Following the events of Doom Coalition, continues the adventures of the 8th Doctor, Liv Chenka and Helen Sinclair.
1.1 Their Finest Hour by John Dorney
In the early days of the Second World War a strange and elusive craft attacks British targets. Could it be a German superweapon? Churchill calls for the Doctor’s assistance and with the help of a squadron of Polish fighter pilots the TARDIS crew take to the skies to investigate.
1.2 How to Make a Killing in Time Travel by John Dorney
A disturbance in the vortex causes the TARDIS to land on the Scapegrace space station, where Cornelius Morningstar experiments in time-travel for nefarious purposes. But the Doctor’s plan to stop him winds dangerously out of control as the different agendas of criminals, murderers and alien dynasties conspire against him.
1.3 World of Damnation by Matt Fitton
Rykerzon is a maximum-security planetoid designed to hold the most dangerous criminals in the star system. The Governor plans to reform its inmates, with the help of the Kandyman. But two prisoners prove particularly troublesome: the alien fugitives known as the Eleven, and Miss Helen Sinclair. The Doctor and Liv have finally tracked down their friend – but are they too late?
1.4 Sweet Salvation by Matt Fitton
The Eleven has the authorities in the palm of his hand and an entire world held to ransom when the Kandyman cooks up a deadly confection containing a secret ingredient. In a last-ditch attempt to prevent disaster Liv teams up with a desperate criminal, and the Doctor must decide whether Helen is still his friend.
RAVENOUS: THEIR FINEST HOUR
With Doom Coalition completed, and the new Time War sets floating around, the story of the eighth Doctor, Liv, and Helen continues in a new series of box sets: Ravenous. If history is any indicator, we’ll find out why it’s called Ravenous somewhere around the third box set. Doom Coalition ended with the titular Coalition defeated, their plans foiled – but the Eleven escaped, taking Helen along in a battle TARDIS. And that’s where we pick up in “Their Finest Hour,” by John Dorney: the Doctor and Liv desperately trying to find their friend. The Doctor dashes about the TARDIS controls, brilliantly programming a way for the ship to determine Helen’s location, and then… they have to wait for the TARDIS to perform the calculations, so they wander off to World War II to have a jolly, pointless adventure with Winston Churchill! It will probably come as no surprise that I didn’t like it.
“Their Finest Hour” feels like a time-filler, like the sort of story that’s produced to fulfill an episode order but that doesn’t actually advance the plot in any meaningful way. In my experience, however, these time-filling episodes don’t normally feature as the series premieres! It’s fun to hear Ian McNeice’s Churchill with someone other than a new series Doctor – these are the sorts of crossover elements they should do more often, rather than bringing back random guest stars to headline box sets – but the script doesn’t even do anything interesting with him, it just leans heavily into cliché. Churchill wants to use the TARDIS to end the war, the Doctor must be sure not to tell Churchill how the war ends, and so forth. Dorney draws attention to the fact that Liv is from the far future by showing her not knowing who Winston Churchill was, but then doesn’t do anything with this idea. Wouldn’t it be interesting to give Churchill a crisis of confidence? If he’s forgotten, does that mean he loses the war? But no, let’s not do that.
Instead, it’s time for a laughably uninspired alien invasion plot. An invisible alien spaceship is flying around destroying British military installations, leading everyone to assume they’re in league with the Nazis. At least the story isn’t quite so lazy as to go down that road, but the path it chooses isn’t much better: everyone flies around in airplanes for a while until Liv finally radios the alien homeworld and some other aliens show up to solve the problem. There’s no brilliant deduction by the Doctor, no dangerous face-to-face confrontation, no heroic moment of personal risk by the companion – just a quick radio communication and the plot’s over. Don’t worry, though, because there also isn’t any character development to speak of. Churchill is at his most generic, the Doctor and Liv don’t do or say anything unusual, and the only two guest characters of any importance are two Polish fighter pilots who only show the briefest amount of interest. Most of the story is consumed with characters in airplanes yelling at each other over radios, which is incredibly grating on the ears. It’s rare for the actual experience of listening to a Big Finish story to be unpleasant, but this is an example.
