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By Big Finish release four, someone clearly said, “Right, let’s try atmosphere instead of plot,” and The Land of the Dead was born. Peter Davison and Nyssa land in Alaska—because what says Doctor Who like tundra, spiritual unease, and the looming threat of subtext?
We’re introduced to Brett, a millionaire man-child who’s built a luxury house-slash-personal fossil museum on sacred native land. The Doctor and Nyssa arrive just as all the ancient spirits (or maybe just ancient trauma) start clawing their way back into the present, complete with ominous rumbling and what sounds like undead xylophones in the vents. The whole thing wants to be a haunted house story filtered through polar existentialism, but instead it’s more like watching snow melt. Slowly. While someone narrates it.
To its credit, this is better than the last three. The plot is focused. The sound design actually works in its favour—you can almost feel the cold seep in through your headphones. And the creatures (ancient prehistoric bone beasts or something equally vague) are, at least conceptually, more interesting than yet another energy being made of noise. There’s something refreshingly physical and earthy about them, even if their actual impact is about as terrifying as a grumpy moose.
Peter Davison does solid work, showing early signs of the looser, more natural performance style he’d grow into later. Nyssa… is Nyssa. Competent, moral, and painfully earnest in the face of cosmic nonsense. Brett, meanwhile, is a smug little colonial metaphor who exists solely to be wrong about everything, loudly.
The story dances around ideas about cultural erasure, guilt, and ecological desecration—but it’s more interpretive dance than actual commentary. Any big themes are buried under character monologues that go nowhere and a resolution that quietly folds in on itself without daring to say anything. It’s a tale of ghosts, grief, and exploitation that doesn’t really want to commit to any of them.
Ultimately, The Land of the Dead is fine. Not awful. Not great. Just fine. It’s more confident than what came before, and less offensively stupid than what came directly after (cough The Fearmonger), but you’re still looking at a story where the emotional climax involves a rich guy shouting at spirits he doesn’t believe in.
Final Verdict:
It tries. It really does. But good sound design can only carry a story so far when your big idea is “What if ghosts… but in Alaska?” File under “mildly spooky, vaguely symbolic, but ultimately skippable.”
2.5 out of 5 fossilised eldritch nightmares