I mentioned in my Full Fathom Five review that the story is important because it goes beyond Auld Mortality and Sympathy for the Devil by asking a question about Doctor Who that isn’t simply continuity-related. Both of the first two plays overcame this limitation with excellent scripts and fine productions, but the fourth Unbound release, He Jests at Scars…, demonstrates exactly why continuity overload is a gigantic mistake 99% of the time.
Easily the most fannish of the Unbound questions, “What if the Valeyard won?” doesn’t really seem like a good basis for a story. Indeed, what happens in any story if the awful supervillain actually wins? Well, he’d probably just try to take over the world/universe and end up destroying it thanks to his megalomania. Unfortunately, author/director Gary Russell has decided to subject the listener to eighty tortuous minutes in order to make this basic point: it’s actually a pretty good thing that the Doctor defeats the bad guys!
The strategy through which Russell makes this point is dubious: he paints the Valeyard as an evil anti-Doctor and then has him travel back through time undoing everything the Doctor did in his televised stories. The doomsday weapon from Colony in Space? Used to blow up Gallifrey! Logopolis? Destroyed when the Valeyard tries to cram a third TARDIS between the Master’s and the Doctor’s! Ellie Martin, character from obscure BF Sarah Jane Smith spinoff series? Killed, for no reason! Oh, that Valeyard sure is evil! Fortunately all the Time Lords from the Trial space station are on hand to… do absolutely nothing! That’ll show those noninterventionist fools!
Of course, this is also a Big Finish production, so we’ve got a series of time paradoxes that threaten the web of time (and this is useful reference material if you want to find out what happens if the Doctor isn’t around to stop the meddling), lists of companions that carefully avoid any mention of the books, and uninspiring returning characters from other plays. It’s amazing that all of the worst excesses of the Doctor Who audio range are allowed to bleed into the separate Unbound range, but there I was listening to it.
Michael Jayston returns to the role of the Valeyard for this production, and he shows exactly why he was cast in the role in the first place: his wonderful, intimidating voice, his excellent acting, and his ability to read nonsense technobabble non-stop for an hour and a half. Jayston’s lines are terrible: it seems as though Russell is attempting to channel Pip and Jane Baker in his script, and considering their status as possibly the worst writers ever to attempt Doctor Who, I’m baffled as to why. Unlike …ish, the verbal excesses of which were explained through the setting, He Jests at Scars… is full of awkwardly lengthy vocabulary for absolutely no good reason. Jayston actually manages to make the lines sound convincing, but as he never stops talking it’s impossible not to zone out after five minutes.
Then, of course, there’s Bonnie Langford, who is cast against type as an angry, vengeful Mel out to stop the evil Doctor once and for all. Her scenes on the time station in her old persona are reasonable enough (though every bit as annoying as her performances in Trial) but once she shifts into this new persona she completely fails to convince, even after she shoots someone in cold blood. Langford has done an excellent job in other audios — why give her an impossible task here?
Anthony Keetch returns as Vansell for no reason other than he’s the stock BF Gallifreyan. Sure, he does a good job, but these Unbound audios are supposed to push the boundaries, not make the listener roll their eyes as it heads down the same avenues as its unimpressive predecessors The Sirens of Time and Neverland. Juliet Warner plays Ellie Martin, a character that adds absolutely nothing to the story and is only there to get killed in front of Mel.
There are two inexplicably brilliant elements in He Jests at Scars…: Michael Jayston’s performance and Jim Mortimore’s sound design. Mortimore does an amazing job recreating the various environments in which the story takes place; his work with the doomsday weapon in particular is astonishing. The music is equally exciting, subtle yet threatening in equal measure. Russell directs his own script, and though the production is put together well, there’s nothing that can be done to actually make it good.
The end of He Jests at Scars… is the most depressing element of the whole thing, not because it’s poor but rather because it’s so good. It’s haunting and poignant — but coming after the preceding 75 minutes, it’s impossible to care about. If it wasn’t for Jayston there’d be no reason to listen to this play, and as it stands it’s still a waste of money. Full Fathom Five may have been the most disappointing of the Unbounds but this is far and away the worst.
