2021: Another audio with a slow start, but the slow burn is definitely worth it. While this one gets a little melodramatic, it’s definitely something that needed to happen, a breaking point that caps the previous four Sixth Doctor and Evelyn stories!

Enjoyed this one a lot. I teared up and everything.

a story of the Doctor trying to get Evelyn's mind off recent tragic events and ending up getting over-involved in a local political situation. Indeed, really rather too involved for my reading of how both the Doctor and Evelyn normally operate. But the whole thing hung together well, with a grim and tragic story which yet found some redemption at the end.

This is a sixth Doctor story with Evelyn Smythe as the companion, and is #57 in the Big Finish main range.

Evelyn, traumatized from the events of [b:Doctor Who: Project: Lazarus|152047|Doctor Who Project Lazarus|Cavan Scott|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1327498433s/152047.jpg|146759] needs some time away from the TARDIS and the Doctor. The Doctor takes her to a world with one large continent split into three countries, two of which have been at war for a long time. But the war has just ended with the arranged marriage of the princess of one country to the prince of the other. Evelyn becomes friendly with the ruler of the third neutral country and the Doctor becomes close with the princess, but unfortunately changing the history of this world as the Doctor and Evelyn understand it.

The sixth Doctor and Evelyn are the best of the Big Finish main range and this story underlines it. One of the best Doctor Who audios I've listened to and maybe one of the better Who stories in any medium. It does everything refreshingly differently, with the TARDIS team spending weeks in place, developing quite deep relationships with the people they're interacting with and altering the timeline inadvertently and deliberately from their foreknowledge of events. It also addresses Evelyn's trauma and issues with her own mortality directly as well as putting a strong light on the Doctor's own ability to pick up and move to his next adventure.

Just brilliant.

This might be the first Big Finish story that actually brought me to tears... twice!
Doctor, the Sixth, and Evelyn Smyth are the most reliable Doctor/Companion team in the series. There is a maturity in their relationship that truly transcends Doctor Who as a whole and I treasure it.
In some ways this story is clever, but workmanlike, and would be a fine, though not exceptional, piece for any other TARDIS team, but Colin Baker and Maggie Stables invest it with some real marrow as the story becomes far more about their mortality and their relationship than it does about these people they are trying to save.
I knock one star for Gary Russell again trying to spear his white whale of large scale action sequences in audio and again missing. It just doesn't work and a bit of the latter two episodes could've used less of it.
But the ending is as transcendent as anything in "Spare Parts", "The Holy Terror" or "Chimes of Midnight." And it had me in tears.