Doctor Who: Domain of the Voord

The obvious problem with doing audio plays (rather than novels or comics) featuring any of the first three Doctors is that their actors are no longer with us. Up until 2014, Big Finish dealt with this by using their Companion Chronicles format, audiobooks narrated in the first person and told from the perspective of one of the companions. With this new series, they expand that a little. The stories are still narrated, and, to that extent feel more like audiobooks than full-blown plays, but the narration is in third person, and much of the story is told through dialogue provided by a small cast of actors, and so is not solely seen from one person's perspective. They are also double the length, allowing for a more complex narrative.

This very first offering features the original line-up of the TV show, with William Russell delivering the Doctor's lines as well as Ian's, and Carole Ann Ford speaking as both Susan and Barbara. Three other actors round out the cast, providing five main guest characters between them. As the title indicates, it is a sequel to the first season TV story The Keys of Marinus, only the second story to actually feature a ‘monster', in the form of the titular Voord.

Although we know virtually nothing about them from the screened episodes, writer Terry Nation intended the Voord to be interstellar conquerors, and that's the theme followed up here. The TARDIS crew land on an alien planet recently subjugated by the Voord, and become involved in the resistance. This obviously has echoes of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and its enlivened by an exotic setting that makes the alien planet feel like more than simply one town or colony, but a whole world.

Other tropes of the First Doctor's run are also on display here; the early separation of the travellers from the TARDIS, living among the locals for several weeks, and an honest attempt to actually look at an alien culture. Here, that's the Voord, who are far more detailed (and, at times, sympathetic) than they were in the original TV story, and become much more interesting as foes because of it.

The weaknesses arise from the inevitable fact that, even in this new, more expanded, format, there are a limited number of original actors available, and they are fifty years older now than they were then. William Russell, for instance, is clearly not going to fool anyone into thinking he's still thirty, for all the general quality of his narration and acting. Partly to mask the first of these issues, the story primarily follows Susan and Ian, with Barbara reduced to a bit part, and even the Doctor missing for over half of the run time. On the plus side, this does at least mean that Susan gets to be a more central part of the story than she often was on TV, even if a key part of it still hinges on her being placed in peril.

There's also an issue with the incidental music being overly loud and distracting, something that should at least be easy to fix in later releases.

Despite such flaws, I found this to be an excellent start to the new series, doing a good job of evoking the atmosphere of the era, but expanding onto a wider stage than would ever have been possible on '60s TV, as well as breathing some life into one of the Doctor's more enigmatic foes. If they'd been this well-developed and original the first time round, they might have been used again...