It’s London, 1828, and the father-and-son team of Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel are masterminding a dangerous project – the digging of the Thames Tunnel. There’s just one problem…
The Brunels’ tunnel is haunted. Every night, a spectral blue lady walks the excavation.
Now, the 22-year-old Isambard, eager to step out of his famous father’s shadow, finds himself dealing with not only the supposed supernatural, but a second unexpected guest – a colourful trespasser who calls himself ‘The Doctor’.
Isambard would like to know a great deal more about this strange man and his mysterious blue box…
IRON BRIGHT
I’ve enjoyed Chris Chapman’s work for Big Finish thus far, as he has an ability to tie seemingly unrelated settings together via intelligent plotting. Another example of this is “Iron Bright,” which starts off as a celebrity historical but quickly and successfully transforms into something else entirely, remaining thoroughly entertaining throughout.
The celebrity in question is legendary engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (James MacCallum), and the script tells the story of his work on the Thames Tunnel underneath his father Marc (Christopher Fairbank). While the tunnel was eventually completed, Isambard left the project after a serious flood killed several workers, moving on to his own brilliant career. Chapman looked at this and saw the potential for a Doctor Who story, and it’s a good one: the tunnel was haunted! The Doctor arrives, traveling alone, as work is proceeding, and promptly encounters Brunel, along with a group of scared miners fleeing from a mysterious blue apparition in the tunnels. Brunel is a skeptic, the Doctor believes, and that provides the initial conflict between the two – but of course, being a Doctor Who story, the ghost is real. And as the ghost starts to remove supports from the tunnel, causing deadly flooding, we think we’re in for a claustrophobic story set deep underground. A good one, too, based on the first two episodes.
But much like “The Middle,” Chapman pulls the rug from beneath us as the story shifts to the alien world of Luceat. Some time ago, “windows” appeared allowing the people of Luceat to watch the people of London, but they appeared impassible. Unfortunately, appearances were deceiving, and as the Industrial Revolution commenced, the air pollution from London’s factories seeped through the windows, poisoning the people of Luceat. I loved this revelation because it sets up a complex conflict with no easy answer. The people of London have no idea that Luceat even exists, and they’re just following their development curve. Does Luceat have the right to stop them? It’s an interesting moral question, one that you could definitely see in a Star Trek episode about the Prime Directive. The script doesn’t explore the question as deeply as it probably should – the moral conflict is written off about the time that we get another “kill all humans” plan from Luceat – but it’s nonetheless an interesting attempt to bind a contemporary political issue to its historical roots through science fiction.
Some other interesting choices include the people of Luceat speaking in casual, modern dialects, juxtaposed against the 19th century English. I’m not sure this works, because it comes off as funny when the story isn’t calling for comedy, but it’s certainly memorable. I enjoyed that the first thing that came to Marc Brunel’s head when he learned of an alien world was the impulse to conquer it for the British Empire. MacCallum is wonderful as Isambard, his initial haughty superiority vanishing in the face of intelligence and wonder, and he and Colin Baker make an ideal pairing. The Doctor is great in this as well, heroic yet vulnerable, and no longer prone to correcting everyone’s grammar. The production is equally solid, both Andy Hardwick’s sound design and John Ainsworth’s direction, capturing the varied environments effectively. Overall, “Iron Bright” is a high-quality Doctor Who story that blends an interesting plot with good characterization and a solid production. More from Chris Chapman, please.
8/10