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5th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Lady Of Mercia

Doctor WhoThe Doctor lands the TARDIS near the University of Frodsham in 1983, just in time to attend a historical conference – and, perhaps, track down some indications of primitive time travel taking place here. By posing as “Dr. Jovanka” from Wollongong (and entourage), the Doctor gets to take part. Tegan experiences a strange sensation while looking at a prized sword said to have belonged to the 10th century warrior queen Æthelfrid, and later sees the college’s history professor stealing the sword. He takes it to a campus science lab where his wife has constructed a primitive time machine, which then propels Tegan and the professor back to the 10th century; their meeting with the real Æthelfrid doesn’t exactly go well, and the time travelers are accused of sorcery. Worse yet, the time machine reactivates, send Æthelfrid’s warrior princess daughter back to 1983. The Doctor promises to take Ælfwynn back to the 10th century in the TARDIS in exchange for her not killing anyone, but even that plan goes awry, landing them behind enemy lines. When Æthelfrid offers to spare the time travelers’ lives in exchange for Tegan assuming her daughter’s identity, it seems that history is almost destined never to be the same again.

Order this CDwritten by Paul Magrs
directed by Ken Bentley
music by Steve Foxon

Cast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Janet Fielding (Tegan), Mark Strickson (Turlough), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Anthony Howell (Professor John Bleak), Abigail Thaw (Dr. Philippa Stone), Rachel Atkins (Queen Æthelfrid), Catherine Grose (Princess Ælfwynn), Kieran Bew (Arthur Kettleson), Stephen Critchlow (Earl of Wessex)

Timeline: for the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough: between Enlightenment and The King’s Demons; for Nyssa: 50 years after Terminus. This story takes place after Eldrad Must Die! and before Prisoners Of Fate.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
4th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Dalek Contract

Doctor WhoStill concerned about the migration of the Laan, the Doctor tries to follow their trail, and finds himself in the Proxima system; too late, he learns that the TARDIS has not followed the Laan, but has instead tracked down Cuthbert’s Conglomerate headquarters, where Cuthbert is pressing forward with the same illegal experiments that ensnared the Laan before. But this time, Cuthbert is meeting with local resistance on Proxima Major, and he has done a deal with his business associates, the Daleks, to quell that uprising. Romana and K-9 are captured with some of the resistenace fighters, and once the Daleks realize they have companions of the Doctor in their custody, they’re less concerned with being Cuthbert’s subcontractors than with capturing their deadliest foe.

Order this CDwritten by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Alistair Lock

Cast: Tom Baker (The Doctor), Mary Tamm (Romana), John Leeson (K-9 / Tollivun), David Warner (Cuthbert), Toby Hadoke (Mr. Dorrick), Dominic Mafham (Chidak), Nicholas Briggs (The Daleks), Jane Slavin (Halka), John Dorney (Sterris)

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

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5th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

Prisoners Of Fate

Doctor WhoThe TARDIS brings the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Turlough to Valderon, a penal colony governed by a society that punishes potential criminals on the basis of crimes predicted by a “chronoscope”. As the Doctor becomes uneasy about this system of justice, Tegan is pulled aside by a medical researcher who reveals his identity: he is Adric, Nyssa’s son, and his mother has been missing for over a decade since her disappearance (and presumed death) at the Helheim research station. The disease whose cure she was searching for on Helheim still rages on, unabated – and thanks to her youthful appearance, Nyssa’s son is worried that he is seeing her before she started her family, thereby creating a paradox. Tegan reveals some (but not all) of this information to the Doctor, but before he can bundle his companions back into the TARDIS to leave, Tegan and Turlough are arrested and tried because the justice computer had calculated a high probability that they will kill a guard.

Order this CDwritten by Jonathan Morris
directed by Ken Bentley
music by Fool Circle Productions

Cast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Janet Fielding (Tegan), Mark Strickson (Turlough), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Sarah Dougles (Sibor), Alistair Mackenzie (Galen), Anjella Mackintosh (Mahandra), Jez Fielder (Kartis)

Notes: The names of Nyssa’s husband and children were revealed in Circular Time (2007); Nyssa asked Tegan not to reveal her family to the Doctor in Cobwebs, the story that also saw her leave Helheim and rejoin the TARDIS crew. Nyssa’s youthful appearance was restored at the end of The Emerald Tiger.

