Big Finish: Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Travel In Hope – Review

Following rapidly off the heels of his last box set, Pioneers, the Ninth Doctor is back, this time travelling in hope through these three standalone stories. It is fantastic that Christopher Eccleston is getting more adventures as the Ninth Doctor but I have to be honest right off the bat, Travel in Hope is a great example of how the unconnected strands of episodes just don’t work anymore, no matter how excellent the leading man is.

It all kicks off with Lauren Mooney and Stewart Pringle’s homage to The Signalman with Below There. This is an unsettling and serious story, much more serious than we’ve been used to with the Ninth Doctor’s output of late. It also introduces another in a long line of one-off companions for the Ninth Doctor Vyx Leeson who finds herself stranded on a space station where her friend is taken over by a mysterious entity. Actress Kelly Adams does a great job in the role as a scared, secretive character that the Doctor ultimately leaves living in hope, though while she has great chemistry with Eccleston she’s not quite as good as some of the other would-be-companions we’ve had in this range.

The Ninth Doctor is a little edgier than some of his predecessors and Eccleston does a brilliant job here, especially given how there isn’t really a baddie for him to fight, more a philosophical dilemma for him to solve. In fact, it feels very similar to the Doctor’s problems in the Twelfth Doctor story, Oxygen, here he has to start something of a revolution and it’s a little more of a sedate problem for the Ninth Doctor to solve than he has had in the past.

James Moran’s The Butler Did It takes the Doctor to the far future for a futuristic Agatha Christie adventure. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot to recommend for this story, there is little to no imaginative plot, interesting side characters and little of anything that makes for an engaging murder mystery. It’s telling when the best thing in the story is the pre-titles sequence and not the rest of the story.

It’s a shame because Moran normally does an amazing job and on the surface, this story had the potential to be the best one of the set. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really rise to the challenge and feels like something that was left till the last minute. And all the actors seem a little subdued here, none of them really putting in an engaging performance. Maybe the script was brilliant and the actors just didn’t quite get into it or maybe there was no rescuing this story. Every writer has a few missteps and this is certainly one of Moran’s.

Robert Valentine also brings the set to a close with Run, a story which is a lot better than the previous one but not by much. It sees the Ninth Doctor meeting the Ice Warriors and working as Alpha Centauri’s political advisor. In many ways, this was the story that could have filled out a whole box set. The Ninth Doctor and Alpha Centauri share great chemistry together, the Doctor having to keep things from the future secret so he doesn’t ruin the timeline while the pair try to take down the villainous Bellatrix Vega, played with passion by Jane Asher, could have run for three episodes.

In fact, that might have been to this story’s benefit, as Valentine gives us some great world-building and characters to explore and the forty-five-minute format for the Ninth Doctor’s stories didn’t really allow for much exploration outside of what was vitally important here, though further exploration of this world would have helped the listener understand why the Doctor and Alpha stopping Bellatrix was such an important task.

Despite Run being pretty good, Travel In Hope can’t help but feel pretty lacklustre, the standalone way of telling these stories doesn’t help matters either. It was about time that the Ninth Doctor had a companion to travel with and more story arcs to help tie his Big Finish outings together, if Travel In Hope proves anything it’s that The Ninth Doctor needs stories a lot more ground-breaking than this.

You can pick up Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Travel in Hope on CD (including digital) for £29.99 and on digital for £22.99 now from Big Finish.