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5th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Haunting Of Thomas Brewster

Doctor Who: The Haunting Of Thomas BrewsterYoung Thomas Brewster hasn’t exactly led a charmed life. Orphaned at the age of five, he winds up in the London workhouses and is eventually handed off to a vile man who forces young men into a life of virtual slavery, searching the banks of the Thames for valuable cargo thrown overboard by corrupt boat skippers who don’t want to pay taxes on what they’re carrying (or smuggling). But from his mother’s funeral onward, there have been two constants in Thomas’ life (aside from suffering): his mother’s ghost speaks to him, and he keeps seeing a tall blue box whose occupants keep asking after him. When he finally meets these two people – a man called the Doctor and a girl named Nyssa – they seem pleasant enough, but they’re an obstacle to his plans. His mother’s ghost has given Thomas instructions to build a time machine to change the future – an act which she assures him will reunite them at last. And when Thomas’ makeshift time machine isn’t enough to change history to his mother’s liking, she tells him to steal the Doctor’s TARDIS instead…

Order this CDwritten by Jonathan Morris
directed by Barnaby Edwards
music by Simon Robinson

Cast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Leslie Ash (Mother), Christian Coulson (Robert McIntosh), John Pickard (Thomas Brewster), Barry McCarthy (Creek), Sid Mitchell (Pickens), Trevor Cooper (Shanks)

Timeline: between Renaissance Of The Daleks and The Boy That Time Forgot

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
5th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Boy That Time Forgot

Doctor Who: The Boy That Time ForgotTrapped in Victorian England without the TARDIS, the Doctor and Nyssa try desperately to track down the TARDIS, ultimately resorting to – out of sheer desperation – convincing guests in a Victorian sitting room to unwittingly participate in a block-transfer computation to allow the Doctor to peer into the time vortex to look for his missing ship. But instead of a peek, the Doctor, Nyssa and two of their unsuspecting acquaintances find themselves transported into prehistoric Earth – but a prehistoric Earth that shouldn’t exist at all. The dinosaurs are nowhere to be found, and giant insects seem to overrun the planet. Even the insects, however, answer to someone else – someone eager to renew his acquaintance with the Doctor and Nyssa. They’re horrified to discover a wizened, demented old man at the heart of this world, a man they once knew as a boy called Adric. Having somehow managed to survive his fiery fall to Earth, Adric has changed history, and he has a score to settle with the Doctor…and he expects to make Nyssa his queen. But is this really Adric? And if so, can his surprisingly vicious taste for revenge be turned into his own redemption before his rule comes to an end?

Order this CDwritten by Paul Magrs
directed by Barnaby Edwards
music by Steve Foxon

Cast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Andrew Sachs (Adric), Harriet Walter (Mrs. Beatrice Mapp), Adrian Scarborough (Rupert Von Thal), Oliver Senton (Kranlee), Claire Wyatt (Madam Teegarna)

Timeline: between The Haunting Of Thomas Brewster and Time Reef

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
5th Doctor Doctor Who

Time Reef / A Perfect World

Doctor Who: Time ReefTime Reef: His TARDIS returned to him by Thomas Brewster, the Doctor is suspicious of everything, and it seems with good reason, since the TARDIS is missing vital pieces – one of which holds the timeship’s the internal dimensions in place. The Doctor backtracks to the TARDIS’ most recent destination, a “time reef” isolated in a shrinking pocket universe, where two other ships have become marooned. The missing pieces of the TARDIS are easy to find: Brewster had been selling and bartering items such as the TARDIS’ food machine to both ships’ crews. Hawklike predators from another dimension swarm around the stranded ships – including the Doctor’s now-useless TARDIS – and the Doctor isn’t sure he wants Brewster’s help to try to set things right.

A Perfect World: Brewster slyly talks the Doctor into taking him to another time and place that he visitedv during his unauthorized solo trip in the TARDIS: present-day London… only now the city, the world, and the people who inhabit it are vastly improved. Aside, of course, from the one person Brewster hoped to see again.

Order this CDTime Reef written by Marc Platt
A Perfect World written by Jonathan Morris
directed by Barnaby Edwards
music by Simon Robinson

Cast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), John Pickard (Thomas Brewster), Nicholas Farrell (Gammades / Phil), Beth Chalmers (Vuyoki / Taz), Sean Biggerstaff (The Ruhk), Sean Connolly (Lucor / Trev), Rebecca Callard (Connie)

Timeline: between The Boy Who Time Forgot and Castle Of Fear

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
6th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Crimes Of Thomas Brewster

