The Havoc of Empires (2015)

After being very impressed with Prisoner of the Lake, I pressed play on my generic MP3 device with higher expectations than before. Having got use to the fact that not every word that Tim Treloar says is going to sound as close to the way that Jon Pertwee spoke others words might do.

This story was written by Andy Lane who is another safe pair of hands and wrote the pilot for the Jago and Litefoot series and like Justin Richards is someone who can be trusted to write a story that feels like the era it’s supposed to be. The set up for the story is that the Doctor is taking Jo and Mike Yates to see a cricket match but obviously with this being a Doctor Who story it wasn’t going to happen like that and that is when the story gets going. There is a wedding going on between rival races and a whodunit. There are moments in this story which reminded me of Frontier in Space which is another example of how efforts have been made to invoke Jon Pertwee stories. I suppose if your relatively new to Doctor Who and haven’t seen many or any Pertwee this wouldn’t be a big thing but for people like me it was a nice bit of nostalgia.

What tickles me is how Mike Yates seems to have become a companion in the proper sense of the word. To the best of my knowledge Mike has never even set foot inside the TARDIS so to have an alien adventure seems like a bigger deal than the story gave it credit for. I quite like how Mike deals with what he is thrown into. By the end of this story I found myself hoping that there will be more stories involving Jo and Mike because one of the successes of this boxset has been the relationship between Jo and Mike which never went anywhere on TV. Like the previous story, Tim Treloar was very impressive in this story. The gamble has paid off for Big Finish because I could listen to this story and just enjoy the story instead of being so impressed with Treloar’s performance.

Due to the fact that Prisoners of the Lake is such a good story, I thought that this one wasn’t as good. That’s not that its bad or anywhere near that but I think that there was something about the previous story that got me more. I hope that sales of this lead to a lot more adventures. I know that its called Volume One but if sales were very disappointing then its unlikely that more would follow however I cant see that happening. There is a great deal to like as a boxset and different things in each story. The performances from Katy Manning and Richard Franklin are highly enjoyable but its worth the £25 for CD or the £20 for download purely for listening to Tim Treloar doing his performance of Jon Pertwee. The idea of recasting the lead role is always going to be controversial and some people may not listen because of this but quite frankly they aren’t being silly because everyone knows that Treloar isn’t really the Doctor but he helps plug the hole in a story that requires him to be in the story without having the Doctor either missing or Katy Manning pretending to be Jon Pertwee. A wonderful boxset.