Red Dawn
The Doctor wants to take Peri to alien worlds now that she is travelling with him in the TARDIS, and their first stop is a cold apparantly dead world. The planet is actually Mars, and while the Doctor and Peri explore within the structure they have landed, overhead an expedition from Earth is making final descent for the first time since the Mars Probe visit of 1970. Once the humans arrive it becomes obvious that some of them are not here on a benign mission of exploration, and as that happens, a group of Ice Warriors emerges from hibernation to defend their world.
It's nice to see the Ice Warriors back in action. Well, see being a relative term. The sad truth is the Ice Warriors made their final televised appearance in The Monster of Peladon and even now in this new age of Doctor Who have yet to be seen. Choosing the silibant Martians as audio foes is a bit of a calculated risk as even on television their voices could sometimes dip below audible levels, but they manage to work this time, with their leader, Lord Zaal, evoking Alan Bennion's performances as Izlyr and Azaxyr in both of the Peladon stories.
The Doctor and Peri work well together for having just met, really. Peri is full of questions and sarcasm that the Doctor takes in stride as part of his "nice guy" demeanour. On television they hardly had any time together before things began to change, but Big Finish have given us the chance to see this relationship develop so that when we finally rejoin the Doctor and Peri's televised adventures (and it'll be a while as I mentioned before) it will seem as if they have been together a while.
The human supporting cast is the usual sort of thing we get in these tales: scared of the unknown, unprepared for what they do find, and one of them with a secret agenda that puts everyone in danger when it emerges. Mars continuity is maintained by referencing the events of The Ambassadors of Death and referring to it as the "Mars Probe fiasco", wherein the public was spared the truth of events and told that the project had indeed failed. Turns out, it hadn't, and while the landing party met some Ambassadors from another world, they did indeed discover relics from the civilzation of the Ice Warriors which in turn spurred this landing expedition.
I've only got one tiny beef with this one, and it's the episode length. While the rest of the episodes in Big Finish so far have stuck to the established length of televised episodes as a guideline, one episode of Red Dawn clocks in at just under the 19 minute mark. Okay, only four minutes shy of the usual, you may say, but let me tell you when your day consists of a cramped ride on the 44 Kipling South to Lakeshore you need all the Doctor Who you can get your hands on to keep sane...
NEXT EPISODE : THE EYE OF THE SCORPION
It's nice to see the Ice Warriors back in action. Well, see being a relative term. The sad truth is the Ice Warriors made their final televised appearance in The Monster of Peladon and even now in this new age of Doctor Who have yet to be seen. Choosing the silibant Martians as audio foes is a bit of a calculated risk as even on television their voices could sometimes dip below audible levels, but they manage to work this time, with their leader, Lord Zaal, evoking Alan Bennion's performances as Izlyr and Azaxyr in both of the Peladon stories.
The Doctor and Peri work well together for having just met, really. Peri is full of questions and sarcasm that the Doctor takes in stride as part of his "nice guy" demeanour. On television they hardly had any time together before things began to change, but Big Finish have given us the chance to see this relationship develop so that when we finally rejoin the Doctor and Peri's televised adventures (and it'll be a while as I mentioned before) it will seem as if they have been together a while.
The human supporting cast is the usual sort of thing we get in these tales: scared of the unknown, unprepared for what they do find, and one of them with a secret agenda that puts everyone in danger when it emerges. Mars continuity is maintained by referencing the events of The Ambassadors of Death and referring to it as the "Mars Probe fiasco", wherein the public was spared the truth of events and told that the project had indeed failed. Turns out, it hadn't, and while the landing party met some Ambassadors from another world, they did indeed discover relics from the civilzation of the Ice Warriors which in turn spurred this landing expedition.
I've only got one tiny beef with this one, and it's the episode length. While the rest of the episodes in Big Finish so far have stuck to the established length of televised episodes as a guideline, one episode of Red Dawn clocks in at just under the 19 minute mark. Okay, only four minutes shy of the usual, you may say, but let me tell you when your day consists of a cramped ride on the 44 Kipling South to Lakeshore you need all the Doctor Who you can get your hands on to keep sane...
NEXT EPISODE : THE EYE OF THE SCORPION
Labels: Ice Warriors, Peri Brown, The 5th Doctor
posted by Sean Hoover @ 3:25 AM
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