The Wishing Beast: What can it mean when the Doctor and Mel are drawn to an asteroid by a message from the strange, elderly Applewhite sisters?
The Vanity Box: A strange beauty parlour has opened its doors for business in a dowdy Salford terrace circa 1965.
THE WISHING BEAST
I’ve struggled to review some of the latest Big Finish releases because I’ve found myself with little to say about them. I haven’t had the feeling since “Circular Time” that the main range plays have been about anything — and unfortunately that feeling continues through the latest Paul Magrs release, “The Wishing Beast.”
I find this to be a particular shame: I’m a big fan of Magrs’ writing for the EDA and PDA ranges, as well as his previous scripts for “The Stones of Venice” and “The Wormery” (with Stephen Cole). You’ll see the term “magical realism” thrown about with abandon in sci-fi fandom, Doctor Who fandom in particular, but Magrs is the rare writer whose work truly illustrates this term. Yet despite some interesting buildup in the first two episodes, much of this atmosphere is lost from “The Wishing Beast,” and it feels at times like nothing more than a basic fairy tale. This style can work, of course — check out “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” or “The Scarlet Empress” — but here the tale is drained of all effect and significance.
The plot, as you’d expect from a tale like this, is simple: the sixth Doctor and Mel are drawn via distress signal to the wooded home of two sweet old ladies (Jean Marsh and Geraldine Newman), and the sweet old ladies turn out to be evil old witches looking to feed the heroes to the monster in the woods. The Doctor, of course, vanquishes the enemy by discovering its true nature and turning that back upon itself. Unfortunately, there’s little more to the play than that. There are some cute scenes where the dotty old witches “menace” the Doctor and Mel in their cabin, and Magrs pens some sublime moments involving ghosts and a vacuum cleaner, but apart from that this is standard, by-the-numbers writing. There’s no atmosphere whatsoever: it’s a house and some woods, and the ghosts don’t make things any creepier. Despite the changing terrain at the start of the play, there’s no sense that the regulars are in a world of fairytale characters. The revelation about the Wishing Beast — that he’s just a little boy wanting to frighten his sisters — is the sort of thing that should cap a thematic buildup, but instead it’s just thrown in at the end sans foreshadowing.
Colin Baker is, of course, in good form as the Doctor. There’s a curious moment where he sacrifices himself, however, and openly acknowledges that he’s about to die. This isn’t Magrs’ fault, of course, but this just happened in Exotron — it’s one thing for the Doctor to risk his own life, but if he’s this prone to making decisions with 100% certainty that he’s about to die, I have no idea how he’s still alive. Bonnie Langford continues her assured, reinvented Mel, but struggles a bit with the contrived death scene in episode 3. In fact, the whole of episode 3 sounded incredibly stagy, with more structured speech — if this was making a thematic point of some kind, it missed me entirely. Jean Marsh and Geraldine Newman make a fine pairing as the witches Maria and Eliza, with Marsh playing the evil, controlling sister and Newman playing the senile, clumsy one with laser beam eyes. I’ll be honest, the rest of the cast did nothing to distinguish themselves, though Toby Longworth sounded suitably evil as the Beast.
The production (from sound designer Gareth Jenkins and music composer Andy Hardwick) is convincing as always, though I think they aimed for an atmosphere that was too realistic. John Ainsworth’s direction is quite capable — the play is paced well, and in fact is the best suited to a three-part structure of all the three-parters released thus far. Yet “The Wishing Beast” isn’t very interesting, despite its suitability for the format. It feels like Magrs on a slow day, with all of the elements but none of the heart. And with a stilted and shouty final episode, the play just doesn’t distinguish itself at all.
6/10
THE VANITY BOX
It’s light, it’s fluffy, it’s cute, and I think I missed 95% of the cultural references. I like Magrs’ decision to pre/sequelize “The Wishing Beast” by undercutting the whole thing: this horrific monster being co-opted by a hair salon to perform makeovers is a hilarious image. We also get Colin Baker disgusing himself as a woman — and fooling a hair stylist! Toby Longworth is great, too, as “M. Coffure” — he lets the accent slip just enough to indicate his character is a fraud. Again, though, I think I lack the UK cultural experience to fully appreciate this one, as I didn’t really see the humor of the neighborhood or tavern scenes. Still, “The Vanity Box” is a lot of fun, and it continues the trend of strong one-part releases.
The two-disc “The Wishing Beast”/”The Vanity Box” release contains several interviews — conducted in an improved manner from the past few discs — with Bonnie Langford, Jean Marsh, Geraldine Newman, Sean Connolly, Toby Sawyer, Longworth, Diana Flack, John Ainsworth, and Gareth Jenkins and Andy Hardwick.
7/10