The search for the Key to Time has stalled. Forced into an alliance with one of his greatest enemies, the Doctor suggests a course of action that validates chaos itself.
The search for the Key to Time has stalled. Forced into an alliance with one of his greatest enemies, the Doctor suggests a course of action that validates chaos itself.
Big Finish seems to be releasing the audios earlier and earlier. Not that I’m complaining!
Destroyer of Delights is wonderful!
WARNING: Spoilers galore!
There are 40 reasons why I enjoyed this audio. Well I’m sure I could come up with 40 reasons, but if you’ve picked up in the reference, then you’ve been concentrating!
Destroyer of Delights picks up from the cliff-hanger ending of Judgement of Isskar. We see a different side to the Black Guardian, he’s not all loud and shouty! And this sets up the rest of the audio. The Doctor agrees to let the Black Guardian transport him and Amy somewhere random – 9th Century Sudan. The Doctor and Amy get split up and Amy is not sure how to cope. Amy also looses her satchel and is desperate to find both it and the Doctor. Because of how she was made, she latches onto someone. In this case, she latches onto the slave girl Nisrin. Nisrin’s influence on Amy is interesting, but Amy is now too much like the Doctor to be affected too much. Amy becomes a slave to the Prince Omar and his father however Amy does not know how to be a slave, or what a mop and bucket are!
The Doctor is pottering around in the desert, doesn’t know where Amy or his TARDIS are, or whether Amy is alive or not and he runs into a tax collector who just happens to be the White Guardian! The White Guardian is stuck in this time and place. His powers are fading because the segments are decaying.
Neither the Guardians nor Amy can work out where the fifth segment is. It just doesn’t seem to exist.
There is an interesting almost love story going on between the slave, Nisrin and the master of the palace, Prince Omar. We can see just how much like the Doctor Amy has become because she is constantly speaking her mind. Nisrin thinks this is Amy trying to win over Prince Omar and becomes insanely jealous. She accuses Amy of ‘batting her eyelashes’ and the next time Amy sees Prince Omar, she says “Don’t look at my eyelashes!” showing just how innocent she still is.
Prince Omar’s father turns out to be the Black Guardian, who is also stuck in this time and place. He has a spaceship which he needs to power and the only resource available to him that will work is gold. Little does he know that the process he uses to turn the gold into the power he needs actually turns the gold into the fifth segment. Amy realises this and her and the Doctor escape in the TARDIS (which was in the same place and Amy’s satchel) and the Guardians are stuck in 9th century Sudan with no chance of escape. The audio ends with the two Guardians bickering like an old married couple!
I really enjoyed Destroyer of Delights. It’s just as good as Judgement of Isskar. It was a wonderful mix of the classic story, Aladdin, and an alien/sci-fi twist. It has a lot of layers and definitely needs more than one listen to be fully appreciated. The cast was absolutely wonderful. Normally, there is someone in the cast that I don’t think much of, but not this time. Peter Davison, Ciara Janson, David Troughton, Jason Watkins, Jess Robinson, Bryan Pilkington, Paul Chahidi, Will Barton and David Peart all gave wonderful performances. Lisa Bowerman directed this audio (her first main range audio, according to the interview extras!) and she did a marvellous job. The music was perfectly balanced with the dialogue which just added to the atmosphere that was created.
So all in all, a wonderful audio. I can’t wait for the next and final instalment, The Chaos Pool. I am sad that there is only one more audio to go. Key 2 Time is definitely one of the best audio series that Big Finish has ever produced.
KEY 2 TIME: THE DESTROYER OF DELIGHTS
I’ll admit the concept of revisiting the Key to Time season seemed totally unnecessary to me: by necessity, the plot is going to be exactly the same — searching time and space for the segments of the Key — and what more can be done with a concept like that? Still, there’s potential there: there’s a lot of mileage left in the Guardians, for example, and the introduction of Amy and Zara sets up an intriguing new Doctor/companion dynamic. I didn’t particularly enjoy the first play in this series, “The Judgement of Isskar,” but I had heard good things about the second, Jonathan Clements’ “The Destroyer of Delights.” Unfortunately, describing my reaction to this play as “disappointed” would be an understatement.
I’ll start with a positive: the setting of “Destroyer” is brilliant. Clements has clearly done a great deal of research, both into history and mythology, and has crafted a 9th century Arabian society almost worth the price of admission on its own. Particularly good is his use of language: this is one of the few stories to foreground the TARDIS translation circuits, which allows us to see, through Amy’s “unusual” use of nouns, the Arabic forebears of common English terms.
And yet, despite this fantastic setting, there isn’t anything even remotely believable about the story. I’m certainly not the type of person who rejects humor in Doctor Who; season 17 is one of my favorites, after all, and I’ve never read anything by Douglas Adams that I’ve disliked. “Destroyer of Delights,” though, doesn’t make an attempt to take anything seriously: the vast majority of the characters are flippant and disinterested, the relationships are completely incongruous with the setting, and Amy’s characterization is laughably inconsistent with the previous play. I mentioned the Guardians in the opening paragraph, and, following on from the cliffhanger in “Isskar,” they reappear in this story — and are totally reimagined as comedy characters. I’m entirely unsure why this decision was made: what is the point of taking well-known characters from the TV series and distorting them to the point of unrecognizability? You’ve talked about the “Grace” in this series already — so use them if you want to have two comedy agents of order and chaos arguing with each other. I like how Clements portrays their actions, providing a lesson in the relative merits of their desires, but it’s drowned in this unfunny nonsense. I’m not questioning the casting, either — David Troughton (Black) and Jason Watkins (White) play their roles excellently — but at no point was I even remotely convinced that these were the Guardians. A common argument against this is that they wore stuffed birds on their heads in “Enlightenment” — but I’m judging their characters by their actions, not by whatever the costuming department stuck them in.
Then there’s Amy, whose portrayal in this is confusing and somewhat insulting. It was established in “Isskar” that these living tracers derived their personalities from those around them — but it was certainly not established that Amy would immediately revert to an ignorant blank slate the instant she was separated from the Doctor. So there she is, roaming through the scenes as a totally wide-eyed innocent, completely bereft of any social graces, but still possessing whatever knowledge is useful to drive the plot along. Sure, Ciara Janson plays the part well, so it’s not her fault that Amy is deeply irritating, but that doesn’t reverse the effect. It would literally be impossible to craft a more helpless, “what-is-it-Doctor?” companion than this — some would call this a step back.
Let’s also not forget about the relationship between slave Nisrin (Jess Robinson) and Prince Omar (Bryan Pilkington). We learn from Nisrin that slaves are the lowest of the low in this society: while the Caliphate is reknowned for being welcoming and friendly to all visiting strangers, slaves are often known to go missing or turn up dead for the smallest of infractions. Nisrin, despite her better judgment, has fallen in love with Omar. This could easily set up something interesting or — heaven forfend — dramatic, but instead devolves rapidly into beyond-cliched scenes in which Omar must choose between his love of gold and his love for Nisrin.
On the production front, Lisa Bowerman’s direction is reasonably effective: despite the often-tedious subject matter, the play never seems overlong or bloated. Simon Robinson’s contributions are something of a mixed bag — his sound design is impressive, but his score is often jarring. Overall, “The Destroyer of Delights” is a major step down from its predecessor, and yet again has me asking of a Big Finish release: what on earth was the point?
4/10