After “A Christmas Treasury” and “The History of Christmas,” Big Finish released its third holiday-themed anthology, “The Ghosts of Christmas,” the 22nd volume in the Short Trips range. Would it live up to the standards of its predecessors?
Faithful Friends: Part One — Cavan Scott & Mark Wright — While the characterization of the Brigadier as a lonely man with no life outside UNIT is well-portrayed, it adds an upsetting undertone to the Pertwee era. Fortunately, this is an uplifting tale that exhibits the relationship between the Doctor and the Brigadier like few others.
But Once a Year — Colin Harvey — Well-written to be sure, but almost too short! For a Christmas anthology, this entire volume is surprisingly downbeat, and this story of a monster abducting children from their family at Christmas and the resulting psychological effects fits well.
For the Man Who Has Everything — Dan Abnett — A cute story about the traditional assistant-secretly-loves-her-boss relationship, with the requisite Christmas theme. The final scene, however, elevates it to the sublime. Good stuff.
Tell Me You Love Me — Scott Matthewman — Heartbreaking. A race needing love to survive (echoes of “Fear Her”) impersonates missing or dead family members to get that love, causing terror and anguish in their victims. Interesting to get a major revelation about Barbara in a short story collection.
The Cutty Wren — Ann Kelly — An intriguing, if brief, take on the similarities between religion, magic, and advanced technology. The companions are superfluous; the interactions between the Doctor and Isiah make the story.
Do You Dream in Colour? — Gary Russell — Gorgeous. Russell has always been at his best writing character pieces, and this examination of the underrated Ben/Polly relationship after their travels in the TARDIS might be the best story in this collection.
The Nobility of Faith — Jonathan Clements — Presented as a translated version of the story of Aladdin (Ala ud-Din), here we see the fourth Doctor presented as the mythical genie and the TARDIS as his lamp. Amusing story written in an accomplished style.
24 Crawford Road — Ian Farrington — A competent but predictable story of time travel, connecting a future archaeologist with a mundane suburban family home at Christmas. There really isn’t anything more to say about it.
The Sommerton Fetch — Peter Anghelides — I love Pertwee in this: he’s pompous but self-aware, genial but not condescending. It’s easy to understand his relationship with Jo when you see the character interact with Casimer — this is some of the best Doctor Who writing Anghelides has done, if you ask me.
Faithful Friends: Part Two — Cavan Scott & Mark Wright — I’m really not sure why Scott & Wright are doing this to the Brigadier. In the first part, we saw him as a man for whom the military was life. Now we see him at home at Christmas with his family — and totally unable to relate to any of them and generally feeling uncomfortable. It’s a very good story, and a good setup for the finale, but don’t approach this looking for holiday cheer.
Dear Great Uncle Peter — Neil Corry — I like how Corry narrates this story, using the perspective of a little kid but putting the stylistic flourishes aside when it comes to dialogue or action scenes. It’s an unmemorable story, but the stars of the show are the fourth Doctor and Leela, who are at their most entertaining.
Do You Believe in the Krampus? — Xanna Eve Chown — Another brutal read, this story presents less advanced societies founded on perfectly understandable human interpretations of their surroundings as dangerously ignorant, ultimately leaving the Doctor to despair of the human race. Merry Christmas!
They Fell — Scott Handcock — Another story from a child’s perspective, and another good one — the changed family and the presence of the Doctor and Charley as stable factors makes for an effective combination and an impressive use of limited perspective.
The Christmas Presence — Simon Barnard & Paul Morris — Gorgeous. Barnard & Morris provide another nominee for “best in the collection” with this tale of a lifelong mystery revealed to be something beautiful. Great work with Troughton, too, something that isn’t easy to accomplish.
Snowman in Manhattan — John Binns — The epistolary style is becoming repetitive in this collection, but it’s nice to read a truly uplifting story in with the darkness. A man regains his lost confidence and stability with a visit from the Doctor and companions, tearing the depressing veil of retail work.
The Crackers — Richard Salter — I like the narration, and I like the way Evelyn is incorporated into the plot, but ultimately the resolution feels a bit too abstract for my taste. The image of the sixth Doctor as an awkward Santa Claus in a tattered costume more than makes up for it, however.
Jigsaw — Michael Abberton — Sneaky/clever, and you don’t realize it unless you check the dates at either end of the story. It’s the sort of thing that’s quite rewarding to figure out, but seriously, did we need the smug title and last line?
Dr. Cadabra — Trevor Baxendale — Far too rushed, as the story spends almost its entire length on the setup and barely remembers the resolution at the end. Fortunately, as with “The Crackers,” the sixth Doctor makes a great fish out of water, and his attempts to convince as a children’s entertainer are hilarious.
Far Away in a Manger — Iain McLaughlin & Claire Bartlett — As expected, Erimem’s creator knows the character — and the dynamic with the Doctor and Peri — better than anyone. The ending, however, jars, as the fifth Doctor is the last person I’d expect to have a manipulative plan running behind the scenes. Entertaining story, nonetheless.
All Snug in Their Beds — Scott Alan Woodard — It must be so much fun to write for the season 17 TARDIS crew — there’s a definite sense of joy that shines through those stories, and this one is no exception. This is another example of how well the fourth Doctor works with child characters, something I hadn’t really considered before.
Decorative Purposes — Eddie Robson — I love the way this is structured: you can’t possibly expect it to end where it does from the opening paragraps. This is Robson playing to his strengths with the characters he seems to know best, and it’s a fabulous read.
The Stars Our Contamination — Steven Savile — One of those unusually apocalyptic stories, here we see New York City reduced to a zombie-ridden wasteland by the passage of a comet. While stories like this always struggle to convince me, I love the end, with the Doctor releasing a cure in the effective form of snow.
Keeping it Real — Joseph Lidster — I wasn’t expecting anything like this. I like Joe Lidster, but he tends toward the bleak in his writing; it was a shock, then, to get a story written from Tegan’s perspective that was amusing and heartwarming in equal measure. Great stuff.
Christmas Every Day? — Mark Magrs — Cliched, yes — the seventh Doctor is inserted into a regimented future society and, within minutes, has toppled it from within — but it’s written well enough that it hardly matters. Fantastic job of satirizing the nightmare that is Christmas shopping, too.
Faithful Friends: Part Three — Cavan Scott & Mark Wright — And here’s the payoff to the previous two parts, an adorable story about the UNIT era reuniting for Christmas dinner. My reaction wasn’t anything deeper than “Awwwww!” but for the last story in a Christmas anthology, isn’t that exactly what you want?
Overall, “The Ghosts of Christmas” is another fine entry in the Short Trips series, with not a single subpar story to be found. It’s a bit unusual for a Christmas edition — it’s surprisingly downbeat throughout — but the spirit of the material shines through. In sum, it’s highly recommended.
Bernice Summerfield and the Big Hunt is a short, side step adventure from Lance Parkin. After the traumatic events of the last book and the fallout from Death and the Daleks, its about time we saw Bernice back doing what she does best; having adventures.
The key word of the Big Hunt is, by and large, refreshment. The story cuts loose from the collection, starting with Bernice naked on a holiday planet, just enjoying being alone for once. With no Braxiatel or Adrian around, Parkin crafts his own arm of the galaxy for Bernice to explore, albeit with ‘slight’ references to some of his older Bernice works for the virgin range. The plot itself is fairly simple, but exceptionally well told throughout with good pacing that throws a new discovery or danger at her every chapter.
Although he initially pulls you in with a fairly sedate proposition, a quest for Bernice to engage upon, the novel really doesn’t kick off until they actually arrive on the planet. Parkin constantly alters the setting, showing how his characters react as the world alters around them. For a few chapters he writes a horror story, with Benny, Flynn and Johansen terrified by something ‘trying’ to get in. Then it becomes a puzzle with their ship mysteriously vanished and them trapped on an alien world. Then Parkin avoids pulling punches by mercilessly killing off one of his characters whilst the others watch.
I’m not sure how much characterisation Parkin gave his cast at this point. He has vary natural and real dialogue, everyone acts and responds to each other in perfectly believable ways. However aside from Benny I don’t think anyone in the story really gets explored properly, there’s no exploration or real significance behind anyone else besides the role they have to play.
With the death of one of the crew the stakes are altered again, with the introduction of the titular hunt. Parkin paints a vivid, imaginative world that keeps reminding me of that scene in the Lost World where the hunters are introduced, speeding onto the island in jeeps, using nets and tranquiliser darts to take down the unsuspecting herbivores.
