Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Billie Piper, Em Thane, Camille Coduri, George Asbury, Heather Coombs, Lorraine Horgan, Holly Jackson Walters, Akshay Khanna, Chelsea Little, Robert McCafferty, Bailey Patrick, Cleo Sylvestre.
When we know the outcome, we may be distracted from learning the truth behind the tale.
For many, the fact that we have been taught to repeat facts ad nauseum, parrot fashion so that for example we can quote the dates of factory acts, of F.A. Cup finals, of Nobel prize winners with certainty, we forget to delve closer to the human being affected by or instrumental in the cause of history being made, altered, or even in some cases saved.
We are trapped in an endless cycle that overwhelms, we search for meaning in what we consider endless worlds driven by our imagination and fears, and in the Doctor Who universe, there is arguably none so trapped as she hunts down the one person she knows in all of creation who can solve the threat that will see all life extinguished, all potential, all facts, as Rose Tyler.
In the third of The Dimension Cannon series starring the irrefutably character endowed Billie Piper in the role of Rose Tyler, the worlds in which she has been exploring, rifling through various alternate Earths and the history in which its future is doomed, has become narrowed as she is Trapped in time and space in a world that is frightening, fiercely alarming, and one to which leas to the biggest clue to the whereabouts of The Doctor, and who his present companion is.
A different kind of Jackie Tyler awaits Rose, a sibling in which she could never have expected, and the dire brutes who stalk the world in the guise of Anti-Life creatures and their mysterious origins as Lizzie Hopley’s Sink Or Swim, Tim Foley’s The Lower Road, and Helen Goldwyn’s The Good Samaritan all captures the fear felt as the suns across the universe lose their light and the Daleks’ plan is worked upon in secret, so the past and future is seen to be more than facts that were framed neatly in the tenth incarnation of the Doctor and his tale of Journey’s End.
Trapped is very muchRose’s time to shine, confined on a single world, surrounded by a foe that leaves a chill in the listener’s blood, but in which her tenacity and empathy are key weapons in the fight for survival.
The writing of the three audio authors is dramatic, studied, planned to within an inch of the narrative that it contains, and with Em Thane as Danni adding a striking extension to the history of an alternate Tyler family history, so Rose Tyler: The Dimension Cannon 3: Trapped becomes the anchor between television serial history and the account of Rose’s audio adventures; and it is a glorious revelation that is entailed.
Rose returns; but is time truly running out for her own journey’s end.
Ian D. Hall