Similar in tone to Fright Motif, Monsters in Metropolis brings us back to early 20th century Europe where an alien threat has broken into a postwar city. Then, it was Paris, this time, it’s Berlin, 1925, and the influential movie Metropolis is being filmed! Again, this is a cultural reference I am not familiar with, so more old-school-attentive science fiction aficionados will likely appreciate this more than I do.
As the title suggests, there’s a monster getting into the Metropolis film. Where we (and the Doctor) know a woman plays the machineman, someone instead has a damaged Cyberman prepared to play the role! It’s an early cyberman, like seen in The Tenth Planetin a situation not unlike in The Silver Turk, wrestling with his last gasp of humanity, being forced to kill at the behest of a evil master, but increasingly unwilling to be the soldier he was “made” to be. It’s a great twist of a story where the Doctor doesn’t dare to hope for this Cyberman’s redemption, celebrity history is introduced and played with in a clever and on-theme way, and the audience is treated to a 9th Doctor story that feels like very classic Doctor Who yet retaining some of the 2005-ish style.
In a way this story gives us an emotional contour like that of Dalek: in both cases the 9th Doctor goes into the story with a set of biases informed by his injured past, and has some measure of hope and optimism restored. The box set that this story concludes is called Old Warriors, and even though the Doctor encounters old warriors in each story, dealing with their own post-war identity and purpose, the 9th Doctor himself is an Old Warrior, recuperating after the Last Great Time War and finding his feet as being The Doctor again. In that sense, this is a very significant story in the 9th Doctor’s early timeline and development.
This is a neat story! Here we see woven together elements of Shakespeare’s famous Scottish Play, Scottish mythology, and scraps of known surviving history. The result is a heartfelt and moving Doctor Who story, if a little confusing if you’re not familiar with most of the elements at play.
The Curse of Lady MacBethbrings the 9th Doctor to the kingdom of Moray where Lord MacBeth is returning from a local war and Lady MacBeth is managing things at home – and having a hard time of it due to the curse of the Fuath – a mythical creature that steals the faces from babies and haunts the dream of the young prince rendering him mute. MacBeth and two other women are initially trying to use the superstitious folklore of the land to cast away the evil spirits when the Doctor arrives and is thereafter mistaken for the dangerous mythical Blue Man throughout the story. He earns Lady MacBeth’s trust, however, and together they set out to try to save the children she’s been taking in and find out what malevolent force is behind these dismal goings-on.
There is some family intrigue, of course, and tension between Lord and Lady and father-in-law, but honor eventually wins the day as the Doctor and MacBeth recognize each other as old warriors, not murderers. There’s even a happily-ever-after sort of ending, which sits quite nicely in the face of the tragedy we’re accustomed to associating with these characters.
Volume 3 of “season one” of the 9th Doctor audio adventures is entitled Lost Warriors, and the first story is The Hunting Season. The lost warrior in this story is an alien ex-soldier refugee and his daughter, disguised as members of the British aristocracy. Taking place in a manor house in 1936, this story has kind of a Chimes of Midnightvibe to it, albeit with more emphasis on the interplay between the upstairs and downstairs characters. It’s interesting to consider how different incarnations of the Doctor might be more or less comfortable in the upper or lower class settings here – the 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 8th Doctors for example being particularly appreciative of the finer things in life – while the 9th Doctor is much less patient with the nobility and much more a commoner at heart.
But the manor house is under siege: every night otherworldly creatures ride around the grounds and threaten its inhabitants, and lord and his bloodthirsty daughter are particularly enthusiastic about shooting at them to ward them off. Eventually the Doctor learns of the blood feud between these aliens and Lord Hawthorn himself and attempts to broker a peace and end this remnant of war.
It’s not a story that stands out as one of the greatest, but it’s a solid entry on its own, introducing the theme of this box set of three one-hour stories.
