The TARDIS deposits the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough and their android ally Kamelion aboard a prison ship. A ship with just one prisoner: Nustanu, last warlord of the Zamglitti – monstrous, mind-bending mimics able to turn themselves into mist.
A ship that’s in trouble, and about to make a crash-landing…
On a planet of mists.
DEVIL IN THE MIST
To kick off the 2019 release year, the Big Finish monthly range turned to Cavan Scott to reintroduce Kamelion to the series. Kamelion may be the single least-explored “companion” from the classic series, as even the novels barely touched upon him. The result, “Devil in the Mist,” is a decent if uninspiring reintroduction, but it struggles with enough problems that it never truly becomes good.
Kamelion is a decent enough idea: a sentient robot that can change its appearance to look like virtually anyone, controlled by telepathic commands. We first saw him in “The King’s Demons,” in which he was controlled by the Master to impersonate King John – and then not again until “Planet of Fire,” where he was once again controlled by the Master. I suppose it’s inevitable, then, that Scott writes a story in which Kamelion is controlled by other minds, but it’s already making the character feel one-note. As Gerald Flood passed away thirty years ago, a recast was necessary, and so Big Finish turned to talented impressionist Jon Culshaw. His performance is excellent; he explains in the extras that he started from Flood’s performance and made it a bit more natural and less mannered to reflect Kamelion’s time away from King John. But the material isn’t there to tell us much about him, as he spends most of the story under the control of one person or another.
Scott structures the script so that it never slows down: we split time between a prison ship and a dangerous alien world, and the pace (and Ken Bentley’s direction) never flags. It’s positively frantic at times, though some of the yelling and running around, especially in episode four, is incomprehensible. The cast is also quite small: apart from the TARDIS team, there are only three other characters, one of whom drops off the map halfway through. I also like how the script misleads you: the villain of the piece is telepathic war criminal Nustanu (Simon Slater), so you automatically assume he’s the one possessing Kamelion, but the actual answer to the possession is much subtler and more complicated. Sadly, that’s all replaced by a second, much more straightforward possession in the final episode that doesn’t come off nearly as well. The last episode falls into a well-known trap characteristic of other Doctor Who stories: the story leaves all the explaining to the end, so the final episode must be both full of exposition and action that resolves the plot, leaving it feeling garbled and the first three episodes feeling slight.
The character work is quite good, particularly for Tegan. It’s easy to write her as the stereotypical “mouth on legs” but Scott imbues her with more depth, fleshing out her sarcasm and hostility as manifestations of her emotions. Turlough doesn’t get much to do. The story tries to do something new with the Doctor: he is paralyzed from the waist down in a spaceship crash and must now operate without the ability to walk. At first, the story embraces his emotions: he tries to put on a brave face for his companions, but ultimately passes out while desperately trying to warn Turlough that he may soon regenerate. The problem, though, is that the Doctor’s newly-acquired disability doesn’t meaningfully impact the narrative. How do we move the Doctor around? Oh, just build a hover-sled from the spaceship wreckage. Mere minutes later, he’s already figured out how to super-power the sled to fly far into the air and save Turlough from falling from a cliff. And by the end, he’s figured out how to heal himself. It’s perfectly in keeping with the Doctor’s character to figure things like this out, and I’m certainly not suggesting an ableist narrative of the Doctor being utterly unable to function as a consequence of his injury – but none of it feels earned. Look to the TV show: when Peter Capaldi’s Doctor was blinded, we spent a few episodes watching him adapt to his inability to see. And while we know the fifth Doctor must eventually regain the ability to walk, there’s no law saying it had to happen by the end of this story. You’ve got a trilogy of stories – explore it! Don’t cram it all into an episode and a half! Think of how much we could learn about this Doctor and his companions! But instead, we immediately hit the reset button, and it’s off to the next story, with paralysis left as a minor inconvenience that happens occasionally.
Sadly, I didn’t particularly care for this story. I appreciate its ambition, I like how it tries to flesh out the Doctor, Tegan, and Kamelion – but I think it falls short. The last episode is overcrowded. The story throws out some fascinating ideas but doesn’t meaningfully grapple with them. It’s certainly not boring – this is not the usual carbon-copy Big Finish monthly release – but I still don’t think it works.
5/10