What Still Remains is on first glance and first listen, a collection of deeply Doctor Who ingredients, woven into a story that is driven on by a slow if steady heartbeat of menace.

The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive on a research station. So far, so almost-every-week normal. It’s a station that’s significantly more empty than it should be, with a small remaining crew in increasingly desperate need of relief or rescue.

There’s a solidly MacGuffiny MacGuffin known as “The Remnant,” which is suitably portentous and not a little creepy, but which earns its place in the script by virtue of being the Holy Grail – a potential source of limitless power, to re-enlighten the lives of everyone on Earth. 

Annnnnd the whole station is in a state of temporal displacement with regard to Volkoff Epsilon, the plane on which it’s situated.

Pick A Mystery

That right there gives you a whole heap of Sylvester McCoy-shaped Doctor Who mysteries. Why the temporal displacement? What’s The Remnant? Can it do what the humans on the station hope it can? Does it have entirely different plans for its future? Where the hell have the rest of the crew gone when they apparently randomly vanish? How much longer do the existing crew have before the same fate befalls them – and the Doctor and Ace? And ultimately, can a solution to the station’s problems be found before, in all likelihood, the universe explodes?

The slightly weird thing about What Still Remains is that all of these are valid questions, and the story of how the Doctor and Ace unravel the mysteries of the station is delivered with appropriate levels of echoing creepiness… and yet, at the end of it, it leaves you with the sensation of having been through Just A Bunch Of Things, rather than a particularly coherent story.

In fairness to writer Adam Christopher, that’s a feeling that accurately replicates the sensation of the stories late in McCoy’s TV run, where a handful of ideas could be thrown at the screen with a line or two of linking explanation and fans to this day would proclaim the result a masterpiece (Yes, Curse of Fenric, we’re looking at you). 

Christopher’s work is better than some of the final season of on-screen McCoy, and there’s a definite underlying logic to the mystery. There’s a sense of the ticking clock of drama built in too, meaning that once you engage with the premises of What Still Remains, it’s likely to keep you hooked through to the end.

There are mind-bending elements of temporal mechanics, living essences from a universe entirely previous to our own, and a vaguely Shining-style overlay of insidious, creepy reasoning behind why things happen the way they do. There’s also enough wallop in the final bargain made by the Seventh Doctor, which resonates with far more recent Who like the 60th anniversary space-based creepfest, Wild Blue Yonder. 

A Storytelling Puzzle Box

There are ways in which Ace and the Doctor can win, can escape, but to activate them means doing a thing that would kill them before they could make it back to the Tardis, along with everyone else on the station. That keeps the pressure on, and doesn’t allow either them or us any easy out of the scenario Christopher builds around them like a techno-spiritual spiderweb.

All of which means What Still Remains is not a casual listen – it’s one that demands you strap in and commit, or you’re likely to miss something important in the story’s layers, and missing the things that are put there specifically help you swing from one problem to the next will leave you puzzled, going “But how did that work?”

Keep your head in the game and there’s enough logic to hold the story together. Miss an element and you’ll be floundering fast.

And even if you keep hold of the story’s layers all the way through, by the end, the feeling you’re left with is of being put through the intellectual wringer, rather than the emotional one, because What Still Remains is constructed like a puzzle box with physical and wider-world consequences, but its emotional impacts registering only as a fairly distant adjunct to the main thrust of the story.

The Aldred Magic

Sophie Aldred has been delivering vocal performances in Doctor Who for decades now, and is by far the most effective choice that could be made to read this story. It probably took a lot of work to delineate the crew members, Ace and the Doctor, but Aldred makes it sound like a naturalistic walk in the park through her professional take on the storytelling. 

She delivers and points all the tension as it builds, while still, for instance, allowing Ace a relatively stress-free start to the story as someone who’s been Tardis travelling a while and has seen enough of a wide and creepy universe to know she has a place in it.

Aldred is worth her weight in gold in stories like What Still Remains, giving the story beats their due weight but allowing the listener to move through their new environment at an Ace-appropriate teenage speed.

What Still Remains combines lots of authentic-sounding elements, has a strong story driver, and a reader that makes the whole thing come alive. But once you’ve listened to it, it’s difficult to pinpoint the elements for which you’d go back a second time. 

In the great tradition of expanded universe media, it feels like an adventure the Doctor and Ace would have on some random Tuesday – interesting and perilous, absolutely, but the kind of thing that feeds a companion’s potential overconfidence when they meet the Big Bads of the universe. 

Worth a listen? At least once, certainly. Worth your money? That depends on your level of completism, your dedication to the Seventh Doctor, and your available funds. As we’ve said, there are lots of good things in What Still Remains, that make it sound like an authentic late-TV-era adventure for the Seventh Doctor and Act. 

Beyond replays to make sure you understood what happened along the way, though, it’s questionable whether it’s one you’ll listen to repeatedly over the years. Tony Fyler

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