Sunday, March 10, 2013

Doctor Who: The Sands of Life Review





Doctor Who:
The Sands of Life
By Nicholas Briggs

The Doctor and Romana are traveling along when Romana hears voices.  The Doctor doesn’t hear them and Romana claims they are saying The Sands of Life.   The voices really bug her as she wishes she could determine what they mean.  Meanwhile aliens are heading to earth and have destroyed a space platform owned by Cuthbert who is a powerful Earth CEO of the Conglomerate who is feared and has lots of power and influence on Earth and who many see as the true ruler of Earth and not Earth’s President Sheridan Moorkurk. 

What’s worse is The Laan have decided to have their babies in the desert on Earth.  It appears the voices Romana is hearing and now The Doctor is coming from The Laan.  In particular the Laan that is giving birth on Earth.   That is not satisfactory to Cuthbert as he wants to destroy it for destroying his space platform and if The Doctor and Romana don’t come up with a solution Earth will be at war with The Laan.

At first I thought this story would have a jumbled finish as there was a lot going on to be resolved in one 72 minute adventure on one disk.  But then I was pretty surprised to find out that this story ended on a cliffhanger.   That was pretty cool as this was in fact disk one of a two disk story.  So disk one has episodes 1 to 3 and disk two will be out in March and hopefully it will have a pretty good ending to go with a pretty decent first part.

I liked how this story centered more on Romana and gave Mary Tamm a bigger part to flex her acting prowess and add something more to her version of Romana.  It makes me sad thinking that these are it for her since she passed away last year.   I’m glad the people at Big Finish gave her the chance to expand on the character by writing her better than she was portrayed on TV. 

David Warner guest stars in The Sands of Life and delivers a great performance as always.  It will be good to see him in a televised story this year when Series 7 continues.   Tom Baker is great as well and at 80 years old it’s amazing that he still can step into the role as The Doctor and sound like he did back in the 70’s when he was the mainstay. 
The story so far is a pretty good mystery and hopefully the next part will be just as good as the first part.  There was a lot of action to get through which is quite a turn for Big Finish as they usually do not feature that much action.  I enjoyed this story so far and loved what they did with the characters and am looking forward to seeing how everything is resolved.
Grade B



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