This month, the Doctor Who main range presents one of its occasional anthology releases, with four short stories starring Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor and Nicola Bryant’s Peri.

The first, ‘Breaking Bubbles’, finds the time travellers in a set of formal gardens much to the surprise of its sole resident. Safira Valtris is a deposed royal with designs on escape from her prison and their arrival provides an unwanted distraction, as well as perplexing her two paranoid jailors.

LM Myles provides a tale where Peri comes to the fore and pleasingly, she is the one to confront the former Empress with the moral implications of attempting to regain power.

Mark Ravenhill’s ‘Of Chaos Time The’ begins with the Doctor on the run from killer droids with an unknown woman at his side, not so unusual perhaps, but he also appears to be shifting about within his own timeline.

Moving rapidly through a series of connected events in the wrong order, he has to unlock the mystery of a rapidly ageing patient and a bomb which needs defusing, as well as saving himself. The tale benefits from some handy inner dialogue from the Doctor as he tries to make sense of the mixed-up chronology.

‘An Eye for Murder’ brings the TARDIS to a Ladies College on the eve of WWII. Mistaken for a visiting thriller writer, Peri finds herself drawn into a case of poison pen letters and this grants the Doctor his chance to pursue unusual energy fluctuations behind the female-only walls of St. Ursula’s.

Events happen at speed, with revelations about the staff’s differing political affiliations coming to the fore and perhaps, of the four stories, Una McCormack’s is the one we feel might have benefitted from a greater duration. With another strong role for Peri and with all the other major characters played by women, we particularly enjoyed the wind being taken out of the Doctor’s sails when he is told the place is already full of Doctors!

The final tale, written by Nev Fountain, is the most overtly comic of the four and yet perhaps the most affecting too. Riffling on Mark Haddon’s famous Curious Incident… bestseller, we see the time travellers intersect with the life of Michael, who has a unique world view due to his autism.

Entertainingly off-beat, involving both mortality and gnomes, it ends with a rather touching conversation that put us in mind of Patrick Troughton’s wonderful lines about the Doctor’s family way back in ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’.

This collection offers stories from some diverse voices. Fountain and McCormack have other audio credits and the latter has written two Eleventh Doctor novels. Myles on the other hand has written about the show, but only penned a short story for Big Finish before while Ravenhill is a well-respected playwright whose apparent desire to write for Doctor Who once which resulted in a meeting with Russell T Davies, from which sadly nothing came.

As a collection we found them the stories both enjoyable and a happy reminder of the Doctor and Peri’s occasionally spiky yet warm relationship, which should come in handy as the range finally tackles what happened to her after ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’ in October.

Extras: The release comes with an eighteen minute music suite as well as over fifteen minutes of interviews with both the cast and writer Nev Fountain.

Released in July 2014 by Big Finish Productions Ltd.

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