The Eternal Summer written by Jonathan Morris and directed by Barnaby Edwards

What’s it about: It's been a long, hot summer in Stockbridge. Longer than the villagers can remember. Summer's lease is never-ending – and all thanks to the Lord and Lady of the Manor! One man alone knows that something's wrong: Maxwell Edison, Stockbridge's unofficial ambassador to the Universe. Or 'flying saucer nut', as the locals have it. He'll need help proving it: from the local postmistress Miss Nyssa, perhaps; or the village Doctor, the fellow that's been living at the Green Dragon Inn these last 30 years. They'd better hope that autumn never comes to Stockbridge. When autumn comes, the world is doomed…

An English Gentleman: Like Black Orchid and The Awakening there is something very right about the fifth Doctor visiting a quaint picturesque old English village – he’s so quintessentially English himself he seems to fit Stockbridge like a glove. Whilst some might think of living the highlights of your life a joy the Doctor considers it an abomination. Wonderfully he describes the collective hypnotised villagers ‘stark raving bonkers’ which is a very funny description whoever it is being pointed at. The Doctor comes face to face with himself from the future scarred by the infinite ravages of time, decomposing and rotten, over a million years hence. The decrepit Doctor remembers that his real name wasn’t Doctor but cannot remember what it actually was. Deferring explanations is a habit he really must learn to stop. The Doctor calls the Lord and Lady a remote possibility of a future, a shadow place maintained by the nightmare of what is happening in Stockbridge. The Hyperspatial warp must have splintered off alternative selves and as they were sent into the future another Doctor and Nyssa were summoned into being in the past – that’s the technobabble explanation but there are still a possibility and that’s pretty chilling.

Alien Orphan: Nyssa takes on the surname of Jones which added to the Doctor’s alias makes them Smith and Jones! It has been so long for the older Nyssa that she doesn’t remember Tegan, Adric, the Master of the Cybermen. The time before the village is too distant now. Nyssa is frustrated at being treated like a simpleton and comments that she is more than capable of understanding anything that Lizzie might consider complicated! There is an astonishing sequence as we slip back through Nyssa’s memories of her entire Big Finish run and we realise just how far she has come in the audio adventures.

Village Geek: An expert in all thing abnormal, supernatural and extra terrestrial, basically if it is anything to do with the unknown he thinks he knows everything about it. He’s such a lovable character because everybody else in the village thinks he is a still a crackpot child looking for space monsters. He’s a bit shy and useless around girls and talks too much when it comes to thinking through problems because he is so excited to have the Doctor back in his life. Max is a helpful reminder that it is not just the bad stuff, they get to relive the good moments in their lives too. ‘Who would want to spend their life with an obese, ugly failiure like you?’ – how could you not love a man who is battered down with insults like that by the people who are supposed to love him. Max tries to do the thing where suggests something stupid which enables the clever guy to think up the solution – he’s such a sweetie. Its rather lovely that Lizzie and Max get along so well after everybody else is so mean to him and the offer to join the PIG is clearly the highlight of his life. The way she asks in him (in such a gloriously upper class way) if he wants to go for coffee and a bun together made my heart melt. Coffee and a bun sounds fantastic, indeed. He’s sick of working on the sidelines and leaps back into the danger that waits in Stockbridge to help his friends but gives Lizzie a snog before he goes. The force inside tries to assault him with all the insults and jeers he has had but he knows what happened the night that stars fell on Stockbridge and he refuses to give in to his own insecurities. He’s the one person who was never part of the village, the one person with a mind of his own and the only person who can fight against the power of Veridios. The real hero of the piece. Max died in a bike accident in the real time but pleasingly those events have been wiped out once he saves the day.

Standout Performance: Its not easy to suggest age through your voice alone without the back up of make up to pull the effect off but Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton do an outstanding job as the ravaged versions of the Doctor and Nyssa. With faltering croaky voices and an air of slowness about them they genuinely convince that they have aged 10,000 centuries. The scene where Sutton and Davison cackle orgasmically as feeding from the villagers memories is hauntingly done, they really are nothing like the originals.

Sparkling Dialogue: ‘It reminds me of a town I once visited but that was entirely artificial, a space time trap brought into existence by a madman’ ‘What Milton Keynes?’
‘Its like that film Groundhog Day! I loved that film. I must have seen it a hundred times. Which is a bit ironic come to think about it.’
‘We have our whole lives over again every time that sun comes up. Every joy, every heartbreak, every love, every loss.’
‘What happens to all bubbles in the end? Pop!’
‘The Eternal Summer is ending. Autumn is approaching.’
‘Without the girl Nyssa my existence is founded upon a paradox! I am an edifice built upon shifting sands!’

Great Ideas: I love the way the story opens with the Doctor waking up at a Bed and Breakfast in Stockbridge and being told that he has been staying there for as long as the owners can remember, living under the alias of Dr Smith. What on Earth has happened? He tries to piece together the mystery of his situation – Harold and Alice remember the Doctor being there at their wedding anniversary 30 years ago which would make him 50 but nobody questions that he looks about two decades younger than that. Nyssa woke up in the same way with everybody in Stockbridge thinking she was the post mistress, as though someone has found roles for them and is trying to make them fit into the village. There’s a wonderful observation that this isn’t the 2000s but the 50s or 60s, the gag being that a country village is set in time whilst the rest of the world changes around it. The Doctor and Nyssa seem to be bleeding through time to various events in the past 60 years and the Doctor picks up the phone in a police telephone box and hears himself at the other end of the line. He then picks it up again and has the same conversation from the other side – immediately after! Harold and Alice get married and are buried on the same day. Something has happened in Stockbridge to link all these wibbly wobbly fabulously Morrisesque events! Max explains that the same day keeps occurring but with all the things that have happened in the last 60 years, all the births and deaths jumbled up. Always the same day of later summer, over and over. You can’t leave Stockbridge, every time you try you find yourself back by the village green and duck pond. It’s a very clever way of giving characters a life beyond the confines of this story by revealing all the most important events in their lives and by experiencing the moment Dudley proposed to Jane and she refused, falling to her death, Harold and Alice’s wedding, the death of their son and their gravestones we get a broad strokes painting of their whole lives. Brilliantly as we get used to how the story starts jumping about the characters start to acknowledge the scattered approached to the storytelling – Dudley stating as he pulls the Doctor a pint of ginger beer that losing Jane was the saddest day of his life, experienced just seconds before. Jane then reappears as we head into the past with the glorious line ‘I know, I know, I fell of the old bridge to my death but I’m alive again now.’ The Doctor starts to notice inconsistencies in the history of Stockbridge being relived, first Alice was at Harold’s funeral and then Harold is at Alice’s bedside as she slips away. It transpires that they like to take turns, him there at her death and then her there at his. He doesn’t understand if they have been living the same day over and over why they haven’t gotten used to it but he is reminded that these people are their family and friends – no matter how many times they die it will always affect them. The torture of losing their son so young over and over makes this one of the cruellest Doctor Who stories, fancy having to relive that moment every single day. Whenever the pain of remembering the past becomes too much the Lord and Lady of the manner help the village folk to take it away (although the Doctor wonders if that is just so they can experience it again afresh). The older Doctor and Nyssa are scared that their younger versions might leave and his future self might never have existed – that is why they wont let him leave Stockbridge. They have ruled of Stockbridge for so long but they stopped counting after the first 10,000 centuries. PIG – The Psychic Investigation Group are investigating the lost village of Stockbridge. Max never knew that they existed because they are top secret organisation (did I detect a little dig at UNIT there? And with so many paranormal organisations around during the 20th Century I’m surprised they didn’t trip on each others toes at every supernatural occurrence the Doctor was involved in!). They said that the village was destroyed by a V1 at the end of World War II but there is no evidence of that. People kept claiming they could see a village shrouded in mist, a ghost village. I really like how we get to see this phenomenon from both sides, initially Edison claiming that those on the outside are ghosts. The reason why the two sides can now see each other is because the time bubble is collapsing allowing both a glimpse and then to be able to pass from one side to the other. Tying into Castle of Fear, the older versions of the Doctor and Nyssa have built the manor house out of the ruins of the Rutan spaceship. The warp core didn’t ignite because the Doctor activated the failsafe, the engines were caught in a stasis field and the bubble engulfed the village and the past 60 years. If it explodes those 60 years of temporal energy will be released. The people of Stockbridge are held in the moment of their death, suspended in the moment. The older Doctor and Nyssa have been savouring the emotions and memories of the villagers like a fine wine. When the Doctor leaves the village for a few minutes to them he has been away for a hundred years. The villagers want their purgatory of immortality to be other because they have lived their lives a millions time over – death would be a welcome release. In a top grisly moment His Lordship eats the Lady Nyssa after she extracted our Nyssa’s memories. Veridios is a figure from human folklore suggesting rebirth – Wells Wood woke to an eternal summer and has taken control.

Audio Landscape: Morris is such a confident writer and Edwards a certain director that the opening episode is a brilliant scene setter pulling off the quaint English village better than any other story I can remember. I love the way that as the characters are introduced we quickly cut to a sudden moment of tension that would occur later in the tale to prove that things aren’t quite as picturesque as they might appear on the surface. There was a moment that really made me jump – the cut from the Doctor pronouncing Phillip dead to Harold’s funeral. Birdsong, ducks quacking, church singers, a bicycle bell, the Doctor falling into the duck pond much to the birds’ consternation, post office bell, wedding bells, the village school of fire, the fire alarm, crows in the sky, trampling through the woods, the river bubbling and flowing, pouring a nice frothy pint of ginger beer, smashing a window, the roof breaking and caving in, Alice’s last breath, a fountain, crackling fire, mobile ring tone, storm clouds breaking with thunder, the aperture tearing open, window smashing, rain lashing, the awful sucking noises as the rotten Nyssa extracts the life out of the villagers.

