Night of the Vashta Nerada by John Dorney
Funworld was set to be the happiest planet in the galaxy. A planet of joy, of euphoria, of laughter and delight. Except construction was marred by reports of a predator and then, a few days before opening, all communication ceased. Owner Georgia Donnelly is desperate to open the resort and has hired Amanda Steele’s crew to find out what happened on the planet. They’re the best. But even they might not be up to the task. Joined by the Doctor and being picked off one by one, they slowly start to realise that something terrifying lurks in the shadows.
Empire of the Racnoss by Scott Handcock
When a distress call rips the TARDIS from the Vortex, dragging it back through time, it arrives in the midst of a conflict between Gallifrey and an ancient foe. The Doctor, as ever, wants to help, but in returning a wounded combatant home, he becomes further and further entangled in a web of deceit and recrimination. A web spun by an eight-legged Empress and her minions…
The Empire of the Racnoss is at war, and wherever he stands, the Doctor is on the wrong side.
The Carrionite Curse by Simon Guerrier
Katy Bell returns to her Midlands home to find strange goings-on at the buskers fair. A witch trial in the 1980s. A bonfire ready to be lit…
Luckily, a colourful visitor is already investigating, and the local vicar, Katy’s dad, is versed in tales of the macabre. Terrifying forces are on the loose, and the town hall holds a secret. There is black magic in the Black Country, and the Doctor has the name of his enemy on the tip of his tongue…
Something wicked this way comes.
Day of the Vashta Nerada by Matt Fitton
As the Time War rages, Cardinal Ollistra of Gallifrey seeks to create ever more dangerous weapons to deploy against the enemy.
When the Doctor stumbles across Synthesis Station, he discovers that the Time Lords have sponsored a project to weaponise already-lethal creatures. But in doing so, Eva Morrison and her team have unwittingly used a colony of Vashta Nerada with a very unfortunate history of humanoid contact.
The Doctor finds himself leading a desperate race for survival, in which the shadows may be the least of their worries…
CLASSIC DOCTORS, NEW MONSTERS: NIGHT OF THE VASHTA NERADA
I’m not sure why we have these separate “Classic Doctors, New Monsters” sets, apart from Big Finish’s need to put everything into a box set. They would make for a perfect series of monthly range stories and leave that range with fewer spots to fill with its general lack of imagination. Are there still “classic” Who fans so opposed to the new series that they’ll refuse to buy anything with new series elements? In any case, the second set starts with “Night of the Vashta Nerada” by John Dorney, notable for being the first Tom Baker story to incorporate new series elements. And it’s surprisingly good!
The Tom Baker stories Big Finish has released outside of the Fourth Doctor Adventures range have largely been of much higher quality. I don’t have a good explanation for this disparity, but “Night of the Vashta Nerada” illustrates it further. Set during one of the fourth Doctor’s companionless periods, it’s a fairly standard Doctor Who story: a group of mercenaries is sent to a planet to investigate disappearances, but when they arrive all they find is an odd man in a long scarf. Dorney has the Doctor talk them around fairly quickly, sparing us the capture/escape dynamic, and from there it’s all about figuring out what happened and how to stop it happening again.
As the title implies, the Vashta Nerada are loose and they are angry. An entire world of forest was bulldozed to construct a planet-wide amusement park, destroying the habitat and food supply of the shadow-dwelling creatures. So they have no choice but to consume the humans working to open the park – and indeed they want to do so, to take revenge on the humans for destroying their world. This is a very traditional “humans reap what they sow” story, but the story embraces the theme and runs with it, making it work. Tom Baker is perhaps the most serious he has ever been for Big Finish – this is an angry Doctor who despises what the humans have done but knows he must still try to protect them. And it’s a very dark story – the casualty rate among the supporting cast is very, very high. I do wish Dorney hadn’t succumbed to the temptation to turn the Vashta Nerada into a universal threat at the conclusion, but that’s a minor complaint with a largely successful story.
The problem is with the production, and it’s not the fault of the people working on the story. Rather, it’s a similar problem to the Weeping Angels: the Vashta Nerada derive much of their menace from visual clues. They inhabit the shadows, but you can’t aurally represent encroaching shadows, so the characters have to describe it. Before they strike, their intended target has two shadows – but again, how can you represent this on audio? And the script doesn’t even incorporate the more horrific elements: there’s no “Who turned out the lights?” and no creepy skeletons stalking the characters. To Dorney’s credit, he largely makes the descriptive dialogue sound natural, but it still stands out for what it is.
