The Fourth Doctor Adventures: Solo

 

The Fourth Doctor Adventures Solo

I see opinion on these sets circle around each year. The Fourth Doctor Adventures can seemingly never do anything right - at least for a vocal minority that I hear every single time one of the eleventy-seven boxsets comes out. I think that's worth noting, because there's one aspect of Solo that utterly, utterly fascinates me. It was pre-recorded, and then left to sit there for a gargantuanly long time - as has every single series that follows it. But the main thing is that Solo was genuinely recorded in a pre-COVID world. This product that came out in 2022 was finished and in the bin back in 2017. New Frontiers, the set that's coming out this year, was recorded in 2018. And you can't tell! These productions, thanks to the extra time in the bin, might have seemed either duller or more polished than other Big Finish productions, for all sorts of extenuating circumstances, and yet it's something you genuinely wouldn't know unless you checked the backstage tab on the Big Finish website. 

Beyond that, Solo is set one out of two sets starring The Fourth Doctor on his lonesome, fresh off the toes of the Deadly Assassin. People often say this doesn't work in the audio medium - and I can even be apt to agree, as some of the Christopher Eccleston 9DAs can struggle when he's on his own. The Doctor is a character that's usually best partnered with a contrasting personality. This is a general thing about their character - be they Jodie Whittaker, Colin Baker or David Tennant. It's pretty much universal. You get exceptions - Heaven Sent, The Hunting Season, The Two Masters, every Doctor can have their day on their own, but they're usually stronger with a quality character beside them. 

And yet - and yet - Tom Baker works in this fashion in a way I cannot begin to describe. I think what makes it work particularly is that he's so DOTTY! He's the only Doctor that I truly actually think is a little insane, that actually IS that madman in a box that we hear so much about. The other Doctors I don't think could be someone you could find in a mental asylum, yet Tom Baker's incarnation, and I do not mean this as an insult, totally could. He as a character always functions so much in his own head, mumbling to himself, He has these mildly psychotic turns from calmness to sudden shouting, and that grin! That grin! You get what I'm talking about, don't you? Anyway, Tom Baker has got his lifelong dream of having the room all to himself in these stories, just like he wanted back in the 70s, and oddly, to my surprise, it is not a bad arrangement. 

Blood of The Time Lords by Timothy X Atack

I usually get worried when Big Finish announces a story like this - ooh, the Fourth Doctor is returning to Gallifrey to deal with the Master!! It's just like the 70s!! Ooh!!! There's something dreadfully cynical about being advertised to in such a manner - wouldn't you like more of the same thing?? It instills me with dread every time another Big Finish Tomb of the Cyberman story comes out that's basically the same thing. But said Master aside, and we will get to him, believe me, Blood of the Time Lords is sort of shot in the foot by it being advertised as such. It's very different than The Deadly Assassin. That was politics and matrix-ing 23 years before it was cool. Blood of the Time Lords is a horror story - and yes, it is pretty much a horror story for a good deal of it's runtime, much more than the average Who serial - set in an infinite library where Time Lords live out their final days and come face to face with mortality. The Deadly Assassin is bombastic, at least in Classic Who terms, and while the stakes are roughly equal, Blood of the Time Lords is far more introspective. 

It's easy to think of this as merely another Master story, and yes, it would be very good by those standards, I'll admit, but I think Blood of The Time Lords shines in it's first half very brightly indeed. The atmosphere in this story is THICK, and I find it wonderfully Hinchcliffe to imagine Time Lords at the end of their last lives walking into the shadows of an infinite library with only a candle to light their way. There's something a little Silence in the Library about that idea, to be fair, in that it takes place in a gargantuan library, but I didn't find this to be reductive. The story has plenty of ideas of it's own, it's not a greatest hits playlist. 

The side characters in this story I found to be quite impressively drawn. There's the return of that hermit man from Planet of the Spiders, here referred to as Ansilon, in a way that the TARDIS wiki can't really seem to reconcile, Eleanora, a Time Lord archivist who is Gallifreyan but delightfully quite different from Romana, and lastly, Annette Badland. Annette Badland is an actress who I have never seen give anything less than a 10/10 performance, no matter the quality of the script - I never ever have any notes to give on Annette Badland. While the character she has to work with is slim, this is no exception. You could study this woman - just look at what she did in 2022 alone for Doctor Who. Her turn as the Miniaturist was childlike, yet petrifying. Mrs Goose was motherly, admirable, and a little snide. Here she plays a woman that's ambitious, scholarly, and subtly desperate. I have rambled about her for a little too much, but when I see so much range in an actress, it really does tend to impress me. 

