Why is Benny missing on the cliff-edge of the universe? On a planet rumoured to have links to the Tartarus Gate, the mythical gateway to hell?
Why is Benny missing on the cliff-edge of the universe? On a planet rumoured to have links to the Tartarus Gate, the mythical gateway to hell?
The Tartarus Gate
Stewart Sheargold impressed with his previous ‘event’ stories for the Big Finish range and the prospect of him throwing Bernice and Jason at the ‘door to hell’ sounds, on paper, like a good idea. Unfortunately this doesn’t make the best season opener, as it starts far too loud and bombastic and ends on a self referential note that struggles to distinguish itself from where the previous series ended.
Having read the ‘Inside Story’ behind the scenes segment I can see how this happened. Stewart Sheargold apparently came up with the concept unaware that Braxiatel was going to be written out. If he’d been featured in the story as a villain and at the end his manipulation of Jason had been outed, the story would have gained a new layer that was badly needed. Bereft of the arch-collector however the story feels strangely slight, quite self involved but struggling to ever gather itself together as a whole.
The sound design is loud and relentless, removing any chance of subtlety in the play. The constant drone of noise threatens to drown out any listener who can’t keep their attention up from start to end. Stewart’s script takes several leaps of ‘hard’ Science Fiction and aside from ‘Jason and Bernice need each other, they actually are very close’ there’s very little ‘human’ going on here. It’s big on concepts but none of the other characters are drawn out as being particularly interesting or three dimensional (except perhaps La’Heyne who manages to reveal a personality by the end) but there’s so much going on that isn’t properly commented on or grounded, in the end it becomes fairly peripheral.
In the end Jason gets his memories back, all of them, and learns he’s killed for Braxiatel before. I was scratching my head a bit as I thought he’d got them back in Cantus. It’s a shame that apart from restating ‘Brax is gone’ to us the conclusion here doesn’t really push Jason any further forwards than we were before. This isn’t particularly Sheargold’s fault, as he wrote this originally with no knowledge of what had come before, and Jason needed some kind of payoff in this story, but it is a fault.
All in all the Tartarus Gate is a bold, unusual, brave idea that struggles for a number of small reasons that combined together hold it back. The idea of the CrosSSScape is fascinating but it doesn’t offer up much emotionally to the rest of the range. Same for the character 137 who appears, gives out information, does very little and then sacrifices himself in a way that doesn’t actually obviously alter the plot for anyone else immediately after.
I’m not going to suggest the range should dumb down, because this is exactly the kind of experience it should offer for listeners prepared to engage and think, but it isn’t capable of giving out the same kind of payoff I’ve come to expect from the range’s greats.
7 / 10