You see, I am a big fan of audio drama, and have been ever since I discovered CBS Mystery Theater and old time radio programs as a kid in the 70‘s. And during the ‘Wilderness Years,’ the decade and a half where Doctor Who was off the air save for a failed TV movie pilot and a couple of charity specials on the BBC, Big Finish Audio (a company that, according to legend, began because a bunch of guys were doing the equivalent of Who fanfiction and the BBC decided to give them the license instead of stifling their creativity) was the one of the few outlets that produced Canon adventures of our favorite Time Lord. Recently that Canon-ness has become more fluid as NuWho’s history becomes as elaborate as the classic--one could even say ‘accelerated'--but it is Canon. This was driven home by the Steven Moffat penned 50th Anniversary short ‘Night of The Doctor’ where the Eighth Doctor, Paul McGann, namechecks all of his Big Finish companions (including Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Pollard, whose relationship to her Doctor is a big part of the template Russell T. Davies was following when he fashioned Rose Tyler's relationship to Ten). At this point, my guess is that as long as it’s not contradicted by anything in the TV show--like the way the recent Chris Chibnall episode concerning Mary Shelly contradicted a trio of Big Finish dramas (dramas that were very good, incidentally) where the Eighth Doctor palled around with Shelly--it’s canon to the BBC.
(And no, I won't be reviewing every Big Finish production in this series--these lines have been going on for so long that there are literally hundreds of them, some of which I don't know if I could fit into continuity, and that way lies madness).
Which brings us to this, a Companion Chronicle (a line that started in 2007 as a way to tell stories with Doctors who were no longer with us) that was released to mark the series’ 50th Anniversary. It’s a ‘Dramatised Reading’ written by Marc Platt, who wrote my favorite classic Who serial, ‘Ghost Light’ and read by the original Susan, Carol Ann Ford with an assist by Terry ‘Davros’ Molloy.
This serial purports to be the story of the Doctor and Susan’s ‘borrowing’ of the Tardis and their first adventure, which takes place mainly on The Moon. The biggest problem is that by taking that particular Tardis, our protaganists also take Quadrigger Stoyn (Malloy reads Stoyn’s dialogue) as their unwitting stowaway, something that Stoyn isn’t too keen on. And when the Doc and Susan find themselves in a strange terrarium on Earth’s moon curated by an even stranger alien race who are helping to cultivate life on this planet.
The bulk of this first part of a two part story is composed of the Doctor’s escape and his and Susan’s adjustment to life on the run. Ford is engaging in the way she interprets the material. A somewhat large portion is devoted to introducing Stoyn, who is the villian in two other Companion Chronicles that follow this one which I will get to at the appropriate time in the chronology. And since it’s a Marc Platt story, the alien race is suitably weird, being globes of shiny, reflective liquid (There’s a moment where Ford describes how these creatures ‘bow’ that actually makes me giggle).
As with many of the other items in the Big Finish range, the drama emulates the show’s pattern. In the case of this story, we’ve got music cues that seem to evoke the sounds of the early Hartnell episodes. And it has a cliffhanger--in this case it’s only one, but when we get to the audio dramas based on the later Doctors, they’ll have three or more--although I’m still not sure what is going on in this cliffhanger after listening to it several times. But I’ll get to that when I come to the second part.
Obviously your milelage may vary--for all I know, most of you reading this can’t stand audio drama--but if you genre, this isn’t too bad a’tall.
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