This story is pointless. It’s generic, reheated Doctor Who, utterly bereft of creativity or invention. I struggle to accept that John Dorney wrote this: it’s unquestionably the worst Doctor Who script he’s ever written, coming across instead as Nick Briggs on autopilot. The plot is boring, the resolution is laughable, the characters barely meet the definition – and this is the first story in a brand-new range of adventures! What on earth were they thinking? Who thought this was a good idea? It’s not quite down there with “Minuet in Hell” or “Zagreus” but this is one of the worst Paul McGann stories in a long, long time.
2/10
RAVENOUS: HOW TO MAKE A KILLING IN TIME TRAVEL
“How to Make a Killing in Time Travel,” by John Dorney, is the second story in the Ravenous set and only a marginal improvement over the first. While it’s a much more entertaining story, it once again has virtually nothing to do with the ongoing plot, and features the principal characters complaining about this very point just in case you wanted to enjoy it on its own terms.
The Doctor and Liv have located Helen, but (of course) a disturbance in the vortex pulls the TARDIS off course and onto the space station Scapegrace. Brilliant yet awkward scientist Stralla Cushing (Judith Roddy) is building a time machine to further the financial goals of billionaire Cornelius Morningstar (Roger May), and the effects of this machine render the TARDIS unable to leave the station. All the Doctor and Liv need to do is shut it off long enough to depart, but this becomes impossible when Stralla kills Morningstar and a madcap murder mystery breaks out. Dorney struggles to capture a consistent tone: there are times when this story feels like outright slapstick, others when it feels satirical, and still others when it suddenly takes itself completely seriously. This makes for an entertaining, surprising listen, which is good, but it doesn’t feel particularly rewarding by the end.
Rather than follow the murder investigation, we largely follow Stralla, who makes her overall situation worse each time she solves an immediate problem. Everyone seems to know she killed Morningstar, or at least strongly suspect – this is the sort of thing the Doctor can figure out in about eight seconds and it certainly seems like he does so. Indeed, the Doctor and Liv largely seem irritated with having to deal with this, which neatly illustrates the problem: the scale of the story isn’t big enough. When the Doctor and Liv act like this is beneath them, you agree with them – this isn’t significant enough to warrant our favorite Time Lord’s involvement. It’s just an obstacle, an imposition along the path to finding Helen and the Eleven. And while it’s an entertaining imposition, the script leans into this concept, to the point that the story ends with Liv essentially asking “Can we go now?” The characters are entertaining enough, the screwball plotting is fun, but ultimately this story feels lightweight and disposable. I understand that the box set format forces the listener to purchase all four stories, but shouldn’t the first two stories in a new range do something to hook the listener? Having listened to the entire set, you can very easily skip both this story and its predecessor and not miss a single thing. That may have been okay at one time but it’s now 2018 and serial drama doesn’t work that way anymore.
5/10
RAVENOUS: WORLD OF DAMNATION
I’m not sure why this Matt Fitton script is called “World of Damnation,” but it is, and it’s the point at which Ravenous finally remembers that it’s a sequel to Doom Coalition, reintroducing Helen and the Eleven to our ears. There’s some interesting, if flawed, structure to the script, and it actually seems to be promising some interesting character development – but it’s also the first half of a story and we know how that usually goes around here.
As the first half of a story, most of “World of Damnation” is setting up the conclusion. After the events of Doom Coalition, Helen and the Eleven ended up on Rykerzon, a prison planetoid and asylum designed for dangerous criminals. Helen, possessed of the powers of the Sonomancer, accidentally used those powers to blow a significant hole in the prison. And so over the course of the next six months they’re both locked up, with Helen serving as a caretaker for the Eleven, talking to him, helping him manage his insanity, and even potentially building a relationship with him. When the Doctor and Liv eventually reconnect with them, the Doctor is instantly suspicious of Helen: something has changed about her and he’s unsure of what it is. This is genuinely interesting character work, the sort of thing that could change the dynamic of the TARDIS and lay the groundwork for dramatic conflicts later on. It would be a real shame if all this was reset to normal in the second half, wouldn’t it?
