The Hollow Crown

First Doctor Adventures #5.2

Released: 27 April 2021

Listened: 5/1/21

The second story means it’s time for a historical, and unusually for this particular series, they don’t land someplace entirely horrible and immediately want to leave again. It’s time to meet Shakespeare! Again! This story takes place later in Shakespeare’s life than “The Shakespeare Code,” so he remembers meeting someone called “The Doctor,” but the First Doctor doesn’t react to that. Shakespeare is not played by Dean Lennox Kelly, as he was on TV, but rather by Nicholas Asbury, who’s had a tiny role on TV and several Big Finish parts. Writer Sarah Grochala (an award-winning playwright, but with only a few Big Finish credits yet) tells a tight story, leaning in on the Shakespearean tropes of noble rebellion, main characters in disguise, and gender-swapping, as well as slipping in rhyming couplets here and there. The TARDIS crew can’t seem to help quoting the plays at every opportunity, but it’s not like the Tenth Doctor resisted either. There’s also a nice subplot where Ian and Barbara once again test the limits of how much one can go against recorded history, which sometimes records incorrectly. In the end, though, this is the Essex Rebellion (which I knew very little about), and it has to go more or less to form, but with a nice romantic twist that’s very appropriate to the tone. And it ends on a sudden cliffhanger, a nice 1964-ish twist, so I hope it won’t be long before that’s resolved. I enjoyed this story much more than I expected to, and I hope to hear more from this writer in the future.