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The Condemned is a brilliantly scrappy, very nu Who on a shoestring kind of Big Finish story, and honestly I kind of love that about it. This is Sixth Doctor Colin Baker throwing his trousers into a grimy Manchester tower block, stumbling over a dead body, and getting hauled in by the local police like some washed up magician suspected of petty crime. The premise is simple, but Eddie Robson turns that simplicity into tension and mystery in a way that feels both grounded and uncanny.
Yes, the story uses classic Whovian tropes like aliens hiding in plain sight, haunted flats, secret conspiracies lurking behind peeling wallpaper, but it leans into them with gritty confidence, not campy nostalgia. The atmosphere is great. The clicks of lifts, the buzz of ancient strip lights, the echo of footsteps in corridors that feel too tight for all the secrets they are forced to contain. The sound design puts in overtime to make the whole estate feel wrong in a way you can almost smell.
The themes here are juicy. Identity and who you are when you are out of place. Justice and what the law can actually do when aliens are involved. Condemnation and how easily people fall into roles they never chose. Charley herself is carrying a private sentence and the Doctor is trying to read her like a mystery novel with half the pages glued shut.
The standout to me is DI Patricia Menzies. She is the kind of detective you want to hang around in dark stairwells with, not because she is morally questionable, but because she means business. Her performance is absolutely terrific: sharp, realistic, and not quite convinced by the Doctor’s increasingly frazzled denials. She feels like the most convincing cop who could actually headline a Doctor Who spin off, and she anchors the whole narrative in street level realism while the sci fi creeps in through the cracks.
The other characters like Sam and Maxine are solid, though sometimes they slip into the background while the plot conducts strange little dances around them. There is a conspiracy here, and Robson unspools it piece by piece. Sometimes it works beautifully and sometimes it wanders off into slightly cheesy territory. Still, the overall strength of the performances and the setting holds everything together.
Then there is Charley Pollard. This is her first story with the Sixth Doctor in the monthly range, and their chemistry sparks in the strangest and funniest way. Every scene between them feels like Charley is about to accidentally try to explain to Sixie that Steamed Hams is an old family recipe, much to his growing deadpan suspicion. She is hiding so much from him and he has no idea how much danger he is in from her talent for telling the truth while sounding like she is lying about lying about telling the truth. Their scenes together are delicious.
Final thoughts:
This is not a cosmic epic. It is a gritty little ghost story with teeth. It introduced DI Menzies who is instantly iconic and it gives Charley a dangerous new dynamic with a Doctor who absolutely does not trust her and absolutely should not trust her.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 haunted council flats full of extremely suspicious aliens pretending everything is normal.