Still a great deal of catching up to do on Big Finish, but here’s a release from 2014, four half-hour stories about the Sixth Doctor and Peri by four different authors, two of whom were regular readers of this Livejournal back when Livejournal was still a thing.

Luckily their two are the best of the four. L.M. Myles’ title story, “Breaking Bubbles”, has the Tardis crew coming to the aid of a political prisoner – but it turns out that she may have been imprisoned for very good reasons, and there is a nice navigation of ethics and responsibilities on all sides.

I may be getting old, but I found Mark Ravenhill’s “Of Chaos Time The” rather difficult to follow, and I did listen to it twice.

Una McCormack’s “An Eye for Murder” takes us to the fictional St Ursula’s College in 1939 as war clouds darken the horizon. It packs a huge amount of plot into quite a short space and nicely reverses the Peri/Doctor dynamic as he is treated as her assistant by the women academics.

Finally, I am perhaps a bit too close to the subject matter of Nev Fountain’s “The Curious Incident of the Doctor in the Night-Time” to appreciate it; missing parents, fake garden gnomes and autism. Probably those with less of a stake will enjoy it more.

Three guest actors to note. Johnny Gibbon, who starred in the West End version of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, reprises the same role adapted to the Whoniverse and does it rather well. Jemma Churchill is brilliant as the prisoner in “Breaking Bubbles” and the college principal in “An Eye for Murder”. And Andy Secombe, son of Harry (and therefore uncle of our former au pair) is reassuringly solid as the antagonist in “Breaking Bubbles” and the policeman in “An Eye for Murder”.