Big Finish Audio Drama Capsule Reviews: Kiss of Death, The Four Doctors, Wreck of the Titan

This isn't going to become just a Doctor Who blog, I promise!

Kiss of Death: The idea is that Turlough and his childhood sweetheart can unlock the treasures

hidden away on a forgotten world by mingling their DNA, the titular kiss of Death. If kissing on Trion involves mingling DNA, I think they're doing it wrong. (Though on reflection, maybe we're the ones doing it wrong.)

Like an unfortunate number of the Fifth Doctor's stories, this one was just kind of there. Not so bad that I hated it, but plenty bland. They gave it a try with the Morass, a biological security system, but mostly they're trying to stretch out an extremely thin story.

Rating: 2/5

The Four Doctors: This was a gloriously complicated pileup of Doctors. The audio plays are for the superfans, and the producers can get away with convoluted plots like this. The Daleks are being dicks, but the Doctor stops them with a moebius strip of time travel. The story seems a bit disjointed at first, but it's interesting to discover how things that seemed to happen concurrently are actually the result of an action being performed by a different Doctor in another timeline. Fun, but insubstantial.

Rating: 3/5

Wreck of the Titan: This opened with the 6th Doctor continuing his adventures with Jamie?! Yes,

please! Unfortunately, it's almost sunk, as it were, by a rather large flaw. The story hinges on the assumption that neither the Doctor nor the audience know of the novella of the same name, which is really fairly well known. Once that occurred to me, it was hardly a leap at all to get to the Land of Fiction for the climax.

Also, it had a performer of whom I thought "This is the worst New York accent since that showgirl from the Daleks Take Manhattan." Of course, it was the same person. It must be refreshing to Frazer Hines not to be delivering the worst accent in a production.

Rating: 3/5