One empire has fallen and another has taken its place. The race known as The Wrath are expanding into new territory. Only the Earth Empire stands in their way.
It’s been fifty years since the Doctor last visited this sector of space. And one man in particular has been awaiting his return. As the mistakes of his past come back to haunt him, and with a price on his head and bounty hunters on his tail, the Doctor is heading for a last reckoning.
The pieces are finally coming together. Somewhere deep within The Shadow Heart.
THE SHADOW HEART
After a strong start and a mistake in the middle segment, the trilogy following the life of Kylo and the Drashani Empire comes to a conclusion with Jonathan Morris’s “The Shadow Heart,” one of the more self-consciously epic Doctor Who stories ever written. It’s almost too ambitious for its own good, but it’s refreshing to hear this sort of writing in Doctor Who, which doesn’t normally lend itself to the epic format.
The nature of the story is clear from the sheer number of settings. From its beginnings in a seedy space bar, to several spaceships – including one that’s actually a giant snail named Hercules – to a desolate half-planet, to the fortress of the Wrath, this is a script operating on a massive scale. To Morris’s credit, he basically manages to execute this without any significant difficulties – perhaps some of the descriptions are rushed, but he manages to present these fantastic images on audio with very few examples of clunky descriptive dialogue. The characters also travel between them with a minimum of effort, eliminating any sense of boredom, a sense that pervaded “The Acheron Pulse.”
“The Shadow Heart” is also notable for how it portrays the Doctor, giving us a rare insight into how the seventh Doctor actually operates. Unlike Morris’s novel “Festival of Death,” which followed the Doctor and Romana’s timeline as they appeared haphazardly throughout “normal” time, this story follows the ordinary people and lets us see the Doctor popping in and out, often in the wrong order. When the Doctor appears at the beginning, his plan nearly complete, he’s every inch the mysterious, manipulative Time Lord with a master plan. Yet when we see him near the end, at his personal beginning, it’s clear he has no idea what the hell’s going on and is making everything up as he goes – and then using his memories of that improvisation to make himself look mysterious! It’s not the NA Doctor, of course, but it’s a fun, unique take on the character, something which can be hard to come by.
The problem with the story becomes clear as it becomes apparent that this trilogy is actually about Kylo (James Wilby), not the various empires or even the Doctor’s interference. Clunky as “The Acheron Pulse” was, it gave Kylo his catharsis: he earned forgiveness from his beloved, he sacrificed of himself, and he was given a peaceful place to live by the Doctor. But here, as soon as the Wrath turn violent, Kylo turns evil once again, living in a castle on an abandoned world and waiting for the moment that he can capture the Doctor and confront the Wrath. And yes, at the end of the play, he realizes the error of his ways and earns forgiveness from Aliona (Kirsty Besterman). I realize it’s not entirely fair to criticize Morris’s play for what happened the previous month, but really, all of this is old ground covered in the story we’d just heard. And Wilby still hasn’t discovered subtlety, using the same one-note supervillain voice for everything, with a bit of added gravel for 50 years of age.
The supporting cast is generally effective. Eve Karpf and Alex Mallinson steal the show, their double-act of Talbar and Horval entertaining throughout without becoming overbearing or silly. But the featured star of the supporting cast is DS9’s Chase Masterson, who plays the assassin/bounty hunter Vienna Salvatori. I actually enjoyed Masterson’s performance – she has the sultry charisma to pull a role like this off – but the character itself left me cold. She’s mostly a one-note employee of the highest bidder; there’s a moment where the Doctor seems to start to turn her but it quickly vanishes. The first scenes try to establish that she’s ruthless: she murders a barkeep (John Banks) for no reason other than she told him her name, but this scene loses its effectiveness as literally every other credited character in the story eventually hears her name without dying immediately. I’m also not sure why this character warrants an apparent spinoff, as there’s really nothing interesting about her – in what way does this story compel us to want to hear her further adventures?
The production is generally excellent, as director Ken Bentley and sound designer Wilfredo Acosta easily capture the various settings throughout Morris’s epic script without ever losing the plot or the interest. Overall, “The Shadow Heart” is a solid, ambitious conclusion to this trilogy. While not without its flaws, it’s definitely worth hearing to experience performed Doctor Who on a true epic scale, and it adequately wraps up the various plot strands started in the previous two stories.
Recommended.
7/10