Planet of the Endfeatures a graveyard planet harboring a secret – an ancient syndicate simply called The Corporation – who have a plan to return from digital suspended animation. They are aware that the Time War has ended with the destruction of Gallifrey and the Daleks, and see this as their opportunity to rise, especially once they get their hands on the Doctor to harness his regenerative abilities. The Corporation is an extreme plutocratic society: the accumulation of wealth is 100% their ethic and aim. When the Doctor visits the planet to correct some records and whatnot, he is captured despite the robot guardian’s positive impression of him, and handed over to the Incorporation. He manages to negotiate limited freedom for himself, in which they take over his body to harness his regenerative abilities, but allow him to move his eyes once a year… which he then does to communicate to the robot (whom he named Fred) in binary to explain his plight.
Eventually she (Fred) understands his plight and builds a machine to rescue him. There is a confrontation, techno-babble gets a little difficult to remember for this review, and the end result is that the Corporation is solidified in their golden tomb forever, no longer preserved alive, and a jolt of regenerative power transforms Fred into a living being instead of them. There’s also a funny moment where the Doctor has massively long hair after being frozen in place for the better part of a century, and he’s afraid a bird might have pooed on him – an image unsubtly recalling Sylvester McCoy’s costume as Radagst.
The use of lore, referring to the Time War and exploring an alien force trying to take advantage of the power vacuum left behind, gives this story a special weight to the Doctor Who fan and 9th Doctor enthusiast, without the tedious sideshow of making the Doctor go through another guilt trip. There are also references to the Doctor’s “misdeeds” in past incarnations where several wonders of the galaxy were defiled or destroyed – the living city of Exxilon being “a very naughty city” was especially funny (if obscure to some).
Fright Motifis the weak entry in Respond To All Calls, in my opinion. The story is good, and the characters are extremely well played – the fault is in how the antagonist works. An invisible creature that feeds on sound, or is somehow drawn by sound, is stalking an American jazz pianist in post-War Paris. He is afraid to play music or even listen to music, lest the creature manifest and kill someone else again. It’s an eerie story with many ups and downs as the Doctor races around the city with the tight cast of characters trying to capture the invisible killer. Unfortunately it gets confusing (and explanations fall short) when the Doctor realizes it’s actually drawn to the pianist’s sense of guilt and loss.
The twist is good for emotional storytelling, but I felt it undermined the music/sound motif of the entire story. As an almost-professional musician, with perfect pitch like Maurice the pianist in this story, I was on track with relating to the musicality and the fear of losing it, which he was experiencing, and the Doctor was trying to protect. (Plus, it’d been a while since Big Finish last had a sound-based creature as a foe.)
But if you can overlook that hurdle, Fright Motif is a story with much to commend it. And, at the very least, the other two stories in the box set more than make up for the shortcomings here.
The second volume of 9th Doctor audio stories, collectively called Respond To All Calls, is a string of three unrelated stories. Well, they’re unrelated in a narrative fashion, but they are a thematic union, kind of like how a lot of the monthly range trilogies were arranged. And, as much as Ravagers was enjoyable, this box set really sold me on the 9th Doctor’s return as a glorious return. He didn’t quite sound like himself in the first round, which is partly unavoidable simply due to 15 years of ageing, but in this set he captured even more of his Doctor-ish voice.
The first story is called Girl, Deconstructed. It is a spooky story of a girl whose matter is scattered into an incorporeal space within her house, turning her into a spectre, almost a poltergeist if she concentrates. Doctor Who has done a number of haunted house stories in the past, and the science fiction behind this one is pretty unique (and more believable than most) – an incorporeal alien race that travels great distances often stops off on Earth and sometimes tries to help humans who want to “get away” travel with them, but aren’t able to upload them properly, thus scattering their consciousness in a bodiless localized space.
The Doctor is able to save her and several others, but not everyone to whom this happened. His de facto companion in this story is a police officer, who is investigating the missing people, and their chemistry is a lot of fun to listen to. The way he messes with her by traveling by TARDIS a couple times during the narrative is priceless, and he even briefly runs into himself in front of her when he arrives a few seconds too early!
It’s also interesting that this takes place in 2004, reinforcing this incarnation’s “home time” on Earth as the mid-2000’s, leading up to his eventual travels with Rose.
Girl, Deconstructed has a great balance of science fiction, spookiness, and heart. Excellent stuff.
