Review: The Dream Team

     Another year, another run of The Fifth Doctor Adventures by Big Finish. This time Adric is along for the ride, completing the season 19 quartet. It's a team I like to describe as a dysfunctional family, and is one befitting of the box set's title: The Dream Team.

 

The era-appropriate variant of the cover art, designed by Ryan Aplin.

The Merfolk Murders

    Tim Foley has become a regular writer on this range, previously penning The Auton Infinity and last year's Pursuit of the Nightjar - which I previously gave a glowing recommendation - expectations are set high, this time stepping away from sci-fi and placing the Doctor and his friends into a more traditional murder mystery with The Merfolk Murders.

    The team find themselves at the University of St Andrews in 1940 and meet the Merfolk, a society that spends the summer reading murder mystery stories, who soon have a real murder to discuss. The society's leader Athena, maths student Henry, the allied soldier Private Kowalski, Professor Hodgson and Sebastian - the student who knows of the Doctor - are they key players.

    Subverting the usual Doctor Who tropes, the central protagonists aren't so much as suspected, instead being free to make their own investigations, each spending a good amount of time with the others while getting the chance to go off alone and get to know members of the side cast, a blossoming romance between Adric and Henry being a personal highlight, as well as Nyssa being able to connect with Kowalski over having lost their homes.

    The mystery itself is well-crafted, there did come a point where it seemed the solution may be obvious but the story has enough twists, turns and red herrings to keep you guessing. The identity of the culprit certainly surprised me and it all comes together in an overall satisfying way. While not a lot of substance is drawn from it, a parallel being drawn to people who get a too obsessed with modern true crime media also goes appreciated.

    The performances are great throughout, the "gotcha" scene is so well performed and Foley gives Janet Fielding another moment to shine as Tegan has to make a difficult phone call. As always, Fielding's interplay with Davison entertains.

    As with last year's box sets it's a shame there's no music suite on this release, as Howard Carter's score for this story is my favourite he's done for the range so far, music during a major reveal in the climax and a scene with Adric and Tegan on the beach are particular highlights I'd love to have listened to in isolation. I hope that future Fifth Doctor Adventures releases do feature music suites, even if it's too late for this one.

    The Merfolk Murders is another big winner for The Fifth Doctor Adventures, adding to Tim Foley's impressive streak. There's no telling if or when Foley will write another story for the range, though this story does tease other adventures for the this Doctor's immediate predecessor and successor.

 

Dream Team

    Lizzie Hopley's Dream Team is the story the box set derives its name from, a story featuring only the main cast as they have to face the Dream Crabs - Facehugger-like aliens that latch onto people's faces and feed on their brains as they're forced to dream - from the 2014 Christmas special Last Christmas, one of the few episodes of revived series Doctor Who I haven't actually seen since the original broadcast.

    This story sees the Doctor and his friends arrive on the Trine Archipelago, a natural wonder of the universe now overrun by Dream Crabs and corporate advertising, where they quickly find themselves trapped in perilous dreams with very tangible threats.

    You'd be mistaken to assume being limited to the main four cast members comes with a lack of scope, the most is made of the cast and the dream scenarios to provide interesting and varied scenes, while the sound design does a good enough job at implying the existence of more characters.

    Where the story seems to suffer is in its shorter runtime, Hopley brings no shortage of interesting ideas: the disarmed Dream Crabs are a curious enough hook to begin with, the idea of too many people sharing a dream causing them to lose their sense of reality is a nice one to up the danger but it's never really returned to. The more interesting ideas come very late into the story and don't have the time to be expanded on and fleshed out. The story also lacks a proper villain behind the curtain which I feel it needed and that's an area where I feel the limited cast comes back to bite it as well. The resolution to the story feels a bit unsatisfying although it is well set up, and the get-out for the midway cliffhanger was a bit of a head scratch and a shrug, I'm still not sure how that was supposed to have worked.

    The scenes with Tegan are among the story's strongest, she's the character most drawn in by the dreams and throughout she's driven by a fighting spirit and desire to protect her family. This ties in well with the greater Dream Crab plot and is an interesting angle for Tegan's character. The story never spells it out, but you have to wonder if this motivation was brought on by the loss of her aunt in Logopolis.

    It's easy and even exciting to imagine a longer version of Dream Team where the late-on revelations have more time to be explored, where the story isn't having to wrap itself up in a hurry and it could be doing even more with dreams, but as it is it's not a bad two-parter by any means.

 

Final Thoughts

    The Dream Team succeeds in taking a TARDIS team often criticised for being "overcrowded" and taking them on adventures where all four of them can shine. The Merfolk Murders brings drama and humour, while Dream Team is an interesting pairing of a classic team and a modern monster.

If this review has sparked your interest, The Dream Team is available at https://www.bigfinish.com/