Plum Pudding Reviews

  Memories of a Tyrant by Roland Moore I really respect  Memories of a Tyrant, because without being about sex or drugs or anything like that, it's immediately Doctor Who at it's most adult, it's most philosophical. Memories of a Tyrant has no alien monster or sci-fi invasion to deal with, it's more concerned with it's own ideas, and as such reminds me immediately of a lot of classics in that regard. It's nature about taking a sci-fi issue and presenting it with multi-faceted themes and an open-ended narrative that almost feels like a thought experiment, well, it reminds me of many of the other classics of the Main Range like Jubilee or The Fourth Wall. When Doctor Who does the exclusively thought provoking ideas route, it can sometimes come across as dull, or that not much is happening without an alien force: even the Cyborg Alien creature that we see on the cover is still merely just another character in a murder mystery, and is treated as an ordinary person.

  Enemy of the Daleks by David Bishop  I've never reviewed the Settling or No Man's Land on this blog, and perhaps that was an oversight. It's been a long time since I've heard those two tales, but my feelings on them are critical to how I feel on Enemy of the Daleks, which I think is a mixed beast. The Hex arc itself does feel quite odd though, I must say, especially since whilst the Fifth Doctor and Sixth Doctor are doing the same sort of things they did on television but with more depth and nuance, The Seventh Doctor's stories are starting to feel like some of his books. Stories too deep and broad for the television screen was a sentence plastered on the back of the first ten or so Virgin Novels, and I can't help but take issue with the term, especially since they often didn't earn it. Big Finish is smarter than that, to be fair, and there aren't any sex pest idiot characters, but the mood, the edgy element, that feels somewhat present. That, I don

There's an increasing problem with the Daleks these days. It can be downright unpleasant to note that the Daleks are the largest victim of the tried and tested formulas over the years - we were already experiencing it in the Third and Fourth Doctor's eras, that early on - when Terry Nation, their own creator struggled to deliver an original story each time and proceeded to make something that usually ended up looking rather similar to the previous one. While there have been exceptions since then, stories that forged the Daleks in a new way in public consciousness - Genesis of the Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks, or more simply, Dalek, but in truth, even these newer entries have their imitators. As such, it can be common perception among the Doctor Who fan that the Daleks, as a species, are on a decline, and there is less and less to do with them. And indeed - even in Big Finish, that can be the case. We're now onto Fifty Eight years of Dalek-ing, with no end in sight, and

  NCBBDAS: Oh Flux - Village of The Cybermen  Starring Brenda Blethyn, Linda Hamilton and Rinko Kikuchi  Part Four of Six My Four Hundred and Seventy Fifth Blog Post! Previously on Doctor Who  The Doctor, Sarah Connor and new friend Danieru have been combatting a cosmic force, a second Flux thing, engineered by cosmic beings' Evil Dan and his less famous partner Evil Yaz. There are way too many side characters, like the non binary fish person Jaime, Time Travelling Richard Nixon, Joseph Williamson's wife Elizabeth Tate and also, the Rani? A Secret Doctor? Davros is involved too? It's a clusterfuck let me tell you. But we're not worrying about that, because The Cybermen have stolen the TARDIS! Which technically shouldn't be working, but Flux ignored that story thread so we will too. Onwards, Aoshima!  * * *  Earth 1969 "Extraordinary." The Scientist said, examining the youth with a magnifying glass.  "What? What is it?" Jaime asked, and they were

 

  The Forsaken by Justin Richards The Forsaken is accurate, incredibly accurate to the Second Doctor era, almost so that it might slot comfortably into the Lost Stories range - a base under siege story set in Japan where the TARDIS team encounters an evil figure in a black cloak that feeds on fear. Yeah, It's a Second Doctor story before anything else. That's the thing, your enjoyment of the Forsaken is entirely equal to how willing you are to just suspend caring about the plot and just let this enjoyable yet oddly uncharacterized TARDIS team take you along for the ride. There isn't much meat to be found here. It's a good story, and it's immersion is, to it's merit, part of what makes it good, but it's never good in originality. You have to have this mindset or it will be dull. This is very tried and tested Doctor Who, it does not break new ground, and it does not try to for that matter. The villain is legitimately an alien that appears as a man in a black c

