Mastermind (2013)

Mastermind is the first story of the eighth and sadly final series of the Companion Chronicles. This is the second story from Yee Jee Tso and Daphne Ashbrook who reprise their roles of Ruth Matheson and Charlie Sato who appeared in the 2011 story ‘Tales of the Vault’, I thought that it was a good story but I can’t say that I thought it was screaming out for a sequel. Any doubts that I may have had about this release were quickly dispersed when I discovered that Geoffrey Beevers would be returning as the Master. The first thing about this story is that it doesn’t actually feature a Doctor.

There is a wonderful build up to Sato and Matheson’s scene with the Master. There are basically rules to how they should be with him and there seem to be water-tight precautions to prevent the Master from escaping. When the Master does finally appear we get a nice explanation as to what happened to the Master after the TV Movie. It’s an interesting one which works well and would have looked great on TV. Once that explanation has been given then the story moves on a bit more to the Master being on the Titanic and how he ended up in Las Vegas. He wants to use Earth’s technology to become a Timelord again but had to wait for the technology to get up to the standard that he wanted but didn’t want to help otherwise he would attract the attention of the CIA and also the Doctor. It’s quite a good excuse as to why the Master doesn’t speed up the technology.

The idea of the Master running casinos is quite a fun idea and also the scene where the he is left to die is a great scene and is played well between Beevers and Tso. The whole theme of the story is about the Master’s survival and how he leaps from one body to another. At the end of the story he has escaped from what seems unescapable and it hopefully means that we are going to get more Master stories in the near future. I like what Jonathan Morris has done with the Master because we get a lot of the story from the Master and its all really fascinating stuff and well done.

I love that after all the speeches about how not to listen to the Master and to speak to him for only a short time and the other person watching them, they are still possessed into doing the Master’s bidding without even realising. It leads to arguably the best scene in the entire story (which is quite a compliment) where they realise that they have both been had and that they will be effectively imprisoned for the rest of their lives. They wont because Big Finish will find a way of getting them out because I get the feeling that this story will be very popular and will lead to another story but obviously it wont be in the companion chronicles series.

Geoffrey Beevers is one of those people that has a truly wonderful voice and every time he has featured in a Big Finish audio. Here he doesn’t disappoint and easily steals the show. Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso are both really good in this and well in what is effectively a supporting role. They were always going to be in that position against Beevers but that doesn’t mean they are below par because we learn a bit more about their characters and they deal with it well.

Mastermind is a fine story and a great way to start the final season of Companion Chronicles. It’s a good story told well and it has an ending which some may have seen coming but it doesn’t mean that its not a great way of ending it and its crying out for a next instalment.

Shockwave (2013)

Shockwave features Sophie Aldred and this is only the second time (to my knowledge) that she has narrated this type of the story. The last time was 2009’s ‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma’ and I haven’t listened to that since then so I couldn’t remember how she sounded but what I liked about this was the difference between Ace and Sophie Aldred. Aldred adopts a posher tone to her delivery whereas she slips easily into doing the London accent of Ace.

The story sees the Doctor and Ace arrive on Tarsus Six where the inhabitants are trying to evacuate the planet before the sun collapses. The whole pacing of the story is quite quick because of the impending doom and I thought that the story was brought alive by Ian Brooker who played Captain OhOne.

As with all of the stories in this range, the 11^th Doctor has to make an appearance and whereas in the previous release it happened quite early on in the story, here it happened quite late and it was getting so late that I thought that I had missed it but no it happens and its always fun to see the narrator trying to do an impression of Matt Smith’s Doctor. I thought that it was a good attempt from Aldred and I was also impressed with her attempt at doing a Sylvester McCoy accent. It’s simply not good enough to just have him pop up to match what he has done in previous stories but its good that Swallow has done his short scene in a way that fits the story and the story arc of the series.

James Swallow is an author who has written too little Doctor Who audios in my opinion. He has written the second Cyberman series and also the superb Kingdom of Silver. He is a writer that I rate highly and here he has written a solid story that didn’t get boring, didn’t get predictable and had some strong characters and I thought that Shockwave was another highly enjoyable release.