All that said, “Night of the Vashta Nerada” is a very enjoyable listen. It’s a dark story taken straight from the Hinchcliffe era featuring one of Tom Baker’s most intense turns in the role. The supporting cast are all ciphers, but Dorney sketches them out well enough to be effective. And despite the issues above, director Barnaby Edwards and sound designer Howard Carter provide an eerie, threatening soundscape. It’s not groundbreaking in any way, but unlike so many of the Fourth Doctor Adventures, it feels vibrant and exciting and it’ll leave you wanting more.
7/10
CLASSIC DOCTORS, NEW MONSTERS: EMPIRE OF THE RACNOSS
“The Runaway Bride” was the second Christmas special of the Doctor Who revival, and it’s remembered largely for introducing future companion Donna Noble. It’s also memorable for introducing the idea that the Doctor needs a companion to stop him from flying off the deep end. The image of the Doctor, willing to die to exact revenge, stopped only by Donna’s intervention, is haunting in its reflection of how the Time War has affected the character. I’m not sure anyone really remembers it for the Racnoss, however – and yet we’re already digging for material in the Classic Doctors, New Monsters sets, so here comes “Empire of the Racnoss” from Scott Handcock.
I frequently complain about Big Finish stories that present fascinating ideas and then promptly abandon them to tell generic Doctor Who stories. “Empire of the Racnoss” doesn’t quite do this, but it largely ignores a fascinating potential story. The fifth Doctor encounters the Racnoss in this story at the height of their empire and during their war with Gallifrey. This happened billions of years in the past, and the Doctor encounters two Gallifreyans that have been imprisoned by the Racnoss. This is rife for conflict: how do these ancient Time Lords think? How does their morality differ from the Doctor’s? Do they prefigure how the Time Lords will act billions of years later in the Time War? But Handcock dances around this in favor of focusing on the Racnoss.
That wouldn’t be so bad if the Racnoss weren’t so uninteresting. They’re a warlike society wracked with internal strife – nothing we haven’t seen a thousand times before. The Empress (Adjoa Andoh, and I’m not sure if she’s playing the same character as Sarah Parish on TV) is simultaneously fighting the Time Lords and a civil war against her former husband, the Emperor (Nigel Planer). What follows is a series of double-crosses, in which every time the Doctor begins to think that there might be some depth, some emotion to the Racnoss, he is proven wrong as they lapse back into cackling threats at each other. And let’s not ignore just how irritating the Racnoss voices are – it’s not Big Finish’s fault, of course, but when you’re making an audio story it’s usually wise to stay away from the aliens with the most annoying speech patterns.
Fortunately, this is a great story for Peter Davison. As with the other stories in this range, he’s traveling alone, and he’s particularly desperate to see a good outcome. This strikes me as a fifth Doctor in the depths of season 21, who wants to know that there is a better way to resolve difficult situations than everyone dying. Davison brings emotional weight to his performance; you can feel how each Racnoss betrayal pains the Doctor and forces him to take unwanted action. He’s also at his most sarcastic in this story – we don’t get the “old man in a young man’s body” thing very often, but here it comes through in spades. We’re fortunate that Davison is still making these so many years later, and we should not take his performances for granted.
I suppose this is the result of taking a monster from the TV series about whom we know very little and trying to stretch their culture out into a one-hour story. There’s nothing particularly bad about this story – Handcock’s script is tight, the performances are good, the sound design is effective – but there’s nothing memorable about it either. Yep, the Racnoss are angry and untrustworthy. I would have liked to learn more.
6/10
CLASSIC DOCTORS, NEW MONSTERS: THE CARRIONITE CURSE
This one sounded promising. A story featuring the return of the Carrionites, meaning that it would naturally involve language as a plot device, and written by Simon Guerrier? Sounds perfect, but “The Carrionite Curse” doesn’t work out that way – it’s actually repetitive and surprisingly uninteresting.
It’s the 1980s, and a small town is putting three of its citizens on trial for witchcraft. Katy Bell (Maya Sondhi), a local girl returning home after years away, is appalled, and so is the sixth Doctor, who’s there posing as a clown for the local children for some reason. They intervene, and it turns out that the women are on trial for witchcraft because they actually are witches – or, more specifically, Carrionites. With his enemies revealed, the Doctor must defeat them before the town is destroyed and the Carrionites (probably) go on to destroy the world. Nothing is too surprising about any of that, but Guerrier tries to change things up by getting to the Carrionite revelation only a few minutes into the story. I like the idea – a “new series” set should try to do away with the often ponderous format of the “classic” – but unfortunately there’s not enough plot to keep things going from there.
