Tuesday 30 September 2008

Big Finish Doctor Who 113 - Time Reef

A curse on this damned reef - and curse the Doctor who brought us here!

Drawn by the siren call of a distress beacon, the TARDIS crash-lands on an uncharted time reef. However, the Doctor, Nyssa and Brewster are not the only mariners marooned on this barren rock. Commander Gammades and his crew of returning war heroes have been similarly shipwrecked, as has the beautiful but mysterious Lady Vuyoki.

But there's something else here, too. A thing of darkness which crawls blindly across the surface of the reef hunting for prey: the Ruhk.

Big Finish just keep pulling rabbits out of hats with their audios! We’ve been treated to some great stories in the last couple of months and ‘Time Reef’ is no different.

Following on from the events of ‘The Boy That Time Forgot’, we are in the TARDIS as The Doctor and Nyssa try to find items that have mysteriously disappeared, and they believe that Brewster is behind it.

They learn that the dimensions of the TARDIS are closing in and with time running out, before it's destroyed, they land at the last journey the TARDIS made – a reef, in space, which is stuck in a ‘time bubble’! They are not the only ones stuck there, the rock is populated by the ship’s crew who are on constant guard against killer birds called ‘The Ruck’. And there’s even a sinister lady nearby, who seems to have wrapped the ship’s captain around her little finger.

It’s quite a bizarre concept but it makes sense when you listen to it! It’s brilliantly written by Marc Platt, even with a lot of Ancient Greece references (for more info on that – listen to the extras!)

Our usual team are joined by Nicholas Farrell, Sean ‘Harry Potter’ Biggerstaff, Beth Chalmers and Sean Connolly. As usual the supporting cast do a wonderful job!

The three-part ‘Time Reef’ is accompanied by the one-parter – ‘A Perfect World’. This is another truly wonderful story, which sees one of the TARDIS crew making a big decision as they have caused the whole earth to be perfect, which is a bad thing! It just puts the icing on the cake and it’s rather different from the one-parters that we are used to.

4.5/5

Next Time – Colin Baker and India Fisher are back in ‘Brotherhood of the Daleks’!

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