The war is over and the Proteus, the last Gallifreyan ship on Karn, can leave. But Captain Argento has been rewarded with the last thing she expected: a second chance. And she is not the only one.

From the crashing organ of Howard Carter’s superb score to the closing reveal, this plays like a pulp adventure sequel fired sideways through Gallifreyan lore and it’s glorious. Samuel West, who has excelled in everything he’s done for Big Finish, excels here as the Banquo’s Ghost of the Time Lords. His Morbius is distant but never absent, a constant presence thrumming with power and seething with rage. Morbius clearly has a plan, and that plan is just one part of the story, told to us with measured calm by Janet Henfrey’s wonderfully named Narrata.

The voyage of the Proteus feels like the voyage of the Demeter with added relativity and the crew are as enraged and under pressure as the Time Lord they haven’t quite noticed they’ve gained. Mina Anwar’s Rolko is a grumpy crewmember eager for power and apparently gaining it. Hywel Morgan’s Mr Middlewitch is the exact sort of pragmatic, natural leader who will go down with the ship. If he’s lucky. All of them feel like fully formed characters who we’re meeting in the middle of their lives and at the end of a Gallifreyan civil war that has changed all of them.

The shadow of the Time War lies across this story but does so lightly. The Morbius conflict is far more specific, and raw, and Tim Foley’s script dives into its consequences for two characters in particular. Gilda, played by Lara Lemon, is a young Sister of Karn heading offworld. She’s determined and earnest and naive. Meanwhile Captain Argento, burning with new found life and trauma and played by Rachel Atkins, is keeping something from the crew but wearing her new found life, and gender, as she struggles to process her second life. Argento is fascinating, a non-Gallifreyan granted a regeneration, and a second heart, and barely able to deal with it. It would be easy to play this as revulsion, but Atkins finds something much more complex and far more interesting. Argento has no idea how to deal with the fact she’s alive, is wracked with the trauma of her survival and bent double under the secrets she’s keeping. But she keeps going, and so do the crew.

Verdict: Broken into chapters and directed with a sweeping gothic touch by Samuel Clemens, this doesn’t feel like anything else Big Finish have done. An excellent start to something new, built from the loud ghosts of ancient evil. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

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