The Doctor and Romana return to Victorian London for a reunion with Jago & Litefoot. While K9 becomes latest star attraction of the New Regency Theatre, the travellers are embroiled in robberies committed by a mysterious thief known only as ‘The Knave’.
THE BEAST OF KRAVENOS
Another new year is upon us, and with it has arrived a new series of Fourth Doctor Adventures. Every year, I go into these with a renewed sense of hope that this will be the year Big Finish stops wasting the contributions of the most beloved of all Doctors, and every year I wind up disappointed. Now, as the sixth year begins with Justin Richards’ “The Beast of Kravenos,” I am once again hopeful – and already I’ve been handed a disappointment.
It’s a Justin Richards story, so you know what you’re getting: a competent plot, characters that don’t stray too far from their archetypes, and a sense that everything involved knows its limitations. Frankly, I’m not that interested in discussing “Kravenos” as a story, because it’s nothing we haven’t heard ten thousand times before. Much more interesting is its relationship to Big Finish, and the company’s attitude toward nostalgia.
I’m frequently on record saying that nostalgia does little for me and that I find continuity largely uninteresting. Many fans love debating the correct chronological placement of each Big Finish story; more power to them, but I couldn’t care less. Similarly, while I think it’s important for Doctor Who to stay attuned to its past, outright nostalgia doesn’t earn any bonus points with me. Just because a story is a perfect recreation of its era doesn’t mean it’s good: season 19 may have had Castrovalva and Kinda, but it also had Four to Doomsday and Time-Flight, and a slavish recreation of season 19 can just as easily produce the latter as the former. Big Finish, at least under Nicholas Briggs’ stewardship of the Doctor Who range, has wholly embraced nostalgia as a defining characteristic of their work, and nowhere is this better represented than in the Fourth Doctor Adventures. Briggs has described the range as an attempt to recapture how he felt watching Doctor Who as a teenager in the 1970s, and you can see that throughout the five series. There’s a strong embrace of the Hinchcliffe-era gothic horror motif, but it’s leavened by a lot of Williams-era humor. This is how the same series can, for example, involve both mysterious goings-on in a quaint English village as well as the Master teaming up with the Kraals. If you’ve followed my reviews, you’ll know that I do not find this to be advantageous; instead, I think this obsessive focus on nostalgia hurts the company’s ability to tell new and interesting stories involving Tom Baker.
So now we come to “Kravenos” and we notice something interesting: it’s set during season 18. We’ve got the Peter Howell theme, the Doctor on the cover in the red coat – there’s no question about it, this is season 18. And unlike any other season in the classic series, season 18 features very strong thematic consistency as well as a consistent visual and aural aesthetic. Even a story like “State of Decay,” which was explicitly repurposed from an earlier era, is produced in a manner utterly unique to this single year of Doctor Who. So while I don’t clamor for nostalgia, if you’re going to produce a story set in season 18 as part of a range whose very existence is predicated on nostalgia, I think at a bare minimum you should try to recapture the style of that season. Naturally, “Kravenos” doesn’t bother. It’s exactly the same Hinchcliffe/Williams amalgamation that we’ve been listening to for five years before this. And Briggs’ explanations for this insult the intelligence. Imagine, he replies when asked about the period-inappropriate music, if Dudley Simpson had been asked to stay on for one more story. The problem with this idea is that it presumes that it would ever have been a possibility. John Nathan-Turner didn’t change Doctor Who’s entire aesthetic by accident; he wanted to give the series a kick up the ass and restart it in a bold, new direction. If you watch the Tom Baker era in sequence, the Howell theme alone at the start of The Leisure Hive is a complete shock to the system. Simpson would never have been kept on for season 18. To imagine that he would have is to imagine the history of the series is false. I do believe, therefore, that if you are going to explicitly set a story in season 18, you have an obligation to embrace its aesthetic, just like you wouldn’t populate a season 17 story with dour, humorless characters.
But that’s the point. The “nostalgia” that dominates the Fourth Doctor Adventures isn’t a steadfast determination to recreate a particular era or season of the show – if it were, “Kravenos” would not have been produced for this series. Instead, it’s a long-running attempt to recreate how Nick Briggs felt when he watched it at 16. And Briggs doesn’t like season 18, so here we are. Ultimately, “Kravenos” is just another in a long line of generic Tom Baker Doctor Who stories, but with season 18 décor cynically slapped on it in an attempt to get fans of that season to buy it. Yes, at least it’s a Justin Richards generic runaround, and there’s lots of fun scenes with Jago and Litefoot, and the cast is well-represented (except for Lalla Ward, whose Romana sounds bitter, miserable, and mean), and K9 gets some good lines – but if you’re tired of every damn one of these being yet another recreation of tea time 1977, you won’t find any solace here, no matter what pretty star field they plaster across the cover.
4/10