You Are The Doctor and Other Stories

 

Okay so I don't know what's with this cover but McCoy just looks wrong in it... is it just me?

You are The Doctor and Other Stories

It's been a while since I've listened to an anthology Main Range release - I think the last one was Circular Time. I'm not amazingly familiar with them, but to be honest - they're the absolute best. I can't help but love these stories - essentially short stories in audio format. Short form story-telling is oddly suited for Doctor Who, and as a particular lover of short stories, (I WRITE LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE) I find them far more engaging and frankly brilliant on average than some of the behemoth serials you can sometimes get (Whoever came up with stories longer than six parts can shove it!) Yeah, I'm rambling almost inconsequentially, but these one-part episodes are great ways to explore ideas in a quick format. Check out the Big Finish website's Freebie zone, and you can sometimes pick out some of these. Stories like My Own Private Wolfgang, Ghost Station, An Eye for Murder, or The Word Lord, they each explore ideas or themes really well, and they couldn't be two-hour stories, or even one-hour stories, yet they're still super rad. You Are The Doctor and Other Stories is perhaps one of the finest examples of this - yet another hit for the Seventh Doctor Main Range - and the stories are fun and some of the most original I've heard in a while. 

You Are The Doctor by John Dorney

I can't help but feel this one is an absolute work of genius and one of Dorney's best works, and it's just twenty nine minutes long. Really explaining You Are The Doctor runs the risk of ruining it, but it essentially boils down to a Choose Your Own Adventure story where the format itself is the story. It's really brilliantly implemented - you can hop around and do it in your own order or listen to the tracks all the way through and get the full experience depending on what kind of person you are, and it will make sense both ways. Not only that, it's funny as hell, and it's a sequel to THE FOURTH WALL, and kind of makes me love that already excellent story even more. Chimbley's return is a triumph - perhaps one that could give some listeners some continuity lockout, but I mean, come on, he makes this story. I'm perhaps irritated we haven't had a third installment with Chimbley, he's excellent. But nonetheless, You Are The Doctor is really really smart. Like, out of universe, from a design standpoint, it's brilliant, and then when you think about it in universe, it only gets smarter. McCoy and Aldred nail it - I love to see these bursts of bold experimentation in the Main Range, and this perhaps is the most experimental audio I've heard (bar perhaps Scherzo, or Tropical Beach Sounds!) Perhaps a two hour release of this variety would have out-stayed it's welcome, but my god, did this leave me wanting more in the best way - utterly magical, folks, really brilliant as heck 10/10

Come Die With Me by Jamie Anderson

Come Die With Me is also really bloody good - even more suited to the one-part format than the last one. A puzzlebox of a story, it just explores a cool concept for half a hour and that's it! Come Die With Me is almost as good as You Are The Doctor up until the last five minutes or so where it really fumbles the ending (the entire point of the story is the murder mystery is impossible, and then it's solved by a literal cliche) which is... quite problematic if I'm being honest. Is it a quibble? Perhaps, but it's also a really major problem with the story at the same time that drags a lot of the story's internal logic down with it. The story is otherwise quite quite good - The Seventh Doctor is very fun in it, the perfect mix of serious and silly. Ace is also ...fairly well played? Sophie Aldred plays the role with nothing but charm, but it can be irritating for the most experienced of all of the Doctor's companions to be like, "oh, the Doctor said I can't go in the library!? Waah, screw him!" and then instantly go in the library. Okay, so really, Come Die With Me is flawed as heck from many many angles, but it's also super well performed and very very entertaining and has such a great idea at it's core. I can't really be mad at it for doing it's job so well... 8/10

The Grand Betelgeuse Hotel by Christopher Cooper

The Grand Betelgeuse Hotel feels like a companion chronicle gone wrong, as it essentially is a framing device of Ace telling a story in an interrogation with a really dumb alien, who lives in a Dictatorship society where the trials are predetermined. The scenes with Ace in these interrogations are intercut with Ace’s story of ..a heist…(god I hate heists) involving the Seventh Doctor, where she is quickly led to believe he is dead. The result is that of a predictable ploy where Seven ends up using Ace (as usual) to convince the authorities he is dead. because Ace must suffer in these episodes I guess. Sometimes I think the only serial that these writers have watched for Seven is Curse of Fenric, and that they think his “emotional cripple” speech is his base characterization. God. Ah well. The story does have very little emotional fallout, so this usage isn’t as taxing as it might usually be, but it does sort of just end suddenly. As such it’s a companion chronicle without the emotional beats, depth of characterization and appeal of Ace’s narration and so the whole thing really falls flat - uninspired characters, uninspired writing, and some frankly lacking performances (I can’t believe I’m saying Sophie Aldred is bad, but her shrieking that she will haunt these aliens to the grave is just yelling for yelling’s sake.) The thing that probably hurts most is this has the ingredients of some of the best companion chronicles or 1 hour stories - it really needed some more time. If you want a good example of what this episode should have been like, check out DS9’s Tribunal: it’s every bit as awesome as this story isn’t. 5/10

Dead to the World by Matthew Elliott

Dead to the World is pretty fun, all things considered, even if it's another tale that desperately aches to be longer. The story spends a lot of it's admittedly short word-count on gags that aren't really important (the side characters are horny??) but there is the semblance of an AMAZING story snuck in here where the Doctor has to face off immoral real-estate agent aliens in an admittedly cool moral dilemma. I love all the individual pieces of the tale so much that I'm almost willing to forgive some of it's errors as it works pretty well as a concept piece. All of the individual pieces are once again here, and unlike Betelgeuse Hotel, where the pieces are there but lack emotional subtext, this isn't trying to be an emotional story like Betelgeuse was, it's trying to be a concept piece, so it comes off much better. There are definitely bits that should have been cut for time on the more important stuff; the scene where the Doctor decides to give his sonic screwdriver a gender did make me squirm a little. (It sounds much worse than it is, but it still should have been cut for time, you have a very limited slot of time here) so it's certainly not a flawless beast, but god, the very concept of aliens trying to buy out your planet simply because you don't have a physical deed for it, the bonkers bit about the Doctor being legally considered the owner, (reeking of Steven Moffat tbh) and the ending where you think Seven went complete murder-y on this alien guy are all so great. I can't help but like Dead to the World. It's not perfect, and I don't love it, but I can't help but like it at the least: 7/10