Mike Maddox

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2257186.html

I'm really not a huge fan of the Trial of a Time Lord season of classic Who; but Big Finish have proved capable of mining the rubble for jewels, and this is an excellent coda to the season, 27 years on: Colin Baker, Michael Jayston and Lynda Bellingham are renited as the Sixth Doctor, the Valeyard and the Prosecutor for a trial drama that picks up the rather tangled threads of Time Lord lore and the Valeyard's own intricate relationshp with the Doctor, and weaves them into something new. My favourite moment was quite near the beginning, when the Doctor, initially somewhat disinclined to act as the Valeyard's defence counsel in a rigged trial, becomes sufficiently outraged by the Time Lords' conduct of proceedings to take on the challenge. In general, there are three seasoned performers here, particularly Jayston, who slip back into their previous parts with a real injection of adrenalin. Much better than I expected, even with the more than reliable Alan Barnes as co-author.… (more)

The Feast of Axos brings the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn into contact with an Earth spaceship mounting a salvage expedition to Axos, four decades after the Third Doctor left it in a time loop. It's nice to hear Evelyn alive and well again, and there were some interesting reflections on the Doctor fixing his mistakes, and an amusing extrapolation of how the British space programme of the Who stories of the 1970s might have developed to the 2010s. However I wasn't really satisfied with the geopolitics and stereotyped treacherous foreigner johnnies.… (more)