Scattered through all of space and time, there are many women whose paths have crossed that of the Doctor.
Some were once fellow TARDIS travellers, some staunch allies defending the Earth, and one was the Doctor’s wife…
From Victorian London, to an intergalactic convention, from the offices of UNIT, to an impossible university library – on the 8th of March, four very different adventures will unfold.
1. Emancipation by Lisa McMullin
When River Song crashes a Galactic Heritage convention, posing as the wrong Time Lord, Leela is sent by Gallifrey to investigate.
But before the canapés are cold and the champagne becomes warm, they find themselves embroiled in a royal kidnapping.
2. The Big Blue Book by Lizzie Hopley
With the Doctor AWOL, Benny and Ace are left to their own devices, going native in a Liverpool university.
Benny accepts an invitation she really shouldn’t, and Ace meets a very strange collector.
An alien library is about to gain a big, blue book… but where’s the TARDIS?
3. Inside Every Warrior by Gemma Langford
The Great Detective, Madame Vastra, aided by her resourceful spouse, Jenny Flint, and loyal valet, Strax, is looking into a series of mysterious break-ins.
An eccentric scientist and his put-upon assistant are the latest victims. Evidence mounts, with animal footprints and a trail of destruction.
4. Narcissus by Sarah Grochala
When one of their own goes missing, Kate Stewart and the two Osgoods decide to investigate.
Narcissus is interested only in the most beautiful people, but as the UNIT operatives are about to discover, its true purpose is something far from desirable.
THE EIGHTH OF MARCH: EMANCIPATION
To commemorate International Women’s Day, Big Finish released a special Doctor Who box set: “The Eighth of March,” hitting the shelves on that date and featuring four stories starring prominent female Doctor Who characters, all written and directed by women. This is an admirable effort for a company whose record on female representation was generously described as “questionable” for much of their existence – though to be fair their record in that department has improved significantly over the past few years. Unfortunately, the first story, “Emancipation” by Lisa McMullin, is not very good. It’s a Diary of River Song story, judging from the theme music, and it features River infiltrating a Galactic Heritage convention by posing as Romana. Leela is there, however, on a separate mission from the Time Lords, and she obviously knows River is not Romana. The two must learn to trust each other as they attempt to save a princess from a sacrificial altar. The plot is fairly straightforward and the twists are predictable, at least until the end. It falls down in the interactions between the leads: neither River nor Leela distinguish themselves, and their relationship boils down to River deciding to interfere in history and Leela telling her it’s a bad idea. Yes, at one point Leela holds River at knifepoint, but then River asks her not to so she stops and it’s never mentioned again. River, of course, knows everything about Leela based (presumably) on the Doctor’s stories, but that knowledge never factors into the story in a meaningful fashion. It feels like a missed opportunity, and that’s before the ending, where two episodes’ worth of plot are condensed into about 10 minutes for no particular reason. Had the story ended after the initial rescue it would have been fine – did they need to pad out the running time? In any case, a disappointing start.
4/10
THE EIGHTH OF MARCH: THE BIG BLUE BOOK
After a disappointing opening story, The Eighth of March follows it with a story featuring Benny and Ace: “The Big Blue Book” by Lizzie Hopley, presumably part of that “New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield” range I haven’t heard.
(Continuity question separate from the review: when exactly does this take place in Ace and Benny’s relationship? At one point, Benny defers to Ace’s knowledge of the TARDIS, stating Ace has been traveling in it a lot longer than she has – but didn’t Ace leave in “Love and War,” the same story in which Benny first joined? Yes, Ace later rejoins the TARDIS crew, but at what point would Benny’s lack of knowledge of the TARDIS lead her to defer?)
