Stranded Four

 "So, There's This Guy Called Shackleton..."

Stranded Four

Stranded Four is the last Stranded set, and technically speaking, the last of the sixteen story arc sets in general, an end of an era for the Eighth Doctor that started all the way back in 2012. It's easy to forget that we've had Liv Chenka as a companion now for literally nine years, and I want to use this section to look back at the Eight boxsets in general. Dark Eyes started without a plan, and bounced around with Daleks, and The Master and The Eminence in a big space opera, Doom Coalition focused on telling the same idea but without as much dumb fanservice and with an actual plan, Ravenous tried to be disconnected and more of a NuWho series arc, Time War did, something, I think, I only did one boxset of that, and now Stranded comes to a close with what they should sort of been doing all along, an arc that 98% of is derived from character. Stranded is sort of the model of what audio drama should be moving forward. Big Dalek nonsense on audio just isn't as suited to intimate character study, and Stranded has completely and utterly succeeded since it started (in June 2020!??!?!) As Eight moves forward, while I can tell that we aren't necessarily going to have something like this again, but it's something we should take notes from, because character development isn't something that's tied to the year 2020 on the planet Earth. Liv and Helen have had some of the best character development of basically any companions, but that shouldn't end if Eight soon returns to a dynamic sort of space opera, possibly related to the Time War. Stranded is just simple proof of the ultimate success of character. 

Crossed Lines by Matt Fitton

Crossed Lines is quite good, really. There are episodes of Doctor Who that just work, and Matt Fitton is especially adept at delivering them for The Eighth Doctor. He's got a grip on the character thanks to his work on basically everything with him. Sure, he sort of got overexposed, essentially writing half of Dark Eyes, half of Doom Coalition, half of Ravenous and whatnot, and that overexposure can make you forget that it's him who has been integral to shaping this era of the Eighth Doctor. And perhaps I think, I can be a little too unkind towards him. He has damn good merits. Fitton is an expert at being a sort of mold to what the series he's doing requires. It's something I've especially noticed from him recently, as he's good at stories like this that get you from point A to B. It's a disservice to Crossed Lines to say it just gets you from What Just Happened to Get Andy though, as Crossed Lines is just rather brilliant storytelling in it's own right, muddling about with time and big sci-fi ideas about the end of the universe in a very small and intimate scale as befits this series so well. It does a hell of a lot if you look at what it's juggling - Two storylines, The Eighth Doctor and Helen fricking about in a traincar trying to figure out what's up with Robin whilst being plagued by Mr. Bird.... that's a lot alone. The other half of it is perhaps even more eye-catching, about Liv and Tania turning to the Curator for help due to time stuff that Eight and Helen are doing. The two eras the story is set in and how they affect each other just leads to excellent stuff. I'm not entirely sold on Colin Baker's Curator - well, that sounds negative, as Colin Baker is just as good as Tom Baker is as the Curator, if not better. It's just the fact that we are seeing the Curator in a more detailed light in any way that slightly irks me. It was inevitable, I suppose, him being in the series at all, however, and he serves remarkably well within the story's elegantly complex yet not confusing narrative. It's a good episode, and while it's not a momentous one that got everyone shrieking, I felt extremely appreciative of it. 8/10

Get Andy by Lisa McMullin

Get Andy, on the other hand, did get everyone shrieking about how good it was, and in all earnest, I don't think it was by any means bad, and I actually really loved it really, but I am slightly confused why people think it's the best thing Big Finish have made since Sliced Bread. ....Sliced Bread was evidently a really good audio drama. Bad jokes aside, yeah, Get Andy is great. I like it less than Crossed Lines, but that hardly means much, it's a very talented hour with big dramatic punch to it. From the opening where we are introduced to the idea of "hopping back and getting Andy" as casually as if it's a shopping trip, the story immediately feels new and different. The story also directly plays with your expectations of it. The Doctor thinks it's going to be an easy task, but he just sort of nearly dies, and it was one of those rare Doctor Who stories that made me think, oh yeah, he's, like, really close to dying. The majority of Get Andy is The Doctor slowly dying, which is just sort of really interesting, as we get to mess around with the concept of the TARDIS's holographic interface that's been used a few times in NuWho and see the Doctor's interaction with it. The opening of Get Andy and the end of Get Andy are big wonderful shockers, but It really did lose me in the middle. While the delightful absurdism with Liv and Helen seeing Andy show up on their doorstep in under two seconds is fun, it sort of leaves them with a lot less to do until later on. The whole thing does lead to something that's ultimately astonishing though, so I'm mixed. The climax with Andy giving a wonderful monologue on the nature of companions that's beautifully played by Tom Price and Helen's reaction is unquestionably the story's high point, I just do question some of the hoops it took to get there. It's an audio that didn't hit me as much as it did everyone else, I think. But I'm not gonna say it was bad by any means: 7/10

The Keys of Baker Street by Roy Gill 

Keys of Baker Street is probably one of the best hours of Stranded in general, I feel, in a series that is basically nothing but best hours. It's a really brilliant audio because it's a finale done in the way only Stranded could really do it, through a conceit about time and a series of scenes inside the Baker Street household. As the story goes on, it also gets surprisingly deep into the multi-doctor concept, as a larger than expected amount of the runtime is Paul McGann and Colin Baker's Curator playing off eachother. As a way to resolve what's essentially the entire plot minus literally one loose end, it's wildly inspired, especially since a lot of it is essentially random disparate scenes that coalesce into a pretty brilliant piece on the whole. All of the individual character scenes really engrossed me, and the final sentiment between the Doctor and Robin is so earnest and heartfelt that I was utterly astounded. It's absolutely wild how well this story resolves basically everything, because it really has the largest bucket list of stuff to go through with everything about the alternative timelines, Mr. Bird, all of the individual plot threads that have led up to this point. And it resolves them well, by paying most of the attention to the character ones instead. The Keys of Baker Street is just really kind of immaculate, and that's really hard to say when honestly, it's not even the best story of the set: 9/10

Best Year Ever by John Dorney

This is the most earnest and optimistic depressing monolith of a story I've ever heard. It's actually uplifting, and it's all the emotions, really, and it's a John Dorney script without any real sci-fi elements, so I mean, based on Wild Animals you sort of already know that it's going to be a killer. It's a very very delicate piece, looking sort of with rose-tinted glasses at how humanity acted during the pandemic. But anything that wouldn't be sort of rosy and somewhat saccharine like this one would be an utter disaster in a way, and it also sort of doesn't shy away from the sheer catastrophic nature of what's happening, even if it never says the word "COVID" or "Virus." Because in earnest, it doesn't need to. We all know what's going on here. And it portrays all of those emotions of what happened, and it does it with a very relatable atmosphere too. I was worried when the story opened after the intro with jokes about Toilet Paper, but from then on, I think that it made the right choices when it came up, because I keep saying delicate and beautiful to describe this story, but it's also really vicious. For a small cast, there's actually some vicious stuff relating to the nature of death, and some analysis on the mass spread of depression at the time and how that affected our characters. It spends exactly the right amount of time on this, I feel. Anymore time on a particular element of the story would have made it quite indulgent, when in truth, it's aiming to tell a story about all of the light moments in one of the darkest years of our lives. It's a John Dorney script, and while it doesn't reach the heights of Wild Animals or Snow or even UNIT Dating, it's got a sense of sincerity to it, a sincerity that deeply and truly matters. Stranded doesn't feel like it could have ended any other way. 9/10