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You know that creeping dread when someone says, “We’re doing a ghost story at a Victorian boarding school,” and your soul immediately curls up in a ball because you’ve already seen that episode of Doctor Who? And that one. And… yeah. Welcome to Winter for the Adept, the tenth in Big Finish’s early-run collection of “What if we did the same plot again, but colder?”
We’re in the Swiss Alps this time, because snow is apparently spooky. Nyssa is dropped straight into a mountain Gothic horror setup, all girls’ dormitories and religious repression and rattling tea trays. Meanwhile, the Doctor rocks up like someone wandered in from a better script. There’s a ghost (sort of), there’s psychic nonsense (of course), and by the end there are aliens (because we can’t just have one genre, that’d be too focused).
The twist is that there isn’t a ghost—it’s just latent telekinetic energy left behind by a dead epileptic. Yes, really. That’s the payoff. You sit through 80 minutes of frostbitten tedium, and it turns out the haunting was a paranormal case of bad vibes. There’s also a deranged fundamentalist teacher, because what’s a posh boarding school without a bit of theocracy? But don’t worry—she mostly just yells “God disapproves!” at lesbians and psychic children, then vanishes from narrative relevance.
And then, just when you’re dozing off to the gentle sound of plot inertia, BAM: aliens. The Spillagers! Who are they? Who cares! They crash the party right at the end like uninvited stoners at a séance, get instantly bodied by the Doctor, and leave again. It’s the kind of pointless intrusion that feels like the scriptwriter panicked and googled “Doctor Who mandatory alien quota.”
The dialogue is peak early Big Finish clunk: people shriek things like “Look out, it’s the piano!” with all the urgency of someone announcing a bus timetable. And speaking of the haunted piano—it’s real, it’s dumb, and it literally chases people. Like a ghostly Wile E. Coyote gag, except with zero irony.
The only vaguely noteworthy thing here is the debut of India Fisher as Peril Bellamy (yes, that’s her actual character name). She’ll go on to play Charley Pollard in better audios, but here she’s stuck playing the most annoying telepath since Bester from Babylon 5. The rest of the cast try their best to emote through snowdrifts of exposition, but there’s only so much you can do when half the script is “Look! It’s cold! Something moved!”
This isn’t even camp enough to be fun-bad. It’s just bland, cold, and so aggressively middle-tier that it feels like it was written by an AI trained exclusively on 1980s Target novelisations.
Final Verdict:
Because apparently we can’t do ghosts, boarding schools, telepathy, and aliens without killing the vibe completely.
1 out of 5 haunted pianos