Doctor Who: The Death Collectors

Another somewhat disappointing entry in the 7th Doctor audio plays. As with a number of other such stories set before the TV movie, when the Doctor is travelling alone, there is a fair bit of musing on mortality, and, as is also usual, it doesn't really come off.

The story does benefit from some hard sci-fi elements that make it more believable than stories set in the future normally are - there's a significant risk from vacuum, for example. But these are offset not least by the Death Collectors themselves; quite what it is they're supposed to be doing isn't terribly clear.

There's a sense of a dark, brooding atmosphere here, an homage, perhaps, to something like Alien, but the story certainly isn't in that league, and, despite some efforts at exposition never quite made sense to me. It's grim, yes, and it's done reasonably well, but that's about it.

Attached to the end is the 30-minute story “Spider's Shadow”, a story about a time loop that's quite a bit better than the main feature. The disjointed nature of the narrative works in its favour, without making it difficult to follow. But it doesn't manage to pull the release as a whole above 3 stars.