Halloween can’t be properly celebrated unless Big Finish Productions starts honoring the holiday with new Doctor Who audio adventures. Halloween: Sea Smoke and Other Stories is actually a good homage to the season all the way through. There are four episodes with various writers, directors and Doctors. Although I have my preferences as usual in a collection such as this, there really isn’t an episode that hit a totally wrong note with me.
The First Doctor, played by Stephen Noonan, takes the lead in Sea Smoke by Jonathan Sims. Ken Bentley is back in the director’s chair. Noonan is continuing his impression of the late William Hartnell and has gotten better. Lauren Cornelius is at his sided as Dodo, who was initially played by the late Jackie Lane. The guest cast is comprised of Kiran Sonia Sawar, Jamie Laird, and Michael Abubakar,
The Doctor and Dodo arrive on a Scottish island in the nineteenth century. There is a strange tradition of burning “kelp” ,, and this time strange transformations are occurring among the residents. The Doctor realizes that an alien presence is at work, and he is not going to let that stand.
This is not the most memorable of episodes, but it’s not bad. It has that reliably great, isolated setting of an island, which can feel kind of repetitive. It does work, and Sims is a good enough writer to tell a unique enough story even in Doctor Who. Noonan and Cornelius continue to build on the chemistry between them. It’s an enjoyable enough start to the collection, and the First Doctor is well realized even without the original actor to portray him.
Party Favours by Georgia Cook has no Doctor, but UNIT is on hand to deal with a threat from the Weeping Angels. Jemma Redgrave and Ingrid Oliver reprise their roles as Kate Stewart and Osgood of UNIT. Other cast members are Saffron Coomber, Liv Andrusier, Nicole Davis, and Jack Ayres. This director here is Helen Goldwyn.
The focus of the story is on a couple, Annika and Bev who are having some trouble in their relationship, A Halloween party is to be planned, and Bev wants to invite some upstairs neighbors who seem to be rather secretive. The Weeping Angels are about to crash the party and feed on the guests.
This one took me a bit to warm up to, but I ended up liking the idea well enough. The nature of the Weeping Angel has that instinctive creep vibe. I don’t know if Osgood’s eccentricity comes across all that clear on audio. The cast on the whole was fine.
The Weeping Angels are a little tricky when it comes to the audio medium, but Cook does a decent enough job with the dialogue to convey what was happening. Of course, the sound design continues to be stellar. Even though the Doctor wasn’t really in this one, this was still a worthwhile addition to the set.
Paul McGann and Jaye Griffith star in Bramble King written by Noga Flaishon with Steven Kavuma as director. Judith Jacob, Jamie Kenna, and Felicity Cant make up the guest cast in this story.
The Doctor and Lady Audacity Montague find a strange cargo ship drifting among the stars and help the crew when it seems that they are dealing with creature from folklore known as the Bramble King. They find that this entity may be a manifestation of a severely damaged mind.
So, tree-like people are now crossing the stars, and they have their own spooky legends.
This is a very imaginative, spooky story that does have all of the tropes of a horror/sci-fi romp. Paul McGann and Griffiths are great here.
Jaye Griffiths has a very uniquely resonant voice that is striking and pleasant. Paul McGann continues to sound great as his version of the Doctor. It continues to be an inspired pairing.
There is also something quite somber about the story when the origins of the Bramble King are revealed. The performances are quite compelling from everyone involved. The characters are a little hard to fix in one’s mind when trying to decide what these people looked like. They have human-sounding names and don’t really sound that alien. I guess that made them easy to understand, but I had some difficulty picturing what they were supposed to look like as a species. Leafy hair and bark-like skin was about as far as I could get. Anyway, it’s still a compelling episode, and I can picture the Doctor and Audacity well enough, so that was all that mattered to mne ultimately.
Finally, Hannah Kennedy delivers Merlin’s Trap with Jon Culshaw stepping into the vocal shoes of Peter Capaldi, who has yet to participate in these recordings. This episode is directed by Samuel Clemens. The guest cast is comprised of Robyn Cooper, Kymberley Cochrane, Lucy-Jane Quinlan, and Antony Jardine.
A group of cave explorers find themselves experiencing strange distortions in their surroundings. A ghostly voice keeps warning them to stay away, but they push forward until members of the party begin to disappear. They believe that the spirit of Merlin is issuing these bizarre warnings, but this presence goes by another name…the Doctor.
Another compelling spookfest here. Jon Culshaw really nails it here in his imitation of Peter Capaldi. It’s quite an unsettling story, and the Doctor is kind of absent in many ways, but Culshaw gets enough to do to show off his vocal talents.
Overall, the set is probably one of the best releases in some time. All of the stories were kind of unsettling in their own way, so all of the writers hit that goal. It was a fun set to experience, and that was just the first of the Halloween sets that have been released so far.
Doctor Who audio fans should not let this one pass by.
