The travellers are taken deep underground by a steam-driven alien drill ship, where the terrifying Silex await.
1 Comment
Styre
on June 19, 2017 at 5:30 AM
SUBTERRANEA
There’s a lot of Big Finish product that feels like it was generated on autopilot, but the Fourth Doctor Adventures feature the greatest concentration of such stories. We have yet another example in Jonathan Morris’ “Subterranea,” a story that creates an alien civilization with potential, couples it with some whimsical flourishes, and then does precisely nothing interesting or exciting.
So we have a civilization of alien mole people who spend their entire lives underground on massive city-ships (“Drill-towns”) mining the supplies they need from the surrounding rock. But there are monsters underground as well: the monstrous Silex, cyborg creatures that devour entire Drill-towns and leave chaos in their wake. This is a great setup, but Morris employs it in the most generic Doctor Who plot imaginable: the Doctor and Romana land on one of the Drill-towns, get separated, meet up with different factions of the native race, and ultimately come together to defeat the enemy just in the nick of time. The Silex are basically just this planet’s equivalent of the Cybermen: native people modified into partially robotic monsters who reject emotion and praise the cold efficiency of pure logic. At least they’re not allergic to gold, but it doesn’t take much for the Doctor and Romana to defeat them.
About the only thing that sets “Subterranea” apart is its sense of whimsy. Morris is clearly going for a Dickensian feeling – the captain of the Drill-town, for example, is named Maxwell Wilberforce Bell (Matthew Cottle, great), an unassuming man who nevertheless has a strong sense of what’s right. He wears a jaunty top hat, and argues with his wife (Abigail McKern). The story even ends like a 1970s sitcom, with the characters standing around laughing at a terrible joke. I might be inclined to cut the story some slack for its sense of humor, but that would be forgetting that it is yet again supposed to be set in season 18 and as such feels catastrophically out of place. I wonder how many season 18 fans Big Finish tricked into buying a subscription, and how many of them won’t make that mistake a second time?
Nicholas Briggs directs to his usual high standard, and Jamie Robertson’s sound design is quite good, though his score is only barely reminiscent of the supposed era. But none of that is enough to save the story. I’ve come to expect mediocrity like “Subterranea” from this range, but I’m disappointed to see it come from Morris’s pen, especially given that he wrote the best stories in the entire Fourth Doctor range thus far. For this range, “Subterranea” isn’t bad, but that is most certainly not a compliment.
SUBTERRANEA
There’s a lot of Big Finish product that feels like it was generated on autopilot, but the Fourth Doctor Adventures feature the greatest concentration of such stories. We have yet another example in Jonathan Morris’ “Subterranea,” a story that creates an alien civilization with potential, couples it with some whimsical flourishes, and then does precisely nothing interesting or exciting.
So we have a civilization of alien mole people who spend their entire lives underground on massive city-ships (“Drill-towns”) mining the supplies they need from the surrounding rock. But there are monsters underground as well: the monstrous Silex, cyborg creatures that devour entire Drill-towns and leave chaos in their wake. This is a great setup, but Morris employs it in the most generic Doctor Who plot imaginable: the Doctor and Romana land on one of the Drill-towns, get separated, meet up with different factions of the native race, and ultimately come together to defeat the enemy just in the nick of time. The Silex are basically just this planet’s equivalent of the Cybermen: native people modified into partially robotic monsters who reject emotion and praise the cold efficiency of pure logic. At least they’re not allergic to gold, but it doesn’t take much for the Doctor and Romana to defeat them.
About the only thing that sets “Subterranea” apart is its sense of whimsy. Morris is clearly going for a Dickensian feeling – the captain of the Drill-town, for example, is named Maxwell Wilberforce Bell (Matthew Cottle, great), an unassuming man who nevertheless has a strong sense of what’s right. He wears a jaunty top hat, and argues with his wife (Abigail McKern). The story even ends like a 1970s sitcom, with the characters standing around laughing at a terrible joke. I might be inclined to cut the story some slack for its sense of humor, but that would be forgetting that it is yet again supposed to be set in season 18 and as such feels catastrophically out of place. I wonder how many season 18 fans Big Finish tricked into buying a subscription, and how many of them won’t make that mistake a second time?
Nicholas Briggs directs to his usual high standard, and Jamie Robertson’s sound design is quite good, though his score is only barely reminiscent of the supposed era. But none of that is enough to save the story. I’ve come to expect mediocrity like “Subterranea” from this range, but I’m disappointed to see it come from Morris’s pen, especially given that he wrote the best stories in the entire Fourth Doctor range thus far. For this range, “Subterranea” isn’t bad, but that is most certainly not a compliment.
Mediocre at best.
5/10