Big Finish has announced that Reece Shearsmith will be making his debut with them in a brand-new horror series set in the Doctor Who universe. The first box-set of this new series, Planet Krynoid: Nightfall, features the carnivorous plant known as Krynoid that first appeared in the 1976 Doctor Who TV story The Seeds of Doom. In the episode, the Doctor saved the Earth from the destruction of these plants, but not all planets are as fortunate, as this new audio-drama will soon show.
This first box-set in the Planet Krynoid series takes listeners on a 3 hour long disaster adventure that starts with Krynoid seed pod landing on the utopian planet of Sunlight. For a hundred years, this shining beacon in the galaxy has been a safe haven for the super-rich and offers a wealth of employment for all, but when an engineer finds a pair of strange looking seed pods in a satellite it’s not long before the utopia becomes unrecognisable.
Wherever the Krynoid get established, the vegetation begins to eat the animals, and this time there’s no Doctor to save the day. It’s up to Governor Robert Hodan (played by Reece Shearsmith) to lead the fight back against the Krynoid, assisted by xenobiologist Bryn Forrester (Melody Chikakane Brown) and the impoverished Hart family (Sarah Whitehouse, Ian Conningham and Nye Occomore).
The three episodes in the box set are Sunlight by Jonathan Morris, Sunset by Jonathan S Powell and Darkness by Chris Chapman, with Sunset featuring a guest appearance from the Eighth Doctor played by Paul McGann.
Shearsmith said: “I know a lot of actors on Big Finish’s roster – David Warner was a great friend, and he used to love doing them and would tell me about them: ‘Why haven’t you done one?’ So I was thrilled to be asked to be in this. It’s a really huge drama, it feels a proper disaster movie of the 1970s, like The Poseidon Adventure – things just get worse and worse.”
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Producer Jonathan S Powell said: “Planet Krynoid is Doctor Who’s answer to The Last of Us and The Walking Dead, a heart-stopping vision of society’s collapse under the weight of one of television’s most terrifying creations: the Krynoid. The Krynoids themselves are terrifying because they do that great sci-fi thing of inverting the ordinary and making you petrified of pot plants. More than that though, they’re a sentient infection utterly antithetical to our existence, for which we are woefully unprepared, which makes them the perfect monster to explore today, half a century on from their debut.
Planet Krynoid: Nightfall is now available to pre-order for £24.99 (collector’s edition CD box set + download) or £19.99 (download only), from the Big Finish website.
