Review by Daniel Mansfield

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The Short Trips range returns with a boxset of six new bite-sized audio adventures for various Doctors and their companions.

The eponymous Impeccable, written by Georgia Cook, opens the set, giving us a new tale for Eric Roberts‘ Master as he navigates life as suburban husband Mark. While the reveal of just why the Master has been forced to adopt this new alias is an interesting one, not enough time is spent with Mark for us to really care about him as a character. That said, Eric Roberts puts in a good performance, really selling Mark’s confusion at his situation before reverting back to his more familiar role as one of the nastiest, most sadistic Masters.

Hard Feelings by Philip Lawrence pits the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa against the Cybermen in the wake of Adric’s tragic death. While this is a strong premise, this sort of thing feels like it’s already been done with the stellar Marc arc in the Main Range, meaning that, although Sutton’s performance is suitably emotive, this feels too much like familiar ground to be worth a listen.

Cut-Out by Dominick Polion is presented as a case file narrated by an MI6 agent about his interactions with various Doctors. Duncan Wisbey is shockingly good at recreating the voices of Doctors 4-7, but the story itself, while novel, doesn’t match the strength of his performance.

Much better are the following two stories. First up is Bring Me The Head of Dorium Maldovar, which sees the Twelfth Doctor reunite with his old friend (now just a head after an encounter with the Headless Monks) to save him from a dodgy deal gone wrong. Peter Forbes is excellent at recreating both the voices of Peter Capaldi and the late Simon Fisher-Becker, elevating an already strong story to

Meanwhile, Lisa Bowerman puts in a quirky performance as the neurotic Dr Sandra Urtiman in The Tip of the Mind, which sees her narrate a series of encounters with both Zoe Heriot, whose memories of the Doctor have been wiped, and a familiar time traveller with a blue box. This is a story that takes a while to play its hand, but when it does it recontextualises everything you’ve heard.

Sadly, the boxset finishes on rather a bum note, with Benjamin Mackenzie‘s Is Anybody There? While Bronté Barbé‘s narration is strong, bringing haunted Keena to life with ample pathos, she doesn’t quite have a handle on the Ninth Doctor’s distinctive voice. That said, if the Thirteenth Doctor ever makes the jump to this range, she’s surely a shoo-in for the role, with more than a touch of Jodie Whittaker about her.

All in all, this isn’t the strongest of the Short Trips boxsets we’ve had in recent years, but there are still some gems here.

Impeccable and Other Stories is available as a download from http://www.bigfinish.com