3.1 Absent Friends by John Dorney
Earth. The late 20th century. Across the world, the mobile phone is gaining popularity as more and more people decide to join the digital age. But for the residents of a sleepy English town sitting in the shade of a new transmission mast, that ubiquity has a troubling cost.
When the TARDIS veers off-course, the Doctor and his companions find themselves in the middle of a mystery. Sometimes the past comes back to haunt you. And sometimes the future does as well.
3.2 The Eighth Piece by Matt Fitton
15th Century Prague: in the castle dungeons, a prisoner raves about the end of the world. Outside, Liv Chenka seeks out the workshop of a strange Clockmaker to see what he is creating.
England, 1538: Lord Thomas Cromwell finds his duties interrupted by otherworldly forces – clockwork soldiers, an unusual nun, and a mysterious scholar calling himself ‘the Doctor’. Perhaps the truth can be extracted in the torture chamber of London’s Bloody Tower?
Rome, 2016: Helen Sinclair has an appointment with an enigmatic Professor, whose greatest work is almost complete. Only the Eighth Piece is missing…
3.3 The Doomsday Chronometer by Matt Fitton
While River Song takes Helen on an archaeological expedition like no other, the Doctor finds himself enlisted by an alien Queen to save her people.
Trapped and alone, Liv stares death in the face as she meets the enemy who’s been dogging the TARDIS travellers’ footsteps throughout Earth’s history.
The Doomsday Chronometer has been protected for five centuries: secret cults and societies jealously guarding its mystery. But what is their real purpose? The Doctor is about to discover the truth…
3.4. The Crucible of Souls by John Dorney
The date has been set.
The trap has been sprung.
A life has been taken and a maniac is on the loose.
With the TARDIS crew separated and in terrible trouble, will today be the day the bad guys win?
Spoilers…
DOOM COALITION: ABSENT FRIENDS
I’ve criticized the direction of the Doom Coalition series over the first two sets. Specifically, it’s more than a little odd to call a series “Doom Coalition” and then get halfway through and eight hours in without either saying the words “Doom Coalition” or show anything resembling a coalition of doom coming together. The series has been at its best when it doesn’t pay attention to whatever its plot arc actually is – and that is borne out in John Dorney’s “Absent Friends,” which has almost nothing to do with the arc and is simultaneously the best Paul McGann release since the eighth Doctor was taken out of the monthly range.
“Absent Friends” doesn’t appear to have much to do with the arc plot. In fact, it doesn’t have much of a plot of its own. The Doctor investigates a mysterious temporal phenomenon that causes people to receive phone calls from dead friends or relatives from their pasts. A suspicious telecom company has erected a new cellular tower in a small village, and it seems obvious that the company is behind the calls, which are coming through exclusively on the cellphones they distributed throughout the village. Even the employees of the company are suspicious, with clammy skin and perfectly sculpted hair. But it’s all a red herring: apart from some potential insider trading, everything here is above-board.
This story is about Helen, and her journey to meet her brother, over three decades after she left her old life in the TARDIS. It’s about what her family thought of her for leaving, and about her desperate, futile attempts to earn some sort of reconciliation. It’s about Liv and her father, about the relationship they had and the relationship she wished they had. And it’s about the Doctor, how he’s more alien than we think, how he only understands his human companions to a certain extent. This is a story that would fit in well on the modern TV series: it treats the TARDIS crew as distinct characters, developing them and allowing them to experience emotions other than fear or exhaustion from their travels.
The acting in this story is first-rate – Paul McGann, Nicola Walker, and Hattie Morahan all turn in excellent performances, as does Jeremy Clyde as Helen’s brother George. The production is great, as expected. But it’s the writing that particularly shines. This is a script that unashamedly tries to put a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye, and Dorney succeeds because he has such a keen understanding of the characters and how difficult relationships sound. Yes, there’s also stuff in here about a clock that I’m sure will tie into the broader arc, but I don’t care about that right now. Frankly, you could dispense with the whole Doom Coalition thing and just tell stories like this and everything would be great. The rest of this set has just been held to a particularly high standard.
Excellent.
10/10
DOOM COALITION: THE EIGHTH PIECE / THE DOOMSDAY CHRONOMETER
After the brilliant, mostly standalone “Absent Friends,” the third Doom Coalition set jumps into its arc with both feet in a two-part story by Matt Fitton called “The Eighth Piece” and then “The Doomsday Chronometer.” It finally seems to push the plot forward – we actually hear the word “coalition!” – but it feels cluttered and disorganized, not working as well as it perhaps should.
The story is set over three different time periods, as the Doctor and his companions split up to find and reassemble the Doomsday Chronometer, a device that indicates the precise moment at which the universe will come to an end. While the Doctor is in the England of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Liv is in the 15th century in Prague while Helen is in 21st century Rome. (Though wouldn’t it make more sense to put the doctor from the future in the more modern era and the professional historian in the past?) In their respective times, they each encounter the Clocksmith, another renegade Time Lord who evidently wants to see the end of everything. We don’t find out in this story who the Clocksmith is working with, though since he refers to a “coalition” it’s safe to assume he’s in league with the Eleven and the Sonomancer.
The characterization is disappointingly one-note. Yes, Fitton tries to flesh out the Clocksmith by having him relate everything to his love of art, but he’s ultimately another lunatic in single-minded pursuit of a devastating goal. Cromwell (John Shrapnel) is another example: the only thing he cares about is asserting royal authority over any potential Catholic influence. He gladly accepts the Doctor’s alien nature, but loses all interest in him the moment the Doctor’s actions no longer affect the crown. We do spend quite a bit of time in England, and Fitton does a fine job of building the world – the Abbot (Glen McCready) is a good character, for example – but the other two threads are barely explored. It’s almost impossible to get a sense of Prague or Rome from Liv and Helen’s story threads, which is disappointing.
