Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #356620 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-01
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Audio CD

Customer Reviews

Another day, another Dalek story
An ordinary story saved by strong performances from leads Paul McGann (Eighth Doctor) and India Fisher (Charley Pollard). Some decent dialogue but too many paradoxes and too little excitement.

another runaround
This comes right after the audio embrace the darkness, which had a superb first episode but became a very disappointing runaround of a story afterwards.

And alas, the same thing happens here.

What a set up!

Future britain under a military dictator. The daleks. Who recite shakespeare. Time travel via mirrors. And a mysterious young boy. Who is he?

Once having set this up in the first part, the next three have the doctor run around for the course of the episode before everything is resolved at the end with lots of explosions. Justin Richards has done so much doctor who fiction now many of his characters do tend to come over very cliched, and that's true of the supporting cast here. You will either guess the identity of the boy early on and find the story totally obvious as a result, or be compltely fooled and knocked for six as a result. Maybe whether you like this story or not hinges on that, but I'm afraid I fell in the former camp.

Shakespeare spouting daleks with clocks and mirrors
Big finish has the ability to wander into some very strange areas which often isn't a bad thing the lack of visual means that there is the ability to go further with a plot and for some reason it gives the daleks more menace. The general plot is difficult to explain in the semi near future the uk is ruled by an originally benevolent dictator who is slowly becoming more brutal against a band of rebels who are very unhappy because people are forgetting shakespeare enter the doctor. who belives there is a fissure in time and when he finds out there is a primitive time travel device using mirrors and clocks he believes that this could be the cause of it all until he sees a few daleks skulking around wanting to protect shakespeare.
As odd as it sounds it does all make a twisted sense and as usual McGann pulls it off with a aplomb, one of his strongest assets is that he takes it seriously and delivers it all with a strange caring tone, unfortunately as usual Charley is superflous but the rest of the characters interact well, the daleks are at there best when they are being devious which they are here. It all kind of works when it could have been crashingly painful and ends up being very entertaining.