The Doctor figures out a way to stop the Carrionites. But the solution only holds for so long, and they escape to wreak havoc once again. Repeat this sequence several times until the story ends. It’s very much a runaround – the Doctor and the locals spend most of the story literally running from location to location. And this continues until they finally finds a way to stop the villains – and that’s just the same thing they’ve been doing all along, except more intense. See, in “The Shakespeare Code,” language gave the Carrionites power and language was also their downfall. By feeding Shakespeare the lines to complete a paradoxical play, they gained power over reality – and by naming them, and feeding them lines in opposition, the Doctor was able to limit their powers and defeat them. That worked because it relied on the presence of the greatest author ever to write in English, plus the joke incorporating some Harry Potter. In “The Carrionite Curse,” Guerrier reduces this to specific words being enough to stop the Carrionites. At first, the Doctor thinks that long, complex words are the answer, something that plays to Colin Baker’s strengths – but then he realizes that short, sharp words will also do the trick. The idea of different words serving as different types of weapons is interesting, but in practice it just sounds like Colin Baker reading from a vocabulary book. There’s no explanation for why some words work and others don’t – the whole thing feels arbitrary and unrewarding.
Much like the last story, “The Carrionite Curse” isn’t bad. But there isn’t enough plot to sustain even an hour, and the character work is too shallow to make up for it. Katy’s father Douglas (Michael Fenton-Stevens), the local vicar, is the most interesting character, but he spends too much time running around for us to get to know him. Colin Baker always loves scripts like this, but even he struggles to make it interesting. I must say, though, that the references to a book by Professor Litefoot serve as a fine tribute to the late Trevor Baxter, even though I’m sure this was written long before his passing. Overall, “The Carrionite Curse” is fairly entertaining but unrewarding.
5/10
CLASSIC DOCTORS, NEW MONSTERS: DAY OF THE VASHTA NERADA
To round off the set, and perhaps the entire Classic Doctors, New Monsters series, we have Matt Fitton’s “Day of the Vashta Nerada,” a sequel to the first story in the set starring Paul McGann that also incorporates Time War mythology. Much like “Night,” it’s a dark, downbeat story about facing defeat before hopeless odds. Unlike “Night,” however, it’s somewhat unfocused and gets a bit silly near the end.
I like how Big Finish is trying to construct a consistent Time War mythology across multiple ranges. To that end, we see Cardinal Ollistra (Jacqueline Pearce) in this story, paying a human research station to develop weaponized Vashta Nerada. By programming them to consume Dalekanium, they can be released on Dalek worlds and into Dalek fleets and wipe the Daleks out without any danger to the Time Lords. Naturally, the Doctor shows up, and he knows exactly how dangerous the Vashta Nerada can be – but before he can intervene, a greedy lab technician (Himesh Patel) allows them to escape into the station. What follows is very typical sci-fi horror – the characters have to traverse the station to reach safety, facing traps and dangers along the way.
As this is a biotech station, the dangers come in various mutated versions of the Vashta Nerada. While I appreciate that Fitton is trying to branch out, and not just repeat the same tropes we’ve seen in their other appearances, the ideas here are fairly silly. At one point, they come across a room containing a giant Vashta Nerada, which roars and pounds against the walls and so forth. What does this thing even look like? Does it have corporeal form? We never get an explanation, even as it eats one of the supporting characters. I don’t mind having things left to my imagination, but since I don’t know what an individual Vashta Nerada looks like, what am I supposed to be picturing here? They also find “reverse” Vashta Nerada: they shun the darkness and live in the light, meaning the characters must stick to the shadows to survive. It’s not a terrible idea – though the characters calling them “Nerada Vashta” is so on the nose it hurts – but this is an audio story, and since you can’t hear light, the characters have to yell out what’s happening. The same problem happened with “Night” and I’m not surprised it came up again here.
Even for a Time War story, “Day” is particularly grim. Everyone except the Doctor and Ollistra winds up dead, most in painful, pointless ways. There are a couple of heroic sacrifices, of course, but the bloodlust is still remarkably high – especially considering what happens to Dr. Morrison (Jan Ravens). Unfortunately, we don’t get much out of either the Doctor or Ollistra, as the story hits many of the same beats we’ve seen already. The eighth Doctor is disgusted by the behavior of the Time Lords and rejects any role in the Time War – he even spells out that he’s a doctor, not a warrior, foreshadowing the decision that precedes his upcoming regeneration. Ollistra is ruthlessly pragmatic, irritated by the Doctor’s frivolity while knowing he is one of Gallifrey’s best assets. As we’ll soon be heading into Time War-themed box sets for this Doctor, it would be nice if these smaller stories pushed things along, but until then we’ll have to settle for more of the same.
Overall, “Day of the Vashta Nerada” is a very solid story and a good conclusion to a solid box set. I wish it had distinguished itself in ways other than unintentionally humorous modifications to the title monsters, but Matt Fitton’s script nonetheless combines with a strong production to produce an entertaining hour of drama.
7/10