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| written by Barbara Clegg & John Dorney directed by Ken Bentley released October 2011 starring Peter Davison as the Doctor Janet Fielding as Tegan Sarah Sutton as Nyssa |
As Dorney points out in the liner notes, The Elite opens the way many Nathan-Turner/Saward stories did: the Doctor and his companions in a long TARDIS scene, discussing the previous adventure and bickering a bit. For someone like me who considers Seasons 18 through 21 to be one of his favourite periods of Doctor Who, it’s a joy to listen to. Dorney writes the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa perfectly. But he’s not above a bit of modern joking at the expense of the era, as we find out why Tegan wore that tube top all season long. There’s also a reference to the Big Finish adventure Omega. I feel like I shouldn’t like these ahistorical components, but they work here, making the story not just a pastiche of the era it’s recreating, but a knowing one. The music all adds to the experience — moreso than any Lost Story so far, it sounds perfectly like the music of the era. You can imagine Roger Limb or Paddy Kingsland slaving away in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop producing this score. It’s the work of Fool Circle Productions (I see what you did there), who were previously responsible for excellent work on Cyberman 2. The sound effects get it, too.
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Doctor Who: The Lost Stories #3.2: Hexagora
Hexagora is the second of the Lost Stories to feature the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan, following straight on from The Elite in a way that feels nicely authentic to the 1980s. The original outline for Hexagora was written by Peter Ling and Hazel Adair (Ling was the writer of The Mind Robber back in the 1960s), and it was adapted to audio by Brian Finch (who’s penned a few Big Finish stories the past couple years, including a Sixth Doctor Lost Story, Leviathan). Vacationing in Australia, Tegan alerts the Doctor to the fact that a guy she knew at school has gone missing… and of course the Doctor determines that he’s been abducted to another planet. But when the TARDIS arrives on Proxima Centauri, they find not an advanced civilisation, but a recreation of Elizabethan London.
Hexagora starts off roughly, with a hoary scene where Mike Bretherton talks to his editor on the phone in a distracting accent when he sees a meteor, then a couple scenes where the Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa work to track Mike down that are high on technogubbins and low on energy. But once the plot makes it to Luparis, it picks up in energy. At first, I was worried because Hexagora seemed to do that thing that bad Doctor Who stories do — jam together a number of disparate elements in the hope that it creates something interesting — with Elizabethan London, Proxima Centauri, alien insects, and court politics, but in fact as the story unfolds, we see that all of these elements go together quite nicely.
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| written by Hazel Adair, Peter Ling & Paul Finch directed by Ken Bentley released November 2011 starring Peter Davison as the Doctor Janet Fielding as Tegan Sarah Sutton as Nyssa |
Hexagora starts off roughly, with a hoary scene where Mike Bretherton talks to his editor on the phone in a distracting accent when he sees a meteor, then a couple scenes where the Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa work to track Mike down that are high on technogubbins and low on energy. But once the plot makes it to Luparis, it picks up in energy. At first, I was worried because Hexagora seemed to do that thing that bad Doctor Who stories do — jam together a number of disparate elements in the hope that it creates something interesting — with Elizabethan London, Proxima Centauri, alien insects, and court politics, but in fact as the story unfolds, we see that all of these elements go together quite nicely.
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| written by Christopher Bailey & Marc Platt directed by Ken Bentley released December 2011 starring Peter Davison as the Doctor Janet Fielding as Tegan Sarah Sutton as Nyssa |
The Children of Seth delivers. While this isn’t as good as Kinda, it’s better than Snakedance. More importantly, it has the same kind of feel as both — that the Doctor and company have stepped into a large and complex adventure close to the end. There’s a whole world in place here already, built up through tiny mentions and a series of excellent performances, not to mention some brilliantly atmospheric sound design/music by the always-reliable Richard Fox and Lauren Yason. (Once again I’m bummed that The Lost Stories use interviews as extras on both CDs, and no music.) I loved almost every guest character. David Warner puts in an unusually subdued performance as Siris, Autarch of the Sirius Archipelago. Honor Blackman is brilliant as Anahita, his wily wife. My favorite of all, however, was Vernon Dobtcheff’s Shamur, an old soldier forgotten by the empire who goes back into battle to save it despite itself.
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