Plum Pudding Reviews

The Seventh Doctor Adventures: Far From Home It's rare one can feel woefully underprepared for starting to listen to a Big Finish Production. They've put in such effort to be accessible of late, but equally some of their choices can be impenetrable. Not only have I not bothered to listen to UNIT: Nemesis due to my prior allergic reaction to the series, but I've not really listened to Sullivan And Cross AWOL either. And if that's not enough, nobody's really prepared, because Big Finish made the fascinating choice to release all of it in the wrong order, nobody's heard Harry and Naomi's upcoming first appearance with the Fourth Doctor. One could quibble with this for ages -- imagine how newcomers feel when even the diehards need a flowchart.  But I was in the mood for some classic McCoy three-parters, and so here I am: attempting to see if it's all as impenetrable as it first appears. Bravely charting new waters. One could note that if things don't mak

  The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles: Geronimo! Yes, I've finally got off my ass and have done the goddamn Valarie audios. Yes they are entirely worth it and what everyone else has told you about them  I'll be here all day Before we begin please allow me to note that I will be using she/her pronouns for Valerie, but as Safiyya Ingar is non-binary, they will be referred to with they/them pronouns, which is different from Valerie's character but look this is probably the best way to do it I don't want to misgender either the fictional character or more importantly the actual living person anyway Geronimo! is the first time Big Finish has actually tried to make a series of NuWho, properly. Oh, you could argue that it could technically be The Ninth Doctor Adventures series one, or Dalek Universe, but you're kidding yourself if so. The Ninth Doctor Adventures is largely episodic, and Dalek Universe is exceedingly Big Finish-coded. For my money, Geronimo! and the Valarie arc

  The War Doctor: Infernal Devices Infernal Devices is the second set of War Doctor stories ever produced, one of the original four sets (or three of the twelve episodes) starring Sir John Hurt as The War Doctor and Jacqueline Pearce as Ollistra. In none of these reviews will you ever hear a bad word out of my mouth about either of them -- if you're going to have two actors to lead your series, you might as well have those two. They're fucking excellent. The only thing I'll be really discussing in these reviews are the writing and sound design itself because really when you hire someone like Sir John Hurt you might as well not bring up his performance in the review of the thing because it just automatically equates to a certain outcome. What a goddamn career. No, these sets always have fascinated me because of the character they star, and the environment they star in -- it's a very difficult thing to get working from a writer's standpoint at all. I wrote an essay a