What if the Doctor had escaped the justice of the Time Lords?
2 Comments
Styre
on May 7, 2016 at 9:00 PM
EXILE
It’s impossible to follow up a play as stunning as Deadline, and indeed that was never Big Finish’s intention: they’d intended the Unbound line to end with Deadline, but circumstances dictated that it would be the fifth release. The job of concluding the series thus fell to Nicholas Briggs’ Exile, featuring Arabella Weir as the Doctor and intended as a lighthearted comedy. Though some of the humor is misplaced, this remains a solid outing — it’s just a shame that the original release order could not have been maintained.
Much of Exile is comedic, generally revolving around two styles of humor. The first — drunken barroom humor — doesn’t really work at all, amounting almost entirely to drunk people slurring at each other, belching, and vomiting. Unfortunately, this mostly isn’t even used for comic effect within the play; these sorts of jokes can be funny but they generally have to be the punchline, not presented forthrightly and as funny in their own right. Mostly, this is just disgusting and unfunny. The second style, though, is much more successful, as we see two bumbling Time Lords attempting to pursue the Doctor on Earth. Their plans are hilarious, their asides are amusing, and every scene of theirs fades out on a good line. Briggs comes across as a talented comedy writer — it just seems as though he doesn’t necessarily know what’s appropriate for what situations.
That leads us to Arabella Weir as the Doctor, significantly the first female actor to play the character (excepting comedy skits like The Curse of Fatal Death). It’s something of a shame that this casting was used for the comedy release, as it undercuts any arguments it could have supported in favor of the possibility of a female Doctor, but when she’s not acting drunk Weir is quite good in the role. She’s very laid back and resigned, but there’s a surprising degree of heroism that comes to the fore — as mentioned above, I’d love to hear her attempt a serious take on the role. Also as before, though, much of the drunk humor undercuts the character — there are little more than fifteen minutes of this play where one could argue that Weir is actually playing the Doctor at all.
Hannah Smith and Jeremy James play the Doctor’s friends Cherrie and Cheese and they come across just like you’d expect from drunken bar regulars: obnoxious and unmemorable. Fortunately, Toby Longworth and David Tennant are on hand as the bumbling Time Lords and they’re wonderful: they have excellent comic timing and what sounds like great chemistry, plus Briggs’ script gives them some great material. Of course, nobody knew at the time that Tennant would eventually become the tenth Doctor, but it makes his stealing of the show more than a little ironic! Briggs himself appears as the former Doctor (as Exile transpires after the Doctor’s trial in The War Games) and is quite funny in his own right.
As usual, Briggs directs his own script, and his direction combined with Andy Hardwick’s sound design produce even more humor. Briggs understands his material: he knows exactly when to have scenes fade, what lines work best where, and so on. Briggs’ music works well, too — it shifts from lighthearted to humorously melodramatic.
There’s not much to say about Exile — sure, there are some poignant moments but mostly it’s an outright comedy. Weir is decent if unimpressive as the Doctor, the production is average and the script is nothing special. It’s a disappointing way for the range to go out, but there’s nothing actively poor about it. Decidedly average.
“Trolleys! I hate trolleys. They’re just Daleks without the interesting bits.”
The gimmick is that the Doctor has become a woman (which is typical of Nick’s gender bending approach to the Daleks in Dalek Empire), and what’s impressive is how something that once seemed like such a taboo, eventually becomes simply taken for granted. Arrabella Weir is immediately natural and comfortable in the role as the Doctoress, and almost feels like she’s always been there. Her blend of righteous indignation and womanly ditziness actually works “Surrender the Tardis key” “Never! Oops, I dropped it!”, it feels highly appropriate that she’s meant to follow from Troughton’s Doctor, and her firey confrontation with ‘the Master’ shows that ironically she actually has more balls than most of the male Doctors we got after Tom Baker.