Set 1 of the Ninth Doctor (audio) Adventures concludes with Food Fight, a quirky title for a story that is actually quite hefty in content. A lot of unanswered questions continued to linger through the middle story, especially concerning how the antagonist in the first story came to be as we get to know the same woman as a scientist dedicated to saving her planet from the Ravagers. This is where everything comes together, while the universe is unraveling – the Doctor has to save everyone and everything, and his own interference in Audrey’s strange project on the game station (the Sphere of Freedom) has apparently advanced the universe’s destruction unavoidably.
Like both previous stories, Food Fight is fast paced and a little hectic. I think Cataclysm (the middle story) is the most confusing one on first-listen, where this story ties together both that have come before. Here, after picking up a support crew and struggling to stop them from trying to kill one another, the Doctor and Nova finally initiate their plan, dropping a bunch of robots on the Sphere of Freedom who “eat up” all the corrupted time particles, with amusing support from some soldiers from British history from the Roman era through the 1950’s running distractions. Unfortunately, the Doctor learns too late that the Sphere of Freedom is running an operation that’s actually holding the Ravagers at bay, so once his plan is set in motion the Ravagers advance and the entire universe convulses in the storm of time eddies.
The Doctor himself is caught up in one such time eddie and rides it all the way to the Ravagers themselves. Along the way he makes ghostly appearances to Audrey throughout her lifetime, explaining the mysterious apparitions throughout Cataclysm. Face to face with a Ravager at last, the Doctor learns of their hunger, and the “sweetness” that they crave. He then pulls a trick with the TARDIS key akin to what he would later attempt to do in Father’s Day, rescuing himself from this wave of destruction and skipping out of this timeline entirely. Returned to beginning of the sequence of events that unfolded in Sphere of Freedom, the Doctor is free to pursue a modified plan that will save the enslaved population on the Sphere, end the kidnapping of people from throughout time and space to play in the immersive (virtual) reality games, and provide a permanent solution to entrapping the Ravagers. It turns out they’ve been feeding not only on the adrenaline and fear of the people captured in the games, but have actually become addicted to their own physiological responses to that fear and excitement, meaning that rather than needing real people going through the experience of being kidnapped and thrown into these games, the Sphere can simply broadcast the games already played, with minor edits to the scenario in successive broadcasts, to keep the Ravagers appeased in perpetuity.
It’s an unusual sort of solution, and I’m a little surprised (and uneasy) about how delicate the setup is. Surely one day the Sphere will stop running and the broadcasts will cease and the Ravagers will continue their rampage, eating up the entire universe star system by star system? Is this a loophole in the story’s resolution, or is this an intentional open door to revisit them in a later set of stories? Maybe we’ll find out with box set 4 in 2022. <shrugs>
On the whole, Ravagers was not an extraordinary story, starting off the 9th Doctor’s audio stories with a groundbreaking bang. It was a good story, kind of a normal story – the sort of high quality that one expects from Big Finish Productions. Nothing to get embarrassed about, as modern Who on TV can be a bit silly sometimes, so that’s a plus. Besides which, it’s got to be a difficult task to live up to the emotional tenor of Series 1 from 2005. So I see the greatest value in this box set to be not so much the story itself, but the fact of its existence. Eccleston is clearly enjoying the role of the Doctor once again. The 9th Doctor is playing post-War clean-up (like we see him in The Oncoming Storm). He’s looking for good in the universe, and not yet ready to accept he can be a “nice guy” again after his War persona’s tenure. What this story represents is that there is something new to be explored in the 9th Doctor without having to repeat, rehash, or recapture the television series in 2005. I don’t expect Ravagers to top my favorite adventures of the year, but these stories do make me very happy to have this Doctor back and look forward to the next three sets.
The second story of the 9th Doctor’s first set of audio adventures, Ravagers, is entitled Cataclysm, and it’s very much a “middle story” as box sets go. The disappearance of the Doctor’s accomplice during the first story is resolved here, and he goes to rescue her pretty promptly. But along the way there is a lot of confusion as a great cataclysm unfolds around them…
The Doctor has words with Audrey, the CEO of the megacorporation game station catering to posh aliens and practically enslaving ordinary people to work there. He briefly disbelieves the Ravagers, but soon discerns the connection between the “neutron star” which is the mass of living creatures called ravagers and the time eddies that he’d already encountered.