There’s no way to sugarcoat this: “The Big Blue Book” is absolutely dreadful, one of the worst things Big Finish has ever produced. It’s badly written and badly performed. There’s a cool idea at its heart – alien technology that imprisons people by turning them into books and storing them in a massive library – but absolutely nothing interesting is done with this idea at any point. This is supposed to be a story featuring Ace and Benny, but Benny gets turned into a book within the first five minutes and we don’t hear Lisa Bowerman for the majority of the run time. As a result, much of the story is consumed with Ace wandering around talking to herself. Carrying a solo audio story for multiple minutes is a supremely difficult job for a performer, and unfortunately Sophie Aldred isn’t at all up to the task. She’s not always alone, though – sometimes she’s accompanied by Vassa (Rosemary Ashe), a deeply, deeply irritating creature that Ashe plays like a cackling fantasy gremlin. The plot is also nonsensical – it’s basically a runaround that could fill a 15-minute story at best. There’s virtually no characterization, the library idea isn’t meaningfully explored – it’s hard to express just how irritating and unrewarding this story is. It should not have been released.
1/10
THE EIGHTH OF MARCH: INSIDE EVERY WARRIOR
“Inside Every Warrior,” by Gemma Langford, is something like a backdoor pilot for the upcoming Paternoster Gang audios. We haven’t heard these characters together on audio – Vastra was in a Churchill Years story and Strax showed up in Jago & Litefoot, but separately – and it’s delightful to have them together again. This is the clear strength of Langford’s story: she expertly captures the relationships between each member of the group, and spends a lot of time on the nuances and subtleties of Vastra and Jenny’s marriage. All three characters support one another in various ways, and all three are variously saved by the others over the course of this story. I particularly enjoyed how involved Jenny was with the plot, as she’s often been the overlooked character of the three – but no such trouble here, and Catrin Stewart is at home being at center stage in a story like this. Unfortunately, while the characterization is the clear highlight of the story, the story itself isn’t very good. Pinch is written as such an over the top misogynist – and is played that way by Nigel Fairs – that it’s obvious he’s not going to be the true villain of the piece. And the plot is thinly-sketched at best – there are neat ideas like draining fluids from characters into cocktails with pun titles, but it barely hangs together and is honestly rather difficult to follow. The sound design is partially to blame here – multiple scenes degenerate into cacophonies of sound effects and yelling and leave the listener in the dark. Overall, though, “Inside Every Warrior” is entirely worth hearing as a solid audio debut of the Paternoster Gang.
6/10
THE EIGHTH OF MARCH: NARCISSUS
“Narcissus,” by Sarah Grochala, is a UNIT story, but it differs from the others in an important way: it is set later in the UNIT timeline, sometime after “The Zygon Invasion/Inversion.” In that TV story, we never found out which Osgood, human or Zygon, survived “Death in Heaven,” and the Zygon two-parter leaves it even more ambiguous, a state of affairs thematically designed to mirror the human/Zygon stalemate engineered by the Doctor. Here, all that ambiguity is tossed out the window: the human Osgood survived the first story and, while the other UNIT personnel cannot tell the true Osgood from her Zygon counterpart by sight, they know one is a Zygon and make use of her shapeshifting abilities when necessary. None of this is necessarily bad, but it drastically alters the status quo from TV in a way that seems less interesting – yes, the idea of a Zygon UNIT operative is fun, but is it worth the cost of the Osgood ambiguity? (“The Osgood Ambiguity” should be the title of a future story.) Ingrid Oliver is fantastic in this – she has multiple scenes in which she plays both Osgoods in conversation, and it’s never difficult to understand or to follow. Apart from all that, the story is fairly standard UNIT fare: an alien is hijacking a dating site to abduct and use the beauty of its users as an energy source. It’s just Kate, Josh, and Osgood in this one, and it’s a neat little piece that doesn’t outstay its welcome. My only complaint is that Kate and Osgood both get “crisis of confidence” scenes that feel out of character for both women, taking me out of the story – but apart from that this is solid. It’s probably the best story in the set, though unfortunately that’s not a high bar to clear. I’m curious to see if this heralds a jump forward in time for the UNIT range or if this is a one-off.
7/10