Given that Paul Cornell created the character of Benny, it no doubt seemed fitting that he should script her first audio appearance with the Doctor and Ace- and in Lisa Bowerman, it’s fair to say that the character found her perfect interpreter. Bowerman’s Benny is quite simply flawless- at the time of her conception, the idea of having a slightly older female companion was something of a departure, but by being both quick-witted and vulnerable, most notably in the use of witty rejoinders in tense situations and irony when faced with the uncanny, Benny became something that Doctor Who had never really had before. Lisa Bowerman’s achievement came in approaching a role which already had a complicated back story from a long series of novels and taking it on so well that it’s hard to pick up, say, ‘Love and War’ without now imagining Bowerman saying Benny’s words. In the "Squidgy and Speckly" scene for one, she’s on top form and manages to be both hilarious and genuine. It’s also fitting that a rather older Sophie Aldred should be playing the battle-hardened Ace of the books rather than her television character and she’s nowhere better than when the character deafens herself as a form of immunity against the Scourge’s main weapon. If there’s a duff performance, unfortunately it’s Sylvester McCoy- the script as written has the Doctor undergoing various metamorphoses, however this isn’t playing to McCoy’s strengths as an actor and for the benefit of anybody who believes that he can’t "do" anger- well, he can’t "do" being morphed into a giant mantis-creature either.

Although a lot of the elements of Cornell’s script are right- the self-contained setting, plenty of supporting characters bringing different things to the mix and a menace which adds something new to the ranks of Doctor Who monsters, there’s something about the whole which doesn’t quite fit together. The manipulative Doctor who enters into a previous unseen deal with the Scourge in order to destroy them is bang on for this era- but because this is episodic Who rather than a novel, he has to get it wrong or we don’t have a story. And while the elements of the second half of the story which take place inside the Doctor’s mind are also consistent with a New Adventures approach, without either the prose to describe what’s going on or the visuals to let us see it, too often it just sounds like a couple of people talking in a room. Far better to concentrate on the good ideas- the minor characters who have lives of their own, histories, aspirations and secret affairs, and particularly the idea of the Scourge themselves as creatures who feed on human insecurity, doubts and self-hatred. It’s a suitably mature concept for a race of monsters, particularly the way in which they can use their influence to persuade people to surrender themselves to death, and one which owes something to the Joss Whedon demonology of Buffy and Angel, where demons are often the external manifestation of internal phenomena.

So it’s a curious experiment rather than a triumph or a failure, then, but still worth a listen for those familiar with the context. Sadly, familiarising oneself with the context these days will in most cases mean a great deal of expenditure on eBay and the like, but as a one-off attempt to bring this particular sideline in Doctor Who history to life, it’s a decent stab at something which was after all an attempt at breaking out of episodic stories to do something more complex.