In search of the TARDIS, the Doctor and Charley enter the Interzone where they encounter the insect-like Kromon who also covet the Doctor’s vessel.
In search of the TARDIS, the Doctor and Charley enter the Interzone where they encounter the insect-like Kromon who also covet the Doctor’s vessel.
THE CREED OF THE KROMON
With Scherzo in the books and the Doctor/Charley relationship somewhat resolved, it was time for the eighth Doctor’s adventures in the Divergent universe to begin properly. To this end, the production team decided that the best way to introduce their audience to a new universe with different laws of time would be to… release an ultratraditional story written by Philip Martin?! Even before the play was released, this didn’t look like a good idea, and despite the inherent factors in its favor The Creed of the Kromon lives down to every one of those negative expectations.
Quite frankly, I’m not sure why this wasn’t called Vengeance on Varos II: The Reckoning. It’s exactly the same: there’s an alien race with distinctively non-human physiology and an obsession with finance and profit oppressing another race by controlling their economy and holding the population hostage to costs. There’s also a sequence in which the companion is partially mutated into an alien and, while this is going on, the Doctor and a rebel of the indigenous population are running up and down corridors trying to stop it. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that a) the story lacks Varos’s most brilliant element, the media satire and b) Martin doesn’t know how to write for audio. The script is full of terrible, terrible exposition — the scene where the Doctor and Charley find C’rizz features some of the poorest dialogue written for the range since the earliest releases. Indeed, there isn’t a single spark of originality in the entire script — there’s a time and a place for this sort of story, and it’s BBC1 in 1985.
The opening sequence, taking place in the Interzone, is utterly confusing. Sometimes it makes for effective drama to drop the listener into the middle of events and let them catch up to the characters, but when we last saw the Doctor and Charley they were taking their first steps into a new universe, leaving behind the TARDIS. When The Creed of the Kromon begins, not only are they in this Interzone, they sound like they’ve been through it before, leaving the listener without any frame of reference. Furthermore, the TARDIS has suddenly just gone missing, something which is not properly explained within the text.
Furthermore, this story is the first adventure in the Divergent universe that does not take place in a giant glass tube, and as such it should, at the very least, communicate to the listener that it takes place in a truly alien, bizarre environment where even time itself has no meaning. The script utterly fails in this regard, as there is absolutely nothing unusual about the setting or the characters. Because Zagreus established the linking characteristic of our universe as a humanoid appearance, all the authors have to do to create a so-called “alien” universe is present nonhumanoid aliens — something the series could have been doing all along. The “no time” concept is ludicrous to begin with, and Martin doesn’t help things by interpreting it as “the aliens don’t know what the word means” rather than anything interesting. Where’s the hook? What in this play makes me want to hear the next one?
Paul McGann is again on fine form in this play, but unfortunately someone forgot to tell Martin that Rob Shearman had planned to alter the character’s psyche in the previous release. The darker, cynical Doctor of Scherzo is completely gone here, replaced with breathless, heroic McGann, who tries his best to keep the character interesting. I should note that this is not an objectively poor portrayal of the Doctor, but these plays do not take place in a vacuum — as a followup to Scherzo, this is yet another misstep.
Charley is given a bizarre treatment here, as her character development in the previous story is mostly overlooked in lieu of a stereotypical “80s companion” portrayal that sees her scared to move while asking obvious questions. India Fisher plays the part fairly well, and fortunately she doesn’t annoy, but she sounds as though the writing sits uneasily with her. I don’t have a problem with the metamorphosis on its face, but its execution is so inconsequential it’s basically free of drama. Apparently, she is altered at the genetic level to become part Kromon — but fortunately she’s able to eat some roots and herbs and get better!
The Creed of the Kromon will perhaps be most remembered for its introduction of new companion C’rizz, played by Conrad Westmaas. Unfortunately, there isn’t much on display here that distinguishes C’rizz from the wallpaper: he’s headstrong, impulsive, and emotional, but there’s nothing which makes the listener think “Ah, I expect this guy will become a companion.” By the end of the story, he has some mysterious backstory crowbarred in, but for the most part there’s nothing particularly interesting going on. Westmaas plays the part well, though, putting believable emotion into lines that could easily have been disastrous — I’m looking forward to hearing him in a better script.
