Virgin Worlds

 As you're aware by now, my reviews of the Big Finish Doctor Who ranges of audio plays have noted that the disks can vary wildly in terms of quality and originality.  I ascribe this situation to the sheer volume of the company's output, which now far outstrips the publication schedule of Who books in the Nineties and early Noughties.

The protagonist of Bernice Summerfield and the Criminal Code is a remarkable figure in Doctor Who lore. Created by Paul Cornell as the first original Companion for the Virgin New Adventures, Benny has had nearly twenty years of adventures in those aforementioned books, as well as comics and twelve seasons of audio plays. Yet she never appeared on tv, so, for many fans, she's not "canon". The wry, time-travelling archaeologist has in fact been usurped by Steven Moffat's ubiquitous Professor River Song. 

River was, initially, a riff on The Time Traveller's Wife-  a tragic figure who sacrifices herself  before they ever travel together, from the Doctor's point of view. Ironically, the sheer presence and knowing humour of Alex Kingston's performance ensured seven more episodes for River; she morphed into a frustrating Mary Sue character whose sole plot function is to turn up and be enigmatic while shooting monsters.

Lisa Bowerman's Benny can be a little grating with her brittle "Roedean Head Girl" performance. I haven't heard any of Benny's compassion or trauma underneath the archness, as it were. However, she injects pace and energy into a surprisingly dull story by the prolific Eddie Robson.

The Doctor and Bernice are attending a peace conference in the far future when she learns about a forbidden magickal language -the Criminal Code of the title. It takes very little imagination to guess what the language might be. What follows is a forgettable adventure in which Bernice foils a conspiracy to disrupt the conference, using the elemental powers granted her by the code.  Bowerman's impression of Sylvester McCoy is quite unconvincing, compared to Peter Purves and Frazer Hines "giving their Hartnell and Troughton".Without Ace, it doesn't feel much like an homage to the Virgin Era; I'm afraid Professor Song retains pole position. Two out of ten Talmars.

The Elite, as you can see,  is another in The Lost Stories range. It's a script by Barbara Clegg, who wrote the schooners-in -space tale Enlightenment, one of the best tv stories for Peter Davison's Doctor. At first, I was warily expecting a bland parable about fascism; many of these scripts were "lost" for good reasons. But even though I'd read a plot summary of the story in some old issue of DWM and could even see the mystery villain on the front cover, I'd forgotten the solution to the story's twist until the end of episode one. The CD- cover reference to a "domed city, scarred by war" should have been a dead give-away too!

The denouement is noisy and a bit anti-climatic while the descent of Ryan Sampson's character into insanity verges on the risible. However, Doctor Five and Tegan, a wearing and negative presence in the Eighties, were very well-characterised and engaging. The sound design is very evocative of Season Twenty  and the plot is a stock one in the series: alien interference in the development of a society.  But here, it had an epic scope that would have been mould-breaking in Eighties Who. Six out of ten Talmars.

Coming Attractions: Another Tom Baker audio next week. The next post will revisit the final issue of  DC's Wanted and I'll speculate on what reprints we might have seen, had the title survived for a dozen issues. If you want yet more super-villains, look out for the Bronze Age debut of Earth-1's Injustice Gang on Materioptikon soon!

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