The Outliers

Early Adventures #4.2

Released: 14 September 2017

Listened: 5/9/21

As the previous story in this boxed set was a pure historical, it makes sense that this one would be a sci-fi story. It’s by Simon Guerrier, who’s a top-tier Big Finish writer, but sometimes when these accomplished writers set out to evoke a certain era, they do so almost a bit too well. In this case, that means the pace is a bit languid, and makes the story feel overly drawn out. For example, the Doctor doesn’t appear in Episode 3, because he’s off talking to the aliens, and Ben, Polly and Jamie spend the whole episode being worried and coming up with various plans to rescue him, which he ultimately doesn’t need. As often happens in these sorts of stories, there’s a big corporation doing insensitive corporate sounding things for the “good of humanity,” and not noticing the indigenous life forms they’re harming until things start to go wrong. The manager who speaks only in corporate slogans and can’t get his head around the real problem is a bit of a wet dishrag this time around, so there’s less tedious shouting and threatening of executions, but he’s still not easy to deal with. I have to give credit to Guerrier’s writing of narration (spoken by Anneke Wills), who really evokes rather silly-seeming space-age corporate uniforms, and the prefab housing sets. It’s remarkably visual for an audio story.