Big Finish Productions Spaceport Fear

Written by	William Gallagher
Format	Compact Disc
Released	2013

Starring Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford

Synopsis: Welcome to Tantane Spaceport - where the tribes of Business and Economy have been at war for all of four hundred years... Welcome to Tantane Spaceport - where a terrible creature called the Wailer prowls the corridors around the Control Tower, looking to eat the unwary... Welcome to Tantane Spaceport - where there is one Arrival: a battered blue Police Box containing the time-travelling Doctor and his companion, Mel... Welcome to Tantane Spaceport - where there are no Departures. Ever.

• A Review by Thomas Tiley

A Review by Thomas Tiley 12/1/26

Landing in a spaceport, the Sixth Doctor and Mel 's arrival causes the long-dormant lights and systems to come back for a while. The locals call this summer, and they run into a Naysmith fleeing for her life from a rival tribe. The Doctor and Mel get draw into the situation when it is reveal their arrival has unleased a monster know as the Wailer that is following them in the dark.

This is a fun story, the stetting of a advance port is a good one and easy to imagine/envison as its basically just an advanced airport. The two tribes, descendants of the people working and visiting the spaceport, are separated into Business and Economy, leading to all sort of misunderstandings and jokey humor in the style of Douglas Adams (people defecting from their tribe are upgraded, people getting murdered are retired or downsized, a woman with the surname Captain wonders if her ancestors were passengers or crew etc). There are some fun ideas at play in the story (the Doctor uses a videogame tablet to try and contact the outside/as a way to message each other, and they go to duty free to get the batteries for it) and lots of amusing wordplay in relation to the business people.

The monster Wailer is a great concept, a creature coming after the cast in the darkness, making an awful noise, disintegrating people and then vacuuming up the remains, gross. It reminded me from its description of that terrifying baby monster from Resident Evil: Village, so it was easy for me to picture it as the story went along.

Isabel Fay as Naysmith is great, acting as the Doctors guide. I liked her 'We also make our clothes in the dark' in reaction to seeing the Doctor's coat. Beth Chambers as Galpan is also pretty great as well, with her funny Business talk and an interesting character arc as she slowly starts to realize what is going on.

Ronald Pickup plays Elder Bone, the tribe leader, and its no spoiler to say he is the real bad guy. I guessed his secret long before the Episode 2 reveal with all the obvious little hints in the dialogue (his insistence they go to the control room and the fact that he is hundreds of years old). He does a good job playing the double agent/secret villain/nice old tribal elder and gets a few good lines along the way such as when he reveals he has been feeding bright and intelligent members of the tribe to the Wailer and responds to a rebuke with 'You were never in any danger being feed to the Wailer'.

There are a few plot niggles. The Wailer is revealed to be the child of the people laying siege to the spaceport for centuries, and Elder Bone wanted to use it as a weapon in a war he is part of; despite bombarding it for that long, the shields still protect it and they can't get in, but in the backstory multiple craft have arrived during this time. How could they get in and the Wailers can't? Do they fly past the Wailers to get in? Presumably, the port computers can tell the difference between friend and foe but it's not explained. If the spaceport's been out of commission for centuries, why hasn't anyone come to investigate (unless it's those previous visitors) and reopen it? If someone had been blasting at Heathrow for years, I think someone would have phoned in the authorities but this spaceport can't have been on a busy route as no one has done anything to help (it might have been more realistic to shorten the span of the story to a more plausible decades rather than centuries). The spaceport's shield repel the invaders for centuries, so either their weapons are very weak (possible to avoid hurting their child) or the port has strong shield, strong enough to be the envy of any spacegoing baddy like the Daleks or Cybermen.

Elder Bone needs to get to the control room where the Wailer is locked up at the story's start in order to power up the port but hasn't been able to; however, he has also been feeding it people all this time as well (he also needs to the Doctor to show him how to use an emergency door opener, despite presumably being smart enough to know that kind of thing or at least read the instructions). He is also under the impression that the plan he had all those years ago is still viable after all the time he has spent trapped (for all he knows, his side has surrendered or won already). Also apparently, all it takes to stop a reactor strong enough to power up the port for over 500 years from exploding is to turn it off and one again like a computer.

Barring the opening scene and first few minutes that I found slow and a few plot holes, this is a good story. Well worth a listen. 9/10