The Dead Star

Audio Novels #4

Released: 5 January 2023

Listened: 2/26/23

Big Finish’s audio novels have been all over the place in terms of who they feature. This time, it’s the Second Doctor, Polly, and Ben, shortly before Jamie joins up. It’s narrated by Michael Troughton, who now has the role of the Second Doctor in full-cast stories. I wasn’t too impressed with his version of the Doctor before, but somehow the contrast between his narration voice and his Doctor voice makes him sound more like his father. His secondary characters sometimes sound a bit odd, but they’re consistent, and you get used to them fairly quickly. Like all audio novels, it’s long, but it’s also split into several distinct parts, not unlike “The Mind Robber.” The first part is in a dimensionally fractured, empty, version of London, which would have been terribly difficult to pull off on TV in 1966, and might even be now. The next chunk takes place in London, 1968, which is a bit odd for Ben and Polly, as it’s two years after they left, but they mostly fit in. This time, the disaster is a small black hole passing through the solar system, which gets hung up on a time corridor that brings it straight toward the Earth. The third chunk takes place on a space station some distance into the future, but it’s more of a realistic station than one would have seen in the 60s. And the last bit is surreal to the point of being indescribable. The story is written by Kate Orman, who wrote several of the Virgin New Adventures novel series, but hasn’t written anything since then; Big Finish were determined to track her down for this series. That background shows in the story, as she pushes the boundaries of the story in ways that go beyond what Big Finish would normally do. She introduces a number of high concepts, such as reconfigurable robots held together by muon fields, and liquid knowledge transfer, which can impart skills and knowledge to anyone, Matrix-like, for a limited period of time. As a result, Polly gets to literally be action-girl, and Ben becomes a physics genius for a bit. There’s also a non-binary character from a human colony where gender simply isn’t considered important, and is referred to with female pronouns in one time period, male ones in another. This does throw Polly and Ben for a loop, but they adjust quickly enough. What’s interesting is that the Doctor really doesn’t understand what’s going on for most of the story. The black hole is a threat, but the underlying reasons remain unknown, so the Doctor spends a lot of time poking at the problem and being frustrated. I don’t normally mention the sound design in Big Finish, but it’s really excellent here, and takes the novel series beyond just an audiobook into creating a real sense of presence. So far, all the novels have been very different in tone, but that’s starting to feel like a feature.