  The Yes Men by Simon Guerrier  There's something hard to quantify about The Yes Men, because I essentially liked everything about it and what it was doing and still didn't actually feel at the end of it like it was anything amazing. There's just something about it that isn't outstanding. I can't truly say what it is, because I was entertained, fascinated throughout. It's good. And I can't truly say what I'd do different if I wrote it, no, Simon Guerrier does everything right here. It's just a story that I can't explain why it's not really amazing. The Yes Men is a classical 60s-esque sci-fi tale about mechanical rights and how we treat appliances, machines, naturally extrapolated into a really good allegorical plot. I was impressed by how far the story took it, at one point a character moans that the robots have to be treated like people now. They say it with such distaste that it really put me in mind of how real people respond to politica

  The Whispering Forest by Stephen Cole Painfully Traditional, for all good and ill (and mostly ill), The Whispering Forest is a story that only has half of an idea to it. So, you know, like, Faces of Evil where a crashed spaceship ends up forming a society? Okay so like hang on here - what if it was a HOSPITAL ship that ended up forming a society and everyone LOVES WASHING THEIR HANDS!?!?? Also that's a twist early on in episode two but it is clear from the first thirty seconds. The Whispering Forest is almost parodic in it's simplicity, there's absolutely no ideas here. At all. There aren't ideas. It's downright depressing. People accuse certain series of Doctor Who on autopilot, but quite frankly, they don't understand what that is, because this is it. This feels like an Artificial Intelligence made this, compiled out of a bunch of random stories from classic who. There's a lot of dull strangely political drama to do with this medical colony and how some

  The Sixth Doctor Adventures: The Eleven I have such admiration for this boxset, especially if it's how things are going to go as we move forward. The Three Story Boxset can still feel a little sacrilegious, because, well, it's not as much as four. And we'd really prefer to get four stories of Christopher Eccleston or Michelle Gomez, rather than three, isn't that right? But this boxset takes a different approach to it, and one I heartily stand by... it's sort of three stories, and at the same time, it's also just in all honesty, a single Main Range release, because only two of the episodes contribute to the story arc actively - that's not to say that the other episode is superfluous, because it's the best of the lot, but technically, well, you could skip it and you'd have something not far off a Main Range release like Planet of The Rani or Order of the Daleks. But what this boxset does, really, is it spends an extra hour, on well, the character and

  Winter of the Daleks A Four Part Unbound Miniseries When the Doctor and The Master arrive at the same time on the planet of Skaro in the bitter winter months following a devastating nuclear fallout, they realize what day it is - the day the Daleks awaken. For thousands of years, the Daleks were burnt in, held up alone in the bunkers beneath Skaro - buried with their creator Davros by the Fourth Doctor's mission to destroy them once and for all. But no, they were always going to get out. This is the day they did. And then - and then - the TARDIS, is destroyed. Once and for all. For good. Kaput. The Doctor and The Master are going to have to work together, aren't they? It's only polite, after all. They might die otherwise, of course. It all sounds so very run of the mill for them. They've done this sort of thing, running from Daleks, forced to work together, so many times. The Master's gonna betray the Doctor eventually. Backstabbing 101. But what if, for just one d

 The Magic Mousetrap by Matthew Sweet I can't help but feel the Magic Mousetrap is one of those plays that the most effective review I could possibly give it would be to say very little. When a Doctor Who story where so much is predicated on mystery and atmosphere is this good, well, I can't help but feel that not much would be gained from me going into much detail, as it might ruin some enjoyment. Usually I don't care about this sort of things, but The Magic Mousetrap's mystery elements are too delicious to serve up to you outright as I would most stories, it's probably best to discuss it in vague terms minus a bit of discussion of the scene setting. The story takes place in Switzerland, where there's a sort of deranged mental hospital - not like deranged in terms of insanity, no one's insane, they're all seemingly ordinary people that are just slightly weird enough. They're obsessed with games, and The Doctor and a new resident of the facility find

  Cobwebs by Jonathan Morris Now stop me if you've heard this one before...  The Doctor and Companions arrive in Location X where they discover evidence that something bad is going to happen in the future (i.e. their deaths, the TARDIS not working, etc) and have to fudge the rules of time so they live. It's a Doctor Who stalwart, I should think, I can't count how many stories I've done with it, but the Fires of Vulcan and the entirety of Matt Smith series 6 come readily to mind - and quite frankly, Cobwebs is no exception. It's a complicated time puzzle of a story that will never really surprise you (I figured out the twist a solid hour before it happened.) The story's chief selling point is that for the first time ever since like Mawdwyn Undead and Terminus for two seconds, Tegan, Nyssa, and Turlough are in the TARDIS together. It's other chief selling point is Tegan is in it - this was her second Big Finish audio ever, and she had previously said she would