A newly regenerated Fifth Doctor arrives on an occupied ice planet – where the Seventh Doctor is investigating dangerous energy experiments conducted by the Earth Empire. But events spin out of control when a refugee from the distant past arrives – Patience, the Doctor’s Wife!
COLD FUSION
Unfortunately, Big Finish’s superlative Doctor Who Novel Adaptations range is ending, ostensibly due to poor sales. While some may argue that audio adaptations of novels we already have is needlessly reductive, it is difficult to deny that the results have been some of the best releases in the recent history of the company. And so we come to “Cold Fusion,” adapted by Lance Parkin from his original novel – it’s possibly the most celebrated Missing Adventure, and it brings the range to a very strong close.
Thank heavens they made this a six-parter. There is so much going on in “Cold Fusion” that any attempt to do it justice in two hours would have failed. As it stands, it still feels a bit overcrowded: you’ve got an ice world run by the scientific elite who criminalize any unscientific thought, an underground terrorist group looking to strike a critical blow against the elite, an ancient TARDIS entombed in a mountain, an alternate universe version of Time Lords bleeding through the cracks in reality and appearing as ghosts, a female Time Lord who may have been the Doctor’s wife in a past life, and a whole lot of continuity references besides, not to mention two Doctors and five companions. Parkin somehow makes it all hold together, though the story feels like an adventure romp as a result, rushing from scene to scene and location to location.
The characters are the best part of the story. In keeping with its Missing Adventure roots, this is a fifth Doctor story, set soon after his regeneration with Nyssa, Tegan, and Adric. The seventh Doctor, Chris, and Roz are guest stars, though each gets to take center stage as the story progresses. The conceit is very smart: the fifth Doctor is investigating a mystery for which the seventh Doctor is at least partially responsible, and keeps stumbling into his successor’s plans as things continue. I love scenes like the fifth Doctor accidentally finding a secret escape hatch with convenient rope ladder and welding the door shut behind him, only for Roz to later enter the same room and be unable to find the same secret escape hatch despite looking for it. We also get characters interchanged: Adric and Roz, or Nyssa and Chris, provide new and entertaining dynamics separate from what we normally got on television.
The adaptation makes a mistake by not drawing as much of a line between the two Doctors as the book. In the novel, the fifth Doctor is reactive and often ineffectual, something tied both to his personality and his recent regeneration. Here, apart from an early scene in the TARDIS cloisters, there’s no evidence of any of that. Similarly, in the novel, the seventh Doctor is at his darkest and most manipulative; here, he comes across as flying much more by the seat of his pants. There’s a point at the end where the fifth Doctor realizes that, unlike previous encounters with his other selves, his future incarnation remembers exactly what happened the first time around. But this isn’t borne out by the story in any significant way, which robs that scene of much of its meaning. That being said, the final scene between Davison and McCoy is a lot of fun – and at this point I’d like to know why we couldn’t have more of this. Why not a main range trilogy of multi-Doctor stories?
My other issue with the adaptation lies with Patience (Christine Kavanagh) and how she is described. At the time the novel was published, her character was part of the groundwork for a new direction for the series that ended up curtailed when Virgin lost the license. She was always intended to be a mystery, in other words – but in this adaptation her character is so vague as to be utterly pointless. Unless you’re versed in the Virgin mythology, you’re not going to have any idea that the Doctor’s tale of an ancient, lost Time Lord is referring to “the Other” and not, say, Omega. As it stands, all we learn from the audio is that Patience is herself an ancient Time Lord and that she might know the Doctor or it might just be a function of a faulty telepathic link. It didn’t even leave me wanting to know more, honestly – just confused about what I’d just heard.
Overall, though, “Cold Fusion” holds together quite well. All seven regular characters are given a lot to do, and all seven actors turn in fine performances. Matthew Waterhouse in particular shines as Adric, who is unexpectedly and genuinely funny on more than one occasion. Director Jamie Anderson does an admirable job keeping everything under control, and the sound design from Fool Circle Productions sounds great, like it came straight out of the Radiophonic Workshop in 1982. There are some struggles with condensing an overstuffed novel into the audio format, but Parkin is skilled enough to make it work – and I like the feeling that there are too many ideas here to completely flesh them all out. “Cold Fusion,” and indeed all of the novel adaptations, brings to audio an era when Doctor Who novels were genuinely ambitious, when writers of spinoff media weren’t always content merely to slavishly recreate a particular television season. Even the Missing Adventures pushed boundaries, and “Cold Fusion” was one of the best in that regard. The range will be missed – I hope the rest of Big Finish’s output picks up the slack.
Highly recommended.
8/10