Doctor Who overview: The Syndicate Master Plan is a fresh take on the Fourth Doctor Adventures

This year’s series of Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Adventures gave us an ambitious and epic story with The Syndicate Master Plan. But how well did it work as a whole?

The Syndicate Master Plan was a series that I had been excited about for a very long time. It was something that promised to be a little more ambitious than your regular Doctor Who audios with Tom Baker’s Doctor. The moment I heard that he would finally have a new companion, and a huge arc to go with it, I was eager to listen to it.

Not that I haven’t enjoyed his previous audios. In fact, last year gave us an excellent series with him and Leela. But the tricky thing with old Doctors travelling with old companions is that you generally know their story already. You know how they first meet, and how their story ends. So there’s less opportunity for major development than when a new companion is involved.

Which was why The Syndicate Master Plan, the eighth series of The Fourth Doctor Adventures, promised to be extremely exciting. A new companion meant a relatively new side to the Fourth Doctor. New beginnings and new endings. And, of course, a new story to go with it, too. A new story that’s a sequel to a very, very old one…

A mix of standalone and arc

I really enjoyed how the arc unfolded across this series. Initially, I was surprised that during the first volume, a couple of the stories were completely standalone, but when listening to the series as a whole, it was actually a very strong balance.

There are six stories that form The Syndicate Master Plan – four two-parters, and two four-parters – and it’s nicely split between stories that help to push the arc forward, and stories that just stand out on their own.

Especially how they’re split. The Sinestran Kill kicks off the arc, The False Guardian and Time’s Assassin are nicely split between volumes one and two, and The Perfect Prisoners brings it to an end. So you’ve got three stories forming the beginning, middle and ending of the overall arc, and it works out really nicely. If you wanted just the core story, you could listen to these three and not really need to listen to the others.

However, I wouldn’t recommend that myself. Because the standalone stories help to develop the Doctor’s and Ann’s relationship considerably. They help to flesh out her character, and the banter between them is fantastic. You get some of that in the more arc-focused stories, especially in The Sinestran Kill, but it’s definitely built up more in the stories where their characters have room to breathe from the major events.

From one master plan to another

The content of the arc itself was also fantastic. Making a kind of sequel to The Daleks’ Master Plan was an especially brilliant move. I’ve discussed before how much I absolutely love that story. It’s a huge and ambitious epic that kind of gets overlooked, one that takes place across many worlds and times.

The Fourth Doctor Adventures using that as a template for its eighth series works well in several ways. For instance, going for the same kind of scale allowed for the mix of stand-alone and arc stories to work really nicely.

Another thing I liked was that, in some ways, the overall plot is more of an inversion of the original story. For The Daleks’ Master Plan, the Doctor and the audience found out pretty early on what the Daleks’ plan was. The main focus of the story was the Doctor and his companions being hunted down by the Daleks when they stole a vital element of the Time Destructor, the weapon that would give the Daleks ultimate power.

The master plan inversion

For The Syndicate Master Plan, however, it’s the other way round. The Doctor initially has no idea what’s going on, and so he’s hunting the Syndicate down with Ann’s help. Along the way, hints and clues of what’s really going are revealed, but the main bulk of the plan is revealed in the final story, The Perfect Prisoners.

On top of that, we also had several key characters from the original story return. It was fascinating to learn how they fitted in, and what they had been up to in the aftermath of their first appearance.

All of these elements helped to make The Syndicate Master Plan both a great sequel and an intriguing arc in its own right. The Perfect Prisoners was an especially excellent story, and a finale that was really worth all the build-up.

But it wasn’t just the arc that made the finale so special. It was also a key character to this series…

Introduced in the series opener The Sinestran Kill, Ann Kelso is a great companion to Tom Baker’s Doctor.

(Image credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.

Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.)

Ann Kelso

What really made The Syndicate Master Plan truly stand out was Jane Slavin as Ann Kelso. In her first story, she was clearly a great character. One who was perfect for the TARDIS life due to her intelligence and how easily she worked with the Doctor, while also providing him (and the audience) with plenty of great banter.

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The natural chemistry between Slavin and Baker was also great. It probably helped that they had worked together before at Big Finish, as there are several other roles she’s played in the past. But, as far as The Fourth Doctor Adventures were concerned, this was definitely her biggest role yet.

Along with a well-written character and a great performance by Slavin, Ann Kelso was also given a great story, too. One that very naturally developed over the course of the series, and really pushed forward in the second volume. I can’t go into too much detail, as her story is one that you definitely don’t want to spoil too much of. But I can say that The Perfect Prisoners has a lot more weight because of that development.

Overall, The Syndicate Master Plan was a bold move for The Fourth Doctor Adventures. But it definitely paid off, in a lot of ways. It gave us a lot of strong stories, a very satisfying arc and, best of all, a fresh look at the Fourth Doctor. A very easy series to not only binge listen but also re-listen to, and it’s definitely well worth checking out both volumes of the whole series.

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Have you listened to The Syndicate Master Plan? Do you think it was a strong arc for the Fourth Doctor? Would you like Tom Baker’s Doctor to have more companions in the future? Let us know in the comments below.

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