Alas, I can totally understand why one would want to miss out on Blood of The Time Lords, and I have been totally failing to address the Elephant in the Room, a Mr. James Dreyfus, who is one of the most abhorrent men I have had the pleasure of viewing on the internet. I don't want to talk about him much, because he is so unpleasant and has been cruel to people that I indeed do care a good deal about. He acquits himself quite admirably in the role of the Master, both fortunately and unfortunately, depending on how you care to look at it. If only the good people could be good actors and the bad people could be bad actors, it would make my job a lot simpler. I cannot begrudge you if you would wish to pass on this release due to his name being on it. Perhaps donate some cash to a trans charity while you're at it - add a little more love in the world, there's far too much hate as it is.

Anyway, yeah, Blood of The Time Lords is oddly exceptional. It's sound design and music is terrific, and Baker is on top irreverent form, especially in the trial scenes and opposing the characters of both Annette Badland and The Master. This is great stuff, and worth your time, especially if you've hated prior Gallifrey stories of being too stuffy. Deadly Assassin, quite frankly, could never. 8/10 

The Ravencliff Witch by David Llewellyn

The Ravencliff Witch will be remembered primarily, if it is remembered, sadly, for the introduction of Margaret Hopwood, a companion who has been a long time coming. I say if it is remembered, as while The Ravencliff Witch is as good, if not better a story as it's predecessor in the set, it's one of those 4DAs that just happens to not really be discussed. There are so many audio plays that some are bound to fade into obscurity, and I really hope the following season with Margaret is popular and it doesn't, because this story is just fabulous. If you are not willing to buy Solo thanks to the prior story, please consider that The Ravencliff Witch is indeed available separately on download. More boxsets should do this, it makes things very easy to recommend. 

Even more Hinchcliffe in tone than a story that has Blood in it's title, The Ravencliff Witch is delightfully moody, and especially exceedingly well-plotted. It's pacey, but in a good way. I had sat down to do part one of the story and I soon found myself having done the whole thing in one sitting, something that I don't think I've done with a Big Finish play in more than a year. If that is not high praise, I don't know what is. 

Set in a small English Coastal town threatened by the arrival of a new power plant, people in the town begin to see a strange robed woman on the coast, who foretells death. It's a gothic pitch of a story, if simplistic. The Ravencliff Witch works with that though - unlike with Blood of The Time Lords where it is very new despite being advertised as a nostalgia trip, the Ravencliff Witch is purposefully composed of many many typical Classic Who plots. It's not trying to be ambitious, it's trying to be really really good, with a focus on, as said, tight pacing, but not speedy pacing. It knows to give scenes time. A lot of Ravencliff Witch is atmosphere and character moments, and some gnarly horror by at least modern Big Finish standards. While this isn't completely unhinged like The Holy Terror or Night Thoughts for instance, it's still reasonably macabre - there's a gorgeous sequence around the middle of the tale where dead birds begin to fling themselves at a household window. 

Most of the reason you'll have heard about this, is, as said, Margaret, who is incredibly likable yes, but isn't really a companion, despite us knowing that she'd be important all the way back in Ravenous 3! She's a side character really, while she takes up the companion role at least by a technical standpoint, Ravencliff is a story that isn't a prototypical companion introduction. She's no different from a likable guest character in any other Classic Who serial. Her character arc feels like a complete piece in the story, where she is just a random woman in town that helps the Doctor solve the problem and then feels at peace at home again. It was very refreshing. By the end of Ravencliff, it doesn't really feel like she's going to come back, and yet we know she is going to.

 Her popularity among the creative team caused her to be promoted to main cast and it's not hard to see why. While her outward appearance and voice may remind you of Evelyn, she couldn't be further away from that characterization. I really like her, she's a firebrand of a character who's very first scene is telling a man who wants to buy her property exactly where he can stick his offer. She's very fun, Nerys Hughes does a great job, but I'm not necessarily sure how a dynamic between her and Leela might work, or how much future there is to the character. None of the other townspeople (that survive the story) are anywhere near as memorable, so maybe it's for the best that she gets top billing.

Anyway, yeah, The Ravencliff Witch has a simplistic, and some would say predictable plot, but it's still a very strong piece. It's generic - but it's one of those rare Who stories that while isn't perfect, really genuinely doesn't do anything actually wrong. I absolutely adored it, my biggest note was that the story could overrely on Tom Baker's narrating his own actions early on, and Nick Briggs was distracting because I know his voice so well. I hesitate to give it such a strong ranking immediately after Blood of The Time Lords was so strong - I do not want to overinflate my rankings, especially as this is cookie cutter Big Finish and by being overly positive devalue what this means, but at the same time, this is some damn good Doctor Who: 9/10