Dead Air [AUDIO/2010.3.4]

★★★★★

  It's always special when Dr. Who adventures fully lean on their medium, utilise them in ways that only that medium could. Dead Air ticks off a box on my personal 'giddy thrill' checklist: to utilise suspension of disbelief to its limits by incorporating real life (i.e. listeners turning this on in whatever device they're using) into its narrative. Don't you just love it when the Doctor starts the narration by practically warning us that there's a dangerous entity living inside the recording, just after a public announcement by the BBC that it's the audio equivalent of found footage? It's instantly arresting, memorable, and it tickles my fancy to no end.

  Dead Air doesn't just have that to offer. David Tennant, renowned narrator of audiobooks at this point (and not just for Who), gives what is to date his best Tenth Doctor performance on audio. He's narrating the events of the story at its climax, and you can feel his every emotion practically seeping from the audio. It's a post-Donna Ten, so angst is his middle name; he's plagued by the ghosts of his past (the Hush being an unstoppable Time Lord weapon he must stop) and regretful about the fates of his friends along the way. The Hush is a terrifying monster, a weapon capable of killing anything that makes sound, and in an audio medium, that's quite the scare factor indeed. Kudos to whoever "directed" this, because the sound mixing is insanely good as well... and that's because there are barely any sound effects! This has to be, due to the nature of it being that it's the Doctor's recording right before his final confrontation with the Hush... but when the distortions happen and you catch the small glimpses of HELP ME etched onto the recording, you know you're listening to something special.

  That's the thing, really. Dead Air is special, it's simply fantastic, and one of my personal all-time favourite adventures from sixty years of the show. Not only is the script airtight, but the execution as well is something to be talked about for years and years after (and it's already been 13 years!). If the novels have The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, then the audios have Dead Air.