Cataclysm [AUDIO/2021.5.13]

★★★☆☆

  Cataclysm is, by all rights, a bridge that connects the beginning and end of the Ravagers boxset. It takes the role that Fugitives did for Dark Eyes 1, showing the Doctor's journey from first encountering Audrey to crossing his own timeline, being locked up and encountering the dreaded Ravagers for the first time. 

  Lemme tell you, I used to loathe these "stopgap" installments. For the old me, they all seemed to lack the spirit and personality of a good Dr. Who story, and I usually breezed through them to get to the "meaty" portion of the boxset. Oh, how things have changed. I adore that writers are usually given the challenge of making these stopgaps interesting, prompting them to pull out every idea they get and somehow make it coherent enough to be a profitable story. I'm not going to say that Cataclysm is a shining example of this, but at the very least it presents us a fascinating villain (Audrey) and a prety well done hook into the next and final installment. Along the way, we have the Battle of Waterloo, the Doctor getting captured, Nova being the de facto companion of the boxset, and the two of them crossing the Doctor's own timeline and meeting the big bad against chronological order. Nicholas Briggs did a good job here not making Cataclysim feel overstuffed or, worse, redundant; his writing's confident here, and so is his direction. A good 45 minutes or so of your time, definitely.