The Hounds of Artemis

"This is a mystery. A beautiful mystery."

Writer: James Goss
Format: Audio
Released: May 2011
Series: NSA 09

Featuring: Eleventh Doctor, Amy

Synopsis

When Lord Woolcroft and his team break open the fabled Tomb of Artemis, sealed for thousands of years, they are astonished by what they find inside...

The Doctor and Amy have come to Smyrna in 1929 to investigate a mystery. The Doctor knows something very bad happened there: something caused a lot of people to die and an entire, magnificent Temple to be found and then immediately lost again.

But he doesn't know what is picking off the archaeologists one by one, or how it is connected to the terrifying howling in the night. And as he as and Amy get closer to the terrible truth behind an ancient evil, he begins to wish he'd never found out.

Verdict

The Hounds of Artemis was a decent little audio adventure and a good continuation of my listening through the Eleventh Doctor Tales of original stories. I think after this one my listening chronology will sort of start to make sense as the stories should actually be in release order on the collection I am listening to the audios through on BorrowBox and I have no caught up with my very minimal previous listening after skipping over The Jade Pyramid. I think you can expect my listening of this series to last quite a while as due to the nature of the format, it is rather difficult to do these audio adventures more than one at a time (meaning in consecutive days) unlike it is for a Big Finish full cast series or boxset. It's just the nature of the format and there's nothing at all wrong with it, but it's just a personal preference and I will admit that today probably was not the best day for me to do a story of this nature with the concentration levels required. We recently had to say goodbye to our pet hamster after two-and-a-half wonderful years so times are quite tough at the moment, but I managed to get through this and I quite enjoyed it where possible. I thought it was interesting to have two different readers and I liked the unique approach, even if it didn't always work for me. Things would obviously have been much improved if we had Karen Gillan reading alongside Matt Smith instead of Clare Corbett. That is not a knock in the slightest to Corbett but it just would have been something special to have Smith and Gillan together because of their chemistry and the fact that they are the actors who play the two main characters in this adventure. Instead we had Corbett voicing the entries in Amy's diary concerning the events of this story and whilst I liked that prospect and the different feel it brought to the telling of the adventure, I struggled to believe that Amy would actually have kept such a thing at a time like was told. It was a little uncharacteristic of the character in my opinion which was a shame. The two readers not really interacting was a big mistake in my view as instead of adding to the dialogue scenes, it just felt like we were bouncing around. In a story where Matt Smith actually reads, I shouldn't have to hear Corbett's impression of the Eleventh Doctor! That makes no sense at all to me. The actual plot was pretty good and I liked the theme of Artemis and the history that was associated with her. The arrival of the Doctor and Amy being on the other side of the tomb was wonderful and I really loved the former's mentioning of almost being able to see Vortis. I do wonder how a return there would fare nowadays. Bradley Stapleton was a good character and it was nice of his granddaughter to be the one that had hold of Amy's diary. I was a little surprised to find that the Doctor succumbed to the beauty of Sophia but that was good in selling how powerful she was. Van-Der Cass was another pretty good character but one element of the story I actually wasn't so keen on was the titular hounds. I didn't really think they were all that necessary as I think they could have been something on more supernatural lines but it wasn't to be. The ending was pacy and exciting which is needed in stories of this format for me and as a whole it was just a solid audio. Overall, a good little adventure.

Rating: 7/10