I’m currently going through the long and arduous process of updating all my old Benny reviews from the other site, so that I can eventually start reviewing the magnificent seventh series.
Whilst I adore this range, there have undoubtedly been a couple of stinkers.
What would you consider to be some of the worst in the range?
These would honestly be my least favourites from the range - my review of ‘Beyond the Sun’ was essentially me just ripping into it.
As for the other two;
‘The Poison Seas’ is a dialogue heavy story featuring the Sea Devils, who have one of the worst voices for an audio drama. I ended up with a headache after five minutes. The entire thing might as well be an advert for Nurofen!
‘The Goddess Quandary’ is quite possibly one of the most nothing stories evert released. Shame considering it comes right before one of the most brutal and phenomenally written stories in the entire range.
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Yep, I would agree with Beyond the Sun 100%.
For me, other worst ones I’d throw into the ring are The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel, Dragon’s Wrath, and all of the New Frontiers boxset - that boxset was so boring I nearly couldn’t bear to listen to it
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I remember liking The Poison Seas but everyone round here seems to hate it!
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I did quite enjoy The Poison Seas, but I also did find all the sound design and Sea Devil voices to be grating and almost unintelligible at times. But as far as a story goes, no, I didn’t hate it at all.
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Everybody loves Irving for sure… I thought Miles Richardson’s performance was good in the early bennys, but he kinda fell off after s11… also his idea of brax’s character was clearly uninformed by the anthologies and novels (where I think brax’s characterization is the strongest) so it makes for a very baffling take on the character, which I would’ve expected better from brax’s voice actor ?
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Is Summer of Love a contender here?
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The Heart’s Desire. It feels like a holdover from when the range did returning monsters or characters from Classic Who but in very not engaging way (I know Draconians are in series 7, but it’s part of the major arc instead of a one-off like Sea-Devil, Rutans or the Giant Robot). Lucy Beresford’s character got horrible direction as well as writing (“Okay Lucy, that wasn’t quite paint peeling off the walls enough, can you get more obnoxious?”), and the almost Looney Tunes-esque antics didn’t work. The only interesting bit is where Benny is living a normal life, and something like Buffy’s Normal Again where she’s being told her life was huge elaborate story rather than her actual life story could have been more interesting for character material (just a lot less blatantly meta than how In Living Memory did it). Or the Kingdom Hearts II prologue (or Wish World) where like Roxas, Benny starts questioning the normal, domestic world around her until the truth fully comes back to her.
Then there’s how it ends, Benny doing a Christmas greeting because nothing in this story said Christmas and it didn’t even release near December.
Thankfully it’s the last David Bailey story for the Benny range.
