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Merlin’s Trap                             


Halloween: Sea Smoke and other stories 1.4                            


Once again a British thing using American wording: flashlights. Why Big Finish is going to the lengths of using Cornish accents when they can’t get the terminology right, you may as well just set it in the US and forget you’re making Doctor Who. This audio never recovered from such a basic mistake.

A couple and friends go exploring caves, named after Merlin. Things don’t go right, hearing voices, time going weird. Somethings down there and it's being protected.

The big draw of this release was the Twelfth Doctor. Having only heard a brief snippets of Jacob Dudman’s version and not being that enamored with it, hearing Jon Culshaws portrayal, and it being so close, made it a much have. Unfortunately it takes so long for the Doctor to appear that you’ve almost forgotten its a Doctor Who audio you’re listening to. He’s good, but it does have a sense of the first episode of Class, where the Doctor feels shoehorned in and isn’t really part of the main plot.

There is nothing here that felt like a twelfth Doctor story. The idea has been done in plenty of other places, and as with most of this set its connections to Halloween and horror are tenuous.

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