twinborne

[twinborne]

Twinborne's Discount Big Finish Reviews! Main Range #2: Phantasmagoria

Alright, I had a good long think. I've decided to abandon my idea after this of "randomly picking audios to do a review on them" because I'm getting overwhelmed by ALL THE CHOICE. The Monthlies are three weeks total worth of content alone. Not off and on listening either; literally a back to back, three-week-long playlist. I am making the executive decision to do the Monthly Range by sequence, maybe with a side shot, depending on how I feel. That's gonna probably be a pitfall to watch out for, but what can you do. …God, I need to get better at making these. Spoilers abound.

This one up is Phantasmagoria! No, not the video game (though, I would like to take a crack at that one sometime). This is set sometime after the midpoint of the Fifth Doctor run. It's literally the second story in the Monthlies, so no continuing plotlines as it were; it's sometime between "Resurrection of the Daleks" and "Planet of Fire." We have Mark Strickson reprising his television role as Vislor Turlough, aka the Doctor's Assassin-Turned-Boyfriend. Don't look at me like that; he's literally trying to learn cricket. Cricket. The Fifth Doctor's hyperfixation. I remember confusing a cricket game in an episode of Murder, She Wrote for a Doctor Who episode when I was a little boy, that's how into "The Greatest Game in the Universe" the Fifth Doctor is. The fact Turlough even cares enough to try to learn means he's got some interest.

Meanwhile, for our established setting, there's a few guys playing cards and having talk of the succession of Queen Anne in the "Diabola" Club (sounds like a Hellfire Club We Have At Home). And, well, this is Mark Gatiss' writing, so literally first scene intros the antagonist, Nikolas Valentine. Londoners better watch it, they've got a synth. Actually he's an alien serial killer, pulling a "Deep Breath" a few decades early; luring the "unworthy" to be drained of their minds for his ship parts. Honestly, we find out he's a bad'un pretty early on in the story, so the real challenge for the Doctor and Turlough is how they stop him.

Honestly, the early years of BF go really back and forth with their pacing; it's almost like the first private screening of the original Star Wars. We swap constantly between the Doctor and a guy called Holywell's investigation of the disappearances (and Holywell's apparent mysticism that turns out to just be tapping into the mental radio in Valentine's ship), Turlough (who randomly gets separated from the Doctor during events) and some shmucks from the Club, and the aliens hunting down Valentine, one of whom pulling a double as Holywell's housemaid Hannah, and a highwayman named Lovemore who robs the rich and eventually kills her own earlier-attempted SA-er (no I'm not gonna correct that). About three-fourths of the way through, the Doctor calls her out on it, and they team up to confront Valentine while Turlough and Jeakes find his ship, and the plot points converge. Doctor plays a game and tricks Valentine into touching his own bio-abduction tech (cleverly hidden in his playing cards), and Hannah turns it against him, burning both of them out. There's a couple of quips and Holywell gets his moment finally joining the Club and then it sorta just… ends.

Idk, like I said, this has weird pacing, and most of the story is just Doctor and Turlough interacting with the contemporaries, as they understandably do. I'm still not over Turlough randomly splitting up and ending up with the Club Guys, but I guess it's fine, since again, most of the Doctor's scenes with Holywell are unraveling the plot around Valentine for their benefit, since we the audience are already clued in. No real twists to be had, maybe except for the Hannah/Lovemore connection midway-3/4 through.

Meh. Much like OG "Sirens" I give this one a 2/5. If they'd set up Hannah/Lovemore as an accomplice/Red Herring and established Valentine as just a land-owning dickhead that cheated at cards before revealing him as the true killer, I'd probably like this more. It's early BF, and early Gatiss. He certainly gets better, as we see with Revival Who's "The Unquiet Dead" and even him giving the antag in "The Idiot's Lantern" was just plain better.

Final Verdict: "Phantasmagoria" 2/5.

[twinborne]

Twinborne's Discount Big Finish Reviews! Main Range #1 / Special Rerelease 2024: "The Sirens of Time" / Redux

So. Here we are again. I used to write these little "Discount" audio reviews back when Cohost still lived. I did not get far, I'll admit. Choice Paralysis. But I've decided to start this up again. Probably should have back when this particular story got the Redux treatment for Big Finish's 25th Anniversary. Ah well. Better late than never.

The Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors unite in the first (un)official Doctor Who story directed since the ill-fated-attempt-at-a-reboot film in '96. McGann wouldn't make his appearance as the Eighth Doctor for just over a year, until his re-debut in Jan 2001's "Storm Warning" (which I shall strive to review as part of this series).

So, the important thing to note about the different versions: other than the story beats being shuffled around a bit for the sake of pacing and the improved sound mastering, the story remains unchanged. Spoilers abound, but this story is literally a quarter-century old.

The Doctors find themselves drawn into the thick of their own respective dramas by the titular Sirens: the Seventh Doctor to a swamp planet housing an exiled war criminal from the planet Velyshaa; the Fifth Doctor to a U-Boat during the Great War; the Sixth Doctor into a temporal anomaly that completely knocks him out of the TARDIS onto a tourist starliner headed straight for said anomaly. Meanwhile, the Time Lords on Gallifrey get a visit from a Celestial Intervention Agency Coordinator by the name of Vansell. And what a knucklehead he turns out to be; he tries to kill the Fifth Doctor at several points for seemingly no real reason just before their current enemy, the Knights of Velyshaa, find their way past Gallifrey's transduction barriers to take over, killing the President and Vansell (who finally does something good in this story by sending the Doctor an important message).

The Doctors go through their parts, Five heading off his assassination attempts and trying to communicate back to the Time Lords and get to the TARDIS, Six investigating the anomaly with the assistance of the starliner's android pilot as his TARDIS is trapped there, and Seven finding the aforementioned Velyshaan war criminal, Sancroff. Each Doctor is joined by a girl in their respective times: Helen, Ellie, and Elenya. The Sixth Doctor notes that he's somehow seen Ellie before, and suspects why she of all people on the ship survived the time distortion, as all others on board (barring the pilot and the Doctor) were turned to dust by it, and the only other living beings on the now-deteriorating ship are heavily-mutated bacteria. Five ends up finding his way back to the TARDIS, which is inexplicably sealed off, while Six crashes into the anomaly and Seven is nearly gunned down by Sancroff's assassins.

The Doctors find themselves together on Gallifrey... somehow. Honestly, I don't think it's explained at all how they got there, so I'll chalk it up to the Sixth Doctor triggering the time distortion and pulling along Five and Seven. It's eventually revealed Ellie/Helen/Elenya are in fact all facets of the Sirens of Time, who were with all three incarnations for the sole purpose of luring the Doctors to make timeline-altering mistakes and eventually freeing an entity called the Temperon, jump-starting a Second Empire of Velyshaa and using them all to take over the universe. Is the plot making sense yet? No? That's Doctor Who for ya. Don't worry; it all gets taken care of Deus ex Machina-style by the Temperon. It provides time travel to the Doctors for them to correct their initial mistakes to set the timelines right, prevent the initial meeting of the Sirens, and trapping both the Temperon with the Sirens in perpetual temporal conflict. Everything resets to just before Vansell arrives on Gallifrey, who notes the disturbance but simply gapes like a fish about it before leaving.

Oof. "A little madness helps" eh? I suppose so. It's the only way I get my head around the plot in the end. I originally gave the story a... wanna say a 2 out of a 4-point scale? Yeah. I stand by that here in 2025. I know this story deserves all of the "return of Doctor Who" hype it gets, but purely as a story, it's very mid. I give this one a generous 2 on a 5-point scale (I know, unprecedented) for the original, but Redux gets a solid 3/5 for the better pacing. It's still worth the initial listen, as Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy all come into the story like it's their answer to "The Three Doctors" and just that alone is worth checking out, while the supporting cast gives it their equal footing to make it all worthwhile. Not sure how I feel about the price for Redux though. As I said before, it's literally just a recut/remastering, and the original is damn near free. I suppose if you were one of the people to get the limited-production Platinum, Gold, or even Silver Edition, that's cool from a collector's standpoint, but the Bronze Edition is just the download and you can get the original cut for a third of the price (or listen free on Spotify).

Final Verdict for "The Sirens of Time" - 2/5 (Original), 3/5 (Redux)

Next up is "Phantasmagoria." Wish me luck.