“Tell me another story, Leela. Not the one about the walking doll or the creepy mechanical men. A new one. I want to hear a new one…”
Leela is dead but her soul lives on. She has been reborn as a young girl, Emily, whose ‘imaginary friend’ tells her amazing tales about a great Wizard and the warrior who accompanies him on his adventures through time and space.
Emily prepares to tell her parents the story of a cold, grey world whose people are ruled over by a Glass Angel. The Wizard is her prisoner and only the warrior girl and her three peculiar friends can save him…
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE CHILD
Louise Jameson, despite her apparent ubiquity at Big Finish, only appeared in four Companion Chronicles: a linked trilogy that concluded with “The Time Vampire” and “The Child,” another story from Nigel Fairs that was intended to be the first installment in a new trilogy. Unfortunately, those other two installments were never produced, and so we’re left with a stylistic curio that works in some ways and struggles in others.
From what I gathered from the extras, the intention was to tell three stories in three different styles reflecting three different ages. As the title implies, “The Child” is from the perspective of childhood and is thus told in the style of a classic fairy tale. We follow on from “The Time Vampire,” in which Leela died, and in which we learned that the Sevateem believe that babies are born with all the knowledge of their past lives already in place. In this story, Leela has been reborn as Emily (Anna Hawkes), a young girl who experiences these memories by perceiving a ghostly Leela as an imaginary friend. And so, the two characters share narrative duties. When Leela narrates, she describes the story in a manner very familiar to the Companion Chronicles range. When Emily narrates, on the other hand, she relates the story as a child would relate a fairy tale: the Doctor becomes a powerful Wizard and the other characters are described as archetypes.
For the most part I liked this narrative style, because I could hear Emily describe things in fantastic terms and then Leela would interject and ground the story in more realistic language. And in the great Doctor Who tradition, the acts of magic on display are given scientific explanations at the conclusion. But I don’t think these elements hang together very well: the story sits uneasily in the real world, with many overtly fantastic elements. When the Doctor conjures avatars from his subconscious to guide Leela through her trials, it’s obvious they’re intended as analogues for his previous incarnations – but since we hear almost everything with these characters in the fairy tale narration, it’s difficult to understand exactly what’s happening. There’s also the question of Emily’s real world situation, with her references to her upper-class lifestyle and the expectations of young girls in her time – I’m sure this would have been explored in the other installments of the trilogy, but as a standalone these elements feel incomplete and unrewarding.
As with almost all of his stories, Nigel Fairs handles every element of the production: writing, directing, and sound designing. And as with his other stories, this helps create a consistent atmosphere that envelops the listener in the story. But ultimately the story isn’t as rewarding as it could be, both because of the unusual style and because we never get to hear the themes carried forward into future installments. I enjoyed “The Child,” but it left me scratching my head, and not in a good way.
Not bad.
6/10