The Angel of Scutari - Review

When this trilogy format showed up for Big Finish I wasn't sure what to make of it. I thought we might be losing out on good standalone stories and getting only serials like Key 2 Time. But I've sampled my first one (I skipped K2T based on reviews), and if they're all like this, I consider myself corrected. Not a trilogy at all, but a genuine mini-season, it really feels like a little season of episodes.

Spanning the Magic Mousetrap, Enemy of the Daleks, and the Angel of Scutari, it delivers the whole range of stories.

The Magic Mousetrap is a 'season opener' that reintroduces us to Ace, Hex and the Doctor, and gives a definite sense of a shifting equilibrium. It's also the weirdy mind-bending episode of the series, and the human sci-fi story. I had been avoiding getting my hopes up, after hearing Forty-Five hailed as a classic and being disappointed, I was worried the same would happen here. After the first part I was still bracing myself for a disappointment. But, no, this genuinely is a minor classic, one that shows the McCoy team are at the best they've ever been and gives them loads to play with. A great opener that sets the 'revamped' tone of these mini-season.

Enemy of the Daleks is less exciting fayre. It's popular with some but I found it really rather poor. It's a future-set, alien world, base-under-siege story. It's also a subpar dalek runaround. With the surfeit of daleks coming around lately they really need to be far more even than a trad runaround. This isn't even that. Noisy and boring. The first episode has some promise but it's never met. The one highlight is Hex. The season is very much an arc for his character, and his scenes are fantastic. They lead us nicely on to...

The Angel of Scutari. Rounding out the series, with a definite sense of 'finale', a pure historical character drama, featuring Florence Nightingale (and, for rather less reason or effect, Lev Tolstoy).

I listened to this one last night and really enjoyed it. Big Finish seem to do some of their best work on pure historicals, and McCoy in particular gets great ones. The Settling, No Man's Land, and now the Angel of Scutari.

I've really become quite interested in Hex since the Settling, and his arc in this mini-season is one of its biggest selling points for me. I didn't much care for Enemy of the Daleks, but I did love Hex's scenes. This is really Hex's play, though, and I found it at its best when we followed his adventures in the hospital. Philip Olivier is a fantastic actor, one of Big Finish's best bits of casting.

The non-Hex stuff wasn't quite so thrilling. It seemed a bit of an empty aside. Ace and Tolstoy felt quite similar to some of Ace's stuff in Colditz, and the Doctor just seemed to be ferrying between his cell and various diplomatic meetings to no real ends. That said, they didn't drag, I enjoyed the scenes, they just didn't seem to be firing on all cylinders like Hex's story.

As for the historical content, I just happened to have read Flashman at the Charge recently, so it was more engaging than it might otherwise have been. I can see how, if you weren't aware of the details, it might be a story that left you a bit cold. However, having been filled in on the details (and even introduced to Willy Russell) by the inimitable Flashy, the setting was a delightful surprise. (I confess I'd thought Scutari was going to be an alien planet or something - my geography is terrible - so a Crimean pure historical was a most unexpected pleasure.)

A great story, BF's run on historicals continues without wavering, and a fantastic story for Hex that ends a fantastic season for Hex. And it really did feel like a season. Now I'm dying to hear the next one, and I only have six months to wait. I feel sorry for those chaps who've already been waiting for eight!

The Magic Mousetrap - 8/10
Enemy of the Daleks - 5/10
The Angel of Scutari - 8/10

Still to come (honest), Anathem, Bioshock, and the return of TV Who. Still need to get my thoughts in order about that, though.