As part of my gradual catching up with Big Finish audios, these are three main sequence releases from 2014, all starring Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, and Francesca Hunt (India Fisher's half-sister) as temporary companion Hannah Bartholomew.


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Oh dear. There are some nice ideas in this Fifth Doctor / Nyssa audio; a country-house story in the same style as Black Orchid and The Unicorn and the Wasp, an alien which turns out to be a bit different from what we might have expected. But the guest characters are total cliches, including in particular Silver Crow, a mystical Native American ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of the third chapter of the first story: "If he's so keen to find these fireballs," Mattias grumbled, "Why isn't the Doctor with us?"
Four stories from the Eleventh Doctor's climactic centuries of battle against the bad guys on Trenzalore, each bringing back a classic era monster. The first one, where Justin Richards (who is ( Read more... )

A Torchwood novel where Cardiff is assailed by a zombie invasion and Jack, Gwen, Ianto, Rhys and Policeman Andy have to sort it out. Entertaining enough, with some decently tense horror passages, but no big surprises. By coincidence I was reading this at the same time as another much longer zombie novel, Mira Grant's Deadline; it's not my usual sub

One of the newer original single-CD audiobooks in the Who range, read by Alexander Armstrong (whose accent is occasionally a bit surprising - his "stall" sounds like "stool" which doesn't quite have the same meaning). All but completists can safely skip this one; the setting is a future-kitsch 1950s public school which turns out rather pointlessly ( Read more... )

Having whined last week about the recent "Lost Stories" of the Seventh Doctor released by Big Finish, I'm glad to report that this month's two plays in the regular sequence, both featuring the Seventh Doctor with no companions, are a bit better.

( The Doomsday Quatrain: The Doctor and Nostradamus )

I've just started re-watching the Fifth Doctor's stories, so it was interesting timing to read a Fifth Doctor novel featuring Tegan and Turlough, but also bringing in UNIT in the interval between The Green Death and Invasion of the Dinosaurs, giving pride of place to Tegan and Mike Yates - not the most obvious of pairings, but in the context where ( Read more... )

I'm totally delighted with Big Finish's rediscovery of Jago and Litefoot, two incidental characters from the 1977 story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Jago is a down-at-heel theatre manager, Litefoot a police pathologist, and together they fight strange occurrences in late Victorian London. Big Finish brought the original actors (Christopher Benjamin ( Read more... )

An adventure with the Tenth Doctor and Martha, set around Halloween in a small town in contemporary New England where there have been spooky goings-on (which turn out to be sort-of linked to The Shakespeare Code). I found it nicely atmospheric; Morris uses the local children as viewpoint characters which works rather well. No doubt those who know ( Read more... )

The Eighth Doctor and Sam turn up in Victorian London where they have an adventure which largely retraces The Talons of Weng-Chiang, complete with Litefoot (but not Jago) and with added ( spoiler )