Arguably this is the worst of the Unbound stories. This is effectively a sequel to Trial of a Time Lord which is devoid of even the better qualities of that turbulent yet compellingly unusual season. The most interesting thing about Trial of a Time Lord is how because it was made whilst the show was under the axe, the story itself almost felt like the show having a moment of mortal awareness and existential angst. In that regard the character of the Valeyard was a chilling symbol of that bell tolling mood, and the temporal vertigo of wondering how far into the future the story could go.
But anyone hoping for even the barest insight into the Valeyard’s mind will be sorely disappointed. Here all potential for the character is completely squandered. A sense of complete lack of thought permeates every aspect of this story. You never for a second, get the sense of a calculating, ticking mind underneath there, you barely even get the sense of two brain cells rubbing together in him (the same problem plagues the Master in New Who). Nor do you get the sense of wonder and horror at seeing the unreachable, forbidden truths about the Doctor’s future, there’s nothing remotely haunting or dramatically satisfying about this story. This story succeeds only in turning the figure into a shallow mindless killer and a spree anarchist, not unlike Nuclear Man in the collection of contrived set pieces that made up Superman IV- The Quest for Peace. Essentially he’s a villain who without motive, rhyme or reason becomes the contrived tool for Gary Russell’s favourite hobby of continuity vandalism.
Continuity may be a dirty word amongst some fans but here it’s certainly for good reason. This story is not outright unfathomable in the way the incompetent 80’s continuity fests could be, but it’s so random and vacuous that nothing actually carries the listener from one scene to the next. As I said in Flip-Flop, a story about time travellers changing history benefits from an emotional impetus for the act, but this has none. This is continuity at the cost of everything else that makes a story work as a piece of drama- characterisation, imagination, tension, discipline. It doesn’t even have any atmosphere, at all.
Gary Russell can pen a decent story when he disciplines himself. He did after all write one of the best Audio Visual stories, Deadfall which still stands as a masterpiece today. His problem has always been when he revisits too many elements to the point where it becomes unmanageable, and this story finds him revisiting the Valeyard, the Doomsday Weapon and Logopolis. For the last example it’s clearly trying to do for Doctor Who what Trials and Tribbleations did for Star Trek in having the present characters interact with the past, but it’s never going to work on audio, it’s simply going to expose the falseness of it all (same with Jon Pertwee’s cameo in Zagreus). When we’re comparing Doctor Who unfavourably to Star Trek you know you’re in trouble. This is very much Doctor Who being fixated on the letter whilst ignoring the spirit, and for all its fannish encyclopaedic details not a shred of thought or imagination seems to have gone into the story.
In homage to The One Doctor, the Valeyard is teamed up with a young common cockney simpleton woman, but unlike in The One Doctor, there’s no character or humour to her, or even tragic naivety of her being a natural follower. For instance the listener feels no empathy with her or concern for her survival when the Valeyard sends her on a dangerous errand. She’s simply a stereotype, much like the Valeyard himself is. The story has missed the irony in a big way, particularly when it comes to the Time Lords. We see the President and Vansell from The Apocalypse Element discussing the problem of the Valeyard, and whilst it gets across the stuffy, lethargic nature of the Time Lords it shouldn’t mean the scene itself has to be boring too, or bogged down with the most asinine dialogue. It’s a sequence that’s honestly painful to listen to and might even make some listeners press eject there and then. No matter what atrocities the Valeyard, or even Mel commit, it simply leaves the listener cold and feeling that none of it is worth caring about. This is of course the problem with continuity in hoping that fans will care now about a revisited story element just because they cared back then. As with the JNT era, relying on continuity and past niche elements can unfortunately become an excuse to be half-hearted in the scriptwriting.
