A couple of recent Big Finish audios set in a slightly divergent First Doctor continuity, with the initial TARDIS team from the TV drama An Adventure in Space and Time – David Bradley as the Doctor, Claudia Grant as Susan Foreman, Jamie Glover as Ian Chesterton and Jemma Powell as Barbara Wright. They have already done several audios from 2017 to 2021, but I had not heard them. These two are very recent, released last September and in January this year, but are being marketed as “Doctor Who Unbound”, as an alternative timeline not constrained by TV continuity (though I didn’t really spot anything in either that would have been constrained).
David Warner is as ever great at channeling William Hartnell as the First Doctor. Jemma Powell and Jamie Glover are OK as Ian and Barbara. I find Claudia Grant a bit squeaky.
Knights of the Round TARDIS sets us up in Oxfrod just before the Battle of Evesham, with Simon de Montfort pitted against the forces of King Henry III for the sake of the future governance of England, and the famous friar, Roger Bacon, offering technological innovation. It won’t take the informed Who fan very long to work out who ‘Bacon’ really is. The cast are all having a good time, but it didn’t really work for me; historical stories run the risk of just doing the events as they happened, by the numbers, and at the end Simon de Montfort is given a very Whiggish briefing on the future constitutional history of England by the Doctor and team. You can get Knights of the Round TARDIS here.
Return to Marinus is a different matter. You can enjoy it without having previously listened to Knights of the Round TARDIS (in fact, that’s what I did myself), but I think you’ll be mystified by it unless you have at least a passing familiarity with the 1964 TV story The Keys of Marinus. I happen to love The Keys of Marinus, and stories of Team TARDIS coming back to societies that they have already irrevocably altered on a previous visit are often fun (witness The Ark). I’m really impressed that Morris has found new riffs on each of the sub-plots within the main story; it ends up being a bit episodic, but that’s not always such a bad thing if that’s what the material requires. The ending puts a truly impressive twist on several of the established plot elements. You can get Return to Marinus here.
I’m looking forward to the third of this trilogy, Battle of the Acid Sea by Simon Guerrier, but it looks like I will have to wait until next year.
