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REVIEWS

Doctor Who: Orbis

reviewed by guy adams Written by Alan Barnes and Nicholas Briggs

Produced by Big Finish

www.bigfinish.com

£10.99

Seafood is pernicious stuff and I for one am at a loss as to why the fact is not universally accepted. What is it with people turning a blind eye towards clearly unpleasant organisms simply because they hail from underwater? Prawns are sea insects... bluebottles of the waves... Doesn’t stop you lot cooing over them like they’re God’s gift to the palate... Oysters? Dear Christ... the day I need to ingest shelled snot to stimulate an erection is the day I convert to celibacy. It’s not as if we’re running out of things to eat now is it? Develop selective taste, you idiots, before evolution turns its back on us for not getting the joke!

The Eighth Doctor certainly wouldn’t eat seafood: how could he? On the evidence of Orbis he’s been cohabiting with some for the last 600 years and NOBODY with an ounce of gastronomic savoir-faire eats something it’s possible to have a conversation with. In fact, during his time on the planet Orbis the Doctor has grown very fond of the jellyfish-like inhabitants, acting on their behalf against the invasive cruelties of the Molluscari. These shelled swine, led by the Great Crassostrea – played by Andrew Sachs, whose running commentary about the development of his female sex organs might have taught humourvacuum Russell Brand a thing or two about the potential for obscene phone calls – want to take over the planet of Orbis and use its waters for breeding... a bit like the English in Benidorm.

I confess that after the epic quality of last season’s Vengeance of Morbius (and its resultant dual cliff-hanger) I had expected a similar tone here and it took me a few minutes of listening to the amusing gurglings of Orbis’s fruits de la mer to shift my expectations. Orbis isn’t a kettle-drum pounding, jawdropping hour of high drama, it’s a charming tale that seeks to remind you of the Doctor’s emotional leanings rather than present any great challenges to the Very Fabric of Existence. On reflection I think this was a sensible route, providing a pleasant reintroduction to the whimsies of the Eighth Doctor and his relationship with Sheridan Smith’s Lucie. True, in the last quarter things get a little more weighty – in a beach scene that runs perhaps a fraction too long, fraught exposition and dramatic storms rage just a shade past our inclination to stay thrilled at them – but overall this is a fun start to Big Finish’s third series of Eighth Doctor and Lucie adventures and no worse off for it.

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