Doctor Who: The Crimes Of Thomas BrewsterA peaceful visit to early 21st century London becomes less restful for the Doctor and Evelyn when they find themselves pursued by robotic insects with deadly homing instincts. Help comes from an unlikely ally within the police, D.I. Patricia Menzies, pursuing a criminal investigation well outside her home jurisdiction in Manchester. The Doctor has never met Menzies before, but she knows him well, and keeps silent about their past meetings (which take place in his future). Total strangers or not, though, she does need his help in ending the crminal activities of a mysterious gang operating in London. The Doctor and Evelyn quickly find out that the trail leads to a criminal known as the Doctor – described as a fair-haired young man in Edwardian clothes. Though the sixth Doctor is troubled by the thought that another of his incarnations is acting criminally, he follows the clues until he finds out who the other Doctor is: his unethical former companion, Thomas Brewster. Acting as “the Doctor”, Brewster is trying to restore his ability to time travel, and has done a deal with a species from another world. Naturally, what Brewster has failed to take into account is that he himself has been double-crossed by the aliens, who wish to wipe out the human race and take Earth for themselves.

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

Cast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Maggie Stables (Dr. Evelyn Smythe), John Pickard (Thomas Brewster), Anna Hope (DI Menzies), David Troughton (Raymond Gallagher), Ashley Kumar (Jared), Lisa Greenwood (Philippa), Duncan Wisbey (Sergeant Bradshaw), Helen Goldwyn (Terravore Queen)

Notes: This adventure definitively places the sixth Doctor’s short string of adventures with Charley Pollard, a shipwrecked former companion of his eighth incarnation, after his travels with Evelyn (and obviously before his travels with Melanie). To familiarize herself with time paradoxes, Menzies has “watched the first ten minutes of The Time Traveler’s Wife“, a movie adaptation of book that many fans believe inspired the tenth and eleventh Doctors’ out-of-chronological-order relationship with River Song in TV Doctor Who.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
6th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

The Feast Of Axos

Doctor Who: The Feast Of AxosA private expedition from Earth sets out to gain access to the time-looped space parasite Axos, hoping to trap and tame the living space vehicle that once threatened to drain Earth of all life and energy. With Earth now facing a debilitating energy crisis, it is hoped that Axos can be harnessed to transmit energy to Earth from within its time loop. Awakened by the activity in its immediate vicinity, Axos begins making its own plans to regain full strength. “Hijacked” by Thomas Brewster, the TARDIS arrives aboard Axos, and the Doctor is immediately wary of the motivation of the human astronauts trying to revive the being. When not all of the astronauts turn out to be following the same plans, this only serves to intensify the Doctor’s suspicions of them, and Brewster’s ever-changing loyalties make matters even worse. Reawakened, Axos reverses the apparatus designed to bleed its energy off and send it to Earth, instead draning energy from Earth to feed itself. With the unwitting help of the explorers from Earth, and the very willing help of Brewster, will Axos succeed in sucking Earth dry this time?

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

Cast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Maggie Stables (Dr. Evelyn Smythe), John Pickard (Thomas Brewster), Bernard Holley (Axos), John Banks (Campbell Irons/Svenni Nilson), Andree Bernard (Joanna Slade), Chook Sibtain (David Brock), Peter Forbes (Craig Swanson), Duncan Wisbey (Philippe Lefevre)

Notes: Irons “bought out the old British Rocket Group” 30 years prior to this adventure, which appears to take place in the 2020s at the earliest. Axos was previously encountered in the 1971 TV story The Claws Of Axos, during the Jon Pertwee era and featuring Roger Delgado as the Master. (That story’s original working title, Vampire In Space, was changed shortly before broadcast, and is worked into dialogue here.) Actor Bernard Holley also provided the voice of Axos in that story, as he does here.

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green

Categories
6th Doctor Doctor Who The Audio Dramas

Industrial Evolution

Doctor WhoThomas Brewster is back in his element, laboring at a factory as the rise of unions and workers’ rights begin to gain a foothold in the early industrial era. One of his fellow workers loses a hand on the job, and Brewster is surprised when the Doctor and Evelyn arrive to investigate, believing that they had left him and continued their travels. In the basement levels below the factory, an entirely different kind of machinery lurks, intelligent and capable of building more like itself, centuries ahead of human technology. Not everyone is oblivious to the silent spread of the self-replicating machines, and once again the Doctor and Brewster have to form an uneasy alliance to keep history from being rewritten. But this time, Brewster will take measures to save Earth of which the Doctor would never approve. Is their tenuous partnership done at last?

Order this CDwritten by Eddie Robson
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Fool Circle Productions

Cast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Maggie Stables (Dr. Evelyn Smythe), John Pickard (Thomas Brewster), Rory Kinnear (Samuel Belfrage), Warren Brown (Stephen Gibson), Joannah Tincey (Clara Stretton), Hugh Ross (Robert Stretton), Paul Chahidi (George Townsend)

LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green