The Great Space Elevator

Companion Chronicles #3.2

Released: August 2008

Listened: 9/28/20

This is a Companion Chronicle, one of the very few read by Deborah Watling, and it puts the spotlight squarely on Victoria. It features the Chronicles conceit of having an older Victoria relating a story that happened earlier in her life, explaining Watling’s much older-sounding voice. Her portrayals of the Doctor and Jamie aren’t the greatest, but that’s to be expected. The story involves a space elevator, as the title indicates, which makes the space-borne terminus a perfect “base under siege” scenario. Victoria displays a much greater sense of adventure and determination in this story than she has previously, disobeying instructions to stay put, and demanding to carry out a scouting mission on her own. She believes the Doctor and Jamie to be patronizing her at times. At other moments, though, she appears quite frightened, which matches her shifting characterization on TV. Writer Johnny Morris tries to fit in quite a lot of information about how electrical currents behave in magnetic fields, mostly by having the Doctor explain to Jamie and Victoria, who don’t follow much of it. Small trivial note: The Doctor plays his recorder, which the Second Doctor had mostly stopped using by this time on TV, but hasn’t appeared in Big Finish before now. It’s a fairly basic story, but it’s good to get inside Victoria’s head for a change.