Of the supporting cast, Stephen Perring gets the most work, voicing the Kro’ka and half the Kromon. He’s great as the Kro’ka — patronizing, smug, and amusing all the same — and, along with Daniel Hogarth, never falls into the trap of sounding the same when he voices different characters and extras. Brian Cobby’s Oroog sounds like he just saw the Ents in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy before he played the part, but it works well. And Jane Hills… well… she screams well, I suppose.
David Darlington handles the sound and music design, and though there’s nothing especially notable about his effects work, his score is a work of brilliance. Atmospheric guitar pieces at the beginning give way to 80s-style synth-sounding tracks as the story moves further indoors and grows darker — this is the sort of score I’d buy separately. As for Gary Russell’s direction, it seems to me that he’s always tied to the quality of the script. When a great script comes through, the acting and production seem to be top-notch, but when a poor script comes through everything seems much more low-key and disinterested. There’s nothing particularly poor here, but the material could easily have been tightened up, despite the generally high quality of the acting.
This is not to say that The Creed of the Kromon is terrible. Disassociated from its surrounding material it’s the most average Doctor Who story that BF has ever released and would warrant a 5/10 or so. However, as the first full adventure in a new universe and a vehicle to introduce a companion, it’s poorer than that. A shame, as it’s basically required listening, but I still can’t recommend it.
4/10
“The experiment has begun.”
And so we venture further into this Divergent Universe and quickly we wonder if it might have been better to have ended the McGann run with Zagreus and leave the question of what the Doctor will find in the Divergent Universe as an imponderable open-ended cliffhanger. Because whatever the listener might imagine will happen next for the Eighth Doctor and Charley, it’s got to be better than this.
It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that this story sees the return of Philip Martin as scriptwriter, and the story even name-checks Zeiton 7 and Varos to ram home the point for anyone who didn’t read the back cover. But it’s immediately clear that Philip doesn’t really have a proper grasp on writing audio Doctor Who.
The first half of the story mostly holds up well, but even then there’s nitpicky flaws that threaten to bloat and spill over in the second half. Despite the detailed background sound effects that convey a windy desert landscape, Paul McGann and India Fisher just sound like they’re talking in a studio booth which hints that we’re in for severe apathy on the part of the lead performances. There’s also the scene where they have to pass the gate-keeper and Charley suffers a mental attack on her fear sensors. Well that’s what she tells us anyway, but she verbalises it in such an unrealistic way that exposes it as dodgy scripting at perhaps the worst point in the story for this to happen. That aside, it more or less works as an ominous sharp opening, but it sets us up for a story that runs on the shallow philosophy that pain builds character. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it was the same ethos that much of Season 22 was built on, and indeed much of 80’s cinema- Robocop being a case in point since Murphy only had fifteen minutes to make a sympathetic impression with the audience, so they opted to ensure audience sympathy by making his death as nasty as possible. In the JNT era, a companion departure was nothing special unless the character got a bridge dropped on them, Lytton’s out of the blue redemption was symbolised by the crushing of his hands representing ‘penance’, K-9 and Peri seemed to be the two companions the show enjoyed abusing the most, and Nyssa losing her home planet seemed to add nothing to her personality.
In the same way we’re introduced to C’rizz as a new companion who is characterised solely by his anger and misery over losing his significant other, and we learn nothing else about him. In the same way, Charley spends a huge length of the story being cruelly experimented on, and unlike in Dalek Empire’s tales of endurance, her suffering doesn’t really tell us anything new about her character. And without that display of individuality, this parade of pain simply becomes oppressive.
