Survival Of The Fittest
Klein’s Story: The Doctor is curious as to how Klein went from the future to Colditz Castle, the first time he encountered her. He learns of an alternate Doctor’s grisly fate, and the very precise guidance of a young man named Johann Schmidt in helping Klein learn how to control the fallen Doctor’s TARDIS. And Klein learns, to her alarm, that the Doctor has been pulling the strings of her life all along.
Survival Of The Fittest: The Doctor and Klein arrive on a planet whose native insect population, the Vrill, has been decimated by chemical weapons. The time travelers split up, with Klein following the trail of clues back to the mercenary humans who prey upon this planet’s populace, while the Doctor discovers that even chasing the humans away may not stave off the insects’ doom due to the tightly-regimented nature of their society. But in sparring with the genocidal humans, who claim to be eradicating pests in advance to make much-needed space for a human colony, Klein has a revelation about the nature of many of the perils that the Doctor faces… and decides to take the TARDIS for herself.
Survival Of The Fittest written by Jonathan Clements
Klein’s Story written by John Ainsworth and Lee Mansfield
directed by John Ainsworth
music by Simon RobinsonSurvival Of The Fittest Cast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Tracey Childs (Elizabeth Klein), Adrian Bower (Steffen), Hannah Smith (Rose), Evie Dawnay (Lilly), Mark Donovan (Jackson), Alex Mallinson (The Carrion)
Klein’s Story Cast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Tracey Childs (Elizabeth Klein), Rupert Wickham (Faber), Paul McGann (Johann Schmidt)
Notes: Klein’s Story is a single-part story which tries to reconcile various loose ends left dangling in Klein’s first audio appearance, Colditz (2001). In Survival Of The Fittest, the Vrill race communicates by smell, which may be a sly reference to the decidedly outside-of-accepted-canon charity spoof The Curse Of Fatal Death (1999), in which an alternate ninth Doctor played by Rowan Atkinson had to communicate via the “carefully modulated breaking of wind”. There’s no indication that this story involves any such summoning of the posterior winds. This was the finish Big Finish release to pair a three-part story with a single-part secondary story, and the only occasion upon which the single-part story presented before the “main feature” in the CD track order.
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
The TARDIS is now in Klein’s hands, and she has rewritten history as she pleases. Whenever threats arise to challenge her “Fourth Reich”, she simply goes further back in time and prevents those threats from existing. The web of time is stretched to its breaking point. In a cell in Klein’s headquarters, a Time Lord called the Doctor is kept in chains, because he remembers events that Klein wiped from history, from meeting her in in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising to taking her to an alien world to thwart genocide. To anger Klein is to risk being erased from time itself; even though she’s not the nominal Fuhrer of the Fourth Reich, few dare to cross her. But when a Selachian attack force arrives with its own time travel technology, the Doctor instantly becomes a suspect – and, it turns out, he helped to plan the Selachian invasion in advance. Or maybe he did that in another timeline. In any case, Klein and her “Bureau of Temporal Affairs” have met their match, and her own place in history is subject to revision.
Notes: The lightning and thunderclaps in the new opening titles hearken back to the very origins of Doctor Who; the unaired pilot version of 
the series; both episodes have a darker tone (and much darker lighting) than most of the rest of the series, with the Department experimenting on captured alien life forms and Inspector June Turner exhibiting more ruthless behavior (and more advanced technology) than in the remainder of the series; also, Jorjie seems to know nothing of her mother’s day job, whereas by 
“Magdalen Academy,” even before Starkey interferes with the school’s systems. (The logo seen on-set on various computer screens was probably made by the scenic art department, while the signs that Starkey hacks outside the school were probably the responsibility of the visual effects department.) In a throwback to his days in 1970s Doctor Who, K-9 is sidelined for much of the story for repairs, affording his human co-stars a larger share of the action. Somewhat confusingly, references are made here to events in the episode Liberation, which had yet to air in the UK – even though it had aired in other territories, and effectively serves as part two of the pilot, 
Notes: Oscar-winning actress Sophie Okonedo makes her second Doctor Who “appearance” here; her first was in animated form in the 2003 BBCi webcast