Timeline: for the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough: between Enlightenment and The King’s Demons; for Nyssa: 50 years after Terminus. This story takes place after The Lady Of Mercia.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

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7th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

Persuasion

Doctor WhoUNIT scientific advisor Elizabeth Klein is discussing work performance issues with her recently-hired assistant, Will Arrowsmith, when the dreaded “Umbrella Man” is sighted nearby. Klein orders Will to stay put while she tries to follow the Doctor to ask him why he’s there; Will, naturally, follows them both right into the TARDIS, which then proceeds to take off. It lands in postwar Germany, where something decidedly strange is happening. A couple speaking entirely in couplets seems to have the nearby village in their thrall, while a man named Schalk, the developer of a prototype mind-control device called the Persuasion Machine, hides out among the locals hoping to escape the notice of anyone who would wish him to build such a device for them; sure enough, a spacecraft does turn up looking for him, as does the Doctor, who is aware of Schalk’s past as a wanted war criminal. The Persuasion machine could conceivably end free will throughout the universe, and more than one party would do nearly anything to claim either the machine or its inventor. The Doctor must be prepared to be even more ruthless, and this, he reveals, is why he has brought Klein with him.

Order this CDwritten by Jonathan Barnes
directed by Ken Bentley
music by Andy Hardwick

Cast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Tracey Childs (Elizabeth Klein), Christian Edwards (Will Arrowsmith), David Sibley (Kurt Schalk), Jonathan Forbes (Lukas Hinterberger), Paul Chahidi (Shepherd / Bondsman Tango-Veldt), Miranda Raison (Shepherdess / Acquisitor Prime), Gemma Whelan (Casta / The Sylph / Khlecht)

Timeline: after UNIT: Dominion and before Starlight Robbery; the Doctor seems to be aware that he will regenerate soon, so probably not long before the 1996 TV movie for the Doctor.

Notes: Apparently Klein has finally convinced UNIT to hire an assistant for her (UNIT: Dominion). Persuasion‘s opening scenes with Klein and Will are said to take place in 1990.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
4th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Final Phase

Doctor WhoTo save Romana and K-9, the Doctor gives in to the Dalek Supreme’s demand that he hand himself over… but naturally, this is part of the Doctor’s plan, and the Dalek saucer sent to collect him winds up under his complete control. Romana and K-9 get a glimpse of Cuthbert’s top-secret R&D project at last: a tear in the fabric of space-time, which Cuthbert has harnessed and turned into a dimensional gateway to explore (and, more likely, exploit) “the glories of the past.” Romana quickly realizes that this is the only reason why the Daleks are cooperating with Cuthbert: they intend to commandeer the gateway for their own purposes. The Daleks converge on Cuthbert’s space station to claim the gateway for themselves, forcing Cuthbert’s private army to join up with the Proximan rebels to fight off their common enemy. The Doctor arrives to make “adjustments” to Cuthbert’s dimensional gateway, over the corrupt businessman’s protests, but the choices on the table are wiping out the Dalek threat… or annihilation for the entire universe, Daleks and all.

Order this CDwritten by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Alistair Lock

Cast: Tom Baker (The Doctor), Mary Tamm (Romana), John Leeson (K-9), David Warner (Cuthbert), Toby Hadoke (Mr. Dorrick), Dominic Mafham (Chidak), Nicholas Briggs (The Daleks), Jane Slavin (Halka), John Dorney (Security Man / Warrior)

Notes: This was Mary Tamm’s final performance as Romana before her death in 2011.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
7th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

Starlight Robbery

Doctor WhoThe Doctor, Klein and Will discover that Schalk’s Persuasion Machine design – and possibly even Schalk himself – are up for grabs in an auction of rare weapons of mass destruction. Such a sale of salacious merchandise has already drawn the attention of such unsavory suitors as the Sontarans and other assorted warmongers. Hosting the auction is the equally unsavory Garundel, unaware that his own underling, Ms. Ziv, is planning a double-cross of her own. The Doctor adopts a curiously hands-off approach to this TARDIS trip, assigning Klein and Will to stage a heist of their own to steal the Persuasion machine and Schalk himself. But things quickly go wrong, leaving the Doctor with little choice but to take a more direct hand in events, and risking the lives of his companions.

