The End of Time (Part One)

Back in the dim and distant past I was running a never entirely successful roleplaying game in which the characters were acting as caravan guards during a long journey. Sensing, perhaps erroneously, that they were a bit bored with lots of description and no choices I threw in an entirely random troll attack. I was a bit surprised some weeks later to discover that the players were still trying to work out why the trolls appeared.
I say this because I can't shake the feeling that Russel T. Davis writes Doctor Who in my the same way that I once wrote bad roleplaying games.
The End of Time is a perfectly servicable Doctor Who story, complete with a pointless and incomprehensible action scene in the middle. It features The Master, who was quite comprehensibly Dead with no hope of regeneration at the end of his previous appearance, and so the first job is to ressurect him. This done he falls into the clutches of a somewhat mad chap who hopes to rule the world via a price of dubiously explained alien tech, but horror of horrors, The Master turns the tables on his captor and conquors the world on his own behalf!
That being the classic Master storyline I have no real complaints. In the middle of this though there is the random troll attack. Or rather the classic bit of RTD throw something in that makes little sense. A fight scene in which The Doctor confronts The Master, and it transpires that The Master has developed super powers, including flight and the ability to fire lightning bolts. Does this add to the story? Does the subverting the alien tech in some way relate to these new abilities? Does it heck.
Does it fit neatly into the middle of an episode, in which the writer thought 'this has too much narrative, we need an action sequence to spice things up?' Probably.
While I'm not a subscriber to the 'everything RTD does damages Who' thesis, it can't be denied that he throws in random trolls, and they generally help his stories about as much as they helped my game all those years ago.
Still. One more of his stories and he's gone.

The Doomwood Curse

Back in the olden days, when Doctor Who was off the air, and Russell T Davies made TV shows that seemed to set out to annoy the people that weren't watching them, it carried on, as books and later as audio recordings. The books seemed to work very hard at becoming incomprehensible as fast as they possibly could, but some of the recordings were rather good. Made by Big Finish, they feature 'real' TV Doctors, often with 'real' TV companions supporting them.
At their best the Big Finish audio stories can be very good indeed. The one in which the Tardis arrives on the doomed world of Mondas just as desperate measures become essential remains the greatest Cyberman story yet told in any medium. At their worst the writers start to become obsessed with companions having only a single story hook, which has to be brought out every time. There was one girl slotted into the space between two Peter Davison stories who could be relied on to have a fight with the Doctor every adventure, and wonder if she should leave the Tardis and settle down where ever they happened to be this time. And in the end she did of course.
The revelations though have been that Colin Baker would have made a pretty damn good Doctor given decent scripts, and even more surprisingly, that Bonnie Langford could have made a good companion. Really.
As well as better special effects, the audio adventures do allow a modicum of time travel adventures rather more easily than can TV. For some years India Fisher played Charlie Pollard been a companion to Paul McGann. Eventually the relationship became a bit tired and McGann went off to do a different style of story, leaving Charlie to a happy ending. Except a few stories later Charlie pops up as a companion to Colin Baker, knowing rather more about the Tardis and the Doctor than he really expects, not letting on half of what she knows for fear that it might alter the Doctor's history and prevent her Doctor from ever coming to be. It makes a different and really rather jolly dynamic.

This story's pretty much a romp. There's a bit of pretext for a highwayman melodrama, but it doesn't really matter. Bodices are ripped, horses are chased, lost siblings are discovered through matching birthmarks. All very silly and a welcome sign that Big Finish aren't taking themselves too seriously.