Doctor Who and the Star Beast

Doctor Who and the Star Beast is the second of two stories from Big Finish’s The Comic Strip Adaptations: Volume One from Big Finish.
Adapted by Alan Barnes based on the comic strip story of the same name.
The comic strip story is credited to by Pat Mills and John Wagner but Dave Gibbons who provided art for the comic strip story later said in an interview that only Mills wrote the story.
The story later became the basis of The Star Beast, the first of the 60th anniversary TV Specials which marked the full debut of Fourteenth Doctor David Tennant with Mills and Gibbons being credited for the original story.
Notwithstanding different Doctors, the comic strip story is kind of the same and different from the TV adaptation and is a Fourth Doctor story and appropriately Tom Baker plays him in the adaptation.
The comic strip story introduced original comic strip companion Sharon and she is played in the Big Finish adaptation by Rhianne Starbuck for what would be so far the character’s only appearance on Big Finish with this adaptation being released back in 2019.
As in the later TV adaptation, the Star Beast refers to Beep the Meep which this being the Meep’s debut.
This is set in 1980 when an UFO crash lands to a place called Blackcastle.
It is at this time that two teenagers Sharon and her friend Fudge what is inside the UFO that of the Meep.
The Doctor soon comes along and he Sharon and Fudge soon encounter the Wrath Warriors who are after the Meep.
Putting aside for one moment what the general public had seen of the TV adaptation, things don’t appear what they seem to be initially and quite a reveal of just what was really going on with the situation at hand culminating in the story’s climax.
Pretty enjoyable and just as the story comes to an end comes an unexpected development for Sharon
The development being that Sharon got aged by Black Sun radiation (a key plot element) and became one of the reasons she joins the Doctor on his travels. This element of Sharon being aged along with the Doctor’s comment about being a spotty teenager for 57 years had originated from another comic strip story The Time Witch although in The Time Witch, the Doctor said that he was a spotty teenager for 50 years.
This fact about The Time Witch was something I came across by chance as I saw the fan made presentation of that story at the same time with listening to The Star Beast.
Unfortunately there is one niggle I had about the Star Beast Big Finish adaptation is when the Doctor got introduced to an organisation known by its initials GLEB.
The niggle being that acronyms are initials that can be pronounced as words but GLEB gets said as letters and not as a word.

Matthew See
Spocksoc Vice President