The Doctor is whisked away from his adventures with Peri, deposited on a world where time itself has been brought to a halt. Here he meets a young woman who claims to have been brought into existence mere seconds ago. Her mission is simple (to her): find and reassemble the segments of the Key to Time. The Doctor, in his previous incarnation, carried this mission out and inadvertently set this new quest for the Key in motion. The woman, who he names Amy for lack of any other name, is a tracer in humanoid form, capable of “smelling” nearby segmets of the Key. She has picked the Doctor to be her assistant. Their first stop is Mars, at an earlier stage of the planet’s development, when its native life forms are about to meet a destiny that will reshape their peaceful society into the form in which the Doctor knows them better: the Ice Warriors. And the Doctor – and the Key to Time – may be responsible for that drastic change.

written by Simon Guerrier
directed by Jason Haigh-Ellery
music by Jamie Robertson

Cast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Ciara Janson (Amy), Laura Doddington (Zara), Nicholas Briggs (Isskar), Andrew Jones (Harmonious 14 Zink), Raquel Cassidy (Mesca), Jeremy James (Thetris), Heather Wright (Wembik)

Timeline: between The Bride Of Peladon and Mission Of The Viyrans

Review: Just about any Doctor Who fan knows that one of the most beloved high points of the 1970s was the season-long quest for the Key to Time. That experiment, spread across the entirety of classic Doctor Who’s season, had quite an impact on the show’s mythos, introducing Romana, the second K-9 model, the Key itself, and the Black and White Guardians. Almost all of these things have resurfaced again, in later episodes, in audio form, in novels…but very few have revisited the Key itself. As Big Finish’s creative brass began realigning the release schedule into short “seasons” of audio adventures focusing on a single Doctor/companion combo, the first such “season” picks up the Key’s pieces – literally. (more…)

Christmas, 2009: retired UNIT Captain Mike Yates spots a classified ad seeking a retired Army captain with experience in dealing with alien threats. With an uneasy feeling that the ad was written specifically to catch his attention, Mike responds, visiting an isolated country cottage called the Nest. Here he finds a stern housekeeper, Mrs. Wibbsey, and the Doctor. The house is filled to the brim with examples of the art of taxidermy, but Mike is startled to learn that the dead animals return to life at night, ready to kill. Demanding an explanation from the Doctor, he learns that some force has reanimated the creatures to use them as pawns for a sinister plan. The Doctor, at great personal risk, has isolated all of the dead creatures in his cottage, using the TARDIS’ dimensional stabilizer to surround the house with a force field and using his own psychic abilities to keep the undead animals docile. But this has also trapped the mind behind the evil plan – a hive-mind swarm of alien hornets – near the house with him. And now Yates is trapped there as well…

written by Paul Magrs
directed by Kate Thomas
music by Simon Power

Cast: Tom Baker (The Doctor), Richard Franklin (Mike Yates), Susan Jameson (Mrs. Wibbsey), Daniel Hill (Percy Noggins)

Notes: Early plans for the Hornets’ Nest stories apparently called for the team of the fourth Doctor and the retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, a part that Nicholas Courtney had reprised just a year prior to this story’s release in The Sarah Jane Adventures and in a short bonus featurette, “Liberty Hall”, filmed for the 2009 DVD release of Mawdryn Undead. Before production began, however, Courtney suffered a mild stroke in early 2009, and though he made a recovery, he was unavailable to reprise the role of the Brigadier for either Hornets’ Nest or for Sarah Jane Adventures (in which there were plans for him to become a recurring guest character).

Review: To put it mildly, the anticipation was off the scale for Tom Baker’s return to the role of the Doctor for a short series of new audio adventures. For many years, Baker had ducked questions about returning to the role for Big Finish, preferring to make snarky comments about the company’s output instead. When Baker finally did return, however, it wasn’t for Big Finish, but for the BBC itself. When I learned this, I was somewhat worried that Big Finish’s days with the Doctor Who audio license might be numbered. (more…)

A growing number of people are ending up in Cardiff’s hospitals, trapped in a trancelike comatose state. These victims all have one thing in common: they answered a random phone call on a vintage business phone. While Jack can understand retro chic, he doesn’t understand how the outdated phones could be having this effect. A trace reveals that the same number was responsible for all of the victims to date. Jack calls the number and gets no answer, but when he gets a call back from that number and answers the phone, he joins the ranks of the victims. Ianto and Gwen call on the expertise of an old flame of Jack’s, neurologist Stella Courtney. She’s familiar with Jack and with Torchwood, but hasn’t been involved with either since the 1970s. With Rhys helping out, Gwen tries to track down more information on the phones responsible for the wave of incidents. Ianto stays at Jack’s bedside while Dr. Courtney tries to learn more by watching Jack’s brainwaves. Torchwood needs to work fast, because the effects are soon no longer limited to a specific set of 30-year-old telephones…

written by Phil Ford
directed by Kate McAll
music by Murray Gold

Cast: John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness), Eve Myles (Gwen Cooper), Gareth David-Lloyd (Ianto Jones), Kai Owen (Rhys), Dona Croll (Stella), Eiry Thomas (Jan), Matthew Gravelle (Bob), Brendan Charleson (Tyler)

Notes: This made-for-audio Torchwood adventure was produced by BBC Radio 4 for broadcast on July 3rd, 2009, days before the premiere of Children Of Earth on BBC TV. The Dead Line was written specifically to accomodate an extremely tight recording schedule for John Barrowman, hence Jack’s absence from much of the story. Phil Ford has scripted TV adventures for both Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Timeline: After the audio story Golden Age, and before the Torchwood: Children Of Earth TV miniseries.

Review: The Dead Line is yet another radio adventure for Torchwood that doesn’t suffer for existing in the audio medium alone, and yet is good enough that one wonders why it couldn’t have been done on TV. (more…)