We wouldn’t have wanted this to be anything more than a non-canonical one-off, especially since there’s more than enough man-bashing in modern entertainment as it is, without transforming one of the few remaining positive male role models into a woman. All indications are that this is the kind of one-off Doctor who deserved a better story than this wasted opportunity. Quite simply Arrabella Weir seems like the only one here who gets what kind of comedy story this is meant to be. This is meant to be quirky, cringey comedy in the same vein as a Mike Leigh film, and only Arrabella seems to get to grips with the banal, believable, human element of it. Making a reassuring reminder of how we can all be as drunk, dumb and embarrassing as this sometimes. But the rest of the characters are played as shallow, artificial caricatures of the most obnoxious kind, and that’s what spoils the suspension of disbelief, rendering the story relentlessly false.
We’re not sure whether it’s down to a writer who’s only put the effort into making the protagonist credible, or that only Arrabella is making the effort to bring her two-dimensional characterisation to life. Certainly the more poignant moments where the Doctor wonders why she’s running away from a noble and proud life of heroism seems in concert with Nick Briggs existential themes in Dalek Empire of a modern life that’s so consumed with work and blotting things out by turning to the bottle that we no longer live our dreams or be who we want to be.
But that aside this story, moreso than He Jests at Scars really feels like nothing more than the runt of the litter of inspiration for the Unbound range, and as with the worst excesses of New Who, the overly flippant treatment of the story will probably leave us no longer believing in it or caring. A witless farce might just work on TV on a visceral level, but not really on audio. As with Aliens of London’s body function humour, the constant burping and vomiting isn’t so much offensive because of its crudeness (I mean Tenko, Once Upon a Time in America, Robocop, Meet the Feebles and Trainspotting are superb examples of films and TV shows that actually feel so much more human and sensory simply by reinforcing that just like us, its characters do need to pee sometimes), but because of just how condescending and patronising it is, using it almost like its very own laughter track, with umpteen burps to try and get across the obvious point that this is meant to be a ‘funny’ scene. As with The Dark Husband, the sheer cynicism of it all cancels out much of its occasional charming moments, with an uneven tone that shifts from poignancy to horribly cynical humour. And what really puts the nail in the coffin is how the story elects to end in a final ‘last laugh’, of a particularly cruel kind.
EXILE
It’s impossible to follow up a play as stunning as Deadline, and indeed that was never Big Finish’s intention: they’d intended the Unbound line to end with Deadline, but circumstances dictated that it would be the fifth release. The job of concluding the series thus fell to Nicholas Briggs’ Exile, featuring Arabella Weir as the Doctor and intended as a lighthearted comedy. Though some of the humor is misplaced, this remains a solid outing — it’s just a shame that the original release order could not have been maintained.
Much of Exile is comedic, generally revolving around two styles of humor. The first — drunken barroom humor — doesn’t really work at all, amounting almost entirely to drunk people slurring at each other, belching, and vomiting. Unfortunately, this mostly isn’t even used for comic effect within the play; these sorts of jokes can be funny but they generally have to be the punchline, not presented forthrightly and as funny in their own right. Mostly, this is just disgusting and unfunny. The second style, though, is much more successful, as we see two bumbling Time Lords attempting to pursue the Doctor on Earth. Their plans are hilarious, their asides are amusing, and every scene of theirs fades out on a good line. Briggs comes across as a talented comedy writer — it just seems as though he doesn’t necessarily know what’s appropriate for what situations.
That leads us to Arabella Weir as the Doctor, significantly the first female actor to play the character (excepting comedy skits like The Curse of Fatal Death). It’s something of a shame that this casting was used for the comedy release, as it undercuts any arguments it could have supported in favor of the possibility of a female Doctor, but when she’s not acting drunk Weir is quite good in the role. She’s very laid back and resigned, but there’s a surprising degree of heroism that comes to the fore — as mentioned above, I’d love to hear her attempt a serious take on the role. Also as before, though, much of the drunk humor undercuts the character — there are little more than fifteen minutes of this play where one could argue that Weir is actually playing the Doctor at all.
