DOCTOR WHO: SNAKE BITE (audiobook) by Scott Hancock



Published in 2012 by BBC Audiobooks Ltd.
Read by Frances Barber
Duration: 1 hour, 13 minutes
Unabridged

Two physicists are working in a secret lab in a massive space station that literally encircles a planet. Their secret project is kept hidden from everyone - even the power to run it is taken siphoned away from dozens of other locations on the space station. Down below, a unique planet is being studied. In the lab, a a stable wormhole is being perfected. As the wormhole stabilizes, the TARDIS arrives right in the middle of it all. The Doctor (Matt Smith's Doctor) doesn't know where they are at first and he certainly doesn't know why he is there. Once they start to figure things out they discover that things are weirder than they even imagined...
Frances Barber was picked to read this audiobook. The producers tried to tie a little Doctor Who authenticity to the book by picking a Doctor Who alum to read the book. Barber played Madame Kovarian - the Eye Patch Woman who kidnapped Amy Pond's baby. This is a very memorable character and perhaps it would have been better if this character had been in the story because Barber just does not have the rhythms of any of the regular characters. For example, her Amy Pond sounds hesitant and scared. When Amy Pond gets scared, she gets loud and mad, not hesitant. Her portrayal of the Doctor does not have Matt Smith's rapid-fire delivery. 

 The plot reads like a middle-of-the-road Doctor Who story (not too good, not too bad) but the performance of the reading just wore on me and made it seem slow. About an hour into the story I checked to see if this was a 2 CD set and was very pleased to see that I had misremembered the number of CDs and this story was nearly over. 

 I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon here: Doctor Who: Snake Bite.

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