Over the last few days I listened to the main range audios 198 The Defectors, 199 Last of the Cybermen, and 200 The Secret History, in which the Seventh, Sixth, and Fifth Doctors respectively find themselves suddenly somehow in the place of the Third, Second, and First Doctors respectively, trying to convince old companions who they are, trying to sort out the events they find themselves in, and trying to work out what happened to pop them into the wrong parts of their timelines. None of them exactly blew me away, but overall they were enjoyable. The combination of 7 and Jo Grant was particularly fun.
There is a story that involves the Monk in the 8th Doctor Adventures with Lucie Miller. This trilogy is a sequel to it.
It's been so long since I listened to the Lucie Miller stories that I'd forgotten about that. If I was caught up with BF it'd be fun to listen to those stories again, but I'm years behind as it is.
Yeah, I dropped out a few years ago myself. I wasn’t enjoying them as much. I think I just overdid it.
I thought teleworking meant I'd get through more, because I have so much more time at home, except that if you're used to listening during commutes and suddenly you don't commute...
I’ve started working out again, which means more time to work through my Big Finish backlog. The big recent project has been the third and fourth batches of what is now the monthly Torchwood range. It might be ironic (or it might be entirely logical) that a show that never quite gelled on television should lead to some of BF’s best work, but certainly their Torchwood output has been top-notch, taut, creative, and character-driven in a way that their Doctor Who releases conspicuously aren’t. There are a couple missteps in this batch (notably The Dollhouse, which is an attempt to do Torchwood by way of 70s pop culture, but when you pastiche schlock the results are still going to be schlock), but the batting average is still very high. I also listened to the final volume of Stranded. An improvement on volume three but not quite up to the standards of volumes one and two. I don’t know whether it was a logistical or a creative decision to bring Colin Baker in to play the Curator, but despite giving a competent, thoughtful performance he just doesn’t have the right energy for this version of the character. The final story is something that BF can’t have been planning when the series was devised but more or less had to do given how things turned out. I’d love to say that it lives up to its difficult brief, but it mostly does the expected things and takes a relatively safe approach to dropping Doctor Who characters into a very un-Doctor Who story.
Ok, so, I usually do my occasional Big Finish Doctor Who listening through a subscription service through my public library, but after learning about Doctor Who Out of Time: Wink, I had to listen to it. I'm glad I did, because its brilliant. Its the 10th Doctor & 6th Doctor vs the Weeping Angels, on a planet that is blinding bright for most of the year, and inhabited by aliens who can't see (and so can't stop the Angels). It was a great story. Tennant and Baker were excellent (as you'd expect), and the writing was very good, with the Weeping Angels being threatening and the situation in general being very clever. It also knows to be just as long as it needs to be, being about 51 minutes long, although of course I could have listened to Baker and Tennant for a lot longer. This was a legitimately great story, especially if you like the Doctors involved. I guess they could have gotten a bit more character moments between The Doctors, the story is very face paced, but overall its a top tier Doctor Who story, and not just for Big Finish.
Drifted away from the effort to catch up for a little while, but I've been back to it for at least a couple weeks. I did a few Companion Chronicles (most recently 6.05, The First Wave, but the next one is a follow-up to one of the BF Stage Plays productions that I haven't heard yet. So, over to the Torchwood main range, picking up again with 36, Dissected, and I've just listened to 44, Rhys and Ianto's Excellent Barbecue. This series is somewhat constrained, usually a small cast of one or two regulars or recurring characters and maybe a couple of supporting cast, and yet it manages to do a really wide range of stories. I find it one of the most consistently entertaining BF ranges I've heard. This one starts off as a bit of an odd couple tale with, obviously, Rhys and Ianto, but throws in a science fictional story as well as a bit of commentary on male friendship and grief. Good stuff.
Ended up listening to the other two Doctor Who: Out of Time episodes. The first one, with the 10th & the 4th Doctors was pretty good. Not quite as good as Wink, but I liked the story and The Doctors had good chemistry together. The second one, Gates of Hell, I thought was a bit meh. I liked the 10th and 5th Doctor's interactions, but the actual plot with the cybermen was nothing special, and got a bit boring honestly. Overall its cool to get to hear the 10th Doctor meeting older Doctors, I'd be curious to hear more if they end up making them.
