Choose 3 favourites from Old Sixie’s first audios
So many good choices here but I’ve plumped for
The Marian Conspiracy - an historical which introduces one of Big Finish’s best original companions, the much-missed Maggie Stables as Dr Evelyn Smythe.
Doctor Who and the Pirates - utterly format breaking and so heart breaking - an absolute tour de force
The Holy Terror - Frobisher the penguin brilliantly brought to life and a terrifying tale.
Just missing out - The One Doctor (hilarious); Jubilee (the inspiration for Dalek and will wrongfoot you througout); The Spectre of Lanyon Moor - some astonishing sound work and the 6th Doctor gets to meet the Brigadier properly.
I would be betraying my username if I didn’t vote for pirates
My top three are (in no particular order):
Project: Twilight - Delightfully dark and creepy, but really, really good. Nimrod is possibly Big Finish’s best original villain.
The Apocalypse Element - Evelyn’s first encounter with the Daleks. And an invasion of Gallifrey that’s considered an early battle in the Time War, and the Big Finish debut of Romana II.
The Spectre of Lanyon Moor - Six meets the Brig and a strong outing for Evelyn.
The Marian Conspiracy, Jubilee and The Holy Terror just missed the cut with Whispers of Terror and The Pirates just below that. I must be the only Doctor Who fan who doesn’t care for The One Doctor. I mean, it’s okay, but it’s just okay. I maybe chuckled a couple times through the whole thing. I just found rather average.
Ooh love so many of these, but for top 3 absolutely had to go with
1- Doctor Who and the Pirates. this is my #1 favorite main range audio I’ve listened to so far, quite possibly my favorite doctor who audio ever. I’m generally a sucker for stories that, while tackling heavy elements, still generally try to have fun and be optimistic. I love Evelyn and the Doctor as unreliable narrators, and of course I love ALL the songs. I used to have a playlist on spotify of all the different songs until spotify changes the way the tracks were listed for the story (I still have the playlist, but now instead of each song being cut into its own track, they’re across multiple tracks, which makes it harder to listen to a specific song :/) This is one of just 2 audios I have on CD!
2- The Marian Conspiracy. this is the other one I have on CD! I think this is probably the audio I’ve relistened to the most it’s just a lot of fun, Evelyn’s one of my all time favorite companions and she has such a great introduction. I love how the moment she finds out the Doctor’s a time traveler she 1- accepts it and 2- insists he takes her with him to the past. I love her so much and she makes a great impression right off the bat
3- The Holy Terror. Again I love stories that manage to balance both silly and heavy elements, although in this case the heavy part is more outright horror. Six and Frobisher are a lot of fun (all hail frobisher! all hail the big talking bird!!) and I am convinced that parts of this story inspired the empty child/the doctor dances. I mean, a child with godlike power that goes around asking people “are you my father?” ? It had to be at least an influence.
The unfortunate thing is that of the audios listed, all I’ve listened to is the first third or so of the Marian Conspiracy, several times.
I liked what I heard of it, but my attention just kept drifting eventually, and I’d suddenly realise that I’d zoned out and stop it.
Weird as it might sound, I think I’d do a lot better with the audios if they came with a transcript I could follow along with…
in that case you might be interested in this! its got transcripts for every (or nearly every) main range episode all the way up to 260-something.
https://archive.org/details/doctor-who-audio-scripts-main-range
I’d add them to my site, but not sure about the legality of it…
The One Doctor is one of my all-time favorite audios. It’s low on the hard sci-fi elements and is more fluffy and silly than anything else, which I greatly enjoy. I love a lot on that list, but the one audio I refuse to go to bat for is The Spectre of Lanyon Moor. I will never understand how that audio ranked as high as it did on that poll Big Finish did a few years ago. I’ve listened to it twice and found it to be terribly boring.
I’ve listened to these only up to and including Project: Twilight. The Sixie audios are among the best in the first 50 MRs, mostly thanks to Evelyn. Marian Conspiracy and The One Doctor are fun, so I picked them. One of the few BFs that has effectively unnerved me is The Holy Terror, which is why it is my third choice.
The Spectre of Lanyon Moor is good old traditional spooky Who. That cliffhanger with the voice is excellent and it’s marvellous to hear Six have a proper story with the Brigadier.
Love it.
Agreed. I think I like Lanyon Moor better then Marian Conspiracy.
Oooh, I don’t know if I’d go that far but there are certainly equally enjoyable.
Gone for …ish, Jubilee, And The Pirates! All brilliant stories
Thought I’d give a brief explanation for my choices.
The Holy Terror
One of my first purchases from the BigFinish website, and still one of the greatest. Who would’ve thought that a story featuring a shapeshifting penguin with a film noir accent would be so viscerally dark and horrible?
Also RIP Roberta Taylor. Her performance was fab in that story.
…ish
Quite easily one of the most unique stories I’ve ever encountered. I heard someone complaining a while ago about how it should’ve been an Evelyn story given she’s a university lecturer and is immersed in academia.
But having Peri makes more sense. It uses the differences in dialect between British and American English to great effect. Also just inherently interesting. Would love another adventure set in the Articulate Worlds.
I also head-cannon that the …ish is a distanct cousing of the i from ‘Iterations of I’.
The Pirates
I’ve always spoken very candidly about my mental health struggles, whether that be generally or in reviews.
This story pulled me out of my lowest ebb back in 2018. I can actually credit an audio drama with saving my life.
I can still remember the scene where the hiker got ripped apart. The sound design was incredibly visceral - horrifying too!
