After many adventures with the Doctor, Peri returns to her family to explain exactly where she’s been. Meanwhile, in the shadows lurk the Cybermen.
After many adventures with the Doctor, Peri returns to her family to explain exactly where she’s been. Meanwhile, in the shadows lurk the Cybermen.
THE REAPING
Back around the time of “Terror Firma” I remarked that Joseph Lidster is not only talented but important — by that, I meant that he doesn’t settle for writing potboilers or “standard” Doctor Who stories. Lidster pushes boundaries and explores new realms, often taking the classic series into “new series territory” with remarkable skill. This is on display again in “The Reaping” as Lidster develops Peri into a sympathetic, fully three-dimensional character, accomplishing in just over two hours what still hasn’t been fully realized in the whole series of Peri/Erimem audios. But the presence of the Cybermen makes “The Reaping” the success it is — while the plot is hardly the best, Lidster’s use of the Cybermen is arguably the best in any performed media since their original story back in 1966.
Doctor Who has often used the Cybermen as a simplistic social cypher, presenting them as an illustration of the benefits of human emotions. It’s easy to recall scenes of Peter Davison appealing the joys of a well-prepared meal, or David Tennant proclaiming the virtues of being human, but what, ultimately, is proven by these stories? The “logical” plans of the Cybermen are almost always convoluted and silly, driven more often than not by a desire for revenge, and they’re always brought down at the end. While there are often consequences — the death of Adric being the most obvious — it’s easy to say that human emotion is superior to cold Cyber-logic when those with emotions always win. It would be nice to counterpoint this, but the obvious solution of letting the Cybermen win won’t fly in a drama like Doctor Who, so what is a writer to do to make his point?
Lidster’s solution is brilliant: he sidelines his Cybermen, using them only as a point of comparison, and allows human emotion to dominate the play. The Cyberleader’s (Nicholas Briggs) plan is the driving force behind the play’s action, but at its heart it is irrelevant. Indeed, this is the weakness of “The Reaping” — the plan is honestly ludicrous, and seems to be in place to give the play an apocalyptic thrust that it simply does not need. It’s not so bad for it to rely upon coincidence — the Doctor never reacts out of character, so it’s hardly unbelievable — but the ultimate objective is somewhat silly. But this doesn’t cripple the play because it doesn’t matter: the Cyberleader is simply there to provide a reference point and to remind the listener that this is a play about emotion. The Cyber-plot is not without merit, however: the Doctor defeating the Cyberleader through the simple human tactic of lying is a delightfully ironic twist, and the final fate of the Cyberleader is a stroke of genius.
The true core of “The Reaping” is the story of Peri’s return home to Baltimore and her family after four months (to them) away. Peri’s story is uncomfortable: it becomes rapidly apparent that she was not the most likeable person in the past, as she has the reputation of a selfish snob. Her relationship with her mother Janine Foster (Claudia Christian) is strained at best, while even her (best?) friend Kathy (Jane Perry) has reservations about Peri’s character. Her return coincides with the death of Kathy’s father Anthony Chambers (Stuart Milligan), an event which has devastated family and friends, and rather than a warm welcome, Peri’s return is treated with disdain. Even Anthony’s accused killer Daniel (Vincent Pirillo) is miserable, having been framed for the killing — and having spent nights sleeping in the graveyard mourning his deceased wife. It might sound melodramatic, and it’s certainly not easy listening, but ultimately this display of raw emotion is important, as it allows the listener to truly believe in these characters as they come together to face a greater threat.
And that’s the role of the Cyberman, ultimately: his plan brings a devastated, disjointed family together, even though their chaotic actions and thoughts have no logical business uniting. Of course, it’s the Doctor who serves as the catalyst, but the point remains: while the Cyberman clings to life in his capsule, withering away, actual living people are uniting outside. It’s beautiful, in its way, and it is this that the Doctor is speaking of whenever he lauds the human spirit. Lidster doesn’t make it easy, however — a “chaotic” twist at the conclusion throws lives back into disarray and depression. When Peri then asks if maybe the Cybermen are better off, the listener might briefly agree — but just as the Doctor immediately supports his companion, so too does the preceding play support the listener.
