The Wanderer

"I can see the revolution."

Writer: Richard Dennick

Format: Audio

Released: April 2012

Series: Companion Chronicles 6.10

Featuring: First Doctor, Susan, Ian, Barbara 

Synopsis

Siberia at the end of the 19th Century, and the TARDIS arrives just as a shooting star hurtles to the ground.

With it comes an illness that affects the Doctor and Susan, and knowledge that must not fall into the wrong hands.

With his friends either dying or lost, Ian Chesterton must save the future and win the ultimate prize – a way home to 1963...

Verdict

The Wanderer was an excellent Companion Chronicles audio! It feels like an age since I blogged anything within this range so it was great to return to it and going back to the very first TARDIS team was a delight. William Russell was magnificent with his narrating and I also have to give huge credit to the writer for capturing the era of the early days of Doctor Who. This felt very much like a story within those first two seasons and it was good to include the element of Ian and Barbara being desperate to get back home to 1963 whilst also making it clear that they had travelled extensively in the TARDIS. They were very much wanderers in the fourth dimension and coming back to that line from An Unearthly Child was really nice. It's always been a favourite of mine! I liked the uniqueness of the setting in Siberia at the turn of the twentieth century and Ian finding that actually close to home with it only being six decades behind his own time was really interesting. Despite everything he and Barbara had seen on their travels, they still longed for home which I think is actually quite telling. Their arrival in Siberia coinciding with a shooting star was intriguing and I liked how it was quickly deduced that it was no ordinary shooting star. The fire in the sky on this occasion was more of a controlled landing so it was clear that there were aliens on the way. They were the Dahensa who turned out to be an intriguing race but it was actually their robotic probe that was of more interest. It was malfunctioning and that meant chronon particles were being released into the air and infected the Doctor in quite a severe way. I thought it was quite clever to have Susan and Barbara separated so we only heard the aftermaths of Susan's rampage after her infection. That was a good use of the format and the range with Ian clearly the focus. I liked how he was continuing the theme of The Aztecs in not wanting or believing he should change history and also applying that to the future was terrific. Grigory turned out to be an excellent character and I loved how through the probe he was able to see the next one thousand years of human history almost in an instant. And the things he was going to do! Stop the Holocaust, become Hitler's superior and directly impact the World Wars. They were just a few and the potential for disaster with this foreknowledge was fantastic. I was a big fan. The revelation that he was actually Rasputin was something I never saw coming so I loved that. The mad monk indeed. His crazed demeanour was marvellous and I was a big fan of him at the cliffhanger where he saw so much. His take on the Doctor being woven throughout human history was wonderful and some of the dialogue surrounding that was very good. It was good to have some use of the TARDIS telepathic circuits this early on to ensure Rasputin didn't retain all he had learnt, and the efforts of using the probe to get Ian and Barbara back to 1963 were lovely and it was actually a shame they had burned out so rendered useless. Overall, I thought this was a magnificent venture into the past and whilst the conclusion actually came in quite a simple fashion, the pace and logic of it was right at home with the early First Doctor era. A great listen!

Rating: 9/10