Big Finish Review – The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Lost Warriors

Quite unbelievably, we’re now only a boxed-set or so away from Christopher Eccleston doubling his Doctor Who output. This latest set Lost Warriors finds the Ninth Doctor in three solo adventures with a loose thematic thread of former warriors hiding from their pasts. Across the set, he battles aliens on a country estate, meets the real-life Lady Macbeth and comes face to face with a Cyberman in 1925 Berlin. Lost Warriors, appropriately, marks nine new Eccleston episodes. How is he settling into the role now?

The Hunting Season by James Kettle

The opening story of the set has a fantastic hook. What happens when you place the earthy, staunchly working-class Ninth Doctor within the upper echelons of an English stately home? It’s this central conceit that raises an otherwise run-of-the-mill, but fun Doctor Who story.

Arriving at Duberry Hall, the Doctor is thrown into a battle between Lord Hawthorn and the marauding Fleshkin on the outskirts of the estate. In many ways, The Hunting Season is a classic base under siege style story, but Kettle’s script and a strong cast ably tap into the more interesting thematic concerns. This is a story about the arrogance of the English upper classes, the rigid, unflinching loyalty to our so-called betters and the dark, violent pasts of many in the British aristocracy. Eccleston is clearly having a ball, and gets some cracking lines such as “Is there anywhere to wipe my feet? I presume you lot do it on the servants” and “What does it take to break down the feudal system around here?”

He’s supported by a cast of former Doctor Who actors like Annette Badland and Don Gilet whilst Alex Jennings, criminally never used in the TV show, plays the arrogant and bloodthirsty Lord Hawthorn. The aliens themselves are played by members of the cast and as such feel like an add-on rather than well-developed antagonists, despite a twist that shifts the audience’s perspective on the story.

Overall, despite some tired sci-fi elements, this is a pacey, often very funny Doctor Who story. It’s one that feels perfect for Christopher Eccleston’s incarnation. It’s a joy to hear the Ninth Doctor run rings around the upper classes, completely uninterested in trinkets and family legacy and far more interested in the plight of the lower floors.

The Curse of Lady Macbeth by Lizzie Hopley

Christopher Eccleston has made no secret of both his love of Macbeth and his desire to see Doctor Who meet more historical female characters. Lizzie Hopley combines these desires to present us with The Curse of Lady Macbeth, an evocatively stormy, muddy, and wet adventure in medieval Scotland.

The children of Moray have been cursed, and the people blame the mysterious Blue Devil and Queen Gruach, or Lady Macbeth to you, for their plight. The strength of The Curse of Lady Macbeth lies in the chemistry between Christopher Eccleston and Neve Macintosh in their respective roles. They breathe life and energy into a script that can sometimes feel plodding.

There’s an uncomfortable feeling of too many elements throughout the story which can be hard to follow in the audio medium; the history of the Macbeths, the mysterious creatures that stalk the mists of Moray, psychic projections, alien cocoons and missing children. Unfortunately, it never knits together as a satisfying whole. There are some standout moments, the Doctor’s starstruck response to meeting Macbeth himself being tempered by the King’s macho bravado Is a lot of fun, for example. However, it’s hard to escape a feeling that this treads a very similar line to 2018’s superior The Witchfinders. Not only that, but the solution lying in a mother’s love feels like a very well-worn Doctor Who cliché by now. Unfortunately, this windswept, stormy meeting of the Doctor and the Macbeths feels a bit of a damp squib.

Monsters in Metropolis by John Dorney

When the Nation Estate pulled the rights for the Daleks prior to the show returning in 2005, Robert Shearman’s script went through a number of changes, replacing them with what would eventually become the Toclaflane and there was also the potential for the Cybermen. Thankfully, the Nation Estate saw sense and the result was Dalek, one of the crowning jewels in the short-lived Eccleston era. Unfortunately for Monsters in Metropolis, the shadow of Dalek looms large and renders some elements of the story overly familiar.

Christopher Eccleston clearly gets the legacy of the Cybermen and infuses his performance with the same level of gravitas and eventual sympathy that we get in Dalek, although there’s much more levity here. He’s the gushing fanboy we see in The Unquiet Dead and eventually tips over into the sort of irritating cinephile that can’t stop referencing movies. Dorney’s story has a fun hook, a Cyberman on the set of Fritz Lang’s legendary sci-fi epic Metropolis. The issue with the central Cyberman plot is that, on televised Doctor Who in 2005, a malfunctioning Cyberman in touch with their emotions would have been fairly groundbreaking. Listening to it in 2021, the very idea feels passe and overdone. Thankfully, the story plays out within an evocative historical milieu, which lends added gravitas.

As a time period, Berlin in the mid-’20s is a perfect location to thrust this war-weary Doctor and Monsters is just as interested in the simmering political attitudes and crippling reparations payments of post-Versailles Treaty Germany as it is in monsters and mayhem. He pushes it ever so slightly too far with a final scene that borders on the crass, but generally, it’s the setting and the history of Lang and his nearly forgotten masterpiece that are the most interesting elements. It’s a shame then that Fritz Lang is so miscast. He was 35 at the time and went on to make films for decades after, yet here he often sounds like a rasping, ruddy-faced English impresario.

It might not be fair to compare Monsters in Metropolis with Dalek but the legacy of the latter is so huge that, entertaining as this is, it’s not the groundbreaking pseudo-historical Cyberman story that it could have been.

And what of the Ninth Doctor sets overall? They still fail to set this fan’s heart fully aflutter. It’s certainly comforting, and often very entertaining, to return to those halcyon days of 2005 for a few hours but the writers are still struggling to push the character in an interesting direction given how rigidly the Ninth Doctor’s arc is laid out.Your enjoyment of the set, as ever with Big Finish, will likely rely on what it is you want from them. Do you simply want more, more, MORE adventures for your favourite Doctor? Or would you prefer something a bit edgier, something more interested in pushing the envelope?

After all, isn’t that exactly what Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor did all those years ago?