Review by Jacob Licklider

The second installment of the third series of Ninth Doctor Adventures from Big Finish Productions is continuing the idea of these sets being three stories wrapped around a theme.  This set has the Ninth Doctor traveling alone once again, but with the wraparound title of Travel in Hope giving the audience an immediate understanding of the overarching theme of the set.  This theme is the Doctor bringing some sort of hope, or causing some sort of hope for the future to come around, something that allows each of the three stories to really hammer home the idea of the hope that the Doctor himself is lacking, and the need for a companion.  This need for a companion was briefly solved in the previous set, Pioneers, but sadly that Doctor/companion relationship was limited to one story.  The continual use of the Ninth Doctor without Rose is becoming a clear issue and that issue is hanging over each episode of Travel in Hope, almost enough that it feels as if writers Lauren Mooney, Stewart Pringle, James Moran, and Robert Valentine are screaming at Big Finish to schedule some dates where Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper can get together and record some stories so these turning wheels don’t just keep turning.  This is the tenth set for the Ninth Doctor Adventures and there are most likely two more where this issue will present itself, both being released in 2024.  The other solution would be to give the Ninth Doctor a second, pre-Rose companion, which may come with its own set of problems, but they would be a different set of problems with a different set of solutions as potentially interesting storytelling avenues to explore a la the forced gap Big Finish made work with the Fifth Doctor and Peri in the early monthly range.

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