The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Nyssa to a vast pyramid, floating in space. A tomb ship – the last resting-place of the God-King of the Arrit, an incredibly advanced and incredibly ancient civilisation, long since extinct.
They’re not alone, however. Another old dynasty walks its twisted, trap-ridden passages – a family of tomb raiders led by a fanatical matriarch, whose many sons and daughters have been tutored in tales of the God-King’s lost treasure.
But those who seek the God-King will find death in their shadow. Death from below. Death from above. Death moving them back and forward, turning their own hearts against them.
Because only the dead will survive.
TOMB SHIP
I’ll be honest – there was a small part of me hoping that “Tomb Ship,” the latest monthly Doctor Who release from Big Finish and authors Emma Beeby and Gordon Rennie, would be terrible purely so I could refer to it with an immature nickname in my review for a chuckle. Fortunately it’s not quite that bad, and thus my immaturity is kept from you all – but it’s still another bland, uninspiring release in a range that continues to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
The sad part is the potential that exists here. An alien race that sends its celebrated dead into deep space to become stars, a thief who spends her entire life searching desperately for a treasure that does not exist… this could be a wonderful character piece with an elegiac atmosphere. Instead, Beeby and Rennie go the traditional action movie route, rigging the tomb with dangerous traps, turning the thief into a megalomaniac, giving her one-note associates, etc. Her sons have one personality trait each: there’s the stupid one, the cowardly one, the violent one, and then her angry daughter. Someone on Gallifrey Base compared this crew to Futurama character Mom and her idiot sons, and it’s a surprisingly (and disappointingly) apt comparison.
What is it with Big Finish’s desire to constantly produce large action stories in this range? I understand that audio doesn’t require the multimillion dollar CG that TV episodes need, but it does require an ability to describe what’s going on, and too often we get scripts like this one in which characters yell descriptions to each other. And maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if things were at least imaginative, but “Tomb Ship” isn’t even that: oh, a giant pillar that crashes into the ground every 2 seconds that a character needs to get around? Remember when Galaxy Quest lampooned the hell out of scenes like that? I do – it was 15 years ago, right when Big Finish was starting Doctor Who!
I just don’t see where stuff like this comes from. You’ve got two authors who are relatively new to the range – shouldn’t they be boiling over with fresh, ambitious ideas? You’re in the Doctor Who universe, where the beauty is its ability to go anywhere and do anything, so you decide to do Dungeons & Dragons in space with one-note ciphers for supporting characters? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised after the wholly uninspiring “The Doomsday Quatrain,” but at least that wasn’t interminable listening. Oh, and at the end, Hannah Bartholomew turns up, triumphantly declaring “…or my name’s not Hannah Bartholomew!” in a scene clearly drawn as a punch-the-air moment for the listener. My reaction: “Who the hell is Hannah Bartholomew?” I honestly couldn’t remember, and I had to wait for Nyssa to spell it out for me before it sprung to mind. This is a character that featured heavily last month and I’d already forgotten her – you’d think I’d have remembered the laughably terrible accent, but I suppose not – and I cannot think of a stronger indictment of the state of the main range right now.
I guess the production was okay. I don’t have anything more to say about this. Don’t waste your money.
4/10