How nice it is to hear the Sonic Screwdriver referred to in full, rather than with sloppy modern nonsense like “The Doctor reached for his Sonic,” that had become the norm in recent Audiobooks.
So, with that small but irritating detail apparently rectified, these latest releases unfold with lots to enjoy. Freema Agyeman, David Troughton and Georgia Moffett are the latest notable readers and each gets a story worthy of their time and effort, the result being some of the best audiobooks to date.
Troughton’s story, The Many Hands by Dale Smith, brings the TARDIS to Edinburgh 1759 for a tale involving a mad anatomist and a loch full of zombies. With a stagecoach hurtling through a crowd, and the Doctor clinging to the top while under attack from a pale figure with black marble eyes, Smith’s story bursts into life with an opening that’s pretty hard to beat. And things continue along a similar vein: the Doctor in a midnight boat chase across the loch, with the progress of his zombie pursuers marked by the swirling waters behind him, and Martha trapped in a cell with the disembodied many hands of the title jumping about her, are just two of the memorable scenes.
There are in-jokes too, like the Doctor’s thought that at 900 years old he’d still make a pretty good Hamlet. David Troughton’s Doctor is a fairly neutral interpretation, but elsewhere the story is alive with thick Scottish voices and gruff British Redcoats.
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VB