The Umbrella Man is back. But when the Doctor recruits UNIT’s Scientific Adviser Elizabeth Klein for an off-the-books mission to the apocalyptic final days of Hitler’s Germany, he isn’t expecting Klein’s hapless young assistant, Will Arrowsmith, to be joining them, too.
The Doctor isn’t the only alien creature seeking to loot a very particular secret from a Nazi base in Dusseldorf, however. Strange and sinister beings are converging on the same time/space location in search of the scientist Schalk, whose experiments are the key to a devastating power…
The power of Persuasion.
PERSUASION
Halfway through the anniversary year, with the Colin Baker and Peter Davison trilogies wrapped up, Big Finish then turned its attentions to Sylvester McCoy. Rather than picking up in the aftermath of “Gods and Monsters” – a wise decision, given how that story turned out – they instead head after “UNIT: Dominion” and once again reunite the Doctor and Klein. The first story, Jonathan Barnes’ “Persuasion,” is very much part one of a trilogy, and while it does some things right it faces too many fundamental flaws to be deemed a success.
The last trilogy to pair McCoy and Tracey Childs was generally brilliant in large part because of the relationship between their characters. Klein was still the unapologetic Nazi, and the Doctor was attempting to show her the wonders of the universe in order to change her supremacist worldview – but his own moral difficulties got in the way of the lessons, creating many dramatic confrontations along the way. In “Persuasion,” we’re given the Klein that works as scientific adviser to UNIT. In “Dominion,” at least, we got to see her pragmatism juxtaposed against the Doctor’s idealism. Here, there’s no sign of that. Klein comes across as rather generic, in fact: yes, she’s forthright and independent, but she still spends much of the play asking glorified “What is it, Doctor?” questions and acting frustrated at the Doctor’s reticence. We spend much of this play in Nazi Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war, and apart from one character recognizing her, absolutely nothing is done with Klein! It’s such a painfully obvious thing to overlook that I wonder if it wasn’t deliberate, but I can’t see any story benefits.
Meanwhile, Barnes also introduces a new TARDIS traveler: Klein’s assistant Will Arrowsmith, brought to life by Christian Edwards. He is, in two words, absolutely useless: he’s a smart guy who likes to record things on a Dictaphone but has absolutely no idea how to interact with other members of the human race. In other words, he’s an utter cliché, and Edwards does nothing to help, affecting a high-pitched, awkward tone as the most stereotypical geek imaginable. If people like this actually exist – and I know a lot of socially awkward people, but none like Will – they certainly aren’t going to be hired by a top-secret international security force! I’ve seen a couple of reviewers compare him to Jeremy Fitzoliver, and rightfully so, though he’s not quite as useless or annoying. I’m desperately hoping this character is some sort of front or act because I have a very hard time believing a professional drama company would write and cast a character like this in 2013.
Then, of course, we have the Doctor, who’s very arch and mysterious and knows everything that’s going on, except of course when he doesn’t. I love the seventh Doctor in all his forms, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to write this character, and this is largely the wrong way. If you’re going to write the Doctor as all knowing and mysterious, you have to keep him out of the spotlight and show the story from someone else’s perspective. Otherwise, you get “Persuasion,” in which the Doctor practically exclaims “I know something you don’t know!” somewhere in every scene and delights in not explaining himself. And even that would be okay if the story was about Klein’s distrust of the Doctor, but that’s not what’s going on either. It’s clumsy and it encourages the listener to dislike the central character. Then you’ve got the Struwwelpeter, insanely powerful aliens from another universe that the Doctor wasn’t even expecting to encounter, and he disposes of them with almost no effort. This “evil from the dawn of time” stuff has got to stop – it poisoned the recent arc because it’s inherently undramatic and uninteresting.
Speaking of clumsy, the tone of this story is all over the map. The story of the Shepherd (Paul Chahidi) and the Shepherdess (Miranda Raison) is told in pre-credits sequences using an archaic dialect in iambic pentameter and aims for a magical tone. Then there’s Will, who’s straight out of a bad comedy, and the aliens like the Khlecht, yet another obvious satire of cruel business practice, giving the story a comedic air. And then of course the Doctor, Klein, and Nazi Germany, all of which are much more serious. It’s obviously possible to present Doctor Who in shifting tones – heck, it’s one of the hallmarks of the series – but it’s best to pick a primary tone and leaven it with something else.
Despite the overwhelmingly negative tone of this review, I didn’t hate “Persuasion,” but I suspect that’s almost entirely down to the actors and the fact that I could listen to McCoy and Childs read the phone book together. But the story’s flaws are incredibly similar to those seen in “The Interplanetarian,” the segment of “1001 Nights” contributed by Barnes. I understand that this is the first part of a larger story, and that many of my complaints may eventually become irrelevant, but what this story needs more than anything is a tighter focus. The production is solid – Ken Bentley directs well, though Andy Hardwick’s sound design is decidedly unmemorable – but it’s too hard to see what the story is even trying to do, never mind what it accomplishes.
Not recommended.
4/10