flowsoffire

So thanks to the amazing

universaldogma, I got to listen to my very first BF audio adventure! :D

And quite the delight that was! Audios are really great, as it turns out—not that I'm surprised, but they work really nicely on the voices, the noises, the music, the descriptions and storytelling to make up for the lack of any images; the whole thing really comes to life. The plot was fascinating, the town of Hisk vividly portrayed, the concepts really clever and the ending twist just wonderful. The way the whole city worked, the trading and the dreams, were really interesting; the Harbingers were really scary. Overall, BF proved quite different from classic!Who in the feeling it gave, much more… adult. TV!Who remains a show that's meant for kids as well as grown-ups. Here, Ian being interrogated gives a much more chilling feel than what I was getting in The Invasion when the situation was roughly the same; suicide and death were soberly tackled, the idea of the city itself eliminating its weaker elements, twisting its citizens into murderers gave me chills. Darkness was more present, whilst being fought, and successfully so. I love the idea of Ian and Barbara's simple dream of home overruling the city's infected dream.

The constant questioning of the Doctor, his identity, his strengths and weaknesses and his actions was also very interesting—thought-provoking, though the point of that was revealed in the end and Ian resisted the suggestion trying to plant seeds of doubt in his mind. On a lighter note, I liked Ian and Barbara having very human-oriented skills while Vicki and the Doctor were being the brains—and that one-liner about Barbara wearing a peculiar outfit in Ian's dreamspace took me completely off-guard and made me CRACK UP! Goodness, that was perfect! :D

Only thing that disappointed me at first: I wasn't clear at all about the release date of that adventure, so I wondered if several of the actors would be featured. Turns out it was only William Russell—such a performance, though :D