Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2025902 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-06
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

Customer Reviews

An Excellent What If? Doctor Who Adventure
Back in 2003, Big Finish Productions got an idea for a way to celebrate forty years of Doctor Who. The idea was to do a series of what if stories. These stories would be so outside the normal universe of stories that the only way to described would be Doctor Who Unbound. This story is the second story of the Doctor Who Unbound series and its what if...what if the third Doctor hadn't been science advisor to the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT)?

The story opens in 1997 the night before the UK is to hand over Hong Kong to China. A blue police box suddenly appears and a man pops out of it. And he soon realizes he's in the wrong place or rather the wrong time. His name: The Doctor. Soon he finds an old ally now discredited after years of disasters and alien invasions. His name: Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. Soon their reunion is interrupted by the crashing of a highly advanced Chinese stealth plane. As UNIT attempts to recover the plane and its passenger, the Doctor soon realizes he is facing an old enemy with evil plans of his own.

David Warner plays an alternate third Doctor (replacing the late Jon Pertwee). Warner's Doctor is terrific, even though the Doctor is in a daze for most of the story due to his regeneration.. Nicholas Courtney (reprising his role of the Brigadier from the TV series) gets a chance to play a very different version of the Brigadier. This Brigadier is a man who has been let down and feels like he has failed in life, but it only takes a bit of prompting from the Doctor to convince him otherwise. Warner and Courtney have excellent chemistry and its not surprising that it has been announced they will get another story together.

The story's villain is all too instantly recognizable, scheming and killing here, threatening and cowering there, and generally causing as much damage and disaster as possible. Having said that, I'll let you the listener figure out who the villain is. Needless to say who'll figure it out very quickly.

The supporting characters fare very well too, with a highlight being Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood. Brimmicombe-Wood is a nasty piece of work; he shows no respect to the inhabitants of the Monastery, he is largely insensitive towards the way events have affected civilians, and he really cements the listener's dislike by referring to the Brigadier simply as `Lethbridge'. As an interesting note on the actor who plays the Colonel, does the name David Tennant mean anything to you?

The story is terrific, taking many elements from the Pertwee / UNIT era stories. These include a list of UNIT"s failures under the Brigadier (The Auton invasions of Spearhead from Space and Terror of the Autons were dealt with by the "plastic purges", which caused a shortage; Captain Mike Yates took a UNIT team back into the past with several nuclear warheads to prevent the Silurians from awakening, and half of present-day London suddenly became a crater; the "Probe 7 fiasco" lead to a line of radioactive craters across America; lives were lost whenever UNIT provided security at a peace conference) and the main part of the story centers around a very strong plot element from The Mind of Evil. The ending is interesting and leaves the door open to the aforementioned possible sequel.

Overall then, `Sympathy For The Devil' is yet another strong story for Big Finish, and a great way to continue the `Unbound' range. The script sparkles and shows just how much flexibility there is with the format of basing a script around a question. In many ways, the question is more "What if the Doctor was too late?" than "What if the Doctor had never been UNIT's scientific advisor?" but both are amply covered. This is a fine example of Big Finish at work and one of their best stories.