Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: David Tennant, Michelle Gomez, Neve McIntosh, Dan Starkey, Catrin Stewart, Hannah Genesius, Stephen Noonan, Tim Treloar.
The Doctor’s lives are being extinguished too fast, the degeneration effect that is afflicting him is seeing the many faces of the time traveller rapidly thrown out of time and out of place. Old friends are unknown, and new ones forged in an order that would threaten the sanity of anyone, but to whom the one who cannot but help the universe when it faces trouble, it is one that could see the end of all that history and what is to come destroyed forever.
In the fifth instalment of the Big Finish special event, which sees the audio drama company stand alongside its television counterpart in delivering the fans a specialised treat as the legendary science fiction serial celebrates its 60th anniversary, Once And Future: The Martian Invasion Of Planetoid 50 brings together the tenth incarnation of the former President of Gallifrey and his friends to be, Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint, and Strax, and places them in a peril that could only have been inspired by a book. Not just any book but the Godfather of all science fiction novels, H.G. Wells’ account of the fateful war between humanity and the beings from Earth’s near neighbour, Mars.
It is to this nugget of an Easter egg for the fan, the mention of the great man’s work, that sees the Doctor’s nemesis and best friend, Missy provide the clues to the current detour in which the item of salvation might be procured.
Big Finish are to be congratulated on the special editions released so far, but the fifth seems seismic, a grand affair in which the popular guise of the tenth doctor, played with his usual style of maniac brilliance and highly attuned aplomb, act with volcanic intensity opposite Michelle Gomez’s Missy, and the Paternoster Gang’s Neve McIntosh, Catrin Stewart, and Dan Starkey, in a tale that fits like a velvet glove, so smooth its almost criminal.
It is perhaps though to the sparky and enjoyable tussle between Doctor and Missy that the drama excels upon, Michelle Gomez rising to the occasion with her usual stylish wit and verve and sparing with linguistic pleasure against one of the finest in the business. In this encounter there is nothing quite like best friends and enemies sparring it out as the world around them crumbles to dust.
As Wells himself could have hypothesised, “No one would have believed such a meeting of minds could be written so well”. A terrific and boundless tale.
Ian D. Hall