dwmr219_absolutepower_1417The Doctor and Mrs Clarke arrive on the planet Teymah where ancient secrets are about to come to light…

Jamie Anderson’s debut script for the main range, which he directs himself, deliberately evokes a number of familiar tropes from Doctor Who stories (as he admits in the extras) but gives some of them a twist. That accounts for the feeling of déjà vu that you may well get in early scenes, but stick with it because Anderson opens up the scope of the piece as each episode goes on and what seems like quite a small scale tale becomes a discussion of revenge and betrayal.

There’s one element though that doesn’t quite work, and while it obeys Chekov’s law* (Anton, not Pavel!) about the gun on the wall that’s displayed at the start needing to be used by the end, it takes this a little too far, and gives us something that every successive Doctor would use had he access to it. I’m hoping that Quicksilver will address this.

That’s a small negative among a sea of positives: the characterisation of the sixth Doctor and Constance is spot-on (particularly with regard to their emotions), and there’s a terrific – and mostly new to Big Finish – guest cast, with Eve’s Jenny Bede great as Florrie and Arian Nik similarly strong as Ammar. The extras reveal this is one of his first jobs, and based on this, he has a very bright future ahead of him!

The music and design work are very cinematic, as we’ve come to expect from Anderson’s work on the series, with muffled dialogue used very effectively. It’s the second Big Finish contribution from Joe Kraemer – the composer of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, among many other Hollywood scores – so perhaps it’s not surprising that it’s like that. Hopefully he’ll be providing many more.

Verdict: An engaging and very slickly produced piece. 8/10

Paul Simpson

*(“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on a wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there”)