4-a. A Star Is Born.

1 episode. Approx. 25 minutes. Written by: Richard Dinnick. Directed by: Nicholas Briggs, Ken Bentley. Produced by: David Richardson. Performed by: William Russell.

THE PLOT

A distress call draws the TARDIS to a spaceship that is the sole home remaining to the Metraxi, survivors of a race that became sterile generations earlier. Believing their sterility to be a result of a poisoned homeworld, they fled in search of a new planet, maintaining their population during the search through cloning. Now their ship is breaking down. Radiation is seeping into their atmosphere and is slowly killing them.

The Doctor and his companions are quick to promise help, and the Doctor and Ian begin to investigate at once. They find no malfunction in the ship's systems. But when they search further, they find a truth that's even more disturbing...

CHARACTERS

The Doctor: While William Russell can't make himself sound exactly like Hartnell, he does manage to fit some of Hartnell's mannerisms into his First Doctor line deliveries. As such, his readings of First Doctor stories always end up being a pleasure to listen to. When the Doctor becomes righteously indignant at a terrible discovery, the image is vivid of the First Doctor standing, chin raised, grasping his lapels as he imperiously stares down a villain. Russell's reading is no small part of bringing such moments gloriously to life.

Ian/Barbara/Susan: The 25-minute length and comparatively complex story leaves little time for characterizations of the companions. Ian acts as the Doctor's assistant, helping him to investigate the radiation leak, but he really is just a sounding board for the Doctor here. There is a nice exchange between Barbara and Susan, in which Barbara references The Bible as "the book of our religion," only for Susan to correct her by reminding her that it is "one book, of one religion." This is a good moment, one which feels right for the characters even as it expands beyond the usual teacher/student, surrogate mother/daughter roles they were usually confined to in the series.

THOUGHTS

The final volume of Big Finish's short-lived audio "Short Trips" series launches with this atypically lengthy story. Whereas most of the "Short Trips" on these discs run somewhere between 10 - 20 minutes, this one clocks in at 25 minutes, the length of a full episode.

Writer Richard Dinnick fills that time with a full episode's worth of story, which he even takes care to structure and pace like a black & white Hartnell story. It's not difficult to picture the whiskered, pot-bellied Metraxi as benign aliens in the early Hartnell era, and a fair amount of time is provided to establishing their background and even a bit of their culture. The regulars are split up, with the Doctor and Ian investigating the dilemma of the episode while Barbara and Susan talk with the Metraxi and share cultural insights. The character divide is fully in-keeping with the televised era.

It's a well-told story, tightly structured but with a measured enough pace to reflect the characters of this TARDIS crew. William Russell does his usual fine job of narration, switching effortlessly between the First Doctor and Ian. Between his skillful recreations of this story's primary regulars and the effects layered onto the Metraxi voices, the story almost feels "full-cast"... though, of course, Russell can't do much with the Barbara and Susan bits.

The story does suffer from one huge continuity error, a glaring one given the era in which it is set. The story's climax depends on the Doctor being able to control the TARDIS... Something he absolutely could not do at this point in the series. I could have blinked at this if there had even been a couple of short lines to address it. As it is, however, it feels like a glaring error that's allowed to pass simply because it would be inconvenient to do otherwise. This is sufficient for me to dock a point from the story's score.

Even so, it stands with a solid score as one of the better audio original "Short Trips."

Overall Rating: 7/10.

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3-c. Pop-Up.

1 episode. Running Time: Approx. 16 minutes. Written by: Dave Curan. Directed by: Nicholas Briggs, Ken Bentley. Produced by: David Richardson. Performed by: Katy Manning.


THE PLOT:

After attending a peace conference, the Doctor is in a hurry to leave the asteroid Epsilon Gamma. Jo is confused by the rush - until she notices the flood of advertising everywhere, so pervasive that the TARDIS has been literally buried under billboards planted by Micro Server Robots.

The Doctor shoes the robots away... most of them, at least. Jo notices one with a crippled leg and, out of misplaced compassion, tucks it away in her pocket when they leave in the TARDIS. She is able to repair it, which leaves her quite pleased with herself.

