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Last Doctor Who Story you listened to?
- Thread starter Emperor-Tiberius
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Back to my intermittent BF listening, I spent a couple of days listening to Arrangements for War. Honestly, I think its the reason I'm in a bit of an annoyed mood, it was a real pain to drag myself through. You have a companion I don't like, Evelyn, whining at The Doctor for not being able to save a vampire she knew for a few hours in the last story, and then basically threatening to stop traveling with The Doctor (but unfortunately not going through with it). The main plot is a mostly boring political story about The Doctor screwing up an important arranged marriage on an alien world while Evelyn is basically out getting a boyfriend. Almost nothing happens until near the end, then it has a downer ending. Another flop for Big Finish, and the 6th Doctor/Evelyn pairing in general.
Honestly I wonder if I should just skip around to other 6th stories with different companions, Evelyn just isn't very good and it feels like she drags down a lot of the stories that she's in. At this point I'd say she's a much worse companion then Mel. Colin Baker is holding these stories up with his great vocal performances as much as he can, but he just has no one to play off of since Evelyn is only around to complain to and nag at him.
Honestly I wonder if I should just skip around to other 6th stories with different companions, Evelyn just isn't very good and it feels like she drags down a lot of the stories that she's in. At this point I'd say she's a much worse companion then Mel. Colin Baker is holding these stories up with his great vocal performances as much as he can, but he just has no one to play off of since Evelyn is only around to complain to and nag at him.
Evelyn is Sixie's best companion by far, and I'm not even going to argue about it.
To each their own, I guess. Currently I've listened to 9 stories with her (The Marian Conspiracy, The Spectre of Lanyon Moor, Bloodtide, Project Twilight, The Sandman, Jubilee, Doctor who and the Pirates, Project Lazarus and Arrangements for War) and of those only most are either very average or below (Jubilee and Project Lazarus being tied for worst, in my opinion), and Doctor Who and The Pirates is the only one I'd say was outright good. Now most of those stories aren't bad just because of her, but she certainly doesn't help. I find the character to be a whiny know-it-all, who has a complaint for every occasion and has an arrogance that dwarfs The Doctor at his worst. This is, of course, not the actress' fault, but I'm not going to pretend I don't dislike the character just because the actress has unfortunately passed on.
I'm far from a Big Finish supporter, but they have released some good and even great stuff, even just based off of the limited amount of stories I've experienced. But Evelyn in my opinion is easily the worst companion of my favorite Doctor.
So, I've finally listened to one of BBV's Professor & Ace audios, the first one, Republica by Mark Gatiss. Some of BBV's audios were semi-authorized (not by the BBC, but by people who retained copyright over certain elements of the show). This series was not one of those. It was a very thinly disguised Seventh Doctor and Ace series, but to avoid legal problems Ace only ever referred to the Doctor as Professor... just as she did on TV. (It didn't work for very long.) And in this story, at least, there's no mention of the Tardis. Anyway, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred play their characters exactly as they did on TV. Gatiss's story isn't bad, about an alternate 1998 in a world where the Restoration never happened and Cromwell's followers still rule England. And there are suspicious high tech advances. And a mysterious advisor to the latest Protector. And a mysterious advisor to the would-be king waiting to lead an army into England and restore the monarchy. Aside from the theme music and the general lack of references to the Tardis it could be a Big Finish story, though it's only one hour long. I'm not sure how many of these I'll listen to when I have a backlog of the real thing, but it's part of a key moment in Wilderness Years history, and it's written by someone who's written the real thing, so what the heck.
I started listening to Storm Warning, the first 8th Doctor and Charley audio drama this morning. I've been curious to check out more 8th Doctor stories, and this seemed like a good place to start. I not quite a half hour into it, and so far it's been pretty good. It's still setting things up, but what it's setting up has been good so far.
Was in the car on a long trip recently and listened to a couple Big Finish stories. First up, The Children of the Future.
This was a good romp for the Brigadier and Sarah. The initial wariness between the two felt pretty natural, as did their finally working together out of concern for the Doctor. Sadie Miller continues to impress me as Sarah; she's got the voice and inflections down pat but never seems to be simply imitating her mother. She's genuinely good at this. My partner even thought that it was a story Lis Sladen had recorded before her death while listening. Treloar and Culshaw are also good as usual.
The plot, though....eh. It was fairly predictable and bland, and the one thing towards the end that I didn't predict I didn't particularly like. I did enjoy the audio, but that was entirely down to the characterization, not due to any story originality.