Also of note is the return of a classic Doctor Who villain: the prisoners are being kept in line and even reformed by the sweet concoctions of the Kandyman! Oddly, he doesn’t look or sound anything like what we saw on television – he’s inhabiting a new body and looks human. Nicholas Rowe gives him a threatening, businesslike air, while simultaneously emphasizing his love of preparing sweets. It’s a good performance, but it does make me wonder what the point of bringing back a villain is if you’re just going to change things so drastically. Imagine if a story was billed as the return of the Daleks, and when the Daleks appeared they looked like humans and sounded like humans. Sure, they’d still yell “exterminate” and shoot people, but would they really be Daleks? Fortunately, since it’s the Kandyman, nobody is going to be too worried about this.
I think Matt Fitton was watching Westworld, because there’s a point in this story where we discover that two apparently concurrent storylines are actually separated by six months. Unfortunately, it’s bungled – there’s no big reveal of the surprise, it just happens by implication. And honestly, if you don’t even notice, it doesn’t matter – there aren’t any subtle changes or clues to the true nature of things to detect on a second listen. Still, I appreciate the effort to try something different with the structure.
Overall, “World of Damnation” is a solid story that lays the groundwork for some potentially interesting character development in the second part and into the future.
7/10
RAVENOUS: SWEET SALVATION
And so, the first Ravenous set concludes with “Sweet Salvation,” also by Matt Fitton. The previous story actually set up some interesting material for this conclusion – and it’s frankly staggering that yet again all of that interesting material is thrown away.
I’m really getting tired of repeating the same complaints over and over again, but Big Finish is at it again with this story. In the first part, Helen was showing hints of the Sonomancer’s influence, such that she occasionally demonstrated psychic powers and such that the Doctor didn’t entirely trust her. By the end of “Sweet Salvation,” those powers are gone and the Doctor trusts her completely. The previous story built an interesting relationship between Helen and the Eleven: was she helping to cure his madness? Were they building an unlikely relationship? In “Sweet Salvation,” we find out that the answer to both of those questions is “no” and that the Eleven is the same megalomaniac he’s always been. For some reason, over the past few years Big Finish has been utterly averse to anything even resembling character development in the Doctor Who ranges, but this is a new low. “Sweet Salvation” almost revels in its disregard for drama, with characters proudly declaring that everything is back to normal. In fact, even the way it ends reinforces this, with the Eleven and the Kandyman carelessly kicked off a platform and possibly fed to a psychic spider. It seems that the entire purpose of “Ravenous 1” was to erase “Doom Coalition,” to make it as though those stories had never happened and send our characters off completely unchanged by their experiences – and that’s deeply cynical and insulting to an audience spending real money to listen to these.
Is anything about this good? The Eleven has always been a boring character – at least here he actually works with his other personalities instead of yelling at them, but his plan certainly isn’t memorable. Two of the guest characters have a relationship but I can’t even remember either of their names and I listened to this yesterday. The plot is ludicrous – taking the psychic spoor of a giant spider and using it as an ingredient in food to control an entire population? The Kandyman is in this but he doesn’t really do anything – although my favorite part of the story is when he reverts to his TV persona, something so entertaining it makes you ask why they didn’t present him that way in the first place. I suppose the design is good: Ken Bentley is a capable director, the sound design from Benji Clifford and Steve Foxon is effective, and Jamie Robertson’s score is useful if also unmemorable.
Ultimately, “Sweet Salvation” is an appropriate ending to a terrible box set. It’s a deeply cynical corporate mission statement: don’t take any interest in our characters, because we’re going to hit the reset button before too long. You would think this range, which has no controlling TV continuity, would be the one in which they would actually push the boundaries, but it isn’t. None of them are. I should have known this was going to be bad when even the gushing review copy on the product page could only manage to score this a 4/5.
What a miserable experience.
3/10