Then the robot taps into the TARDIS systems and begins flooding the time/space vehicle with ads, leading the Doctor desperate to stop the promotional deluge!


CHARACTERS:

The Doctor: He has fond memories of Epsilon Gamma as it was before it was consumed by advertising. He abhors the current state of it, observing to Jo that people have long stopped paying attention to the ads, but that hasn't stopped the corporations. He reacts with weary disapproval to Jo's sympathy for the tiny robot, but he quickly gives up on trying to get her to see that the robot isn't alive and therefore can't be in pain. By this point, he's realized that he's not going to change her nature (nor does he particularly want to).

Jo Grant: When she notices the injured robot, she can't help herself from trying to rescue it, which leads to the entire situation in the story. We see again that underneath her surface ditziness, she's rather capable. She's able to repair the robot without any help in a matter of minutes. This time, that ends up not being such a good thing. Though the Doctor doesn't berate her for creating the mess, she feels enough sense of responsibility to take it on herself to organize afterwards.


THOUGHTS:

Like most of the early Big Finish Short Trips, Pop-Up is a trifle. Fortunately, it's a fun trifle.

Writer Dave Curan works within the 16-minute running time by keeping his structure simple and precise: The advertising robots are introduced creating minor mayhem by covering the TARDIS exterior with ads, setting up the larger mayhem created when one manages to tap into the interior systems. The Doctor tries to resolve the problem, only for the situation to keep escalating. It's small scale, but it works because there aren't any deviations. There's some minor and obvious commentary about pervasive advertising, but everything is here to advance the base story.

The piece benefits from a splendid reading by Katy Manning. As usual, she does an equally fine job of capturing the Third Doctor's voice and of recapturing her old, early 1970s performance as Jo. She's also extremely good with the advertising voices, putting on an inauthentically chirpy tone for the promos, which adds to the humor while at the same time conveying how annoying it would be to be stuck in the center of this.


OVERALL:

Pop-Up is a tiny diversion; but within that stricture, it's expertly turned. It's meticulously structured and benefits from an outstanding performance by Katy Manning - and it's also quite a bit of fun. A good listen, though it probably won't linger long in the mind afterwards.


Overall Rating: 7/10.

Set during: Season Ten

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2-b. The Way Forwards.

1 episode. Approx. 16 minutes. Written by: Steve Case. Directed by: Nicholas Briggs, Ken Bentley. Produced by: David Richardson. Performed by: David Troughton.


THE PLOT

Sherman Pegg is an unwilling participant in a school science fair, having agreed to enter to avoid his mother entering him in dance lessons. His project is a theory of time travel, a formula which he has dubbed "A Way Forward." The judges don't appear to take him seriously at all... But one stranger does, a peculiar and disheveled little man accompanied by a very pretty young girl.

The Doctor scrutinizes Sherman's formula, then makes a single correction to it. Sherman studies the correction, has a realization - And then vanishes, right in front of the Doctor's and Victoria's astonished eyes. As the Doctor realizes that Sherman has gone back in time to avoid entering this hated science fair, the landscape begins shifting around them. Their surroundings become a field, a parking lot, a forest on fire, and even underwater!

The Doctor realizes that Sherman is trying to fix his changes to history, and in so doing is making things exponentially worse. He bundles Victoria back to the TARDIS and goes in search of the boy, determined to find him so that he can set things right - And maybe even win Sherman first prize at the Science Fair!


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: David Troughton has a voice that's quite similar to his father's, which makes it no feat at all to picture Patrick Troughton's Doctor throughout this story. The 2nd Doctor is well-captured, as well. What other Doctor would impishly fix a boy's time-travel formula to make it correct, just on a whim? Certainly, his immediate predecessor and successor would find such behavior shockingly irresponsible. He realizes his mistake instantly, and apologizes to Sherman for underestimating the boy, for assuming that a mere child could not possibly understand his correction even though his formula was otherwise correct.

