Last night I listened to Project: Destiny, a 2010 Seventh Doctor Doctor Who audio play that functions as a sequel to the 2001 and 2003 Sixth Doctor stories Project: Twilight and Project: Lazarus (the latter also featuring Seven) about vampires. Project: Destiny is an entertaining story about an alien epidemic in Earth's future marred only slightly by a pretty ridiculous reaction by the Doctor's companion Hex upon learning an important piece of information about his past.
In the world of Doctor Who, vampires, as introduced in the Fourth Doctor television story State of Decay, are ancient enemies of the Time Lords. In this plot threat manifesting sporadically throughout the audio plays and tie-in novels, conceived by writers Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, the vampires on Earth headed by a villain called Nimrod (Stephen Chance) have a secret organisation called The Forge. In Project: Destiny, it's revealed that Hex (Philip Olivier) has a connexion to a character in the earlier stories and he seems to resent the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) to an unreasonable degree for keeping the information from him. Hex isn't a bad companion and he works as a surprisingly natural third member of the Seven and Ace (Sophie Aldred) group when the audios haven't seemed to manage the same chemistry between the Doctor and Ace that made the last two seasons of the original television run so great. But here he's pretty much wasted on this overwrought drama. More interesting are the Doctor's attempts to negotiate with the epidemic and his need to temporarily ally with Nimrod even as Nimrod is trying to cause trouble. Ace also has an entertaining rapport with Aristedes (Maggie O'Neil), a soldier who's forced to kill people before they're corrupted by the microscopic alien menace. The story also features Ingrid Oliver, who would appear on the television series as Osgood three years later, ably playing two not especially memorable characters.
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