The Perfect Symmetry of the Crocodile

The Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller travel to a world where most everything, even the people, are blue in the 2008 Doctor Who audio play "The Skull of Sobek". I still haven't heard any audios from the Eighth Doctor's series that are anywhere near as good as his stories in the monthly range but "The Skull of Sobek" is one of the best I've heard so far.

Upon arriving on the planet, the Doctor (Paul McGann) explains to Lucie (Sheridan Smith) how it rains one day in a regular interval of decades and a bright red flower blooms when it does, which puts a pretty image in the listener's mind. But the main plot involves an abbot and nun belonging to two sides of the local religion, one which emphasises the need for balance between perfection and imperfection. The Doctor explains how in the distant past, these people had a society that was too perfect and it caused problems so this "Order of Imperfect Symmetry" arose. Which is an intriguing concept. Since it's one of the really short audios, only fifty minutes, writer Marc Platt can't explore it too far but in one amusing development it turns out the people responsible for the past perfection were talking crocodiles, which becomes apparent when one, a general, returns from the grave.

I guess I can see how crocodiles might be sort of obnoxiously perfect. The important thing here is that they're vicious carnivores and also apparently hypnotists as Lucie is somehow bewitched into joining the side of the crocodile. She mentions having a fear of crocodiles early in the story, which I liked--the idea that she's susceptible to becoming something because she fears it.

Veni, Vidi, Vortisaur

The Eighth Doctor takes notice of his companion's butt in the 2007 audio play No More Lies. "Always looking at my bum," says Lucie when the Doctor tells her to mind her backside before wandering into a confrontation with a wicked time traveller named Zimmerman. It's a time loop story but without the usual repeated scenes effect; it turns out to be a decent episode about a villain who changes.

The story begins at what feels like the end of a story--The Doctor (Paul McGann) and Lucie (Sheridan Smith) having a final confrontation with the newly introduced Zimmerman (Nigel Havers). Lucie seems to have the initiative throughout, coming up with some solutions before the Doctor several times, and benefiting from an immunity to Zimmerman's "Time Whip" because she's not a Time Lord (or Time Lady). Zimmerman escapes and then the story becomes quite different--in chasing him, the Doctor and Lucie end up at an innocent looking garden party where a much reformed and elderly Zimmerman is devoted to a wife of many years named Rachel (Julia McKenzie).

It's a nice enough story, not really filled with many surprises for Doctor Who fans, but it's fun hearing Paul McGann grudgingly express something like affection for Lucie. There's a callback to the 2001 Eighth Doctor audio play Storm Warning with the return of Vortisaurs—pterodactyl-like creatures from the Time Vortex, somewhat like the titular creatures from the Third Doctor story The Time Monster, though presumably better looking than a guy in a white suit flapping his arms (I still think the chronovore is kind of cool).

Fright with a Dash of Delight

Doctor Who stories about beings that feed on specific emotions seem to be numerous enough that the 2007 Eighth Doctor audio play, Phobos, parses the suitable emotional fodder to being quite a lot of fear, but not too much fear, and always mingled with a certain amount of euphoria. The writer, Eddie Robson, was only 29 at the time but the story's condemnation of thrill seeking tourists by a peace and quiet loving elder generation seems at first like it was written by someone much older. Incidents of the Doctor grandstanding in the story definitely feel like the work of a young man, though. Maybe not one of the best audio plays but not bad, most of its faults resulting from the short length of shows from the Eighth Doctor's series.

The Doctor (Paul McGann) and Lucie (Sheridan Smith) find themselves in a precarious spot halfway up a mountain when they emerge from the TARDIS. A couple adrenaline junkies or "Drenies" turn up to inform them they're on Phobos, the Martian moon, where, in the future, people go to indulge in extreme sports like bungee jumping and "gravity-boarding". But a greater danger lurks in the shadows, according to old man Kai Tobias (Timothy West) whose dislike of the noisy young interlopers coincides with his repeated warnings about a deadly indigenous lifeform no-one's ever seen. But then people start winding up dead. Without getting into too many spoilers, this story does feature a direct Scooby Doo reference (". . . if it weren't for you meddling kids!").

But the story really does have a creature that feeds off psychic energy, whose appetite for slightly pleasurable fear causes it to stir up suspicions in an alien tourist (Tim Sutton) that the human tourists have been making racist comments behind his back so the large furry fellow can sucker punch one of them. I guess the idea is first there's the fear of being the target of discriminatory insults and then there's the pleasure in getting revenge.

The climax of the story is one of the instances where a psychic vampire gets more than it bargained for trying to feed on the Doctor who has an ominous speech about how he's seen and experienced terrible depths of fear, much more than the creature can bite off let alone chew. Paul McGann sells it really well.

Daleks in the System

Sometimes even Daleks can be subtle. Blood of the Daleks, a two part Eight Doctor Doctor Who audio play from 2006/2007, is set in a colony beset by the social and political problems arising from resource scarcity in the aftermath of a global calamity. I found the portrait of citizens desperately scavenging, hoarding, and attacking people, paranoid about the politicians, and generally panicking nicely developed through the story.

The Doctor (Paul McGann) also gains a new companion in this, his first adventure in his own Big Finish series of audios outside specials and the regular monthly releases. Lucie Miller, played by Sheridan Smith, is a bit ornery compared to Charley Pollard, Eight's most recent companion for listeners at that point. And Charley was no shrinking violet. Lucie seems to get on the defensive about everything but that's somehow not annoying. Her sudden appearance in the TARDIS baffles the Doctor and over the course of the story we learn little else about how she got there, this being part of the general story arc of the series.

Hayley Atwell, four years before she was cast as Peggy Carter, also appears as one of the political types being menaced by a mob when the Doctor arrives. Which is not to say she's entirely innocent herself. But the villains here are the Daleks, of course. When they do finally show up, the title of the story, Blood of the Daleks, turns out to be related to a fixation with racial purity and one faction of Daleks seeking to destroy a mutated faction, much like in Remembrance of the Daleks. But in the context of the problems in the human colony it still works really well. I also loved the name of the colony, "Red Rocket Rising". It sounds like something that might have sounded hopeful but circumstances have easily made ominous.