Doctor Who: Project: Destiny

It is entirely possible that I'm being unfair to this release by giving it just three stars. The fact is that I found it rather confusing, and difficult to get into, but that may not be the fault of the play itself.

That's because the story builds heavily on established continuity, and continuity, it turns out, that I'd almost entirely missed. What I didn't realise when I bought it is that it's the fourth in a set of audio plays dealing with a particular villain who runs one of the UK's many secret organisations investigating alien artefacts. And I've not listened to the first two in the sequence, which seem to be the critical ones for understanding this one, while I'd never realised that the third one was actually a prequel to the others. (No wonder I thought there were unresolved plot threads at the end of it, though...)

It doesn't help that the main villain's name is the same as that of a guest character in the TV series, leaving me wondering for a while what the connection between them was supposed to be. Or that one of the characters was previously introduced in a novel that I've not read either, adding yet another layer of backstory that was entirely opaque to me. Oh, and a large chunk of it is a direct continuation of the cliffhanger at the end of The Angel of Scutari (released 18 months previously!) and references to the events of The Harvest, but fortunately I'm familiar with those ones.

Now, the fact is, I like stories that do this kind of thing - building over a number of episodes into a grander arc. In this case they are surprisingly far apart, with each “episode” being released at roughly three-year intervals, but even so, it's more likely my bad luck than any fault on the part of the writer.

At any rate, what we have left is a zombie apocalypse story with giant insects as stand-ins for the zombies. It's reasonably atmospheric (hence the three stars), and, in fairness, Captain Aristedes is written on the assumption that you might not have read the novel she's originally from. It's all complicated by something to do with Hex's past, but I was just getting confused by that point. For instance, I have no clue as to why he was willing to believe the villain when the latter was quite so obviously lying. This apparent stupidity on his part did rather damage my suspension of disbelief, but it's at least possible that there's something in the stories I've missed that explains it.

So, who knows? Maybe it's better than I found it to be; I was likely not the target audience for this particular tale.