Last night as part of the Torchwood catch-up I listened to Coffee, written by James Goss, with Gareth David-Lloyd as Ianto Jones. I enjoyed that quite a lot. The story's told as a succession of relatively short vignettes set at different times starting a bit before the first season of Torchwood and up to and including Children of Men. Near the Tourism Information Centre in Cardiff, the secret entrance to Torchwood, is Baps, a small cafe run by David and Cathy. Every so often, Ianto Jones drops by for coffee. He gets to know David, whose mother is one of Cardiff's many unsolved disappearances, and Cathy, an American backpacker who's working in Cardiff for a little while to make enough money to move on. But it can be hard running a cafe when aliens keep invading and things keep exploding. Turned out to be quite a touching story, as the characters get to know each other, and you recognize moments from different Torchwood episodes happening in the background and you can fill in what Ianto's been doing (minor spoiler example: when Ianto orders five sandwiches and corrects himself and says no, three). And you know it's a story that can't keep going on forever. I'm kind of living in fear for the day when someone realizes James Goss should be running some big deal TV series and he doesn't have time for the audios any more.
Tried to listen to Jubilee and...yeah, this is a total dud for me. I don't find the alternate world/history interesting, the villains are mostly just annoying and the story feels like it should have ended 20+ minutes before it does. Colin Baker's performance is excellent, but thats to be expected. Dalek, the TV story that takes inspiration from this, is much better.
Don't think I've seen anyone post this yet: Humble Bundle has a Doctor Who audio bundle. The contents are: Ninth Doctor Chronicles Vol 1 Diary of RIver Song Series 1 War Doctor: Only the Monstrous Novel Adaption: The Highest Science (7th Doctor) Churchill Years Vol 2 The Well-Mannered War (4th Doctor) Doom Coalition 1 (8th Doctor) The Lost Stories: Nightmare Country (5th Doctor) The Lost Stories: Power Play (6th Doctor) The Companion Chronicles: The Child (Leela) Classic Doctors New Monsters: Judoon in Chains (6th Doctor) The Early Adventures: The Forsaken (2nd Doctor) Classic Doctors New Monsters: Harvest of the Sycorax (7th Doctor) Classic Doctors New Monsters: Fallen Angels (5th Doctor) Classic Doctors New Monsters: The Sontaran Ordeal (8th Doctor) The Early Adventures: Domain of the Coord (1st Doctor) The Compain Chronicles: The Scorchies (Jo Grant)
This is, what, their third Big Finish bundle? Great way to get some Big Finish for a fraction of the usual price. I've got all of this stuff but have only listened to a few of them so far. Too many audios, too little time. Meanwhile, I'm continuing to catch up with the Torchwood monthly range, more slowly than I intended, but at least I'm enjoying the ones I'm listening to. Drive was a fun two-hander with Tosh and a taxi driver chasing around Cardiff. Lease of Life is a mostly real-time story with Owen pretending to be some kind of inspector in a shared flat that has a problem with mold. But it's not ordinary mold, as the flatmates too quickly realize. In Gooseberry, PC Andy's got a girlfriend, and dead Owen finds he can relate to her more than he expected. All solidly entertaining stories. I don't think there's been more than a couple of Torchwood main range audios I didn't care for. It's probably BF's most consistently solid series. The fact that it's generally standalone, hour-long stories helps.
Took a break from Torchwood to listen to Big Finish's Space: 1999 and UFO audios, which are like BF's take on The Prisoner, rebooting the shows, changing a few things, mixing new stories with retold versions of TV episodes. It's an approach that just doesn't demonstrate why a reboot was necessary. At least The Prisoner went a bit farther in its rebootyness; UFO is still set leading up to the futuristic year of 1980 and its main change is taking a lot longer to retell certain beats from the TV series. Oh, and bad attempts at accents. BF has done a lot of good work within the constraints of Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Blake's 7 continuity. Space: 1999 and UFO just don't feel like stories that really needed to be told or fresh new takes on old material. Back to Torchwood soon.
An interesting thing to do with Space: 1999 might've been to do Space: 2049 -- pick up the story 50 years later in-continuity, explore how things have evolved over that time, how the next generation of children born and raised on Moonbase Alpha has grown up and how they see their situation. Although I guess they'd have to ignore that coda video that Zenia Merton did.