Big Finish Doctor Who Audio Reviews: The Sandman - Simon A. Forward
The Doctor is know as the Sandman to the Galyari - a legendary figure who did something incredibly nasty to their race in the distant past. As a result, this tale is told with flashbacks - something that's much harder to pull off on radio than on the screen or the page - and I had to really concentrate to follow what was happening in a couple of places. The Galyari are a reptilian race who travel in an interstellar convoy of spaceships called The Clutch as they are no longer allowed to live planetside after the Doctor banished them.
Of course, it turns out that the Doctor isn't really the monster that Galyari legend proclaims him to be and he eventually explains just what he did and why, but - rather annoyingly - the reason for him withholding the real story behind his status as the "Sandman" from Evelyn is never actually dealt with in a convincing manner, so we're left on tenterhooks until the final episode (he could have told her - and us - much sooner) - which left me feeling very impatient (and left Evelyn with very little to do throughout the story, except to keep asking "what's happening Doctor?" at intervals). This also means that the last episode of the story feels very rushed as the listener is given eleventh hour infodumps of technobabble making the Galyari's Srushkubr a rather unconvincing plot device; if it had been developed properly throughout, the story may have flowed rather better, but instead crucial details about how the Srushkubr works (or even what it is!) are thrown at the listener at speed as the Doctor rushes to stop it from doing whatever it does.
So yes - an interesting concept of the Doctor-as-legendary-monster, an interesting alien race, and an interesting almost-Companion (Mr Mordecan, an Irish Gypsy Traveller who travels as part of The Clutch), but a less than convincing delivery of the story. Thus it earns a "not bad, but could have been better" from me.