The Crimes of Thomas Brewster features not one, not two, but three returning characters. First and most obvious is Thomas Brewster, the Victorian scamp who once travelled with the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa, and who later bedevilled some old friends of the Doctor in The Three Companions. Second is Evelyn Smythe, recently heard in A Death in the Family, but not heard alongside her own Doctor since 2008's Assassin in the Limelight. And last is Patricia Menzies, who previously encountered the Sixth Doctor and a timelost Charley Pollard in The Condemned and The Raincloud Man.

The story of The Crimes of Thomas Brewster is okay, a fairly average story of battles between two groups of aliens reaching the Earth. It feels, oddly, like not a lot actually happens. Things and people move along pretty linearly, with no real unexpected developments and all get lost in a technononsense conclusion. It does help that both groups of aliens are written pretty generically-- one's a hive mind and the other is a single-entity planet, and neither is interesting.

The main selling point of The Crimes of Thomas Brewster is that it features the return of two beloved characters and Thomas Brewster. But unfortunately, that’s about all it has on offer; who the characters are is nearly irrelevant to the plot, which is thin as is. That said, I was delighted at the return of DI Menzies nonetheless-- she of course got all the best lines. More of her, please. Let's see her become Big Finish’s Brigadier.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.

My expectations were low of this month's Big Finish main sequence release, The Crimes of Thomas Brewster, mainly because I was never impressed by the eponymous character, played by soap heart-throb John Pickard in three Fifth Doctor stories in 2008 and then as one of the Three Companions whose story was released episodically by Big Finish in 2009-10. But actually it was not bad at all: there wasn't too much Brewster in it, in any case Pickard seems to have raised his game significantly, and the Sixth Doctor / Evelyn Smythe interaction is hugely lifted by the reintroduction of Anna Hope as Mancunian police detective Patricia Menzies, after her appearance in two 2008 Big Finish plays also with Colin Baker but set later in the Sixth Doctor's continuity; and David Troughton turns up as a wonderfully gravel-voiced East End crime boss. The story is basically a standard alien invasion of contemporary London, with the point being to get Brewster back in the regular cast for the next two stories, but there is some quite clever stuff with working out what people actually know about the Doctor, and who he is. And the cast seem well up for it (Maggie Stables gets to be the voice of an alien intelligence as well as her usual inimitable Evelyn). Reasonably accessible for non-fans, given that the three recurring characters other than the Doctor are from different places in Big Finish continuity and so need the background helpfully explained to them. ( )