Classic Doctors, New Monsters: The Stuff of Nightmares is a new Doctor Who audio boxset from Big Finish Productions. It is the third volume of episodes in which the Doctors from the classic series encounter creatures and adversaries introduced in the renewed series that began in 2005. There are four adventures included in this set.

Tim Foley starts off this collection with his Third Doctor story, The House That Hoxx Built. Tim Treloar provides an acceptable impression of Jon Pertwee’s performance alongside Sadie Miller, who is portraying Sarah Jane Smith, originally played by her mother, Elisabeth Sladen. The Doctor and Sarah travel to Earth in far future where they find an isolated, haunted house, inhabited by the Hoxx of Balhoun and his ward, some kind of sentient sheep. Dan Starkey, a frequent guest on Big Finish plays the role of Hoxx, which is a bit of a departure for him. He actually really helps make this work. Foley provides a bizarre story, but I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would. Treloar really has done well with capturing the essence of the late Jon Pertwee. Miller certainly has been getting better with sounding like her late mother. This first story in this set is a promising start.

Robert Valentine reunites the Fourth Doctor and Leela in The Tivolian Who Knew Too Much. Tom Baker and Louise Jameson reprise their roles. The Tivolians are a race perfectly comfortable being conquered, except for the one gangster in their midst. The story takes place in 1970’s Rome, and the Doctor keeps coming across Tivolians and ends up being stuck with one of the more nervous allies he has encountered. The tale is a strange hybrid of a comedic mob and soy story. Of course, the title does rather give away the inspiration Valentine was drawing from. This was a pretty fun romp for the most part. I like that not all of the new monsters are necessarily the bad guys. Baker and Jameson still manage to keep the banter familiar and sharp.

Together in Eclectic Dreams is written by Roy Gill and introduces a new companion for the Sixth Doctor. Colin Baker figuratively slips back into the patchwork coat and is trying to help his new companion, Mari Yoshida, played by Susan Hingley, to get some better sleep. Strangely, Mari has dreams where she encounters a strange long-haired man in a green velvet coat. Paul McGann, the Eighth Doctor, is also in this one. The Dream Crabs are feeding again, and it will take two Doctors to wake everyone up. For some reason, I think Colin Baker just shines when playing off one of the other Doctors. He just seems extra funny when reacting to his other incarnations. The Sixth Doctor really struggled with popularity during his television era, however Big Finish continues to make this particular iteration much more engaging. The writers flesh out how brilliantly inventive this Doctor can be in a crisis. McGann’s participation was a treat as well. There is a pretty good twist with Mari’s presence as well. I have a somewhat disapproving take on multi-Doctor episodes, but this ended up being one that worked. I think it was because the Sixth Doctor’s interaction with his other incarnations are often extra funny.

John Dorney brings this set to a close with If I Should Die Before I Wake. The story was apparently conceived by Jacqueline Raynor. Paul McGann is reunited with India Fisher. The Eight Doctor and Charlotte Pollard have some stories to share, however the tales have a deeper purpose. The Dream Crabs are still hungry, and the Doctor and Charley have to use fantasies and myths to find their way back to reality. This one got better as it went along. McGann and Fisher have maintained their chemistry. It was good to revisit this pairing in a new adventure.

Barnaby Edwards directed this set pretty well. The stories were not necessarily stand-outs, but none of them really disappointed either. All of the Doctors were just as fun as I remembered. The performances were all solid and engaging. This turned out to be one of the better collections overall that Big Finish has delivered.

Sherlock Holmes and the Three Winter Terrors is the latest contribution to the vast pastiche material from James Lovegrove. This is actually three novellas that are connected by a familial thread over a period of five years between 1889 and 1894. Holmes is back to debunking various supernatural incidents, which is a trail that I don’t often appreciate.

The first story involves a curse from a long dead accused witch. Then a client is apparently killed after a haunting a year later. Finally, Holmes meets a possible cannibal after a body is found to be uniquely ravaged in the woods.

Lovegrove is obviously quite an admirer of the Arthur Conan Doyle’s works and does well with the characterizations of Holmes and Dr. Watson. Once again, he seems overly fond of placing Holmes as some kind of myth buster.

Even though this novel sort of contained a practice I find a little irksome, I did end up enjoying it quite a bit more than I expected. Christmas was mentioned only briefly, but I go to other inspirations for that particular joy.

Lovegrove’s prose style manages to be easy to read and yet somehow seems faithful to Doyle’s original literary voice. Kudos to Lovegrove, but it would be nice if he wrote a different type of Holmes story without having him dip into these supernatural undertones.

