PLOTLINE  

After a trip to the zoo, the Doctor and Martha go in search of a real live dodo, and are transported by the TARDIS to the mysterious Museum of the Last Ones.

There, in the Earth section, they discover every extinct creature up to the present day - billions of them, from the tiniest insect to the biggest dinosaur, all still alive and in suspended animation. Preservation is the Museum's only job - collecting the last of every endangered species from all over the universe.

And for millennia the Museum has been trying to trace one elusive specimen: the last of the Time Lords...

COMMENT 

Freema's youthful energy and enthusiasm carry this story along for what feels like a surprisingly brief running time of 2 hour 25 minutes. This is definitely my favourite of the DOCTOR WHO audio books (well, those I've had the pleasure to hear). Again, I've not read the source book but looked forward to hearing this because I enjoyed Jacqueline Rayner's THE STONE ROSE (as read by David Tennant) and like everyone else I'm a committed Freema groupie so what was not to like?

The narrative flits back and forth between third to first person which gives a very human voice to this story; specifically, Martha's ("Hello! Martha here!" Try not smiling the first time you hear Freema sing out this greeting!). This is very much Martha's story and so bagging Freema for this reading was a coup.

This trip is prompted by Martha's wish to encounter a dodo and so they do but its frozen in a stasis field in a "museum of the last ones" which is losing its exhibits. Considering the agenda of the museums curator, bearing the title in mind and noting that the Doctor is (supposed to be) the last of his kind, it comes as no surprise whatsoever when he winds up a temporary exhibit. Martha rescues him but in the process teleports all the Earth exhibits to Earth! On arriving planet-side, they encounter the missing dodo, whereupon the Doctor names her "Dorothea", a nice nod to all the William Hartnell (First Doctor) and Jackie Lane (Dodo) fans out there.

The Doctor and Martha split up: she returns to the museum to solve the mystery of the vanishing exhibits and he stays on Earth to sort out the chaos caused by a flood of dangerous critters. This squares with the thrust of the show: they are companions in a meaningful sense, working here as a team.

The baddie is the curator, Eve (the name is a clue; and the psychic paper does not work on her, ooh, and there's another one.). When you hear "Eve prided herself on being free from emotion" it's hard not to smile at the obvious flaw in that statement but it makes a lot of sense later on in the story.

Martha finally confronts Eve and discovers that things are going from bad to worse. Eve declares that she cannot cope with the turnover of extinct species on Earth and so her solution is to blow it up ("Finally, I'll have closure!"). Or as Martha puts it, "You're destroying all life on Earth to cut down on paperwork ?"

From this point, there are essentially four endings: the defeat of the main baddie; the defeat of her henchman; the happy resolution of Martha's massive gaffe during her rescue of the Doctor; and a final special twist involving the being that in effect put Eve in charge of the museum.

This is familiar by-the-numbers stuff in terms of plot and characterisation but Freema's performance is a joy and the main reason you should give this release a chance.