Parkin keeps his cast mobile throughout, slowly uncovering layer after layer of mystery. The actual answer at the bottom isn’t particularly satisfactory, but the journey is definitely colourful, and if the image of a mechanical crocodile that opens its mouth and there’s just as buzzsaw inside doesn’t freak you out then I don’t know what will.
The book has a flair for imagination, drawing amusing parallels to evolution and applying it mercilessly to a robotic kingdom. At the end there’s also a corrupt businessman and a double cross, followed by a fairly traumatic spider. If I’ve a complaint it’s that there’s no real depth given to the villains here. Parkin applies the same evolutionary rules to his humans as he does his robots, his cast acting as directed by their nature. Of course the corrupt businessman has an underhand scheme to make profit. Of course the hunting crew are being paid to do this. Of course Bernice has to stop them, because she knows better. However, even if there’s nothing deep happening beneath the surface, the text remains brilliantly readable and engaging throughout and the change of pace is welcome after the last few books.
This book reflects the same changes that have been going on in the audio series. It’s much bolder and confident than its predecessors, speaking with a clarity of voice and purpose. It’s not necessary to read to keep up with Bernice’s continuing adventures, but it is a good reminder of why you should.
The appearance of Daleks in Death and the Daleks (formerly known as the ‘Axis of Evil’ before it started turning up on people’s doorsteps) may or not have come as a surprise when it released. Thematically it sits roughly alongside the rest of the ‘monster’s audio series which have insisted on using traditional monsters for the last three plays. It’s a big, bold sequel to ‘Life During Wartime’, which means that if you haven’t read the collection you’re immediately at a disadvantage. Despite the brief ‘previously on Bernice Summerfield segment’ there’s no chance to get to know newbies Moskoff and Anson as intimately as you should. It’s also the first full Bernice story penned by Paul Cornell since BF got the license, so straight off the bat you expect something special…
All the regulars are back here, and a few more besides. I never realised Mr Crofton was actually Nick Briggs (I suppose it makes sense to have him doubling up, seeing as they’d dragged him in to provide the Daleks, but he just doesn’t seem… old enough), on the other hand Beverly Cressman makes an excellent Ms Jones, bringing out a very sympathetic side to a character we’d only ever ‘read’ bad things about before.
Paul Cornell’s forte is always playing with human emotions and he makes good use with his first scene here, showing a tearful reunion between Bernice and her dad, played with an easy confidence by the late Ian Collier. Collier’s a good fit for the character, bringing out a militaristic knowledge and confidence without ever sounding like he fits in, he’s got the same rebellious streak and wit as his daughter. Lines later on in the play such as; “I have the biggest gun here so I win the argument,” he clearly enjoys.
After the first few scenes the majority of the first disk involves Bernice and Jason rushing off the Collection to rescue her father from ‘unknown’ captors on the Planet Heaven. I was a bit dubious about exactly why events were being set on Heaven, but that’s a minor detail only thrown in for fans. Paul gives fairly convincing dialog between Bernice and Jason, something I’ve noticed writers other than Dave Stone often struggle to manage, and soon they’re both prisoners of the Daleks.
Although Nick Briggs provides the iconic voice he apparently didn’t do the sound design or post production, and although they did sound a ‘little’ different to normal I can’t say that I noticed a specific problem. I think the real problem is that Paul Cornell struggles himself to write good Dalek dialogue. Although they plot and scheme intelligently they very rarely actually say anything that shows how smart they are. Although doing rather than saying is an admirable trait in a villain, it’s a shame you never actually really get to hear the Daleks rant with the exception of their final betrayal of the fifth axis to Anson.
Meanwhile the rest of the play shows tension building on the collection, with Adrian finally taking a proactive move and staring a full slave rebellion. The rest of the cast see this as a trigger to engage the axis, with the exception of Ms Jones who begins plotting an escape route for her and Moskoff. Why haven’t we heard Ms Jones on audio before? She’s brilliant.
When action returns to Benny and Jason I’m still not entirely sold on the behaviour of the Daleks, as they manage to escape and rescue her father fairly easily (all they had to do was get Jason naked) and scoot off the planet, accidentally leaving some innocent Axis students behind… For some reason they thought the Daleks wouldn’t kill Axis civilians. Very wrong.
The war on the collection changes leaders a lot. At first it’s led by Bev and Adrian, the slave insurgent and the resistance leader, but the moment Jason returns control is seeded automatically to him. Then after a few minutes of fighting, with the Axis pinned down in one building, Brax steps in and suddenly he’s in charge. Then, when Benny’s father shows his face, he becomes the de facto General of the collection, albeit one who defers to Brax for the larger decisions. Although all of this suits Brax’s character, the focus on exactly ‘who’ is leading the war means we get to see precious little of the war itself. Considering most of that is frantic shouting and distant explosions though, perhaps that’s no bad thing.
Moskoff’s story ends badly with him insisting on fighting to the end. Judging by this play alone he seems to have been a fairly standard, normal soldier shown just to showcase the other side of the war. On the other hand, as ‘Life During Wartime’ showed, he is no normal axis grunt and he really ‘could’ have taken that shuttle with Ms Jones. Assuming you read the preceding novel there’s great emotional payoff here but Paul Cornell barely makes use of this at all.
I’m not entirely sold on Marshall Anson’s voice, in the book he was a civilised, intelligent military ruler but although Michael Shallard doesn’t detract from any of that he sounds just a little too evil for the role. Additionally, with the Collection collapsing around him, he doesn’t get much to do besides bark at soldiers and call for backup. Then, when a Dalek arrives and reveals the truth about the Fifth Axis, the confrontation is a little… standard. Nothing is revealed that the audience won’t have already gathered and the conversation is played out entirely for Anson’s benefit. Apart from that it’s up to Brax to explain exactly what’s going on.
Eventually it’s all revealed the Daleks ‘let’ Bernice and Jason escape with their father, just to get the old man inside Brax’s Tardis. The revelation that his Tardis ‘is’ his office is a fairly good one, and it leads in nicely to the concept of the collection and the subplot of the previous book; the Axis had been stepping in and out of his Tardis the whole time.
The betrayal plot showcases Paul Cornell’s strengths, tying everything together with a small human act of compassion. Benny loves her father, of course she’s going to get him. And we see Braxiatel momentarily loose it and start to attack Isaac, telling of the months of frustration in the previous novel.
In the end though the Axis soldiers take on the Daleks, Isaac them somehow makes the entire Axis fleet ‘magically disappear’ (he’s their commander in chief see) and life slowly returns to normal on the collection. Not bad for a long days work.
So, any complaints? I have a few. The battle scenes aren’t very exciting, with the focus being on who’s in command as opposed to what’s actually happening. Also after a brilliant single chapter in Life During Wartime I’d hoped to here a little more of Peter than some toddler sobbing sounds. The Daleks show their malevolent scheming side but in truth none of them actually act as anything more than drones.
As for the deaths? Mr Crofton had his finest hour in the preceding book so it may have been time for him to go. In a way it’s actually crueller to let Mrs Jones live than die, now that Moskoff is dead and everyone knows that she’s a traitor. I hope we hear more from her.
This story was bundled with Closure, from the special release years ago. Closure is a good fit, although I kind of wish the main story itself could have packed a little more in. A few more Dalek expositions, a few more scenes with Moskoff actually showing he’s more than just a stooge, and a few more with Ms Jones.
All in all though, Paul Cornell delivers on his promise. The large cast pays dividends, giving an epic climax to a story that shakes the collection to the ground. However at the end, strangely though, you don’t feel like much has changed because the buildings can be rebuilt and life goes on for 90% of the cast. Paul Cornell plays to his strengths though and makes it a big, emotionally charged story about real human interests, rather than a common one about monsters and armies. I just wish they’d ‘say’ what they’re up to as well as do it.
Introducing traditional ‘monsters’ into Series 4 to attract Doctor Who fans over into this mini-range is a pretty shameless piece of advertising, however for the most part it seems to have worked. The first two plays of the series are very strong releases, taking the strengths of their respective monsters and using them to their advantage to tell a completely ‘new’ story. Sadly, on this third release, things start to stumble.
