Watchers

Audio Novels #2

Released: 12 January 2022

Listened: 7/19/22

This is the second of the original audio novels, written and narrated by Matthew Waterhouse, which is an interesting twist. Unfortunately, he’s not as adept a mimic as John Culshaw (who is?), so we’ve got his David-Warner-sounding Fourth Doctor. Because it’s an audio novel, it’s also quite long, which allows for lots of additional detail, but also affects the structure of the story. The Time Lord “Milady” and her companion Marcel are introduced early in the story, but don’t join the main plot until much later. This mostly gives Waterhouse the opportunity to describe the features of an advanced TARDIS in detail, followed later by tons of other TARDISes of various times and purposes, even a child’s “play” TARDIS with a cardboard console and painted controls. The majority of the story takes place in a timeless spot in the Vortex, where something is pulling other time ships together and fusing them into a single mass. (TARDISes are more advanced, so they just land inside, but can’t get away.) Of course there are Daleks here, because who can resist telling a story with Daleks? Plus it allows Nick Briggs to be a second voice actor, relieving the monotony. The Daleks act like Daleks always do, but at least it gives Adric the opportunity to encounter them, which he never did on TV. Much of the story revolves around a couple of other groups of aliens, one a race of cyborgs with a superiority complex, and one a race of lizard-types with a penchant for slavery. There’s not much here that affects the larger story of the Fourth Doctor, except that he becomes exhausted by the end of the story, perhaps contributing to his tiredness in “Logopolis.” The pace seems unnecessarily languid to me, but maybe that’s because I’ve been listening to radio plays, not audio books. Maybe if this were in print, it wouldn’t bother me so much. But as it is, there’s too much description, too much musing, and way too much denouement.