After colliding with a meteor in space, the TARDIS is forced to make an emergency in China around 200 BC, during the reign of the first emperor, Qin.
When the Doctor is taken away to the imperial city, it’s up to Victoria and Jamie to save him. He is now a prisoner of Qin, who intends to extract the secret of eternal life, so that he may rule the world forever…
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE EMPEROR OF ETERNITY
“The Suffering” was something of a landmark Companion Chronicle: it was the first on a double CD, it was the first to co-star two companions, and so on. The following release, Nigel Robinson’s “The Emperor of Eternity,” follows the two-companion format, but takes such a significant step back in all other areas that it’s hard to believe it’s part of the same series.
Nigel Robinson, former editor of the Target range, was rarely recognized for penning modern, innovative Doctor Who, and nobody will confuse “The Emperor of Eternity” for a story like that. It’s a pure historical, but unlike almost every historical story from the television series, it forgets to be interesting. The setting is certainly unique: ancient China during the reign of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. But instead of using this setting to tell an unusual story, or delving into ancient Chinese culture, Robinson opts to tell a conventional, unoriginal story of intrigue at the imperial court. It’s Scooby Doo-level storytelling: the mysterious monk of whom everyone was suspicious was the emperor all along! The characters are all generic villagers or angry people with grudges – you could set this story in basically any historical period and it would work with different names. About the only recognizably different moment is a brief, cliffhanger encounter with the Terracotta Army – and that requires Victoria to be mind-numbingly stupid. The ending is also terrible, with the climax coming a good fifteen minutes before the end and the subsequent conclusion accomplishing absolutely nothing of note.
Speaking of Victoria, this is Deborah Watling’s second and final appearance in the Companion Chronicles. I don’t know why she never returned, but judging from her performance here, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She’s an average narrator at best, her attempts at other voices fall flat (though her Troughton is surprisingly recognizable), and she does nothing to elevate the story above its lackluster source material. With her television stories largely destroyed, it was hard to come to grips with her character until recently; sadly, the discovery of “The Enemy of the World” and “The Web of Fear” demonstrated only that she was among the slightest of all companion characters. Frazer Hines is the supporting voice, but as he only plays Jamie and is barely involved in the story, it feels like a wasted opportunity, especially on the heels of Maureen O’Brien and Peter Purves’ extended interactions in the previous release.
I’d usually discuss the framing story and its relationship to the narrative here, but as there is none, I’ll just move on and say that the production isn’t even very good. The story is bloated and flat, not a testament to Lisa Bowerman’s direction, and the sound design by Howard Carter is irritating, consisting of little more than repetitive animal noises. Overall, there’s little to recommend “The Emperor of Eternity,” and there was no reason to release a story like this in the first place. Ask me in a month what this was about and I promise I’ll have absolutely no idea.
Terrible.
3/10