This was a good romp for the Brigadier and Sarah. The initial wariness between the two felt pretty natural, as did their finally working together out of concern for the Doctor. Sadie Miller continues to impress me as Sarah; she's got the voice and inflections down pat but never seems to be simply imitating her mother. She's genuinely good at this. My partner even thought that it was a story Lis Sladen had recorded before her death while listening. Treloar and Culshaw are also good as usual.
The plot, though....eh. It was fairly predictable and bland, and the one thing towards the end that I didn't predict I didn't particularly like. I did enjoy the audio, but that was entirely down to the characterization, not due to any story originality.
I've been in a Dr. who mood, so I decided to listen to Live 34 (I had it on a "To Listen" list because I had seen it recommended as a BF Who story with a special gimmick). It was definitely interesting. I liked the idea of telling the story like the listener is listening to various news reports, which include live segments and interviews with characters (like The Doctor, Ace and Hex). I think the overall story was maybe a bit standard, the Foctor and Friends have to take down a dictatorship on a space colony, and its not the most unique concept or execution of the concept. Still it worked well enough, and the story telling gimmick helped.
Big Finish revamped their website a couple days ago and to say it's not going well would be the understatement of the century. Tons of basic functionality is gone. The downloads page only shows 5 titles at a time with no ability to sort them any way other than a weird default (that BF insists is most recently purchased first but that simply isn't true). Many people are missing content. The orders page shows only orders in which people bought something physical. The new menus are confusing and built for mobile, so they're wonky on desktop. They clearly didn't do any visual disability testing, as I'm told the colors and background are absolutely awful for that. The app is apparently a total nightmare, only displays 30 titles at a time (randomly), and no longer has CarPlay or Android Auto.
It's almost like their old website was going offline (and not by their choice) and they launched the new site and app without beta testing and before it was ready. It's really the only explanation I can come up with as to why so many features are missing.
It's almost like their old website was going offline (and not by their choice) and they launched the new site and app without beta testing and before it was ready. It's really the only explanation I can come up with as to why so many features are missing.
Yep. It's a mess. I order regularly (almost always downloads) and I'll be waiting for at least a few weeks before trying to order on the new site, because people have reported weird pricing mixups happening during the purchasing process. Among other issues, not all of the order history data was migrated to the new system. In addition to download orders being missing from the order history page, the orders that are visible have had new order numbers assigned. If you still have your order confirmation emails, the order numbers there won't match what's in the new site.
It is in every respect an epic fustercluck.
It is in every respect an epic fustercluck.
I finished listening to Storm Warning this morning, and I really enjoyed it.
This was a nice introduction to Charlie, who seems like she's going to be a pretty good companion. I love how she just kind of invited herself onto the TARDIS.
The whole set up and conflict with the Triskele was pretty interesting, and Uncreator Prime and Rathbone were pretty good villains.
It's always a good source of drama to drop The Doctor into a situation where he has to let a tragedy play out in the end, to preserve history.
This was a nice introduction to Charlie, who seems like she's going to be a pretty good companion. I love how she just kind of invited herself onto the TARDIS.
The whole set up and conflict with the Triskele was pretty interesting, and Uncreator Prime and Rathbone were pretty good villains.
It's always a good source of drama to drop The Doctor into a situation where he has to let a tragedy play out in the end, to preserve history.
I've come to hate that kind of story, because it's basically an argument from privilege -- "Some people have to suffer and die so the rest of us can thrive and maintain our status quo, and that's the way it's supposed to be." It seems to me that if history can be rewritten at all, then there is no absolute "true" history, which means there's no good reason not to change it for the better, except that the people who are comfortable with the current status quo don't want to give it up even if it means other people had to pay the price for their comfort.
Which is particularly true in the Doctor Who reality, since we now know that its history is pretty mutable anyway, that the timeline's changed a great deal from how it was in the classic series, when there was a crewed Mars mission in the 1970s-80s and a Moonbase and global weather control by the early 21st century. So just keeping history the way it was is a ship that sailed long ago. At least in "The Fires of Pompeii" it was unavoidable to prevent a far greater tragedy, and Donna convinced the Doctor to save somebody at least.
But your examples are more about the show just wanting to continue to reflect the modern day, so it's kind of ambiguous if those would really be considered changes to the timeline in the show.
And hasn't the Doctor working to ensure that major historical events have always played the way they were originally recorded been a big part of the show's historical episodes all along?
And hasn't the Doctor working to ensure that major historical events have always played the way they were originally recorded been a big part of the show's historical episodes all along?
