Doctor Who: The Third Doctor Adventures Series 7 – Review

It’s very sad that so many people involved with making the Third Doctor era are no longer with us. With the exception of Katy Manning, John Levene and Richard Franklin, all the main cast have passed into that big blue box in the sky. Luckily over the years, Big Finish has gone to great lengths to give us new Third Doctor adventures with the remaining cast. And now, with some recasting and the brilliant discovery of Tim Trelor as the Third Doctor, we’ve gotten some great full-cast adventures once more!

Opening this two-story set is The Unzal Incursion, from Mark Wright. Set firmly right in the middle of Series 7, the era is evoked brilliantly from the beginning. With the exception of Spearhead from Space, Series 7 is a series that divides fans. Some love it, some don’t. I really like it, and I only think that The Silurians is the only boring story in that series. Luckily, The Unzal Incursion seems to be set just before The Ambassadors of Death.

Liz Shaw has helped to create Hotspur, an early warning system designed to alert UNIT to alien threats before they invade the Earth. It’s a good idea for a device, though I would be worried it would put UNIT out of business! Of course, things go wrong quickly with the Unzal needing to gain access to the system so their invasion can succeed and the Doctor, Liz and the Brigadier find themselves on the run.

If you really pay attention there are a few nods to stories like The Ambassadors of Death, its really the humans who are the villains, allowing an alien invasion for their own nefarious schemes as well as the variation on the theme tune, which I saw panicked listeners on the release day as everyone wondered if the track listings were wrong. The villains also feel like something straight out of Series 7, with shades of Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks about them, they do feel like a good threat, even if they do stay in the background throughout the run time. This could have run the risk of undermining the threat in the story, but Wright channels just enough Barry Letts, Hulke and Dicks into his script to get away with keeping them in the background.

He also channels enough energy into the main baddie, Cherilyn Dankworth, one of the other scientists behind Hotspur that keeping the Unzal out of the action doesn’t matter too much. Actress Claire Corbett also does a great job injecting her character with enough menace to make her feel like a unique villain in the early 70s era of the show. And the after-credits scene was brilliant and will either be a nod to the arrival of a character in Terror of the Autons or is a promise for something more! It was a great moment and Corbett does a brilliant job delivering it!

Wright also has a great handle on the main cast, it took me a little while to get into Tim Trelor as the Third Doctor but he is on fire here. He has brilliantly recreated Pertwee’s personality while giving it something new. While it’s Trelor performing here, it isn’t hard to imagine Pertwee delivering these lines, whether you imagine Trelor or Pertwee in these stories both actors are brilliant in the role and it’s great to hear that Trelor has really made the character his own while honouring the original performance. Daisy Ashford made her debut as Liz Shaw in the previous series of Third Doctor Adventures, but here she also really comes into her own, getting the time she rightly deserves to shine. She is also the real-life daughter of original actress Caroline John and, like Trelor, effortlessly brings John’s energy to the role while making it own and she wholly succeeds at honouring her mother’s legacy on the show.

That brings us to Jon Culshaw, stepping in as the Brigadier. He’s blown me away in recent years at Big Finish from playing two different Masters in one of last year’s Short Trips, to getting the chance to recreate Kamelion, who really impressed me in that trilogy of adventures, to bringing the Brig back in last years, The Grey Man of the Mountain. Here, from the word go, you’d think it was Nicholas Courtney delivering the lines. Culshaw is pitch-perfect from the very beginning and while I’ve seen a few people on social media slightly kicking off about Culshaw playing the Brig, unless Big Finish master the mystical arts of Voodoo and resurrect actors like Courtney, re-casting seems to be the thing to do to get some brand new stories with our favourite characters. And Culshaw treats the character with the respect he deserves and does a brilliant job imbuing the character with new life.

As you might have guessed, I thought that The Unzal Incursion was a brilliant story. Mark Wright gets the story right from opening moments and he effortlessly evokes the early Pertwee era and the main cast are excellent and I can’t wait to hear if Wright is going to do any more stories for this team, especially with the after-credits scene seemingly promising so.

The set concludes with The Gulf, written by Tim Foley and sees the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive on a water-world. There they find an artists retreat under threat from a menace beneath the waves and a war raging on in the galaxy above them.

Foley’s writing has always impressed me and this is his first two-hour script. Once again he succeeds at creating a really great story, that brilliantly brings to life the final series of Pertwee’s series. In many of Foley’s other scripts, his focus on the characters he creates is brilliant and that continues here, with Foley giving him some complex supporting characters and no easy answers as to whether they got what they deserved or not.

As usual, Foley gives us some themes, this time looking at how war affects different people and some commentary on grief and how people deal with it but in this aspect, he also doesn’t give us some easy answers, instead of leaving the listener to consider the messages long after the story has finished. He also added a great scene where Sarah has to face her grief over her parent’s death, its an excellent little nod to the events of The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith and the Trickster’s involvement and a fun moment because that hadn’t happened to Sarah yet, though we know she isn’t responsible.

Foley’s handle on the main characters is also excellent easily giving the Third Doctor some great moments as he explores the retreat and it isn’t hard to imagine Pertwee doing much of the action himself. His take on Sarah Jane is also excellent, I’ve always loved the Doctor/Companion dynamic between the Third Doctor and Sarah and Foley effortlessly brings that back to life, properly for the first time since the audio plays in the 1990s.

Sadie Miller also continued to impress as Sarah here. I loved her in Return of the Cybermen but here she gets a lot more to do. So convincing was she that everyone around me, kept asking me if it was Elisabeth Sladen voicing Sarah or not! I really hope that Miller gets a lot more to do as Sarah because she is excellent and I still think her mother would be proud of her work here.

If there was one minor issue I had with this story, it would be that the exposition at the end is a little strange, rather than explaining it as the characters go, instead, the Doctor seems happy to explain what has gone in a few minutes right at the very end. It isn’t too bad and only a minor quibble but having the characters explain things as the actions unfold around them, might have made some of the plot a little clearer earlier on.

Volume 7 of the Third Doctor Adventures is another triumph for Big Finish though. It’s clear how well-loved the Third Doctor era is at the Big Finish offices and both scripts handle the characters with dignity and care while the new cast effortlessly breathes new life into characters where you might think all the stories they could have, have already been told. As long as this series or if they are continued in these new boxsets they are doing for every Doctor continue to be as strong as this, Big Finish will continue to honour the hard work of those who originally brought these amazing characters to such vivid life.