Order this CDwritten by Matt Fitton
directed by Ken Bentley
music by Howard Carter

Cast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Tracey Childs (Elizabeth Klein), Christian Edwards (Will Arrowsmith), Stuart Milligan (Garundel), Dan Starkey (Marshal Stenn / Major Vlaar / Sergeant Gredd / Asallis), Jo Woodcock (Ziv), Lizzie Roper (Krakenmother Benarra)

Notes: Actor Dan Starkey is the voice of the Sontarans for both Big Finish and the BBC, having played the eleventh Doctor’s well-meaning-but-still-Sontaran ally Strax in television Doctor Who, and having appeared as other Sontarans since the creatures’ return to modern Who in The Sontaran Stratagem (2008). Starkey also plays the magical imp Randal Moon in Russell T. Davies’ CBBC series Wizards Vs. Aliens. Stuart Milligan, who appeared in previous Big Finish audio stories The Reaping and Lurkers At Sunlight’s Edge, also appeared in televised Doctor Who as President Richard Nixon in The Impossible Astronaut and Day Of The Moon; he first played Garundel in 2012’s audio story Black And White.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
5th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

Fanfare For The Common Men

Doctor Who: Fanfare For The Common MenThe Doctor tries to take Nyssa to 1963 to show her the heyday of Beatlemania, only to find that another band, the Common Men, has taken the Beatles’ place in history. Worse yet, as the Doctor and Nyssa stand in the screaming crowd awaiting the Common Men’s arrival, they see someone in the crowd with a gun. The Doctor warns the band while Nyssa tries to disarm the shooter, only to find that he has a weapon that’s definitely not from 1963, definitely not from Earth, and he also has a time transporter which he uses to escape, taking Nyssa with him. Trying to find out what’s going on, the Doctor befriends the band and a fan named Rita, with whom he witnesses several incidents of the band’s fans taking their devotion to dangerous levels. Nyssa, in the meantime, also finds herself in the company of the Common Men, at a different point in their career. As she awaits rescue via TARDIS, she also meets Lenny Kruger, a man determined to manage the Common Men’s careers. It turns out that he’s an alien (but then, so are the boys in the band), and he hopes to harness the power of their popularity for something beyond mere show business. The Doctor, determined to restore the Fab Four to their rightful place in history, is an obstacle to Kruger’s plans, one which Kruger wants to remove by any means necessary.

Order this CDwritten by Eddie Robson
directed by Barnaby Edwards
music by Howard Carter

Cast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Mitch Benn (Mark Carville), Andrew Knott (James O’Meara), David Dobson (Korky Goldsmith), Ryan Sampson (Lenny Kruger), Alison Thea-Skot (Rita/Sadie), Jonty Stephens (Paravatar)

Notes: The Common Men – at least, the Common Men as history should recall them – were mentioned in the very first episode of Doctor Who, An Unearthly Child, and in the course of restoring history, the Doctor very specifically puts them on course to be the one-hit wonders mentioned by Ian Chesterton in that episode. The Doctor recalls that Susan used to listen to one of their records in the TARDIS and that his first incarnation “didn’t like it.” The Doctor mentions the Ferutu, time-sensitive beings encountered by the fifth Doctor and his early lineup of companions in the Missing Adventures novel Cold Fusion, published in 1996.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
7th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

Daleks Among Us

Doctor WhoThe Doctor, Klein and Will return to Earth, now certain that Schalk is still hiding there and perhaps never left. What they find instead is a Dalek, which Klein manages to destroy with her usual ruthless efficiency. The trail then leads them to Azimuth, a world the Doctor previously visited in the company of Ace, where he helped the locals fend off a Dalek invasion. But Azimuth is strangely changed: even saying the word “Dalek” out loud violates the law, since the government of Azimuth has declared that no invasion ever took place, and no Daleks ever landed there. Will immediately runs afoul of this law and discovers that there is an underground movement on Azimuth that not only believes that the Dalek invasion happened, but that it never ended. This resistance movement’s leader is known only as “Father”, a wizened, damaged man whose life support system resembles the lower half of a Dalek – a man known to the Doctor by another name. And the Daleks do indeed still have Azimuth under their control, thanks to their new leader… a particularly persuasive man known to the Doctor and Klein as Schalk. Klein’s destiny and her origins are inextricably linked to Schalk’s, though discovering precisely how may be as dangerous as fighting the Daleks.