Musical Cues: Smooth tinklings on the piano in the early scenes introduce the story; it gives the tale a lightness of touch which is practically effervescent. Listen to the confident playing as Nyssa discovers the graves of everybody in the village.

Isn’t it Odd: Its heartbreaking that Max and Lizzie never got to share a coffee and a bun together, the only unhappy part of the conclusion.

Standout Scene: Just as I was starting to tire of Nyssa’s continued absence from the story along comes the end of episode two which somehow after two episodes of temporal high jinks pulling the rug from under me managed to completely floor me. The Doctor and Nyssa are revealed as the Lord and Lady of the Manor, thousands of years old and faces as grey as dust. The Doctor is horrified to take a glance into his own future… Morris is so good at using the concept of time to shock and this cliffhanger is exquisitely timed to give the second half of the story a brand new direction.

Notes: ‘He stumbled into the TARDIS once the night that stars fell on Stockbridge’ You couldn’t possibly have a Stockbridge trilogy of adventures without featuring Maxwell Edison, the lovable UFO spotter that helped the Doctor during his comic strip adventures and here he is right in the heart of the stories. Rather wonderfully the stories brings to life several moments from the comic strips that will no doubt have the fans frothing at the mouth! Its lovely to see the strips being acknowledged and realised in such a generous way and Mark Williams plays an adorable Max Edison (‘I thought it looked a bit Venusian’).

Result: Spellbinding, a story that continually evolves as it continues but feels skilfully structured throughout, juggles all manner of clever plot devices but ties everything together satisfactorily at the end. Scripts of this quality don’t come along every day and we’re fortunate that Barnaby Edwards was the director chosen to bring it to life because it has the same glorious mixture of genuine sentiment and splintered plot games that made his earlier masterpiece, The Chimes of Midnight, such a success. Edwards puts the puzzle together with real dexterity, capitalising on the choking moments of emotion whilst ensuring the mystery keeps you guessing and excited. There is an energy to the piece that is easy to be swept up in and the atmospherics of an English village make this adventure easy to conjure before your eyes. My favourite scenes where with the rancid old Doctor and Nyssa as they greedily fed on the villagers pain and love – it was such a gloriously macabre spin on the characters we know I was lapping it up. Jonathan Morris deserves a huge round of applause for continually coming up with the goods for Big Finish – his work has been of such a consistent high standard I fail to understand why the new series hasn’t snapped him up. I’ve always been fond of conundrum tales like this and enjoy working at solving a complicated plot and when it reaps rewards as much as The Eternal Summer I couldn’t be happier. A top notch fifth Doctor release of the type that is quite a rarity these days – this really was a phenomenal year of Big Finish adventures: 9/10

Castle of Fear written by Alan Barnes and directed by Barnaby Edwards

What’s it about: 1199: Returning from the Crusade, Hubert, the new Earl of Mummerset, comes to take possession of Stockbridge Castle, his ancestral home. The only trouble is, in his absence, demons took possession of his Castle... 1899: The Stockbridge mummers’ play takes a wholly unexpected turn, when the Dragon slays St George. These events are not unconnected, the Doctor and Nyssa discover. There's an alien presence squatting in Stockbridge Castle, and it's their job to expose it. If Turkish knights, killer boars and a gang of rogue paladins don't stop them first…

An English Gentleman: ‘There is a Doctor near at hand, ready to make the champion stand. Not another poultry mime but an Earl of Space and a Lord of Time!’ ‘What if I promise to doom myself just as soon as I’m out of the pit?’ the Doctor says, getting into the Monty Python spirit of the story. He wants to be saved from certain death so he can go and save certain death, naturally! I love the way Maud digs at the Doctor’s feeble strength by calling him Sir Runt! The Doctor has puns coming out of his backside as he faces up to the Rutan on the rack and when he meets up with Nyssa again he compliments her on her resourcefulness. What sort of knight wears a wegetable upon his breast? One inspired by JNT of course. I was astonished listening to the Doctor and Nyssa pooling their information when they meet up, finishing each other’s sentences so smoothly in an extremely fluidic exchange. They compliment each other beautifully and later when the Doctor believes Nyssa to be dead he drops his guard for a moment and says that he was fond of her – very fond in fact. If there was ever a moment where the Doctor had come close to admitting romantic feelings for one of his companions this must surely qualify.

Alien Orphan: I love Nyssa being able to travel alone with the Doctor and completely agree with Peter Davison that she compliments his Doctor better than his other companions. When written well Nyssa can be very surprising character and Sarah Sutton a surprising actress and plonking somebody as regal as Nyssa in the middle of a Pythonesque farce might seem like a contradiction in itself. However it works a treat because Nyssa gets to be a fabulous bossy boots when it comes to dealing with the inept Hubert, Earl of Dorkdom and unexpectedly she really gets into the spirit of the adventure and proves a warm presence. By the end of this story it has surely been the kindest adventure yet to her character as she has a hand in all the best moments.

When the Doctor suggested spending Christmas in Stockbridge, Nyssa was desperate to escape the confines of the 20th Century that they always seem to find themselves in. However 1899 proves too primitive for her with all its debauchery and jeering but even she can’t resist pointing out her Doctor when they call out for a medical man to join in the theatrical madness. In fact once they start participating she rather gets into it, pointing the Doctor towards his lines and improvising some herself! I love the way she calls herself the Lady Nyssa of Traken and she is smart enough to take her shoes off when she realises that is why the boar are pursuing them. A quick thinker, she can immediately see that the enemy are using electricity to bring down the knights in their suits of armour and orders their retreat. Then she marches into action with a plan to short-circuit the drone army! No wonder she was so trigger happy in Arc of Infinity, she’s had plenty of practice developing a fighting spirit with Big Finish. Come episode three she is ordering Roland to strip before her, the dirty mare! She laughs when he attempts to frighten her by waving his sword around and all he is wearing is long johns! She’s such a clever one that she double crosses the Rutans by tricking the Doctor into thinking she has given them everything they wanted…and then reveals that she did give them everything they wanted – unlimited power! Power without limit. How destructive does that sound?

Standout Performance: You know you are going to be in for a good time when Joe Thomas turns up on the cast list and his turn as Hubert, Earl of Mummerset is a delight to listen to for exactly the same reason Simon is such a treat in The Inbetweeners – he’s not afraid to throw away any sense of image and play an absolute prat! ‘Oh you fibber!’ He turns out to be a right big girls blouse and reminds me an awful lot of Captain Emanuel Swan from Dr Who and the Pirates thanks to his upper class twittitude and he is just as fun to listen to (also the director Barnaby Edwards played swan which creates a nice symmetry). Susan Brown also deserves kudos for really throwing herself into Maud the Withered (not the strumpet!) and having great fun with her horrifically over the top accent. John Sessions gets his tongue around a particularly quotable cod French twang as Roland of Berkhampsire! I really don’t have anything bad to say about any of the performances though, as usual Big Finish has assembled a top-drawer cast.

Sparkling Dialogue: ‘This is stretching the point too far, don’t you think?’ – the Doctor on the rack!
‘I suppose middle age counts as a good innings in the Middle Ages’ – I love a bad pun, me and it reminds me of The Time Warrior which this story alludes to.
‘Its not too late to consider a collectivist alternative!’ – all the confab about serfs only being serfs when they have someone to serve is very funny! ‘We aint peasants! We’re serfs!’
‘Nyssa don’t patronise them’ says the Doctor as she gives them some peasantry explanation as to why the demons are leaving. He then continues with a full on Star Trek Voyager technobabble description of his own and naturally they comprehend the former.
‘And what if we aren’t lucky?’ ‘I recommend you don’t start any long sentences!’

Great Ideas: Somewhere along the line a ‘Doctor’ has visited Stockbridge with the ability to bring the dead back to life and his skills have passed into folklore and are being worked into the local mummery. An event involving the Doctor, a green dragon and a Turkish knight! The plot hiccups back 500 odd years to the 12th Century to explain how this peculiar myth began. Nyssa steps in shite and the Doctor in a boar trap – I didn’t think this was particularly sophisticated comedy until Barnes dovetailed the two to make a great boar hunting action sequence. The tone of the piece is distinctly Pythonesque and the Doctor confirms its influences when he runs away from a fight suggesting he is ‘off to find the Holy Grail!’ A great hellish fireball came shooting over the battlements and that night the old Earl was found dead in his bathtub. There was the sound of lightning and demons about their terrible, infernal business. It’s only in hindsight that the appearance of the Rutan is well sign posted with the Earl mentioning a mist thickening and the mention of the fish stock dying the night it landed – both elements used to great effect in Horror of Fang Rock. The mist has been concocted to lower the local temperature. The Doctor guesses incorrectly that the Rutans are here on the trail of a Sontaran that has landed in the 12th century – Linx from The Time Warrior when it was the other way around. Linx was following the Rutans that were plotting here, looking to find a way to clone themselves the way their enemies do. The process has eluded them in the past but if they clone themselves whilst in human form they will end up with armies of obedient canon fodder ideally suited to hand to hand combat to throw at the enemy. The reveal that Roland of Brittany is in fact a mercenary with a bad accent is beautifully done and I was cracking up as the Earl’s scoffing retorts. The Earl returned home to claim his Kingdom in the first episode and had to suffer the indignity of proving who he says he is to a rowdy rabble in the first episode and its that Barnes being a clever sod again, setting us up for a twist in the third episode where he reveals that he isn’t who he claims to be. He’s little more than an Apprentices apothecary caught up in a messy tale of death, imprisonment and making the best of a bad situation. Is anybody who they seem to be? After illusions to The Time Warrior and Horror of Fang Rock it is natural to automatically assume this is another lone scout and the reveal of a second Rutan is another clever twist. Barnes seems to be really getting off on subverting Who clichés – the two Rutans seem absolutely delighted that their plan seems to be working at the climax almost as though they expected to be foiled. The dragon turns out to be the Rutan spacecraft aflame as it leaves the area and Nyssa quotes the play as the ‘demon’ is vanquished to ensure that the tradition is in place for when they hear it in 600 years time. George becomes St George who slayed the dragon and the rest you know as mythology.

