Beachhead [AUDIO/2016.3.3]

★★☆☆☆

  I appreciate a slow-burning opener to a series as much as the next person, I swear. That said, there's no love lost between me and boring slow burners — and unfortunately for Doom Coalition 2, Beachhead proves to be just that.

  No, hang on, that might not be completely true. A slow burner implies that there's something at the end of the rainbow to burn to; Beachhead is such an uneventful droll from beginning to end, and it's not as if the conclusion proved to be any more entertaining than the adventure it's strapped to. The Voord are there as pure setup, to imply that something is destroying planets and the Voord homeworld was one of the victims, but surely there must have been a more interesting way to use both this foreshadowing concept and the Voord themselves? Big Finish's own Domain of the Voord was a much more fascinating use of the aliens, and there were certainly other box set openers that captured my interest more successfully. At the end of the day, I don't think Beachhead is for me. It may not exactly be outright terrible or anything, but it fails to capture my interest. It doesn't help that the Eighth Doctor is stricken with a mild case of amnesia (yet again) for the first half, reducing the amount of fun I could've had.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  It's pretty clear that Beachhead is a Voord story first and a Doom Coalition chapter second. That's completely fine, that's good, but at least make the standalone installment interesting. The Red Lady did a much better job at grabbing the attention of the audience, and that was also pretty much a standalone adventure that only turned out at the tail end of Doom Coalition 4 to be intrinsically connected to the main arc!