Mother Russia (#2.1)

  Big Finish, Companion Chronicles

The Doctor, Dodo, and Steven land in a small town in Russia in 1812, the year the French invade.  They get jobs and generally learn to fit in, though this is told from the perspective of Steven.  This is an historical that covers an alien crash landing and Napoleon’s attack on Moscow.  Stephen becomes fast friends with the forester and learns a trade dealing with his hands, which is new to him as he’s spent his whole life in a space-aged city and piloting ships.  He always sounds older than he actually is to me.  I expect him to have more experience with aliens and strangeness from space but he always seems to expect things to be normal, even when he knows there’s strangeness going on.

This adventure goes from town to city and follows Steven’s desperate quest for answers and understanding.  The travelers settle in for a few months, then an alien spacecraft crashes and things begin to go awry.  The French army marches in and Steven is cut off from his friends, following the Doctor to Moscow.  This is all framed inside of a story of Steven interrogated by the alien stranger and yet, something else is going on we don’t find out about until the end of the story, which comes in bits and pieces out of Steven’s memory.  It’s well done but I just think Steven’s being a bit dense about possible causes for the strangeness of his friends.


Peter Purves (Steven Taylor) and Tony Millan

Writer: Marc Platt

Director: Nigel Fairs

Release: October 2007

© Laura Vilensky 2019