Audio Landscape: I have heard complaints that the electronic monotone of the Rutan sounds an awful lot like the Daleks from the Hartnell era and there is some truth in that statement – only so much as the Rutan from Horror of Fang Rock also sounded and awful lot like the Daleks from the Hartnell era. It’s a harsh, memorable shriek and I rather enjoyed it for all its lack of subtlety. Rowdy theatrical crowd, birdsong, a horse whinnying, a cock crowing, Nyssa steps in horse muck, wild boar on a hunt, trees swaying, knights stomping along on horseback, the Doctor falling down the steps in true comedy fashion, a crackling torch, bubbling wine, Maud electrocuted, the fabulous Rutan transformation noise, sparking (the equivalent of foaming at the mouth!), ashes inside armour, Roland kicking in the water and drowning, the Rutan ship ascending.

Musical Cues: If I weren’t in a good enough Christmas cheer already the opening theme of Castle of Fear made me jollier than Santa Claus noshing on a mice pie in the warm glow of a Christmas tree. Fox and Yason are some of my favourite Big Finish composers (along with Jamie Robertson, Alistair Lock & Russell Stone) and they understand the tone that Barnes’ insane script is aiming for and play plenty of heroic, jolly music to give the tale a shot of magic. Listen to the superb music as Nyssa tries to figure out how events will unfold using the plot of the play in episode three, it really is fantastic.

Isn’t it Odd: For all the uproarious performances and solid production the first episode is an absolute mess being far too confined, failing to move the plot on in any great hurry and lacking any tension whatsoever. Bawdiness is fun but it need to be attached to a dramatic story in order to work, the first episode of Castle of Fear feels like a Saturday night down the local after a few too many drinks and makes about as much sense. It strays quite close to Unbound: Exile for me tastes and that is an experiment that should never be repeated. Nyssa tries to inject a little drama into the situation by reacting in horror to Osbert jumping off the battlements but the comedy music robs it of any drama. It didn’t help that the script seemed to repeating the same information again and again without telling us why it is relevant or come to think of it explaining what is actually going on. The answers come and the repeated information is of course vital to the story but for that initial thirty minutes you could be forgiven for thinking you were in for a long ride. Alan Barnes has a bit of problem with his opening instalments when he is writing comedy episodes. Heroes of Sontar suffered the same fate. Androidisation? Even by my standards (it has been noted that I make up my own words whilst writing these reviews) that is a duff science fiction term! Nyssa loses her wits for a moment and fails to spot that Osbert is clearly a Rutan in disguise.

Standout Scene: I really enjoyed how Barnes tried to convince the audience that the demon of Stockbridge was a Sontaran by mimicking dialogue from the Sontaran experiment before turning 180 degrees and revealing that it is a Rutan. Mind you a clever Doctor Who fan would have guessed by all the clues littered about in the first two episodes. It’s still a great cliffhanger though, given some climactic pizzazz by the director. The last episode is one of those rare Doctor Who stories where everything slides into place satisfactorily and watching this jigsaw be completed is a joy.

Notes: Having a trilogy set around the village of Stockbridge is a novel idea and a wonderful gift for the fans of the comic strips. It took me a long time to be convinced to give the comic strip a try in Doctor Who magazine because that medium has never appealed to me before and I have to admit I greedily gobbled up 12 or so graphic novels full of new stories. There was a whole new era for the sixth Doctor, a great new companion for the tenth and the eighth Doctor had a massive lease of life in the comics that was denied to him on screen it was a delight to be able to see visuals of him in action. The fifth Doctor Stockbridge adventures were exquisite to read and the return to the village every couple of regenerations is a lovely touch of linking continuity – it’s a bit like UNIT turning up in the TV series, you know it wont be too long before we end up in Stockbridge again. Its an intriguing approach to a trilogy to have it based around a location because one of the joys of this format is in linking adventures but showing how diverse Doctor Who can be. Can they tell three stories of varying tones all set in one village? Only time will tell…

Result: Castle of Fear is massively enjoyable but I beg of you not to give up on this story on the evidence of the first episode because it is a plotless half an hour of inexplicable mummery and setting up clues and the plot doesn't kick in until the second episode has begun and then story gets better and better and better. Big Finish have this uncanny ability of adding detail to televised stories without touching the continuity established on screen and this 12th century escapade offers a great explanation for why Linx was trapped on medieval Britain in The Time Warrior. I really appreciate the continuing use of Nyssa in the audios because they are giving more weight to Peter Davison’s assertion that she would have been an ideal solo companion for his Doctor and Sarah Sutton is blazes with vim and vigour throughout. Davison is no slouch either, clearly delighted to be back in cahoots with his favourite. I love the idea of a Rutan story where all of the characters aren’t who they claim to be but aren’t the Rutan either, it’s a deceptive concept that gives the third episode a real boost (everybody is putting on a duff accents because the characters are putting on a duff accents!). The comic tone of the piece is so unlike anything we have had from the main range for a while it has to be commended and once I had cleared the hurdle of the introductory episode I had a oodles of fun as the story uncoiled and all the characters dropped their masks. There are some great gags in there and the performances are all sublime and I desperately want to mark this story higher. A terrifically energetic start to the Stockbridge trilogy and like authentic mid eighties Who ends on an explosive cliffhanger: 8/10

Hexagora written by Paul Finch (from a story by Peter Ling & Hazel Adair) and directed by Ken Bentley

What’s it about: When a newspaper reporter goes missing, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa uncover a case of alien abduction. The trail leads them to the planet Luparis, and a city that appears to be a replica of Tudor London. What are the monsters that lurk in the shadows? And what is the terrible secret at the heart of Luparis? To save a world, the Doctor must try to defeat the evil plans of Queen Zafira. And one of her plans is to marry him…

An English Gentleman: The Empress suggests that the Doctor has the bearing of a warrior and he is certainly chivalrous enough to step and prevent Tegan from being accosted by horny peasants! There is a slight but mildly amusing subplot where the Doctor inadvertently gets engaged to the Queen at her bidding but its all a bit reminiscent of The Aztecs and Davison’s mild mannered reaction is nowhere near as funny as Hartnell’s spluttering. He seems unusually naïve too, being led into a trap like a mouse sniffing cheese on a trap. The marriage between the first Doctor and Cameca was an accident and he grew to have a deep affection for her so it was an easy relationship to invest in. The marriage between the fifth Doctor and Zathira is one of scientific necessity where neither party particularly wants to go through with the act and there is little chemistry between the characters. It doesn’t quite have the same ring to unfortunately so the climactic wedding feels like just another plot point rather than the dramatic highlight it should have been. And boy doesn’t Peter Davison sound embarrassed during the sequence where he objects to the wedding?

Alien Orphan: Nyssa is still dreaming about the Elite and while the Doctor wishes he could help her more she understands that they all have to find a way to deal with bad experiences and she has to handle it on her own. That’s one of the reasons I love Nyssa so much, she’s just so damn practical and refuses to assign blame. Traken is said to have been destroyed in a cosmic disaster. The gag about Tegan being deliberately ignored in favour of Nyssa is even funnier because it is usually the reverse – it is nice to see somebody with Nyssa’s noble bearing being given some attention. She fights for herself and her friends but Jezevar sees much more than a homeless traveller in her, someone who should be the ruler of a mighty monarchy. She doesn’t believe that any monarch should rule in complete isolation and one should always be open to advice. Oddly this subplot about Nyssa taking the throne completely disappears by the end of episode two and she’s…you’ve guessed it…a bloody bystander again! This time to make way for Tegan flirting with a bloody bug!

Mouth of Legs: There is a vein of good humour with regards to mocking Tegan in this story that I heartily approve of but what I don’t like is the sense of Janet Fielding phoning in her performance and reacting to everything with a shrill tone. After the business on Florana (are we ever going to get to visit that most elusive of planets?) the Doctor decided they all needed a rest and has brought Tegan back to her hometown of Brisbane to visit her family. Just when they all thought they were going to get a nice relaxing holiday Tegan comes panicking back to the villa afraid for her friend Mike who has gone missing. What with her aunt, cousin and grandfather making an appearance on screen and now her hometown and friends visited does this mean Tegan is the most fleshed out companion of the classic series? I love her assertion that she knew Mike must have been abducted by aliens! Just a year or so back the very idea would have made her boggle! ‘That’s all I get?’ Tegan cries when the Empress pays compliments to the Doctor and Nyssa and looks at her and says ‘no doubt you are hungry.’ Tegan asks why she is always wearing heels at the most inappropriate of times and you have to wonder if this was inserted at Janet Fielding’s request. Mike and Tegan were taught physics and chemistry by Miss Anderson and they both her inspirational. At fifteen she broke her toe during track and field and he carried her school bags home for her. Nyssa understands that Tegan often lets her emotions get the better of her and apologises for her when she is resting – I wonder if she does that wherever they visit? Can you honestly imagine Tegan saying the line ‘If you wont help me then just don’t hinder me!’ Turns out Mike was always in love with Tegan and he knows she always felt the same but it’s a shame they had to wait until he was a chittering insect to reveal these feelings! Their parting doesn’t have the ring of empathy it is hoping for because the two actors have no chemistry – in fact they sound a little bored at this point.

