Deeptime Frontier [AUDIO/2019.4.9]

★★★☆☆

  I've seen people compare this to Seizure and talk about how those two are way too similar for their tastes. Well, I can offer them some of my own thoughts into this matter. Seizure is a much more atmosphere-based, plot-light audio drama, and Deeptime Frontier has, in comparison, about a metric ton's worth of expositions and explanations on the nature of the Ravenous and the major players of the eponymous series. Now, I don't think I'm hugely interested in whether one's better than the other, necessarily, but I am saying that Deeptime Frontier has a lot on its plate. It has a lot to do, no doubt talked over meticulously by Matt Fitton and John Dorney, and it hits Ravenous 3 off with as confident a stride as it could ever have had. Paul McGann seems interested in what's going on (which was something I never really mentioned before in my reviews, but something that seemed to be an issue with the latter Doom Coalition installments because he was, shall I say, very much not fired up for cerain audio dramas), there are a bunch of Time Lords that provide interesting new developments on the whole Ravenous business, and Ken Bentley is, well, pretty fine. If you've read a few reviews of mine, you know how I feel about Ken Bentley's near monopoly on Big Finish directing, but I never said he was bad in any respect. Deeptime Frontier's got some cracking ideas (the Ravenous can take over regenerating Time Lords, for instance!), and it's good enough to whet your appetite for the rest of the boxset. Ravenous as a whole, I'd say, has the least going for it in terms of characters and/or events that dramatically ramp up the tension and such... but I can hardly attribute that to Deeptime Frontier alone. It's a first installment of a boxset, and it does its job pretty competently.