The Doctor and UNIT investigate when Liz Shaw’s friend goes missing. A new adventure for the Third Doctor as told by his companion, Liz.
The Doctor and UNIT investigate when Liz Shaw’s friend goes missing. A new adventure for the Third Doctor as told by his companion, Liz.
The Blue Tooth
THE PLOT
Liz decides to spend a day off visiting Jean, an old university friend. When Jean fails to show up at their scheduled meeting, though, Liz goes to her house and finds that her friend has vanished. When the Doctor arrives at the scene, he tells Liz that there have been several disappearances in the Cambridge area.
As Liz investigates a link between Jean and another missing person – Jean’s dentist – the Doctor and the Brigadier follow up another lead: a particularly bizarre suicide-by-train. A look at the dead man’s body confirms the Doctor’s worst fears. The body has been infested, and partially converted, by Cybermats. The Doctor is about to pit his wits against the Cybermen once more…
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: Writer Nigel Fairs does a fair job of capturing the Pertwee Doctor’s gentler side. The Doctor is compassionate with Liz in every scene. He is also unfazed and unruffled by the dilemma. Even when Liz is herself infected, he refuses to give up, identifying the means of this new Cyber conversion process and using his considerable skills to find an antidote.
It’s a strong characterization, and Fairs does a good job of keeping the viewpoint Liz’s while at the same time keeping the 3rd Doctor in the foreground of the story. The only thing that’s missing from the Pertwee Doctor is the spikiness. Look at the televised stories from Season Seven, and Pertwee’s Doctor is very short-tempered, even downright antagonistic, to characters in each of those stories. Here, we only get the 3rd Doctor’s softer side. That makes for a more likable characterization, perhaps, but a slightly less interesting one. Still, Nigel Fairs captures the Doctor here somewhat better than James Swallow did in Old Soldiers, and Caroline John manages to suggest something of Pertwee’s style of line delivery, making it quite easy to picture Pertwee throughout.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: The Brigadier is very much on the periphery of this story, and he ends up being the one regular Caroline John can’t capture in her line deliveries. She basically just lowers her voice and grits out the Brig’s lines in gruff tones, making for a rather one-note Lethbridge-Stewart. Still, the story does convey both his efficiency and his chivalry, in trying to protect Liz from harm. He is definitely the worst-captured of the regulars in this audio, though.
Liz Shaw: The Blue Tooth is Liz’s story, so it comes as relatively small surprise that the character is recreated quite effectively. The best characterization comes in the early episodes, which Nigel Fairs uses to fill in a lot of backstory for Liz (including why a seemingly over-serious, studious Cambridge scientist has such a penchant for very, very short mini-skirts). It adds an extra emotional dimension to the character to have her personally affected by the Invasion of the Week this time; and while the audio never does quite answer its own question (“When did I decide to leave the Doctor?”), it at least points to some potential reasons for the character to have decided to move on.
THOUGHTS
The Blue Tooth succeeds in many respects. It really does recapture its era quite well. This feels very much like an extra Season Seven story, with the Doctor and the Brigadier working together but not 100% harmoniously, and with UNIT even setting up temporary offices on-site (in this case, at the college), rather than at UNIT headquarters (a set which did not exist until Season 8). There is a sense of seriousness to the proceedings, a sense that this story takes place in something very like “the real world.” Even the Cybermen are treated in a way that brings them closer to the real world, using a real world outlet that often is a source of anxiety (in this case, a dentist’s office) to make the threat feel less like science fiction and more credible. Honestly, if you were to take a time machine back to 1970 and commission the production team to bolt a 4-episode Cyberman story onto the end of Season Seven, I could easily picture the result playing out much like this story does.
One thing I do enjoy about the first set of Companion Chronicles is that Big Finish had not yet decided on a “set” number of episodes for each story. All stories were single-disc, but there were both 2-parters and 4-parters. That’s something I wish they would return to, the idea that different stories might benefit from being structured in different episodic formats. The Blue Tooth is very much structured as a 4-parter, and it benefits from that. The Companion Chronicles range has remained strong (it’s my favorite BF range at the moment), but I do regret the more rigid, “one disc = 2 episodes, every time” format.
