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Showing posts from April, 2015

Doctor Who At Big Finish: Throwback Thursday - Eldrad Must Die!

Released: April 2013 Range: The Main Range Range Number: 172 Starring Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson, Sarah Sutton, Stephen Thorne, Nancy Carroll, Pip Torrens, Jessica Claire, Brian Protheroe & Mark Field Written by Marc Platt  Directed by Ken Bentley  "A Doctor, curse his name, threw me down among the dead... but I endure. I am Eldrad... and I must live!" A nuclear icebreaker, foundering in Arctic waters. Seabirds washed up in the fishing resort of Ambermouth, their wings encrusted with crystals. A shining artefact of uncertain provenance, up for sale on an auction site. All of these things are linked, as the Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough are about to discover. Linked to the rebirth of a genocidal tyrant, presumed dead many years ago... For the sake of the planets Earth and Kastria alike... Eldrad must die! Over the years, Big Finish have done many sequels to previous stories in the TV series. The Bride Of Peladon, The Butcher Of Brisbane, The Osiedon ...

Doctor Who At Big Finish: Throwback Thursday - The Sentinels Of The New Dawn

Released: April 2011 Range: The Companion Chronicles  Range Number: 5.10 Starring Caroline John & Duncan Wisbey  Written by Paul Finch  Directed by Lisa Bowerman  Some time after leaving UNIT, Liz Shaw calls the Doctor to Cambridge University, where scientists are experimenting with time dilation. A device hurls them to the year 2014 and a meeting with Richard Beauregard, heir to the Beauregard estate. But there's something rotten at the core of this family... the seeds of a political movement that believes in a new world order. The Sentinels of the New Dawn are stirring. And their malign influence will be felt for centuries to come... After the success of Leviathan, it's no wonder that David Richardson commissioned another story from Paul Finch looking at the Sentinels of the New Dawn. But, in many ways, it goes off on a tangent away from the original story, and that's prehaps why it works. Normally, successor stories don't work very well at all, particularly if...

Doctor Who At Big Finish: Throwback Thursday - Excelis Rising

Released: April 2002 Range: Excelis  Range Number: 2 Starring Colin Baker, Anthony Stewart Head, Charles Kay, Rupert Laight, Toby Walton, Nicky Goldie, James Lailey & Patricia Leventon  Written by David A McIntee Directed by Edward Salt  A thousand years after his first visit to the planet Artaris, the Doctor returns. The city of Excelis has grown, spreading a vast Empire throughout the globe. Science and engineering have provided a new Age of Reason.  But the more things change, the more they stay the same, and once again death follows the mysterious Relic through the halls of the Imperial Museum. When the Doctor finds himself helping the Curator and the local authorities with this mystery, he finds himself crossing paths with a familiar face from Excelis' history - but no-one lives from a thousand years, do they?  After the rather manic 'otherness' of Excelis Dawns, the second story of the Excelis arc is rather more contained than the grand scope of the pr...

Doctor Who At Big Finish: Throwback Thursday - Hothouse

Released: April 2009 Range: The Eighth Doctor Adventures  Range Number: 3.02 Starring Paul McGann, Sheridan Smith, Nigel Planer, Lysette Anthony, Adna Sablyich, Stuart Crossman & Barnaby Edwards  Written by Jonathan Morris Directed by Barnaby Edwards  Somewhere in the south of England stands the Hothouse. Five vast, state-of-the-art biodomes, all steel and glass. Inside, rock star turned environmental activist Alex Marlow has a plan to save the world from climate change. By any means necessary... There's something growing inside the Hothouse. Something that could turn back humanity's tide. A voracious alien vegetable called the Krynoid. The Doctor's going to have to stop it. Stop Marlow. Stop Marlow's fanatical acolyte, Lucie Miller... Save the world. By any means necessary. The Seeds Of Doom is a story that still remains in the highest league of Doctor Who stories to this day. Hothouse, however, most certainly isn't, however. Which is odd, considering that it i...

Doctor Who At Big Finish In 2015: The Darkness Of Glass

Released: Feburary 2015 Range: The Fourth Doctor Adventures  Range Number: 4.02 Starring Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, Mark Lewis Jones, Julian Wadham, Sinead Keenan, Rory Keenan & Nicholas Briggs  Written by Justin Richards  Directed by Nicholas Briggs  Cut off from the TARDIS, the Doctor and Leela find themselves stranded on a small island. But they are not alone. It is 1907, and members of the Caversham Society have gathered on the hundredth anniversary of the death of Mannering Caversham, the greatest Magic Lanternist who ever lived.  But Caversham was also a supernaturalist who claimed to have conjured up a demon from the depths of hell. As people who start to die, the Doctor begins to wonder if Caversham's story might have more than a grain of truth in it. Can the Doctor and Leela discover what really happened to Caversham a century ago? And if they do, will they live to tell the tale..? While some may argue that The Darkness Of Glass is a mere rip-off of...

Thunderbirds Are Go!: Ring Of Fire Parts 1 & 2 - A Review

Starring Rosamund Pike, Thomas Sangster, Rasmus Hardiker, David Menkin, Kayvan Novak, David Graham & Angel Coulby, with Sandra Dickenson, Andres Williams, Adjoa Andoh, Teresa Gallagher & Ramon Tikaram  Written by Rob Hoogee Directed by David Scott  After another daring rescue, International Rescue are called to the scene of a earthquake, where an under-sea research base is caught right in the epicentre. However, as Gordon soon discovers, this is no ordinary seismic shift... Soon, International Rescue will be stretched to the limit to deal with a worldwide crisis. Scott and Virgil must try and save a whole city from being scorched to death, while Alan and Kayo must try and interfere with a satellite sat right in the centre of the chaos.  All the time, however, they are racing against the clock. One of International Rescue's oldest enemies is behind this disaster, and he has plans for them all... 50 years after Thunderbirds first aired of British television (in regi...

Doctor Who At Big Finish: Throwback Thursday - Shadow Of The Past

Released: April 2010 Range: The Companion Chronicles  Range Number: 4.09 Starring Caroline John & Lex Shrapnel  Written by Simon Guerrier  Directed by Lisa Bowerman  There's a secret locked up in UNIT's Vault 75-73/Whitehall. Dr Elizabeth Shaw is the only one left who knows what that secret is.  Returning to UNIT for the first time in decades, she slowly unravels the past. The vault contains the remains of a spaceship that crashed in the Pennines in the Seventies.  For the young Liz Shaw, the priority is to ensure the thing's safe. But the Doctor is more concerned about the alien pilot. And the chance this ship offers for escape. Can he resist the temptation, or will the Doctor turn on his friends? Shadow Of The Past is a story that would fit perfectly into the seventh season from which it chronologically comes from. A Doctor, desperate to leave the planet, the Brigadier, determined to protect the Earth by any means necessary, Liz, caught in the mi...