CAST:
Seventh Doctor - Sylvester McCoy
Nostradamus/Conclave Leader - David Schofield
Brors/Captain of the Guard/Bernardo - John Banks
Garilund/Computer Voice - Caroline Keiff
Kren/Second Nuncio - Derek Carlyle
Larrett/Milo/First Nuncio - Nicholas Chambers
SYNOPSIS:
"When the river is gone, ships shall sail in the sky, monsters bring fire from the heavens. All will fall into a grey and endless sea, and Doomsday has come.
Florence, the sixteenth century. No one thought to pay much attention to the prophecies of the so-called seer Michel de Nostradame, otherwise known as Nostradamus. Until the canals of Venice dried. Until the soothsayer's sayings started coming true…
Because Master Nostradamus is right, in all respects. The end of the world is nigh. The ships are coming. The monsters are coming. The fire is coming. There's only one thing he didn’t see coming, in fact: the sudden apparition of a certain strange Doctor, in his even stranger TARDIS. Today, the Earth dies screaming. And all the Doctor can do is watch."
REVIEW:
Before I start, I enjoyed this. It was a very entertaining story with some good acting and direction. It is not however, without a lot faults. Most of them pinned squarely down on the writers.
The writing was not exactly brilliantly designed for the audio medium with too much describing what what was happening to the point of it being obvious. The story starts out in Venice and almost immediately the twist is revealed which left me wondering why for two episodes, The Doctor seemed uncharacteristally ignorant of it. That is untill at the end of the second part, they revealed the twist that had already been practically spelled out in the first part. They seemed to go to great lengths to explain what was happening but holding back a tiny little part as if only that part reveals the twist.
I did like the inclusion of Nostradamus, though for a while it seemed like he was superfluous to the story and there to just help sell the 'cover story' before the 'twist', but he proved to play a vital role and set things up for the other episodes in the Seventh Doctor's run.
This story did have a lot of potential and could have examined some of the themes it introduced but were left pretty much untouched in favour of a pretty standard, if not entertaining, story.
Could this duo be my new Cavan Scott & Mark Wright?
SCORE:
0/7 - Non-existant
1/7 - As bad as you can get
2/7 - Poor
3/7 - Quite poor / too many poor points / didn't like it
4/7 - Quite good / plenty of good points / liked it
5/7 - Good
6/7 - As good as you can get
7/7 - Impossible perfection
Writer: Emma Beeby & Gordon Rennie
Director: Ken Bentley
Produced By: Big Finish
Released: September 2011
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