The Sea Devils have often been described as an ‘iconic’ monster of Doctor Who, and yes they are. They are famous for the image of Sea Devils emerging from the ocean and climbing up the beach towards land. They are less famous for their voices which are a strained, almost inaudible mix of gasps and protracted whispers. Having one Sea Devil in a conversation is tenable but the very nature of this play has scenes of dialogue where every character has to put on the voice. It makes the audio a challenge to listen to at the least. In fact congratulations are in order for the actors for putting their best into it and actually having a go; it is at least a good attempt at a bad job.
Which is a shame because there’s not actually a bad story beneath all the voice distortion. Braxiatel’s influence seems to be everywhere these days and once again Bernice finds herself away from home (and Peter) and on a dangerous mission to stop a terrorist attack. Unfortunately, despite being fully aware that an attack is imminent and sharing a room with the woman she ‘knows’ is planning the attack, she doesn’t do anything about it until the bomb has practically already gone off. The proactive Benny of the old days this isn’t.
To make matters worse one of the few characters not playing a Sea Devil seems oddly stilted, although when the backstory is explained the blunt attitude of wannabe terrorist Joanne Carver was a good fit. Here though, where we’re depending on her to counterbalance the difficult Sea Devil voice, it does not make a good fit.
Whilst all of that is going on something strange seems to be going on in the water. In parts this thread of the story complements the first half, as the theme here seems to be about the concept of ‘home’, with one character remarking no one gets to ‘choose’ their homes. It all fits in quite nicely with the climax of the Mirror Effect, with Bernice attempts to settle down and find security for herself and Peter. That paralleled with the plight of the Sea Devils, banished from their own home and now stuck in an ocean they can’t even swim in, works nicely.
It all culminates with a deliciously, if camp, over the top villain. That itself though causes problems, as to try and portray his villainy effectively Principal Lurnix drops the throaty Sea Devil voice and reverts to human, and somehow none of the other Sea Devils notice this. Although it certainly is a treat to the listener’s ears, it is a glaring plot hole.
The Poison Seas is a decent story gone awry by a crap voice for the monster. In part that’s down to the very choice of using the Sea Devils in the first place, but despite that inherent flaw a good attempt has been made at building an original story around them.
There are a few things you might expect from the Draconian Rage. It’s by Trevor Baxendale who is known for dark and traumatic stories. It features the misogynistic Draconians who are sure to spark against Bernice’s natural wit and independence. Its got a relatively small cast set amongst a political setting, so plenty of intrigue and backstabbing are expected.
A fully fledged sequel to ‘The Dark Flame’ was not expected. For ones there are some serious problems with that story and it did not get a very warm fan reception. Additionally what the hell do the proud, Draconians have to do with Villus Krull, human emissary of the Dark Flame?
Actually, it turns out in this story, quite a lot. Things start with the expected confusion about why the Draconians would invite a ‘female’ professor to Draconia, and our glimpses of the Emperor show that actually he isn’t aware of who he’s inviting. But whilst Bernice and Lord Vasar dance around each other you can sense something brewing unsaid in the background. What exactly happened of Tranagus isn’t explained clearly but the concept of an entire planet commiting suicide, and the rest of the galaxy considering it no more than a political embarrassment, is unnerving.
And then, just as Bernice arrives on Draconia and the story seems ready to begin, Tevor Baxendale pulls the rug out from beneath you. This isn’t a story about the Draconians, and they didn’t ‘accidentally’ invite a female professor to Draconia, they wanted her specifically. It’s about Bernice, about a dark side of her we haven’t seen since Just War when she shot a German soldier in cold blood. Its about how she might endeavour to be a woman of peace but actually, when push comes to shove, she’s a bloody dangerous woman.
Yes there are torture scenes, and actually, they are quite excruciating. The ritual drilling into her skull, the humiliation of a shaven head, the drugging and the duplicity are actually a perfect fit for the Draconians. Baxendale’s representation of Draconia as a society twice as old as our own makes sense, whereas we only have legends of mythical ancient evil, they were around to experience it.
And the story dovetails nicely towards a brilliant climax between Bernice and the Emperor Shen, where the very concept of good and evil are thrown out of the window. Additionally, its nice to see the poetry quoted at the very beginning of the play come back at the end with twice as much meaning behind the words.
The Draconian Rage is a brilliantly scripted play, showing a strength and agility that was completely lacking in its predecessor. The sound design is almost flawless and the Draconians make a brilliant nemesis for the professor. It’s just a shame that the way things are left hanging she wont be back any time soon.
Thoroughly recommended only for those with a strong constitution towards torture scenes.
Bernice Summerfield and the Bellotron Incident is a surprisingly solid play. Mick Tucker’s script isn’t as clever or witty as some of his predecessors but it is a tight, well delivered story. The actual plot, concerning a planet whose orbit takes it between Sontaran and Rutan lines, seems a little pedestrian at first but it comes across well with a few genuine surprises throughout. The appearance of Bev Tarrant at first seems surprising but actually she seems a natural fit, and there’s not a single weak performance from the cast.
The setting is well fleshed out by plenty of military banter between Peter John and Karl Hansen, and although this won’t go down as one of the greatest double acts in history they do convince as nervous peacekeepers. It toes just the right line between political chit chat and constant motion, and the threat of endless bureaucracy dooming a planet is believable enough to get the blood pumping.
Joseph and Brax both make brief appearances but the majority of this play is about the newcomers; Commander Ryan, Captain Quilby and Bev Tarrant. That Commander Ryan knows Brax, quite well by the sound of it, and is able to summon at a moments notice, is quite telling about Irving’s extended sphere of influence.
Knowing that the story is about shape shifting aliens, its no surprise that there are a few twists concerning characters who aren’t who they appear. It’s almost expected. However, even then, right at the end, it has a few surprises. If you’ve heard Nev Fountains Omega, which contains one of the greatest twists in a Big Finish play to date, this play pulls something just as outrageous and it got there first by four months.
Bev looks like a fairly natural fit for the Bernice Summerfield series. The audio gives a hint for potential tension and similarities between her and Bernice. By having a more gung ho, less scrupulous leading female there could be some interesting developments down the line. However the only scene you can really trust is the two of them drinking together at the end, comparing how they both know ‘HIM’.
Seems everyone’s had a trip with the Doctor.
Recommended as a good, solid, solitary adventure. It doesn’t rely on previous knowledge and it won’t leave you wanting more. But what’s here is exactly what needs to be; despite the fairly weak Rutan monster voice.
If I thought Lisa Bowerman overacted slightly in certain scenes of ‘Dance of the Dead’, this play rushes in to prove me wrong. This play is full of shrieks and wails, unrelenting in its angst. Only now it all makes sense, it’s called for.
It’s all about context.
Previously I praised the Green Eyed Monster for tying together Joseph, Adrian and Jason on audio. The Mirror Effect goes one better by bring Braxiatel into the scene and actually giving him something meaty to do. In fact possibly he could occupy more air time than any other character, slowly probing deeper into the mirror, the only one holding it together as the world falls apart around him.
It starts unusually. There’s no build up to the action, events are already in progress when the cast are dumped in an underground mine with no explanation; wet, cold and already pissed off with each other. Things slowly deteriorate, with characters forming and breaking alliances in quick succession, everyone determines to force the world to fit around them. Jason and Adrian both want Bernice to themselves, Bernice doesn’t know what she wants and Braxiatel… well he wants something but the audience isn’t privy to that.
The only outsider in this little world of confusion is Beverly Cressman as Doctor Carnivel. She’s introduced and dismissed fairly quickly, as an example of the dangers of the mirror. Her stories, or lies, make no sense, even if they do provide drama and tension for the first twenty minutes whilst the main story builds towards a critical point.
In fact very little of the Mirror Effect does make sense. It’s all overwrought and confusing. The moment you become certain of something the world twists around you, dumbfounding the cast one by one, the only constant the characters themselves. It’s like explorative surgery into the character’s heads, as the mirror pulls out their deepest fears and anxieties and scopes in on them, carefully examining them. Although the ‘evil mirror’ world is hardly new, this is a very good examination of the concept.
Whether you enjoy this or not probably depends on your threshold for this level of angst. Also it depends on the previous level of attachment you’ve given to the assembled cast, and how much you want to see them vindicated. Jason gets to do something very smart, followed by something very stupid, and then typically no one realises it. Adrian gets vindication for his love of Bernice, and she goes through hell and back to confirm that she loves her baby.
