Winter for the Adept

Well, that didn’t last long. After listening to The Land of the Dead a couple of months back I was incredibly excited about hearing more Doctor Who audio adventures. I discovered the Big Finish audios at just the right time, having viewed well over half of the 159 stories from the original television program that ran from 1963 to 1989. I was also thrilled that I enjoyed Peter Davison’s portrayal of the Fifth Doctor far more now than when he first took on the role back in 1981. When I looked at the stories I had to choose from I decided on one that immediately followed The Land of the Dead called Winter for the Adept. Unfortunately, it was quite a disappointment.




Every now and then in Doctor Who there appears a story that doesn’t play by the rules. Sometimes these stories are brilliant (Ghost Light, Blink) and sometimes they’re absolute rubbish (Underworld, Love & Monsters). Winter for the Adept doesn’t exactly play by the rules, either, but it in this case maybe it should have. It’s not that it has any glaring flaws, but it seems much closer to uninspiring fan fiction than the work of a serious author.

The story begins with a woman reading an old diary entry and the melodramatic way in which she does so immediately evokes the mood of Jane Austen and 19th century England. Unfortunately the story is set in Switzerland in the winter of late 1963, so we’re already off to a rocky start. At least the locale of a finishing school for young women has the air of Austen about it, if indeed that is a good thing. A couple of girls find themselves stuck in the aged academy for the Christmas holiday and decide to make a break for it…in the freezing cold.

Meanwhile, the Doctor’s companion, Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), is all alone on a nearby mountainside…in the freezing cold. She’s left to carry the early part of the story on her own as the Doctor won’t arrive until the end of the first half-hour episode…when he explains why Nyssa ended up here in the first place. Nyssa isn’t very well written in this story and comes off sounding more like Tegan (the complainer) or Adric (the whiner) than her usual logical self. Of course, having nearly been frozen to death by the Doctor may certainly explain her behavior. A Lieutenant Sandoz discovers Nyssa and accompanies her to the academy where he’s surprised to hear the two girls have run off. He goes after them and it’s later revealed that Sandoz and one of the students, at least twenty years his junior, were planning on eloping.

And it just goes downhill from there. The story makes a surprising amount of left turns and none of them quite work. There’s a plotline about one of the characters being psychic, in the middle of the story we find out the school is haunted, and the final episode is inundated with aliens. The aliens, referred to as Spillagers (because they spill into different worlds and pillage them…get it?) would probably work better in a story that focused on them exclusively and not merely used them as bookends to a melodramatic ghost story.

I mentioned in my review of the previous Fifth Doctor audio story The Land of the Dead that I recognized none of the actors that were part of the supporting cast, but I was rather impressed with their work. In Winter for the Adept I found the opposite was true. I recognized many of the people involved, but I couldn’t say they were all that remarkable. The head of the school, Miss Tremayne, is played by Sally Faulkner who memorably appeared as the young photographer in the 1968 Second Doctor story The Invasion. I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t looked it up, because Tremayne is a pretty forgettable caricature. Lt. Sandoz is played by Peter Jurasik, best known for the role of Londo Mollari in Babylon 5, but he really takes a back seat in the story and seems wasted in the part. Finally, India Fisher plays one of the school girls, but you probably know her as Charley Pollard, the Eighth Doctor’s companion in over two dozen audio stories.

Only Peter Davison remains on top of his game in Winter for the Adept, but as he’s almost entirely absent from the first episode it’s a long wait for not much of a pay off. I recommend skipping this story unless you’re a big fan of the Fifth Doctor as there are so many better audio stories available. Winter for the Adept was enough to put me off of the Peter Davison stories for a while and I decided to move on to his successor Colin Baker, but that…is another story for another time.


2 Daleks (out of 5)