Starring Claire Huckle, Noel Sullivan & Colin Baker
Written by Terrance Dicks
Directed by Jason Haigh-Ellery
A thrilling adventure in Time and Space!
The Doctor, Crystal and Jason have survived monsters, Madame Delilah and Mrs T, but then their former enemy Karl calls them back to the Bar Galactica. The mercenary has a cryptic message concerning Ultima Thule, the location of fabled treasure - and a threat to the universe...
The journey requires entering another dimension, where old enemies - and a brand new adversary - lie in wait...
Oh...
Oh dear.
Whatever happened to Terrance Dicks? Once he was a great writer, especially with regards to his brilliant Target novelisations and his really strong TV scripts. However, it seems as if this latest Companion Chronicle has brought Dicks to his true nadir. And that's a shame, because Beyond The Ultimate Adventure has some really good elements to it. Certainly, there are parts of this story which do show some real promise. However, a lot of that is muffled beneath cliche and cheesy performances and the fact that David Banks should really have been brought back for this audio. Either that, or he's part should have been cut. It didn't really make that much difference.
Sadly, everything that made The Ultimate Adventure fun is missing from this sequel. This story is very much a 'greatest hits' album. But unlike The Ultimate Adventure, this isn't a greatest hits compilation. More like, it's an 'everything else' compilation, where every other typical Terrance Dicks trope is amalgamated into a brand new plot. Certainly, this whole story reminds me of classic Terrance Dicks writings, but unlike those, they feel simply hollow. They feel more like recreations of memorable moments rather than a coherent narrative. The're just those moments with no real context between them. It ends up giving it a pantomime feel, especially in the structure of the tale. Everything just feels completely predictable: the few twists in the story someone could guess a mile away. It's nice to have a simpler Doctor Who story, but this is ridiculous. The Ultimate Adventure has an excuse: it comes from a simpler time. However, Beyond The Ultimate Adventure really doesn't have an excuse. It was written relatively recently. You could say that it's a nice little romp, but it seems too straight for that. In all honest, it's format proberbly let's it down. It tries to be serious and simple and that just doesn't cut the mustard anymore.
Now, I wasn't massively impressed with Claire Huckle and Noel Sullivan first time round, but then, they had a supporting cast to back them up. However, here they're pretty much carrying all the material themselves, and let's just say, thank god they decided to get Colin Baker in to play his lines. Noel and Claire make for one of the least engaging TARDIS teams ever. There's still no real connection between them, and giving them a paperweight story like this doesn't really help. They need material that puts them through the ringer and makes us understand there characters better. That should be the whole point of The Companion Chronicles, but if there failing in this simple task, then I don't really see the point. It just a wasted release, especially considering the two first Doctor releases that surround it. And why they made David Banks' character such a pivotal part of the story, then not have him performing it is a mystery to me. I hope he never hear's the impersonations of him: there comical. The direction and sound design are just flat, with nothing intreasting or new about it. It's like Pennant Roberts in the 80's. And the music is so unmemorable it makes one wonder what happened to David Darlington. In fact, only Colin Baker makes it out of this joke with any dignity, but he can never really be bad. His haunting delivery of a line of Edger Alan Poe's poetry is a particular highlight.
Beyond The Ultimate Adventure is, at the end of the day, fustrating. It's trying to be a nice little, jolly romp, but there's no warmth of joy. It's trying to follow it's all singing, all dancing predecessor, but just looks like a cheep imitation of it.
TARDIS Rating - 2/10
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