Bit by bit he works out what’s going on, though the chronology is difficult as yet to untangle. Audrey was once a young scientist, the only one who recognized the Ravagers for what they were and the threat they posed to her planet. Luckily for her, she somehow got her hands on Gallifreyan technology that was ejected from the ancient cataclysm that we can assume was its “destruction” at the end of the Last Great Time War. She tried to use it to destroy the Ravagers by beaming time energy at it, but they just absorbed it. “This is where things all went wrong.” How she went from a scientist trying to save the world to a game station CEO we have no idea so far, but it gives us a hint that there’s a more bizarre secret purpose for the station than we first assumed.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Nova have a plan: if they can reprogram the robots he rescued her from at the beginning of this story, they can be deployed to track down and mop up all the corrupted time energy particles that are causing the time eddies and ripping apart the vortex and imploding the universe. The Doctor has already crossed his own timeline, so things are unusually complicated and dangerous for him, and we can be sure that things will get worse in the third and final story before they get better.
Eccleston continues to get a bunch of lines that match phrases and exclamations that he got in Doctor Who series 1. Hearing him say the same or similar lines really highlights how his voice has changed in 15-16 years, but it also helps the listener connect our memories of him as the Doctor then with his continuation of the role today. After all, the monthly range stories did this frequently with Doctors 5 through 7.
One last note should be made concerning Nova – as in the previous story she continues to exhibit hints that she knows a great deal more about time travel than she ought to. What her connection is to all these events, assuming there is a connection, is still anyone’s guess. But I’m fairly certain that she isn’t going to be a regular companion who continues beyond this box set, so it’s also an open question as to what her fate is going to be at the end of this!
He’s back! I was so bummed when series 1 ended in 2005 and Christopher Eccleston departed from the Whoniverse. And his silence about the franchise for so many years was really saddening – he’d made such an impression in just 13 episodes kickstarted the show anew. There was the occasional tease of unlikely hope in the late 2010’s that he might come back for an anniversary special or sign on with Big Finish, but no. We did learn, instead, some of the story of his bad experiences on set with the producers and/or other people involved, and his falling-out with the BBC, on top of some personal health issues from back then. So it was all the more surprising in 2020 when he announced his involvement in recording some brand new Ninth Doctor Adventures with Big Finish. I was so excited that I introduced my kid to a couple of his television stories!
The first of four (announced so far) box sets is entitled Ravagers, and it’s got three stories in it. It opens with Sphere of Freedom, where the Doctor is up to shenanigans on an ironically-named game station where the workers are all indentured servants, or essentially slaves. The story is fast-paced, true to 2005, starting in the middle of the sequence of events and bouncing back and forth. He’s working with a woman named Nova (a galley chef) who just helped him with some sort of plan, but she gets scooped with in a Time Eddy just before she escapes into his TARDIS. He stumbles into conversation with a nosy old lady and recounts his tale of how he got to the point he’s at…
Some time earlier, he’d detected something wrong with time, landed in London in 1959, and found a Roman legion smashing up Piccadilly Square. He gets involved in events there, trying to help solve that situation, but just as he returns to his TARDIS to sort things out the soldier following him (Sgt. Farraday) gets scooped up by a time eddy. So the Doctor tracks the source of the problem to the Sphere of Freedom and meets Nova. Over the course of time he develops a plan to infiltrate the security system and prevent the Sphere from projecting these time eddies all over the universe, but it goes wrong – Nova gets scooped up and taken away. And the old lady he’s talking to turns out to be the CEO of the place and has his TARDIS seized and is about to throw it into a neutron star (which apparently actually can destroy it) so it (and he) will be the first casualty to a crazy alien menace that somehow lives inside the neutron star – a race called the Ravagers.
That’s basically all that happens in 45 minutes. Obviously it’s a set-up for the next two stories, introducing us to the concept of weaponized time eddies, to the innocent character of Nova whom the Doctor would like to rescue now, to a shady CEO and corporation, as well as a hint of what these Ravagers might be. Both Nova and the CEO (Audrey) seem a little more aware of time travel technology and concepts than usual, so there may be more to this setting’s backstory yet to learn. We’ll see how all this plays out in the next two stories.