The Valeyard sets off the entropy of Logopolis again but there’s nothing in the story to compliment the theme of decay or delicacy or to get across such an apocalyptic concept. Perhaps revisiting a force of destruction that’s silent wasn’t a good idea on audio. The best that can be said about He Jests at Scars is that the tragic ending just about belatedly makes us care and seems unusually inspired, despite the utter soullessness of everything beforehand. It’s also the only part of the story that has any atmosphere. But the main reason it doesn’t connect with the rest is that the scene seems to be trying to tell us some moral about how evil always undoes itself, but everything about the story tells us that the Valeyard only failed due to being so determinedly and stupidly self-destructive in such a contrived way that it just fails to mean anything representational about natural human folly.
The intent behind He Jests at Scars seems to be to speculate on the question of what if Eric Saward’s more bleak ending had been used for Trial of a Time Lord and the story had ended with the Doctor and Valeyard merging, and thus Michael Damien Grade wasn’t satisfied with it and decided to axe the show there and then. There’s almost a sense that the story is exploring the possibility with glee, and that this is pitched at those of us who partly wished this had happened to spare us the indignity of Season 24 (in truth though, Gary Russell is a confessed Ghostlight fan). Which is fair enough, I often wish the show had ended with Castrovalva before it all turned sensationalist and nasty. The purpose then of He Jests at Scars seems to be to write the final conclusion of Doctor Who. An ultimate finale that kills off every loose end and finally sees the destruction of the universe.
Sadly He Jests at Scars might as well be something written for 1986. It’s archaic in every way. It’s devoid of anything progressive or forward looking, it’s bogged down in depressingly shallow clichés and patronising stereotypes. For an expansive range like the Unbounds that was about pushing boundaries of what Doctor Who is capable of, this derivative regurgitation and stubborn parochialism is almost insulting. Even Michael Jayston and Bonnie Langford can’t save it. It feels true to the era it’s trying to homage, but for all the wrong reasons. It perfectly compliments an era where Doctor Who wasn’t just killed by poor budgeting or scheduling or BBC politics, but by its own introspectiveness and hollow indulgences leading to uninspired directionless lethargy and ultimately outright self-contempt.
HE JESTS AT SCARS…
I mentioned in my Full Fathom Five review that the story is important because it goes beyond Auld Mortality and Sympathy for the Devil by asking a question about Doctor Who that isn’t simply continuity-related. Both of the first two plays overcame this limitation with excellent scripts and fine productions, but the fourth Unbound release, He Jests at Scars…, demonstrates exactly why continuity overload is a gigantic mistake 99% of the time.
Easily the most fannish of the Unbound questions, “What if the Valeyard won?” doesn’t really seem like a good basis for a story. Indeed, what happens in any story if the awful supervillain actually wins? Well, he’d probably just try to take over the world/universe and end up destroying it thanks to his megalomania. Unfortunately, author/director Gary Russell has decided to subject the listener to eighty tortuous minutes in order to make this basic point: it’s actually a pretty good thing that the Doctor defeats the bad guys!
The strategy through which Russell makes this point is dubious: he paints the Valeyard as an evil anti-Doctor and then has him travel back through time undoing everything the Doctor did in his televised stories. The doomsday weapon from Colony in Space? Used to blow up Gallifrey! Logopolis? Destroyed when the Valeyard tries to cram a third TARDIS between the Master’s and the Doctor’s! Ellie Martin, character from obscure BF Sarah Jane Smith spinoff series? Killed, for no reason! Oh, that Valeyard sure is evil! Fortunately all the Time Lords from the Trial space station are on hand to… do absolutely nothing! That’ll show those noninterventionist fools!
Of course, this is also a Big Finish production, so we’ve got a series of time paradoxes that threaten the web of time (and this is useful reference material if you want to find out what happens if the Doctor isn’t around to stop the meddling), lists of companions that carefully avoid any mention of the books, and uninspiring returning characters from other plays. It’s amazing that all of the worst excesses of the Doctor Who audio range are allowed to bleed into the separate Unbound range, but there I was listening to it.
