Excelis Rising
Starring Colin Baker and Anthony Stewart Head

I hadn't heard this play in about eight years when I re-listened to it. I'm older and I'd like to think slightly more mature than back in those days. The first time I heard this play, I didn't enjoy it. So, how do I feel about it now?

Well, I'll start by saying that I really enjoyed it. David A. McIntee wrote a wonderful play that doesn't really suffer from "trilogy middle syndrome" too badly. It was just the right length. I adore the Enlightenment-esque setting on Excelis, I adore the museum setting and I adored all the performances. I must say that after Excelis Dawns it was nice to have a normal-voiced Anthony Stewart Head, rather than his comedy ruffian voice.

So, what of the setting? Well, it's fairly self-contained, being in a museum. It does nothing really extraordinary with the audio format, but does it need to? By this time, Big Finish had already used the museum setting to do things that you can only do on audio at least once (with Whispers of Terror), while the point of this audio was to tell a fairly orthodox story, which just happens to be set in a museum.

One of the great joys of the Excelis storyline was to see how the City of Excelis progresses. Here, we've clearly moved on from the setting of Excelis Dawns 1,000 years prior. Excelis has law and order, culture and history. It has plenty of spirituality, as heard through the seance. The city is showing promise. Things are looking good. Except that people are still obsessed with that damned relic... ho hum!

But not only do we hear how Excelis has developed, but we also get the impression of true character development for Grayvorn... or, as he is now, Maupassant. I really love how in the intervening years, he's slowly been going insane, unable to sleep and forced to share a mind with the Mother Superior from the previous play. I also absolutely adored his confusion over the Doctor's new body, assuming that the Doctor's mind had somehow possessed a new body. After all, that's what he plans to do to get away from that nagging Mother Superior...

Finally, onto the plot itself. While so simple, it works! It's a simple whodunnit - who arranged the attempted theft and why? Well, no prizes for guessing on that one. As I said, it's simple, and the Doctor does as the Doctor normally does, and wins... or does he?

Frankly, I really, really enjoyed this play. Much more than I remember doing so on my last listen eight years ago. By far, this gets 9/10 - and it only misses out on that last mark because something has to be truly exceptional for me to give it that much!