Standout Performance: Being a massive fan of The Two Doctors, of Servelan and of Jackie Pearce in general (‘daaaaah-ling!’) I was delighted to see she would be taking part in this story – rather wonderfully this would have been about the right time she would have taken part in a Davison story too with Blakes’ 7 just coming to an end a year or so earlier. Even her role isn’t particularly well written but she is pretty much acting royalty and can rise beyond a duff script to bring something to the story. She was given a much better role to play in The Fearmonger.

Great Ideas: Why does the planet Luparis resemble Tudor London complete with an iced over river Thames with people skating on it? And why does Tegan’s friend Mike think he is a member of the City Watch? Segara Nine was a Paradise, uninhabited and fruitful with warm winds rippling across endless fertile meadows. It flourished as an ideal environment for their next generation. There was an insectoid race, the Hexagora from the mountain ranges, that they had to conquer in order to colonise. Only fragments of their original technology remains. The Hexagora are itinerant, travelling the cosmos under the power of the Queen. When they visit other planets they have the power to move amongst the natives unnoticed and it was during the 16th Century when they moved amongst the human race on Earth. They had only been on Luparis a short time when the climate began to change and their natural instinct was to move on but it takes time for Hexagoran young to reach full maturity and they had several generations that could never survive another migration through space. Hexion is the raw stuff of their original world, it usually provides sustenance but in times of war, famine and plague they use it to drain the mind essences of Hexagoran husks into their genetic pool. The Hexagorans then kidnapped people from Earth and brought them to Luparis and siphoned off their memories into their genetic pool. Hybrids make better hosts for the Hexagora than humans and could stave of the cold of the coming Ice Age on Luparis.

Audio Landscape: Something tearing through the atmosphere, insectoid mandibles, horse clip clopping on the cobbles, a punch up, birdsong, bubbling vats, crackling fire, swords clashing.

Musical Cues: I’m not sure if I could call it stylish by any means but the electronic period music for the initial Luparis scenes is gloriously reminiscent of music during the Davison era, in particular the cod medieval score in The Kings’ Demons. It begs the question of how far you should go in order to make these Lost Stories authentic – do you deliberately write duff music because it fits in with the era? There’s an odd sting that sounds eerily like the opening bars to the Emmerdale theme tune.

Isn’t it Odd: You know when you try and convince people that televised Doctor Who is the most wonderful thing ever and they dismiss it as being an alien invasion every week and then when they get around to watching an episode it seems to confirmed their fears? Well this story opens in a fashion that I imagine people would groan when I tell them that audio Doctor Who is the best thing – I could imagine them thinking it would be people talking to themselves, not bothering to describe what is going on and a load of inexplicable sound effects. A lot like the first scene of this story, in fact. It was a space eddy, a diminishing ion stream like a vapour trail from a space craft is what the Doctor follows to try and find Tegan’s friend Mike – not the most interesting of storytelling devices to move the plot on I have to say. It does worry me that in the first episode there is nothing that feels particularly fresh or original (beyond the concept of a period atmosphere on an alien planet) – in particular the characterisation and the dialogue feel very passé and ‘that’ll do.’ Coming after The Elite with its razor sharp script and production this was always going to be a problem. I’m not sure why transferring this tale of courtly romances and overthrowing the monarchy was brought to an alien planet because it could happily have played out on Earth. It all gets a bit embarrassing when the Doctor has to cross swords over a woman he doesn’t even want to marry and fight Zellenger, a man of the most melodramatic declarations in Doctor Who history. ‘Tegan do you know this insect?’ might be a strong contender for the most unintentionally funny line ever. Info dumps are the worst kind of writing and there is a great splurge of exposition in episode three that feels like it is trying to explain everything without the audience having to work any of it out for themselves. Go and read the Great Ideas section of this review and see if you agree with me that the explanations offered justify the idea of Tudor England on an alien world and Tegan’s friend randomly turning up as an insect. I really don’t think it does, it’s a tale of hackneyed ideas and lame co-incidences and the ailing explanations only really serve to reveal that the writers thought it would be a neat idea and then had to try and work some reasoning around it. There’s nothing especially surprising going on – the Queen is a ruthless leader, one of her subjects is unsure of her plan and reveals all to the Doctor, he acts as though it is the most monstrous thing he has ever heard, Tegan gets in a tizzy and Nyssa tries to calm everyone down. I could write this story in my sleep. Say what you will about season 20 (and I have said much over the years) there was nothing this predictable about it. Only Doctor Who could try and get away with a buzzing with a cod Australian accent is in love with the companion – it’s so awkward to listen to I think I actually winced. The climax is oddly placed because the Doctor could have made his suggestion that the Hexagora stop breeding with humans at some point during episode three – it appears that he waited for the moment of the wedding just for dramatic effect and because the story length demanded it.

Result: A weak story with little to recommend it beyond the glorious Jacqueline Pearce returning for another appearance in Doctor Who. Beyond that Hexagora is dreadfully dull and fighting against the unconventional storytelling of season 20 manages to be one of the most predictable, archetypal Doctor Who audios complete with a colonised race under threat, human being kidnapped by aliens and Tegan’s personal life suffering another blow. Beyond the conventional storytelling and unconvincing dialogue there is a real issue with pacing too with the music trying to suggest (in a very cod synthesised way) moments of tranquillity with the odd meaningless flash of jeopardy thrown in to try and keep things interesting. The characters fail to come to life and speak the most godawful melodrama and the regulars fulfil their functions but never stretch beyond them (the Doctor is passive, Tegan gets grumpy and Nyssa is trying to keep the peace). Its not the worst Lost Story that has been released (nothing could quite sink lower than the McCoy tetrology) and there is a basic competence to everything that unfolds in this story but it never rises to a level that I would even call average. Its one of those Doctor Who stories that is just sort of there, doing what’s been done before but not as well and we should be thankful that the TV series dodged the bullet with this one: 4/10

The Architects of History written by Steve Lyons and directed by John Ainsworth

What’s it about: The year is 2044. Earth is enjoying a Golden Age of peace, prosperity and technological advancement… but somebody is plotting to destroy all that. The Selachians, shark-like alien monsters, launch a crippling attack on Earth’s Moonbase, using deadly weapons from the future. Help is at hand. A police telephone box appears in a Moonbase hangar. A time-travelling hero has returned in the hour of Earth’s greatest need. Now, Elizabeth Klein must fight to save not only the Galactic Reich but Time itself from the mysterious prisoner who has orchestrated these fateful events... the Doctor.

The Real McCoy: This trilogy has enjoyed revealing the potential of the seventh Doctor in different shades and The Architects of History is no different. A Thousand Tiny Wings saw him at his improvisational and sparring best, Survival of the Fittest focussed on a more cuddly, charming Time Lord that was trying his best for a dying alien civilisation and now in History he is back to being the master manipulator again, sitting in a dark cell pulling strings and bringing down a perverted timeline. After the Mousetrap/Daleks/Scutari trilogy and now the Klein trilogy Big Finish have revolutionised McCoy’s Doctor on audio to the point where he is potentially the most exciting incarnation to listen to because of the possibilities. Even better this prominent material has enticed some of the best ever performances out of Sylvester McCoy and I am including his television performances in that. There has been a consistency and dramatic strength to his performances in his last two trilogies that has put a lot of his earlier Big Finish performances to shame. Just listen to how commanding he is when he drops his bombshell at the end of episode two. There is none of that angst and melodrama that sunk stories like The Rapture – McCoy is completely focussed, word perfect and powerful. Exciting times for fans of the seventh Doctor.

As far as the Doctor is concerned he and Klein only met in this timeline a while back whilst he was held prisoner in this cell, he doesn’t remember travelling with her in the TARDIS because that timeline no longer exists. Its odd but I find that a more frightening prospect than many others – the Doctor has always been in control of the TARDIS and responsible for any shifts in the timeline and for somebody to alter his timeline against his will feels…wrong. The Doctor sees the Selachians as a disagreeable race but also as a product of an abused history. He doesn’t see a great deal of difference in them and the Nazi’s and ponders whether he should bother interfering because one race of ruffians will just take over from another. He’s a Time Lord with seven lifetimes worth of exposure to the vortex, she might have rewritten those timelines and placed him in a universe he doesn’t recognise but she cannot take his mind. The Doctor remembers his own past and then history reshaping over and over again. This is one time that the Doctor has to face up to a manipulating presence that even he would have trouble facing…himself! He has no idea what his own consciousness might have been about before he arrived and replaced his but it looks like he has had a hand in Selachian development. I cannot believe how frightening the Doctor is when he takes control of the situation, he really seems to fit into the role of a aggressive, snarling dictator. He visits Klein in what used to be his cell to remind her of the water dripping torture she tried to put him through, that every drop was a second ticking away imprisoned. The Doctor knew all along that no matter how many trips in the TARDIS she took, how many changes she made, she would never get back the timeline she lost. There are simply too many variables when it comes to changing time. You can take away his past but you can never changer who he is and I don’t think we have ever seen a greater affirmation of what the Doctor is all about when he tells Klein despite the odds, despite the role this timeline wants him to take he will still save as many lives as he can on both sides of this conflict. Very often when they have clashed he hasn’t been able to argue with Klein’s logic but that doesn’t mean that he has to like it.

