Backtrack

"Time itself is in agony."

Writer: Matthew J. Elliott

Format: Audio

Released: April 2018

Series: Tenth Doctor Chronicles 1.02

Featuring: Tenth Doctor, Martha

Synopsis

When the TARDIS crashes in the vortex, Martha and the Doctor find themselves on board the time-ship The Outcome, where the host offers temporal cruises at reasonable prices.

But time travellers must never cut corners. Dangerous forces have been unleashed, and Martha finds her medical skills put to the test as she deals with some lethal fall-out.

Time is running out, and the clock is ticking towards disaster!

Verdict

Backtrack was an excellent audio adventure to continue my listening of the Tenth Doctor Chronicles! I thought this was brilliant right from the start and it felt very much like a part of Series 3 which is a huge compliment. Although we are yet to get David Tennant and Freeme Agyeman reunited for a series of audios, getting a brand new adventure featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha is absolutely welcomed and I thought this was a fun use of their partnership. Something that has always irked me is the lack of reference addressing Martha's one trip journey that just is completely missed in Daleks in Manhattan, so having this story within that passage of 'one trip' journeys is fun and goes some way to tackling the continuity era. I like that it's established this story is set prior to The Lazarus Experiment which means things are still pretty early for Martha when it comes to travelling with the Doctor. There was definitely a feel of The End of the World when it came to her onlooking a bunch of aliens all at once as that was something she hadn't experienced before. The cruise ship that turned out to be the Outcome was a good setting and the concept behind Backtrack was fantastic. It offered an authentic sight seeing experience of the past using its own time technology and despite the Outcome supposedly being protected, there was a sense of danger there when it came to witnessing past combats like the Battle of Hastings or Waterloo. Martha getting the opportunity to gaze at the Time Vortex presented a wonderful image in my head and the Doctor referencing the Master without name when mentioning what looking directly at it without protection could do was brilliant, especially with when the episode is set chronologically. It was a lot of fun to have the Doctor and Martha posing as inspectors, but Hobb in leading the tour back to the Battle of Hastings wasn't buying it despite what the psychic paper showed. The thirtieth century setting was intriguing and I'd love for there to actually be this potential by then, not that I'll be around to see it though. Martha being thrust into the action as almost a doctor and being on hand to treat the collapsed Callifera was good and the mysterious globules containing the Malorian fungus was terrific. This coming from the faulty quantum generator leakage was fun and I loved the potential of an alien virus in the past, such as in 1066, threatening to wipe out the future. That was tremendous. Hobb taking a fancy to Martha was amusing because she was far from reciprocating the feeling which was good writing of the companion in my opinion. Her characterisation was well captured. Martha's moment of forgetting to vaccinate herself and then injecting the looming globule and seeing it diffuse like a balloon was good stuff as well as we knew they could be defeated despite their time jump mutation. Salt was a decent character as a soldier in 1980, even if he wasn't really needed. It was all about Hobb and his lust for profit which was great. The dilemma of him not being able to let the virus free in the past but also not face there consequences for his actions in the future was superb and I loved how he wasn't going to trust the Doctor to save him. The nuclear approach actually providing the solution and using the power of the Atomic Bomb to save the ship and materialise around the Outcome seemed a tad convenient, but it was a fun moment to end things that's for sure. Overall, a fine audio adventure!

Rating: 9/10