Last Doctor Who Story you listened to?

[Emperor-Tiberius]

This could be constituted as a light spoiler, but the audios do suggest that Five and Peri have a sorta-kinda memory wipe of their adventures following Erimem's departure. Don't quite remember how it went down, to be frank, but what I remember is that.

 

[Steve Roby]

The Sara Kingdom trilogy in the Companion Chronicles doesn't really squeeze much in between bits of Dalek Masterplan. If you haven't heard them, here's some spoilage.

Spoiler: Sara

She's a haunted house. At some point, Sara, the Doctor, and Steven visit a house with a defective wish-granting AI that keeps accidentally killing people, so she lets it copy her mind to make the house safer. Jean Marsh is playing the copy; the real Sara Kingdom is long dead.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Interestingly, there is an Early Adventure called The Sontarans which is meant to act as the introduction of the species in the narrative (basically, the Doctor's first meeting with them) and leads directly into the second half of the Dalek Masterplan.

 

[Steve Roby]

Working through the Companion Chronicles still. On average, I'm not having a great time. The Suffering had some moments thanks to its tag team cast of Peter Purves and Maureen O'Brien, but despite combining suffragettes, an alien from Galaxy Four, and Piltdown Man, there isn't enough story for two CDs. Back to one for The Emperor of Eternity, a predictable plotless runaround in ancient China with Frazer Hines wasted as support to Deborah Watling, getting a bare handful of lines.

There have been some decent enough stories, but I think the last really enjoyable one was almost a dozen stories back, The Mahogany Murders with Jago and Litefoot. I suspect some writers struggled with the length of the average CC, some with the idea of having a companion and a guest star, some with balancing narration and dialogue. The Short Trips got off to a rocky start but pretty quickly found their footing. I've found them a more satisfying range than this one so far.

 

[Christopher]

Finally finished Doctor Who and the Pirates. I respect what it was trying to do -- tell a comedy (and 1/4 musical) story with a more serious and poignant twist about its real purpose, and to play around with story-within-a-story and unreliable-narrator gags -- but I couldn't really get into the story about the cliched pirates, so that kept the rest from working that well for me. And the serious twist was telegraphed way too clearly in part 1. So it just didn't quite come together. So far I don't think I've been a fan of any BF's attempts at outright comedy.

 

[Jinn]

I enjoyed Doctor Who and the Pirates a lot. Sometimes, I still listen to the Gallifreyan Buccaneer song.

 

[Steve Roby]

I don't remember much about that one other than that my wife and I listened to it in the car on a visit to her sister, who lives about an hour away. First CD on the way there, second on the way back. Fun enough, and Laura enjoyed it well enough too. We both liked Evelyn Smythe. (We listened to some of the Eighth Doctor, Charley, and C'rizz stories on the same route, in a couple of cases with much less enjoyment.)

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

Love Doctor Who and the Pirates.

 

[Marc]

I don't remember much about that one other than that my wife and I listened to it in the car on a visit to her sister, who lives about an hour away. First CD on the way there, second on the way back. Fun enough, and Laura enjoyed it well enough too. We both liked Evelyn Smythe. (We listened to some of the Eighth Doctor, Charley, and C'rizz stories on the same route, in a couple of cases with much less enjoyment.)

Found a story that had a humourous top layer but when you got the crux of things it was quite dark.

 

[Brendan Moody]

I've been listening to more latter-day monthly range stories. This time it was the introductory trilogy for Marc, a new companion for the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan. Nothing earthshatteringly good, and some real missed opportunities to push the envelope at the very end of the trilogy, but I admire the ambition even when the execution falls short. Full review on my blog here: https://latedemocracy.com/2020/08/22/a-roman-question/.

 

[Steve Roby]

Meanwhile, I think I'm going to change plans and not plow all the way through the Companion Chronicles, because I didn't realize that they eventually started crossing over with the main range (like the Jamie story Night's Black Agents, which doesn't really stand alone). I think I'll do some main range stuff for the next little while. Considering I haven't made it to 100 yet, I won't be encountering the new companion Marc for a few years...

 

[Brendan Moody]

Night’s Black Agents is the only really aggressive crossover with the main range in all of the Companion Chronicles. The Prisoner’s Dilemma before it tied in to the Key2Time trilogy, and down the line Project: Nirvana tied in to a Seventh Doctor arc in the main range, but it’s not a direct lead-in/lead-out like Night’s Black Agents did with the Jamie trilogy in the main range.

