Big Finish Productions is filling up the TARDIS again for its latest batch of Doctor Who audio dramas.
The company, which was producing original, full-cast stories with performers from the original television series long before the cult British sci-fi classic was resurrected on-screen in 2005, has announced that Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding and Mark Strickson will be returning to the roles of Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough alongside the Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison.
The last time the Doctor had so many companions at once was in 1983’s “Terminus,” the final part of the “Black Guardian Trilogy,” which introduced the scheming but ultimately noble companion Vislor Turlough. Sutton, Fielding and Strickson have each appeared separately in Big Finish stories with Davison over the years, but this is the first time they will all perform together again.
Nyssa is a scientist and the last survivor of an advanced world destroyed by the Doctor’s nemesis, the Master. Tegan is a smart-mouthed Australian stewardess always trying to get the Doctor to take her home, then changing her mind. Turlough is an alien political exile living at an English public school, where he met the Doctor and the others.
The “season” begins in July with Cobwebs, continues in August with The Whispering Forest and concludes with The Cradle of the Snake, which is a sequel to 1983’s Snakedance, in which the Doctor and his companions encountered an evil psychic force called the Mara.
“When we knew we could get these characters back together, we realised we wanted to bring back the Mara because it was an iconic monster from the Davison era,” said executive producer Nicholas Briggs on the Big Finish website. He also provides the voice of the Daleks in the modern Doctor Who TV series and is rumored to appear in the upcoming fifth season with the new Doctor, Matt Smith. He finally appeared on-screen in the Whoniverse last year in the Doctor Who spinoff series Torchwood as a cowardly British government official who was complicit in a plot to sell a percentage of the Earth’s children to vile aliens.
Big Finish also announced that subscribers will get a free story in December called The Four Doctors, which unites former leading men Davison, Colin Baker (Sixth), Sylvester McCoy (Seventh) and Paul McGann (Eighth) “in an epic fight against the Daleks.”
Their products are available as CDs and digital downloads from www.bigfinish.com.
Tip and image via The Doctor Who News Page