It turns out that Rachel is an old companion of the Doctor that should exist in this timeline. The Doctor she knew always had a plan but he didn’t always tell what it was. He’s beaten Selachians, Sontarans, Autons and Daleks but this time even he said the stakes were the highest they have ever been and took her back to Earth to her old life. But he also fixes it so a few days later she gets her call up papers and a week after that she is working in the Moonbase. Its almost as if he knew he wouldn’t be around anymore and his alternative self would need her help and he put her exactly where she was needed, leaving her with a list of instructions. This is clever, mind bending stuff. In a story that refuses to conform to any stereotypes Rachel dies in the destruction of the Moonbase and the Doctor doesn’t even realise she was an old companion of his so he doesn’t know she exists to save her. She dies wondering if she has ever lived. That’s pretty tragic.

(Not So)Reformed Nazi: Since stealing the TARDIS Klein has managed to not only go back and restore her timeline but ensure that the Reich succeed at every turn and is calling herself Oberst Klein, Head of temporal affairs for the Galactic Reich! Only Klein and Richter remember how the timeline should have played out and she is starting to think that that might be a problem. Klein has rewritten history again and again until she likes what she reads. She considers the TARDIS her property now. Even she isn’t sure what is real and what is not anymore, whether she left a lover called Faber in 1965 or if that had never happened at all. It has been worrying Klein that at some point she might accidentally write herself out of the timeline and so others are being trained up to continue her work. The story is even brave enough to have a cliffhanger where Klein’s life is in danger as the TARDIS threatens to tear itself apart – considering she is the central protagonist at the beginning of this story it seems only fair that the jeopardy angle is reserved for her! Its almost with her teeth clenched that she has to ask the Doctor for his help in fixing the broken TARDIS but her desperation to have the one item that always gives her the advantage clearly overrides any sense of pride she might have. The Doctor seems to enjoy the moment Klein realises that there is no going back on the events that are taking place, that she will have to live with the consequences of her actions. Only Klein would consider boiling the Selachians in their water filled armour to be an acceptable strike against the enemy. When the Doctor turns facist Klein declares that they are a lot more alike than they seem which he refutes strongly. When she rewrote history she made herself a Lord of Time, everybody was afraid of her and she didn’t expect to feel so relieved once it was over. She’s almost sanguine about the thought of being executed. When you think that Klein might have turned a corner she tries to have Rachel murdered by the Selachians to get her out of her hair! She realises with some clarity that this was only ever going to end one way – the Doctor’s way. Executing Klein would never have been enough, she was always going to have to be taken out of existence because she is an anomaly, a refugee from a world that never should have been. Thanks to the Doctor Elisabeth Klein is born in England to German parents, raised in a time of war, gifted with an enquiring mind and prestigious intellect but also a need for order. And she is working for UNIT. Who ever saw that coming?

Standout Performance: I’m still astonished at how good McCoy is in this story. All of his detractors (which includes me) needs to listen to this story to see how good he can be. On the downside I wasn’t convinced by Lenora Crichlow who was mostly fine when she was spouting exposition but lack conviction when it came to the more emotional material.

Sparkling Dialogue: ‘I have become the architect of a better world! A golden age!’
‘This man could save our lives but he chooses not to. Its against his principles! Well good for you, Doctor. Now at least you can die with a smug look on your face.
‘I’m the Doctor. That’s what I do.’
‘You can’t punish a whole race for something we’ll never do!’
‘Push that button. End my life.’

Great Ideas: The Galactic Reich has ships powered by Dalek propulsion units – imagine the two great racial cleansers working together to exterminate the universe. Their ships have the finest technology of three galaxies incorporated. It’s a great scene setting set piece that shows you how much Klein has raped the timeline and twisted it to her design and she keeps returning to one particular moment where she has the Doctor trapped. The Reich cannot lose because as soon as they realise that there is a revolution they have all the time in the world to go back and wipe it out. In 2044 a unified Nazi government has ended famine and disease, averted wars before they could even begin, repelled invaders from a score of worlds – it’s a track record that is very impressive and sees a thriving world but there is only one problem. This world is hiding under the shadow of a swastika and free will is no longer an option. Knowing the future is a fascinating idea and encapsulated in a scene where Richter confronts the staff of the Moonbase knowing that there is a traitor on board because he has already seen the future where it plays out. The way he plays with them, teases them, threatens them…it is a teasingly sadistic way of exploiting foreknowledge to get your kicks. Klein using the TARDIS as a Nazi device causes another intriguing deviation from the norm, rather than being a simple conveyance for the Doctor it is now a weapon and one that is being targeted by the insurgents. In the other timeline the Selachians were the scourge of the galaxy and it took Klein many months to stop them from conquering this one. In 2044 they hadn’t even built their armoured suits that allow them off planet let alone developed space travel and Klein sees the Doctor’s hand in their rapid evolution of technology. Fantastic world bending imagery as the interior of the TARDIS becomes…just a box. The exterior dimensions of the TARDIS have been torn away from the interior. Sam transpires to be a spy from the future working for the Selachians and when he sleeps it uploads his memory to their flagship. The perfect spy. The story veers close to admitting that if Klein had never come to Colditz castle then the Nazi’s may have won the second world war which is a pretty bold statement to make. Very Steve Lyons. Then he sports the terrific notion that at the flick of a switch either the Doctor’s or Klein’s timeline will spring back into existence and either one would be preferable to the one they have experienced in this story. I thought the story might end on that indecision but we get a definitive answer.

Audio Landscape: Footsteps, squeaky prison door, dripping water, marching boots, bleeping deep space radar, the TARDIS having a choking fit whilst it refuses to take off, the cloister bell, setting a fire extinguisher on the flaming TARDIS, the bubbling water tanks of the Selachians and their gorgeous amphibian voices (how was that achieved?), gun shots, explosions, a Selachian drowning on his own tank, breaking through the Earth’s defences and bombarding the Earth.

Musical Cues: Listen to the score at the very beginning of the story which is full of bombast and striking the right note of furious fascism right into the heart of the listener. Jamie Robertson is back and I couldn’t be happier. I really like the approach of playing out a space battle sequence through some powerful performances describing the action and the dynamic music guiding us to all the right feelings of excitement. It’s a very different approach to the usual deluge of sound effects.

Isn’t it Odd: My only real trouble with this story was that I found the Doctor/Klein material so stirring that when the story concentrated on the guest cast I found my attention waning because I wanted to get back to where all the intelligent discussion was. But this only lasted for the first two episodes because this material suddenly gained sharp focus when Rachel admits she is working for the Doctor and it takes on a whole new emphasis. Perhaps Sam being a spy for the Selachians as well as Rachel being one for the Doctor was one twist too many. His ‘I have to sleep now’ is appalling clichéd for a death scene and I expect better of Lyons unless he was going for the clichéd wartime melodrama approach.

Standout Scene: The end of episode is an absolute stunner. The first two episodes have been toying with the idea of the Doctor being helpless against the Reich and then he has been slowly taking control of the situation. But he proves an imposing figure as he boldly declares ‘I gave your rulers the means to reach this Moonbase a hundred years in your past and I told them how to conquer it. I planned this invasion right down to the last detail. And that leader is why I am now taking command!’ It is one of those jaw droppingly magnificent cliffhangers that turns up once in a while that leaves you begging to listen to the next episode.

Notes: Its nice to see some continuity being shared between the novels and Big Finish. The Selachians featured in a number of Steve Lyons Past Doctor Adventures less successfully in The Murder Game (a light entertaining novel that turns into a disaster movie halfway through) and more prominently in The Final Sanction (where they were the central protagonists of a really nasty war which was pleasingly told from many points of view to give a fair and unbiased snapshot of the conflict). They are pleasingly brought to life here with very little subtlety, an aggressive, nonnegotiable armed force that considers everybody that isn’t a Selachian to be plankton beneath their feet! Its quite nice to have a stomping, violent, thoughtless alien race in Big Finish for a change because they do like humanising their monsters and giving them some depth. These guys are just nasty and there’s nothing wrong with that every now and again. Besides this is written by Steve Lyons so if there were any accusations of dumbing down the race this is their creators approach to writing for them on audio. Because this is an alternative Earth the Selachians get to be the biggest badasses the Earth has faced as they blast the planet to pieces with their battle fleet in reparation for the Doctor’s betrayal. Not many Doctor Who villains can said to have destroyed the entire human race. Many have tried but none have succeeded. ‘The only blood that will spilt today is warm blood.’

