Bletchley Park. Britain’s most secret weapon in the Second World War.
Inside draughty huts, the earliest computers clatter day and night, decoding enemy transmissions and revealing intelligence crucial to the country’s defence. Leading WREN Mrs Constance Clarke directs her charges to provide vital assistance to the boffins stationed in the Manor House. But a recent arrival among the code-breakers, the mysterious Dr Smith, has attracted the attention of MI5’s spycatchers…
Over in mainland Europe, Nazi agents are briefed, covert operations planned, and a German submarine embarks on a very secret mission.
As encrypted radio waves criss-cross the planet, unearthly forces stir. And when certain ciphers are cracked, something will emerge to threaten all humanity, regardless of allegiance…
CRISS-CROSS
Another year, another double monthly range release from Big Finish, and another new companion for Colin Baker. As the start of a new trilogy of stories, Matt Fitton’s “Criss-Cross” works well enough, though it’s needlessly technical and not as interested in its characters as it should be.
Though we already saw a glimpse of her in “The Sixth Doctor – The Last Adventure” box set, this is the formal introduction of Miranda Raison as Constance Clarke, the Sixth Doctor’s newest companion. She’s a WREN – and don’t worry, she’ll remind you of that over and over and over and over again – and the head of a code breaking group working at Bletchley Park. She’s also married, and her husband, an intelligence officer, hasn’t been heard from in months. I like the character in general – she’s intelligent, driven, and capable – but right now she’s painted in rather broad strokes. Hopefully we’ll learn more about her as the stories continue, and I *really* hope we don’t fade up on the second story in the trilogy with her and the Doctor having traveled together for months. Miranda Raison is great, naturally – she’s got a higher professional profile than almost every companion had when they were hired – and the strength of her performance should make up for any initial weaknesses in the writing.
As for the story itself, it’s solid, if unspectacular. It’s definitely a slow burn: the true villain isn’t even revealed until the third episode, leading to a lot of running around Bletchley Park and the surrounding area. The usual Doctor Who pattern is followed: the Doctor walks in as if he owns the place, people get suspicious and investigate, and he exonerates himself not by disproving their suspicions but by saving the world. It’s interesting, though, that the Doctor apparently has connections all the way up to Churchill – if this is true, then why is he being investigated by an intelligence officer? Shouldn’t he already be cleared? That’s a minor plot complaint, though – for the most part everything hangs together without complication. Far too much attention is paid to how the Waveform and its Chuadri work: there’s some brief investigation of their motive, but for the most part we have to listen to a great deal of technical jargon about how they function and how they can be defeated, and that’s something that has never interested me.
There’s no depth here, in other words, something I’ve said about a lot of monthly releases of late. Is the Waveform simply misunderstood in its attempt to communicate? Of course not, it’s just trying to take over the world. Is Agent Flint (Paul Thornley), or “Spark” or “Criss-Cross” or whatever, driven by a sense of abandonment or betrayal? We don’t know – all we find out is that he’s entirely self-interested and desirous of power. The Doctor, predictably, reacts with horror, asking things like “Is that really all you want?!” as though he can’t believe his foes are so one-dimensional either. There’s an interesting character beat early on when we discover that the Doctor has been working Sylvia (Charlotte Salt) half to death; this is of course not followed up in any meaningful sense, even though it could go a long way to defining the Doctor’s relationship with Constance.
This isn’t to say that “Criss-Cross” is a bad story. Despite getting bogged down in technobabble for a while, it moves along at a fairly brisk pace, and everything is sketched in broad enough strokes to be believable. But all of the potentially interesting elements are glossed over in favor of yet another standard Doctor Who runaround. There’s a brief mention of “Alan,” presumably Turing – and while I have to say I’m not displeased that such a notoriously complex individual was left out of this story, it did remind me of what the story lacked. Ken Bentley does his usual sterling job in the director’s chair, while the sound design from Steve Foxon is quite interesting – but then I would hope so, with a creature made out of sound appearing in an audio story! Overall, “Criss-Cross” is, yet again, solid and unmemorable. While the quality of the monthly range has certainly improved over 2014, it would be nice if something came along and tried something new.
Not bad, in the end.
6/10