Doctor Who: Frostfire

A quick word on the format here, since it's the first Companion Chronicle I've reviewed. Unlike most of Big Finish's other work, this isn't a full-cast play, but something more akin to an audiobook. The Companion Chronicles feature a character from the series giving a first-person account of an un-televised adventure, and, in that respect, are basically audiobooks that happen to be written in the first person.

It differs from a regular audiobook in that (in this case) an additional character, voiced by a different actor, occasionally interrupts the narrator, and that the story itself is enhanced with background sound effects. If you're used to audiobooks this may be a plus (or, then again, it may be distracting), but if you're used to full-cast plays, it's likely a step in the other direction.

Anyway; Frostfire.

This is a perfectly functional Doctor Who story, but it suffers from feeling a bit too generic. One could easily imagine the story featuring any Doctor and around half the companions would work as well as Vicki does. Indeed, by being set in Earth's past, yet still featuring a monster, one could argue that the First Doctor is just about the one it works least well with. It has a reasonable pace, and is quite atmospheric, and there's some nice ideas in it, but it somehow fails to take advantage of the characters that it has to work with.