Result: There are a wealth of goodies to discover in The Architects of History and it is something of a miracle that after the quality of the previous adventures in this trilogy that this concluding blockbuster doesn’t disappoint. Steve Lyons has always been a dependable Big Finish writer (The Fires of Vulcan and The Son of the Dragon are two of my favourites) and his obsession with temporal shenanigans dovetails into this arc to create a fascinating ‘what if’ tale and then play with the audiences expectations with some surprising results. Klein manipulates herself into a position of power and learns to the true dangers of playing about with time. An alternative Doctor manages to pull strings within this timeline without even existing to see if it pans out as he planned. An enemy from the books makes a bold appearance in the audios and achieves where so many other Doctor Who monsters have failed, to destroy the Earth. We meet an ex companion of a non existent Doctor. Our seventh Doctor gets to bark orders like a mad Nazi commander. There is just so much to enjoy in this adventure which is also bursting at the seams with action and excitement to balance the intelligent dialogue. Considering where this adventures leaves Klein I sincerely hope that they pick up her character in the upcoming UNIT box set the seventh Doctor is going to have because there is clearly a whole new spin on the character to enjoy. I found this a very satisfying audio and when my head wasn’t spinning with the heady ideas I was engrossed in the action and spurred on by great cliffhangers. This is another accomplished audio from a fantastic year – let John Ainsworth script edit again because he clearly has the knack for it: 9/10

Survival of the Fittest written by Jonathan Clements and directed by John Ainsworth

What’s it about: The hive of the Vrill bears the scars of a terrifying cataclysm. Only a handful remain alive, hatched after the holocaust of the mysterious Winterlack. The Vrill seek a new Authority. They find the Doctor, a two-legged creature who can lead them to survival. He must solve the mystery of the Carrion beast that haunts the lower chambers. He must face the Winterlack that still stalk the mountains. And he must find a path that does not lead to extinction…

The Real McCoy: Its such a Doctorish thing to do when faced with a cave to starts hollering just for the sheer joy of hearing his voice echoed back. He’s super cheeky this week and when the Vrill chants ‘someone is here’ over and over the Doctor suggests what it means is ‘someone is here!’ The scent of the Doctor’s name is one of helping, healing and giving information. He’s like a childish pied piper the way he excitedly tries to encourage the Vrill to leave the nest, it reminds me of just how cute the seventh Doctor can be when he is given the chance. He talks to them in a very soft, singsong voice that is almost hypnotic. When Ace called him an ageing hippy in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy she was not wrong as he gives the Vrill he meets names like Rose and Lily. He thinks they are incredible creatures with their memory hardwired into them, there before they are even born and is devastated when Butterfly is killed after protecting him. The Doctor refuses to listen to a lecture about taking the moral high ground from Klein of all people. He’s declared a condescending hypocrite because he thought he could change Klein’s philosophy by seeing the universe through his eyes. By jiminy these two make an exciting pair!

Reformed Nazi: Survival of the Fittest is unique in that it is the only story of the trilogy to actually see Klein travelling as a companion of the Doctor and enjoying an adventure in the tradition sense of the term. A Thousand Tiny Wings re-introduced the character, the aptly named Klein’s Story explains a great deal and Survival of the Fittest sees what happens to time after she half inches the TARDIS at the end of this story so this is the only peek into how she would turn out as an assistant had they taken her down this route for a longer period. Unfortunately for us, she’s rather impressive even on those terms.

When stepping from the TARDIS she is awe struck by the sight of the entire galaxy swirling around her, experiencing the wonder of the universe for the first time. She has always found it is best to negotiate with the highest possible power. The more time she spends with the Doctor the smarter she realises that he is but in her own unique way she only sees that as a missed opportunity for the Reich. She really is a woman after her fascistic political party. The Doctor jokes that Klein would like the Vrill because their mantra seems to be that they are just following orders but the difference is that they don’t have a choice or free will to do otherwise. She makes a massive mistake by realising that the Winterlack are human beings and voicing that she is one of them too, a snippet of information that sends the Vrill into a frenzy and is repeated over and over throughout the nest. The story takes the unusual approach of putting Klein very much in the sympathetic category, shoving one the humans in a headlock to make him realise that they are exterminating the native species on this planet. She doesn’t care who is the inferior race in this situation only that there is an alien race to be studied so she is still thinking like a scientist but seems to have dropped her Nazi morality for the time being. Klein hears another culture claim to be the Master Race and she is shocked, almost as if she can finally see the paucity of those words. Almost as astonished as she is that she is actually pleased to see the Doctor when they are finally reunited. Klein is extremely smug at having the knowledge that the Doctor’s incredible universe at large is small enough to contain its own fascists. She is willing to let Stefan die a horrible death by poetic justice, torn apart by a hundred Vrill. Klein believes the common good comes before the private good. Klein is smart enough to figure out that the Vrill consider the truth to be whatever they hear and they stay calm as long as they like the sound of it…so she convinces them she is the Doctor and with the TARDIS key whisks herself away with the power to gut the timeline and turn it back the way she remembers. She’s still furious with the Doctor for tricking her into obliterating her own timeline and she plans to put it back exactly as she remembers it.

Sparkling Dialogue: ‘It made the tunnel’ is not a great line on its own but it is repeated when Klein discovers a diamond drill head that has sliced through from the surface into the nest and that is how the Vrill have tries to justify its existence.
‘Oh Klein if you want fascists I’ll get you a date with a Dalek!’

Great Ideas: Languages that are composed entirely of scent markers you are hearing words that aren’t there and the residual smell is like an accent. A language made of scents, what an imaginative idea to base an alien species on. The Vrill have a caste system based on size with small ones to watch and warn, medium sized ones to work and build and large ones to fight and protect. Their language leaves them no room for things that aren’t true because their words are something physical. They hatch in the centre of their nest and right in the heart is the authority. Eggs sit in boiling nutrients until it is time to hatch and then they are taken from the shallows until the new Vrill emerge. They do not have names to tell each other apart, only jobs, different functions to tell themselves apart. Shout with a human voice and you can hear an echo but if your language is a scent you can be track very easily. Its like you are constantly saying ‘follow me.’ The Winterlack are an outside agency that have been trying to systematically destroy the nest, an agency of human beings. Without a new authority they cannot make a new one and no more eggs can be hatched, by destroying her the Winterlack have brought the Vrill to edge of extinction. The story the humans spin to Klein is that their homeworld is drastically overpopulated, the air dirty and the food getting more toxic by the day and they have decided to colonise the Vrill homeworld. There aren’t the resources to search further for another inhabited world. All the Vrill were murdered in one monstrous half hour and now the only Vrill that will be hatched are the ones that have already been laid. Vrill workers are female and they hatch from fertilised eggs. There are 4000 eggs left in the hatching yard and because they are to hatch unfertilised they will all be born as warriors. There is a fine line between exterminating and farming another species, isn’t there? Vrill nourish their eggs with super concentrated nutrients and grow to a huge size in a matter of days, it’s a super food that can be diluted to feed humans. Undiluted it could be used as a wonder drug or a hoer growth hormone and this is a fringe military smash and grab organisation after the nutrients. By leaving with the TARDIS Klein is denying the Vrill and the humans the ability to communicate with each other and the Doctor knows that it will mean further exploitation and murder.

Audio Landscape: John Ainsworth has done a phenomenal job in giving the Vrill a unique realisation on audio with their wings that beat so fast they sound like a motorbike engine, their repeated language and the gorgeous voice modulation. He’s basically been given a Web Planet style story to realise and it looks as though he has attacked the challenge with his usual vigour and enthusiasm. The different sized Vrills are given very different tones of voice and you can hear their mouth mandibles twitching. There’s a lovely sequence where we hear the overlapping voices (smells) of the Vrill crying out for the warriors and wondering why they are burning. Its such an imaginative way to tell a story credit has to go to both the writer and director for making the Vrill so instantly unlike any alien species we have met before and enjoyable. They discover bodies of dead Vrill blocking a passageway, burnt and choked by the Winterlack and the Doctor still being able to hear their distress by the smell of their burning corpses translated by the TARDIS. The bubbling hatching yard, firing a machine gun at the Vrill, creatures screaming in the jungle. tearing apart Stefan.

Musical Cues: The music is wonderfully odd and perfectly matches the unfamiliar tone of the story with discordant themes bridging the scenes and unusual sounds trickling into scenes and vworping out of them.

Standout Scene: How wonderful is it when the Doctor convinces Lily that he is an authority and can sanctioned the creation of a new Adam and Eve to create a new nest of Vrill – he sounds so giddy with excitement its impossible not to get whipped up into his frenzy.

Result: Completely different from the opening story of this trilogy (and a bit) of adventures but just as assured, Survival of the Fittest is a weird and wonderful foray into an alien culture that is brought to life with some skill. It reminds me of The Web Planet not only because of the unusual focus on an exotic alien race but also because it tells a traditional Doctor Who story in a very unconventional way suggesting a colonists versus natives tale and then twisting into a story of greed and genocide. Its worth mentioning here just how superb Sylvester McCoy has been in the last few years of Big Finish adventures and this trilogy sees him at his peak. Survival of the Fittest is a story that allows us to experience him at his best; desperately sweet with the Vrill, locking horns with Klein and trying to save as many lives as possible. Four episodes and this might have outstayed its welcome but at three it is fast paced and exciting (great editorial decision) and there is even a juicy cliffhanger ending that should be all the excuse you need to dive into the next story. Its our one chance to see Klein as a travelling companion rather than an enemy and it works so well its agonising to think that their adventures are almost over already. They make such a gripping, antagonistic pair the distinctive dialogue trips naturally from their tongues and the final face off before she steals the TARDIS is a fantastic moment. Unlike anything else and hugely enjoyable: 8/10

Klein’s Story written by John Ainsworth & Lee Mansfield and directed by John Ainsworth

What’s it about: Elizabeth Klein is an anomaly. A renegade from an alternate future in which the Nazis won World War II, In an attempt to get to know his latest companion, the Doctor invites Klein to tell him how exactly she came to be in possession of his TARDIS and of the events that led to her trip into the past to Colditz Castle.

