Doctor Who - Destination Nerva

By: Nicholas Briggs

Narrated by: Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, Raquel Cassidy

Big Finish's first Fourth Doctor adventure. A great jumping-on point...

After saying their good-byes to Professor Litefoot and Henry Gordon Jago, the Doctor and Leela respond to an alien distress call beamed direct from Victorian England. It is the beginning of a journey that will take them to the newly built Space Dock Nerva...where a long overdue homecoming is expected. A homecoming that could bring about the end of the human race.

Written and directed by Nicholas Briggs.

©2012 Big Finish Productions (P)2012 Big Finish Productions

Action packed

What a pleasure to hear Tom Baker doing a new Doctor Who story! And Louise Jameson too. The music is great and the sound effects are terrific. Some pretty horrible things happen to people in this episode, and hearing it rather than seeing it was somehow even more unnerving. (I remember reading once that in the old radio days, they created the sound of someone being sucked out of his skin by pulling a goop of spaghetti out of the pot. Not to say anything that grotesque happens here, but that's kind of the idea.)

I found it a bit complex in the beginning: the action starts off in Victorian London but very quickly moves to Nerva, a space docking station a couple of hundred years in the future. The cast of characters is not large, but they're introduced in action from the word go, and only as the story proceeds is it possible to work out their relationships. The action supposedly begins immediately after the old Who adventure The Talons of Weng-Chiang. I haven't seen that one yet, and it may be that it would have helpedm I listened to it twice, and the second time all was clear - and I'm certainly not complaining about having to listen to a Doctor Who adventure a second time!

Tom Baker and Louise Jameson, more please.

Big Finish appropriately lets us travel in time, sans Tardis, back to the 70s. It is a wonderful ride of nostalgia.