Order this CDwritten by Alan Barnes
directed by Ken Bentley
music by Wilfredo Acosta

Cast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Tracey Childs (Elizabeth Klein), Christian Edwards (Will Arrowsmith), Terry Molloy (Davros), Jonathan Forbes (Hinterberger), Nicholas Briggs (Ralf/The Daleks), Tim Delap (Falkus), Jessica Brooks (Qaren), Paul Chahidi (Entity)

Notes: Will says he’s seen UNIT archival film of Daleks from incidents in Shoreditch (Remembrance Of The Daleks, in this case said to have been filmed by the Countermeasures group) and at Auderly House (Day Of The Daleks). Under Dalek torture, the Doctor recounts, somewhat disjointedly, events chronicled in the television stories The Twin Dilemma, The Sensorites, and The Happiness Patrol. When the Doctor and Will disguise themselves as members of the SS to rescue Klein, she asks “Aren’t you a little short to be stormtroopers?” (a Star Wars gag).

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

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3rd Doctor 4th Doctor 5th Doctor 6th Doctor 7th Doctor 8th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Light At The End

Doctor Who: The Light At The EndThe Doctor is startled when a flashing red light appears on the TARDIS console. The surprise isn’t that the light has never flashed before, but that it is there at all, where there was no light on the console before. And it’s not just one Doctor, but all of the Doctor’s incarnations.

The eighth Doctor and Charley, after witnessing a strangely disjointed collection of images from the Doctor’s past (and past Doctors), try to follow a trace through time to a London suburb at three minutes after five in the evening on the twenty-third day of November, 1963, but the TARDIS instead deposits them on an alien planet in the middle of a live demonstration of a weapons system capable of immense destruction. The two time travelers are separated, and Charley makes her way back to the TARDIS, just in time for a strange phenomenon to change the TARDIS around her. She finds herself in a different (and yet similar) console room, occupied by a savage woman named Leela and another man who claims to be the Doctor. The eighth Doctor follows, and he and his fourth incarnation try to combine their talents and knowledge to get the TARDIS safely away from this planet. The escape attempt doesn’t go as planned. Charley and Leela inexplicably vanish from the TARDIS.

The sixth and seventh Doctors also find each other on this planet, but are in a different region, where a conference is taking place: a showroom demonstration for other weapons created by the same alien race, the Vess. The seventh Doctor and Ace discover the Master is somehow involved, but then Ace vanishes. The sixth Doctor finds a delegation of Time Lords are an unofficial presence at this weapons sale – members of the Celestial Intervention Agency, led by Straxus, without the knowledge of the High Council of Gallifrey. Peri vanishes, and only then does the sixth Doctor discover the truth: the Master discovered the unauthorized Time Lord expedition and demanded a bribe for their silence. That bribe came in the form of a weapon of the Master’s choice from the Vess arsenal. Straxus knows nothing beyond this, but the Doctor knows enough to threaten to expose Straxus’ presence to the Time Lords; in exchange for the Doctor’s silence, Straxus helps reunite as many of the Doctors as he can.

The fifth Doctor and Nyssa follow the same time trace, but the Doctor is suspicious enough to change the time coordinates, arriving instead at 5:02pm in November 23rd, 1963. The TARDIS crashes through a shed belonging to a man named Bob Dovie, whose wife and children have gone missing. To the Doctor and Nyssa, it is obvious that Dovie has suffered some sort of trauma that has left him in an agitated, distracted state. Dovie’s family are closer to him than he thinks, murdered by the Master. Why has the Doctor’s old enemy chosen to victimize a perfectly average suburban family, how is it connected to the evil Time Lord’s endless quest for vengeance against the Doctor, and what is happening to the Doctor’s companions?

