A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 0.6.1 The Butcher's Citadel (The Sleeping Blood Part Two, The Companion Chronicles: The First Doctor Volume One, Big Finish, 2015)

So after spending twenty five minutes of the first half hour of this story setting up the background, Susan works with the soldiers assigned to stop the hacker to find a way to cure them of their present situation and joins them in raiding said hacker's lair.  Susan is able to foil the hacker's plot, but not before the leader of the mission kills him.  After she is returned to the TARDIS and cures the Doctor, Susan plays back a message from the hacker that pretty bluntly spells out the main theme of the story and....that's it.

This ended up being a rather large disappointment for me, and a lot of it involves writer Martin Day's handling of the point he wanted to make.   Because he spent so much of the first half of this tale in expository mode, he doesn't get to what he wants to really discuss until deep into the second half, resulting in that point being savagely hammered into our head.  I certainly don't disagree with what Day is saying with this story--as someone who relies on modern medication to manage my mental illness, I wholeheartedly endorse it--but the way he lays it out in an undigested lump makes me resistant to it.  Listening to this last few minutes reminded me an awful lot of Ann Nocenti's overpraised and overrated run on Daredevil, where pages and pages of each issue were devoted to characters presenting what read like Nocenti's collection of college political science essays instead of engaging in dialogue.  It ended up wearing the reader--or in this case, listener--down so much he or she actively resented the effort no matter how sensible the points being made.

...and it's really sad, because Carol Ann Ford is as good as always, and guest performer Darren Strange is very adept in playing two roles to the point where I didn't recognize they were the same voice actor.  As I stated before, the time Susan and The Doctor spend together prior to 'An Unearthly Child' is a time ripe for exploring by the writers of Big Finish.  It's just...I'm sorry, but this tale doesn't prove to be one worth telling.  This is not a great start to the company's first anthology of Companion Chronicles featuring the Hartnell Doctor.