Daniel Mansfield reviews 2024’s first Eighth Doctor Adventures boxset: Echoes.

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The much-loved TARDIS trio of the Eighth Doctor, Liv Chenka and Helen Sinclair returns for 2024’s first Eighth Doctor Adventures boxset, Echoes, which contains a triptych of time-travelling tales.

Tim Foley‘s opening story, Birdsong, takes the TARDIS team to a bucolic world completely uninhabited except for two human colonists. But if there’s no other life here, why can the Doctor and friends hear birds? The strongest tale in this boxset, Birdsong is a classic Foley story – well-told with some cracking character moments and a few good twists thrown in for good measure.

Nicola Walker and Hattie Morahan are on top form here, as Liv and Helen to butt heads when their experiences cause them to handle a sticky situation very differently, while Jane Asher excels in the role of Myra, an old woman who may not be all she seems. Meanwhile, Fiona Button puts in the standout performance of not just the whole story, but the entire set, as Bex, who really gets put through the wringer here. Sadly it all unravels a bit when the mystery is eventually explained, but the journey up until that point is truly wonderful. A very strong opener to the set.

Lauren Mooney and Stewart Pringle‘s Lost Hearts feels a little derivative – it’s odd having a ghost story featuring M.R. James here when the previous Eighth Doctor boxset, In the Bleak Midwinter (review here) did a Jamesian Christmas ghost story just a few months ago. Of course, the difference is Lost Hearts actually features James as a character, but because the story tries to keep his identity a secret (even though Big Finish publicised that he’s in it in their promo), he doesn’t get explored very much, meaning his inclusion here feels a little superfluous to requirements.

A similarly underbaked element of the story is the appearance of Helen’s grandfather as a young man. While his presence leads to some timey-wimey shenanigans in the latter half of the story, Helen meeting her grandfather is never portrayed as actually meaning anything to her – we don’t learn anything about what their relationship was like, or get the sense that she is ever more than mildly amused at him showing up. Helen talks about her grandmother in the previous story, and strangely I feel like we learnt a lot more about her than we do about her grandfather here, where he’s an actual character.

Those two niggles aside, there’s some really great imagery in this story – it has a delightfully Gothic atmosphere with tolling bells, secret societies and life-force stealing experiments. Sadly the villain of the piece is played with a ridiculous accent that sounds like a mashup of Professor Snape and Alan Partridge, meaning I quite literally couldn’t take him seriously. Overall, this is uneven, but not without merit.

Making his Big Finish debut with Slow Beasts is Dan Rebellato, who gives us a finale that is well-plotted, but light on character work. The world of Ran-Zoan with its gargantuan creatures who move at one millionth of the speed of everyone else is a great concept- one of those really visual ideas that somehow probably works better on audio than it would on TV.

Derek Griffiths guest stars here as Mathryn, an inspired piece of casting that works well at wrongfooting the listener, while Maya Saroya impresses as activist Iri, and Dan Starkey lends his chameleonic voice talents to a plethora of colourful characters. It’s just a shame the Doctor, Liv and Helen are written so generically as, with a bit of a polish, this story could have been just as good as Birdsong. Nevertheless, I hope we hear much more from Dan Rebellato in the future – this a strong debut.

People often complain that we’ve had too much of Liv and Helen in Eighth Doctor stories recently, but Echoes proves why they’re such an excellent team. McGann, Walker and Morahan are such excellent actors, elevating even weaker scripts with their interplay, and stories like Birdsong prove there’s still more mileage in exploring their characters. Here’s to more Eight, Liv and Helen soon. Recommended.

Echoes is available on CD or as a download from http://www.bigfinish.com