The Archive

"The sisters who very nearly brought an end to history."

Writer: David Llewellyn 

Format: Audio

Released: May 2015

Series: The Worlds of Big Finish 01

Featuring: Abby, Zara

Synopsis

From the streets of Edwardian London to the corridors of a near-infinite library in the distant future, a single book holds the key to the fate of life on Earth.

Some believe it predicts our future – and the apocalypse – with unnerving accuracy. Others will stop at nothing to destroy it, and will chase it from one side of the universe to the other; from a country house in the Roaring Twenties to the casinos of Mars, and from 221B Baker Street to the terrifying desert world of Sisyphus IX...

Featuring Abby and Zara, Sherlock Holmes, Dorian Gray, Iris Wildthyme, Vienna Salvatori and Bernice Summerfield, The Worlds of Big Finish brings together some of Big Finish's best-loved characters in an adventure spanning thousands of years!

Verdict

The Archive is a great little audio adventure to serve as the opening instalment of the rather ambitious release that is The Worlds of Big Finish! I was delighted to see that this first episode was offered for free from Big Finish as part of their Lockdownload weekly deals and releases and I was really glad that it was the Graceless sisters that kicked off this story because it was the only part of the release I am currently interested in! I'm a huge fan of Abby and Zara and I think their spinoff was terrific so it's really good to have completed their run of adventures in their entirety with this particular story. I don't know anything yet about Vienna, I know very little of Bernice on her own and Iris Wildthyme, and I've no interest in Sherlock Holmes or Dorian Gray, so this is certainly where my listening of this release will start and end. Which is why I'm glad it was released for free as I would never have been able to justify spending money on a six-parter for just the opening half an hour or so! I really liked that Abby made reference to the spinoff series and The Battle in particular where Chi prophesied that the next time the sisters met Marek it would be their deaths. I thought that was very nicely done and it meant that this adventure could slot nicely into the Graceless series and the adventures of Abby and Zara as a whole. It tied in very well. Hearing the sisters again was great from a personal perspective because I'm a big fan of both and it was also lovely to have the traditional Graceless sound effects of scene transitions. I love that. Hell, I even found myself almost dancing to the opening theme! It was just great to get to revisit them and have them returning to the Archive. It wasn't exactly how they'd left it and they got the timing off by about a millennium, but that didn't stop Romulus and Lucien knowing about them. They had garnered quite the reputation through time which I really enjoyed and it was good to later have their abilities targeted against them by a sudden turn from Lucien. Getting to know more about the Archive was really good and I loved how complicated it was for the sisters to understand. The Archive was an incredible composite of books and the humour that came with the meta-archive being the archive of the Archive was excellent. Abby and Zara's reaction to the use of universes plural was brilliant and the position of the Archive in the universe was great. The theory that the Archive contained the universe was also really fun to play around with. The Gomegon was an interesting addition to what was happening at the Archive with the archivists seemingly being murdered and I liked how Abby and Zara were initially accused of that. The truth was harder to stomach with it being told how the archivists seemingly killed themselves with poison in some sort of religious doing. Their positioning after death and holding the book was interesting to say the least. I liked the idea of different branches within the Archive pertaining to regions of the universe and it was inevitable that Earth was going to get involved in some way! The sisters leaving the book containing a portion of the history of Earth for Sherlock Holmes to find and deal with is a fun way to set up the second part and the rest of the release, and whilst I'm sure it will be entertaining and a good story, I'm more than happy to leave things here and continue catching up on my incredible backlog across a number of formats! Overall, a lovely listen.

Rating: 8/10