Lidster has written a “season 22” sixth Doctor, and Colin Baker clearly relishes the role, sinking his teeth into the character’s trademark sarcasm. The Doctor clearly softens near the end, however — presumably this is intended as a precursor to the mellower Doctor/Peri relationship seen in “The Trial of a Time Lord.” Nicola Bryant’s performance is probably her best in the role — no, this isn’t the mature character we see alongside the fifth Doctor and Erimem, but what this is is the character we remember from television maturing before our ears. I loved Babylon 5, but I always felt Christian was the weakest acting link, and yet here she slides easily into her role — it’s surprising just how easy it is to believe that this character is Peri’s mother. Perry and Jeremy Lindsay-Taylor are quite believable and sympathetic as Kathy and Nate, while Pirillo’s performance is heartbreaking in its sincerity. Briggs’ Cyberman voices are unusual but effective, while John Schwab is hilarious in his brief scenes.
Gary Russell has been at the helm of some excellent productions, but this might be his best turn in the director’s chair. His actors emote directly into the microphone: we can hear them choking up, hear them sniffling, and this lends a painful believability to the production. David Darlington’s sound design is solid yet subdued, while his score is excellent: partially string-based and sounding much different from his earlier works.
Unfortunately, the bizarre Cyber-plot prevents “The Reaping” from achieving a top score. But that shouldn’t prevent anyone from making this purchase: at its heart, this play functions as a tribute to the human spirit, and does so as honestly as anything we’ve seen in any of Doctor Who’s many forms. Perhaps more will be revealed in its companion piece “The Gathering,” but even on its own “The Reaping” stands out.
Highly recommended.
8/10
“Perhaps the Cybermen have the right idea. They don’t have to go through this.”
The Doctor running from the cops on the streets of Baltimore, gratuitous references to Miami Vice, and with Babylon 5’s Claudia Christian as special guest star. As with The Juggernauts, part of the appeal of The Reaping is that it feels like a speculation of what would have happened if America had taken over and produced the show themselves immediately after the ‘85 cancellation crisis, and thus ensuring Colin Baker got a deserved full run as the Doctor. The Reaping feels like a glimpse of what that series might have been like, or rather what we hoped it would be like. Bold, cinematic, futuristic, media savvy and distinctly teen orientated. It also shares with The Juggernauts a rather retributive conclusion that doesn’t care if it contradicts continuity or makes the Doctor a hypocrite, as if it’s being pitched towards an American audience that expects such harsh justice. This is Doctor Who as many of us would have wanted it to be. A Doctor Who that could look respectable and have a real cool and street cred rather than the pitiable freakshow it had become in the 80’s. In other words, something that would have the rich production of the McGann movie, but with the bullish, irascible Sixth Doctor there to prevent things from getting sentimental or Hollywoodized.
Ultimately though, The Reaping is very much a Season 22 story, and not a good one. It’s little different to how Joe Lidster’s The Rapture encompassed every negative notion of the McCoy era, i.e. angsty, tonally schizophrenic stories directed by film students let loose with a video camera. From the Doctor’s threat to throw scaldling hot cyanide in the brainwashed cop’s eyes, to the crass and hollowly manipulative killing off of Peri’s last ties to Earth, the Reaping has plenty of deplorable moments that leave a bad taste in the mouth. As with most of Season 22’s output, it doesn’t help that there’s a wafer thin plot to expose the pointless deaths as gratuitous and make the Doctor’s more devious and thuggish behaviour seem unprovoked and unmitigated. Particularly here where the Doctor is up against an already pretty beat up enemy, who doesn’t take any effort to vanquish, infact they practically die of natural causes in the end. As is too often the case, a gratuitous midway twist is added which only serves to cheat and disappoint by making the story smaller and less urgent as the invasion of the marching dead is revealed to be a hoax in a major copout.
What it does have over Season 22 though is a touch of humanity. Ever since New Who came along with its self involved emotional mush and spoilt crybaby companions, Big Finish, like a lot of fans heralded it as ‘full blooded drama’ and developed a major case of amnesia, and misremembered all Doctor Who on TV and audio before New Who as somehow being emotionally vapid all along (as if The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The War Games, Inferno and The Geen Death never happened). This story where Peri is returned to her family is the proposed remedy to something that wasn’t a problem in the first place, certainly not in the audios (well, if you don’t count the Gary Russell ones). Doubtless many of the fans who hated the domestic/soap approach in New Who will hate it here, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea and certainly in New Who it was forced down our throats, repeated to the point of becoming hollowed out and making the whole so-called ‘adventure’ series feel stuck on a council estate. It was almost as if the makers were determined to get a negative response from fandom and would keep doing it till they got a reaction.
