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I really loved this one. I enjoyed it even more than either story it precedes - "Home Truths" or "The Drowned World" - although I enjoyed both of those works. I found the melancholic mood and dark tone, with some beautiful lyricism, to be especially engaging, not to mention the sense of "completing" the story begun in the first two installments.

To my mind, in fact, the previous two are now stronger because of the way they tie in to "The Guardian of the Solar System" (and what a marvelous double meaning that title has). The story's visual of a giant, imposing clock is one of the best seen or heard in "Doctor Who" for many a year. I only wish the TV series could afford to go this kind of route on occasion.

In "Home Truths," the entire story was about Sara learning the positives and negatives of getting what you wish for. "The Drowned World" focused on her intertwined senses of guilt and responsibility. Both of those threads meet in "The Guardian of the Solar System," and in fact if you're an informed fan, they spread even further outward to encompass Sara's ultimate sacrifice in the TV series. This is a character who is trying to redeem herself after an incredibly tragic mistake, when she has realized that the rules she's lived by have been false. Instead of abandoning them, she re-applies those rules to herself: she continues to uphold the law, she continues to sacrifice herself for the greater good. And she remains trapped by them. In the TV series, these rules of the universe ultimately kill her, but here she gets a second chance.

I think "The Guardian of the Solar System," and the Sara trilogy as a whole, really shows off the full potential for Big Finish's Companion Chronicles line. There are friends I want to send these to for Christmas, even though I know they aren't really into audio drama. I think they'll enjoy them all the same. ( )

This is the third of the series of audio plays by Simon Guerrier produced by Big Finish as part of their Companion Chronicle series, bringing back Jean Marsh as the short-lived Sara Kingdom, who originally appeared in Doctor Who for a few weeks at the end of 1965 and start of 1966, paired with Scottish actor Niall MacGregor as Robert, a constant visitor to the far-future house in the fens which appears to be haunted by Sara's ghost.

The first two stories took the established Sara story from The Daleks' Master Plan and twisted it slightly sideways. Here the story is definitely twisted backwards, and we get a lot more illumination not only into Sara's character - she must always bear the guilt of killing her own brother - but also into the motivations of Mavic Chen, the eponymous Guardian of the Solar System, and one of the most effective villains ever to appear in Doctor Who.

There's also a fantastic image of elderly prisoners forced to maintain a gigantic clock - I thought this might be based on Aldiss's Wheel of Kharnabar from Helliconia Winter, but it turns out to be inspired partly by The Hudsucker Proxy (which I haven't seen) and partly by John Noakes cleaning Big Ben on Blue Peter. (This is revealed by Guerrier in the extras track, where we also find out that Jean Marsh never actually saw her own episodes due to a) not having a television at the time and b) being very short-sighted.)

It doesn't all make perfect sense, and the three stories will probably confuse listeners who know nothing of The Daleks' Master Plan. But I enjoyed it. ( )