Big Finish Productions Eye of Harmony

Written by	Ken Bentley
Format	Compact Disc
Released	2016

Starring John Hurt

Synopsis: In the aftermath of events on Rovidia, the Dalek Time Strategist is presented with a unique opportunity to strike a lethal blow to the heart of Gallifrey. A devastating power is set to be unleashed, and with agents in place ready to do the bidding of the Dalek Time Strategist, the future of the Time War could turn in an instant. Trapped inside a critically damaged Battle TARDIS, hopelessly adrift in the Time Vortex, the War Doctor and his allies have a final desperate fight on their hands...

• This is what you'll call a review by Noe Geric

This is what you'll call a review by Noe Geric 21/3/22

After listening to The Eternity Cage in the War Doctor third box set, I thought you couldn't do something even more dull and uninspiring. Well, well, well, Big Finish never give up! They decided they needed to end the set on one of the worst - yes one of the WORST - Doctor Who stories ever. Forget Scaredy Cat, Let's Kill Hitler or even The Dominators. This is what will cause the end of Big Finish. John Hurt loses all his charisma. I think he had been drugged to tolerate his voice to be in this story and that's why he is so lifeless there! Every character is crap, the inexistent plot is crap, even the crap of this story is crap.

If you think I'll destroy this story all along this ''review", then you're right. I can't find one thing - seriously I can't find ONE thing - about this that I liked. I listened to it twice before writing this, and each time I lose the story. But no, that's not a problem. You can go away in the middle of a scene and come back twenty minutes later, and you'll miss nothing at all. And I'm deadly serious, I switched off my brain a couple of time and then came back to the action, and I realised everything was where I left it before. Literally (no, the CD player wasn't on pause). The whole story is about the Doctor and some dully written boy running in a dying battle TARDIS. How exciting. There's a lot of useless technobabble that makes you think clever things are happening. But it's just a lie. Every scene is here to make you thinks there's some ideas there. No. No...

I often finds good ideas in even the dullest stories. Things that could've been far better if it has been written properly. But in Eye of Harmony I couldn't find anything original, any piece of dialogue, any of the characters. Honeysuckle Weeks, the traitor revealed in The Eternity Cage, is back, and her acting is even worse. She can't act. The writing for her character is the same, but now she plays like if she owns the whole studio. I'm happy she dies (this is not even a spoiler, trust me), because she'll not have to come back. Her character's motivation was even more weird: she wanted to bring her grandfather from the dead. Wow! That's a motivation. Jacqueline Pearce gives a schizophrenic performance as Ollistra. From the Over The Top screaming, shouting and the ''Tell me about your family" was going to kill me. It's perhaps the way of how-not-to-reveal-a-character-backstory.

The score is cool, but it's the one you're listening to since the first War Doctor box set. There's that ending with the Doctor's speech, but it's rubbish; the sound design is just big explosions and vortex noises. And this is perhaps when I'm bored with the Daleks. They've been in countless adventures, let alone Big Finish stories, and this is when I want Briggs to stop with them. I don't even hear a Dalek voice anymore. The Dalek Time Strategist is Nick Briggs doing no effort to sound like a Dalek. "It has been foreseen." Is this a catchphrase? The Time Strategist says it in every scene. Oh, and it's called Eye of Harmony because the Eye appears and the characters repeat its name every five seconds.

This is where I stop throwing all my hatred at this pile of stupidity. I paid for that, I paid for a whole box set to listen THIS?! And now I begin to wonder if Big Finish know what they're doing. Did they listen to this? Did they like it? Now it's more a matter of quantity rather than quality with countless Box Set and spin-off. They're destroying every bit of Doctor Who mythology. The Time Warner never felt so dull. The soldiers are perhaps even bored on the front, sleeping because their damned Time Warner is just Ollivanders running in a dead TARDIS for ONE HOUR! No one at Big Finish must read reviews anymore, or they'll have stopped this masquerade a long time ago. For 30 release every year, you've got four good stories, and all the others are average stuff or, in some cases, this sort of stupidity.

I won't even rate this. I gave Scaredy Cat a hideous review, but this is even worse. I spent money on this and, even after reading some reviews, I wasn't expecting Eye of Harmony to be like that! Never again. Never.