Michael Jayston returns to the role of the Valeyard for this production, and he shows exactly why he was cast in the role in the first place: his wonderful, intimidating voice, his excellent acting, and his ability to read nonsense technobabble non-stop for an hour and a half. Jayston’s lines are terrible: it seems as though Russell is attempting to channel Pip and Jane Baker in his script, and considering their status as possibly the worst writers ever to attempt Doctor Who, I’m baffled as to why. Unlike …ish, the verbal excesses of which were explained through the setting, He Jests at Scars… is full of awkwardly lengthy vocabulary for absolutely no good reason. Jayston actually manages to make the lines sound convincing, but as he never stops talking it’s impossible not to zone out after five minutes.
Then, of course, there’s Bonnie Langford, who is cast against type as an angry, vengeful Mel out to stop the evil Doctor once and for all. Her scenes on the time station in her old persona are reasonable enough (though every bit as annoying as her performances in Trial) but once she shifts into this new persona she completely fails to convince, even after she shoots someone in cold blood. Langford has done an excellent job in other audios — why give her an impossible task here?
Anthony Keetch returns as Vansell for no reason other than he’s the stock BF Gallifreyan. Sure, he does a good job, but these Unbound audios are supposed to push the boundaries, not make the listener roll their eyes as it heads down the same avenues as its unimpressive predecessors The Sirens of Time and Neverland. Juliet Warner plays Ellie Martin, a character that adds absolutely nothing to the story and is only there to get killed in front of Mel.
There are two inexplicably brilliant elements in He Jests at Scars…: Michael Jayston’s performance and Jim Mortimore’s sound design. Mortimore does an amazing job recreating the various environments in which the story takes place; his work with the doomsday weapon in particular is astonishing. The music is equally exciting, subtle yet threatening in equal measure. Russell directs his own script, and though the production is put together well, there’s nothing that can be done to actually make it good.
The end of He Jests at Scars… is the most depressing element of the whole thing, not because it’s poor but rather because it’s so good. It’s haunting and poignant — but coming after the preceding 75 minutes, it’s impossible to care about. If it wasn’t for Jayston there’d be no reason to listen to this play, and as it stands it’s still a waste of money. Full Fathom Five may have been the most disappointing of the Unbounds but this is far and away the worst.
2/10
Arguably this is the worst of the Unbound stories. This is effectively a sequel to Trial of a Time Lord which is devoid of even the better qualities of that turbulent yet compellingly unusual season. The most interesting thing about Trial of a Time Lord is how because it was made whilst the show was under the axe, the story itself almost felt like the show having a moment of mortal awareness and existential angst. In that regard the character of the Valeyard was a chilling symbol of that bell tolling mood, and the temporal vertigo of wondering how far into the future the story could go.
But anyone hoping for even the barest insight into the Valeyard’s mind will be sorely disappointed. Here all potential for the character is completely squandered. A sense of complete lack of thought permeates every aspect of this story. You never for a second, get the sense of a calculating, ticking mind underneath there, you barely even get the sense of two brain cells rubbing together in him (the same problem plagues the Master in New Who). Nor do you get the sense of wonder and horror at seeing the unreachable, forbidden truths about the Doctor’s future, there’s nothing remotely haunting or dramatically satisfying about this story. This story succeeds only in turning the figure into a shallow mindless killer and a spree anarchist, not unlike Nuclear Man in the collection of contrived set pieces that made up Superman IV- The Quest for Peace. Essentially he’s a villain who without motive, rhyme or reason becomes the contrived tool for Gary Russell’s favourite hobby of continuity vandalism.
Continuity may be a dirty word amongst some fans but here it’s certainly for good reason. This story is not outright unfathomable in the way the incompetent 80’s continuity fests could be, but it’s so random and vacuous that nothing actually carries the listener from one scene to the next. As I said in Flip-Flop, a story about time travellers changing history benefits from an emotional impetus for the act, but this has none. This is continuity at the cost of everything else that makes a story work as a piece of drama- characterisation, imagination, tension, discipline. It doesn’t even have any atmosphere, at all.
