The TARDIS lands in a battleground on an alien world where Sontarans and humans are at war. But what are the vicious feral creatures that are hunting in this wasteland?
The TARDIS lands in a battleground on an alien world where Sontarans and humans are at war. But what are the vicious feral creatures that are hunting in this wasteland?
THE ETERNAL BATTLE
I spent most of my review of “The Beast of Kravenos” lamenting how Big Finish’s institutional nostalgia for the Fourth Doctor Adventures evidently doesn’t extend to season 18. The second entry in this year’s series, “The Eternal Battle” from Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, doesn’t really do it either, but at least it’s a more entertaining story than its predecessor.
Scott and Wright are among my favorite Big Finish writers – they’re very good at adapting an action esthetic to audio, and “The Eternal Battle” puts that skill on full display. There’s a war raging on an unknown planet between Sontarans and humans, with one horrible twist: something is causing the dead to rise, turning them into zombies who indiscriminately attack both sides. The Doctor and Romana find themselves with the Sontarans, whose position is slowly eroding as the zombies kill and convert more and more of their soldiers. The story doesn’t spell it out, but this ties into the central season 18 theme of entropy increasing: both sides of the conflict are slowly being converted into the same mindless final outcome and cannot be converted back. However, if the story is trying to come across as a zombie movie, it fails to do so – the “zombies” seem to exist on the periphery for most of the story, there’s very little body horror, and any thematic significance went unnoticed, at least by me.
This is a very good Sontaran story, featuring yet another great performance from Dan Starkey. It’s always interesting to take defined recurring villains and put them in unusual situations, and a Sontaran army on the brink of exhaustion and defeat is highly unusual. It’s most effective because their usual desire to die gloriously in battle is completely undercut by their situation: any glorious death will lead to their resurrection as a member of the opposition. It’s through this conflict that Scott and Wright get around the question of why the Sontarans don’t just shoot the Doctor on sight – Field Major Lenk knows that their old enemy may be able to find a way out, and his loyalty to his men overrides any desire for revenge. Lenk is my favorite part of the story, actually – he’s a genuinely good leader, above and beyond tactical skill, and he’s not played for laughs.
Is something going on with Lalla Ward? This is the second story in a row where she’s played Romana as particularly sarcastic and irritable – I know that her relationship with Tom Baker had frayed by season 18, but this is taking nostalgia a step too far. In all seriousness, it’s a jarring portrayal, and I’m curious about the reasons behind it. Tom Baker is his usual incorrigible self, and he and Starkey play quite well off one another.
The major drawback here is that the resolution isn’t particularly interesting. The story takes a major shift away from action movie to a much more typical Doctor Who ending: there’s an alien computer carrying out orders from a dead world that are no longer applicable, and the Doctor has to figure out how to stop it. It’s executed well, of course – I would expect nothing less from Scott and Wright – but it seems inconsistent with the rest of the story and a little predictable to boot.
Credit is due to Jamie Robertson, whose score takes the season 18 electronic approach but pitches it to a more fast-paced story. Overall, “The Eternal Battle” is a solid, entertaining story that does some interesting work with the Sontarans. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely above average, especially for a Fourth Doctor Adventure.
Recommended.
7/10