| THE SIRENS OF TIME by Nicholas Briggs |
| Story 1 Synopsis: Gallifrey is in trouble, threatened by a superpower it doesn't know. Their only clue is that somehow the Doctor is involved. The 7th Doctor lands the TARDIS in a harsh jungle, where he rescues a girl called Elenya from peril. They find the TARDIS won't let them in. They see spaceships crashing, one of which has strangely alien occupants. They come to a building where they meet Sancroff, an amiable old man, who turns out to be a former mass murderer of the Knights of Valeysha. The aliens have come to kill him, and leave no trace of themselves - so they have to kill the Doctor and Elenya, too, even though they are innocent. The 5th Doctor lands the TARDIS aboard a British ship, shortly before it is attacked and sunk by Germans. He meets an angry Scouse girl, Helen, with whom he is captured. He deduces it is sometime during WW1. He tries to convince the German officer in charge that he is an important spy, and needs to get back to the TARDIS, which is now floating on the surface. The Time Lords manipulate one of the Germans to try to kill the Doctor, but they fail. The Doctor finally manages to reach the TARDIS, but it has locked him out. He believes the Time Lords want him dead. Back on Gallifrey, the Knights of Valeysha have the upper hand in their attack. The 6th Doctor is removed from his TARDIS, and finds himself on the starcruiser Edifice, currently hosting a conference examening the Kurgon Wonder, a spatio-temporal anomaly. He realises that the Wonder is where the TARDIS went, and is leaking time distortion, which kills almost everyone on board. He is kept company by Ellie, a suspicious waitress, and an android. The Time Lords try to send him a message of warning, but Ellie stops the Doctor from hearing it. He finds the anomaly contains Temperon particles, and is trapping the Temperon. He is returned to the TARDIS, where he thinks dematerialising will free the Temperon. But when it happens, he is smothered by the effect. The Temperon absorbs him, and warns him about the Sirens of Time. Then, he and his other two selves are transported to Gallifrey, where they find the Knights of Valeysha in charge, and the Time Lords kept in a prison camp, their energies extracted for the Valeyshan benefit. The Knights are stricken with a Temperon virus. Their commander, Lyena, explains that the three Doctors upset crucial nexus points, leading to the rise of the 2nd Valeyshan Empire. But she wants them to use a TARDIS to return and correct the damage to the timeline. Suspicious, they look for the imprisoned Temperon. It explains that Lyena is one of the Time-sirens, a race who feed off chronal chaos. Lyena actually wants them to cause more damage. But if freed, it will contain their effect. The 6th Doctor takes the chance, and frees the Temperon. The three Doctors find themselves back in the harsh jungle. The 7th Doctor has to leave the girl he saved to her fate, and thus prevent the Valeyshan success. That done, the Doctors return to the TARDIS, to return to their proper timelines. |
| Review:- A new series of adventures... back in 1999, the audio adventures of Big Finish Productions were the biggest news since the TV Movie. But here, on a bi-monthly basis, were new, original 4-part adventures featuring 3 of the TV Doctors, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. This first release acts as a multi-Doctor special, and a kind of guide to what listeners could expect from the format. Yet, whilst doing this, it finds time to give us a new direction for Gallifrey, new characters who will recur, and a story about time paradoxes that allows stories set in alien and human environments. The first episode gives us the most recent regular Doctor, although now operating solo. He is soon doing Doctorish things like rescuing strangers, facing weird mysteries and befriending the weak against the strong. That the gentle old man they meet, Sancroff, is in fact a former mass murderer, gives a bit of edge, and the cliffhanger ending is exceptional. The next episode is only linked by the framing plot with Gallifrey under attack. The 5th Doctor pays lip service to his companions still being inside the TARDIS, but he soon has other concerns, as a prisoner aboard a German U-boat. His subterfuge to pretend to be a German spy does at least well illustrate his gift of languages. The Time Lords begin to draw him in here, with the psychotic Vansell deciding to try and kill the Doctor, via the gruesome mind control of a German. Quite why the Time Lords put up with Vansell seems unfathomable. Luckily, the Doctor survives and returns to the TARDIS to find himself still locked out, in a less gripping cliffhanger. Things drop off in the third episode, as the Doctor is briefly inveigled into a conference and then the only survivor of a temporal attack. As the mystery builds, so does the confusion, with the Doctor boringly forced into an act of misguided kindness, releasing the Temperon. The final episode has to draw together the three strands into one, as the Doctors find an empty Gallifrey under the subjugation of the Knights of Valeysha. They (and the audience) learn how each of their escapades tied together to cause the doom of the Time Lords. This at least is explicable and satisfying. But the need to free the Temperon leads to the real villains of the story - the Time-sirens. Somehow, they've lured the Doctor into a phenomenally complicated trap, just to feed on the energy created by the ruptures in time. Well, it's a living, perhaps. The Doctor then saves the day by freeing the Temperon again, and going back to the first encounter with the Time-sirens, where they ignore its cry, and save the day. A rather baffling and complicated end to the story. The cast all sound good, with the characterisation of the Doctors seeming in place. The new Time Lord characters are the harassed President, who is charming, and the wily Vansell, who is charmless. They at least give new life to the somewhat tired spectacle of Gallifrey. The Knights of Valeysha convince as formidable opponents, as do the Time-sirens. The Temperon is less so, mainly as its motivation is often hazy. Still, it made an interesting first experiment. And things calmed down later. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy. |