Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Philip Olivier, John Leeson, Mandi Symonds, Maggie Service, John Heffernan, Phyllida Nash, Siobhan Redmond, John Dorney, Paul Panting.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, preferably being poured from a bucket with ice cubes the size of Norwegian glacier formation and over the head of someone you don’t like whilst they are sunbathing. Failing that, to be mastered in the form that Science Fiction adores, with plenty of back story and with an enemy that doesn’t quite fit the top echelons of master criminals or war mongering civilisations.

People seeking revenge should also carry with them two tried and trusted spades, not weak ones that will snap under the pressure of the first damp sod being taken out, but sturdy ones, spades so robust and vigorously tested that at the end they could get a job as a security officer in the toughest nightclub in town or withstand any enthusiastic stage invasion by 1000s of screaming teenage girls at a One Direction concert.

Vengeance though is what The Doctor is up against in Jonathan Morris’s latest audio drama for Big Finish, the storming Revenge Of The Swarm and it’s a settling of scores that could even see The Doctor, Ace and Humanity lose.

The Swarm, like the Axons and up until recently the Zygons, are an enemy that hasn’t been seen on the television series for the best part of 40 years. This one time adversary of The Doctors first made its mark in Tom Baker’s time and it has taken the combined talents of Big Finish, Jonathan Morris and Sylvester McCoy to bring them back into the fan’s attention again.

The story itself is deals with idea that although something may be thought as of being defeated, as eradicated and consigned to depths of Human history, it continues to exist and waits dormant for the right opportunity to return. Just like the Black Death that ravaged Europe and Asia and was considered a buried disease but still somehow manages to pop up in the remotest parts of the world or as Smallpox was thought banished, then so The Swarm finds its way back into the annals of history and catches Humanity unaware in its future.

Revenge Of The Swarm is a very clever look at the way that a story from the 1970s can come back to haunt The Doctor across three incarnations and several hundred years later, it utilises the very best of time travel and the effects of being somewhere long after the event in which you were part of and instrumental in solving and it captures Sylvester McCoy at his very scheming best.

The audio also sees the return of Philip Olivier to the Tardis but in a form unrecognisable to those who may have missed the last couple of instalments in the life of the Seventh Doctor. Hex no longer exists, not in the same way in which he became a much loved character aboard the blue battered box but Hector is a man to be reckoned with. Tougher than the young nurse which he was when The Doctor found him and with an undercurrent of unfulfilled danger running through his veins. It was possible to believe that Hex was on course to becoming as much a staple of life in the Tardis as Jamie was, Hector has the feel of someone who could destroy the Doctor with one sentence; this could really be the start of something big in the time of the seventh incarnation of the man from Gallifrey.

Old enemies can make the most unexpected returns, viruses even more so but old friends? They are likely to want to make sure that only one spade is needed.

Doctor Who: Revenge Of The Swarm is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.

Ian D. Hall