In their third adventure together, the Doctor and Mary land in the 21st century, where they are promptly attacked by a witch. Along with a pair of human twins they've met, they travel back to the 17th century to find out where the witch comes from. But something's not as it seems (of course) and soon Mary finds herself back in the 21st century, fighting the same threat as the Doctor in the 17th. Such is the premise of The Witch from the Well, the second audio drama from Rick Briggs, who previously penned "The Entropy Composition" on The Demons of Red Lodge and other stories.

Briggs writes a nice story. I mean, The Witch from the Well will never be called a classic of the genre, but it's one of those Doctor Who stories with a couple monsters, a nice idea, and a lot of running around that never really flags, and never bungles things up. What could be a bog-standard runaround is saved by the use of the two different time periods. In these days of wibbley-wobbly Moffaty-sophistry, it's nothing new or impressive... but the story doesn't ask us to be impressed, either. It's a new layer or complication added into the plot, a bit of color that actually does quite a bit to energize the story.

It's not as clever as The Silver Turk, but it's on a firmer footing, and I enjoyed it straight through. Plus also there's some nice jokes, and I'll never complain about that. Sometimes Doctor Who goes for big and brash and bold (and does it wonderfully), but there's something in these smaller stories, about the ordinary folks who aren't Time Lords or Time Agents or whatever: lost people trying to find their way in a strange universe, who the Doctor drops in on and gives a helping hand. The Doctor went to Vetter's Tor to save a monster, and both it and us are the better for it.

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

Sorry to say that I thought this was a rare misfire from the Big Finish main sequence of stories. I love the chemistry between Paul McGann's Doctor and Julie Cox's Mary Shelley, but this story keeps them apart in return for a tale of moral, psychological and time-paradoxical complexity which the script didn't really do justice to. Some elements of the plot were similar to the Who book I was reading at the same time, Justin Richards' novel The Death Riders, which confused me a bit, though this is not anyone else's fault. ( )