Lee Child, the creator of the Jack Reacher series, started collaborating with his brother, Andrew, as he prepares to retire from full-time writing. I am next trying out their first joint literary venture, The Sentinel.

The Myth Makers is a Doctor Who serial starring William Hartnell and was originally aired in 1965. This is one of the stories with missing episodes, so BBC released the soundtrack with linking narration provided by Peter Purves, who had portrayed one of the companions, Steven Taylor. Maureen O’Brien makes her final television appearance as Vicki. Michael Leeston-Smith directed this story which was written by Donald Cotton. Adrienne Hill also makes her debut as Katarina.

The Doctor and his friends arrive in Troy during the Trojan War. The Doctor is presumed initially to be a manifestation of the Greek god Zeus. The TARDIS crew is split up between the two factions at war. A giant wooden horse plays a key role in the outcome of the war.

I have never seen or heard the episode as it was originally aired. This episode isn’t one of the greatest of this era, but I do not regret adding this to my collection. There are some noteworthy aspects to this one. This story leads into what was one at one time the longest serial, The Daleks’ Masterplan. Purves provides his usual engaging narration. It’s still a little hard to follow the events of the story. Hartnell still sounds pretty good although this is getting pretty close to the time where he was getting too ill to continue in the role. I have come to appreciate these particular companions from the First Doctor’s era the more I have seen or heard them. Both actors still participate in the Big Finish recordings of new adventures.

It’s not one of the greatest efforts from the Hartnell era, but there is still some enjoyment to be found here. Particularly because it is so hard to obtain these days,

Troll is a monster film that explores Norwegian folklore. The screenplay was written by Espen Aukan with Roar Uthaug serving as director. The cast includes Ine Marie Wilmann, Kim Falck, Anneke von der Lippe, and Mads Sjogard Pettersen.

A paleontologist is brought in by the Norwegian government to help investigate the strange deaths of several miners and protesters that occurred in something burst from the ground. The paleontologist’s father happens to be an expert in folklore and quickly identifies the giant creature roaming the land as a mountain troll. The military and government are trying to figure out how to stop this enormous wanderer from destroying Oslo. A very familiar sort of plot in a rather unconventional locale.

The film was somewhat better than I expected. Not much in way of new ground being broken though. The performances were not terrible. The father-daughter drama was not too out of place. The special effects were not bad. I am not sure if the actual mythology was accurately presented. The monster was convincingly hideous. and ferocious.

I ended up liking many aspects of the film, but I am under no illusion that this is going to be considered a masterpiece. It’s just another monster movie that was fairly amusing but not much more than that.

Relentless is a thriller novel written by Mark Greaney and features freelance CIA troubleshooter and assassin, Courtland Gentry, otherwise known as the Gray Man. He is also known as Sierra Six and couple of other peculiar monikers.

Court has been seriously injured, but that does not keep his handler from sending him on another mission. An agent has been captured in Venezuela. When Gentry is sent in to see if he can help, he finds some information that takes him to Berlin where a Russian agent he happens to love is having some troubles of her own. Killers from all sorts of agencies are coming out of the woodwork, and the Gray Man has to hold his body together well enough to function at his usual lethal capacity.

This novel is not the first in the series, but it is the first one I have read from Greaney. It was actually pretty good. The page count almost makes it to 700. There are times that the story drags in the middle. Greaney does have a fairly intriguing character, but he does at times seem similar to the other killer protagonists in the counterterrorist genre. Greaney is just solid enough of a writer to inspire me to revisit the world of the Gray Man, but I am not sure I am going to be keeping that close of an eye on the series.

There are few better ways to welcome the Yuletide Season than with a new Sherlock Holmes novel. James Lovegrove returns to 221 B Baker Street to relate how Holmes and Dr. Watson faced The Three Winter Terrors.

Silver and Ice is a Doctor Who audio boxset from Big Finish Productions which contains two new adventures with Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford returning to the roles of the Doctor and Melanie Bush. Samuel Clemens serves as the director. Nicholas Briggs returns to the Cybermen and a couple of other roles. Jasmin Hinds, Jenny Spark, Dan Starkey, and Vivienne Rochester are included in the cast.

Speaking of Dan Starkey, he is the scriptwriter for the first story, Bad Day in Tinseltown. In a town called Brightedge, which is supposed to represent some Old West locale, is on the verge of becoming some sort of entertainment mecca. When the Doctor and Mel arrive, it does not take them long to discover that the Cybermen are also there, and they are not interested in the fun and games. No surprise there!

