Bounty

"I merely wanted to recover my key."

Writer: Peter Anghelides

Format: Audio

Released: September 1998

Series: Earth and Beyond 01

Featuring: Eighth Doctor, Sam

Synopsis

Seventeen-year-old Sam Jones's first trip in the TARDIS is to the Seychelles in the present day – and it involved a deadly encounter with alien bounty hunters. Can the Doctor stop them making Earth their battleground?

Verdict

Bounty was a solid little audio story! It's a rather unique little tale and one I had never heard of until I found myself searching through the BorrowBox online library of audio tales as part of my library membership. I don't have any real intentions of ever listening to an audiobook of a Target novelisation, but I was just looking through what appeared on the second volume of the Tales from the TARDIS collection and came across the Earth and Beyond addition. Upon further research I found that there was a whole original audio set within the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels! I have only read four books from that range at the moment, but with this depicting Sam's first adventure in the TARDIS it seemed like a pretty good time to listen given that I last read The Bodysnatchers within the range. It worked well and was quite interesting to place a whole story between The Eight Doctors and Vampire Science. They're both excellent novels so this little anomaly serving as the first time Sam travels in the TARDIS was intriguing. I like what I have blogged of Sam thus far and it was clear from the start that she wanted more than just a singular trip in the TARDIS. The Doctor seemed less keen. I loved that the pair played a game of 'Never Have I Been' with the Time Lord obviously going to have a big advantage given his ownership of a time and space machine. The reference again to the Doctor having recently regenerated was good and makes the chronology of this incarnation interesting when it comes to meshing together the comic strips and the Big Finish audios. Sam blurting out as part of the game that the Doctor had killed someone, or rather having him avoid admitting that, was excellent and immediately shifted the feeling of the audio. I thought Paul McGann's narration of the story was great and it was an interesting change in dynamic having him narrate rather than just play the Doctor. It was a nice change. The metal man on the beach was good and I thought that he was going to be called that for the duration of the audio! It plodded along nicely at just over half an hour and seemed to be the adequate length. His taking of the TARDIS key, that in of itself was the spare, worked well and then we were introduced to the Rhiptogans. One had taken the TARDIS key but didn't really know what to do with it which I thought was quite amusing, it had the means to enter a TARDIS but didn't realise its power or potential. The concept of their shimmering form was decent, but probably too similar to that of the Zygons. Why not just throw them into the adventure instead? I think that might have improved things, although it may have contradicted Sam's encounter with them in a few TARDIS trips time from her perspective. The story wasn't unique, but not exactly repetitive either, in that Earth was essentially going to become a battleground for the Rhiptogans. I liked how the alien device that Sam had found on the beach turned out to be the navigator and I also loved her reaction to the Rhiptogan spaceship. It felt very real and it was good to have this companion that is limited to prose in a performed story, even if her character wasn't cast. Finding out that the Rhiptogans died in salt water was excellent and I liked that those on the run decided to come here because two-thirds of the planet was poisonous and wouldn't be expected to be found there. Sam's fatal injury at the hands of the plants protecting the ship came a bit out of nowhere and I think more clarity was needed on how she was fully healed. The imagery of the Doctor holding a severed head was superb, but a slight let down that it turned out to just be Reduse of the Rhiptogans. Ladeeth's cold nature when Sam had her plant predicament was weird given the position of being hunted, but it also introduced her well to alien feeling. Sam's reaction to the possibility of the Doctor possibly killing a Rhiptogan and the cold-blooded joke that went along with it was brilliant and probably the highlight of the story, but I do feel the conclusion was a tad quick, even if the intention was to be sudden. It was nice for the end of the adventure to have Sam given a TARDIS key. She was a fully fledged companion now which was very nice. Overall, a decent little story!

Rating: 7/10