Order this CDwritten by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Jamie Robertson

Cast: Tom Baker (The Doctor), Peter Davison (The Doctor), Colin Baker (The Doctor), Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Paul McGann (The Doctor), Louise Jameson (Leela), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Nicola Bryant (Peri), Sophie Aldred (Ace), India Fisher (Charley), Geoffrey Beevers (The Master), John Dorney (Bob Dovie), William Russell (Ian Chesterton / The Doctor), Carole Ann Ford (Susan), Maureen O’Brien (Vicki), Peter Purves (Steven), Jean Marsh (Sara Kingdom), Anneke Wills (Polly), Frazer Hines (Jamie McCrimmon / The Doctor). Wendy Padbury (Zoe), Katy Manning (Jo Grant), Janet Fielding (Tegan), Mark Strickson (Turlough), Oliver Hume (Straxus), Nicholas Briggs (The Vess), Benedict Briggs (Kevin Dovie), Tim Treloar (The Doctor)

Notes: Straxus first appeared in part one of Blood Of The Daleks, the eighth Doctor audio adventure which introduced Lucie Miller, but the sixth Doctor would appear to have met Straxus first… at least in the timeline created by the Master, which the Doctors later eliminate. Since Straxus is played here by Oliver Hume, it’s safe to assume that this is an earlier incarnation of Straxus than the incarnations that have been encountered by the eighth Doctor.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
6th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Space Race

Doctor WhoThe TARDIS brings the Doctor and Peri to Kazakhstan in November 1963, and they happen upon a wrecked car with three dead passengers – all of them executed prior to the wreck. When they spot a second vehicle, the Doctor and Peri “borrow” identity papers from the corpses and are picked up and whisked away to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the heart of the Soviet Union’s space program, where mission controllers are frantically trying to reach Vostok 7, a mission to send a cosmonaut around the moon and return her to Earth. Posing as two scientists from Moscow, the Doctor and Peri discover that something has gone disastrously wrong with this mission, which probably has something to do with why it’s been erased from official history. The Doctor manages to restore contact with Vostok 7 and help the engineers fly it by remote back to Earth, only to discover that inside the capsule is a live dog with a human voice – a dog the Doctor recognizes as Laika, the first living Earth creature sent into space. But why is Laika now speaking with the voice of the first woman to go around the moon, and what other secrets await the next visitors to the moon?

Order this CDwritten by Jonathan Morris
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Howard Carter

Cast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Nicola Bryant (Peri), Karen Henson (Larisa Petrov), David Shaw-Parker (General Mikhail Leonov / General Paterson), Tom Alexander (Captain Alexei Kozlov / Lieutenant Andrews), Stuart Denman (Sergeant Leonid Kurakin/Scientist), Samantha Beart (Marinka Talanov / Female Worker)

Notes: The Space Race employs real and invented details of the cold war space race in roughly equal measure. There really was a Project A119, a plan by the U.S. Air Force to detonate a nuclear warhead on the surface of the moon, supposedly to analyze the makeup of the lunar material displaced by the explosion; the real mission objective would have been a morale victory, particularly if the resulting blast could be seen from Earth. A young doctoral student named Carl Sagan worked on the real-life Valentina Tereshkovaproject, which was classified for over 40 years; a similar Soviet plan to nuke the moon was also left on the drawing board. The “Voskhod 3KV” ICBM mentioned was actually a Vostok 3KV, a booster which propelled the second Voskhod flight into orbit. A real Vostok 7 mission was in the planning stages for late 1963, but it was never intended to venture further than a high Earth orbit. Vostok 6, flown by cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova (seen here), was the final Vostok flight; after her flight, the Vostok program ended and the Voskhod program began, but only two Voskhod flights were made before emphasis shifted to Soyuz and the Zond lunar program. Soviet space engineers did, in fact, design their own lunar landing vehicle, but the N-1 lunar rocket never proved to be safe enough for manned flights.

Timeline: after Revelation Of The Daleks and before The Trial Of A Time Lord

LogBook entry & review by Earl Green

Categories
7th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Assassination Games

Doctor WhoIt is late 1963, and one of the leading figures in a project to reposition Britain as a major player in the nuclear arms race is assassinated before the eyes of dozens of witnesses at a press conference. Among those witnesses is Group Captain Gilmore, who draws his weapon and pursues the assassin into an underground station. The assassin draws a bead on Gilmore, but his aim is thrown off at the last second by a man Gilmore has met before – the Doctor. But even this is not a guarantee of bringing the assassin to justice: he jumps in front of the next underground train after dropping a hint that he may be a member of a radical group of nuclear disarmament activists. The Doctor has assumed the identity of a public servant and a position within the British government, keeping a low profile while trying to observe the activities of a mysterious group operating within the government itself. Ace, in the meantime, is also undercover, and encounters Dr. Rachel Jensen, Gilmore’s scientific advisor, and the two are soon embroiled in a plot being carried out by a shadowy agency that has radically unpeaceful intentions. The race is on to start or prevent a war, and this time, the Doctor doesn’t have all the facts.

