Doctor Who: Destination: Nerva

This story kicks off an ongoing series of Big Finish plays starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. It wasn't quite his first return to the role since his TV departure over 30 years prior - even ignoring Dimensions in Time (which is usually a good plan), he had reprised the role in some BBC radio plays, and a couple of “Lost Stories” for Big Finish themselves - but it does rather have that feel.

On that front, it's fair to say that Baker's voice, while still instantly recognisable, has aged somewhat over the decades. He was, after all, in his late 70s when he recorded this. But, taken together with a re-use of the '70s era theme tune, and the fact Jameson's voice hasn't changed so notably, it was still enough to take me back to that era of the show's history. Which, to be honest, is something it's a little difficult to disentangle from the audio play taken on its own merits.

In fact, nostalgia for '70s Who is very much the point here. The story is set on Nerva Beacon, visited twice by Four in his first season on the show, although, in plot terms, any random space station would have done. It's a classic base-under-siege story, with elements of body horror strongly reminiscent of The Ark in Space, and, albeit to a lesser extent, The Invisible Enemy. It's absolutely the sort of tale that could have been written for TV during the Hinchcliffe era, and one can almost imagine it having appropriately ropey special effects.

So it's not, on the whole, a particularly original story. Nor is the hand-wavey resolution much to get excited about. But it's not meant to be original, it's meant to hark back to the past, even going so far as to recycle lines from the TV version. The incidental music is also cleverly composed to sound like something that might have been used at the time.

In that respect, while it's nothing special, it succeeds at what it's trying to do, and the feel is, as noted above, spot on. That's the thing about reprises of old shows; you want them to be the same, but at the same you also need them to be different. This a is a good kick off, dusting off the cobwebs and reminding us where we came from to get here, but the series is going to need to do more than rehash old glories if it's to succeed in the longer term.