The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Ace and Mel to a recently reopened shipyard in Merseyside. It’s 1991, the hardest of times – but now they’re shipbuilding once again, thanks to the yard’s new owners, the Dark Alloy Corporation. A miracle of job creation – but is it too good to be true?
While the Doctor and Ace go in search of an alien assassin at loose in the yard, Stuart Dale, discoverer of the near-magical Dark Alloy material, has an extraordinary proposition to make to his old college friend, Mel.
But who is the Corporation’s mysterious client? Who does she really represent? And what’s the secret of the Blood Furnace? Seeking answers, the Doctor and friends are about to find themselves in very deep water…
THE BLOOD FURNACE
I’m genuinely unsure what Big Finish is trying to accomplish with these seventh Doctor, Ace, and Mel stories, apart from the most basic desire to have Ace and Mel together in the same TARDIS. The latest installment in this effort is “The Blood Furnace,” and it’s so bland and uninspiring you’d never guess that Eddie Robson wrote it.
It’s 1991 Merseyside, and the shipping industry is on its last legs. Native son Stuart Dale (Todd Heppenstall) has returned with a new discovery: the Dark Alloy material, and a mysterious client (Julie Graham) who wants it used to build a ship. The locals are back to work, and everyone is happy, but the true nature of the client’s proposal is about to come to the fore. As setups go, this is good enough – I like the 1991 setting in particular, as it’s in our past but the companions’ present, and Robson actually makes it feel like a historical setting. But the secret plan is boring – yep, they’re aliens and they want to conquer the universe – and the aliens themselves are uninteresting takes on the Carrionites. They can turn an entire warship into a flock of birds with a few words, which really makes their defeat unbelievable – yes, I know they can’t build their own warships, but nearly limitless power like that should make them impossible to oppose.
Worse, though, is that this story was billed as a look into Mel’s past and at the experiences that shaped her. Stuart is her old college boyfriend, he’s back in her life, and now her past and present will collide. And then… nothing happens. We don’t actually learn anything about Mel as a person, we don’t learn much about Stuart, and we barely learn about their relationship. Stuart offers Mel a job, which she first accepts and then declines, without any explanation of why or why not. It rang so false, in fact, that I just assumed her initial acceptance was a ploy to gain access to the shipyard. And it might have been! We never find out if she was being sincere or not. For that matter, we still haven’t learned much about how Mel has changed since she first left the TARDIS. There were hints in the first couple of stories featuring this group, but that’s been utterly abandoned – now she’s just the same old character we know from the 1980s and it’s like she never left. And don’t even get me started on Ace – I know it’s beating a dead horse by now to point out that any character development has long since been stripped away, but it’s still true and it’s no less annoying. The story is also full of moments of the Doctor sending his companions on missions, not explaining his motives, trusting their survival based on nothing in particular… and none of that leads to anything interesting either.
It’s getting more and more difficult to review most of these monthly releases because there’s not much to say about them. I can spend more time outlining the plot, but when nothing new or exciting happens, there isn’t much of a theme, and the characters remain totally static, it’s hard to offer a substantive critique. And that’s exactly the case with “The Blood Furnace,” an anodyne, inoffensive story that sticks around for a couple of hours before fading entirely from the memory.
Snore.
5/10