Brax crosses the line and actually shows there’s something dark going on in there. The questions raised about him, and his motives for housing the collection, rear their head several times in the play. The idea that he’s treating his friends the same as his exhibits, that he ‘allowed’ Peter to happen to add fame to himself, is a powerful concept that undermines everything you thought you knew until now. Only you can almost dismiss the questions out of hand, or you could have, if Brax hadn’t reacted the way he did and simply hypnotised Jason.
Would an innocent man really do that?
It’s a convoluted play, with very little coherent plot until the end. What it does do, hopefully, is re-examine the status quo on the collection and sort through the characters past one final time. However it is very well written, and a rewarding experience for the characters you’ve slowly been building up an attachment to. It’s a clear statement that there are more stories to be told on the collection.
The fact that Stephen Cole also penned ‘Plague Herds of Excelis’ (not actually an official part of the Benny main range) pays dividends here because it informally leads directly into this play. Having Bernice awaken from a party with a hangover, alone in strange surroundings is far from odd. Having her on a ship flying away from an alien peace conference isn’t unheard of either. But courtesy of the build up in Plague Herds we know and have felt exactly how important this conference is. It also makes this a very good fit for the Ice Warriors.
Matthew Brenher from Red Dawn is back as the lead warrior, this time as Lord Grand Marshal Sstac. He is accompanied by Vivian Perry as General Azzar, a conservative ‘female’ Ice Warrior, I think that’s a first. Perhaps as he’s played a similar role before Sstac does a better job of articulating the Martian culture, but he fails to properly convey the quiet menace and determination that she embodies. Although it is interesting to have these characters here, especially given Bernice’s fondness for Mars, its clear that they’ve been designated ‘martian’ in order to draw out potential audience from the Doctor Who range. That’s not a criticism, but although thematically the Ice Warriors make sense given the plays setting we don’t actually see or learn anything about ‘them’ during the play. In fact we don’t even learn that much about Sstac, who comes across as thoroughly noble but otherwise boring. Strange considering he plays the second lead role behind Benny herself.
It all comes down to a standard possession story. Two lovelorn ghosts who died unable to sort out their differences take control of Bernice and Sstac intermittently through the play, eventually reconciling their differences before being assigned to oblivion. Although this should be a powerful story it does lead to some horrendous overacting as Lisa Bowerman forces out professions of alternate love and rage with no provocation.
Whereas Plague Herds rushed out a definitive movie scale climax, Dance of the Dead slowly and sedately leads you to its ending; the journey is key. If you’re a fan of the Ice Warriors you’ll probably enjoy Bernice’s chit chat with Sstac. If you want political intrigue, General Azzar provides an interesting diversion from the main plot. Francis Magee makes up the cast with a suitably hard bitten villain, who turns out to be the very steward Iris hired to escort Bernice home. Oops.
I don’t know. My only real gripe is that I found everything else far more interesting than the possession story itself.
Dance of the Dead is a fairly sedate play, perhaps deliberately to counteract Plague Herds of Exclis. It’s calm and earnest. Even if it treads no new ground, it does tread very well.
Bernice Summerfield and the Plague Herds of Excelis
Listening to Plague Herds if Excelis without having just worked through the preceding Dr Who Excelis adventures is unusual. Although it does have a go at filling you in on the details you can’t get around the fact this is a sequel, and so I am going to assume you have at least a passing idea of what occurred previously.
And yes, it is a sequel, set ‘after’ the final Excelis trilogy to show you what happened to this world after the Doctor left it. It’s also harks back to the very first play in the series, with the reoccurrence of Iris Wildthyme and a few other tidbits…
Actually I really like the start of the play. Bernice’s slow introduction to the planet and then quick introduction to Iris works well. Your opinion of the play is probably directly related to your opinion of Katy Manning’s Iris Wildtyme. Yes she’s terribly overacting, and her accent wanders atrociously across the northern half of England, and it’s a terrible excuse for a drinking scene that brings out the worst in Lisa Bowerman as well (case in point, loudly, drunkenly declaring: “All right Iris, I’ll steal the relic for you” in front of a crowd on onlookers) but it works, and for a short one CD play like this the joke doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Trevor Littledale doesn’t do too bad a job as Snyper, for the first half of the play at least where he still has an air of mystery about him. He’s a man who knows just a little too much, and his scene with Iris in the plague house in genuinely brilliant. I’m not even too put out by the Aragon and Empress Vitutia scenes with constant back and forth chat about the end of the world. It serves a point, drilling home the impending apocalypse even if it does drag slightly.
Aside from the possibility of Iris’s character grating the reader, it’s a large scale apocalypse setting unlike any we’d scene in the Bernice range so far, and the change is welcome. Unfortunately once Bernice, Iris and Aragon leave the city and enter the barbarian horde, to find out the secret of the ‘plague herds’ outside things get a little pedestrian. The animals arrive too late in the play, and the massacre is so sudden and no ‘real’ characters actually suffer from their arrival, the impact is just a little stilted. Also the moment Snyper reveals his plan, and turns from enigmatic villain to raving fanatic, all tension goes completely.
I still don’t understand the point of making Snyper post insert his character into the plot of Excelis Dawns. That he was the one who originally brought the handbag to Excelis I can understand, but the reinsertion of Sister Jolene (who I can barely remember from Dawns) and the reinterpretation of the Mother Superior’s motives (thus altering her true motivations in Exclis Decays) just gets needlessly confusing. Up till that point the story had tread a fine line between assumed knowledge of the preceding trilogy and giving you the necessary information, but right at the end a dozen references are thrown at you so fast your head feels like its going to explode. It does all make sense when you think about it, but it’s all a bit anticlimactic.
Iris Wildtime thrives on the bizarre, but somehow a ‘herd of zombie farmyard animals’ doesn’t quite cut the mustard as unusual threats go. As the only casualties of the stampede are faceless locals and their charge happens so quickly, there’s no chance for the listener to absorb what’s happening. Combine that with a sudden deluge of information and shape shifting from Snyper there’s too much going on at once and not enough pays off.
And one thing that has (or will) annoy me about the Bernice range is when she meets someone who also knows the Doctor, and they both go ‘You know HIM?????’, but for the first time with Iris it feels natural. It’s not forced, and she only realises when Iris mentions her Tardis. Played just right I think.
Would I recommend this play? It’s got worthy scenes of a dying world, public torture and an ominous monologues, it’s slightly impaired by a rushed ending, but the deciding factor should be your opinion of Iris Wildtyme. If you’ve always secretly longed for her and Bernice to team up then this is what your looking for. If you want the few extra secrets of Excelis that the Doctor never found out, they’re here but buried beneath a fairly pedestrian political drama.
The Green Eyed Monsters is an odd play. It has two plot strands, both highly interlinked, but on their own neither would make a satisfying play. The adventure Bernice stumbles into is just too light and obvious, the villain too melodramatic and the plan too obvious. Alternately Jason and Adrian’s scenes are too short, their dialogue although sweet too simple, and giant leaps in the narrative are made very quickly.
But together these two strands tell a story about a dysfunctional family, and yes, for the first time presented on audio, the Braxiatel Collection is a family. You can see just why Bernice wanted to get away from it all, you can see how Jason and Adrian have a natural paranoia about each other. Again, like the last play, this is painted in broad comedic brush strokes, but it works, especially with Joseph’s amusing contributions. The little yellow speaking diary is quickly becoming the highlight of the series.
One thing I don’t get though is, if such a large thing is made out of the concept that Bernice would ‘never’ leave her baby behind, where was Peter during the previous play? He was mentioned there but not given any details. I understand this probably wouldn’t be the best play to kick of a series, but the logic has my head spinning.
Not all of the comedy worked for me, scenes with Jason and Adrian alternately yelling at Sloatie whilst the other held him back are meh, and the twins Boris and Sloatie are pretty poor villains. But the little fluffy rabbit, Joseph’s witty remarks about motherhood and other small, minor tidbits are brilliant.
Perhaps though the Green Eyes Monster needs to be short, in order to not outstay the welcome of its main conceit. It starts, and ends, with a warring household. Not a melodramatic war, but a domestic ‘normal’ one where most of the participants love each other really, even if they refuse to admit it. It gives you a glimpse as to how all these pieces (separate for so long) start to fit together. And the regulars all give exemplary performances. After all, this wasn’t about the villains, it was about them together on Audio. At last.
