• The impending sense of doom. It makes sense given that death is the central theme of this story, but there's a wonderfully maudlin sense that permeates this story that somehow works. This is mostly down to Sylvester McCoy's performance, he hits just the right notes in his portrayal of 7 as weary and ready for a change. The story is - if not his last adventure - very close to it, there are plenty of call-backs (call-forwards?) to the television movie that saw him regenerate into Paul McGann's 8th Doctor. Sometimes that is used for humor such as when he complains that he doesn't intend to die to the sound of glorified elevator music while listening to Puccini's Madame Butterfly, which is the song that plays during his death scene in the movie. But more often than not it is a feeling, a sense that he's lived a long time in this incarnation and is more than ready to move on, tired of being the grand puppetmaster toppling regimes and outsmarting genocidal monsters. Throwing him into the mix of the sky station above Antikon, he fits right in amongst the paranoid, the desperate and the dying who have been drawn to Antikon for various reasons. His solution to dealing with the Decay makes a lot of sense both in the context of his character and the setting, and it's kinda fitting that his plan basically fails which further demonstrates he's reaching the end of the line and isn't quite as on top of things as he once prided himself on being.
  
  
• The cacophony of sound. There's a wall of noise in this story that just bombards the listener almost from the start and never lets up. People panicking, resurrected creatures rushing about, the ship falling apart, the computer constantly talking, it's just noise, noise, noise and yet it all works. The situation is supposed to feel chaotic, unsettling and even in places frustrating and the sound design accomplishes this very well without ever going too far over the line and becoming annoying or detracting from the story.
  
  
• Spider's Shadow. The Death Collectors is a little shorter than most Big Finish stories, which works in this case because the story doesn't outlive its welcome but also doesn't feel rushed. It helps that the bonus story included with it - Spider's Shadow - is very good AND ties in to the main story so it feels like a natural extension. A fun little story about the Doctor finding himself running through the same series of events over and over but completely out of order, quickly working out that something is wrong and turning the trap he's in against itself in order to escape. I mentioned above that there was a sense in the main story that the Doctor wasn't quite as on top of things as he used to be, but here the flame burns bright again for a short time as he smoothly adapts to the situation and works out how to take control. The fact he ends up against a nemesis who is just as used to being magnitudes of intellect above its adversaries as the Doctor works too, because it suggests the Doctor IS out of his league only for his previous actions/interactions in the main story proving the difference - his exposure to the base and "simple" level of time/space that his nemesis despises ends up being the key to defeating it. It would be easy for the gimmick to overshadow the story, but it all ties together nicely and makes sense, probably because it is so short that there is no room for fluff and they just get to the meat of the matter.
  

• Decay and the Dar Traders. The Decay is the central threat of the story, and the Dar Traders are inextricably linked with it.... but neither gets much in the way of explanation and that connection they share doesn't actually make any sense given the information we're given in the story. The Dar Traders come to the Sky Station to help the scientist there treat an assistant infected with Decay because as "traders of death" they have a natural resistance to the Decay.... but then it turns out they were CREATED by the Decay? So then why are they scared of it? If the planet is quarantined to keep the Decay from getting out, how come the Dar Traders are free to just sail about in space trading in dead things? How come the Decay infects them if they're naturally resistant to it? Why are they working to contain the Decay and prevent it from getting out into the universe? Why is the chief scientist so obsessed with "beating death" when the Dar Traders already have, they're basically walking corpses who can only move about thanks to exo-skeletons but they are LIVING dead. By the end of the story, I was more confused by the various revelations that had come about than I was before I started.
  
  
• A muddled climax. There's a story of love and redemption trying to peek through from beneath all the focus on death and nihilism... but when it comes it doesn't feel earned or even particularly desirable. Katherine Parkinson (Jen from the excellent The IT Crowd) is interesting as Danika Meanwhile but nobody really works, including unfortunately the Chief Scientist who serves as the primary antagonist until the Decay can take a more front-and-center role. Katarina Olsson as the Ship's AI which is starting to become corrupted does a perfectly fine job but is hampered by covering such well-trodden ground done so much better in the past. Their various stories coming together lacks any sense of impact and the climax doesn't really hit when it finally comes, especially as there seems to be a deliberate attempt to push the idea of Danika as a potential new companion (and she probably would have been a good one) which overshadows the rather lame broken-relationship one that ends up taking precedence.
  

Forktoss fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Jul 7, 2016

CobiWann fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Jul 7, 2016

Forktoss fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Jul 7, 2016