Destiny of the Doctor: Babblesphere
Starring: The fourth Doctor (narrated) and Lalla Ward as Romana
Format: one two-actor narrated CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? Yes
Standalone? Yes. Linkage to the rest of Destiny of the Doctor is brief and not important to the plot.
Recommended? No
My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it.
Before listening
I'm pretty sure I've listened to this one once. I think I am remembering a planet where people have Internet-but-not-called-that implants in their brains and sometimes their heads explode. I think I remember the villain's motivation and a climactic scene in which the Doctor and Romana overload a computer with listicles of Doctor Who trivia. If I am remembering this correctly, then it is a fairly silly story and essentially anti-technology in theme. I think I remember liking the absurdity of a couple scenes, but not being impressed overall.After listening
Writer Jonathan Morris and director John Ainsworth have both done good Big Finish audios. I'm inclined to blame this one on deadline pressure: it has a decent Doctor Who story's worth of ideas, but the prose feels underpolished. I found the use of phrases like "she said" and "he whispered" excessive, used even during rapid-fire exchanges of very short sentences. The events of the first two thirds or so of the story end up pretty much entirely irrelevant to the climax, other than Romana having received some useful exposition.The narration is mostly external to the characters and mostly visual, but the narrator occasionally states inferences from what is seen and mentions what Romana's thinking a few times, so it doesn't have the same feel as a described television show. Like other Destiny of the Doctor episodes, a message from the eleventh Doctor arrives at one point asking this Doctor to do something minor that will presumably help the eleventh Doctor later. The message is amusing and Lalla Ward does a good voice for the eleventh Doctor.
The differentiation of Lalla Ward's character voices is generally not as well-done as in Luna Romana, but they are distinguishable and the performances are otherwise adequate to the quality of the script.
The plot is a little less anti-technology than I'd remembered. The people on this planet have made a computer network which has gone wrong and taken over their society (specifically satirizing Twitter), but the details are specifically about erosion of personal privacy, not about telecommunications in general becoming inevitably evil. It is still an example of that class of science-fiction story in which the science-fiction technology of the story is a bad thing that the protagonists win by destroying.
I wouldn't say to skip over this story if doing a listen-through of Destiny of the Doctor, but I don't recommend listening to it otherwise.
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