April 24th, 2024 no comments

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Big Finish The Ninth Doctor Adventures 3.4 Star-Crossed

Available to order from www.bigfinish.com

The Ninth Doctor and River Song’s Star-Crossed saga

Story and cast details are revealed today for the final box set in the current series of The Ninth Doctor Adventures, due for release in May 2024.

In The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Star-Crossed, the Time Lord is joined by a very familiar face – who he doesn’t recognise yet – as Alex Kingston stars as Professor River Song, appearing alongside Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor in all three stories.

The second story, Face of the Apocalypse, features a guest starring role from Paul Reynolds, whose acting breakthrough was in Steven Moffat’s Press Gang, now reunited with Eccleston after they first worked together on the film Let Him Have It.

Also on the box set’s cast list are Nadia Albina (Doctor Who: Flux), Trevor Cooper (Star Cops, This Country), Francesca Mills (The Witcher: Blood Origin, Worzel Gummidge) and Tom Neenan (The Hauntening).

Doctor Who – The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Star Crossed is now available to pre-order for just £29.99 (collector’s edition CD box set + download) or £22.99 (download only), exclusively from www.bigfinish.com.

The three fantastic adventures are:

Swipe Right by John Dorney

• There are strange rumours about the planet Crell. People have been vanishing. The mysterious Matchmaker is keen to get the populace paired up via his special dating app… but rejecting too many suitors can have fatal consequences. It’s precisely the sort of thing the Doctor would want to investigate. But unfortunately it’s also precisely the sort of thing River Song would want to investigate too. The Doctor and River are on a collision course – but this time it might not be a match made in heaven.

Face of the Apocalypse by Lizzie Hopley

• After locking onto an unusual algorithm, the TARDIS lands in a hi-security Intergalactic Bank where the computerised system only recognises one face – River Song. The Doctor discovers River dismantling the main computer and immediately suspects her of something dodgy… But a case of stolen identity becomes far more serious as River’s face starts to appear throughout history and the Bank vaults start filling up with Temporal Prisoners. Is River the victim of a sting or a bored computer nerd? One thing’s for certain, the ‘glitch’ is no longer a glitch and is on its way to destroying all of spacetime, starting with Prisoner Number One.

Archipelago by Tim Foley

• River Song has one last request. If the Doctor undertakes a dangerous journey with her on the planet Fortuna, she’ll never bother him again. But this is no ordinary voyage. As the storms batter their tiny vessel, the travellers are confronted with some brutal home truths. There is a captain in search of a husband. There is a ship in need of a light. And there are lovers lost in the maelstrom who will always be islands apart…

Writer John Dorney said: “This box set felt different because normally, they are standalone stories with the Ninth Doctor. Here, it was more fun because there was a sense we could be quite collaborative with it.

“Myself, Tim and Lizzie had a big Zoom meeting where we talked through our ideas, and we felt it might be interesting if we got to a structure that mirrored three stages of a relationship. Mine ended up being the first date, in effect, then Lizzie’s became the mid-period, and Tim’s was old age.”

Lizzie Hopley added: “Starting on a new partnership is like putting two chemicals in a jar and seeing how they interact as you write. River senses he’s maybe more wary of her, so responds to that. She knows this Doctor needs a hug more than any of them, but she’s careful of getting too close while he’s still so raw.

“Face of the Apocalypse went through so many changes. I had planned a story about the later years of Helen of Troy, who was having marriage difficulties. I liked the idea of River and the Ninth Doctor, who weren’t in a typical River-Doctor relationship, having to counsel another couple in order to save a timeline. But I was asked to steer clear of Greeks, so invented my own legend, which starts on a high-security banking planet!”

And, Tim Foley said: “This is the wrong Doctor for River… and we thought it would be really fun to explore what that actually meant. Unlike the other incarnations she’s met, she struggles to click with the Ninth Doctor. It’s an ‘unromance’! But why is that, is this Doctor too wounded from the Time War? Too different from River’s conception of the Doctor? There’s lots of exciting possibilities here.

“I really took and ran with that idea to make Archipelago the most romantic ‘unromance’ I’ve ever written. River has one last request for this Doctor. If he does this for her, she’ll never bother him again. But it’s a task that might mean far more than the end of their relationship… We’re on the planet Fortuna, and there’s an old captain who needs his help.”

Big Finish listeners can purchase Doctor Who – The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Star-Crossed as part of a complete four-volume series bundle for just £108 (on collector’s edition CD box set + download) or £88 (download only), exclusively from www.bigfinish.com.

All the above prices include the special pre-order discount and are subject to change after general release.

Big Finish listeners can still purchase series 1-2 of The Ninth Doctor Adventures. These are each available as triple LP vinyl bundles – limited to a pressing of 1,000 per volume – for £140 per series. Collector’s edition (CD box set + download) bundles are also available at £110 per series, as are digital download bundles, for just £96 per series.

Please note: the vinyl editions do not include any behind-the-scenes extras. However, listeners purchasing vinyl LP editions will receive a download of the story automatically and be given access to the CD edits as a bonus download. Episodes will be edited specifically for the vinyl format, presented as 2 episodes, one on each side, each with opening and closing music. In addition, all pre-orders of the vinyls will also receive the behind the scenes extras as a bonus download.

Categorised under: Big Finish, CD, The 9th Doctor