Doctor Who: The Eleven

This three-episode story features the Sixth Doctor going up against the title character, a renegade Time Lord original to the audios. I know that I just criticised 4th Doctor story The God of Phantoms for feeling too long when it's only marginally longer than this, but here, the fact that the story is broken up into three means that it just doesn't feel the same, especially as the middle episode has a different style to the other two. Nonetheless, it does fit together as a single story, rather than three isolated ones.

All For One - This episode introduces us to a planet where the inhabitants all have a split personality, being able to switch between their two selves at will. Inevitably, they regard anyone who cannot do this as, in effect, disabled and there is some low-level discrimination against such people. That gets directed at Constance and a guest character, but the main focus is on The Eleven, taking advantage of some of the local medical technology to do something it wasn't intended for. Although much of it is a runaround with the main characters being hounded by The Eleven, it does have the advantage of making use of the exact nature of his insanity rather than just have him being nuts. And, while it would work well enough as a standalone, it's a good intro to what follows.

The Murder of Oliver Akkron - The second story is the most unconventional for Doctor Who and serves solely as a bridge between the other two, such that it wouldn't work at all in isolation. It consists almost entirely of a conversation between a sane-seeming Eleven and its titular character, whose identity and importance are slowly fleshed out as the story progresses. This, obviously, is the sort of thing that audio is well suited to, although the fact that it consists almost entirely of two people sitting down and having a polite dinner conversation is far from what one would expect. On its own, this would be dreary, but it fleshes out the world in which it is set and does employ some clever misdirection as well as providing what will prove key backstory for the third episode. An oddity, perhaps, but it fits where it is.

Elevation - We're back on more familiar ground in the final instalment as the Sixth Doctor returns to see the fallout of the previous episode and The Eleven coming up with an even more audacious scheme. It takes a while before that becomes apparent but when it does, as in the first episode, it ties in directly with the nature of his affliction. It manages to explore a little of what it would be like to be him, and gives Miranda Raison (as Constance) some entertaining opportunities to ham it up. It's bonkers and grandiose but very fitting for the character and once again showing Mark Bonnar's strengths as an actor. (If there's a weakness with the character concept, though, it's that eleven is too many - this far in and I've still not got a real feel for Two, Four, Five, or Seven and, while I'm sure they're all in this, I couldn't tell you which ones they are. But heck, that still leaves seven of them...)