Astroman fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Apr 15, 2016

• Nothing is as it seems. The entire story is based on multiple levels of deception, some obvious and others less so. The theme remains consistent from start to finish, with people either withholding vital information, allowing others to jump to conclusions, or actively lying. While it means you can't really trust anything that anybody says, it supplies an important context in terms of reminding the listener that there is more below the surface and that nothing should be taken at face value. I'm not a fan of the premise of the episode at all, but I do enjoy how it plays out, with everything nonsensical about it making sense once the listener has all the (currently supplied) information. It's also nice to see where and when they choose to make the Doctor aware of deceptions - some he falls for completely, others he just smoothly goes along with, and he rarely calls anybody openly out on lies even when they're obvious. There's a nice sense that the Doctor is more onto it than most but not infallible. There's also a level of characters jumping to conclusions that are nicely undercut by the Doctor who uses the odd experience he has stumbled on as a chance to instruct and teach. When people start disappearing and an alien is located, the applicants assume it is behind everything and are at a loss when the Doctor asks them why they didn't just ask it. When a missing team is used as evidence to accuse a suspect, the Doctor reveals that they've jumped to conclusions by assuming the team was missing for sinister reasons and not perfectly mundane ones. Basically this is a story that rewards those who do (and punishes those who don't) look beneath the surface. But even that gets turned on its head when another ancillary character given an unusual amount of screen-time is offered a chance to become a major (and recurring) character and just straight up (if politely) rejects the notion - the listeners shouldn't make assumptions either!
  
  
• The threats. Divided into two parts, each part relies on a distinct threat that keeps the applicants (and the Doctor, importantly) busy. These threats are nicely handled, just big enough to be a real worry while also managing to maintain a sense of having been somewhat cobbled together on the fly. People disappearing into thin air seemingly at random creates a nice level of paranoia and then a race against time once the cause is discovered, and the moment of hesitation of one applicant has fatal consequences which in turn kick off the events of the second part. While the first threat ends up being rather easily resolved, the true "threat" came in the lack of information/understanding they had of the situation until they investigated it, and it makes sense that once everything is figured out it becomes relatively elementary to resolve. More difficult to deal with is the second threat - at first an advanced but crude giant robot stomps towards the hotel, easily taken down by a simple trip, but then multiple smaller versions appear and begin repairing the larger one, while a rogue AI (is there any other kind?) begins the process of taking complete control of the planet's computer and electronic systems. This is made possible by a moment's hesitation in the first part of the story, reminding the applicants that their actions have consequences. Again there seems to be a relatively simple solution, but this gets complicated as various characters begin to reveal their deceptions out of their own self-interest. The final threat is made possible by the resolution of this event, which in turn leads to the Doctor finally finding his new companion.
  
  
• The season arc tease. All throughout the story the Doctor seems as much in the dark as everybody else about what is going on. By the end of the story, revelations make him aware that not only was somebody else running him through this maze, but that they were undertaking their own application process in another part of town, having discarded the problematic candidates onto him to keep him busy. Enough information is presented to suggest who the Doctor might be going up against, but not enough to say definitively who that might be. I can think of several characters it might be (and it could be somebody completely new for all I know) and so long as it isn't the Forge or more of the loving Headhunter I'm looking forward to finding out who they are, and more importantly what they're up to.
  

• The premise. While I'm a fan of Eddie Robson's writing and enjoyed his take on The Office in Human Resources, I wasn't exactly thrilled at the idea of the Doctor holding auditions for a new companion. Even though the idea is almost immediately and obviously turned on its head by the clear implication (and later explicit admission) that the Doctor is as in the dark as everybody else, having him take on the role of the mentor/judge who lines up the contestants to make misleading statements before pulling the rug out by kicking out a different person than expected just fell flat for me. I'd argue that RTD already did as good a job with pillorying Reality-TV with Bad Wolf as it would be possible to do in Who (and others would argue even that was terrible) and seeing yet another tired "subversion" of the artificial and aggravating plague of reality television that I do my best to avoid in the first place didn't endear this story to me.
  
  
• Needing context. While it's nice that the end revelations put everything that preceded it into context and explains why characters (including the Doctor) acted the way they did, it only means that the frankly baffling and inconsistent actions makes sense at the end of the story. On a first listen, I found myself constantly thinking/saying,"What? Why would they....? That doesn't make any sense...." and it just went on like that until characters would reveal their true intentions/backstories and I'd go,"Oh.... okay." There's a balance that needs to be made between a game-changing revelation and a nonsensical story - you should be able to enjoy a story on its own merits up to the point that new information puts it all into a new context. It's rare (but not unheard of) for a story full of contradictions to be engaging on its own , and this story is unfortunately not one of those rare occurrences.
  
  
• The new companion. The basis of this story by Big Finish was to keep the viewer from knowing who the Doctor's new companion would be following the departure of Sheridan Smith. As a result, they wrote the story so that any of the applicants could feasibly (if not optimally) be the new companion - indeed, all four seem to be based largely on versions of previous companions like Adric, Harry Sullivan, Tegan, Leela etc. But every single one of them is lying/deceiving the Doctor in order to get what they want. This means that once we finally get the new companion, we don't know anything at all about them, they're a complete cipher. We don't know what their personality is like, only the barest sketchy knowledge of their backstory and motivations etc. So it is hard to feel much of anything, either enthusiasm or dread for the person who got the role that this entire episode was about getting. They may turn out to be great, maybe they'll be awful, but based on this story there is no way to know because the new companion is barely seen/heard in this story, just a role that they chose to play in a bid to get the job.