SHORT TRIPS, VOLUME 3

Short Trips (Volume 3) from Big Finish begins with a short 5-minute piece narrated/voiced by Nicholas Briggs.  The 7th Doctor and Ace are in a gray space, where everything is gray, and there’s no sign of the TARDIS. There’s a gray door guarded by a gray android.

The Doctor tells Ace about two entities, one Black and one White.  This Gray Space is what’s between them when they tangle.  A voice in their heads tells the Doctor that he’ll have seven chances to solve a puzzle.  He quickly deactivates the android and enters the door, whereupon he falls and falls … and falls.

Written by Simon Paul Miller, Seven to One is apparently split into parts throughout the overall series of stories with this piece being the opening part.  Briggs does a creditable job at giving the Doctor and Ace distinguishing enough voices.  There isn’t much to tell about the story so far.

The Five Dimensional Man by Kate Orman runs for a little under 20 minutes.  It’s the 50s and a typical housewife dreams of wild science fiction adventures to write in her stories, but the words won’t come from her typewriter.  A space-suited Zoe Herriot materialises in her kitchen, clutching a strange gadget.  It’s not long before an oddly dressed little man arrives in a machine, telling the girl that their third friend is in the clutches of some villain.

The 2nd Doctor takes Zoe, and the eager writer, to the far future where the writer encounters a Frankenstein-esque being intent on alien invasion, and a captured Scotsman.  The girl’s gadget saves the day, and the Scotsman, and the writer has a head full of ideas to break her writer’s block.

Read by David Troughton, it should perhaps be no surprise that he does a fantastic 2nd Doctor voice.  If the 2nd Doctor had more input into the story, his voice would have been fantastic to carry the story.  As it is, the story is mostly about the writer, with Zoe being the primary of the three regular characters from this era.   In those terms, it’s an intriguing idea, albeit perhaps one with little depth and mostly made up from clichés.  That said, for a little over 18 minutes, it’s quite a delightful listen.

Next, the 3rd Doctor in Pop-Up…