Tim Foley

Review: The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield – The Eternity Club 1

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Review by Jacob Licklider

The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield are entering a new era after the passing of the late great David Warner who was co-lead five of the seven volumes in the range.  Despite still being advertised as a Doctor Who range, The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield are going back to having Benny on her own, though with several Doctor Who aliens featuring in the range to keep it connected.  The premise of this eighth series is The Eternity Club, one of those series that was clearly thought up as a four disc box set and split into four single releases, though this is slightly easier as The Eternity Club is presented as eight, half hour adventures from different writers.  The tone is also considerably different from what has come before, both adventures in this first installment in The Eternity Club are considerably light affairs, playing heavy on the comedy and pastiche elements.  The main pastiche is the premise being a Victorian style gentlemen’s club at the edge of the galaxy which is allowing Bernice Summerfield entrance, though her inability to pay member’s fees means that she is being put into the role of a servant for the other members of the club.  The club itself is made up of Doctor Who aliens with an association with war, most notably Sontarans, Draconians, and Drahvins.  This feels like an idea that later releases are going to play around with more, the second story of this release hints at it with the Drahvins, but it feels like an idea that hasn’t quite been explored.  James Goss is at the writing helm for this release and it’s especially interesting to listen to this after Goss’ previous work with Benny.  Goss as a writer isn’t always one that I would associate with comedy, but the style here is a more laid back, observational humor about the culture of gentlemen’s clubs with the second half wishing to examine the place of gender roles in the universe for much of the comedy.  The directorial duties fall to David O’Mahony who provides a new touch to the series, his style also quite working with the comedy.

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Review: The War Doctor Rises – Morbius the Mighty

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

Now I like The Brain of Morbius quite a bit, as I imagine many fans do, but I have never quite understood the frequent clamouring for the eponymous villainous Time Lord to return. He’s a great presence in that debut serial because he was a brain in a jar, seemingly punished by the people of Gallifrey with great anger and viciousness thus leaving him reduced to such a state. His appeal stems from this great mystery about who he really was before becoming a Futurama celebrity head-in-a-jar, putting him back in a humanoid body just makes him essentially another Master or Omega really. Now Big Finish have brought back the character a couple of times, most recently with the Dark Gallifrey stuff giving him a whole three dedicated episodes; which I haven’t heard. But bringing him to the Time War offers up a potentially interesting set of interpretations of what you can do with him; is he a resurrected weapon, a manipulative background player or even a Dalek sympathiser?

After having heard Morbius the Mighty, the latest entry in the War Doctor saga and penned by Tim Foley, I’m not entirely sure of why this story needed to have him as a villain.

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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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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: 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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Review: The Diary of River Song – The Orphan Quartet

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

I think we all knew that this series couldn’t last forever but seeing it come to an end still feels a bit surreal. The Diary of River Song has been one of my favourite Big Finish spin-off series, actually doing the impossible job of getting me to really like River Song; a character I ended up loathing on television by the time she was playing a prominent role in the Matt Smith era. But the The Orphan Quartet feels like an appropriate end, especially with how each writer uses the theme of grief and acceptance to explore River finally coming to terms with losing her husband and parents. I don’t think this is by any means the most consistent, or even best boxset in the series, but it certainly feels like the most appropriate way to send of River Song’s solo series. I expect we’ll see her again in the future, but for now this is the end.

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Review: Torchwood – Among Us 3

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Review by Cavan Gilbey

 

Among Us comes to a close with this third and final volume and it may just be the strongest of the trio. It always had the hard task of wrapping up all the plot threads in a neat bow and it sticks the landing, although that is mostly helped by the concept behind the narrative being small in scope but able to maintain a really high set of stakes. The themes of social corruption, media influence and technological fascism all comes to great conclusion with particular praise for the first story in the set which offers us a glimpse into one of Torchwood’s strongest and most interesting adversaries yet.

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Review: Torchwood – Among Us 2

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Cavan Gilbey

Among Us is back for another set, exploring Torchwood’s battle with the idea of altered perceptions and false knowledge. Much like the previous set we’ve got a story about the modern problem of fake news, but also a look at influencer culture, memory implants and finally a story focusing on racial profiling and targeted hate. I’m a big fan of this more social commentary focused approach to Torchwood but this set is really giving the themes room to breathe and are giving us more conceptually experimental stories for those thematic studies. I sincerely hope that the next, and final, set in this series is as good as these previous two because we are currently dealing with the best Torchwood series yet on audio.

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Review: The Fourth Doctor Adventures – Angels And Demons

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Review by Jacob Licklider

New Frontiers began the twelfth series of the Fourth Doctor Adventures wonderfully with two four-part adventures that introduced the character of Margaret Hopwood, played by Nerys Hughes, to the Doctor’s world as second companion with Louise Jameson’s Leela.  Angels and Demons is the second half of the series, once again with a fifth bonus story CD, concluding the series and Margaret Hopwood’s travels, making another Big Finish Companion to have a limited run of only six stories.  Angels and Demons is also the return of two-part stories to the Fourth Doctor Adventures in a significant way with three of the four stories in that format, something we hadn’t seen since 2019 with The Syndicate Master Plan, and something Series 13 will be continuing in 2024.  Bringing the travels of Margaret Hopwood to a close so soon is a bit of a double-edged sword, since it’s a shorter run the stories have to be exceptionally good if the character is to be remembered unlike other Big Finish original companions with short runs (Hannah Bartholomew comes to mind as one that has fallen into obscurity while Raine Creevey is quite well remembered among Seventh Doctor fans).  It does give the character the opportunity for a definitive beginning, middle, and an end which means Margaret won’t become a character like Flip or Constance who have had their travels extended indefinitely due to actor availability and illness.

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Review: The War Master – Solitary Confinement

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Review by Jacob Licklider

When this ninth series of The War Master was announced, it was also announced as the first of three final sets to be produced under Scott Handcock, all made as he was preparing to transfer to Doctor Who on television as script editor, though as is tradition with the range it is still a while before that final set is released (it is currently slated for a June 2024 release).  Solitary Confinement is the first of these three sets and while there isn’t an intent to make a trilogy of series, the listener can’t help but notice that the final two sets have titles of Rogue Encounters and Future Phantoms, while Solitary Confinement seems like the odd one out.  As a set there are moments where it feels like a greatest hits of the style of stories The War Master as a range does, building up to a final twist which in and of itself has similarities to some of the other final twists of the range (Hearts of Darkness in particular comes to mind especially).  For the purposes of this review, I only listened to the set through once to analyse it on initial impressions, but I have a feeling that the recontextualisation, something that becomes quite obvious in hindsight, might explain some of the issues I found myself having with the set, mainly with how derivative it is.  There is a general theme of the Master being imprisoned in an intergalactic insane asylum which is such an evocative image, yet for much of the set it is sadly used as a framing device for the middle two stories with the opening and closing episodes being the main thrust of the asylum stories, for better and for worse.  Because of these issues, I have decided to forgo the usual individual episode scores as all four have highs and lows with things that work and don’t work for me not necessarily being the same for you as a listener.

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