Doctor Who Audio Review: Rest, Recreation, and Regret

Alixion is a Doctor Who audio play from Big Finish Productions and is the latest addition to The Lost Stories range. The addition has its good points, especially with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred leading the cast as the Doctor and Ace, respectively, however it’s a bit of a confusing mess as far as the story goes at times.

This story was originally intended to be produced during the television era in the 1980’s, however that is when the series got cancelled. Robin Mukherjee wrote the script and was able to adapt it to the audio format. David O’Mahoney serves as the director. Ali Bastian, Jon Edgley Bond, Matthew McQuinn, Beverly Longhurst, and Shri Patel make up the guest cast. Even O’Mahoney himself lends his own vocal talents to the effort.

Another planned holiday for the Doctor and Ace goes awry when they arrive at a luxury resort that has been compromised by an entity that feeds off memories and regrets. The Time Lord and his young friend have to face their own darkest secrets and fears as well as a malevolent alien who can inflict the most diabolical of mental tortures.

The plot itself sounds pretty intriguing; however, I think this would have worked better on television since there is quite a bit of flashbacks.

McCoy and Aldred are too good themselves to make me regret listening to this, so I may just need to return to this one to get a better grasp of the events that I can only picture in the mind’s eye.

The Seventh Doctor can be considered one of the more complicated incarnations depicted, and this story does play with that, which still keeps things intriguing.

I know I called this episode a confusing mess at the top of this post, but that doesn’t mean that I disliked it overall. Sometimes, the joy of listening the performances of pretty much any of the Doctors and their companions does carry manage to carry me to some significant enjoyment, and this experience was no exception.

I have found that listening to the cast and crew interviews most of these releases now contain does help my comprehension of the story quite a bit.

In spite of my occasional perplexion of some elements of the plot, I still found quite a bit to appreciate about this release and hope that McCoy and Aldred have a lot more gas in the tank to perform new stories to represent their era of the series.