The Real McCoy: The Doctor is a realist and he understands that they may be ideologically opposed and not like each other but they are travelling companions now so they have to find some way of co-operating. He can’t imagine why anybody would want to steal his corpse because he is much more fun when he is alive! The Doctor admits that his death in her timeline was no accident, that he arranged the whole thing.

Breathless Romantic: How exciting to get to listen to an alternative eighth Doctor who was born out of violence just as ours was (the Nazi’s shooting the seventh Doctor down mirrors the death of our Doctor by a San Francisco gang). Because we know he does not have access to the TARDIS there is the exciting prospect of him on the streets of Berlin, penniless and homeless trying to find a life for himself and work up to a position of power so he could gain access to his ship again. Its so exciting a prospect I would have loved to have spent more time with this version of the eighth Doctor but what we get is intriguing enough to set all these thoughts rolling. Paul McGann is at his charming best, the Doctor worming his way into Klein’s affections by suggesting that she will do great things with access to a time machine that he can provide and help her study. Young, slim and handsome in a gothic kind of way, that’s how Klein describes the eighth Doctor. Yunis doesn’t like the idea of Schmidt working with Klein and feels there is a mocking attitude to him. It turns out that since he regenerated the Doctor has been helping political prisoners to flee the country and undermining the Reich’s ethnic cleansing programmes.

Reformed Nazi: Klein is still clinging onto the hope of using the TARDIS to reclaim her lost Nazi future. She will never accept this reality because she doesn’t belong here. In 1962 when Klein was researching physics at Cambridge (very Liz Shaw) she was commandeered and taken aboard a special military airship to fly her to Berlin. She was quite happy at Cambridge and her researches has reached a critical stage – this is very Liz Shaw, its practically a retelling of the scene between Liz and the Brigadier in Spearhead from Space. Yonis Faber is a charming man and before long they were sharing meals together and falling into bed whilst the research went on. Time travel interested Klein before she ever discovered the TARDIS having written her thesis about it at Cambridge and she uses her wily feminine charms to get Faber to sanction her meeting with the Doctor. Yonis warns Klein about the dangers of time travel and how tinkering with it could result in the most catastrophic changes but Klein is desperate to get her hands on the consequences – a decision she will live to regret bitterly. That entire timeline lives only in her memory now which is quite a burden to carry. She went back in time because she was determined make Yonis the Fuhrer. Klein realises now that she was used by a future Doctor to go back in time and erase her entire timeline and all this time she has blamed herself for what has happened.

Standout Performance: If you needed any more reason to (beyond the superb characterisation and the storytelling opportunities) excuse Klein’s return then listen to Tracey Child’s give it some real welly as she Klein discovers the Doctor manipulated her into deleting her entire timeline. She is furious and however this ends now you know it wont be pretty.

Sparkling Dialogue: ‘Mankind has a breathtaking ability to sweep things it doesn’t understand under the carpet of history.’
‘I was so determined to secure a glorious future for the Reich for Yonis and myself I took a gamble with time’ ‘And lost…’
‘The memory cheats…’
‘You used me!’

Great Ideas: Its easily the best idea for a one parter Big Finish have ever given us and unless I am very much mistaken it is the last of its kind. This features the story of Klein’s first trip in the TARDIS, a tale that is not only worth telling in its own right but fills in a lot of the gaps that led from Colditz and add much depth to that story. In a government depository in Berlin are various items of extra terrestrial technology recovered from alien incursions over the years and it was to be Klein’s job to study them. Surely that is a job that no scientist could refuse! Chairman Hitler was reluctant to accept the existence of superior alien technology, decreeing that they were sealed away and their existence denied. Since his death policies have changed and Yunis wants to make a unit to unlock the secrets of these devices. A UNIT? This is almost a cruel twisting of established Doctor Who continuity but a very fun one. I could imagine this Nazi version of UNIT winding up exactly where the show was during the alternative universe in Inferno, a fascistic scientific base manned by slave labour. I love how this segues into Colditz but telling the story with a very different outcome, the Nazi’s having captured the Doctor and killed Ace and having won the war. Stupidly the Doctor returned to Germany ten years after the events of Colditz and was shot down, forcing a regeneration. In 1961 the ruling body was shaken by conflict and a time machine had the power to literally shape the future which was an exciting enough prospect for Klein, guaranteeing the supremacy of the Reich. Because they know how to fly the TARDIS back to a previous journey (thanks to the eighth Doctor’s insider knowledge) Klein theorises they could travel back to 1944 before he was killed and bring him to the future and force him to reveal the secrets of the time ship.

Audio Landscape: The story picks up directly where A Thousand Tiny Wings left off with the Doctor and Klein still in the Kenyan jungle. The Doctor making the tea, rain in the forest, gun shot, high speed diamond tipped drills trying to gain access to the TARDIS, siren, phone ringing,

Musical Cues: Simon Robinson’s music for this story is excellent, from his magical twinklings as the Doctor asks Klein to recount her story of discovering the TARDIS (it sounds rather like the noise Enlightenment made when it was unveiled in the story of the same name) and the powerful bridges between scenes as the eighth Doctor and Klein meet and start working together. Just because this is a one off it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be the best that it can be.

Standout Scene: I had absolutely no idea that the eighth Doctor was going to have a role in this story the first time I heard it and I remember walking down a forest path with Simon’s mums dog and literally punching the air with delight when I heard his voice. I cannot remember this being heavily publicised at the time (maybe it was and it completely passed me by…it has been known to happen) but I was so shocked in a gleeful way it was the first time Big Finish had pulled off that kind of surprise to me since The Master showed up in Dust Breeding. It’s a truly great moment and it still makes me beam from ear to ear.

Result: A compelling story that cleverly rips the ending away from Colditz and introduces us to a world under Nazi rule before using a Doctor that should never have existed to put it all right again. For so many reasons it is an exciting piece; to delve more deeply into Klein’s obsession with time travel, to explain who we originally met her, to meet an alternative eighth Doctor and the fact that this one part story is used to enhance the trilogy of tales rather than feeling like a tacked on bit of nonsense. The script is of a very high standard and has clearly been thought through well and the first time I heard Paul McGann’s voice at the end of that telephone I almost pissed my pants with pleasure! The sad truth is I could have happily have turned this story into the three parter because there was so much more to explore but what’s great is that even at just half an hour the story never feels rushed or underdeveloped. Its easily my favourite one parter and continues this runs sterling quality: 10/10

A Thousand Tiny Wings written by Andy Lane and directed by Lisa Bowerman

What’s it about: 1950s Kenya. The Mau Mau uprising. A disparate group of women lie low in a remote house in the jungle, waiting for a resolution or for rescue. Among these British imperialists is Elizabeth Klein, a refugee from a timeline that no longer exists… thanks to the Doctor. Reunited, the Doctor and Klein are forced to set aside their differences by terrifying circumstances. People are dying in this remote place. One by one. And there's something out there, in the jungle, accompanied only by the flutter of a thousand tiny wings…

The Real McCoy: He waltzes into the farmhouse with some authority ready to help with the mysterious creature found in the woods until he discovers his old friend Elisabeth Klein is about and then he decides to stay. The Doctor tells Klein is travelling on his own these days and says the words with a heavy heart. Klein suggests the Nazi’s did what they did for the betterment of the human race and the Doctor uses Mengele’s (coined The Angel of Death for his work on children testing the noma disease and even sewing together Romanian children to create a conjoined twin) experiments as an example of how obscene their methods could be. This powerful material ignites a passion in McCoy that is rarely seen and holds your attention completely. In return Klein offers to list all the British and American scientists that have committed atrocities against their fellow man. The Doctor considers the history of humanity as a history of abuse by the more powerful directed against the less powerful and sometimes he wonders why he likes them so much. Its Klein who has to remind the Doctor to remember that Christine’s death has affected them personally but he dismisses their feelings saying that there will be time enough to mourn later once they have discovered what killed her. Klein describes him as devious, manipulative and arrogant and that his innocuousness is his greatest asset. You know what they say, cold hands, two hearts. The talks of ‘his people’ and Sylvia dismisses him as foreign and later as a contentious objector when he tries to avoid violence. In practically every way (especially morally) the Doctor and Klein are different people but when they start working together to beat the disease they make a very effective team and all their previous hostilities are dropped. The Doctor has happy memories about big green land rovers…aww. He’s a clever bastard an no mistake, leaving a shotgun primed to fire when a thin wire is tripped across the perimeter giving them an early warning signal. He boasts he can move like a cat when he wants to! The story pushes the Doctor into the uncomfortable situation of having to try and save Klein’s life which makes him indirectly responsible for anything she might do in the future. Klein thinks the Doctor is suggesting that he will stay with her and watch her until she dies when he tells her cannot allow her to set about trying to create a Fourth Reich but he actually means quite the reverse. She is to travel with him, a dangerous business considering her interest in history but it will definitely make for a thrilling dynamic. He considers her perception too shallow and he wants to show her things that might change her mind.

Reformed Nazi: Klein was introduced to the main range almost over 100 releases ago and any hope of seeing what was by far the sharpest character in Colditz (and the best thing about the entire production) was practically beyond hope. So imagine my surprise and delight when they announced a trilogy of adventures for the corrupt Nazi Officer butting heads with McCoy’s seventh Doctor. For the first time since the Sixie/Charley adventures I was really looking forward to hearing some main range adventures. Tracey Childs made such a fantastic impression in that earlier story and the character had so much untapped potential it would have been such a waste had she never been seen again. A small confession to make – I had absolutely no idea that Tracey Childs played the part of Metella in The Fires of Pompeii and when I found out (checking some obscure detail on its Wikipedia page for my review) I was absolutely delighted as it is one of my favourite New Series episodes. Compare her on the cover of these audios to her period look in Pompeii and they are completely different and the fact that I could even tell by her voice is further proof of what a versatile actress Childs is.