Bernice Summerfield and the Greatest Shop in the Galaxy
Series three of Bernice Summerfield starts bolder than any before it. With a return to the old theme tune, Joseph established as her defacto travelling companion and an all around tighter sound design, she’s ready to face anything. And in this rip roaring adventure which is half comedy, half action thriller, she gets straight to it.
Around half of the jokes in this story surround women and the love of shopping, particularly for shoes. Having seen Bernice as the most down to earth, practical girl around, her obsession here seems a sudden departure. That said when she cracks down and starts justifying herself at the end, it is a particularly brilliant scene. Given her ‘recent’ experiences in the Glass Prison this is understandable.
The Gigamart is definitely an interesting idea, although the shear scale depicted is hard to envisage. Basically it’s a superstore for the universe, on a planet with prehistoric latrines and an uneasy truce with carnivorous, monstrous, human hungry aliens. Not that the play bothers to state this is the case until after the aliens start to appear in the store, followed by a small regiment of battle hardened soldiers.
The plot, deliberately complicated to make use of Bernice’s previous experience with time travel, works well enough. After a promising morning shop she finds herself in the middle of a slaughter, and in true Bernice mode she keeps her head and searches for a solution.
The thing that lifts this story up is the passion of the cast, who obviously enjoying the material. It’s not an out and out comedy, it’s played fairly straight, it just depicts situations that are patently absurd. It does however star a very ‘EVIL’ villain, the epitome of capitalism, a squelching, spitting, creature who literally gets his rocks off on the stock exchange. What better motive than money?
And the dilemma of the grandfather paradox is well presented, providing an interesting solution to the situation. Everything ties together neatly, Bernice’s shoes playing a vital role in the survival of the planet. Throughout the play never stops throwing new ideas at you, but always linking it in to whats come before.
The Greatest Shop in the Galaxy isn’t the greatest play Big Finish have ever commissioned, but it can hold its head fairly high. It has a cohesion and sense of purpose lacking in the previous series, the cast doesn’t seem quite so limited and the actors are clearly having a whale of a time.
The Fall
Bernice returns home to the Collection and things aren’t how she expected. In just a few pages Paul Cornell briefs us on the setting and purpose of this collection and just from the very tone of it you can see how different it’s going to be. Both of the previous collections have suffered from a lack of purpose and cohesion, this time, apparently not.
Careless Talk
Here the introduction of Bev Tarrant in the Bellotron Incident starts to pay off. As the hard bitten moral vacuum Bernice could never be, Bev manages to take control of the resistance whereas her contemporary academic is powerless to act, and eventually ostracised for her inaction.
I was a bit surprised by the reappearance of the Oracle of the Lost, but it does demonstrate the importance of the collection AS a collection rather than a place to live. It’s interesting that even in this short story you can see a level of depth of complexity developing behind the scenes; Braxiatel plays a delicate game, conning the Axis whilst remaining her prisoner, whilst Bernice struggles for those small victories that ultimately mean nothing in the end.
It’s a great first story of the collection and a promising sign of things to come.
9 / 10
The Birthday Party
Marshall Mushtaq Anson is introduced here as an important figure in the Axis, depicted as an apparent ‘moderate’ man, the friendly face of fascism, someone Benny can talk to. He’s also introduced alongside a pretty awkward situation where a student has been shot for no reason. Simon Guerrier crafts a sensitive tale, expanding on what seems to become the theme of this novel; difficult choices and making the best of what you have.
7 / 10
Five Dimensional Thinking
Explanations about Braxiatel’s house arrest, and the search for his time equipment, start to fall here. Or rather questions start to emerge. Brax’s predicament underlines the whole collection and the problem presented by Nick Wallace, Brax’s bungled attempt at a solution, is a sign of just how deep that problem is. Now Braxiatel isn’t the Doctor, so the effect of seeing him chance everything with such an act of violence isn’t quite as shocking but it does show something.
8 / 10
Meanwhile, In a Small Room, a Small Boy…
Roping in Robert Shearman to do anything is a triumph as far as I’m concerned and this short story is important. Unlike all of the others it doesn’t affect anything else, or change the world around it, but without this important glimpse into Peter’s mind the story would be deeply lacking. Although he credits Peter with an intelligence completely lacking on audio this is a powerful first look at a smart, problem solving young boy living in difficult times. Who knew what was to come…
10 / 10
Lockdown Conversations 1
Paul Cornell takes control again to remind us about the Axis as a whole and the larger scope of this collection.
The Price of Everything
Gregg Smith’s short piece highlights the reason Bernice hasn’t joined the Resistance and why. As the whole point of the series is a struggle for freedom we get a glimpse of what it might be like here, only at a terrible cost to the Collection as a whole.
9 / 10
Hit
Frantic, dangerous, scrambled… The fact that this collection is composed of many small segments by different authors and not one solitary vision pays dividends here because it’s the only way you’d get a glimpse of an event like this. Bernice almost becomes a casualty of the Resistance, and we get a scene once again of her siding with the invaders to preserve her moral highground. Short but powerful.
10 / 10
The Garden of Whispers
Ms Jones has never really been fleshed out properly. She appeared quite a few times in the early books but aside from offhand references to how frightening she could be, a few chance encounter with Mr Croften where they wind each other up, and a few chapters spent cooing over Benny’s cat we haven’t seen her the same way we’ve seen Adrian, Brax and Jason.
It’s a shame, therefore, that our first real glimpse into her life is also our first glimpse of Lt. Bernard Moskof, although that doesn’t diminish the impact of what happens here. Collaborator or forlorn lover, we may never know, but the most telling thing is the way Bernice isn’t sure until right at the end whether it was Ms Jones planting the bombs or not. Who can you trust?
9 / 10
Lockdown Conversations 2
One of the few complaints I have with the collection up to now is the lack of Adrian appearances. He makes up a full third of the front cover but never actually gets a chapter to himself. Even a short one, similar to Shearman’s Peter story, would round out an otherwise excellent world. Unfortunately there isn’t one so Paul Cornell takes his chance to remind us about what’s happening here, giving us the lowdown on not just Adrian but Jason as well. Its pretty horrible but given the events of the Green Eyed Monster and the Mirror Effect, and the new situation presented by the Axis Occupation, its all too easy to believe he might have fallen.
The Crystal Flower
Again I’m slightly dumbfounded by a reference to an artefact from a previous Bernice story, and unlike the Oracle of the Lost which become an important event in the early Resistance vs. Axis struggle the handing over of this crystal has no impact later on that I can see at all.
However, the intermittent story of the soldier fighting a war whilst his wife tends her garden, and the tragedy that follows is powerful. Even more powerful is the ending and the revelation of the identity of the soldier. Like Ms Jones, we never quite got to see who or what Mr. Crofton was. If this chapter is all he gets then he’s probably been well served because this is brilliant.
10 / 10
Midrash
I’m not familiar with the folklore this story springs from but it is an interesting diversion from the main struggle of the axis. Whilst the resistance continues Ian Mond shows that the axis aren’t infallible, there are alien influences using them just as nefariously as they are using the collection.
9 / 10
Fear of Corners
I’m slightly confused by this peace although the ending is definitely an interesting idea, and one with great implications for Braxiatel. It’s already been established that he ‘does’ have something to hide, and his treatment of Jason is confusing. The concept of his ‘watcher’ attempting to force its way through, and settling for Bev’s body as a substitute is quite a good one.
8 / 10
The Traitors
Although we already have the tragic lovestory of Ms Jones and Lt Moskof, we get another small vignette here from Radek and Mesa. Hated on both side, the Resistance kill an innocent civilian and Axis soldier Radek allows himself to be sentenced to death in her absence. Pretty grim, but important to remind us of Benny’s reasons for not joining the resistance; she doesn’t like the axis but she doesn’t, cannot, approve of them.
9 / 10
Paths Not Taken
This unusual piece features a living statue, an unexploded bomb and a version of Bernice from the future. It all makes sense, and more insights into the dark world of Brax’s history are always appreciated, but it’s a little light compared to previous instalments.
7 / 10
Every Picture Tells a Story
Vosta has turned out to be a minor star of this collection and it’s a shame to see him die so early on, however this is an important piece. After so many stories of inaction and dithering its nice to show Bernice’s resolve to fight being strengthened, even if it took the death of a friend to spur her onwards. And Vosta’s final victory is a brilliant image.