What we have here is fairly shrewd material. Peri’s relationship with her mother is a very human one, a relationship that’s deeply antagonistic and yet oddly functional for that reason. There’s clearly a strong mother-daughter bond beneath the harsh words and furious passions. And of course it provides a precedent for Peri’s relationship with the Sixth Doctor. On TV, the Sixth Doctor and Peri were simply bickering adolescents, reflecting the show at its most petty and immature and leaving most viewers baffled as to why Peri willingly travelled with such a bully. Here the dynamic is redefined as something Freudian, giving a soul to what was once simply shallow attitude. More importantly when the Cybermen attack, it gives Peri a chance to answer back to her mother’s judgement of her being a failure by showing how capable she is in a crisis. But what’s really touching and human is that her mother can’t accept that, feeling that her daughter has now been brainwashed or transformed beyond recognition.
But as with a lot of Season 22, The Reaping lacks the right kind of symbiosis. These domestic scenes feel like a requirement rather than the heart of the tale. They shouldn’t because effort has gone into trying to make it cohesive. The Cybermen of the 80’s were particularly characterised by their masculinity. Earthshock indulges a particularly homo-erotic exhibition of Cyberman troops. As much as it sums up the style over substance of the era, Earthshock is a very good entertaining story that catches Eric Saward’s brutal actioneering approach to Doctor Who at its most fresh and dynamic, as opposed to the horribly slow, leering, contrived and cynical approach to Seasons 21 and 22. Then there’s Attack of the Cybermen which makes the Cybermen’s masculinity more clear by pitching them against the Cryons in a battle of the sexes, and of course continues the 80’s Robocop macho storytelling tradition of ‘pain builds character’, in the way the much derided hand crushing scene is meant to represent Lytton’s resilience and penance in one go. Silver Nemesis continues with this battle of the sexes with Ace, Lady Peniforte and the Nemesis Statue herself causing the biggest Cyber-colatteral. In that regard here the deliciously cheeky notion of the deceased father of the household becoming a Cyberman and bursting from his grave, announcing in a metallic voice ‘It is me. It is…. Daaaaad’ at the cliffhanger is firmly in line with this. The same is true of when the lead Cyberman sees what it believes to be the perfect all-Cybernised future, puts the Doctor in a fatherly hug grip and insists he watches and takes pride in its handywork in a manner that can only be seen as an emotional desire to bond with the Doctor and share its philosophy. It’s a strangely poignant moment of cyber-pathos.
This is in many ways a story which takes the usual 80’s father-son bonding exercise of having video nights of watching Miami Vice and Zombie movies together and runs with it, imagines it’s all real and that the family home really is under siege from the real cops and zombies, so having the Cybermen and their brainwashed police minions here fits very cosily here. Perhaps too easily, because it gives the Cybermen such an assured place in the story that they do little to subvert it. As with Cuddlesome this story has aspirations of being very 80’s pop-culture savvy, where the Doctor’s first trip to the future is to a visual media repository called the Gogglebox, and he can marvel at the prospect of watching a marathon of the Police Academy films without it seeming out of character.
As I said before, this gives the story a distinctly ‘cool’ and ‘hip’ feel but in a way that speaks to the fans, particularly of the Colin Baker era. Peri does demonstrate the character growth we knew she was capable of, showing how the once spoilt, self-involved brat has learned empathy, heroism and utilitarianism as second nature from the Doctor. It’s a revisit that’s bittersweet, aware that sometimes a return home to family after a long breathing space apart reveals the depressing truth that nothing ever changes, which again makes the rigid, single-minded Cybermen a perfect foil to the story. We have a particularly snobbish and suffocatingly parochial family at its heart (this is definitely how the show would have done domestic back in the 80’s), the despised vagrant Daniel Woods who is wrongly suspected of murder and made a pariah out of by the bereaved family, and we have Kathy Chambers, the geeky best friend who welcomes Peri’s return with some anxious reservations of how the return of the popular girl is going to make her seem insignificant and ignored again. And amidst this we have the Sixth Doctor, the alien non conformist who despite being just as much of an outsider as the rest, has enough natural authority and sense of purpose, dignified decorum and quick wit to stand apart and proud. The scene where the Doctor delivers a promise of vengeance to the Cyberleader after killing one of the innocents is most welcome to those who remember how this Doctor’s unscrupled ruthless streak sets him apart from the rest, and this would be doubly welcome to fans after recently having to endure David Tennant’s messianic “I forgive you” and “make this society’s foundation that of a man who never would” rubbish.
