Big Finish, Special Release
Prisoners of the Lake
I first guessed, due to the title, that the prisoners were the humans and the Doctor, trapped in a spacecraft on the bottom of a lake in Scotland. The reveal on who the prisoners are isn’t until the third episode we discover just who are the prisoners on the ship and the whole purpose of the ship. I do love the stone-based robots – the Prosecutor and the Defender. The concepts in this story are fantastic! And this story makes good use of the Doctor, Jo Grant, and Mike Yates doing their jobs. Fantastic and very atmospheric. And Tim Treloar has really figured out how to “do” the 3rd Doctor. He doesn’t have the gravelly lows but he’s got the vocal mannerisms down very well. It was an easy listen all the way through! Now if they could only find a voice like the Brigadier’s we’d be all set…
The Havoc of Empires
The Doctor is asked to take Yates and Jo to a cricket match, since his TARDIS is now available for trips. Instead they end up on a space station where a wedding is to take place between two high-ranking leaders of two factions in one section of space. The TARDIS team ends up in the middle of it, with Jo Grant taking the place of a security expert who arrived on the station and found them. Bombs keep going off on the space station and eventually, the wedding planner becomes a very helpful figure in the story. And naturally everything turns out okay, though after lots of problems are solved and the Doctor’s life threatened.
This story continues the fantastic work of Tim Treloar as the 3rd Doctor. And the interviews afterwards reveal just how hard he works at it to make the 3rd Doctor come back to life, as it were. An excellent addition to the list of people who are working as the voices of the early Doctors. It can’t go on forever but I, for one, am happy to have William Russell, Frazer Hines, and now Tim Treloar to represent the first 3 Doctors in audio format!
Tim Treloar (Narrator/The Doctor), Katy Manning (Jo Grant), Richard Franklin (Mike Yates)
Writers: Justin Richards, Andy Lane
Director: Nicholas Briggs
Release: September 2015