9 / 10
Fluid Prejudice
Leif Larsson is one of those larger than life characters who turn up in stories and alter everything. The scripting of the tale, with Joseph attempting to replay a ‘very’ traumatic scene back to Bernice, leads us to a pretty epic confrontation, although the answers when thought about aren’t very satisfying.
In a way its almost a shame to see such a powerful concept as rewriting history wasted on a two bit crook, but then that would be a bit too much of a Deux Ex-Machina for ‘Life During Wartime’ to end. Like ‘Midrash’, this story just shows the Axis once again getting duped by someone else out to take advantage of the situation.
7 / 10
Suffer the Children
Dave Stone writes an incredibly sedate (by his standards) piece here which naturally returns the daring do righteous, noble side of Jason Kane. After so many off hand mentions and second accounts of his new position within the axis though, the best thing about this story is that before the unmasking we get to see him act like a ‘complete’ slob. Comments made as he stuffs his face at parties held in his honour momentarily terrified me into thinking it might be true.
Of course in the end the truth comes out, Jason is a hero again and they escape from the Axis in a short, but sweet burst of action and violence. There’s not much fallout from the revelation though, just the revelation itself…
8 / 10
Drinking With the Enemy
…Which is why this piece is so important. We barely had time to see Jason and Bernice reacquaint themselves before, and now we get to watch them do it under the careful eye of Moskof and Ms Jones.
All of the resentment building up on both sides come out here, although neither side of the argument are able to actually say what they think. Watching Ms Jones, Jason, Moskoff and Benny try to keep civil, calm and rational whilst needling each other is powerful. The ending, with the characters escaping with as little damage to themselves as possible and nothing resolved in the long run is telling.
But it does suggest that, at the end of it, Moskoff and Ms Jones might have a future. He isn’t inherrantly a bad man.
9 / 10
Lockdown Conversation 3
It’s nice to see Peter again, even if he has very little to do here. Jason and Bernice take a moment to agree on their objectives. You can sense the end is coming…
Passing Storms
Peter Anghleids message isn’t spelled out subtly here, but it is told in a wonderfully original fashion. It’s nice to see Brax and Bev working together to undermime the axis, in their own, small, little ways. Like everything else in this collection the spirit of defiance is key.
10 / 10
Speaking Out
Simon Guerrier’s second story, one to bookend each side of the anthology, draws on the ending of the first. Bernice’s previous tough choice, showing deference to Anson to save lives, comes back to haunt her just as she was beginning to believe in the Resistance after all.
8 / 10
The Peter Principle
After a failed attempt to strike out against oppression in the last story it’s a powerful blow here. Whereas before she was willing to sacrifice herself for her words and ideals, here she takes the more personal touch of cold blooded murder. It’s been a long time coming and at least she chose her victim well.
In the run up to this the attempted suicide attempt of Bang Jorik and the alien art collection make a very diverting story, exposing the folly of the whole Axis Ideal in one simple example.
Additionally Mr Crofton returns briefly for the payback he was promised, and Moskoff gets promoted to replace Spang. Again you can sense that the end is nearing… I’m just not sure why the title is relevant?
9 / 10
Lockdown Conversations 4
This isn’t so much an ending as a summation. Paul Cornell clearly wants to excite you in the runup to the following audio play so he pulls out a fantastic cliff-hanger that comes completely out of left field…
We knew it was a time traveller. We knew the Axis knew things about Benny that they shouldn’t. We knew their technology was… wrong. We even knew the Axis Commandant’s name was called Isik or something similar. But there’s no way on earth you could have expected that.
A Bell Ringing in an Empty Sky
Jim Mortimore ends the collection on a very strange note. A trillion years after everyone else has died, when the universe has move on and the collection is just a relic of a bygone age, Bernice Summerfield is still there. There to tell stories until the end of time…
Strange, weird, scary but… compelling.
9 / 10
–
Life During Wartime is a brilliant example of the Bernice Summerfield range, a real triumph of short story collections with not a single obvious weak point among its number. It fleshes out characters we’d only glimpsed before and gives them life, love and meanings they were lacking. It constantly subverts your expectations and tells a story both highly personal and highly complicated.
My only real complaint would be the lack of any POV from Adrian’s perspective. Although the Killorian slaves are mentioned constantly, there’s never a chance to get a true perspective on their suffering. I wouldn’t complain normally, only Adrian’s on the books cover, almost highlighting this terrible omission…
All in all Big Finish should be rightly proud of this masterpiece. Not only is it composed of some great independent pieces, good communication between authors result in something that adds up to be more than the sum of its parts.
I might be being harsh here to Terrance Dicks, but its how I came out of this book feeling. I feel bad about writing this but I have to be honest with my opinions.
A Life of Surprises
The Shape of the Hole
This short story quick starts this books ‘on-off’ affair with the Doctor. Although rarely named he looms over this novel in a way he hasn’t in the Bernice range until now. It’s strange, almost making this a Doctor Who novel without the Doctor in.
The point of this story is that he will never disappear, he’ll always be around. Like a lot of Paul Cornell’s work it’s an important, symbolic theme that will mean a lot to Bernice’s life.
7 / 10
Kill the Mouse!
I was left confused by Daniel A Mahoney’s short story Heart of Glass, and although the sequel here is much more accessible, it’s no easier to understand. An alien appears on a planet that is removing people’s faces. Brax becomes a casualty and Bernice is forced to desperately search for answers. Very grim and high on metaphors, but with no real answers or explanations…
8 / 10
Solar Max and the Seven-Handed Snake Mother
Kate Orman produces something special here, an archaeology dig story with something beyond the normal tombs and relics. I can’t do much more than repeat the plot back to you besides say this is an excellent short story.
9 / 10
A Mutual Friend
I just don’t understand the point of this. Bernice is in the 21st century, picking up CDs for Brax and meets a female journalist. They chat for a while, and somehow for absolutely no reason both realise they’re companions of the Doctor. It’s almost as if they have a strange aura, and can recognise each other by smell. This story doesn’t really do anything. There’s no reason for Sarah Jane to be here, and we don’t learn anything from her. It just name checks her, and the Doctor.
I’m not against Bernice meeting other people who have also met the Doctor, god knows there are enough of them out there. But there’s nothing here in this story. Just a bit of empty nostalgia, not even good nostalgia. There’s nothing that actually makes the woman drinking coffee in Starbucks Sarah Jane aside from her name and the fact she’s a journalist.
1 / 10
Alien Planets and You
Dave Stone seeks to out- weird his previous attempts by writing a generic guide to alien evil masterplans. It’s a good checklist you could work through, recognising the clichés one by one that make up a weak or average Bernice adventure.
7 / 10
Something Broken
Whoa. This story flies by before you really realise what’s happened. It shows Bernice foiling a clever high Sci-Fi concept alien plot by doing something ingenious that turns the enemies weapons on themselves. Aside from the specifics of the alien plot there’s little here we haven’t seen before.
6 / 10
The Collection
It’s nice to see Bernice return to the subject of Time Travel. Unlike the parent series, which uses it as an excuse to travel to new exotic locations, here it’s more a massive inconvenience that buggers up peoples lives. I can imagine Brax and Jason doing something like this. My only complaint is once they were both there, surely she would have realised they could use the Time Rings to escape?
8 / 10
Setting Stone
A hark back to an unseen New Adventure, where the seventh Doctor and Benny do something particularly ruthless, as a last resort when they have no other options. Told from the viewpoint of one of the people who suffered as a result of their interference it’s a powerful look back from one of the casualties of war, and an example of what happens if you cross the Doctor.
8 / 10
Time’s Team
If you’ve not seen the TV show Time Team the joke may lose a little in translation but the concept is simple enough. Enjoyable fun.
7 / 10
Beedlemania
Ahem… Well, it’s a fairly average story about a political conference between foreign alien species as they debate the relic. Only to stop it being average, one of the alien species are insistent practical jokers who are unable to take anything seriously. If it wasn’t for the overtly sharp end to the play it’d be pretty dire stuff.
6 / 10
The All-Seeing Eye
Death visits one of Bernices digs, claims her two companions (one elderly, the other depressed) but lets Bernice live because she still has a future left. Told peacemeal alongside a ghost story from the past this is pretty chilling stuff.
7 / 10
And Then Again
Robert Shearman bowls an oddball here with a Bernice play that hardly features Bernice at all. Instead we’re treated to the boring life and times of Bernard Stanley Summerfield, who works in an office and doesn’t love his wife. Something is wrong here. Fortunately there’s a strange, familiar looking little man here to put things right for Bernard.
