Bernice Summerfield New Frontiers


A Handful of Dust by Xanna Eve Chown

Entirely acceptable in terms of Benny fare, after hearing everything on from Epoch alone, you'll be very familiar with what this ends up doing. The dialogue between our two natives is delightful, truly as a masterclass in how alien characters operate, and the haunted house lady herself is beautifully sickening in the vein of Rita Skeeter. All of this blanks in turn to the Irvefield, the best possible ship name, and in fact, probably the best possible thing. I can say without a doubt that the Irvefield is the exact kind of stupid lazy terrible comedy that should never be written on a page and because of that I LOVE IT AND IT'S PERFECT. No, really, few jokes have made me laugh so much.
Not only that, the story has some stuff to say about (whispers) religion, and let me just say if the Holy Terror stomped on the issue with a giant spiked cleat, standing and stomping and smashing the issue for two hours, this one deftly does a ballerina dance on it. Take that as you will. All in all, Handful of Dust is pretty good in what it does. Just...It's nothing that will make you reevaluate life's existence or anything. 7/10

HMS Surprise by Alexander Vlahos

Penned by Dorian Gray himself, HMS Surprise is pretty dang good, even if it leaves Ruth unceremoniously back at the base doing nothing. Despite this, we are getting some peak Jack material, even if it pokes at the arc issue multiple times, as if teasing you, making one slightly annoyed (it'll be more annoyed when you see the resolution to it, jesus christ)
All the same, HMS Surprise is a nice little zombie story (and has a creative idea with that to boot)
So although I couldn't say much about it, I rather liked it on the whole, even if it does suffer from the Hollywood Main Characters are inexplicably immune to all malady thing.
8/10

The Curse of Fenman by Gary Russell AKA Zagreus but minus the good bits

The Curse of Fenman is the most stupidly complicated audio I've ever heard. It goes on for way too long, I've never felt so overwhelmed with the amount of time in the story (which I assume is one hour, but didn't feel like it.) It somehow makes sense of the past three sets of Bernice Summerfield''s more confusing aspects, and yet adds more, building up to a cliffhanger that doesn't happen. It has gratiuitous refernce's to the Chimes of Midnight, which is funny the first time, but the second time made me want to vomit. (Oh, yay, the writer of this story is so clever. If the joke works the first time, I'm sure it will work many more times when we change nothing and expect that this wont annoy the audience) It concludes several arcs very well, and yet kills off an LGBT character to piss me off more. It also doesn't conclude those arcs very well, as many of the character mysteries the past four boxsets have been stringing us along on are kind of unceremoneously dropped on our laps. Ruth used to be a bitchy rich person! Jack was hired by the villain to show up! But in all reality, these don't feel like solutions to mysteries, in that they feel like expected half baked origins. It is ALSO so damn long, It legitimately felt like Zagreus to me, which as we all know is continuity based, but this one feels so much more lifeless especially when anything you've been expecting from it DECIDES NOT TO HAPPEN. and I desperately hope the eleven series before it increased some people's enjoyment, because Jesus Christ, although bits of it near good, the parallel to Zagreus never stops. I understood about 85% in all.  I wish I knew the context because there's a minimal chance it could be better, I wish, I wish so much,  but holy motherfucking shit, I could understand every audio very well before this. And the villain has never shown up on audio before? What? What? What? This...is villainous. It's probably worth more, but just simply saying out loud an hour and twenty minutes of flashbacks detailing how this is the best villain plan ever leading up to a villain plan that fails, is just  literally the worst storytelling device that I've ever heard, plain and simple. When you say that out loud, it becomes vehemently clear how THIS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE it is. 0/10

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