Doctor Who: The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories

An anthology of four 30-minute stories featuring the Fifth Doctor.

The Demons of Red Lodge - The title piece starts out as something vaguely akin to The Blair Witch, before morphing into Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Much of the story is quite creepy, but, unusually for one of Big Finish's 30-minute stories, it would probably have benefited from being longer, allowing a more gradual build-up of the tension, and a more delayed reveal of the monster. But it is quite clever, and works well, even if it is over rather too quickly. 3.5 stars.

The Entropy Composition - The Doctor comes across a prog rock composition which is so bad that playing it will threaten the very fabric of the universe. Fortunately, the story is both much better, and more serious, than that one-line description implies, seamlessly moving from a music library in the far future to a recording studio in the '60s and back again. Big Finish has played with sound-based monsters before, but even so, it's an effective idea on audio, and is successful here. There's also a good performance from Joanna Munro as the housekeeper. An easy 4 stars.

Doing Time - a prison story that starts out as a blunt pastiche of BBC sitcom Porridge, but soon (perhaps fortunately) seems to forget that idea. It all feels very contrived, and it's hard to find the setting, or the plot, believable. With the comedy elements falling flat, in my opinion, it's the weakest story of the four, and a straight 3 stars.

Special Features - the last story comprises the DVD commentary to one of those '70s horror anthology films in the vein of Tales from the Crypt, and one that has a supposed curse associated with its production. The explanation as to what is going on is slowly built up as the commentary proceeds, before hitting a rather large chunk of exposition from the Doctor towards the end; it's one of those nice uses of the audio format that wouldn't work nearly so well in any other medium. The mockery of DVD commentaries in general is great fun, and the central mystery is also intriguing, so it's another 4 stars.

Which overall is an average of 3.63 stars, narrowly scraping a 4.