8 / 10
Cuckoo
Finally, despite appearing on the collection’s cover, Peter’s not been mentioned at all in this novel. He still doesn’t appear here but he is mentioned, and the theme is important. The concept of aliens who give birth to other species children is a great one, and de Tranveldt arrives to turn this into a nice complete story with an almost gruesome ending.
7 / 10
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
I’m not sure that the Skymines of Karthos demands a sequel, so I was initially wrong footed by the start of this story. However its only a passing reference and actually the story and emanant rewriting of Bernice’s memories expose one of Bernice’s hidden weakness; her diary.
8 / 10
Squadborrenfell
A short dark story somewhat reminiscent of Dragon’s Wrath, with two ancient enemies long presumed dead, actually still active behind the scenes. Yet another unpleasant examination of military minds and acceptable casualties.
7 / 10
Taken by the Muses
A delicious oddball story that actually gives you a better look into Bernice’s head than any of the last ten stories: she’s creative, and despite the terrible situations in she never gives up and surrenders, even if her protests are a tad… unusual.
9 / 10
The Spartacus Syndrome
Another fiendishly clever alien plot, foiled by Bernice by turning their own technology against them in an ‘I don’t know how she does it, she just does’ way that I found annoying in ‘Something Broken’. This time though there’s a little moral bite at the end where Bernice confines her copies to death.
7 / 10
Might
Something that could have been completely overlooked by the arrival of Peter is finally addressed here. I’m not to familiar with Keith Summerfield, Bernice’s future son from ‘Return of the Living Dad’ but who has since been forgotten about. Seeing as she’s no longer with Jason, and Peter’s now around, what happened? What caused the change?
Well we’ll get no answers here, and it’s still dubious about whether it was or wasn’t Keith who appears. Hmmm.
7 / 10
Paydirt
Every short story in this collection until now has built the Doctor up as a figure of mythological proportions. Now we get a story suggesting Bernice herself could one day be viewed in the same way. History lies.
6 / 10
Dear Friend
And the conclusion is a letter to the Doctor. This sums up the stories so far really. It’s about Bernice’s surprising life, and the gratitude she has for one man who showed her it was possible.
There’s also a small afterwards by Lloyd Rose, a non fiction essay repeating the love for the series some people have built up.
———-
All in all ‘A Life of Surprises’ is a much more adventurous collection than the ‘Dead Men Diaries’. It ventures off the collection and shows a flare for good, imaginative stories, albeit at the cost of some of the secondary characters from the collection.
As such its highs are definitely much better than its predecessor, it takes more risks and this pays off. That said it doesn’t always hit the mark, and some stories are better than others. Additionally, although I’m happy the Bernice range hasn’t forgotten where it came from, the Doctors presence becomes almost intenable; he’s inescapable. At times I’d like to see the range more successful at paving its own direction.
However there’s a good balance her between the stories and all in all the collection should be viewed as another success for the range.
Big Finish main range #70. 2 CD’s, 4 episodes. Written by: David McIntee. Directed by: John Ainsworth.
THE PLOT
The Doctor has gone insane.
No, really. He’s an inmate of the Klyst Institute, which appears to be a Victorian-era nursing home. The staff are running experiments on their inmates, each of whom has signed an agreement to come here on the day before their deaths. The Doctor apparently interfered with an experiment, resulting in his current condition… though the institute’s security chief, Rigan (Gail Clayton) believes the Doctor is just faking it.
Back on Earth, Mel follows a message from the Doctor which leads her to the institute. She knows the Doctor must be inside. But when she climbs a tree for a better vantage point, she makes a shocking discovery.
The building is just an empty shell, with no rooms, no doors – not even a real roof!
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: Save for a single, brief scene, the first two episodes show us a Doctor who has lost his mind and his very identity. This might be interesting… but writer David McIntee has chosen to avoid dealing with the insane Doctor, who probably gets a total of 10 minutes’ “screen time” across the entire first half of the serial. This is not entirely a bad thing, since “insane acting” not only doesn’t play to Sylvester McCoy’s strengths, it actually plays directly into his weaknesses! In fairness, McCoy occasionally pitches his voice just right and lets out a perfect line delivery. There’s a conversation between the Doctor and Klyst in Part Two, where a few of McCoy’s deliveries chill the spine. But most of the time, he’s just overacting painfully, warbling his voice in a way that makes it all too easy to picture him pulling bizarre faces. Given that these moments are all we have of the Doctor until well into Part Three, it’s… unfortunate, to say the least.
Fortunately, when we do get to see the Doctor being the Doctor, McCoy’s performance is much better. It’s far from his best, but when we flash back to the Doctor’s original involvement with the institute, McCoy is enjoyably in charge. He also does fairly well with an overly-talky climax in Part Four. And at least he doesn’t mangle any sayings for “comedy” value.
Mel: One positive effect of a relatively “Doctor-lite” story is that Mel is brought front and center. And yes, that is a positive. Mel’s character is far better served on audio that it was on television. She’s allowed to be smart and proactive, without compromising her basic naivete. She effectively takes charge through most of the story, until the Doctor finally comes back to himself, and she’s entirely up to carrying the plot. Bonnie Langford, who really wasn’t that bad on television (even in Time and the Rani, the writing was what was wrong with Mel, not the acting), is terrific on audio, and obviously enjoys having an actual character to play.
THOUGHTS
I’ve been a fan of Big Finish’s audio Who output for several years now. A handful Who stories that are among the very best ever recorded have been among their output, and I think there are only a handful of times in the television run (new or old) in which the average episode quality has been higher than Big Finish’s average quality. There are many stories in Big Finish’s catalog that I sorely wish had been made for television.
Unregenerate! is not one of those stories.
The story is explicitly set shortly after the Doctor’s regeneration, directly following Time and the Rani. This makes it the 7th Doctor’s second performed story, in terms of story chronology. If this had been a televised story, McCoy’s second serial would have been a story he barely appeared in, with material seemingly tailored to his worst acting traits. It would have been a disastrous follow-up to a disastrous debut, and I’m rather glad this story is effectively an ancillary product.
So, moving beyond the sidelining of the Doctor and McCoy’s often-poor performance, the next question: Is the story any good? My answer, sadly, is no. The Doctor’s insanity aside, it comes across as a rather generic runaround. Part One gets a lift from the in media res start, intriguing us to stick with it to find out what’s going on. Those mysteries just about carry it through Part Two. The second half is far less interesting, though. There’s some potential in the nature of Klyst’s experiments. But that potential is largely unexplored, in favor of a subplot with the tediously one-dimensional Rigan. What little interest the story builds up is easily washed away by a climax in which the characters talk at each other endlessly before one commits a heroic self-sacrifice (TM), followed by more talking.
As a writer, David McIntee is strong on story structure. Unregenerate! is a competently-told story, and it does actually hang together when all is said and done. From a purely objective standpoint, it is definitely a better story than Time and the Rani. But for all its faults, there was something vaguely charming about Time and the Rani. It was dreadful, but also bizarrely likable in spite of itself. If nothing else, there was a sense of energy and fun to it. Unregenerate! has very little energy, and very little fun. I know it’s slightly the better of the two stories. But I also know that I’ll watch Time and the Rani again, while I strongly suspect that I will never again listen to this.
This is not the worst Doctor Who story I’ve reviewed. I didn’t hate listening to it. I just didn’t particularly enjoy it, either. Neither good nor overwhelmingly bad, Unregenerate! ultimately was just… there.
In the end, maybe that’s the most damning thing I can say about it.
With the dawn of 2009, Big Finish embarked upon a new Doctor Who main range release pattern: three-story mini-“seasons” featuring one Doctor and a plot arc. This had been tested with “The Haunting of Thomas Brewster,” “The Boy that Time Forgot,” and “Time Reef” — three linked Davison plays that demonstrated such a release strategy could be successful. The first “season,” the unfortunately-titled “Key 2 Time,” features the fifth Doctor and a new companion searching the universe for the hidden segments of the Key to Time, just as in television’s season 16.