What is surprising is how underwhelming I found this episode. I was distracted by the exaggerated American accents put on by some of the actors. Although I tend to enjoy pairing of McCoy and Langford, even their efforts were not quite enough to keep me significantly engaged. Doctor Who has attempted to recapture the atmosphere of the Old West, and this effort was not an improvement over the past forays into this setting.

The Ribos Inheritance by Jonathan Barnes is an improvement, but not quite as much as I had hoped. The Doctor and Mel return to Ribos, which was where he had recovered the first segment to the Key to Time in a previous life. Ribos is supposed to be in the midst of their Suntime, however it is still in the grip of bitter cold. For once, the eccentric steering of the TARDIS is not to blame. David Rintoul has taken over the role of Garron, the cosmic con artist previously encountered by the Doctor. Garron was originally played by the late Ian Cuthbertson in the television serial, The Ribos Operation.

I sort of found Garron’s inclusion to be somewhat unnecessary. Rintoul does fine in his performance and can almost sound like Cuthbertson. I think the episode would have worked better with a whole new cast of characters even though the Doctor would be in surroundings that he would find familiar.

McCoy and Langford continue to perform well together, and I don’t mind revisiting the early days of the Seventh Doctor. The mixed metaphor gag returned once or twice.

Anyway, this set isn’t the most exciting to me. It’s not an abysmal listening experience, but there is not much to leave an impression.

The Menu is a black comedy horror film directed by Mark Mylod and written by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy. It contains a pretty impressive cast which includes Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, Judith Light, and John Leguizamo.

A rather eccentric and diverse group of diners gather at the Hawthorne for a unique culinary experience hosted by a peculiar celebrity chef. This restaurant is located on a remote private island. As the courses are served, secrets are revealed as the evening turns into something more macabre. There are humiliations and mutilations served up throughout the evening as the chef, played by Fiennes, has a final course planned which will leave no survivors.

Well, this turned out to be a pretty unique cinematic experience and a welcome one. This film takes all kinds of bizarre turns which did not always make the most sense, however the performances overall were compelling enough to keep me engaged. Fiennes, as expected, is absolutely riveting as the vengeful chef, embittered by the loss of his passion for his craft. All of the diners with the exception of one have played a part in his lost devotion to his artistic profession. The revelations are well planned throughout the film.

In spite of the outlandish plot and the occasional murky moments, the film does the job with keeping the audience in suspense and increasing that tension to a satisfying height. None of the performances turned out to be a weak link.

Overall, this film has far more strengths than downfalls. Although I doubt that I would enjoy the courses presented at the Hawthorne all that much, the film itself manages to satisfy a different sort of appetite for some entertainment with a whiff of originality.

The Night Window is a thriller written by Dean Koontz and closes out the saga which features ex-FBI Jane Hawk’s fight against the Tech Arcadians, who like to infect people with nanobots and compel them to do vile, unspeakable acts against loved ones and others. After five novels, it comes to an end.

There are all kinds of chase scenes going on. A young movie director is being stalked through the winter night by a billionaire megalomaniac who is the head of the dastardly Arcadians. Jane Hawk is joined by a former colleague who has a bit of a crush on her in spite of her still being a grieving widow. Another hitman who likes to perform random acts of cruelty is on her tail. Koontz has quite a few threads running together until what is supposed to be the exciting conclusion.

I may still be reading Koontz more out of a sense of nostalgia than any significant enjoyment these days. He’s still a talented writer, but I am sort of finding too much repetition in the types of characters he presents. I like Jane Hawk, but she just seems to be another archetype strong female protagonist who is just a little too badass to be believable. Of course, this is basically a science fiction thriller, but still…I am having a hard time finding anything that unique about her for this genre.

Koontz knows how to create a sociopath, but even the various mercenaries and assassins are kind of blending together in my memories.

Overall, this novel landed a couple of notches above mediocre. There were a few moments that were pretty gripping, but I wasn’t kept riveted with any amount of consistency. I hope some of the projects Koontz are able to keep as engaged as his earlier works. Hopefully, Jane Hawk is able to live out a long, peaceful life in the fictional realm with her son, and Dean Koontz come up with something a bit more unique and thrilling in his next release.

I recently saw the movie, “The Gray Man” with Ryan Gosling and was not impressed with that, however I am still interested to actually read something in the series of novels from which it was based. Mark Greaney is the next author on tap as I learn how Relentless the Gray Man can truly be.

