DOCTOR WHO: DEAD LONDON
Dead London is a rather odd choice for an opening story as is is quite a low key, and at times a little boring if I am being honest, story which you do not normally associate with opening stories. At least with Blood of the Daleks last year we had the introduction of the new companion and of course the appearance of the Daleks, but this time we have a rather ordinary story and one that sees the two main characters apart for the majority of the story.
Not that Dead London is a bad story by any means. It has the interesting premise of several interlocking London’s throughout history where you could be in the 19the century in one street of London but two hundred years later if you crossed over into another street.
The script is also the first Big Finish adventure penned by Pat Mills best known for his work on 2000AD and on the early Doctor Who weekly and just like most of Mills’s scripts his reserached is unaparralleld and you really are drawn into the different era’s that we are presented with in this story.
I must admit that it is a bit of a shame that the Doctor and Lucie are apart for the majority of the story as their relationship was one of the key triumphs of the first 8th Doctor/Lucie season and for the majority of this story we are denied this. Instead the Doctor and Lucie have surrogate companions of their own through the story: The Doctor is teamed up with the wonderfully named Spring-Heeled Sophie (played by Clare Buckfield who also appeared in last years Horror of Glam Rock), who is the sort of character who may have ended up as a companion in the pre RTD era of the show, and Lucie is teamed up with another wonderfully named character Yellow Beryl (played by Katarina Olsson) .
On the plus side, however, the story does not tend to drag like quite a lot of Big Finish audios tend to and tied up nice and neatly by the end, even though it did take a couple of listens before I truly understood what the story was about. Dead London is a good start to the second series of 8TH Doctor audios but I do hope that the stories get a bit more interesting than this one was.