Order this CDwritten by John Dorney
directed by Ken Bentley
music by Wilfredo Acosta

Cast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Sophie Aldred (Ace), Simon Williams (Group Captain Gilmore), Pamela Salem (Rachel Jensen), Karen Gledhill (Allison Williams), Hugh Ross (Sir Toby Kinsella), Oliver Cotton (Sir Gideon Vale / Handler), Gemma Saunders (Eleanor Vale / Amanda Caulfield), Gerald Kyd (Martin Regan / Sir Robert Devere / Mulryne), Alisdair Simpson (Sir Francis White / Ritchie)

Notes: This story is meant to serve retroactively as a “pilot” for the Big Finish audio spinoff Counter-Measures, involving Gilmore, Dr. Jensen and Allison Williams, a group of characters introduced in the 1988 television story Remembrance Of The Daleks. By the time The Assassination Games saw release, there had already been two box sets of Counter-Measures adventures released by Big Finish. This also concludes the loosely-linked trilogy of 1963-themed stories released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who in 2013.

Timeline: after Remembrance Of The Daleks and before The Harvest

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
6th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Trial Of The Valeyard

Trial Of The ValeyardThe Doctor is once again dragged into the court of the Time Lords, but this time he is sought not as the accused, but as the attorney for the accused. His client is revealed to be the Valeyard, who mercilessly prosecuted the Doctor at his own trial before being revealed as a dark, twisted future incarnation of the Doctor himself. The crimes of which the Valeyard is accused are kept classified, leaving the Doctor few avenues for defending his client, so the Doctor takes the opportunity to delve into the Valeyard’s background, trying to use the trial as a way to discover how the Valeyard came into existence. The answers prove to be both disquieting and cryptic, with the Valeyard finally admitting that he is the result of an experiment to extend a Time Lord’s regenerative life span beyond the accepted limit of 13 incarnations. The Valeyard claims to be the product of a failed bid for immortality, but whose bid? And how does the Valeyard’s very existence constitute a crime punishable by his death?

Order this CDwritten by Alan Barnes & Mike Maddox
directed by Barnaby Edwards
music by Andy Hardwick / ERS

Cast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Michael Jayston (The Valeyard), Lynda Bellingham (The Inquisitor)

Notes: The Doctor’s symbiotic nuclei are mentioned; first mentioned in The Two Doctors (1985), these cells play a role in the regeneration process and, when subjected to the Rassilon Imprimatur, enable Time Lords to travel through time with no ill effects. The Valeyard foreshadows the seventh Doctor as a manipulative chess master, and the eighth Doctor as a man trying to “escape the shadow of death”, which was probably intended, at the time of writing, to refer to the events of the audio story To The Death and the Dark Eyes saga that followed, but can also be applied to the eighth Doctor’s avoidance of fighting in the Time War (Night Of The Doctor). The Doctor’s school nickname, Theta Sigma, was first revealed in the television story The Armageddon Factor (1978), and hints of it have continued to appear in other media as well as the TV series.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
7th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

Afterlife

Doctor WhoTraumatized by Hex’s selfless sacrifice of his own life, Ace is boiling over with rage and grief. She cripples the TARDIS until the Doctor agrees to treat Hex’s death as a tragedy on a human scale, complete with a memorial for the one remaining member of Hex’s family. The Doctor can barely face Hex’s grandmother with the news, and even then he isn’t able to divulge what truly happened to Hex. Ace saves a woman from what seems like a mugging, only to discover that a gang war is overrunning Hex’s home town, and that war is being fought with seemingly supernatural weapons far beyond human technology. She also discovers that the other major rival in this gang war is a man who is, at the very least, Hex’s identical twin: Hector Thomas. At Hex’s memorial, the Doctor is relieved to see Sally Morgan in attendance, and she briefs him on the unnatural warfare threatening to consume the city. As the Doctor steps into the fray, he discovers that he is once again playing games against gods…and the stakes are an old friend’s soul.

