#73 Doctor Who: Short Trips Volume 04

Chimes fade into the distance as my Randomoid Selectortron escapes to...

Doctor Who: Short Trips Volume 04

Starring: Various readers presenting stories about the first eight Doctors and various companions
Format: Eight single-reader prose stories, with sound effects, totalling 2 CDs in length.
Silly? Variably from story to story, but mostly no.
Standalone? Yes. The stories are independent from each other and from other audio releases.
Recommended? Yes overall, but not yes to every story.

My reactions to this anthology contain spoilers for it and possible spoilers for No More Lies.

Before listening

Short Trips was originally a title for printed prose anthologies. When Big Finish lost the license to make those, they retained the name and used it for audio releases. Each story is read by a single reader with some relevant Doctor Who connection and enhanced with sound effects and music. Sometimes there are voice effects applied to help the reader play multiple characters, but that's not the common case. Volume 04 was the last "volume" of Short Trips. After this, they were instead released as individually purchased downloads rather than as anthologies.
I don't know yet whether this volume has a linking device or whether any of its stories connect to specific other Doctor Who stories. I had enjoyed the first three volumes greatly and decided to save the fourth one for some special occasion or great need, but that was before I began this project of randomly clearing out my Big Finish backlog, and it is as good a random selection as any.
I do break boxsets of multiple stories up to select one at a time, but in this case the total length is no more than a standard monthly Doctor Who audio release so I won't do that.
I am expecting this to be excellent, though as with any multi-writer anthology I'm not expecting a perfect batting average.

After listening to 1/8 A Star is Born

This is a very traditional Doctor Who story. It differs from a story that might have come up during the actual First Doctor era only slightly. Susan is present, but the Doctor's characterization is more like that of his later seasons in which he spontaneously wants to help distressed aliens even though there's nothing stopping everyone from just getting back in the TARDIS and leaving. Other than the Doctor's unforced philanthropy and the lack of padding subplots, this story has close similarities to The Sensorites and The Ark. It's well-told, and voices are well differentiated with a mix of reader William Russel's voice acting and sound designer Martin Montague's effects.

After listening to 2/8 Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

This one's situated within the gamut of how Doctor Who stories work, but it's not typical for the Second Doctor era it's set in. The Doctor shows up already knowing facts he's not telling the companions, and there's a theme of bureaucratic pointlessness reminiscent of Douglas Adams. The story is told at a leisurely pace; it's over 15 minutes long and the main action is that the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe fall down a mineshaft and get back out. However, writer Foster Marks's prose largely makes it worth the listen. This seems to be Foster Marks's only Doctor Who credit, and it's unclear to me whether it's the same Foster Marks who has one other science-fiction writing credit.

After listening to 3/8 Lost in the Wakefield Triangle

This story is a type of Doctor Who that only happens in short-form media such as comics and short stories. Rhubarb is very prominent and the stakes are comically low; every point of tension sets up an anticlimax, sometimes immediately. Katy Manning is a good reader for it, presenting it mostly in a natural-sounding reading voice rather than trying to sound like the character of 1970's Jo Grant the entire time.

After listening to 4/8 The Old Rogue

This story's read by Louise Jameson and is in the first person, but the narrator has no resemblance to Leela and the Doctor is traveling with Romana. K9 gets a very amusing comedy subplot. The main action resembles No More Lies, with a former space villain stranded on Earth in a mundane life, but the motivation and resolution are substantially different from that and are on more of a short-story scale. Jameson does a good job of voicing all the characters, and the choice to make this a story of the Tom Baker era in particular is an interesting and effective one.

After listening to 5/8 The Lions of Trafalgar

Peter Davison does a fairly bad job of differentiating character voices in this one. It's a secret-history story: aliens secretly subverted the construction of Nelson's Column, using a perception filter so that people took no notice. There were many deaths and yet history continues on its track ignoring them entirely. The Doctor comes across quippy and much less saddened by these events than he probably should; I this is more writer Jason Arnopp's fault, not reader Davison's.

After listening to 6/8 To Cut a Blade of Grass

The stories in this anthology vary in their stakes; this one plays with the question of where the stakes are, with the Doctor going to elaborate lengths to do what seems to Peri to be a very low-stakes thing. The first two-thirds are entirely from the perspective of an Earthling who has no idea who the Doctor is or how he's connected to her life. Colin Baker does an excellent job of differentiating between the voices of the Doctor, Peri, and the female lead. Parsnips are quite prominent, though not quite as much as the rhubarb of Lost in the Wakefield Triangle. There is a bit of ambiguity in the ending: has the Doctor told Peri his real reasons for what he did, or a story that would look good and close the question?

After listening to 7/8 The Shadow Trader

This is a peculiar story. The seventh Doctor and Ace are visiting a spaceport to watch the launch of a ship. The Doctor tells Ace he just likes to watch spaceship launches and has no specific reason for visiting this particular one, which is the sort of line that normally only appears in a Doctor Who story when it's a lie. However, we find out very little about the ship, and if the Doctor is there for some secret errand it's an errand he does while Ace is busy eating lunch and getting mugged. The mugger wants her shadow, and in this story it is established that the trading or stealing of shadows is a practice dating back at least as far as ancient Egypt, used to infuse a soul in a building or spaceship so that it will be capable of greatness. The Doctor knows about this and thwarts the mugging. The mugger is the viewpoint character at the start and end of the story, though not during the mugging, and there is some degree of character study involved. I wouldn't find this story satisfying at all as an individual item, but it is an interesting beat in its anthology context.

After listening to 8/8 Quantum Heresy

This feels like a teaser for a different story that was never published. There's a time loop going on very vaguely resembling The Chimes of Midnight, but we learn about the events in it from a perspective that knows little and refuses to explain to the listener half of what it does know. I imagine that the story as it was developed in the writer's head might have been richer and more detailed than what actually ended up written down and recorded. It is the least satisfying story in the anthology and makes a terrible ending for the series of numbered Short Trips volumes.
Overall, Short Trips Volume 04 is decent and should not be skipped when the Short Trips volumes are on sale, but it's not the best of the series.