Audio book: Day of the Troll

David Tennant's readings of the audios are probably some of the best, right up there with Catherine Tate's. Unfortunately, here, he cannot do female voices well. And Simon Messingham is not one of my favorite authors. This story is VERY cliche and derivative or maybe DW has just run its course. A plant alien or something wooden (!) starts to take over the area in the near future (think THE ICE WARRIORS or SEEDS OF DEATH setting) just after an Ice Age has left the area. The guest characters are boring scientist types and the set up, which usually is the best part of a DW story, is cliche and boring and dull. In addition, for most of the climax of the story, the Doctor is...stuck in a cell...and then comes roaring up in a jeep type thingie. The female characters are cliche and I"m still not sure what happened to one or two of them and the male charactersa re all cliche too, rough macho types who really aren't. The villains, both alien and human, we've seen before WAY too many times. The  monsters seem right out of WENDIGO, the movie, if better realized here and the opening is very like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the original. There's just nothing new here and calling attention to it by mentioning the Krynoid just gives us memory of better DW stories this one rips off. David does what he can with the story and frankly I was able to stay with this one to the bitter end unlike THE RISING NIGHT. Still, I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that we have so much DW, shouldn't we? On the other hand, the bulk of ALL these stories means that there are more mediocre DW stories than good ones.  Not great. And trolls were done much better in the movie TROLL and an ep of SO WEIRD.