Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Adventures: Storm of the Sea Devils from Big Finish Review

The latest Fourth Doctor box set keeps the trend of the Doctor reuniting with old friends. Well, this time there are two old friends, Harry Sullivan and Naomi Cross, who have recently been travelling with the Seventh Doctor and helping UNIT in the Nemesis series and this time we are finally getting their first meeting and learning how they came to travel with the Doctor.

The pair meet the Doctor in David K Barnes’ Storm of the Sea Devils, where Harry finds himself commandeered by UNIT on a trip to Calcutta to help them investigate mysterious happenings around a newly built hotel. We already know a lot about Harry, so Barnes rightly keeps the focus on the opening episode on Naomi and it’s fun to hear her first interactions with the people who will become her travelling companions.

Actress Eleanor Crooks is fantastic in the role no matter which Doctor she is working with. Throughout her time with Sylvester McCoy, I’ve grown to love the chemistry she has with Christopher Naylor as Harry Sullivan and she shares great chemistry with Tom Baker too and there’s a nostalgic sense of his relationship with Sarah Jane Smith between the pair.

Tom Baker is also on top form here, always delivering a top-notch performance even if he might not have any clue what is going on. It’s certainly a far cry performance from the recent Christopher Eccleston performance in Buried Threats which left a lot to be desired. Barnes plays a lot with his delight at reuniting with Harry even if things are a little darker because of where this is set for him, between The Hand of Fear and The Deadly Assassin.

Barnes plays a lot with the main characters giving them plenty to do across the episodes, but he doesn’t rest on his laurels in terms of plot, there is a genuinely well-written Sea Devil’s story here with a ruthless businessman who has imprisoned a Sea Devil he found while the rest of the tribe try to free her.

With both the Silurians and Sea Devils there tends to be a tendency to make these stories quite traditional and while Barnes does have a few of the same beats as the other stories with these creatures, his character work and character motivations as well as the decision to keep the main group of Sea Devils out of the way until the last couple of episodes helps to keep things feeling fresh.

Helped by the strength of the material they have been given, the guest cast does a tremendous job too. Nicholas Briggs as the Sea Devil leader Taurix does a great job bringing the character to vivid life, while Tracey Childs as the captured creature Shorak is brilliant in her role hammering home the cruelty she has endured at the hands of Ramesh Kamal. As Kamal, Silas Carson is deliciously evil and it’s clear how much he enjoyed getting to imagine feeding people to his pet crocodiles. As a result, Storm of the Sea Devils works as one of the strongest Fourth Doctor stories we’ve had in a long while.

Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s World’s Apart isn’t quite the story Storm of the Sea Devils was, but it’s still a lot of fun, seeing the newly formed TARDIS team forcing the Doctor to take a well-deserved holiday and while it doesn’t focus on action, the drama of the piece comes from the character work the pair undertake with Harry and Naomi sending them on their journeys of self-discovery. The plot is relatively simple with the TARDIS team finding themselves trapped in an evil version of Fantasy Island, but the fun twist towards the end of the opening episode sets things up nicely for the concluding part and adds a new dimension to which the story benefits from.

The main cast once again put in a tremendous performance, Baker in particular goes from being bewildered at Naomi’s reaction to the TARDIS to outright fury at the motives of the villains, proving that even in his age, he’s still got it as the Doctor. He works well with Anthony Howell’s legendary Alan Turing, though any exploration into the background of this historical character isn’t done here, but to be fair, it is hard to find a spot where this could have been done, maybe Big Finish could do a proper story with the legendary man who met such a tragic end.

This boxset is easily one of the strongest of the year so far for Big Finish with Tom Baker, Christopher Naylor and Eleanor Crooks making a fantastic TARDIS team. And luckily for us, it isn’t long to wait for the next box set which wraps up the intriguing cliffhanger we’re left on. Who has taken control of the TARDIS and why do things seem to going a little more Celestial?

You can pick up Storm of the Sea Devils from Big Finish on both digital and CD now.