Basically this goes over the same material of Vengeance on Varos, its corporate satire, the companion being transformed into an animal, and really it shares many of Varos’ major gaping flaws, and the main defining flaw is that there’s no real urgency to the events. The first half of the story manages to hold our interest by building up its complex dome environment of many levels and its own ecosystem, and really communicates the sense of a giant hive, and this somewhat adds to the jeopardy of trying to find L’da but once the Doctor and his companions escape, things become too easy for them, and they face very little in the way of challenge or worthy opposition. At one point they happen onto an abandoned computer terminal which lets them erase their own criminal records, and at another they rescue C’rizz from an execution squad successfully by simply throwing mud balls at them. The threats against them seem so terribly slight, much like how Varos presented guards who’d literally fall to their deaths if you tapped their shoulder, which presents real problems in the second half.
Before we get to that though, we get the cliffhanger where C’rizz discovers L’da being turned into a slug and begging for a mercy killing. Even this is botched by the inattentive scripting that leaves us in the dark as to what has actually been done to L’da until we get a belated visual explanation, by which time it’s a bit too late to empathise with C’rizz’ actions in killing her, and thus our only possible reaction is one of numb shock. There are several examples of this lax, belated relaying of visual information, but this is the most frustrating for happening in such a dramatically crucial moment. It’s perhaps the worst time to be left in the dark and consciously waiting for the script to help us to make sense of it.
And then the urgency is lost, and that’s the trouble with making a story so shock heavy, because gratuitous shock is so transient ultimately. There are some interesting moments that follow such as the tribunal where Charley is being suggested for replacing L’da as the next experimental subject, and we realise that the Kromon’s evil deeds are based far more on bureaucracy than sadism. Also when the Doctor is told the history of the Kromon race, and learns that they were once an oppressed race and thus were taught by the experience to become the oppressors, it’s a lovely turning of its head of Star Trek’s sanctimonious notion that we’re never and should never be responsible for the development of other races and cultures, as if Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden and many of the other most evil figures of the modern world didn’t learn their methods first from the Western powers. But other than that there’s very little that holds the interest after this point and so the story drags terribly, and every time the script builds up what a slimy, ugly and dark environment this is, it simply becomes more depressing and unsympathetic, giving us little reason to want to carry on.
The main problem is that like how Vengeance on Varos indulged Season 22’s favourite pass-time of torturing Peri, because Charley’s transformation into a slug is so prolonged, it just feels gratuitous and sadistic and simply unpleasant to hear. Because we know that Charley will be back to normal at the end, we know that the whole transformation is pointless and nothing to get worried about, and furthermore there’s no real sense of the ticking clock here at all. At whatever point they got round to rescuing Charley, it would make no difference at all.
And thus just like the morally deplorable moments of Vengeance on Varos, because there’s no urgency and because the threats against the heroes are so vague and slight, the conclusion in which the heroes simply wipe out the entire complex, killing all the Kromon creatures, feels like a completely unmitigated atrocity, and leaves the nastiest aftertaste of any main range Big Finish story so far (or at least until Night Thoughts). Whilst the Doctor didn’t do the killing, he certainly didn’t prevent or condemn it either. And that’s what the moral issue always comes down to. We may know in any given Doctor Who story, such as Power of the Daleks or Brain of Morbius that the situation called for a violent solution and called on the Doctor to abandon his principles and take ruthless action as the last resort, but the story needs to make us feel it as well as know it, it needs to cultivate a sense of urgency and insurmountable odds, and this meandering story does nothing of the kind, and certainly does nothing to justify destroying a whole city of inhabitants. The only impression it gives is that the writer simply wanted to wash his hands of the whole plot as quickly and ultimately as possible, and that’s the only sense we get. There’s no sense of an empire falling or a brave new dawn. It’s the same way that when we witness two Kromon guards being needlessly torn to pieces by the rebels, it feels like nothing more than an excuse for the story to revel in being gory and gruesome for the sake of it.
