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Doctor Who 152: The House of Blue Fire. Big Finish Review [Spoilers]

19/11/2011

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_ Amnesia, for some bizarre reason, has been a recurring theme across all the Doctor Who spin-off media, usually involving the poor old 8th Doctor, who from story to story can have anything from hours to his entire life missing from his mind. Big Finish have done it most recently in Question Marks in the Recorded Time anthology just two releases ago. So when the first episode of The House of Blue Fire focuses on four people who arrive at a sinister hotel and who don't remember a thing about themselves apart from their various phobias it starts to feel like very familiar territory.

However, writer Mark Morris effectively creates a sinister atmosphere into which these characters, known at this stage only by their room numbers, are thrown that's evocative of the best of Sapphire and Steel or the TV McCoy story Ghostlight.


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Doctor Who: 150 Recorded Time. Big Finish Review [Spoilers]

15/10/2011

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If you'd have told me back in 1999 when I brought The Sirens of Time that the Big Finish audios would still be going 12 years and a 150 releases (in-fact, my folder with all the related main range audios has 181 albums in it, and that's still missing a couple of Big Finish Magazines and the original Doctor Who Magazine promo disc) later I'd have thought you were mad. But then Doctor Who felt a very different place back then. Though the same year's Comic Relief skit The Curse of Fatal Death (written by one Stephen Moffat) was in retrospect the first real sign of a softening attitude towards the program from the BBC the future seemed very bleak back then.

The fact Big Finish managed to not only survive what seemed to be the dying days of the program's popularity but go on to produce some of the very best Who in any medium and have a influence on the revived television series (most obviously Robert Shearman's contribution to the first season, but only three weeks ago we had a Cyberman story where the words “Spare Parts” were repeated several times as a wacky in-joke) says a lot for the talent of everyone involved.


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Doctor Who: 149 Robophobia. Big Finish Review [Spoilers]

11/8/2011

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With the 150th play looming, this month the usual Big Finish trilogy format takes a slight twist for the first time since it was introduced. Instead of three plays in a row with a specific Doctor and companions, we get this month's Sylvester McCoy story, followed by a special Colin Baker release (of which you'll read more next month) before the rest of the McCoy trilogy concludes with the next two releases.

Also, for the first time in a long time, there's been no promotion of an overall arch or storyline across the plays. There's not even any companions, just the Doctor alone. There are a couple of hints in the play itself of Something Bigger tm (the Tardis is black and the wording above the door is slightly different), but apart from that throwaway line Robophobia is, in terms of relation to other Big Finish plays, entirely standalone.


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Doctor Who: 148 Rat Trap [Big Finish Review: Spoilers]

9/7/2011

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Rat Trap closes the second main range trilogy of Doctor Who audios for 2011 by bringing a very primal, visceral fear many of us share right into our ears, rats. In this case, super intelligent rats out to destroy humanity and take over the world. Not something Rent-A-Kill are set up to deal with, so it's lucky the 5th Doctor and chums are on hand to save us from this fiendish result of science gone wrong.


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