Doctor Who: The Apocalypse Mirror

A Second Doctor story told from the perspective of Jamie. In places, this comes closer to being a regular audio play than a narrated story in the usual Companion Chronicle style, albeit one where Frazer Hines is rather obviously doing all of the voices except for Zoe's - the actual narration is kept to a minimum. Unfortunately, this is more jarring than anything else, neither quite one thing or the other, although it removes the need for the sort of framing narrative that earlier releases in the series relied on.

The TARDIS lands in a city in the far future, with Earth apparently on the brink of being abandoned. The city is run down, and it soon becomes clear that what remains of its population is being steadily whittled down by some mysterious external agency. To this is added an existential threat that seems rather ad hoc, just added in to the main plot to give the action some sense of urgency, and with little connection to anything else.

It's not a bad story by any means, but there's not much depth to it. Where all the people were vanishing to was something I worked out early on, at least in general terms, and this may not have helped. The Hawkers, which fill the role of ‘monster' in the story, are a reasonably interesting idea, but, unusually, they're the sort of thing that would probably work better with CGI visuals than with the narrated descriptions they have to be given here. I wasn't disappointed in the tale, but it's very average, a bit of filler that has nothing in particular to recommend it.