Klein suggests some kind of rota to protect the farmhouse and is greeted by derision and mocked that this isn’t Nazi Germany…if only they knew who they were talking to. She hears the TARDIS materialising in the distance and drops a glass – this is all of her dreams come true. Whilst she may have to circumnavigate the Doctor a time machine would give her the one opportunity to go back and change the events of Colditz. The Doctor describes her as blonde, blue eyed, strikingly attractive with an air of an Aryan about her. She had a feeling they would meet again; first it was a hope, then a certainty and finally a dream and now they are face to face she calls him insane for re-ordering reality the way he wants. It seems that the two of them are never going to agree on which reality is the real one and that will fuel the drama of this trilogy. After the war ended in a farcical victory for Britain Klein escaped to a colony of nationalists in South America, a home away from home (DeFlores from Silver Nemesis was one of this breed). That she put things right – that’s what Klein wants her epitaph to be. When she was in South America she re-qualified as a Doctor of medicine and she couldn’t see herself whiling away her time dreaming of past glories she headed for the Dark Continent for challenges anew. In her version of history the Germany army crushed the Mau Mau rebellion with wave upon wave of aircraft carpet bombing the tribal areas. When the carpet bombing had stopped and the various native uprisings had been irradiated builders were sent in to construct new cities. Within three years most of them were dead, some disease, not infectious but carried by something. Hitler put Klein in charge of a team of Doctors to investigate but they were evacuated before they could make any progress. She doesn’t like to fail and if she couldn’t make a difference in her own timeline she is determined to eradicate the infection in this one. The Doctor wonders if she wants to use the disease in some ludicrous scheme to put the Nazi’s back on top but she scoffs at this asking him to credit her with a little intelligence – diseases aren’t fussy as to who they attack and if she wipes out humanity there would be no hope of her putting things right. To all accounts an purposes this is a humane mission and we are so used to seeing the Nazi’s as monsters it is hard to correlate the two. A quiet moment between Klein and Sylvia reveals that they have similar ideals – the tragedy of national socialism is that the concept of the benevolent dictator has lost all credibility where it is palpably the best form of government if you choose the right dictator. They are literally finishing each others sentences and it is fascinating to see a British citizen quoting Nazi ideals. Her philosophy is that you have to break something down to rubble into order to build it up again in the right way whereas the Doctor believes you can build in whatever direction you want using whatever you are as a foundation.

Standout Performance: A huge round of applause to Ann Bell who slowly unpeels her character as the story develops, starting off as a sympathetic motherly presence in the farmhouse and gradually revealing her fascistic ideals in a so natural its frightening fashion. Its not often we get characters in Big Finish plays that make an impact like this, usually they are there to service the plot but this is a full fleshed out character in her own right and the subtle way Bell gets more furious and forceful as she talks about the positives of the Nazism had me hiding behind my hands. By the end of the story she is a pretty fearsome woman.

Sparkling Dialogue: ‘And will he make the trains run on time?’ ‘You say it as if it’s a bad thing to have a predictable transport system.’
‘Which one will get to us first, the Army or the Mau Mau?’
‘I don’t trust him’ ‘You don’t trust anyone’ ‘And you trust everyone! Guess which one of us gets disappointed the most?’
‘We’re a small island with a small population and yet we’ve made our mark around the world. We didn’t do it by force by and large we did it by civilising and educating and showing small tribes whose vision went as far as the horizon that by working together they could form a nation that would stretch from coast to coast’ ‘Which you would rule.’
‘Violence doesn’t care about your opinions Doctor, it just is.’
‘There are many ways of getting to the same destination and often the best one is not the most direct.’
‘A few seconds earlier there were three people in this house and suddenly there was only one…’

Great Ideas: A tawdry uprising on the part of discontented natives who don’t when their well off…or at least that’s how Sylvia sees it. The British government will not allow this to go on for much longer and they will send the troops in. The Doctor says that self rule is the inevitable outcome and the country the British are used to controlling has changed forever. Klein is worries about the natives getting in and that is very tangible threat throughout the entire story. Denise is such a wonderfully naïve character and symptomatic of a British Empire that refuses to accept that times have moved on since the war. In a farmhouse under siege she is more concerned about having a four for Bridge and expects the servants to still be catering to her every whim. You know from the first few seconds of meeting her that she is going to learn a lesson in the harsh realities of life before the story is over. A body found in the forest that has two knees in each leg, two elbows in each arm and whose joints move in the wrong direction. I love the approach Lane takes to the Nazi’s from Sylvia’s point of view, she had a German husband that was posted near Colditz castle who she loved dearly but has had to hide the fact since the end of the Second World War. She remembers the Mitford girls travelling back and forth between Germany and England, having grand balls and parties with the two countries united as friends. Its such an refreshing new take on the relationship between the two countries it really stands out. That’s why Sylvia and Henreich came to Kenya because British citizens couldn’t admit to knowing Germans anymore. Joshua enters the story at just the right point when a new element of suspicion is needed and despite his protestations of being on the run from the Mau Mau you cannot help but wonder if he is an advance scout sent to asses their defences. There are two burnt out cars and tree trunk blocking the entrance and preventing their escape in the car…the Mau Mau don’t want them to leave. Sylvia catches Joshua signalling with a torch to the Mau Mau, revealing his allegiances and discovering him nearly costs her her life until Lucy intervenes and murders him. The flock is alien birds with poisonous claws, using the Abraham as their mule to provide their manual work via short range telepathy. They are doing research on Earth that is too dangerous to conduct on their own planet, biological warfare which created the disease that would wipe out the population in Klein’s timeline and this one too if they hadn’t have wound up here. They want to use humanity as test subjects for their research, planning to create diseases that attack many races at once – a universal plague. Astonishingly this research isn’t even for their own benefit, they want to sell the microbes on to warring planets and become the most powerful economic power in the galaxy. Once all over life forms have wiped each other out they will take over.

Audio Landscape: 130 releases into the main range and Big Finish scores possibly their most atmospheric production with Lisa Bowerman casting aside all the bluster of the two Key to Time trilogy stories she directed and the camp madness of Mission to Magnus in the Lost Stories range and really focussing on the drama of this superbly scripted story. Not to dismiss the work of other directors (because Big Finish has a very high hit rate when it comes to its chosen directors) but there is a level of care in this story that I don’t always feel in the main range of this period. What’s astonishing is that for an audio this story is far more involved in what we don’t hear rather than what we do and with the Mau Mau closing in on the camp Lisa Bowerman manages to wring astonishing moments of tension by allowing this story to be silent in places and add the sound effect of a snapping twig or a sudden scream to maximum dramatic effect. You can trust Klein to get straight to the heart of the matter with the ultimate cliché – ‘It’s quiet out there…too quiet.’ Denise discovering Christine’s body is terrifying, her screams quite made me jump! Bowerman pulls of the same trick in episode two when a window suddenly smashes and my coffee leap from my hands all over my desk! Sylvia walking through the house as bodies thump to the ground and nobody answers her calls really chills the bone. The fact that there isn’t even an attack in the end and we are still taken to the extremes of dread is all credit to Bowerman’s skill as a director.

Exotic birds screaming in the wilderness, the rustle of leaves and animals forage through the undergrowth, tapping on the typewriter, the dinner gong, wings flapping, walking through the tangled undergrowth, knocking at the door, clacking knitting needles, a crackling news report, the suddenly flurry and fluttering of wings, starting the coughing, grinding engine of the car, shotgun, shots in the distance.

Musical Cues: Like everything else the music has been exquisitely selected to create the maximum disquiet and its lovely to see Yason and Fox (who usually work with Bowerman in the companion chronicles range) having the chance to score a full length main range adventure. A Thousand Tiny Wings proves how good they are at their craft and they should be drafted in more often (still the main ranges loss is the companion chronicles gain). Listen to the atmospherics as there is a knocking at the door in episode one. I love the exotic turn the music takes as they start car and try and leave the farmhouse, its very catchy.

Standout Scene: I honestly couldn’t choose one scene – this is a fantastic story from beginning to end.

Result: A Thousand Tiny Wings is one of my all time favourite Big Finish adventures. Such a simple, evocative, intelligent, beautifully characterised script from Andy Lane complimented by Lisa Bowerman’s atmospheric and disquieting direction that rings every nuance and moment of tension for what it is worth. Whilst you are soaking up all the intellectual discussion between the Doctor and Klein, taking in the ambience of the Kenyan jungle and enjoying the complex characterisation of the guest cast there is the terrifying approach of the Mau Mau keeping everybody on edge and the discovery of an alien creature to solve. As I said in my audio landscape section at times it is the silence that impresses the most because we are waiting on tenterhooks for the Mau Mau to make their move and slightest twig snapping or footstep can be very frightening. Practically every line of dialogue is a gem and the story develops in exciting and unusual ways with the cover and title for once offering hints rather than spelling out the answers. At the heart of this splendid tale you have two towering performances from Sylvester McCoy (whose Doctor has taken off since Briggs took over) and Tracey Childs and their fractious, nascent dynamic makes for an engrossing new partnership. Absolutely top notch, this is the kind of Doctor Who Big Finish can revel in and the New Series couldn’t even touch: 10/10