Victoria: Jamie must be taking a power nap in another part of the TARDIS, because Victoria is the Doctor's sole companion for this story. She's still relatively new to traveling with the Doctor, but is adjusting fast to his breathless lifestyle. She is instantly, instinctively kind to Sherman, particularly when they find him at the end.


THOUGHTS

The Way Forwards plays like a very good first episode of a two-parter that I'd very much like to hear the rest of. Steve Case's script is well-written, the prose breezing by, descriptive enough to encourage a mental image without becoming tedious. The way Sherman's discovery of his time-travel formula is intercut with his sitting, bored, at the science fair is well-handled, amusing and intriguing in equal parts even before the Doctor shows up. The shifting present, as Sherman tries to fix his time meddling only to make matters ever worse, is partially reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, and highly reminiscent of the Simpsons Halloween episode that so amusingly riffed on that - And it borrows while still feeling entirely like a Doctor Who story.

So we have a 16-minute piece that's charming, fun, and funny... But a piece that just stops, with the sense that there's still a fair bit of story to be told. Sure, the ending's not badly-judged. We get the sense that once the Doctor tracks down Sherman, he's all set to put things right again. But it still feels like more could be done here. We're told Sherman's time travel ideas came to him unbidden, something that I personally took as a hint that some outside influence was at work. That never comes to anything, leaving us with an average boy who pulls the answer to time travel out of thin air.

It's a light-hearted romp, so it's easy enough to overlook this. Still, I can't help but feel that this enjoyable 16-minute bit of fluff could have been a quite good single-disc story. As with too many of Big Finish's short-lived CD range of Short Trips compilations, I like what's there well enough - It just feels as though the need to fit eight stories on two CDs results in stories that are less than they might have been.


Overall Rating: 5/10.

Previous Television Story: The Tomb of the Cybermen
Next Story: The Abominable Snowmen

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2-a. 1963.

1 episode. Running Time: Approx. 20 minutes. Written by: Niall Boyce. Directed by: Nicholas Briggs, Ken Bentley. Produced by: David Richardson. Performed by: William Russell.


THE PLOT:

The Doctor has finally done it. The TARDIS has materialized in London, November 1963, not long after Ian and Barbara's original departure. The two have finally come home!

Except that something is wrong. They are in the city on the right date, but it's as if time has stopped. People and cars are frozen on the street, and Ian and Barbara are even able to walk on the surface of the Thames.

Has there been an attack. Is it aliens? Or maybe the Russians? Or is there a more mundane explanation...?


CHARACTERS:

The Doctor: Beams with pride at having finally gotten Ian and Barbara back home. Barbara observes the twinkle in his eye, particularly around Vicki, and she muses that he seems much younger than his years.

Barbara: When she comes across one man frozen in the act of attacking another with a knife, her impulse is to attempt to close the knife or to somehow intervene. When it becomes clear that the situation will not allow that, she leaves with reluctance, helpless to stop this act of violence but hating to simply let it happen. She realizes that this is the date she was supposed to meet her "maiden aunt," with whom she hasn't spoken in years. She goes to the meeting point and is able to see her aunt; but with no chance of interaction, that only makes her feel guiltier.

Ian: Is less emotionally affected than Barbara, seeming to enjoy it almost as a clinical experiment. When Barbara asks him if he thinks this could be the result of an attack, he intellectually engages witht he possibility. Even so, he seems unconcerned, and I suspect he already has guessed the truth of the matter. Oh, and one for the shippers: When Ian wanders onto the unmoving river, his instinct is to share this experience with Barbara, calling out for her to join him.

Vicki: Barbara regards her as the most precocious teen girl she's met - and as a schoolteacher, Barbara's likely met a fair few girls who match that description. Vicki is attentive to what her companions like, even taking time to program the food machine so that Barbara can enjoy some brown sauce with her breakfast. She and the Doctor are conspiratorial as they eagerly spring the date on Ian and Barbara. When it goes wrong, Vicki stays with the Doctor to go over the console.


THOUGHTS:

Big Finish seems to have a knack when it comes to the First Doctor, one that continues with the "Short Trip," 1963. The clever-yet-simple concept allows for some excellent visual descriptions. Writer Niall Boyce observes the way the sun is reflected on the suspended blade of the attacker in the alley, and later details the expressions on the faces of a husband driving his extremely pregnant wife to the hospital.

