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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 |
Doctor Who: The Lost Stories #3.1:
The Elite
The third season of Big Finish’s
Doctor Who: The Lost Stories is here. The scars still haven’t healed since Andrew Cartmel
inflicted Season 27 on us, but regardless, we soldier on into the future. Or rather, into the past — the third season takes us back to Season 20 of classic
Doctor Who, reuniting the Fifth Doctor with Tegan and Nyssa in the gap between
Arc of Infinity and
Snakedance.
The Elite is written by John Dorney, based upon a scrap of an idea by Barbara Clegg. It’s not quite “authentic” (are these
Lost Stories ever?) as Clegg pitched
The Elite after
Enlightenment, which means it could never have featured Tegan and Nyssa, but on the other hand, it’s one of the most authentic-sounding
Lost Stories yet.
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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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 |
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 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 |
Doctor Who: The Lost Stories #3.3:
The Children of Seth
The Fifth Doctor strand of
Doctor Who: The Lost Stories comes to a close with
The Children of Seth, written by Marc Platt from a story by Christopher Bailey. Bailey of course wrote
Kinda and
Snakedance, the former of which is one of my favourite
Doctor Who stories. So the promise of a Bailey
Lost Story, written by one of Big Finish’s best writers, was one I couldn’t resist.
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.