But that's part of the problem with that genre of story. They're just trying to conform to the real-world reality, but they're arguing that there are no better alternatives, that the world we have now is the "right" one even if millions of people suffered and died to produce it. And given how many of those people who suffered were minorities or working-class people, that's really a reprehensible mentality when you look at it from their perspective.
It's also completely arbitrary that in any time-travel story set in the future, it's perfectly okay to erase a dystopian future and replace it with a better one, but if it's set in our past, it's completely unacceptable to change even the worst parts of our own history. It just exposes the artificiality of it as a storytelling device.
Not that there haven't been good stories using the device -- "The City on the Edge of Forever" is a standout example, of course -- but I think it's overused, and it's worse when it's saying a major disaster with many victims "has" to happen, or that a war has to happen or a whole group has to remain oppressed.
Not really. Most of the historical episodes in the classic series didn't worry much about the temporal paradoxes and such. There were a few that addressed it; "The Aztecs" had the Doctor tell Barbara definitively that "History cannot be changed, not one line" -- not "should not" but "can not," an immutable-timeline model -- but then "The Time Meddler" contradicted that and they had to stop a rival Time Lord from altering history. But usually that wasn't an issue, because nobody was trying to change anything and so nobody had to worry about the question. They just got involved with events and watched them unfold. Usually they were just on the periphery of the big events and trying to find each other or escape captivity or whatever, so they didn't have much chance of influencing the major stuff. Or they were involved with people not recorded in the history books (like Jamie) and thus didn't know what would happen to them one way or the other. "The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve" ended with the Doctor and Steven having a falling-out over the ethics of letting a historical horror play out unchanged, but not until after they'd already left that era, and it was the exception, not the rule.
After all, the goal of the early historicals was to teach children history by dramatizing past events, so they wanted to depict them relatively accurately and just have the main characters be spectators. The focus was on showing what happened, or on depicting a culture and period, not getting into timey-wimey paradox stories.
But the modern day stories are clearly intended to be as close to reality as they can make, and it's pretty hard to do that if the characters are constantly changing major historical events.
And it's no fun making a time travel show if you don't at least occasionally put you're heroes in a real historical event.
OK, that's a fair point.
Oh OK.
Just finished Deathworld and it's a resounding "meh" for me - mainly because there's hardly any story in this at all. It meanders aimlessly through a collection of set pieces, which do at times create some genuine emotional reactions but at other times ring hollow. And nothing feels like it actually gets resolved.
As to the impressions, I feel like Tim Treloar does his usual excellent job as the Third Doctor while Michael Troughton is decent but not quite as good as he was in Operation: Werewolf. That four month gap between recordings must have really helped. Jon Culshaw is fine to my ears and I do prefer his attitude in this to the incompetent blustering portrayal of the Brigadier in The Three Doctors. Katy Manning sounds little like she used to but I don't particularly care; her joy in the role is evident as always. Stephen Noonan, however...oof. He does channel Hartnell's personality to some extent but his voice is just so jarringly wrong for the role that it takes me right out of the story. I think I'll be skipping his other stories.
I hate to do it, as there was promise here, but this story gets a 4/10 from me.
The Seven Deadly Sins are particularly egregious. They're just...there. Death has to explain pretty much the entire scenario to the Doctors instead of them figuring it out. The chess game framing was intriguing but I don't understand why it was dropped after the first episode. And the goodbyes at the end went on *far far* too long with little emotional resonance. I did like the pairing of the First Doctor and the Brigadier; that might have been the most interesting part of the whole release. And the Second Doctor sacrificing himself was one of the actual genuine emotional moments that tried to elevate the story.
As to the impressions, I feel like Tim Treloar does his usual excellent job as the Third Doctor while Michael Troughton is decent but not quite as good as he was in Operation: Werewolf. That four month gap between recordings must have really helped. Jon Culshaw is fine to my ears and I do prefer his attitude in this to the incompetent blustering portrayal of the Brigadier in The Three Doctors. Katy Manning sounds little like she used to but I don't particularly care; her joy in the role is evident as always. Stephen Noonan, however...oof. He does channel Hartnell's personality to some extent but his voice is just so jarringly wrong for the role that it takes me right out of the story. I think I'll be skipping his other stories.
I hate to do it, as there was promise here, but this story gets a 4/10 from me.
I haven’t really listened to any of the doppelgänger cast BF stuff, and whilst Culshaw to my ear always sounds exactly like Culshaw (he has some specific speech patterns and I think an impediment that is always there) I dearly love his Five Doctors reading primarily for just how very close he gets Courtney’s voice and performance. Admittedly, it’s likely easier with that, because if he’s anything like me he probably watched that special over and over. His Ainley is also excellent.
