Doctor Who: Breaking Bubbles and Other Stories

An anthology of four 30-minute stories.

* Breaking Bubbles - The Doctor and Peri meet the deposed ruler of an interstellar empire, and become involved with her attempts to escape her imprisonment. This is a pretty decent story for its length, with a few twists in its relatively short run-time. There's perhaps little that's truly remarkable about it, although it's notable that Peri has almost as much to do with the resolution as the Doctor, and overall it's a pretty fun short story. 4 stars.

* Of Chaos Time The - The Doctor contracts a time sickness that causes him to experience events out of chronological order. We hear the story from his perspective, trying to piece together what is going on as he does, even as the characters around him are moving through time in the usual manner., and so often know what is happening before he does. Since the time jumps come quite rapidly (as they'd have to in a 30-minute story) events are particularly jumbled up, so it makes sense that the underlying story, about the development of a time-based weapon, is quite straightforward. Even so, such stories have been done before by Big Finish, and this is a reasonable, but not standout example of its kind. 3.5 stars.

* An Eye for Murder - This takes as its setting a women's college at Cambridge University at the outbreak of World War II (there are a few obvious nods to Gaudy Night). As the only significant male character in the story, the Doctor quickly becomes sidelined as the professors assume that he must be Peri's assistant and curtail his activities to avoid any hint of impropriety. This set-up leads to some great moments as McCormack plays with the altered dynamic, as well as a mystery story involving a Jewish professor being threatened by an anonymous Nazi sympathiser. Although it fits its length here, it's the sort of thing that might have worked even better with more room to breathe. 4.5 stars.

* The Curious Incident of the Doctor in the Night-Time - Like the book that was the obvious inspiration for the title, this takes the form of a first-person narrative by a teenage boy with autism spectrum disorder. It's a nice mix of comedy, focusing as it does on the threat to Earth posed by some garden gnomes, and pathos, as the narrator struggles to understand the more basic things around him while not batting an eye at the bits about aliens. There are some nice parallels, too, with how the Doctor also sometimes has difficulty with basic human emotions (something that probably works better with Six than it would with, say, Five). 4.5 stars.