Divorce, Beheaded, Regenerated

"I've had better engagement parties."

Writer: John Dorney

Format: Audio

Released: February 2019

Series: Missy 1.02

Featuring: Missy

Synopsis

Missy arrives in Tudor England, throwing the plans of another renegade Time Lord into chaos.

King Henry VIII is on the throne, and aliens are stomping through the countryside. Missy just wants to be Queen.

And the Monk? Once he knows who else is on the scene, he'll be glad just to stay alive...

Verdict

Divorce, Beheaded, Regenerated was an outstanding audio adventure and certainly one of my very favourite stories of all time. It was honestly that good. It was sublime from start to finish and I wouldn’t really expect anything less! The combination of Missy and the Monk was something I was incredibly excited by and the meeting definitely didn’t disappoint. Throwing them together in Tudor England was always going to be great, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the Monk to be impersonating King Henry VIII himself! That in itself was just magnificent, but then the prospect of him marrying Missy was just wonderful. Her disguising herself as Foxcroft’s daughter was just barmy and brilliant to see a female disguise for Missy to sink her teeth into, something she was famous for in past incarnations. The Monk’s reaction when seeing who he might be marrying was hilarious and from there on in we had some incredible interaction between the pair. The conversations were just superb and I really liked the reference to The Time Meddler and how the Monk knew of Gallifrey’s fate at the Time War and its return. The Monk having a continued connection to the Matrix was great and I liked how he had settled himself in Earth’s history where he could get up to all sorts of mischief. Here he was changing history in terms of King Henry’s wives and Missy was next in line! She embraced that fantastically. The pace of the adventure was thrilling and I am struggling to think of a more fun adventure. I adored it. The emergence of Catherine Parr into the story was an unexpected moment and it was nice to hear how much she was devoted to King Henry whilst noticing his recent change. Missy joking with the Monk about his name and how he was a meddler was just glorious and his annoyance that the ‘Meddling Monk’ name was the one that stuck was marvellous. There was just so much greatness going on in this audio. The pair needing each other was nice despite there seeming to be a clear hierarchal difference regarding which Time Lord was perhaps most evil. It was clear that the Monk was not a killer whilst the same certainly could not be said of Missy as the Monk was quick to acknowledge. Missy needed a TARDIS component from the Monk’s inactive model, whilst he needed the means to escape the time period he had become accustomed to. Missy wasn’t hiding the fact that she thought the Monk was stupid and that’s because the vortex manipulator had been on her wrist the whole time. Her initial disguise as being sent by the Time Lords was great, but clearly not believable, and the Monk worked that out pretty quickly and took command by imprisoning her! That was a good little twist. His meddling in getting her out of jail to see where she’d go was another very unexpected element. The Gramoryans arriving and following the Monk’s trail after his meddling in the timeline with King Henry VIII’s wives was good and I thought the one we met was quite comical with the ferocious accent. His desire to shoot anything that was insignificant worked well and how he was a collector of paradoxical specimens was terrific. A very good little concept there and I think they could definitely work in bulk in a future story. The conclusion was a lot of fun with the wedding and it was pretty much a game of who would blink first. The wedding was underway and of course the Gramoryan arrived and that set in action a quick defence of revealing that he wasn’t in fact the real King Henry, who was actually in the zero room in the Monk’s TARDIS. It became a very fun finish with Missy escaping and the Monk being left trapped in Tudor England inside his own TARDIS! Overall, a quite phenomenal audio. 

Rating: 10/10