#63 Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Sands of Life

My random butterfly flapping through the time stream continues, alighting next in...

Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Sands of Life

Starring: Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor, Mary Tamm as Romana, and John Leeson as K9.
Format: One full-cast CD (or download) of three episodes
Silly? Very slightly, but less than TV stories from Mary Tamm's season.
Standalone? This is the first half of a story continued in War Against the Laan.
Recommended? Not unless War Against the Laan turns out to be so good that a mediocre introduction is worth it.


My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it, and possibly mild spoilers for subsequent stories with the same villain.

Before listening

I've previously landed on The Dalek Contract/The Final Phase, which is later in this season and follows up some of the events of The Sands of Life/War Against the Laan. My listen here will probably be colored by my awareness of that story.
This is the story that introduces the Conglomerate, and David Warner as Cuthbert, to Big Finish audios. From what I recall, the Doctor has never heard of the Conglomerate and finds its existence anomalous, though this mystery is not as urgent a matter for him as the main action of the story.
I think I've only heard The Sands of Life once before. I vaguely remember enjoying it and I look forward to having my memory refreshed.

After listening to episode 1 of 3

The Sands of Life is formatted into three episodes, though it is a normal CD in length. I'm not sure what Big Finish's motivation for this was, but it means I've listened to less story than usual before my first post.
Cuthbert is introduced; he runs the Conglomerate, a corporation possibly more powerful than the government of Earth, and he certainly thinks of himself as more personally powerful than the newly-elected president of Earth. David Warner plays the role with casual arrogance. Manatee-like aliens traveling in the time vortex ram through an experimental Conglomerate space platform, killing many crew, en route to Earth. Cuthbert notifies the president, expecting Earth's response to be military in nature.
We discover that the aliens are not entirely non-sapient, as meanwhile in the Time Vortex, they make telepathic contact with Romana. (This is the first Romana and the TARDIS randomizer has been installed, placing this season of Big Finish audios just after the Key to Time TV season.) The telepathic contact so far consists of just the words "The sands of life", which Romana has no context for. There are billions of aliens en route to Earth; an advance party of some sort arrives at the Sahara Desert, and the Doctor and Romana land there to meet them.
In addition to the aforementioned plot events, there is some amusing TARDIS banter. I am entertained so far and I expect I will continue to be entertained in the subsequent episodes.

After listening to episode 2 of 3

It is still unclear what the aliens' intentions are at this point, but there's no tension if they turn out to be the hostile invaders Cuthbert thinks they are. Apparently the literally billions of aliens have all arrived on Earth beneath the Sahara, rather than just an advance party; I am not sure whether the geographical and geological math on this checks out, but I am also not sure how big the aliens even are. Their number seems to be a gratuitous dramatic flourish more than an essential element of the story.
The high point of this episode is the Doctor's meeting with Cuthbert. The fact that the Doctor has never heard of Cuthbert is mildly intriguing to the Doctor and openly bewildering to Cuthbert. An aside about a badger cull provides good characterization moments for both the fourth Doctor and Cuthbert.
The phrase "illegal alien" shows up repeatedly, referring to the Earth government's classification of extraterrestrials. No examples of legal aliens are presented.
The matter of Romana's telepathic contact and the phrase "the sands of life" is being dragged out, with repeated contact but still no explanation about the words or the reason for the contact.
Knowing that The Sands of Life is immediately followed up in War Against the Laan, I am not expecting the next episode to provide much in the way of answers or closure, but I am under the impression it will explain Romana's mystery and provide some sort of climax, and I'm looking forward to hearing it if so.

After listening to episode 3 of 3

The third episode is burdened by long, vague sound effects sequences, as are many audios directed by Nicholas Briggs.
The aliens are the size of pilot whales; billions of them in the Sahara doesn't make much sense. Earth is their spawning ground, explicitly analogized to salmon, and they cause destructive temporal distortions when they give birth, so letting them spawn in the present day while Earth is inhabited doesn't seem to the Doctor like a good idea. It's unclear when their previous spawning visit was; I think I remember on my first listen-through theorizing that it was in the future or that they kept looping back to the same timepoint, but that proving false in War Against the Laan.
It does not help in any way that Earth authorities are threatening the aliens (now identifying themselves as the Laan) with weapons, setting off defensive instincts. The Laan seem to be mostly animal in behavior, with a degree of disembodied telepathic intelligence that comes and goes situationally, rather than behaving as rational agents that can understand their own actions and form agreements to change those actions. 
The Sands of Life ends in a cliffhanger. We've learned more about the Laan and about the Conglomerate experiment they've interrupted, but no conflicts have been resolved and Earth military forces are about to openly start a war against the Laan, as threatened by the title of the following story.
Not enough happened in this episode. Dividing the 1-CD running time into three episodes makes the individual episodes even less eventful than they would be in a two-episode CD, and in my opinion there aren't quite two episodes worth of plot either.
The Sands of Life is definitely not worth listening to as an audio release in itself. It sets up a thread that carries into later stories, but considering how much The Final Phase disappointed me, I don't think that thread's particularly worth jumping onto, and so I don't see much reason to recommend The Sands of Life. It is possible that War Against the Laan is much better than I am remembering, in which case it would be worth listening to just The Sands of Life/War Against the Laan and not continue to The Dalek Contract/The Final Phase.