Happy Birthday Tom Baker!
On Monday, Doctor Who actor Tom Baker turned 86 years old, and to celebrate the momentous occasion his newest audio adventures with Big Finish Productions are being released today today.
Some fans might remember Baker’s last year of Doctor Who, with Adric, K-9, and Romana before falling from Jodrell Bank and coming back as Peter Davison. The latest two adventures fit right into this 1980-81 storyline nicely.
The two latest stories in the second volume are called The Planet of Witches written by Alan Barnes and The Quest of the Engineer written by Andrew Smith and here are their synopses
According to Big Finish Productions In Planet of The Witches:
Whilst attempting a detailed scan of E-Space, K9 detects the trail of a large spacecraft. Seeking a lead for their escape, the Doctor sets out on its trail towards a misty yellow planet.
Arriving just in time to witness a crash-landing in the planet’s swamps, the Doctor and his crew discover a number of escaping prisoners fleeing from someone claiming to be a Witchfinder… whilst terrifying ‘familiars’ float around them.
For this is the planet of the witches… and the witches may just know the way home.
They also give us the synopses for The Quest of the Engineer:
The TARDIS crew’s attempts to escape E-Space lead them to a strange planet with a surface that shifts and changes constantly.
Losing their ship down a fissure, they venture into the depths of this world and encounter the man who rules this place – a man known only as ‘the Engineer’. He tells them that he’s on a quest for illumination, and to find a rumoured portal in space that may lead to another reality, with knowledge unknown in this universe.
It seems he may be on the same quest as the Doctor and his friends. But can he be trusted? And who is he really?
Producer, David Richardson gave this quote:
The idea of taking the Fourth Doctor back to E-Space was, of course, irresistible. Revisiting the TARDIS family who were together for basically three stories on screen. And now we’ve a whole new set of adventures in the spirit of that trilogy.I was really keen going in that we would be telling four-part stories only. The television season was all four-parters and so anything else would have felt wrong to me. It allowed us to take the E-Space trilogy and expand it to seven tales. What would we call that? A septrilogy, maybe? With our audio adventures sitting snugly between the TV episodes, we get to explore the relationships between the four leads in more detail – how they fit together and how they don’t. There was so much scope in terms of things for us to play with.
Tom Baker is joined by fellow Doctor Who alumni Matthew Waterhouse who voices the role of Adric
Big Finish Productions is a production company that produces audio plays most popular for their Doctor Who plays and its spin offs. You can find their social media at the following accounts:
Instagram: @BigfinishProd