SHORT TRIPS, VOLUME 3
Following on from its fourth segment, Short Trips (Volume 3) from Big Finish again continues with a short interlude narrated/voiced by Nicholas Briggs. This time around, the third Doctor (with Jo Grant) meets with the android. Rather than being a guard, this android is apparently a salesman. The Doctor gets it to demonstrate its weapon, shooting a hole in the ground. Such is the power of the weapon that the hole goes on forever. The unusually astute Jo Grant, lures the android to the hole and the Doctor Venusian Aikido’s it into the bottomless pit.
I’m not sure when the android went from being a guard to being a salesman but, of more question is the weapon that creates a hole that goes on forever. Wouldn’t that mean the hole would disappear right through the planet and carry on going throughout the galaxy and universe? Okay, it’s not established that this “grey space” is in our universe, but the Doctor treats the extreme power of this weapon with a casual disregard. Rather than try to stop the perpetuation of this weapon (which the android’s owners must have supplies of), he’s more interested in the door – which he subsequently opens and the usual fate befalls.
These little segments continue to be tiresome, although Nicholas Briggs does his best to lift things up a little bit with his voice interpretations (none too accurate this time, sadly).
Murmurs of Earth, read by Colin Baker, was written by M Deacon, J Middleton, and C Wraight. Why it requires three people to write a quarter-hour story is a bit of a question, especially when the story isn’t exactly fantastic. I listened to it in parts bored, and in parts just confused.
The 6th Doctor and Peri land on a planet that’s apparently populated only by naked holograms, of people that all look like each other. There’s some link to the Voyager space program, and Peri’s marked for death because she doesn’t conform to the hologram humans, but it all gets a bit muddled. Maybe this story would have benefited from just the one writer?
I’m sure there were some good ideas and concepts in this one but, despite Colin Baker being the best at reprising the voice of the Doctor in all of these stories, I must admit that it lost me when I went searching for a point to the thing. Perhaps the only time that the interlude before the “short trip” has been better than the “short trip” itself.
I think I shall hurriedly move on to the next one…
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