I was never as excited by the Companion Chronicles as some people were— I think people tended to judge them by the best stuff and forget that much of the range was as middle-of-the-road and unambitious as any other Big Finish— but there’s some great work there, definitely, especially Simon Guerrier’s First Doctor trilogies.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

To me, its occassionaly great, but its never been a range that I was ever going to latch on to. Maybe if I decide to go through every First/Second Doctor tale, I would, and the First has a lot of good stories there... but I'm not a fan of the narration part. It can work and really well occassionally like in Prisoner of Peladon (which is also a perfect story to have for season 10, which worryingly missed out on Peladon) or the pre-Unearthly Child stories, where Susan telling those stories could work as an adress to anybody, but as part of the main NARRATIVE, I don't usually count them because the framing device is almost always much later onwards, and thus ruins the illusion of suspence and surprise, and momentum, too.

 

[Steve Roby]

I've been trying to get more y than n in the listened? column of my Doctor Who audios spreadsheet. Companion Chronicles seemed like a good way to do that, especially because I find it easier to concentrate and stay awake while listening when I'm commuting, which I haven't been since March. If I've already heard the one with the most connection to the main range, I may keep on going.

(Seriously, I have a spreadsheet because I stopped buying the CDs after a few years due to postage costs and went all digital. So I track all the audios, where they're backed up, whether I've listened to them yet, etc.)

 

[Brendan Moody]

I'm still plugging away at my monthly range backlog (somehow, despite thinking of it as a range I don't particularly collect, I seem to have bought more than two-thirds of it), this time with the two most recent releases, Time Apart and Thin Time/Madquake. This is half of a run of stories that got split up due to the pandemic, and while it's good for what it is, it doesn't do much to develop the arc. Full review on my blog: https://latedemocracy.com/2020/08/25/running-away-from-the-consequences/.

 

[Christopher]

Finally got around to Creatures of Beauty. When I read on the Wiki that it had a non-linear narrative, I thought I'd be confused, but it was pretty easy to follow. It was a decent try to be experimental, but it could've been better. The first part of episode 4 felt unnecessary because it just gave the setup that had already been established by chronologically later scenes; that kind of thing works best if seeing the earlier scene reveals some new perspective or the answer to something that's been mysterious, but in this case it didn't add anything we didn't already know.

Most of all, the "shocking" final twist was easy to see coming by the end of episode 3, and blatantly telegraphed at the start of episode 4. And it's a more cynical and nihilistic ending than I care for.

 

[Christopher]

Project: Lazarus was okay, though I'm not a big fan of the Forge arc (the fact that it's basically another version of Torchwood doesn't help, not that the creators at the time could be blamed for that, of course). It was fun to have Baker & McCoy interact, though it was way too easy to figure out what was really going on with Six in the second half. That's the second time in a row that the big surprise twist has been obvious an episode in advance.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

I love the Forge arc. And I really like Project: Lazarus in particular - essentially, its two stories, and I like both, though Baker is unhinged and glorious in a different way than usual. Its audios like these that showcase the 80's Doctors in an interesting and more representatitve way,

Honestly, I'm kinda sad there hasn't been a Torchwood/Forge audio encounter yet. Seems like an obvious area to explore.

 

[Christopher]

Honestly, I'm kinda sad there hasn't been a Torchwood/Forge audio encounter yet. Seems like an obvious area to explore.

I have a hard time believing they could exist independently. They're both the same thing. They were even founded roughly a decade apart. And either one is supposed to be a pervasive secret agency with its hands in all things alien tech-related and with connections in the British government; there's no way they'd be unaware of each other or able to operate separately within the same niche. I could almost buy the Forge as some kind of side branch of Torchwood, some compartmentalized cell (as TW was founded earlier), but it's a clumsy fit.

 

[Christopher]

I'm deeply conflicted by Flip-Flop. On the plus side, the symmetrical-timelines format was inspired and pretty well-executed, aside from necessarily leaving things unresolved. But it's profoundly marred by a portrayal of the alien refugees in a way that plays like an allegory for racist, nativist fearmongering about how immigrants/minorities will take over if allowed into the country, protesting hate speech is censorship and oppression, and affirmative action is an evil plot. Not only that, but it felt hostile to people with disabilities as well, mocking the Slithergees' pretense of helplessness at being blind as a cover for their dominance and enslavement of humans. The fact that "Slithergee" has a slightly Indian sound to it, like Banerjee or Mukherjee, doesn't make it feel any less intolerant. A very ugly element in what was otherwise an extremely clever story.