Rating - 7.79/10

The Dalek Contract (2013)

The Dalek Contract is the penultimate story in what I think has been a consistently strong series. The final two part story from the previous series involved the Master and that seemed to go down well so it was obvious that they were going to do the same sort of thing in this series. I like the stuttering Daleks. I found it hard to get to grips with at first but then I started to enjoy it.

I love how irritating Romana finds the Doctor, she takes every opportunity to berate him for his latest brainwave. Mary Tamm is great in this episode and she seems to be a more tolerable version of what she was like the first time that we saw her in ‘The Ribos Operation’. Tom Baker is also on good form in this and the partnership has worked well throughout this series. It’s a shame that we wont get more from this duo but at least we have what we have. I like the moment when I realised that the first Romana never met the Daleks. It was this little nugget that made the story even more enjoyable because we got to see how she would react to the Daleks.

The Daleks return but what is strange is that they have seemingly entered into a partnership with Cuthbert. They use the word ‘arrested’ in the cliffhanger which the Doctor finds odd. It’s always good when they do something different  with the Daleks instead of the standard invasion (which isn’t a bad thing but its always nice to spice things up a bit). Another thing that they do in this story that I was impressed with was what they did with K9. I am not a K9 fan but I thought that he was well used and was important to the pacing of the story.

Also David Warner returns as Cuthbert after appearing in the War Against the Laan/The Sands of Life two-parter at the beginning of the series. Quite frankly I could easily enjoy a series full of Warner as he is great in whatever story he is in. A bonus of Cuthbert coming back is that Toby Hadoke makes a return as well and I like the character in this episode.

As this is the first two episodes out of four (?), Nicholas Briggs can take his time in telling the story and what Briggs does well is to make it seem like he isn’t filling it with padding. Briggs remains to be one the best writers for Big Finish and if I trust anyone to pull of a series finale well then its him. The cliffhanger is a rather good with the Doctor uttering the words “I Surrender”.  It’s clearly part of the Doctor’s plan but I thought it was still a good way to end the release. After being disappointed by ‘Prisoners of Fate’ I needed a strong story to get me back into a good mood and this story did that. A good story with some good characters and the final release of the series looks like it will be a cracker.

Rating - 8.07/10

Prisoners of Fate (2013)

The final instalment of this Fifth Doctor series. I was hoping that Jonathan Morris would be able to come close to matching the good work he did on ‘Protect and Survive’. I think that story is one of the best stories and was hoping that there would be something that this story to be a fine way to end the series. The story starts off with the impression that the story is going to be about Nyssa’s return to her time in ‘Cobwebs’ where she was looking for the cure to Richter’s Syndrome but in the world of Doctor Who some time has passed. However what seemed like a promising concept soon went downhill.

The problem with this story I felt was that I didn’t feel like it knew where it was going. Whereas with ‘The Lady of Mercia’ and ‘Eldrad Must Die!’, I could see what they were aiming for but with this I struggled with this. The first two episodes were good and I felt that the third was perfectly fine but it was the final episode which I thought was too long and seemed like padding. It needed someone to say whilst making this that they needed to lose about 10-15 minutes from the final episode.

Whereas in the previous adventures Nyssa wasn’t the centre of attention, this story manages to rectify this. I liked the family drama that came up in the first part of this story, it was good how Nyssa’s son tried to hide his face so that Nyssa wouldn’t know what he looked like. Sarah Sutton is the best thing in this story and I thought that Nyssa had the right amount of the old Nyssa and the mother Nyssa. Mark Strickson and Janet Fielding seem to suffer from background filler syndrome where they have to let Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton take centre stage.

Whilst this story has its moments, I have to say that I found Prisoners of Fate to be a bit of a let down. I think had it just been about Nyssa and her son then I could have dealt with it but this story is one of those rare adventures where I struggled to keep up with it and as I never give up on a release mid-way I just kept with it and whilst its not the worst release that Big Finish have ever done its not one that I will be in a rush to re-listen to.