A Death in the Family is the middle story of this series and sees the return of the Word Lord who made a brief appearance in the Forty-Five special in late 2008. That episode of Forty-Five and this story are written by Steven Hall. It’s always good when Big Finish introduce a new writer because it introduces a certain freshness that Big Finish needs just like the TV series. After listening to two really solid stories in The Book of Kells and Deimos, I was really hoping that this story would make it a hat-trick. Sadly that wasn’t the case.
The first episode was very good. It had a lot of excitement about it and there was a genuine intrigue in wondering what the Word Lord was actually doing. However the story starts to go downhill quite quickly. The second episode was enjoyable with Hex encountering Evelyn. It was really nice to have Evelyn back in a proper adventure as she hadn’t been in a Big Finish play since Assassin in the Limelight back in 2008. The Doctor bought Hex to meet her because she was the only person who had met his mother. The third episode was mildly interesting as it was given a nice link when Ace announced at the end of Part 2 by saying she was married. There were some nice scenes in this episode which served the job to distract me from the nagging problem that I had. It’s the final episode where it well and truly fell apart. It was at this point that I well and truly lost all ability to follow what was going on. The problem that I have is that even after listening to it all the way through. I honestly couldn’t put my hand on what the story is about. It seemed like they were trying to defeat the Word Lord who was as slippery as a snake but it seemed that just when you had thought the Word Lord had been defeated, he came back and was trying to outsmart the Doctor. Ultimatley there was way too much of this going on in the final episode and it seemed like the writer was getting desperate.
Sylvester McCoy was very good (for the parts he was in it) and so were Sophie Aldred and Philip Olivier. Maggie Stables performed perfectly well. It’s always nice to have Stables in a Big Finish play because even like this story where she is effectively reduced to a bit part she brings something to it. Ian Reddington was very good as the Word Lord, he goes OTT on the role but to be honest it is such a wonderful character that it doesn’t matter.
A Death in the Family was far too smart for its own good. This was a missed opportunity as they bought back Evelyn and reduced her role to the old biddy who talks about something that connects her to another companion. I might return to this in the future to see if any of it makes sense but I don’t think that a story should require more than one listen.
The first episode was very good. It had a lot of excitement about it and there was a genuine intrigue in wondering what the Word Lord was actually doing. However the story starts to go downhill quite quickly. The second episode was enjoyable with Hex encountering Evelyn. It was really nice to have Evelyn back in a proper adventure as she hadn’t been in a Big Finish play since Assassin in the Limelight back in 2008. The Doctor bought Hex to meet her because she was the only person who had met his mother. The third episode was mildly interesting as it was given a nice link when Ace announced at the end of Part 2 by saying she was married. There were some nice scenes in this episode which served the job to distract me from the nagging problem that I had. It’s the final episode where it well and truly fell apart. It was at this point that I well and truly lost all ability to follow what was going on. The problem that I have is that even after listening to it all the way through. I honestly couldn’t put my hand on what the story is about. It seemed like they were trying to defeat the Word Lord who was as slippery as a snake but it seemed that just when you had thought the Word Lord had been defeated, he came back and was trying to outsmart the Doctor. Ultimatley there was way too much of this going on in the final episode and it seemed like the writer was getting desperate.
Sylvester McCoy was very good (for the parts he was in it) and so were Sophie Aldred and Philip Olivier. Maggie Stables performed perfectly well. It’s always nice to have Stables in a Big Finish play because even like this story where she is effectively reduced to a bit part she brings something to it. Ian Reddington was very good as the Word Lord, he goes OTT on the role but to be honest it is such a wonderful character that it doesn’t matter.
A Death in the Family was far too smart for its own good. This was a missed opportunity as they bought back Evelyn and reduced her role to the old biddy who talks about something that connects her to another companion. I might return to this in the future to see if any of it makes sense but I don’t think that a story should require more than one listen.
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