Fortunately, when River Song is introduced into the story, things take a turn for the better. Her time jumping with Helen is quite entertaining and gives the story a much-needed jolt of energy. I also enjoyed the concept of the psychic wimple because it finally allows Paul McGann and Alex Kingston to share scenes together without the contrivance of communicators. It does sort of defy belief that future Doctors never put the pieces together, but I’m not too worried about things like that. I’m still wondering about how River is involved in this Doctor’s life at all, though. At one point she comments about how she’s gone from believing there’s only one living Time Lord to encountering new ones around every corner – so what is she doing in this pre-War environment? How did she get there? While I’m not obsessed with answering continuity questions, this seems to throw some of the series’ fundamental principles into question. Complaints aside, it’s great to have the character in the story, and with a writer that understands her to boot.
I like how Fitton continues to repeat the puzzle-solving imagery, though it starts to get repetitive by the end. I also loved the revelation about the mad prophet Octavian (Tim McMullan), whose name is a huge clue about his true identity. And I like the ending, which feels genuinely dangerous to Liv and Helen and had me scrambling to get to the final episode. Overall, “The Eighth Piece” and “The Doomsday Chronometer” are solid, entertaining entries in the Doom Coalition saga, featuring a lot of interesting material. They don’t hang together as cohesive wholes, and the characterization isn’t always the best, but they’re still worth hearing, especially as part of the ongoing story.
Recommended.
7/10
DOOM COALITION: THE CRUCIBLE OF SOULS
I’m struggling a bit with this Doom Coalition set. On the one hand, it’s easily the best written of the three; on the other, it still isn’t pointing in a direction that’s particularly interesting. Both of these factors come into play in the final story of the set, John Dorney’s “The Crucible of Souls,” which finally gives us a look at the Doom Coalition and their plans but doesn’t particularly interest me in them.
My biggest issue with the villains in the Doom Coalition series is that they’ve all had good to great “hooks” but haven’t done anything interesting with them. The Eleven is a great idea – a renegade Time Lord plagued by the voices of all his prior selves! – but all he does is rant and rave and yell “Silence, all of you!” as he attempts to take over and/or destroy the universe. He’s back in this story, though he’s in his ninth incarnation (John Heffernan) (so I guess he’s the Nine?), and Dorney does some fantastic things with him. Helen and Liv think he’s the Doctor, and he covers his erratic behavior under the guise of post-regenerative trauma, but he ultimately reveals himself as utterly self-centered, interested only in acquiring things and furthering his own goals. He’s completely dismissive of his companions, gladly offering them up to die if it will afford him a slight advantage. So he’s not the thoroughly evil madman that he will later become, and that makes him more interesting.
But once his scenes with Helen and Liv stop and he becomes involved in the greater plot, the interest declines rapidly. In one of the least surprising revelations, we learn that Padrac (Robert Bathurst) is in league with the Doom Coalition. (You mean that one of the Doctor’s old Time Lord friends that we’d never heard of before this series started turned out to be a bad guy? How shocking!) After being elected Lord President, he looked into the future with the Matrix and foresaw the destruction of Gallifrey, presumably in the Time War. The only possible future in which the Time Lords survive is one in which they preemptively kill every other race in the universe; so of course that’s the Dalek-like quest he embarks upon, teaming up with the rest of the Doom Coalition. Perhaps the fact that all of your teammates are utterly insane should be a clue that you’re doing something stupid? So they’re going to use a combination of the Doomsday Chronometer and something called the Crucible of Souls to kill everything in the universe at a certain time and then convert the dead into life energy to allow the Time Lords to survive forever.
This is ridiculous lunacy. The Daleks just about get away with plots like that because killing everything is the logical extension of their ethos; an apparently sane Time Lord pursuing the same goal is unbelievable. And the team of villains we’re apparently getting only has insanity in common: we’ve seen how the Eleven and the Sonomancer act, and the Clocksmith was similarly crazy but is now apparently dead. Come to think of it, why is the Doctor even involved in this? Is it because the Eleven is unhinged? It makes no sense to incorporate his death into the plan given his long history of defeating villainy like this. I’m curious to see if Dorney (or whoever writes Doom Coalition 4) provides a time-travel explanation for this apparent inconsistency – is this why “The Crucible of Souls” deals with the Nine instead of the Eleven?
I do like River’s involvement in the story. She steps in as the Doctor’s companion in the absence of his two usual partners, and she’s exactly what you’d expect. The “psychic wimple” is still in place, which allows her to interact with the Doctor without changing history, but they can’t keep meeting without him learning more, can they? Thus far he’s only encountered her in the middle of dangerous crises but eventually he has to start digging to find out who this mysterious stranger is, right? I’m interested to see where this goes.
I’m rambling a bit because I’m still not sure what I think of this story. As I said, I enjoy the character work – the dialogue sounds great and the actors all spark off one another effectively. But I’m still not convinced by the arc, and I’m wondering why it’s so hard to construct an effective story arc in Doctor Who. Doom Coalition 3 is the best of the Doom Coalition sets and features one of the best Paul McGann stories Big Finish has ever produced, but I still can’t say that it’s pointing toward a promising conclusion. Nonetheless, “The Crucible of Souls” is an enjoyable listen.
7/10