Excelis Decays

Special

Released: 1 July 2002

Listened: 9/4/21

This is the third part of the Excelis trilogy (after "Excelis Dawns" and "Excelis Rising"), featuring Anthony Stewart Head with the Seventh Doctor this time, and also featuring Yee Jee Tso, who played Chang Lee in the TV Movie. It was unavailable on download for a long time because of rights issues, but I eventually got my hands on it. For a trilogy that started off with Iris Wildthyme and her attendant wackiness, the ending is quite dark. And talky, but that’s common for early Big Finish. Excelis has reached a fairly modern level of development, complete with nuclear weapons, computers, and genetic engineering. Grayvorn is still an influential figure, with kind of a handwave as to how he escaped the Relic in part 2. Excelis is now in a state of permanent and total war with every other nation on the planet, with the entire economy dependent on the war’s continuation. Into which the Seventh Doctor is dropped, and talks it to death, because that’s what he does. Yee Jee Tso plays a senior officer, but there’s no real reason to cast him in particular, and the part doesn’t call for an American accent. There are a handful of other minor characters who are surprisingly amenable to helping the Doctor, but things go badly for them. In fact, things go badly for everybody, including the Doctor, who’s left wondering whether he did the right thing in any of these three stories. It’s notable as the first attempt at a Five-Six-Seven trilogy, but the ending is rather a damp squib.