France, the year 1770: by special invitation, the famous ‘Doctor’, friend of Voltaire, arrives at the lonely estate of the lovely Marquise de Rimdelle – once a hostess to the highest of high society, now isolated by the strange, pernicious mist that lingers round the countryside.
But there’s more in that fog than mere vapour, confesses the Marquise’s strange niece to the Doctor’s ward, Nyssa. She senses some uncanny machine circling the fringes of the estate, in the space between the shadows. Watching. Always watching. She’s given it a name: ‘The Steamroller Man’.
Meanwhile, the man in the cellar talks to the Doctor; a dead man, trapped behind the cellar walls. The Steamroller Man is coming, he says; coming to smash the place down. It seems the Doctor has been drawn into a very dangerous liaison…
MASQUERADE
For the final release in Big Finish’s 2014 Peter Davison trilogy, they turned to Doctor Who veteran Stephen Cole for “Masquerade.” While it’s not a brilliant story by any stretch of the imagination, it separates itself easily from the recent monthly releases because it features interesting ideas, actual characters, and a plot that isn’t immediately predictable. Imagine that!
I loved the first episode of “Masquerade.” It starts with the Doctor, Nyssa, and the recently acquired Hannah Bartholomew arriving at a French estate in the guise of a doctor, his ward, and her governess. This sounds like the start of a typical Doctor Who historical, with the characters involving themselves in the affairs of the past – but Cole rapidly turns this on its head, revealing that the Doctor and his companions actually believe they are from this time period and slowly realizing their memories are faulty over the course of the episode. What sounds like a story that merely skipped the traditional TARDIS intro actually becomes one starting in media res, as the listener has no idea why they’re in this situation or how they got there. And as the supporting characters start to lose their own French personas, and the Steamroller Man (Andrew Dickens) shows up, I found myself eager to go right to the next episode for the first time in a long time.
Naturally, the following two episodes are largely runarounds in which the characters flee the pursuit of the Steamroller Man. This is of course a recurrent problem in Doctor Who, one in which an interesting idea isn’t enough to hold the attention for 90 minutes, so padding like this sometimes feels inevitable. And at least in this case it’s entertaining padding – I like the Steamroller Man and his rhyming cadence, and the lack of unsubtle description allowed me to concoct my own image of the “monster” in my head. Yes, he just appears seemingly out of nowhere to smash things up, but as an artificial world, it makes enough sense to hold up. The appearances of the Dead Man (Sean Brosnan) also add mystery to the proceedings.
Why, then, is the fourth episode so overcrowded? Again, I think it’s down to the Doctor Who structure – Nyssa waking up in the real world needs to be a cliffhanger, so that revelation has to be put off until episode 4 when it would be better suited for the 2/3 mark of the story. So we’re left with all the major revelations crammed into 25 minutes, leaving the story straining at the margins. There are a lot of good ideas in this final episode: the Maschera are revealed not to be cartoon villains but rather disgruntled aliens with legitimate gripes against human imperialism, and they even go out of their way to protect humans from the most devastating effects of their sickness. But all of this is handled in a few short lines near the conclusion! We should be spending more time with these ideas and less time running away from a steamroller through an artificial house.
But in the end, the fact that these ideas even exist in the first place sets “Masquerade” apart from the recent stories in the monthly range. Ken Bentley directs well, and while I’ve seen some criticism of the sound design from Simon Robinson, I found his score to be admirably distinctive. Overall, I think “Masquerade” would fit in quite well with the average stories of the Peter Davison TV era: some fascinating sci-fi ideas let down by a needless amount of padding and breathless running about, but still worth experiencing.
Recommended.
7/10