At its heart, Doctor Who’s morality is not based on pascifism, and that’s a misconception that’s usually adopted by the worst Doctor Who stories that seem to assume there’s anything to be learned at all from seeing the Doctor taking a stance of passive inaction, or showing moral dilemmas being magically resolved by fairy dust. Doctor Who is actually about moral responsibility for your actions and their consequences and when presenting the viewer with scenarios which ask ‘what would you do?’ the show is at its most challenging. That’s what made Creatures of Beauty such an evocative, beautiful portrayal of guilt and remorse. It’s also the reason why Series Two of New Who left many of us feeling betrayed at how it seemingly endorsed the worst, most spoilt, irresponsible and self-involved aspects of modern youth culture that we’d hoped the new show would be railing against. But what’s troubling about this story is how callous it all feels, and there’s no sense of remorse about any of it. It’s partly down to Paul McGann’s apathetic performance but at the end of the story the Doctor walks on from the atrocity he assisted in and seems completely unfettered by any sense of responsibility, or awareness of the consequences. There’s no expression of guilt, not even in the form of the cheap, insincere and indulgent guilt of the Eric Saward era which made the Doctor’s sins or failures seem done as little more than an excuse for him to act all remorseful and noble about it afterwards. The story doesn’t even pretend to care.
Many have complained that the biggest offence of Creed of the Kromon, and indeed of nearly all the Divergent Universe stories is that it seems pointless to do an arc set in a strange new pocket universe only to fill it with the most traditional stories that could have been set anywhere. We might be able to argue that two of the eight arc stories, Scherzo and Natural History of Fear really couldn’t be told in any other context, and by Doctor Who standards that’s a fair percentage, since Warrior’s Gate was the only E-Space story to actually be about E-Space. But the fact remains that Creed of the Kromon is a missed opportunity. On TV, sending the Doctor into another universe has always been a means of placing him somewhere where the normal rules of the show don’t apply, even in the most traditional story, which means there’s suddenly a big chance that the Doctor can lose. That’s what made the parallel world of Inferno the most frightening and chilling world that the show has ever depicted, and hence why the Third Doctor still seems haunted by that experience in The Mind of Evil, and why the all-knowing and ever confident Fourth Doctor came out from E-Space seeming that bit more shaken and vulnerable and aware of living on borrowed time. In a way The Creed of the Kromon does create the sense of a far more hopeless, animalistic and savage pocket world that’s cut off and abandoned from the rest of the universe and thus its population is unleashed upon itself to fend for what it has left, which is something that Natural History of Fear explores well, although here it’s somewhat more repellent than compelling. But what’s so frustrating is how despite this, the Doctor emerges from the adventure unchanged and completely disaffected by any of it.
We perhaps forgave and overlooked the flaws and sins of Vengeance on Varos because it was one of the few highlights of an uninspired era, and because it was pretty much ahead of its time in many ways, in anticipating the power of the media and the sadistic human degradation of reality TV. It drew art out of brutality at a time when blatant brutality was usually all there was and art was ancilliatory at best. Come to think of it, Mindwarp was unlike any other Doctor Who story before it too. Indeed Vengeance on Varos and Mindwarp seemed almost as concerned about the moral degeneration and lost innocence of the show and the mean spirited climate of the times as we were. Like Revelation of the Daleks, Vengeance on Varos was like a really strong, raw, intelligent, brilliant song track on an otherwise patchy and self indulgent album from a once great band that’s now losing its touch, bitterly falling apart and heading for implosion and yet which couldn’t have produced rare jewels like this otherwise, and we’re forever grateful to have both those stories in the canon.
But its not 1985 anymore and this story couldn’t be more behind the times. Worse still, it’s regressive and really vividly reminds us of a morally ugly period of Doctor Who that we’d rather forget, but which has seemingly made an unannounced and unwelcome return. The almost mythologised nasty brutality of the Colin Baker era may have been softened by familiarity and nostalgia but this story manages to make the nastiness and betrayal feel raw and painful like new, and it’s enough to make a fan want to literally weep bitter tears of disillusionment. The only impression it leaves is a strong wish that we’d never listened to the damn thing. As I said of Zagreus and Deadline, there isn’t really any turning back once you become a Doctor Who fan. It’s not really possible to turn away from the TV show, no matter how bad it gets, but giving up on the audios is always far easier and this story of tedium compounded with unpleasant brutality must have made many of those who braved and endured Zagreus and decided not to jump ship wonder why they bothered giving Big Finish a second chance. The worst thing is, we’re only a quarter of the way through the Divergent Universe arc and things can only get more depressing from here. It’s Season 21 all over again!