Most of the run-time is focused heavily on the Doctor himself. And that’s quite appropriate too – it’s the first time we’ve heard the 9th Doctor back in ages. Chris’s voice has aged a bit in 16 years. Woah… I just realized that the time lapse between his time as the Doctor on TV and his appearance on audio is about the same as it was for Peter Davison’s 5th Doctor, about 1984 to 1999. Mind blown. Anyway, although his voice is deeper, it still has the same bouncing range of emotion and power. As he said in one of the interviews before this story was released, his Doctor is very physical, and that does carry through in his vocal performance pretty well actually.
There is, so far, no hint of his post-Time-War trauma persona; he’s just a Doctor traveling solo, checking out random troubles that he finds. It’s all wonderfully normal. I’m not sure how I feel about that – it is great to meet the 9th Doctor in a different emotional place than what we’ve seen on screen – he needs that character development to stay ‘alive’ as it were – but the PTSD was such an important part of his character; we ought to see something of it sometime. I suppose there’s a hint of that in when he insists to Audrey that Nova was “not his friend” – perhaps the rule is that he doesn’t have traveling companions “anymore”, which is what makes Rose so special when they finally do meet (and why he was so dismissive of her at first in Rose).
Anyway, story-wise there isn’t anything super special about Sphere of Freedom that makes it jump out; it’s most attractive feature definitely is the “Eccleston is back!” factor. And for now, that’s perfectly fine. I just hope the Ninth Doctor Adventures deliver us some new truly memorable moments for the beloved 9th Doctor.
I never really got into the world of comics, Doctor Who or otherwise. But the Time Lord Victorious multi-platform multi-media thing worked its magic and enticed people like me to dip into new story-telling media for the sake of curiosity and completionism. Doctor Who Magazine released the comic-strip story Monstrous Beautyin late 2020, though for some reason it took literally months for hard copies to arrive for me in the US.
In this three-part story, the 9th Doctor and Rose accidentally end up in the Dark Times on a “shadow planet” being mined by the Space Lords of Gallifrey, and they run afoul of a ruthless military officer, Commander Rassilon – in a female incarnation. Regeneration is not yet known to the Gallifreyans at this point in time, so the Doctor’s DNA is not recognized as Gallifreyan at first glance, though the scientist he meets does surmise the connection eventually.
This fits into the classic continuity as well as the Timeless Child continuity just fine – whether Rassilon is responsible for inventing regeneration or Tecteune stole the ability from the genetics of the Timeless Child, that breakthrough hasn’t happened yet. The war with the Vampire Alliance is the all-consuming concern of the people of Gallifrey right now. Worst of all, death itself is a new concept to them, having only recently been visited by the Kotturuh.
Through this brief story, the Doctor uses his substantial knowledge of vampires to infiltrate a Coffin Ship, save Rose from vampirism, and free the vampire slaves from their masters. This sets up the “Free Undead” ship we encounter in the novels The Knight, the Fool, and the Dead, and All Flesh is Grass, where the 9th Doctor is traveling with vampires.
As far as the Time Lord Victorious arc goes, this story gives the 9th Doctor’s entrance & exit to & from the Dark Times, on either end of the pair of novels.
There are some excellent character moments in this story – the 9th Doctor was an excellent choice for this sequence. Of all the New Who incarnations, his is the most haunted by the Time War and its losses, so to have him be the one to run across the ancient Gallifreyans was especially poignant. When the scientist (medicus) character realizes that the Doctor is from the future, he has a moment of joy, knowing that their people will survive this war with the Vampires – but the Doctor has a darkened expression knowing of a greater war that will destroy them. Again, this can be softened for the audience who by this time knows full well about the 11th Doctor’s intervention in history to save Gallifrey from his War incarnation’s deeds, but if you stay true to the mentality and setting of the 9th Doctor, the grief is real.
So yes, this is another worthy entry in the Time Lord Victorious range, and I’m glad to gave picked up these magazine issues, despite the intercontinental wait.
The rest of the features in Doctor Who Magazine are interesting, I’ve got to admit – there’s a lot going on in these issues, and now I’m very curious to dig up the year’s subscription I got back in 1996-7 or so. But I don’t think I’m going to become a regular subscriber. We’ll see.
Ripples in my Tea 