Boyce also weaves elements of the period into his story. Barbara wonders if this could be some sort of Russian attack. Ian laughs that off as ridiculous, but it fits the paranoia of the time. That train of thought leads Barbara to recall the Cuban Missile Crisis, when she went to bed each night fretting that she wouldn't wake up the next day, that she and everyone she knew would be wiped out as collateral damage from the tension between two other countries.

The most important thing the story gets right is the characterization. Boyce captures all four regulars just about perfectly. The Doctor and Vicki are only in a few scenes, but their interactions really capture the screen rapport between William Hartnell and Maureen O'Brien that made them such a delightful pair on television. Ian is calm, observing the situation, but also supportive of Barbara - at one point literally supporting her when she stumbles over the frozen waves of the Thames. Barbara's thoughts and reactions all feel right for both the setting and the character, and I have no problem envisioning Jacqueline Hill throughout.

A brief epilogue follows up on all the frozen vignettes Barbara observed and grants a bit of added thematic depth by discussing the ways the world was changing in 1963. It's an excellent button on a fine little story.


OVERALL:

I suppose I could quibble that the "coding" for Barbara's aunt is just a touch heavy-handed. She has a severe haircut, wears tweed, and is suspended while reading The Price of Salt when Barbara reaches her. All of which (probably minus the book title) would pretty much be the way a lesbian character would be coded in a 1960s story... but it's so on the nose that at a certain point, it almost becomes funny. All that's missing is a reference to a long-term roommate and possibly a couple of pet cats.

But that's an extremely tiny quibble. 1963 is extremely well written, with strong characterizations and a concept that is simple enough to feel complete within the short running time but interesting enough for some memorable descriptions.

The best of the Big Finish Short Trips that I've heard remains Rise and Fall - but 1963 is a pretty close second, making excellent use of the format.


Overall Rating: 9/10.

Set some time between The Romans and The Space Museum.


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1-c. A True Gentleman.

1 episode. Running Time: Approx. 18 minutes. Written by: Jamie Hailstone. Directed by: Nicholas Briggs, Ken Bentley. Produced by: David Richardson. Performed by: Katy Manning.


THE PLOT:

A young boy suffers a punctured tire while riding his bicycle home from the shop. Times are hard, leaving no money for a new tire, so the boy has been patching it to stretch out its lifespan - but this puncture is beyond repair.

Then a bright yellow roadster approaches. The driver stops, and the boy recognizes him as his father's tenant: the Doctor, who rents out a small croft every year. The Doctor offers to take the boy to the croft, promising to repair his tire. With his father's assurance that this is no stranger but "a true gentleman," the boy agrees.

Then there's a knock at the door - a visitor with green skin who demands to see Doctor, and who won't take "no" for an answer!


CHARACTERS:

The Third Doctor's natural authority is emphasized; but because he's interacting with a child, we see only his kindest side, with none of the brusqueness. Despite appearing middle aged, the boy is startled to see the Doctor jumping out of his car with youthful energy. When the boy sees the TARDIS and wonders how the Doctor got it into the croft when it's taller than the door, the Doctor draws an analogy with a ship in a bottle before pointing out that while he could go into more detail, that wouldn't fix the bicycle tire.

Katy Manning does her usual fine job of capturing the overall persona of Jon Pertwee's Doctor. She also does well with the child, putting on a country accent that suits both the young character and the narration.


THOUGHTS:

The Third Doctor's tale from the first Big Finish Short Trips anthology, A True Gentleman provides a small-scale piece that spotlights the most likable aspects of the main character. Atmosphere is strong, with the well-written narration and Katy Manning's reading emphasizing the country setting and the narrator's youth. There's just enough incident for there to be a story, but nothing here calls for additional time.

And... there's really not much to say beyond that. This is a thoroughly pleasant minor work that makes good use of its short running time. The Third Doctor is well captured; the story is well-written and well performed; and the entire piece is enjoyable.


