The year is 2085, and planet Earth remains on the edge of a nuclear precipice. At any moment, either of two vast rival power blocs, to the West and the East, might unleash a torrent of missiles, bringing about the terrible certainty of Mutual Assured Destruction.
But there is another way – or so Professor Ruth Drexler believes. Hence her secret mission deep in Eastern bloc territory, to uncover a hidden city, never before glimpsed by human eyes: the Parliament of the Silurians, the lizard people who ruled the Earth before humankind.
There, she’ll encounter a time-travelling Doctor, who knows the Silurians well. A Doctor on a secret mission of his own.
THE SILURIAN CANDIDATE
I guess I should be careful what I ask for. I’ve been complaining since they started this series of seventh Doctor audios that reunite Mel and Ace, pointing out that Big Finish seems to have completely abandoned anything resembling character development for Ace and doesn’t seem at all interested in doing anything with Mel now that she’s back. Well, here comes “The Silurian Candidate” from Matthew J. Elliott, and while it tries to engage with the characters, it’s written so incompetently that it fails badly.
The seventh Doctor isn’t an easy character to write, especially when he’s in his enigmatic moods. If you want a helpful guide on how not to write him, check out this script: he’s capricious, manipulative, and totally uncaring. See, when this Doctor manipulates his companions, he’s either doing it to accomplish a greater goal or for what he thinks are their best interests. When done properly, this leads to serious conflict: think of his relationship with Hex heading into “A Death in the Family,” or the events of “Love and War.” But that conflict is nuanced, because the audience understands that both the Doctor’s goals and his companions’ feelings are worthy of sympathy. In “Silurian Candidate,” he doesn’t tell Mel anything about what they’re doing, and only tells Ace that his plan is to give Earth back to the Silurians. He’s being vague for absolutely no reason – it does nothing to advance his plan, nor does it trick or otherwise manipulate Ace or Mel into doing things that help him succeed. At one point, Ace locks him in a closet in utter disbelief, and she’s right to do so! There’s no point at which the listener realizes “oh, THAT’S what he was trying to do” – the Doctor is just an ass in this story, and that’s it.
Of course, this is also a Silurian story, which means it’s Elliott’s turn to make the same mistake that every other Silurian story has made since the first one: making the Silurians genocidal maniacs. The fundamental conflict in these stories is between the different sides of our nature: the Silurians are meant to mirror humanity’s own attitudes, with some advocating for peaceful coexistence and others advocating from a place of paranoia and racism. If humans can live together, humans and Silurians should be able to, and the Doctor is caught in the middle, trying desperately to stop them from killing each other and to get them to talk. But in stories like this, from the moment we meet the Silurians, they’re planning the mass genocide of the human race. Yes, Karlas (Caitlin Thorburn) eventually realizes the error of her ways, but the absence of a sympathetic voice for the majority of the story means the Silurians themselves are utterly unsympathetic. Every single time the Silurians wake up they try to commit genocide, so why on Earth does the Doctor keep taking their side? Ace even points this out at various points throughout the story! Of course, her complaints come to naught – the lesson is that when your own script tells you that something doesn’t make sense, you really should go back and rewrite.
Even apart from storytelling and characterization critiques, this script falls apart at a fundamental level. The tone of the story is laughably inconsistent, veering from farcical comedy to intense emotion – and no, this isn’t a melodrama. Chairman Falco (Nicholas Asbury) is an obvious Donald Trump allegory written with all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the teeth – and if that wasn’t enough, Asbury plays him as a comedy Australian. At one point Mel reflects on her role in the TARDIS – perhaps she’s there to show the Doctor and Ace the human perspective that they’ve lost after so many years of TARDIS travel? Sure, that makes sense – unfortunately she doesn’t serve that purpose in this story, and indeed hasn’t served that purpose in any of the other stories leading up to this one, so why bring it up? Is anyone in charge of this? Does anyone care?
I could go on, but let’s change gears and look at the production, which is shockingly poor for a Big Finish story. Ken Bentley directs well enough, but the sound design from Luke Pietnik is embarrassing – there’s no sense of place, no perception of where the characters are, and the action scenes are utterly incomprehensible. The dinosaur attack is a particular low point, with the actors’ shouted descriptions the only way to understand what’s happening. Overall, the only saving grace of “The Silurian Candidate” is that it aspires to great ideas. It wants to take a deep dive into the Doctor, Ace, and Mel, and how they relate at this point in their lives – and unfortunately that dive is straight into an empty pool. Otherwise, there are no redeeming factors here. I often complain that the monthly range is unambitious and often boring – “The Silurian Candidate” only wishes it was merely unambitious and boring.
2/10