In any event, most of this story works quite well, better than I had remembered it working in fact. Caroline John does an effective job as narrator, and recreates her performance as Liz with a good degree of success. The story is well-structured, for the most part, building to a rather gripping climax in Episode Four. It also benefits from particularly strong production values, with a nicely eerie score by Lawrence Oakley and Robert Dunlop.
My only major gripe with the audio, and one which does cost it a point I’m afraid, is that the resolution feels weak. The climax – with the Doctor and Liz in the midst of a nest of Cybermen – had me. I was quite gripped, and the images were vivid in my mind. And then… Liz passes out, and the Doctor fills her in on the denouement retrospectively, and not in a great deal of detail. It’s the equivalent of a TV episode cutting from the moment of greatest crisis to the tag scene, and having the Doctor tell the companion, “Oh, I sorted it out.” The summary of this off-screen resolution also feels a bit too easy, almost as if Fairs had written himself into a corner and couldn’t quite write his way out again. It still works better than “Pertwee wrapping a green tentacle around his neck and thrashing a lot” at the end of the otherwise-excellent Spearhead from Space. But it still seems like a very weak ending, one that lets down an otherwise first-rate story.
Frustrations with the resolution aside, though, it is a first-rate story. With a stronger finish, I’d give it an “8.” As it stands, it still gets a quite solid…
Rating: 7/10.
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE BLUE TOOTH
With the exception of a brief confrontation during “The Five Doctors,” Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor famously never encountered the Cybermen during his tenure. Given the tendency for spinoff media to immediately address notable “x never met y” situations, it’s shocking that the third Companion Chronicle, Nigel Fairs’ “The Blue Tooth,” is the one and only official third Doctor story to feature the Cybermen. It also addresses continuity questions and engages in character development – and despite having a lot on its plate, it succeeds admirably.
Liz Shaw was a unique companion character in many ways. She never journeyed in the TARDIS – for that matter, she never even went inside – and she was more like a supporting character in that she got to go home to her personal life after every story. One could argue that she’s more of a UNIT regular than a companion, for what’s the practical difference between Liz and the Brigadier or Benton or Yates? Due to behind the scenes issues, she didn’t even get the benefit of a final story – she just vanished off the map after “Inferno” with only a brief line about going back to Cambridge in the subsequent story. As such, the circumstances behind her departure have been addressed on multiple occasions, and Fairs addresses this as the central theme of his story. When the framing device begins, Liz states clearly that the events of “The Blue Tooth” started her down the path of leaving UNIT. Indeed, much of the story focuses on giving Liz an actual story and depth beyond “beautiful scientist” – we learn, through a few elegant sketches, what Liz was like before and during her Cambridge days, and how she and her friend Jean balanced their academic responsibilities with their social lives. None of this is particularly innovative, but it’s rewarding enough to have this enigmatic character finally fleshed out.
And as a Cyberman story it’s even better! Too many writers miss the point of the (classic series) Cybermen: they’re not a lumbering, all-conquering army, they’re a ragged group of survivors desperate to do anything they can to avoid extinction. The horror isn’t that they kill people, it’s that they convert people to build their numbers. Fairs describes some truly gruesome conversion scenarios, and while it’s obvious to have Jane as one of the converted, his prose is strong enough that we truly feel Liz’s horror and revulsion at the prospect. I also love the idea of the Cybermen taking over a dental office and placing contaminated restorations that create more Cybermen – but then I would. I suspect most find that idea particularly revolting. We need more Cyberman stories like this, more creepy, unsettling material.
We also need more scenes like Liz exploring her friend’s empty house, something that manages to be incredibly tense despite the constant presence of narration. That’s another strength of “The Blue Tooth” – the production. Caroline John is a fantastic narrator, and while her impressions of Pertwee and Nicholas Courtney aren’t really accurate, they’re exactly how you’d imagine Liz jokingly imitating them. Mark J. Thompson directs well, and the decision to bring in Nicholas Briggs’ Cyberman voices was a good one. The sound design by Lawrence Oakley and Robert Dunlop is as minimal as the first two Companion Chronicles, but Oakley’s score is much more effective this time out. Overall, “The Blue Tooth” is a success. It fleshes out a little-used companion, it provides a creepy, effective Cyberman story, and it finally pits the third Doctor against some of his oldest foes.
More of this, please.
8/10