Doctor Who: A Thousand Tiny Wings

After quite a time in the wilderness, the Seventh Doctor stories from Big Finish manage a striking success. At its heart, this is a base-under-siege story, which is about as standard as it gets in Doctor Who. But a number of points raise it well above the average for such tales.

For a start, there's the setting - 1952 Kenya, during the Mau Mau Uprising. (The exact year isn't stated, but is apparent from the radio news in the background). This is not the sort of place that the show regularly visits, with The Massacre being perhaps the closest parallel in the TV show's history. The house in which a group of colonials have sought shelter is thus doubly under siege, from an alien threat on the one hand, and the Mau Mau insurgents on the other. The monster is also rather original, deadly yet seemingly quite fragile and beautiful.

What pushes it up to the top notch, though, is that one of the women seeking shelter is Elizabeth Klein, the Nazi scientist who appeared as a villain in the 2001 Big Finish release Colditz. Klein is no pantomime villain, and, indeed, denounces some of the Nazi's atrocities, yet still holds fast to a belief in National Socialism. The character is not entirely unsympathetic, and there's a logic to her perspective that it's the Doctor who has meddled with history, ensuring that the Germans lost WWII. Her philosophy is, of course, proven quite decisively wrong in the course of the story, which doesn't take a moral relativist stance, but her debates with the Doctor are nonetheless well written and acted.

An excellent start to a trilogy of stories featuring Seven and Klein.