“I wasn’t going to let this happen. After all we’d been through, the Doctor wasn’t going to die like this, on his knees, in the mud.”
When Jo Grant was very young, her grandmother told her that there was a time for everything. A time to laugh and a time to cry. A time to live and a time to die.
Since meeting the Doctor, Jo has laughed till she thought she might burst. She has also shed a few tears along the way, but has lived more than she ever thought possible.
But now, as a strange spaceship materialises over UNIT HQ and a heavily injured Doctor returns to Earth, it is Jo’s time to die. Again, and again, and again…
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE MANY DEATHS OF JO GRANT
I enjoyed “The Many Deaths of Jo Grant,” the fourth release in the sixth series of Companion Chronicles, not least because it’s from Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, two of my favorite Big Finish writers. It’s not a boundary-pushing release by any means, but it has a strong central concept that is executed convincingly.
For the second release in a row, a Companion Chronicle eschews any framing device, this time dropping the listener right into Katy Manning’s narrative. As the title implies, the story is structured into a series of vignettes, each ending with Jo dying in some sort of horrible fashion. I like how Scott and Wright describe these scenes: it would be easy to resort to nasty and/or visceral descriptions of violence, but instead the material is handled sensitively. It’s jarring enough to hear a companion suffering fatal injuries, and as a result the death scenes unintentionally show off one of the central unrealistic tenets of Doctor Who: this really should happen more often.
Fortunately, the authors largely sidestep that issue by focusing on the self-sacrificial aspect of the story. As plots go, this is an hour-long expansion of the end of “The Dæmons” – an alien race lacking the understanding of or the capacity for self-sacrifice uses Jo’s selflessness as a model. But rather than melting down in confusion, the alien learns – he’s a scientist, not a torturer, and he’s trying to learn why an enemy would resort to suicide attacks. It’s entirely appropriate for this story to feature Jo, who was perhaps the most willing of any companion to sacrifice herself for the Doctor – and the script lightly pokes fun at that idea, revealing that she has “died” over 400 times in the experiment, giving herself up to save the Doctor in every single scenario. Importantly, the Doctor is shown doing the same for her – not that we don’t think he would, but it would be churlish to show Jo sacrificing herself so many times without the Doctor returning the favor.
I love the Katy Manning Companion Chronicles because of the obvious fun and affection in her voice in every part of her narrative. It doesn’t matter that her impressions of Jon Pertwee and Nicholas Courtney aren’t very accurate – or that they largely sound alike – because you can hear her love for both men in every line and that warmth stands out. She’s also quite good at pitching her voice upward to recapture how she sounded in the 1970s – there’s a noticeable difference between her narrative and her performance and the story is all the better for it. Nicholas Asbury is the supporting actor, and he gets to play multiple roles, doing well enough that it’s easy to forget he’s the only supporting voice.
The production is solid, including both Lisa Bowerman’s direction and Matthew Cochrane’s sound design, but the score from Daniel Brett is particularly good. Overall, “The Many Deaths of Jo Grant” is an entertaining, loving homage to the Pertwee era. It’s not particularly deep – it wears its emotions on its sleeve just like the TV show did – but it’s compelling enough to hold the attention. I don’t object to nostalgia; I simply prefer it to arise from a sense of love rather than a sense of obligation. Good stuff.
Recommended.
7/10