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Everything about Escape from Kaldor is just, "okay". The acting is okay, the music is okay, the SFX are okay, the story is just okay.
Drawing heavily from the setting of the Robots...of Death! The Robots (of Death), are accidently reprogammed to kill people...to death!
While there is nothing wrong with formulaic stories, this is well trod territory, even for Big Finish, which pretty much covered the inverse ground of Robots of Death in Liv Chenka's first story, Robophobia of Death.
While focussing somewhat on Liv Chenka's relationship with her estranged sister, it just becomes hard to care about it. And while I enjoy Liv as a companion, just before the end of the story, they present a perfect opportunity for her to leave the TARDIS, where she tells the Doctor and Helen to come back in a year...and then immediately pick her up again right before the credits roll, with her promising to tell tham all about the exciting year she's had.
It's happened in Doctor Who before, with Tegan - leaving in one episode, and rejoining the next, a year having gone by from her perspective - but it seemed that there had been at least some change in her character. With Liv, she's the same as when she left. It's an odd choice, in my opinion.
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Next up is Better Watch Out, and Fairytale of Salzberg which are both parts of the same story.
I'm conflicted about this one. I've never really been a Christmassy person - far too cynical - and I tend to find most of the Doctor Who christmas specials mostly unwatchable.
But, that said, hearing Paul McGann's shee glee as the Eighth Doctor exploring a Christmas market does melt this bitter icy heart - if only for a moment. After several boxsets of the Doctor going through absolute misery, this catches the more happy-go-lucky spirit of the Eighth Doctor I tend to associate with the pre-Zagreus stories, before Big Finish decided to make him their misery bitch.
Despite some very pleasant character interactions, and some genuinely funny lines, it goes downhill when another character summons the Krampus via a magic wish. No, literally a magic wish.
The events of the story happen because of the reaction of a character to the actions of Austrian Scrooge, who non-seriously makes a wish (via a magic wish man) to summon the mythical Krampus to punish Austrian Scrooge, which backfires, because the Krampus imps are punishing everyone else as well.
I don't like to question logic in sci-fi or fantasty, but the crux of the story being a magic wish man really threw me out of the story. They do attempt to address this later on - maybe he simply had powerful alien technology, or was a reality warper, or a creature from another dimension - but not adressing this in the story itself rubs me the wrong way.
Sometimes, an unexplained element works - The Red Lady from Doom Coalition - an unknown entity which inhabits works of art and text, moving ever closer and closer, until it kills you. Please ignore this being ruined in Doom Coalition 4 where it's revealed exactly who and what she is - in this instance, I kinda hope this is going to be part of an ongoing plot thread they resolve, rather than just being a rando god-being.
Of the two parts, I vastly prefer the first - mostly due to the presence of McGann - in the second, he's barely present, being carried away by imps to hell. Not joking.
I must admit, I did enjoy the resolution somewhat - the Krampus is subordinate to Father Christmas - so clearly, they must bring Santa to stop the Krampus. Well, the Saint Nicholas will do in a pinch.
This brings me to another point, which contains heavy spoilers, regarding the death of companions.
I feel that, if you're going to kill a companion there has to be a point and purpose to their death. And once they are dead, they should stay dead. No Clara Oswald "
I'm actually immortal until I get bored" shit, or the Testimony Ghosts from Twice Upon A Time.
The Fairytale of Schmaltz-berg has Helen spending nearly 40 years trying to figure out the TARDIS controls trying to fly it to Saint Nicholas to save her friends, succeeding, and then on the brink of death......Liv wishes that Helen could be restored to normal, so the magic wish man makes it happen, and she's de-aged 40 years and fully recovered..
Yeah.
There's nothing worse than unsatisfying Deus ex machina ending.
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The final story, Seizure, is the only one to continue the plot threads from the previous Ravenous boxset, and one which grabbed my attention the most.
The criminal, psychotic Time Lord, the Eleven, is in possession of a stolen TARDIS, and encounters one of the Ravenous. Terrified out his eleven minds, and with the stolen TARDIS dying, he sends out a distress signal to the only man who knows can help him - the Doctor.
The moody atmosphere of the dying TARDIS, with mossy, brickwork walls, and torchlit corridors make for a very gothic feel - the pained pulse and throb of the vworp of the engines, as it reconfigures its internal geometry, closing off passages, and making a dark maze of its insides - haunted by an unstable remnant ghost...it takes Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, and makes it genuinely unsettling, devoid of the problems that Journey has.
This is also the first proper introduction to the Ravenous. Some advice; don't look at the picture of the creature on the cover. Use whatever image the voice, so focussed on assuaging an unending hunger, conjures into your head. Not a very bad edit of a sodding evil clown mask.
Like with anything that was hyped up so much, it's hard to sustain it when you define it - you have a race of creatures that absolutely terrify the Time Lords - even the Doctor - but in this story it doesn't seem so much different from anything else the Doctor has faced. It just devours things, and barely bothers with humans as their life force is the nourishment equivalent of eating a few biscuits.
As I've said in previous boxset reviews, it's not until the end you can look back and see where they're going with things, and it feels very much the case with this. Aside from the last one, the stories in this boxset, while not "bad", were not for me.