It’s time to listen to and discuss The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles Volume 3 - Geronimo: The Inheritance.
It’s time for a whole new era for the Eleventh Doctor as he meets Valarie Lockwood.
Buy it online using the link above.
Once you’ve listened, talk about it below! Even if you listened to it before and just want to discuss it - dive right in! Just please use spoiler tags where appropriate.
Everyone who participates will get a coveted Audio Club badge!
The entire Eleventh Doctor and Valerie Lockwood storyline is all rated obscenely high for me. I just went and looked through my ratings and most of them I rated 5 stars or 4. I think I gave one that was 3½ stars.
I LOVE this series. I think it has so much consistency and quality. It is by far some of the best Big Finish storytelling out there. It is truly remarkable and The Inheritance quite literally kicks it off with such a bang! I was hooked from the opening five minutes. Jacob Dudman is perfect in this, his performance as Matt Smith’s incarnation is incredible and he only gets better and better the longer the series goes on. Valerie Lockwood is an excellent companion for him too.
The Inheritance has everything a series opener should, Valarie is immediately brilliant, there’s a great family dynamic, and there’s a brilliant balance between a proper, action based plot and character dialogue and development, 8/10
We are off to a flying start with Valarie Lockwood. She arrives just fully formed character and personality wise, no shaky ground there. And Alfie Shaw really gets the tone and quirkiness of the 11th Doctor.
Story wise it is great with a great take on the “capitalism is evil” trope.
Jacob Dudman and Saffiya Ingar have fantastic chemistry and both knock it out of the park acting wise from the word go.
I re-listened to this yesterday and it is such a good story and companion introduction. I did not remember this one that much and it was so fun to revisit it. 4.5/5 for me!
I love this. I absolutely adore everything about this story. I’m gonna relisten later but everything about this story is perfection. I’m so excited to listen to it for a third time and see how my thoughts on in have evolved. Valerie is the best companion in Doctor Who and this series single handedly lifted 11 from one of my least favorite new who Doctors to one of my favorite. Also, this was my first full Big Finish series so in a way I have a lot of nostalgia for it!
I have two methods of processing stories I adore: memorizing them down to the minutest detail, or forgetting them, riding high on vibes. This one went through the latter, because I was goddamn excited to experience one of my favourite Doctors on audio. Generally speaking, it’s a sharp, fresh take on a common plot, with some interesting worldbuilding and dangerous stakes, and has a companion I quickly fell for. Everything about Valarie works for me—her brash yet compassionate attitude, her intelligence, funnelled into technology, the fact that she’s a cyborg, Safiyya Ingar’s voice acting—and it doesn’t hurt that she’s a brown woman with a different body type to the norm. (On the covers, anyway. Maybe that should’ve been acknowledged in a story…)
This is an excellent episode that starts the series proper. The plot is imaginative and well thought out. The introduction of Valarie works, while the banter back and forth feels like Eleventh Doctor and his companion. The voice acting is top-notch, with Jacob Dudman giving at great Eleven performance and Safiyya Ingar really stretching their acting as Valarie Lockwood. The overall sound design is what you would expect from Big Finish with a special mention to the music. This release really feels like it would fit in post The Snowman and before The Bells of Saint John.
4.5/5
My rating system
5.0 Perfect/Fav
4.5 Excellent/Fav
4.0 Very Good
3.5 Good
3.0 Enjoyable
2.5 Meh
2.0 Bad
1.0 Very Bad
I like The Inheritance a lot – it’s full of good ideas and I LOVE Valarie. There are some really gutting moments towards the end – honestly I wish more had been made of Valarie’s mum’s death, but what we have is stunning:
VALARIE:Everything can’t stop because my mum died.
DOCTOR:Except it has. For you.
This is a great start to Geronimo! and things just get better from here!
Absolutely. I love how Valarie’s loss of her mum is returned to throughout the series. It understands how it continues to affect you and comes up again and again. Really sensitively written.
They really do succeed at creating long lasting and impactful arcs using returning aspects better than any other series of the revival. It’s honestly shocking how effective it all is.
As far as I’m concerned this is the perfect modern Who story. If it hadn’t been for the looking for Clara bit this could’ve seamlessly been a Rose or Eleventh Hour sort of episode, and I’m utterly convinced that had it been televised it would’ve been regarded as the best opening the modern iteration of the series has ever had.
It simply has everything. It’s the basic ‘Doctor comes into a place where something is wrong’ executed perfectly. It gives us an immediate clear impression of who the Doctor is and what he does while, something that the TV show doesn’t do as often, also showing us how he feels at this point in life. Simultaneously there’s also enough space for us to get to know Valarie and her family, and she gets her moments to show her capabilities, but also her emotional vulnerability. When her mum died I wanted to break down into tears too, I find it rarely so that a death of a character we only really just got to meet is so effective as it is here, and that we take the time to actually process these things. I think NuWho has a bit of a tendency to disregard death and throwing it about without much of a care unless it’s about specific character we should like, and while this doesn’t not entirely do that, I really appreciate that even so early on it isn’t entirely brushed away as easily. And of course it will be brought up in later stories, as it should. You don’t have to kill another uncle or something to make Valarie even sadder now, a bit of reminding is enough for the story lol.
Maybe I’ll give it a relisten soonish and come back with more proper thoughts. It’s been over a year since I listened to it, I remember well typing in my reaction into the What are you currently listening to thread, I promised I’d come back to analyze it sensibly once my thoughts had gathered, but all the other stories quickly gained the upper hand, and I’ve become a bit unsure if I remember all of the details correctly.
from me 