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Doctor Who 2011 Subscriber Bonus: The Five Companions. [Big Finish Review, Spoilers]

28/1/2012

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_ As every trailer, podcast and bit of promotional blurb seems keen to remind us at every opportunity “Subscribers get more at Big Finish”. It's effectively the company's catchphrase, and the biggest bonus for subscribers every year is the traditional free story given out with the December release. Whilst these started out originally as fairly small scale things they've gotten bigger and bigger over the years, covering many of the old monsters (even the Krotons!) until last year's story went all out and gave all four (at the time) Big Finish Doctors together against the Daleks in the snappily titled The Four Doctors. Unsurprisingly, considering the need to balance four leads, a major monster and a complicated time travel plot on just one disc it was a story that didn't have very much room to breath and wound up a bit of a compressed mess.

But it obviously went down very well as 2011 sees the subscriber story get even bigger and more rammed full of characters and villains than ever before. The Five Companions is also packed with enough fan wank to drown Ian Levine with.


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Doctor Who: 155 Army of Death [Big Finish Review, Spoilers]

21/1/2012

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_ In keeping with the previous two plays in the Mary Shelley trilogy the conclusion to 2011's main range releases plays with horror tropes in an every so forced ironic “Look, it's Mary Shelley! The inventor of horror fiction! In a scary story!” way. By this time the skit is wearing a bit thin, but there's other problems with Jason Arnopp's script that make it a slightly underwhelming end to Mary's time in the Tardis (if that's what it is, more on that later...).

As with the Klein trilogy from two years ago the play is keen to emphasise that Mary and the Doctor have had other adventures than those we've seen, at least creating missing stories for the pair Big Finish can go back and visit later. But as with Klein, it means we end up being denied the new companion's first visit to another planet, which is something of a shame, especially as the new series has tended to make a Big Deal of this.


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Doctor Who: 154 The Witch From the Well. Big Finish Review [Spoilers].

16/1/2012

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_ Considering riffing on old horror films is a long and noble Doctor Who tradition it's actually surprising that up till now there's never been a proper Witchfinder General “homage”. The closest being Steve Lyons excellent The Witch Hunters novel back in 1999, but that deals very much with the real life history of the Salem trials rather than being evocative of Vincent Price and Ian Ogilvy. The November main range release sees author Rick Briggs (previously a winner of a competition to write a one part story for the 2010 anthology release) correct this regrettable oversight, coupling some good old fashioned “Get thee behind me Satan!” bodice ripping action with a centuries straddling time paradox. One of these plots works better than the other, but it still manages to be on balance a superior adventure for the 8th Doctor and Mary.


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Doctor Who: 153 The Silver Turk. Big Finish Review [Spoilers]

12/1/2012

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__ The October 2011 main range release is something of a landmark one. The first Paul McGann four part story since The Girl Who Never Was back in 2007, the first such release not to feature Charley Pollard, the first for a new companion and the launch of the first McGann “trilogy”. This effectively relaunches the 8th Doctor after several years in his own, separate series of CD's. It also sees the highly regarded Marc Platt write once more for the original Mondas Cybermen for the first time since he produced their origin story in Spare Parts, s a strong contender for the best Big Finish release of all time.

All this became something of a moot point however as pretty much everything anyone could talk about when it was released was the new arrangement of the theme tune. Intended to be evocative of the version used on McGann's one TV showing it sounds like the composer was having an epileptic fit over the keyboard and is the only version of the theme to date to make use of air guitar. I can't quite decide myself if it's delightfully bonkers or deeply irritating, but it has somewhat unfairly distracted from the story itself. Which is something of a shame as it's a good'un.



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    Stuart Webb. Who knows everything about nothing and not a lot about that.

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