I’m way out of date with my Big Finish updates. I had listened to a couple of dozen before the summer, but never got around to writing them up, and then they got displaced on my commute by the novelisations. So I’ve returned to them, pacing (for example) an act of a Shakespeare play against a Big Finish episode; also I’ve decided to work the most recent releases into my listening as well as catching up from the beginning.

Unregenerate!, by David McIntee, has Mel trying to make contact with a newly regenerated Seven, and finding herself and her taxi driver sucked into an illicit Gallifreyan research centre where Tardis brains are transplanted into the bodies of the dying. There was one particularly memorable mental image, when Mel penetrates the evildoers’ headquarters on earth and dicovers that it is merely a shell, the real business going on elsewhere. The taxi-driver is a memorable character too. But apart from that, I wasn’t wowed by the Doctor saving the day because his brain is just so special (though McCoy plays it well), and not really confident about how it all fits in to what else we know of the Time Lords.

I already wrote up The Council of Nicæa, just noting it here for completeness.

In Terror Firma, Joe Lidster has delivered a fun piece of work. Eight and his team, newly emerged (in continuity terms) from C’rizz’s native universe, are confronted with Davros and the Daleks; but the memorable bits are actually incidental characters Gemma and Samson, who turn out to have been previous travelling companions of Eight’s whom he has forgotten, and their terribly posh mother, who turns out to be the leader of the Folkestone branch of the anti-Dalek resistance. Poor old C’rizz is asked to be the new Emperor Dalek, but I guess he is getting used to that kind of thing.

Paul Sutton’s Thicker than Water takes an unusual continuity angle of visiting Evelyn Smythe after she has left the Doctor and married Rossiter from Arrangements for War: Six takes Mel to visit her, Mel having expressed interest in meeting the woman who tamed the Doctor after the unstable start to his regeneration. The actual plot is rather straightforward – emotional conflict between Evelyn and her doctor stepdaughter, with a rather minor sfnal element of alien tech captured from the Killoran invaders – but there are lots of reflections on parental and quasi-parental relationships, including a twist at the end involving a brief appearance from elsewhen in continuity. Actually rather satisfying.

Marc Platt is either brilliant or incomprehensible in my experience, and unfortunately Time Reef is more in the latter category. Thomas Brewster, who joined Five and Nyssa a couple of adventures ago, has temporarily borrowed the Tardis and flogged most of the interior fittings to a rather curious spaceship marooned on a Time Reef. The script was witty and weird, but I didn’t get enough of a handle on the means and motivation of the various players, including particularly Brewster himself. Also it really annoys me that Five is/was so indiscriminating about his travelling companions – happily sharing the Tardis with those he didn’t like (Adric), who didn’t like him (Tegan), who were actively trying to kill him (Turlough and to an extent Kamelion) and now someone who actually steals his valuable property. There are a couple of Five/Brewster exchanges which are really unbelievable.

Jonny Morris, having written Brewster into the Big Finish sequence earlier this year, now writes him out with a short but satisfactory story: life suddenly takes a shift for the better, but this perfection is not what it seems. Brewster leaves with some element of redemption, a decent end to his character arc.

In summary, Terror Firma is probably the best of these in fannish terms, Thicker Than Water probably the most approachable for the non-fan.