The TARDIS lands in the cargo hold of luxury space cruiser the Moray Rose. The crew and passengers are missing. The agents of Inter-Galaxy Insurance are determined to find out what’s happened and the shadowy Interplanetary Police Inspector Efendi is showing a very particular interest.
Caught up in all this, the Doctor and Leela find themselves facing a horde of metal mantis-like aliens. But throughout it all, Leela is haunted by terrible nightmares and the dawning realization that everything she knows about her life is a lie.
THE EVIL ONE
For the fourth story in the third series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, Big Finish turned once again to Nicholas Briggs, whose obsessive 1970s nostalgia takes another turn in “The Evil One.” Much like other recent Big Finish releases, there are a couple of promising ideas here, but absolutely nothing interesting is done with any of them.
To start with: there is not enough story here for the running time. The entirety of the plot involves the Master hiring a race of telepathic aliens to help him brainwash Leela into murdering the Doctor. What do the aliens want? What is their relationship with the Master? There’s something in here about destabilizing the galactic economy but Briggs breezes past anything resembling an explanation with what almost seems like gleeful disregard for storytelling. Why is the Master doing this? For his own amusement? There’s a brief scene where an alien gains access to the Doctor’s mind and sees the truth about the Master. How promising, I thought! We can finally see a hint of how the Doctor really feels about his archenemy! And what enlightening nugget are we given? The Master betrays people a lot. Oh. Thanks.
Of course, as this is a Fourth Doctor Adventure, we need to reheat some 1970s iconography, and the title should serve as a clue that Briggs returns to “The Face of Evil” for material. The Master exploits Leela’s guilt over the death of her father and transforms her into an assassin, the Evil One of her tribe’s legends. The Master, naturally, takes the role of Xoanon, her employer. Wait a minute – wasn’t the entire idea that Xoanon was their god and the Evil One was keeping him prisoner? Wasn’t Leela’s questioning of Xoanon’s existence what led to her father’s death in the first place? There are so many wonderful possibilities if we look back on the original story: the Doctor and the Evil One of legend share the same appearance, the Doctor’s personality is irrevocably grafted onto Xoanon’s, and so forth. The Master’s scheme could easily incorporate these ideas and nicely parallel “The Face of Evil” – but again, he seems to be using the names for no reason other than his own amusement. The emaciated Master of “The Deadly Assassin” and “The Keeper of Traken” was arguably the most dangerous of his incarnations, so why are we persistently reducing him to a silly figure of fun? Is it because they want to tell a certain kind of Master story but Geoffrey Beevers is the only one still alive?
And the less said about Leela’s character arc in this, the better. She spends the first episode having occasional false visions of her past, then spends the second stalking the Doctor and issuing threats. The conclusion attempts to say something profound, but as the previous 50 minutes have wasted our time, the final 10 have no connection to anything that’s been happening. It was Leela’s pride in her father’s self-sacrifice that helped her break free of the Master’s influence? Gosh, that’s something I would have enjoyed hearing at some point before Tom Baker spelled it all out from nowhere.
On the production front, Briggs directs his own material, and it’s a good enough job, while Jamie Robertson’s sound design is as unmemorable as everything else around it. Overall, “The Evil One” sounds as though it was crafted to be as bland and uninspiring as possible. I’d criticize the range for treading water instead of trying to do something interesting, but at this point, why bother? It’s obviously never going to happen. So here I will remain, giving mediocre rating after mediocre rating, waiting for a reward that will never come. Enough is enough.
Snore.
5/10