But again it gets back to the needlessly nasty moments, which amidst the above plot points, come completely out of left field. The death toll is actually fairly mild by Doctor Who standards but the deaths themselves are unpleasantly cheap. Take Daniel Woods for example. A wrongfully accused man with a name to clear, but who doesn’t want to face the Cybermen again, and so he declares defeatism. But the Doctor rather deviously manipulates him into getting involved, by using the man’s grief of his deceased wife against him. So Daniel joins the noble fight, finds understanding with the unpopular teenager Kathy Chambers who offers understanding about the loss of his wife, and just when he seems to be on the halfway point of completing his character journey of healing process and turning from weasel into hero, he’s suddenly killed off, and the Doctor’s culpability in involving him and failing to protect him is almost cavalierly brushed aside.
This is meant to be an exploration of the Doctor’s failings and death as his constant companion and the opening of questions about how trustworthy the Doctor is, which will be followed up and presumably answered in The Gathering. This particularly shows in the Doctor’s confrontation with the Cyber-leader, who reveals the gullible failings of the Doctor that made him easy to manipulate, and how it killed Mr Chambers to use the Doctor’s compassion against him. The Cyber-leader also demonstrates a philosophy of linear time and causality that makes the Cybermen seem suddenly at odds with the Doctor’s judgement of them being an entropic lost cause. Not to mention that when the Cyber-leader calls the Doctor’s bluff and has Nathaniel killed, it’s making a point about how the Doctor’s private war with the Cybermen has a cost when they finally learn to push back. But like much of the Eric Saward era, it tends far more towards shock than substance, and comes across not so much as challenging and more like a cheat, of making the audience the butt of a particularly tasteless practical joke. The culmination of which is of course the death of Peri’s mother, killed by a malfunctioning plot device that the Doctor carelessly left in her hands. I’m sure many of us would have loved this to have happened to Rose’s mother in New Who, but even if this is wish fulfilment of killing off the companion’s last ties to Earth and barring future excursions into the land of soap, it’s still unpleasant to hear. It’s so obligatory and required as to be cold blooded. Peri’s tearful grieving scene is poignant, Nicola Bryant’s performance in the scene is brilliant and there’s a real naïve tragic beauty of her distraught wondering if maybe the emotionless Cybermen have the better life if they don’t have to go through this pain. But other than that it’s such an afterthought to the story that it just can’t help but feel crass and manipulative. It also makes the Doctor seem like a manipulative opportunist in taking her back to the Tardis whilst she’s at her most vulnerable. When Terror Firma viewed a bereaved family, it reckoned with the grief in a thorough and cathartic way that was borderline therapeutic. This just feels like striking at a raw nerve of something we all go through, and more importantly as an add on to the Colin Baker years on TV, it just feels like the last word on an era that delighted in abusing and tormenting Peri.
It’s a solid production with wonderful sound design and atmosphere. The script is witty, intricate and intriguing and it always bears a relisten and is never any less than engaging. If anything there’s a disheartening shame in how the quality of writing should be above such cheap tactics. Come on Joe, you’re better than this.
This audio completely blew me away. It starts off with Peri and her mum, the day Peri met the Doctor. The Doctor and Peri then land on the moon in the future, Peri gets to watch the news from home. Someone she knew was murdered and she persuades the Doctor to take her to the funeral. This is where the fun starts.
We meet Peri’s mum, Janine, and discover that they have a very firey relationship and Peri’s best friend Kathy and her brother Nate. From the start, Kathy doesn’t seem like the type of person Peri would be friends with. The funeral happens four months after Peri meets the Doctor, and Janine is not impressed that Peri just left them. During those four months, Janine has become a mother figure for Kathy and Nate, which makes Peri extremely uncomfortable. There is an icredably moving scene where Janine and Kathy are talking about how they were there for each other and how much Peri has changed, while Peri listens at the door.
Nicola Bryant gives an amazing performance. She goes from the young and excitable Peri we first meet in Planet of Fire, to the grown up Peri we all know and love, but when she is with her mother again, she regresses back to a child. And to be able to convey this in a purely audio story is incredable.
Peri decides to stay with her mother instead of travelling with the Doctor, which is a complete heartbreaker scene. However, the story wraps up in a very different way to the ‘normal’ way.
Its an interesting Cyberman story. However, that comes secondary to Peri’s story. Peri (and the listener) go on a rocky rollercoaster ride during this audio, with very high emotional peaks. Nicola really the star of the show in this audio.