Ellery Quest has a fantastic idea. It involves a man, a woman with robot limbs and a time machine…

‘All of Time and Space’ is the most Eleventh Doctor story to date in this season and he’s barely in it for the first ten minutes or so. Leroy Bonsu is fantastic as Ellery, a young post-war playwright with a brilliant idea, a great cat and no manner of luck at all. Tim Foley’s script doesn’t so much throw him, and us, in at the deep end as drive us to the coast and fire us into the sea. Ellery is right there with us. Struggling, worried, unsure and ultimately triumphant.

This is an Eleventh Doctor story about Eleventh Doctor stories and it’s lovely. It’s one of those stories that it’s best to experience cold so I’m wary of spoilers but I can say this. If you’re worried this is one of those Eleventh Doctor stories the show sometimes did which threw twenty balls in the air and caught five? It’s really not. Bonsu and Richard Hope as Mr Darling (all of him) are great and Safiyya Ingar and Jacob Dudman have brilliant, sparky energy as the increasingly long-suffering time travellers Ellery is writing towards. It also has one of my favourite endings in any version of the show and that’s not a recommendation I make lightly. It really is that good.

Angus Dunican’s ‘The Yearn’ feels completely different to the other two stories and, quietly, like some major story architecture is being laid down. Arriving at a base under siege (Too many boxes! Recycled air! Brilliant!) the Doctor and Valarie are caught in an unwinnable siege with a mysterious, beautiful alien race called the Yearn. And then they lose.

Kind of.

It’s becoming a truism that Big Finish always excel at supporting casts but they really do and this one is no exception with Mia Tomlinson a particular standout. The burgeoning romance between Valarie and Roanna, played with sparky, exhausted charm by Tomlinson is meant as a pastiche of the flashbulb romances the show has sometimes relied on. Here it becomes something much more interesting and oddly stoic. Valarie is, at this point, a walking trauma victim (and she still has the third story to get through) and hearing her relax into a romance is poignant and earned. It’s also married to a clever deconstruction of Base Under Siege stories that evolves the form, pokes (a little) fun at it and as I say, sets up some big stuff further down the line. Plus there’s great work from Samuel Clemens as the Yearn.

The set closes with ‘Curiosity Shop’ by James Goss and it’s a Lot. A Lot in the same way ‘The Girl Who Waited’ was and honestly it treads some thematically similar ground. Mr Foreman is a junkyard owner. Valarie is the nice young woman who comes every week to check on the strange blue box in the junkyard and tell stories of the Doctor. All it costs her is a piece of herself and the gnawing sense of time running out as the shutdown battle fleets above the world begin to wake up…

There’s an uncomfortable truth around the Eleventh Doctor that he’s either mercurial or actively unlikable in a way few other incarnations are. Goss embraces that here and tells a story which is one part fable, one part horror story and one part acting showcase. You’ll figure out what’s going on fairly quickly but the Doctor doesn’t and that leads to a horrifying final act that gives Ingar some amazing material to work with that she elevates even further. Valarie has been pushed, hard and quicker than most by the Doctor and she gets to push back here after a very unusual, frankly chilling resolution. Her anger and horror and resolve is beautifully portrayed and Valarie ends this story even stronger than she came in. She pays for it too.

Dudman, always great, is revelatory here and without getting spoilery, he’s often playing more than one version of the Doctor at once. It’s complex, subtle writing and acting and feels like one of those choices that really flies in an audio only story. The slow build is both an impressive feat of vocal acting and a remarkably clever means of showing the Doctor ‘rebooting’. The fact he’s ruthless as he does is particularly interesting, given that the Eleventh’s kindness is the only trait as strong as his ruthlessness. This is the Doctor, all of them to date, raw and injured and utterly without front. It’s never, ever easy to listen to and can’t have been easy to play but good Lord is it compelling.

Verdict: All of Time and Space is ambitious and vast in scope but anchored in a uniformly very strong team bringing it to life. It has all the scale of the Eleventh Doctor stories at their occasionally most unwieldy, but moves with a lighter, and far more successful, step. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

Click here to order from Big Finish