News

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

(Warning: Extremely significant spoilers follow! Please Do Not read further if you do not want a major plot element spoiled!)

Well, how’s that for a spoiler warning, eh? Trust me, it’s necessary, and even with that warning, I still won’t get around to discussing the main spoiler until we’re some distance into this, just to keep people from accidentally learning something important.

This boxed set is quite a thing. It features the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy), Raine Creevey (Beth Chalmers), in her first appearance since the Season 27 Lost Stories arc, a brief cameo by Ace (Sophie Aldred), Elizabeth Klein (Tracey Childs), someone simply known as the Other Doctor (Alexander Macqueen), about whom I shall talk more later, and has all of them working to stop a set of incursions from another dimension, which take the form of things like giant floating baby heads and giant lava-spewing spiders.

Considering the title, The Fires Of Pompeii is curiously something of a damp squib. The story revolves around a big moral dilemma which plagues The Doctor throughout. And just like that big dilemma, The Fires Of Pompeii seems to be stuck in its own indecisive rut throughout.

It just cannot make up its mind on what it wants to be. Big ethical epic? Spooky story of sisterhood shenanigans? Flamey monster tale? Well, Fires touches on all three bases, but somehow only dips its arm in the water instead of diving right in. It's also interesting in that it starts to break the mould of a by now familiar season pattern. Normally, the first historical of the season acquaints The Doctor with a famous face from the past. In this season, we'll later get Agatha Christie in The Unicorn And The Wasp. But for now, The Fires Of Pompeii takes The...

Big Finish have afforded us an early look at the cover (click the image to view in hi resolution) of the upcoming drama Tiny Wings, which stars Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor and Tracey Childs (The Fires of Pompeii) reprising her earlier Big Finish role (Colditz) of Nazi scientist Elizabeth Klein - the Doctor's bizarre new companion! 1950s Kenya. The Mau Mau uprising. A disparate group of women lie low in a remote house in the jungle, waiting for a resolution or for rescue. Among...

Nine years after the release of Colditz (number 25 in the Doctor Who range), Big Finish has announced that the character of Elizabeth Klein (played again by Tracey Childs) is returning to audio Doctor Who! In Colditz, Klein was introduced as a Nazi scientist from a world in which Hitler had won the Second World War. Her time line was corrected - but Klein has never forgiven the Doctor for this defeat. And now she's back, in a season of three stories commencing January 2010. The first story...