Overall Rating: 7/10.


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1-b. A Stain of Red in the Sand.

1 episode. Running Time: Approx. 14 minutes. Written by: David A. McEwan. Directed by: Nicholas Briggs, Ken Bentley. Produced by: David Richardson. Performed by: David Troughton.


THE PLOT:

All is not well in the dreary council estate known as "The Slab." It's suffering not just from the usual problems of poverty, neglect, and urban decay - It is the site of a most peculiar alien invasion. An insect-like species the residents have dubbed "Caretakers" are bleeding through from another world, a desert planet with two suns that is only visible from one specific window within "The Slab" - the window of sculptor Roger.

Indigo has an undefined but strong relationship with Roger. She is also drawn to the view from that window - enough so that, despite her fear of the Caretakers, she continues to visit every day.

Much to her annoyance, Roger has become obsessed with his latest work of art: a depiction of an innocent-looking young woman the artist insists on naming "Zoe." He speaks about her as if she is alive, which only increases Indigo's ire. But still she goes to that window, where a stranger known as The Doctor, who had promised he would sort everything out, is engaged in a confrontation. She can't make out the details of the struggle, but she can tell that it's a matter of life and death...


CHARACTERS:

The Doctor/Zoe: Sometime before the story's opening, the Doctor promised to "sort out" the problem of the Caretakers. In the story's present, we see through Indigo's eyes that he's in dire straits while locked in conflict with (presumably) the Caretakers' leader. Zoe is also in some form of danger, with Roger seeming convinced that accurately sculpting her will result in him saving her.

Indigo: The story's viewpoint character. What little we glimpse of the conflict is entirely through her eyes - leaving us very much at a remove from the action. The focus is more on her trips to The Slab, despite her fear of it, and her general resignation to the idea that her life will never deliver anything good. She is concerned for Roger, particularly as he refuses to pause his work to eat, but she is also jealous of the attention he pays to Zoe the Sculpture.


THOUGHTS:

A Stain of Red in the Sand is a rather odd piece. There is a Doctor Who story going on - but since we are locked to the viewpoint of a character who is only peripherally involved, we only catch glimpses. At the end, we are told that the Doctor "won" - but we are left with very few clues as to what happened to create this situation, who the Caretakers are, what happened to Zoe or how Roger's sculpture helped, or what the Doctor and Zoe did to resolve the problem. We only see what Indigo sees... and that is extremely little.

For some listeners, I suspect this was annoying. Truthfully, though, I'm not sure this was a bad approach. What we can glean of the story boils down to: aliens invade; Zoe is put in danger; the Doctor confronts the lead alien; with Zoe's help, the Doctor wins. Which is to say, the actual conflict is a "Who-by-numbers" runaround that would be entirely uninteresting if presented traditionally. Never mind that the scant 14-minute running time would be woefully inadequate to telling it traditionally.

Writer David McEwan instead focuses on Indigo and her emotions involving the building, Roger, the Caretakers, and even the Doctor. This approach allows him to create a strong sense of setting and atmosphere. McEwan's prose is effectively descriptive, whether describing the smell of urine hanging in the air of the lift, the color and texture of the clay Roger uses, or the hues of the sand on the other world that Indigo sees from Roger's window. Her overall attitude of resignation to what we can presume has been a hard life also makes it effective when, near the end, she begins to feel a faint sense of hope.

The story feels entirely controlled in a way that isn't always true of the briefer "Short Trips," and I enjoyed both the writing style and performer David Troughton's narration. Still, I will admit that this is an odd piece that won't be to all tastes. Even at the end, we're kept determinedly at arm's length from the actual conflict, left to piece it together from the scraps seen by someone who only observes a few key moments. No explanation is forthcoming at any point, and I can't blame anyone for feeling frustrated by that.

I will say that within the confines of its running time and format, this story worked for me. I think the end result largely meets the writer's ambitions for it, and I found it atmospheric and engrossing. As a result, within the confines of its very restrictive format and running time, I'm awarding a solid score.


Overall Rating: 7/10.

Set During: Season Six

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