In the remnant of a shattered satellite, far above the ruined planet Earth, Steven Taylor and Oliver Harper are dying. As time runs out, they face their pasts… and a secret long kept is revealed.
The borrowed time is elapsing, and they realize they are facing an enemy that cannot be defeated. The cold, hard facts of science.
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE COLD EQUATIONS
If you’re going to give your story the same title as one of the most celebrated science fiction short stories of all time, you’d better make it a good one – and that’s exactly what Simon Guerrier does with “The Cold Equations,” the final entry in the fifth series of Companion Chronicles and one of the best releases in the history of the range.
The story opens brilliantly: Steven and Oliver, trapped on a crippled ship, air supply running out, no hope left and waiting for death. And with so little time remaining, Steven asks Oliver to admit to the crime that had him so eager to flee. From there, the story jumps back in time, and we spend the first episode seeing how Steven and Oliver got into that position and where the Doctor was at the same time. For the most part, this episode is largely a plot mechanic designed to get the characters in place for the sublime drama of the second part, and while I’ve seen the story criticized for this, I have absolutely no problem with it. There’s a nice little reference to “The Guardian of the Solar System” in there as well. Guerrier also makes use of a real-world problem to get our heroes in trouble: the abundance of debris in Earth’s orbit that makes space travel so treacherous.
The second episode is one of the best single episodes Big Finish has ever done. For starters, it’s almost certainly the best use of Steven in any audio story, or even any TV story: it embraces the little-used detail that Steven is a trained space pilot and allows him to use that unique skill to get out of an impossible situation. Classic series companions were constantly plagued by this: sure, Sarah was a journalist, and Mel was a programmer, and so forth, but their skills and training rarely, if ever, came to the fore. Here, in a brilliant bit of monologue, Steven talks the listener through the calculations necessary to compute an orbital flight path, and Guerrier somehow manages to make this intensely technical discussion quite gripping and dramatic. Even the flight itself, which (due to the constraints of audio) has to be described by other characters, is utterly convincing and never resorts to terrible audio dialogue. We also learn more about Steven, how he doesn’t want to get close to Oliver because he’s afraid to lose another friend – it’s hinting at the breakdown between Steven and the Doctor coming in “The Massacre,” and I’m nervous about what it’s hinting about Oliver’s actual fate.
As for Oliver, his secret is both incredibly important and yet incredibly unimportant: he was in a relationship with another man, something that was criminalized at the time in the UK. This informs so much of his behavior and nicely underscores why he’s such a good fit with this TARDIS crew: he, too, is an exile, someone who can’t get close to those that he loves for fear that they will be hurt. But the best scene comes when Oliver finally confesses his “crime” to Steven, and all Steven can do is laugh at the absurdity. The great secret that Oliver has tried so desperately to hide is, to Steven, utterly inconsequential, a relic of a less enlightened time. And this is absolutely wonderful to hear: it’s one thing when this progressive attitude comes from the pen of Russell T. Davies in a modern Doctor Who series, but it’s quite another to hear it in the thoughts of a character from the 1960s. And this is why a slavish adherence to traditional Doctor Who mores robs so many stories of impact: we would NEVER have seen an episode like this in an actual Hartnell TV story from the era, but now we can.
This might be Peter Purves’ best Doctor Who performance – and Tom Allen is equally fantastic – and I’m sure a great deal of that is down to director Lisa Bowerman. The sound design, from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason, is stark but effective, easily matching the tone of the story. Overall, “The Cold Equations” is one of the very best Companion Chronicles, and that’s with nearly the entire first episode being used purely to set up the second! It’s smart, it’s powerful, it gives previously unseen depth to a beloved character – in other words, a must buy.
Excellent.
10/10