Doctor Who: The Dream Team Review

We’ve got a plethora of Fifth Doctor goodness coming out this year from Big Finish and as one of my most anticipated Doctors from Big Finish, The Dream Team was pretty exciting when it was announced and it’s as exciting as I was hoping it would be with the original 1982 team reunited in stories the writers have crafted to show the obvious affection the cast have for one another.

Things kick off in The Merfolk Murders, where the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric find themselves in a small university town in Scotland to investigate the titular murders. Landing in 1940 they find there is more threat than that of the war in Europe this summer with murder hanging in the air. With the university student body radically reduced, The Merfolk Drama and Arts Society has been forced to reduce to just a book club made up of a few students, a lecturer and a soldier. Their current obsession is the Orion Hood murder mystery series, written by Sarah Joan Watson, and, conveniently, the real-life Orion Hood has just arrived.

It won’t be a surprise to anyone that Orion Hood is the Fourth Doctor in his deerstalker, detective mode in a period of his time when he and Sarah decided to try and solve some murders. And while Orion Hood might be a Holmes pastiche, the story from Tim Foley borrows a lot from Agatha Christie with a secluded location and a small cast of characters slowly being murdered as the plot unfolds. Foley makes sure he takes the time to explore the guest characters giving everyone secrets and motives and while I had worked out the real murderer before the final episode, there are a lot of lovely little nods to the detective genre and lots of questions that are being asked.

Tim Foley should be praised here for crafting a murder mystery so intricate and full of secrets and red herrings that the Queen of Crime herself would be proud and there is plenty here to tax those little grey cells. It’s also nice that is a proper murder mystery for the Fifth Doctor and his companions. I love Black Orchid but as the commentary states, it’s a murder mystery without the mystery here though, Foley makes sure every question he asks has a payoff including the real motives for the murderer which doesn’t feel like it comes completely out of left field. Like Orchid there are no science fiction elements besides the Doctor and his companions yet he keeps things interesting throughout the four-episode runtime.

Handling the murder mystery aspects is one thing but The Merfolk Murders is a masterclass in how to handle three companions, Foley makes sure that all of the main characters have plenty to do with strong emotional connections to the guest characters added to make it feel like a sense of time is being spent here. And while I’m not too sure about how Adric sometimes gets portrayed as a bit self-satisfied and pompous throughout his recent Big Finish outings, I did appreciate the queer love story subplot he gets to explore here and it helps to make him feel more human than he does on screen sometimes.

The second story of this boxset, The Dream Team by Lizzie Hopley sees the TARDIS team facing off against the Dream Crabs from the Moffat story Last Christmas. When the TARDIS is targeted by a hard-sell psychic transmission promoting corporate team-bonding experiences in a site full of endangered species the Doctor decides to investigate. However, the minute they arrive they are attacked by the Crabs who waste no time in throwing them into dream scenarios.

It’s a shame that Big Finish doesn’t have much more to say about the Dream Crabs than we saw on screen. This is more a failing of their concept, they can only really do one thing but Hopley makes sure she sells them as a threat as she details how they attack and digest their prey. The scuttling sound effects are also pretty unnerving so from an audio standpoint they work well here.

Again the TARDIS crew worked well together, I was a little surprised the Doctor worked out what was happening so quickly but with only two episodes there wasn’t much time to hear him working it out. But Peter Davison sells the threat of these monsters effectively enough that this is only a minor quibble. He is giving a great performance in this set, clearly enjoying playing the detective in The Merfolk Murders and then playing a very heroic version of the Doctor.

Matthew Waterhouse does a tremendous job as Adric working particularly well with Janet Fielding as Tegan this time around. It’s an interesting pairing of the characters given how they never really liked each other on the television series. So it’s very nice that the writers are making them work a lot better together this time around. And Sarah Sutton delivers another strong performance even if there are a few times when she doesn’t get too much to do.

Dream Team really is a great release for the Fifth Doctor, showcasing his era perfectly while many stories over the years have tried to recreate various eras in great detail and others have gone down a much more modern route, Dream Team manages to successfully do both and the result is two stories that feel like they should have been aired in Season 19. We can but dream…