fresh. There have been some rough patches on the journey to Shades of Fear but with 24 new stories in this series that is only to be expected. This new boxset I think is the most emblematic of the ranges strongest and weakest elements, it has the characteristic inconsistent quality that has been a bit of a blight on the range but the spirit of the era is captured so vividly with the right themes hitting home and the atmosphere fitting really nicely into what RTD helped create back in 2005. Its not the best one we’ve had from the range, but still manages to keep the momentum from previous sets rolling and delivers an all around good experience with Eccleston at the helm.