brings the Eighth Doctor and Mary Shelley to a future planet equipped with complex politics, scientists playing with artificial life, and (until recently) two major cities. Mary Shelley is now far from her own background but comes over more as Leela than Victoria, with of course the obligatory subplot of her falling in love with the Doctor. It's well enough done, I felt stronger than the previous run in this series, and I was glad that the ending seemed to leave the path clear for more Eight/Shelley adventures. ( )

The previous Mary Shelley Doctor Who adventures have taken Mary to only her near-future and her past; the furthest afield they've gone was Space Year 2011, and even then, Mary spent most her time running around a historic mansion. This has thankfully dodged a problem I predicted ever since it was announced that Mary would be the companion for these three stories: Mary can't go to the future.

The reason is Mary Shelley's "other" science fiction novel, The Last Man. Oh yes, everyone knows Frankenstein, and that story's themes have suffused this run of plays to great effect. Mary has been sympathetic to the "monsters" she’s come across, but there’s always an undercurrent of repulsion, as in Frankenstein itself, where the narrative seems to never quite admit that the creature deserves our pity. But Shelley also wrote The Last Man in 1826, about England in the far-off 2090s… a time where the only changes have been the abolition of the monarchy and the use of balloons for travel. (But only in one scene. Shelley seems to otherwise forget this.) There's even a subplot about the creation of a national portrait gallery, England having been unable to even manage that. How, then could Big Finish convince me that Mary Shelley had ever been to the future when her own ability to predict it had been so meager?

In his director's notes in the CD sleeve, Barnaby Edwards comments on Army of Death's links to The Last Man, but I don’t see it in the play itself. At its best The Last Man is a moving meditation on human loneliness, but there’s also a lot about the collapse of Romantic ideals amidst political and human realities. Army of Death, on the other hand, is a story about an army of skeletons led by a suicidal madman. I think Jason Arnopp wants Army of Death to be scary-- all of these Mary stories have had an undercurrent of horror, and Arnopp previously penned a horror entry on The Demons of Red Lodge and other stories-- but it fails to achieve that entirely. On audio, an army of largely silent skeletons can never really be frightening, and unfortunately my head just kept conjuring the image of Burn Gorman off Torchwood wrestling a crap CGI skeleton in the lobby of a hospital.

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