Gary Russell can pen a decent story when he disciplines himself. He did after all write one of the best Audio Visual stories, Deadfall which still stands as a masterpiece today. His problem has always been when he revisits too many elements to the point where it becomes unmanageable, and this story finds him revisiting the Valeyard, the Doomsday Weapon and Logopolis. For the last example it’s clearly trying to do for Doctor Who what Trials and Tribbleations did for Star Trek in having the present characters interact with the past, but it’s never going to work on audio, it’s simply going to expose the falseness of it all (same with Jon Pertwee’s cameo in Zagreus). When we’re comparing Doctor Who unfavourably to Star Trek you know you’re in trouble. This is very much Doctor Who being fixated on the letter whilst ignoring the spirit, and for all its fannish encyclopaedic details not a shred of thought or imagination seems to have gone into the story.
In homage to The One Doctor, the Valeyard is teamed up with a young common cockney simpleton woman, but unlike in The One Doctor, there’s no character or humour to her, or even tragic naivety of her being a natural follower. For instance the listener feels no empathy with her or concern for her survival when the Valeyard sends her on a dangerous errand. She’s simply a stereotype, much like the Valeyard himself is. The story has missed the irony in a big way, particularly when it comes to the Time Lords. We see the President and Vansell from The Apocalypse Element discussing the problem of the Valeyard, and whilst it gets across the stuffy, lethargic nature of the Time Lords it shouldn’t mean the scene itself has to be boring too, or bogged down with the most asinine dialogue. It’s a sequence that’s honestly painful to listen to and might even make some listeners press eject there and then. No matter what atrocities the Valeyard, or even Mel commit, it simply leaves the listener cold and feeling that none of it is worth caring about. This is of course the problem with continuity in hoping that fans will care now about a revisited story element just because they cared back then. As with the JNT era, relying on continuity and past niche elements can unfortunately become an excuse to be half-hearted in the scriptwriting.
The Valeyard sets off the entropy of Logopolis again but there’s nothing in the story to compliment the theme of decay or delicacy or to get across such an apocalyptic concept. Perhaps revisiting a force of destruction that’s silent wasn’t a good idea on audio. The best that can be said about He Jests at Scars is that the tragic ending just about belatedly makes us care and seems unusually inspired, despite the utter soullessness of everything beforehand. It’s also the only part of the story that has any atmosphere. But the main reason it doesn’t connect with the rest is that the scene seems to be trying to tell us some moral about how evil always undoes itself, but everything about the story tells us that the Valeyard only failed due to being so determinedly and stupidly self-destructive in such a contrived way that it just fails to mean anything representational about natural human folly.
The intent behind He Jests at Scars seems to be to speculate on the question of what if Eric Saward’s more bleak ending had been used for Trial of a Time Lord and the story had ended with the Doctor and Valeyard merging, and thus Michael Damien Grade wasn’t satisfied with it and decided to axe the show there and then. There’s almost a sense that the story is exploring the possibility with glee, and that this is pitched at those of us who partly wished this had happened to spare us the indignity of Season 24 (in truth though, Gary Russell is a confessed Ghostlight fan). Which is fair enough, I often wish the show had ended with Castrovalva before it all turned sensationalist and nasty. The purpose then of He Jests at Scars seems to be to write the final conclusion of Doctor Who. An ultimate finale that kills off every loose end and finally sees the destruction of the universe.
Sadly He Jests at Scars might as well be something written for 1986. It’s archaic in every way. It’s devoid of anything progressive or forward looking, it’s bogged down in depressingly shallow clichés and patronising stereotypes. For an expansive range like the Unbounds that was about pushing boundaries of what Doctor Who is capable of, this derivative regurgitation and stubborn parochialism is almost insulting. Even Michael Jayston and Bonnie Langford can’t save it. It feels true to the era it’s trying to homage, but for all the wrong reasons. It perfectly compliments an era where Doctor Who wasn’t just killed by poor budgeting or scheduling or BBC politics, but by its own introspectiveness and hollow indulgences leading to uninspired directionless lethargy and ultimately outright self-contempt.