She’s baaaaaaaaack!

In the most hotly anticipated translation to Big Finish since the double announcement of the Fugitive Doctor and the Dhawan Master’s first box sets, Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor has arrived on audio. So obviously, the first question is: is Vampire Weekend, the single-story release that kicks off the Thirteenth Doctor’s time at Big Finish, worth the hype, the wait, and the time it takes to listen to?

Not to get needlessly enigmatic and Yoda-esque on you, but it depends on the expectations you’re bringing in with you.

First of all, it’s written by Tim Foley, which is always a solid decision. Once you know that, you know you’re getting a story that will have a good ear for character, and a reasonably strong story progression, which is arguably something that occasionally fell short in Whittaker’s TV run. 

I said, arguably, don’t @ me!

Second, it’s a confined, single-setting adventure with a bunch of scared people and the calls coming from inside the house, proper slasher-movie style, which The Haunting of Villa Diodati proved could be a very effective environment for the Thirteenth Doctor as it allows her Columbo-style investigative powers and her often-quirky oddness a setting that both accentuates and grounds that oddness in the here and now of the potential threat.

And third, it delivers a particular mood of time and place in the development of the relationship between the Doctor and Yaz. We are between the leaving of Graham and Ryan at the end of Revolution of the Daleks and the start of The Halloween Apocalypse. 

That’s a clever piece of placing, because the Doctor and Yaz at the start of that Halloween story are not in any sense the same as they were while “the boys” were around. There have clearly been a lot of adventures that have bonded them as a unit of two in the interim, so it makes perfect sense for at least the start of the audio adventures to be within that period. 

Not A Cyberman In Sight

Talking of Villa Diodati, the opening of Vampire Weekend follows its formula fairly closely – the establishment of a group of people at a remote location for a specific event, the arrival of the Doctor, being pleasingly weird… and then the screaming starts.

But far from the gothic tone of Villa Diodati, one of the most noticeable qualities of Vampire Weekend is its modernity and lightness of tone. Think Scream movies, rather than anything from the pen of the moody poets.

The event – the hen party of Yaz’s old mate Gina (who is notably absent throughout the whole story, for Reasons that become apparent as the tale unfolds). The venue – a big old manor house in the Peak District. The group of scared people? Yaz’s mate Gina’s assorted friends, including Daryl, who recently changed their pronouns, and Gina’s Mum, who’s just… Gina’s Mum.

Add a forcefield, a shape-changing vampire with a particular penchant for a specific kind of biochemical, a yappy little cupcake-licking dog and a couple of investigative chickens, and you have yourself a space-supernatural slasher movie that delivers runaround fun, a couple of poignant human moments, and most particularly, a couple of highly precious scenes illuminating the state of the relationship between Yaz and the Doctor at this point.

Those scenes are the high-water mark of the story. The twist is highly guessable to anyone who can do rudimentary storytelling maths, which means you’ll understand both the nature of the vampire and how it’s hiding out long before the answers explicitly unfold in the course of events. But the delicate shading of the conversations between Yaz and the Doctor, where each confess their insecurities about their ongoing friendship in the wake of leaving Graham and Ryan behind, are the absolute gold of the release, and they’re worth the price of admission on their own.

Vampire Pseudoscience

Foley’s a good and conscientious writer, though – as well as the gold, he gives you enough vampire pseudoscience to get you through (even if the chicken thing feels like a gag for which a ‘serious’ explanation had to be retroactively found in order to commit to the bit), and he expands the events of Vampire Weekend into a trans-temporal hunt, with a solidly satisfying clue-dangle at the end as to a larger series arc.

Added to which, by keeping the majority of the action contained within a single location, Foley invites you to engage with the problems, strengths, weaknesses and underlying truths of Yaz and her friends, while doing the traditional slasher thing and jumping from one suspect to another throughout the course of the story. 

The suspect-jump is only partially successful because once you’re certain you’ve noticed the thing missed by everyone in the house, you’re likely to dismiss all the red herrings thrown your way. But the new characters add light and shade to Yaz’s life and friend group, and give her a grounding outside her family and her job which helps to enrich her characterisation and show us sides to her that we rarely had the opportunity to explore in her TV run.

Vivid Voices

As an introductory story to the Thirteenth Doctor on audio, Vampire Weekend gives you everything you could want. The vividness and authenticity of the main voices help bring back the battiness of the TV stories, while the addition of a new gang of friends and sort-of-friends for Yaz helps round her out, and the delineation of where the Doctor and Yaz are in their friendship is expertly delivered. 

Vampire Weekend is Doctor Who Does Slasher Movie/Base Under Siege in a style which feels almost Doctor-proof – you can imagine versions of this story with most other Doctors – but which, with careful construction and shading by Foley and an enthusiastic attack by the two leads, becomes something uniquely Thirteenth Doctor, and is all the better for that. Tony Fyler