The Doctor, Liv and Helen are stuck in contemporary London – and the Doctor’s bolthole in Baker Street is not the safe haven he expected it to be…

This opener for the latest series of adventures for the Eighth Doctor and his companions is penned by Matt Fitton, and while it has its own self-contained mystery, it’s far more concerned with setting up the new situation in which the TARDIS crew find themselves. The Ship is now just a box, and the Baker Street home has been converted into flats (thanks to the person the Doctor left it with – a nice shoutout to some previous Big Finish continuity) which means that there’s a lot of new people to get to know, both for the Doctor and his friends and the audience.

And of course we have the audio debut of the Curator, the enigmatic figure last seen in the Undergallery with the 11th Doctor at the end of The Day of the Doctor. For him, this is presumably after that, even if it’s earlier in the Doctor’s timestream, and Fitton continues the ambiguity that Steven Moffat put in the anniversary script. It’s a bit clearer as to who the Curator is – and Tom Baker has fun delivering some of the lines that hint at the identity – and he’s a little more proactive than you might expect.

The 21st century is a baffling time for both Liv and Helen – they may have visited, but they’ve not spent any extensive time there – so there’s a decent amount of time establishing how they’re coping, which allows the introduction of and intersection with the residents of Baker Street. It’s a typical London mixture of ages and lifesyles and I suspect each will come into their own at different times across the 16 stories in this strand.

Fitton juggles the storytelling requirements well, and director Ken Bentley and sound designer Benji Clifford ensure that there’s a very different feel to this from previous sets (as well as what feels like a certain stillness around the Curator).

Verdict: A lot of new elements are mixed together to produce an intriguing start to this new series. 8/10

Paul Simpson

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