The Screaming Skull

The Worlds of Doctor Who #3

Released: 8 September 2014

Listened: 7/28/20

This chapter is only tenuously a spin-off, as it has to do with UNIT, which at the time had a few independent stories, but the new-series UNIT stories were still a little while off yet. It stars Richard Franklin reviving his role as Mike Yates. It also features Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso, who were the companions in the 1996 TV Movie, but Big Finish doesn’t have the rights to those characters, so they’re playing unrelated UNIT agents, who both happen to be American. They’d appeared before, in the Companion Chronicle “Mastermind,” where it was established that they work at the Vault, a UNIT storage facility for strange items. It’s the same concept as the Black Archive from the 50th Anniversary special, and even though the Vault predates the Archive, it still gets a little shout-out here. As in his appearance in “Real Time,” Tso has one of the most realistic American accents I’ve heard in Big Finish, and Ashbrook’s is pretty good as well, although the writer has given them both English speech habits, rather than American ones. The story is mostly straightforward, and a good redemption arc for both characters, who have nicely distinct attitudes. However, it takes an unexpectedly dark turn at the end, because the larger story isn’t over yet.