Multihaven, a seemingly harmonious community that embraces vast array of faiths. But the Doctor, Charley and C’Rizz don’t know what to believe.
Multihaven, a seemingly harmonious community that embraces vast array of faiths. But the Doctor, Charley and C’Rizz don’t know what to believe.
FAITH STEALER
With the announcement that the new Doctor Who television series would commence in March of 2005, Big Finish decided to move its Paul McGann audio releases forward to the end of 2004, thereby preventing their ongoing series from conflicting with its official counterpart. This meant that after an 18-month gap between Neverland and Zagreus, nine of the following fifteen plays would feature McGann’s Doctor — but after the up-and-down third season, the fourth would have had to be something special to keep listeners’ interests through December. And after the silly, needless “cliffhanger” at the end of The Twilight Kingdom, it fell to Graham Duff’s Faith Stealer to kick off the fourth season with a bang. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.
When you close a season with your lead actor bellowing “RASSILON!” as the object of his obsession, you generally expect the next season’s first episode to deal with this in some way. Of course, Faith Stealer has absolutely nothing to do with that exclamation, existing instead as a purely standalone adventure that has little to nothing to do with the Divergent universe. This isn’t Duff’s fault at all, but it is emblematic of the arrogant wrong-headedness that has dominated the books and audios of late. “I’ll destroy Gallifrey to *make* the authors tell stories they couldn’t possibly have told before!” bellowed Justin Richards, and lo, the range produced 90% stories that would have worked under the old order. Here, it’s the same thing: “I’ll put the eighth Doctor in a completely new universe, forcing the authors to push the boundaries with new, thought-provoking Doctor Who stories!” was the word from BF — but so far the only thing different about this universe is the absence of the word “time” from the vocabularies of its population.
But despite the uncontrollable factors, there’s a great deal to like about Faith Stealer. Doctor Who doesn’t normally go after religion (and recent efforts like Companion Piece might show you why not), so it’s refreshing to hear an author satirizing religion without resorting to baseless attacks or offensive comparisons. Though there are ludicrous religions on display, most of them are shown to be honorable at heart — Duff pokes fun at the specifics but seems to have a healthy respect for the benefits of religion. Duff also displays a keen grasp of comedy: there are several hilarious scenes, perhaps none more so than C’rizz and the Bishop together: “Uh oh!” “What?” “It has to do with turning back!”
Unfortunately, one of the few common themes of Doctor Who that annoys me rears its head here: the necessity to explain away something horrible with pseudoscience or alien influences. If Laan Carder was simply a religious maniac, if Miraculite wasn’t relying upon him for existence, if this had been a pure exploration of the effects of rampant fanaticism, Faith Stealer would be a better story. Despite the elegance of Duff’s solution, the ending seems to be something of a cop-out — and, in either case, narratively speaking it’s quite rushed. This doesn’t detract from the play as a whole, but I think more could have been done with the premise, amusing as the humorous content may be.
I wasn’t particularly impressed with Paul McGann’s performances as the Doctor in the third season, especially since his only chance to play the Doctor “straight” in The Creed of the Kromon was disappointing. The authors don’t seem to know where to take the character post-Zagreus: Shearman made him darker in Scherzo, Martin made him generic in Kromon, and Shindler put together a combination of the two in The Twilight Kingdom — and here he’s just bland, bereft of his usual enthusiasm but also lacking the darkness that has characterized him from time to time since the universe changeover. Usually he sounds great, but here McGann just isn’t very interesting.
The companion role has been a struggle over the past few plays as well. Charley does next to nothing important in this play; Duff writes the character well and makes her charming rather than irritating, but she’s utterly superfluous. Because of this, it’s hard to rate India Fisher’s performance — it’d be nearly impossible for her to impress or disappoint based upon the material, and as expected she’s decent but unspectacular. C’rizz, on the other hand, gets some exploratory material: we see his guilt over having to kill L’da, and his manner of dealing with it. Unfortunately, his past life as a monk is only briefly mentioned, despite this being a play about religion, leading me to believe that we’re going to get annoying hints about his past for two more plays before getting a poorly-written explosion of exposition come The Next Life. I like Conrad Westmaas, but, much like Fisher, he doesn’t have the best material in the world here.
The supporting cast is, as usual, very good. Christian Rodska adds a small amount of comic melodrama to his performance as Laan Carder, making it all the more effective. Tessa Shaw is wonderful as the Bordinan, lending an enlightened centerpiece to a society founded in religion. And Ifan Huw Dafydd is hilarious as Bishop Parrish, especially in his scenes with C’rizz.
Gareth Jenkins’ sound design is as good as you might expect — this time he’s asked to replicate the sound of someone’s forehead birthing a crystal and he manages it without audible effort. Russell Stone’s score is magnificent as always, offering a tone that matches both the content and subject matter of the play. Gary Russell assembles a large cast for the play, rather than re-using actors, and it pays off — plus the pace is kept up. The cover is not good, though — the stained-glass motif was used to better effect on the Jubilee cover and it isn’t evocative of the content at all.
Despite its flaws, the content of Faith Stealer is effective enough to make this a better-than-average play. However, this is a solid midseason episode; as a season premiere it’s completely inappropriate. This won’t affect my rating of the story, but this makes the series seem as though it’s treading water rather than blazing a trail to an epic conclusion. As it stands, though, Faith Stealer is recommended — you could do worse than this play as a vehicle to introduce a new listener to the McGann range.
7/10