Animal directly follows on from its predecessor... sort of. Crime of the Century saw the Doctor, Ace, and Raine discovering that the robots they'd fought in 1989 came from Margrave University. Wanting to investigate this, they set off for Margrave University in the TARDIS, only to arrive there in 2001. Strangely, no one in Animal mentions the robots, nor do they seem remotely interested in the twelve-year miss. Fortunately, they discover that something else is afoot when Brigadier Winifred Bambera and a cadre of UNIT troops pop up.

"Afoot" might be an exaggeration, as Animal is the longest hour and 50 minutes you will ever spend listening to a Big Finish audio drama. I'm not remotely sure how they managed to fill up that much time, because certainly nothing happens in this story. In Part One, Ace and Raine infiltrate a campus organization dedicated to the liberation of animals in two seconds. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Bambera look at some plants. You might think these plants are important to the plot for all the time spent on them, but they just turn out to be a convenient way to resolve the actual plot of the story. Animal suffers from similar structural problems to Crime of the Century, actually: there are multiple unrelated storylines, which only intersect when one can provide a convenient way to wrap up another. Even when important things do happen in this story, they’re often only related to us. For some reason, once the aliens show up, all their major actions are only depicted via the Doctor and Bambera talking to each other about things they both already know.

Director Ken Bentley talks a bit in the extras about how Cartmel's writing is so different because it jumps around in tone and the structure is weird and the tension is unusual. "Different" is one word for it. "Terrible" might be another.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.

Animal does bring back Angela Bruce as Brigadier Winifred Bambera from the TV story Battlefield, but suffers from having a very similar story line to Rat Trap without being as good. Also the risk of having aliens who are simultaneously boring and menacing is that the boredom will win out. ( )