Order this CDwritten by Mike Fitton
directed by Ken Bentley
music by Howard Carter

Cast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Sophie Aldred (Ace), Philip Olivier (Hex), Amy Pemberton (Sally Morgan), Jean Boht (Hilda Schofield), Mandi Symonds (Lily Finnegan), Jonathan Forbes (Barry Finnegan), Andrew Dickens (D.I. Derek Mortimer)

Notes: Hex died at the end of Gods And Monsters (2012) saving his friends aboard the TARDIS, though that story’s post-end-credits “coda” made it clear that Hex still existed in some (possibly spiritual) form. Private Sally Morgan was introduced in House Of Blue Fire, returning in Black And White and Gods And Monsters; she also appeared in the Companion Chronicles story Project: Nirvana. Hex’s mother, Cassie, encountered the sixth Doctor twice (Project: Twilight, Project: Lazarus).

Timeline: after Gods And Monsters and before Revenge Of The Swarm

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
6th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

Antidote To Oblivion

Doctor WhoThe TARDIS picks up a distress call from another TARDIS, and the Doctor and Flip follow the signal to 24th century London, a near-wasteland in which it is no longer the capitol city of the UK, but is instead part of a geographical area govened by ConCorp, a corporate entity which runs the once-great nation like a huge company. But ConCorp’s chief benefactor is Sil, a profiteering Mentor who has extended enough loans that he and his species stand to own the entire country if those loans are defaulted upon. The Doctor and Flip learn that ConCorp (at Sil’s urging) is embarking on a genocidal plan to reduce the numbers of the unemployed to whom it must pay benefits: Sil and his chief scientist, Cordelia Crozier, are about to unleash a deadly plague to wipe out most life on Earth. And they’ve duped the Doctor into coming to Earth so they can mine an antidote from his Time Lord immune system… a cure for which they’ll happily charge the plague’s survivors a princely sum.

Order this CDwritten by Philip Martin
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Fool Circle Productions

Cast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Lisa Greenwood (Flip Jackson), Nabil Shaban (Sil), Dawn Murphy (Miss Cordelia), David Dobson (Pan / Lord Mav), Mary-Ann Cafferkey (Cerise), Scott Joseph (Boscoe / Voda / Knight Marshal), Mandy Weston (Kristal / Mistress Na / Velena)

Notes: Cordelia Crozier is the daughter of “young Crozier,” whose mind-transplantation process resulted in the direct intervention of the Time Lords and Peri’s removal from the timeline. The Time Lord Anzor was first mentioned in the scripts of the unmade 1986 television adventure Mission To Magnus, which established his past relationship with the Doctor. Mission To Magnus was novelized in the late ’80s and then recorded as a full-cast adventure in the Lost Stories range in 2009, so Antidote To Oblivion effectively canonizes that story. A disease known as Lasarti’s Wasting is mentioned, which may be a reference to Nyssa’s husband Lasarti (Circular Time, Cobwebs, Prisoners Of Fate).

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
4th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The King Of Sontar

Doctor WhoThe TARDIS brings the Doctor and Leela to the site of an unlikely sight: Sontarans fighting another Sontaran. But the target of this operation is no ordinary Sontaran. A Sontaran platoon has been sent to kill – and has failed to kill – a seven-foot-tall Sontaran renegade called Strang. Thanks to a mishap with one of the clone warriors’ cloning vats, Strang has received the concentrated DNA of multiple Sontarans, making him almost unstoppable, and he has his eyes set on wiping out Sontar and its race of “inferior” Sontarans. The Doctor believes that the Time Lords have once again deposited him at a critical moment in history to do their dirty work: to stop Strang from making the Sontarans a far more dangerous race. And just as happened on Skaro, the Doctor has grave misgivings about carrying out this assignment… but others feel differently about the matter.

Order this CDwritten by John Dorney
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Jamie Robertson

Cast: Tom Baker (The Doctor), Louise Jameson (Leela), Dan Starkey (Strang / Hutchins), David Collings (Rosato), John Banks (Vilhol / Mercenary), David Seddon (Irving / Garn / Tashan / Mercenary 2), Jenny Funnell (Reaver)

Notes: Technically, this is Leela’s first encounter with the Sontarans, pre-dating The Invasion Of Time.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green