Vienna Series One

Dead Drop by Mark Wright: A more than reasonable opening for the first Vienna box set with plenty of incident, reversals and action. At times it might feel like you have dropped in on a particularly arc heavy episode of DS9 featuring cosmic super villains, space battles and, well, Chase Masterson. Vienna is not a character I expected to be able to get behind but in Masterson's hands she is sassy and smart, and thoughtful too. Personally I would rather listen to Vienna than River, and they pretty much have the same specs. Vienna is stuck in an impossible situation here, without all of her usual tactics to rely on and so we get to see how clever she is when she has to improvise. That was a smart move. I have no clue what the Judge Dredd style cityscape on the cover is all about since this does not feature in any of the stories in this set. I'm not too sure about the cliff-hanger ending though, especially when it has no resonance with the audience whatsoever: 7/10

Bad Faith by Nev Fountain: I wont get bored of saying that Nev Fountain is one Big Finish's best and his inclusion here adds some prestige to the set. Every now and again Big Finish go after religion (Faith Stealer) but this is the more thoughtful of the few I have listened to, and certainly the most labyrinthine. Clearly this is a series that is being run on a budget and there are only a few characters to play about with and this forces Fountain to be deceptive and use them all twice over, with some brilliant twists about their identity. Having two opposing religions attempting to bring each other down and somebody using the science fiction elements in the story to attempt to bring them together in a painful way really worked for me. There's a ton of funny lines too, because organised religion is very easy to take the piss out of, but Fountain focuses mostly on the absurdity of faith itself for his gags. I'd like to see more stories like this but it does seem that the Vienna series is trading itself on its shock revelations. Maybe the last story in this set will be a little less plotted and a little more character based. Strongest of this box set: 8/10

DeathWorld by Jonathan Morris: This wants to be Red Dwarf's Back to Reality and Hunger Games AND Vienna's backstory reveal, and more besides. That's my biggest complaint. This probably plotted to the hilt if I know Jonny Morris but the story is over stuffed with ideas and revelations and I felt overloaded halfway through and there was still a whole heap more to come. Sometimes simpler is better, but that doesn't seem to be this series' USP. A shame because the ideas are great and the direction of this story (and the set as a whole) is superb. Chase Masterson has to try and play Vienna in lots of ways in this story and really engages with the opportunities that it gives her. My other half is right, what Vienna needs is a partner to bounce ideas (and banter) off of. I hear that is the direction we head in set two. This is not a bad audio, it's just a little overwhelming for an hour. It feels like Morris wanted to write the whole set and instead put a whole sets worth of notions into one story. To his credit he makes it work. Just: 7/10