Agents of Chaos is the third volume of Doctor Who audio set featuring John Hurt as the War Doctor. These continue the efforts of this once unknown incarnation of the Doctor during the chaos of the Time War. There are three episodes in this one. Nicholas Briggs continues to voice the Daleks and also directed this compilation. Jacqueline Pearce also returns as Cardinal Ollistra. Helen Goldwyn, Honeysuckle Weeks, Barnaby Edwards, Neve Mcintosh, and Dan Starkey are included in the cast. Of course, Big Finish Productions are the masterminds behind this offering which was first released in October 2016.

David Llewellyn starts off with his script entitled The Shadow Vortex. The War Doctor is sent to East Berlin in 1961 to track down a Dalek agent, however a dangerous experiment is about to have disastrous results. The War Doctor must first elude the attentions of MI6 and KGB. It’s a pretty good start, and I like the cat and mouse chase between the War Doctor and the Dalek agent known as Lara Zannis. It’s noisy and kicks off this collection cosmic war stories with a promising storyline. Of course, Hurt gives an excellent performance. I wasn’t all that keen on his introduction in the fiftieth anniversary special on television, but he has grown on me.

Andrew Smith continues the fun with The Eternity Cage in which the War Doctor has just learned that Cardinal Ollistra was just kidnapped by the Sontarans. On the planet Rovidia, The War Doctor learns the secrets of the Eternity Cage and learns of an unexpected traitor among his small group of allies. Smith has been associated with Doctor Who a long time, and he deserves to continue in that vein. The story is a little hard to picture in the mind at times, but it’s still pretty good. Weeks shines quite brightly here as the Cardinal’s assistant with a secret of her own. Dan Starkey returns to voice the Sontarans, and he once again hits the right radically militaristic notes.

Finally, Ken Bentley closes this book with Eye of Harmony. The Dalek Time Strategist has a powerful force he can unleash, and the War Doctor still has a chance to stop, but he is trapped in a damaged battle-TARDIS with time, predictably, running out.

This whole set was pretty good. The reveal of the traitor was well handled. All of the cast performed well. John Hurt continues to live up to his status as a legend. As mentioned before, I am not instinctively a big fan of the War Doctor, however Big Finish has sort of helped me raise my respect for this character. Although the War Doctor is supposedly the more ruthless of the incarnations, there are plenty of moments that have him more recognizable as the Doctor, however he does not claim that title during this time. This collection is enjoyable in spite of sometimes confusing action sequences.

The First Doctor Adventures Volume Three is a Doctor Who audio boxset released by Big Finish Productions. This is another in the range of sets featuring David Bradley’s version of the First Doctor. Since it is pointless to wish for William Hartnell to still be alive and well enough to return to the role, one will have to find some satisfaction with Bradley’s interpretation. Fortunately, Bradley is a talented fellow and does well in the role. He is joined by Claudia Grant, Jemma Powell, and Jamie Glover returning as Susan, Barbara, and Ian, respectively. There are two stories directed by Ken Bentley.

The Phoenicians is written by Marc Platt. The guest cast is comprised of Ajjaz Awad, Jo Ben Ayed, Orion Ben, Youssef Kerkour, and Raad Rawi. The Doctor and his companions arrive in ancient Tyre and encounter King Pygmalion. The king is feuding with his sister, and the TARDIS crew get split up again. The story is sort of standard for the era this represents. Platt is a solid writer though. Even if there is little new ground broken here, it’s still a fun story. The actors were all good. Bradley is pretty good as the First Doctor. The story is not the most magnificent of offerings, however it’s solidly entertaining, and it presents another piece of historical perspective seen through the eyes of our favorite time travelers.

Guy Adams is the writer of Tick-Tock World. The guest cast is comprised of Carole Ann Ford, Mina Anwar, Susie Emmett, and Belinda Lang. Ford is, of course, the original Susan, so it’s rather surprising and amusing that she is joining this new cast who represents her era of the television series. The TARDIS has disappeared, and the Doctor and company are marooned in a strange place that is between time and space. There are other survivors, and a mysterious ghost-like woman watching, waiting for a terrible prediction to come true. This was a very intriguing story from Mr. Adams. I liked this one a little more, and I enjoyed Ford’s making an appearance. It’s a somewhat strange, confusing story that works out quite well.

Both stories have plenty of merits. The performances of this particular main cast are improving with each of these releases. Of course, both writers have contributed significantly to Doctor Who over the years, and they continue to come up with impressive ideas that Big Finish effectively brings to life. This third volume of this range is a fine contribution to the vast catalog of stories.