The First Doctor Companion Chronicles Volume One

 

The First Doctor Companion Chronicles Volume One

This is slightly baffling, especially considering that I'm not the #1 fan of the Second Doctor, as opposed to Hartnell, but I think I preferred The Second Doctor's first outing on the whole. That's not to say the First Doctor Companion Chronicles isn't good. There's... there's some good stuff here. I don't very much like dissing the First Doctor's expanded media. I don't like Hartnell that much on television, but there are so many beautiful stories that so wonderfully evoke that boldness the start of the program had. Some of my favorite ever stories are First Doctor ones, and the original cast members still going are all pretty much powerhouse performers, frankly. That's the one big thing this volume has going for it. These amazing performers. 

The Sleeping Blood by Martin Day

Susan, while being up there with Ryan Sinclair, Turlough and Calypso Jonze as one of my least favorite companions, is actually, I loathe to admit, exceedingly well served in this set. The story is completely Doctor-lite, with him never actually featuring, nor Ian or Barbara either, with the story taking place before An Unearthly Child, where The Doctor accidentally falls ill and Susan has to find medicine on a strange abandoned planet to save him. The plot beyond this is very strange, but given that most of my misgivings around Susan are due to her complete lack of agency, it's utterly enthralling to give Susan a story that is nothing BUT her agency. Carole Ann Ford, for the first time ever, in this episode, essentially is playing The Doctor. That's worth respect. To be fair, she's still clearly Susan, still a young immature girl, but her role in the episode is the slot usually retained for dear old Hartnell. This is pretty much exactly the right move. Carole has been around since the start of the show, and she certainly deserves her own stories like this. I like the conceit of the story being focused around her. That's where it pretty much stops, however. The Sleeping Blood's plot is trying to do like, a serious story about the repercussions of character's actions, and looking at both sides of the character spectrum and being like "but who is REALLY the bad guy??" Which would work if the Butcher wasn't actually advocating genocide in order to change society. Like. Yeah, we get it. The Butcher in this story does have a sympathetic backstory, that learning of which gives the story at least an intriguing final note, but he did just try and commit genocide. What's supposed to be a big turn-around shocker just didn't work for me. Making both sides of the equation more shades of grey would have this actually have much more of an impact. The story, while it had promise, just peters out and makes me feel sort of frustrated. 4/10 

The Unwinding World by Ian Potter

I don't usually have least favorite writers at Big Finish. Very few of them have annoyed me, and most of them I can genuinely respect in some manner. Most of them are overworked, and that's the reason for their subpar scripts, so I can never really fault them. Ian Potter is the exception to this rule. I've never liked any of the stories he's ever done. Seriously, every one of them I've done, I genuinely hated. I just did not vibe with what he had written.
Until now. Bafflingly, The Unwinding World is a properly brilliant tale that befits Vicki perfectly, and tells a story involving the entire TARDIS gang in a very strange and experimental format. Color me shocked, but there's very little bad to say about The Unwinding World. It's one of my favorite kinds of stories - Vicki is locked in a room being interrogated by a scary police state computer woman, and the whole story is about how she gets out of it. You know she's gonna, of course, forgone conclusion. The joy is finding out how. Very few climaxes to stories on audio I've done are as electric as this one. I shan't spoil it. The story has purpose beyond this, though. We get flashes across the city to various people interacting with The Doctor, Ian and Barbara, in a way that makes clear what they're doing right now, but cleverly organized in a way so that they don't have to really say anything. These snippets, while kind of irrelevant, add to the story's good time nature. There's something to be said for us to just cut momentarily to The First Doctor having some sort of shenanigans that you can't COMPLETELY picture while Vicki continues on with her story. This is exactly the sort of Vicki content I like - featuring her with her wonderful innocence but also having her be as smart as a whip and just a smidge manipulative. She's really written at her best here, very few writers actually use Vicki's rare mean streak to their advantage, but it really works when it's brought up. This is a beautiful little puzzlebox that's without a doubt the highlight of the set. Just the imagery involving the television stories alone that you're meant to forget is so wonderful that it could be it's own whole story, it's brimming with ideas: 9/10 

The Founding Fathers by Simon Guerrier

The Founding Fathers is a pure historical starring Steven Taylor, and - wait. Wait, I'm confused. 
What's going on? What's this framing device??
Oh yeah, well, it isn't advertised at all, but this is actually PART TWO of a Trilogy, beginning with The War To End All Wars and ending with the final story in the set, The Locked Room. This is a really odd choice, to have half the set be continuing something that someone might not actually have done, without it being mentioned at all. To be fair, it's entirely my fault. I just didn't know about this like I did one of the more famous Big Finish arcs. I did listen to The War To End All Wars afterwards to fill it all in, and yeah, it did help it make more sense, but even still, it didn't help me when the finale of the trilogy also relies on the previous Oliver Harper trilogy. Talk about lockout! So yeah. This was kind of a crazy thing to find out mid-audio.

Luckily, this only factors into the Framing Device for the most part, and the majority of The Founding Fathers is an incredibly charming pure historical that really feels like something the Hartnell era would actually do without hesitation. The Hartnell era often did these little weird two-parters, like The Edge of Destruction, or The Rescue, right next to it's major six to thirteen part epics. It also loved doing historicals that are big and obvious that strangely, no other era would dare to touch, like for instance, Marco Polo. The Founding Fathers is about Benjamin fricking Franklin, and it doesn't feel like some sort of big celebrity event thing like when the revival decides to worship Agatha Christie or Nikola Tesla for a bit. No, The Founding Fathers is very small scale and intimate, while still allowing for an entertaining plot that keeps you guessing. It's certainly a triumph for a pure historical to manage that. The Founding Fathers is quite good, but I found the framing device to be tedious. It doesn't quite gel well with the rest of the story. I get that it's trying to talk about the importance of being aware of the power of governing, but I was much less interested in what The First Doctor's brain copy from the Savages happened to be doing 30 years later than an actually great historical. 6/10

The Locked Room by Simon Guerrier

The Locked Room completely loses me, which I think is a bit of a hot take, considering I've never heard anything but good about it before. It's main narrator is actually Sida, Steven's Granddaughter, and there isn't a framing device. It's more of a two-hander play, which usually, I'm rather a big fan of. Frustratingly however, and I don't know how to say this nicely, but The Locked Room is just kinda a pile of fanwank?? I hate to say that, but The Locked Room decides to have Steven construct a locked room that telepathically connects him with The First Doctor at the brink of The First Doctor's impending regeneration. So the story takes place during The Tenth Planet (already on my nerves) and the main villain is actually The Vardans from The Invasion of Time. I get that Big Finish have sort of reconstituted the Vardans as a recurring villain, but even so, this just sort of ended up feeling desperate to me?? There's an idea here, an idea of a companion getting desperate in their old age and going to great lengths to try and find the Doctor again, but everything outside this just falls flat. The Locked Room's climax is especially weak, with the titular Locked Room just being unlocked and the Vardan being defeated in typically uninspiring technobabble fashion. I think I'm supposed to like this one, but geez, I just don't think there's much kind I can say about it at all minus that the performances were typically quite good: 3/10