The Doomwood Curse

"The whole world will become fictional."

Writer: Jacqueline Rayner
Format: Audio
Released: August 2008
Series: Main Range 111

Featuring: Sixth Doctor, Charley

Synopsis

Curses and tombs, revenge from beyond the grave – and Dick Turpin!

England, 1738. On the trail of a lost book, the Doctor and Charley arrive at the beautiful county estate of Sir Ralph and Lady Sybil. But all is far from idyllic. There's a murderer on the loose, and the nearby woods are the haunt of the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin.

And that's not all. Something else has journeyed here. Something that could destroy the very fabric of reality. The Doctor and Charley have just forty-eight hours to solve the mystery before the whole world succumbs to The Doomwood Curse.

Verdict

The Doomwood Curse was a great audio adventure and certainly a lot of fun! I would not have expected anything less from Jacqueline Rayner as she is a favourite writer of mine and she didn't let me down here. I am longing to find out just what will, and can, happen with the Sixth Doctor and Charley's travels given that she's already had a lengthy run as the Eighth Doctor's companion starting in Storm Warning. How can he not remember her? I'm sure there will be answers soon enough as Charley once again showed cracks when it came to her cover story that the Doctor easily picked up on. He isn't letting it be known that he knows she isn't all that she seems as I think he is very intrigued by her. I'm a fan of that. The Sixth Doctor and Charley work really well together and they were probably the perfect pairing for a fictional historical. It is still a little strange listening to them together as I'm so used to them being in separate eras, but I'm really enjoying them so far. The Grel were fascinating enemies for this story and their obsession with facts was superb. I liked them a lot and I think there's a lot of potential in them for a future adventure. They seem like they would work perfectly with the Fourth Doctor for some reason! Anyway, the Sixth Doctor was here and terrifically played by Colin Baker and I liked how he posed them a well-known conundrum and they just couldn't draw a conclusion. That was a good way to draw a distraction and quite a humorous moment. Despite being the enemies for this adventure, the Grel barely appeared and I actually thought that was really effective. They were there at the start and the end and that was all that was needed. The playing on fiction was done really well and I'm a huge fan of incorporating it into a story. It worked so well in The Mind Robber and Invasion of the Mindmorphs so to see it incorporated again here was good. And it was also great that it was in a unique way with the Doctor and Charley living out fiction despite there being some resemblance of reality. It was not like they were within the book, it was the Grel wanting to turn fiction into fact and so stories had to happen. That was quite an extraordinary concept really, but one I was very much a fan of hearing. India Fisher got to try something new with her accent and whilst I thought it was a little questionable, it was different and it was nice to see a different side to Charley when she was meeting her novel-love in the form of Dick Turpin. Her failure to hide the allure she felt around him from her reading of Rockwood was quite humorous as she was actually there in his era and her sentiments would not be shared for highwaymen. I liked how he was the link to the Grel in being both fact and fiction and the Doctor putting trust into Charley and condemning himself to being consumed by the fiction was fantastic. He doesn't know a great deal about her and he knows she's deceiving him, but he firmly trusts her so that presents an intriguing dynamic. The ending with the pair vocalising facts at such a fast pace and telling their own story was a nice way to be ridden of the Grel, but I do hope they come back at some point in the future as they could be a lot of fun. Overall, a very good adventure!

Rating: 8/10