Hannah Smith and Jeremy James play the Doctor’s friends Cherrie and Cheese and they come across just like you’d expect from drunken bar regulars: obnoxious and unmemorable. Fortunately, Toby Longworth and David Tennant are on hand as the bumbling Time Lords and they’re wonderful: they have excellent comic timing and what sounds like great chemistry, plus Briggs’ script gives them some great material. Of course, nobody knew at the time that Tennant would eventually become the tenth Doctor, but it makes his stealing of the show more than a little ironic! Briggs himself appears as the former Doctor (as Exile transpires after the Doctor’s trial in The War Games) and is quite funny in his own right.
As usual, Briggs directs his own script, and his direction combined with Andy Hardwick’s sound design produce even more humor. Briggs understands his material: he knows exactly when to have scenes fade, what lines work best where, and so on. Briggs’ music works well, too — it shifts from lighthearted to humorously melodramatic.
There’s not much to say about Exile — sure, there are some poignant moments but mostly it’s an outright comedy. Weir is decent if unimpressive as the Doctor, the production is average and the script is nothing special. It’s a disappointing way for the range to go out, but there’s nothing actively poor about it. Decidedly average.
5/10
“Trolleys! I hate trolleys. They’re just Daleks without the interesting bits.”
The gimmick is that the Doctor has become a woman (which is typical of Nick’s gender bending approach to the Daleks in Dalek Empire), and what’s impressive is how something that once seemed like such a taboo, eventually becomes simply taken for granted. Arrabella Weir is immediately natural and comfortable in the role as the Doctoress, and almost feels like she’s always been there. Her blend of righteous indignation and womanly ditziness actually works “Surrender the Tardis key” “Never! Oops, I dropped it!”, it feels highly appropriate that she’s meant to follow from Troughton’s Doctor, and her firey confrontation with ‘the Master’ shows that ironically she actually has more balls than most of the male Doctors we got after Tom Baker.
We wouldn’t have wanted this to be anything more than a non-canonical one-off, especially since there’s more than enough man-bashing in modern entertainment as it is, without transforming one of the few remaining positive male role models into a woman. All indications are that this is the kind of one-off Doctor who deserved a better story than this wasted opportunity. Quite simply Arrabella Weir seems like the only one here who gets what kind of comedy story this is meant to be. This is meant to be quirky, cringey comedy in the same vein as a Mike Leigh film, and only Arrabella seems to get to grips with the banal, believable, human element of it. Making a reassuring reminder of how we can all be as drunk, dumb and embarrassing as this sometimes. But the rest of the characters are played as shallow, artificial caricatures of the most obnoxious kind, and that’s what spoils the suspension of disbelief, rendering the story relentlessly false.
We’re not sure whether it’s down to a writer who’s only put the effort into making the protagonist credible, or that only Arrabella is making the effort to bring her two-dimensional characterisation to life. Certainly the more poignant moments where the Doctor wonders why she’s running away from a noble and proud life of heroism seems in concert with Nick Briggs existential themes in Dalek Empire of a modern life that’s so consumed with work and blotting things out by turning to the bottle that we no longer live our dreams or be who we want to be.
But that aside this story, moreso than He Jests at Scars really feels like nothing more than the runt of the litter of inspiration for the Unbound range, and as with the worst excesses of New Who, the overly flippant treatment of the story will probably leave us no longer believing in it or caring. A witless farce might just work on TV on a visceral level, but not really on audio. As with Aliens of London’s body function humour, the constant burping and vomiting isn’t so much offensive because of its crudeness (I mean Tenko, Once Upon a Time in America, Robocop, Meet the Feebles and Trainspotting are superb examples of films and TV shows that actually feel so much more human and sensory simply by reinforcing that just like us, its characters do need to pee sometimes), but because of just how condescending and patronising it is, using it almost like its very own laughter track, with umpteen burps to try and get across the obvious point that this is meant to be a ‘funny’ scene. As with The Dark Husband, the sheer cynicism of it all cancels out much of its occasional charming moments, with an uneven tone that shifts from poignancy to horribly cynical humour. And what really puts the nail in the coffin is how the story elects to end in a final ‘last laugh’, of a particularly cruel kind.