Margrave University in 2001, and Raine Creevy is enjoying her first trip into the future.
For the Doctor, there are mysteries to solve: what are the alien creatures imprisoned in the science labs? And what are the true motives of the student Scobie and his followers?
With enemies on all sides, the Doctor teams up with his old friend Brigadier Bambera and the forces of UNIT in a battle for the future of the whole world.
THE LOST STORIES: ANIMAL
With a new companion introduced, a new recurring alien debuted, and a changing dynamic between the Doctor and Ace underway, Big Finish’s “lost” season 27 rolls on with “Animal,” an Andrew Cartmel script involving a university, eco-terrorists, and man-eating plant life. And while the story exists in the same vein as its predecessor “Crime of the Century,” it lacks the same atmosphere and therefore fails to reach the same heights.
As I said in my last review, “Crime” didn’t make a great deal of sense, but made up for this with a fantastic, mysterious, slightly dark atmosphere extending throughout the play. “Animal” makes equally little sense, but unfortunately it adopts a much more lighthearted tone, and this draws attention to the flaws instead of papering over them. Much of the first two episodes revolves around the Doctor, Ace, and Raine infiltrating Margrave University and foiling a plot by radical students to bomb the university science facilities, in the process avoiding threatening plant creatures that can paralyze with a touch. While this is somewhat resolved, by the halfway point it’s almost completely abandoned in favor of an alien invasion plot that crops up at the second cliffhanger. There are some great little moments in here – the Doctor in a space suit communing with the plants, Ace almost blowing her cover by ordering a giant hamburger – but none of it feels important. Ace and Raine infiltrate the terrorist group so easily it’s impossible to take them seriously as a threat.
So then, when the aliens show up – and yes, they’re actually called “Numlocks,” and yes, that sure sounds like Cartmel looked at his keyboard to create an alien name – you’d expect some sort of connection with the rest of the story, but there really isn’t one. Instead, we rapidly learn that they’re defined by their way of speaking, which is monotone, drawn out, and based upon a bizarrely archaic sentence structure. They’re the elcor from Mass Effect, in other words, but those games didn’t make the mistake of making them the primary villains. The “aliens talk funny” gambit rarely works – I didn’t mention the disastrous surfer dialect for the Metatraxi in my last review, but it turns up again here, almost to underscore what a bad idea the whole thing is. And the Doctor’s master plan fails at the last minute, but since we never really know what it is in the first place, it’s hard to sympathize.
Even the characters don’t get to do much. The Doctor is fantastic, of course, and Sylvester McCoy gets some great scenes, the greatest being the leaf scene at the conclusion. But after the first episode, Ace and Raine are largely pushed to the sidelines – Ace doesn’t do too much, and Raine blends in so well with the student characters it makes you wonder if Cartmel forgot about her. There’s a bit of conflict between the two at the start, and something actually interesting at the end involving Raine’s father – why weren’t these seeded throughout the script to give us something to care about? One of the headlines of “Animal” was the return of Angela Bruce as Brigadier Bambera – and while I enjoyed her performance in “Battlefield,” here I’m forced to wonder why they bothered. Bambera doesn’t distinguish herself here: she’s a cut-rate Lethbridge-Stewart without the personal history. Yes, she bickers with the Doctor, and no, she doesn’t put up with all his nonsense, but what, exactly, is memorable or exciting about this character? She could be any random UNIT officer – honestly, her sergeant is much more memorable, and that’s only because he veers wildly between complete stupidity and murderous lunacy with little explanation.
I’m curious how much of this is down to the script and how much is down to director Ken Bentley – the cliffhangers in particular are completely uninspiring, almost limping into the end credits. The pace of the story is so languid it defies any effort to find a sense of urgency, but rather than complementing this with a sense of mystery it further adopts a lighthearted tone. I’ve seen Paul Magrs scripts make this style work, along with the Matthew Sweet masterpiece “Year of the Pig,” but “Animal” just doesn’t function properly. Simon Robinson’s sound design is good, and the score is much better than the first two, but this is a strange misstep in an otherwise successful season.
Not recommended.
4/10