The first story of the trilogy, “The Judgement of Isskar,” has the unenviable task of setting up the entire conflict and still managing to tell an interesting story that can stand on its own. Author Simon Guerrier has proven himself in the past with the brilliant “The Settling,” but “Isskar” tries to do too much and ends up falling down as a result. To begin with, the introduction and justification for the new Key to Time quest seems rushed, coming across as an aping of the first scenes of “The Ribos Operation” — we learn that something called the Grace created the Key, and need to collect it to correct the imbalance caused by the fourth Doctor’s use of a synthetic segment in “The Armageddon Factor.” I’m in two minds about this motivation: on the one hand, it’s an interesting twist on the resolution to that story; on the other, it’s built off the resolution to a story from 1978, and the Doctor’s comments that he’s done all this before rob the situation of its urgency.
What is interesting, however, is the introduction of new companion Amy (Ciara Janson), a living Tracer able to feel the presence of the segments. Amy is presented as a complete blank — she doesn’t even have a name when the Doctor meets her — and she is shown to develop her personality from the Doctor’s own, such that at the play’s conclusion she is showing selfless, heroic impulses rather than a single-minded desire to complete her mission. Guerrier does a masterful job presenting this character’s subtle development — she’s the best thing about the play. Of course, she’s not the only Tracer after the Key; her counterpart, Zara (Laura Doddington), is seeking it along with companion Harmonious 14 Zink (Andrew Jones). Zink is a self-centered opportunist, and so Zara has developed to match his personality — and it’s not until the end of the play, when Amy and Zara link minds, that we see how they share the same origins. It’ll be interesting to see how this “season” continues with a villain with a malleable personality, but thus far it’s worked rather well.
After the introductory material, the remainder of the first episode of “Isskar” takes place in an early Martian society: the predecessors of the Ice Warriors. These Martians are a peace-loving people who live in a gift-based society: they do not know conflict, apart from their legal propensity to execute people at the drop of a hat. These scenes afford a rare opportunity to see into the past of the Ice Warriors and see the event that started them down a warlike path — but they’re mainly in the play to give Isskar (Nicholas Briggs) a revenge motive against the Doctor. This is the sort of thing that deserves the attention of an entire story, but instead it’s a glorified plot device.
Instead, the focus shifts to a world called Safeplace and its inhabitant race, the Valdigians. There’s a massive tonal shift as well: the Valdigians are presented as incompetent comedy monsters, with “hilarious” voices and nonsensical plots. I’m not sure why Guerrier opted to take the story in a overtly comic direction: it doesn’t fit, and it seems doubly unusual when the story once again becomes serious in the final episode. Raquel Cassidy, Jeremy James, and Heather Wright chew the hell out of the scenery, which is fun to listen to, but doesn’t fit at all with Davison’s world-weary performance or Briggs’ wheezing dignity.
Once the Valdigians are pushed aside, the final episode becomes more interesting, but unfortunately no less cluttered: we’re given an interesting glimpse into life inside a segment of the Key, but I’m not sure if it serves any purpose other than to give the Doctor something to do to fill time. There’s also the ending — while the appearance of the Black Guardian was entertaining (if predictable), I’m confused by the Doctor’s attitude in the face of death. If we’re meant to be drawing near to “The Caves of Androzani,” this isn’t at all how the Doctor acted in that story. I understand that BF has been forging its own continuity, and I’m generally fine with that, but an open acknowledgement of the story’s placement relative to the TV series feels uncomfortable in that context. This is not to take away from Davison’s performance, however: it’s absolutely brilliant, and more fitting for his current age and approach to the character.
On the production front, Simon Robinson’s sound design is admirably convincing, considering the wide range of bizarre settings. Jamie Robertson offers his first score for the range, and it’s solid if somewhat unmemorable. I also enjoyed Jason Haigh-Ellery’s direction, keeping the production pacy and clear. Overall, “The Judgement of Isskar” is slightly above-average fare with too many flaws to be considered great. There are a number of fantastic set pieces, and some fine concepts on display, but the script veers too rapidly from place to place and the tone of the production is inconsistent at best. As with many Big Finish productions, the quality of the performances and the design elevate the affair — but ultimately I can’t shake the feeling that it doesn’t hold together.
There are lots of things that aren’t wrong about the Skymines of Karthos. Despite being utterly disinterested in the whole adventure aside from the prospect of seeing his wife again, Jimmy Wilson doesn’t put in a bad turn as Michael Peters. His interplay with Lisa Bowerman is certainly one sided in her favour but its nice to see a dynamic where the two leads aren’t colleagues, and it certainly beats Bernice doing it solo as she did in Secret of Cassandra.
Miles Richardson appears right at the beginning as Brax to help set the scene but then remains conspicuously absent throughout the play, marking the ‘isolated’ planet Bernice finds herself on. I like it though, it adds a sense of continuity to the proceedings. In fact the whole introduction scene with the telephone message is an excellent start to what turns out to be a fairly standard play.
In this case, memory certainly does cheat. I was expecting the bad guy banter to be dire but actually it makes sense if you think about it. “The first is in the rock, the second is in the furnace, the third are…” may be grating after a while but it certainly makes sense. And it’s nice to see a villain whom Bernice’s archaeological qualifications actually set her up to face.
If Michael spends the play unenthusiastic about the play, Professor Konstantin played by Johnson Willis seems almost annoyed by his own presence. It’s a fairly stroppy performance that fits the tone of the play perfectly. No one’s here by choice.
It’s hard to sum up my feelings about this story. It doesn’t really have many lows, aside from a few too many pregnancy jokes. Aside from brief quips though it doesn’t really make use of Bernice being pregnant. The fact she is just springs up out of the blue, with a vague reference to the father not being who we’d expect it to be. If you’ve read the books this makes perfect sense but audio only listeners would have a right to be peeved.
And then the only actual consequence of her condition is that Michael insists on lowering her down some rocks, rather than letting her climb down. It adds five minutes of banter which I suppose make up the run time but really?
The fireflies make a somewhat unthreatening monsters, which is a shame because there was potential there. But after you’ve seen Michael clear them away like rodents, and then a couple of them set on Bernice and somehow cause her no damage at all. Mentions are made of the fact they have killed in the past but there’s no reality to it. And swarms of them flocking through the skies would be a brilliant image on film, but this is audio.
There’s a lot of things that aren’t wrong about this play, but it doesn’t have many of the highs the last two have boasted. Bernice’s pregnancy seems foisted on it, the fireflies despite looking threatening don’t actually do anything, and an intriguing concept of warfare comes too late in the day to be explored properly.
Now free to listen to as a podcast on the Big Finish website, this little freebie is a light and fluffy taste of early Bernice. Jac Rayner’s Making Myths seems deliberately designed to showcase the character, highlighting her wit and sarcasm in the form of bad, and tasteless, and utterly unfunny jokes.
Which, despite sounding boring, could be hilarious… Depending on your sense of humour. Sarah Mowat and Lisa Bowerman instantly click to give the desired impression of being good friends behind the microphone, but the constant ape-hamster jokes start to drag after a while. All in all this is a fun, light hearted story that adds a bit of depth to Bernice’s life. It just feels strange to hear Big Finish ‘original’ audios refer to the University of Dellah, a place they were never to return to again.
6 / 10
Closure
Paul Cornell writes something so startlingly different to Making Myths it’s almost hard to believe for a moment that this is the same series. Then you remember that you just heard ‘Just War’ and ‘Dragon’s Wrath’ back to back and suddenly this seems much more credible.
Whereas Making Myths featured Bernice at her best, a generally happy romp through muddy fields with a good companion for company, Closure shows her at her absolute worst. Lisa Bowerman’s performance is different from the off, she’s instantly on the defensive and somehow that always makes her more dangerous than ever. Arriving out of the blue, with a deep frown and an unusually harsh attitude, she frightens Sarah Mowatt’s Isabella more than a little.
Bernice promised at the end of Just War that she would never use the Time Rings again. According to ‘The Inside Story’, it was considered to be problem for the narrative, whilst trying to build a coherent new world they become an easy escape to pastures new. Inside the universe though, time travel seems to equate to unfortunate moral dilemmas and grim, dark thoughts. Here Bernice is full of them.
There is an element of cliché in the story, with the whole ‘would you go back and kill Hitler’ analogy correctly made during the course of the play itself. Paul Cornell’s altered situation enough though so that it actually makes sense, and the conclusion vague enough to make you wonder how it all works out.
9 / 10
These two stories could almost be considered a perfect prelude to the Companion Chronicles that would follow many years later. Closure in particular features Bernice herself telling a story, with Sarah Mowatt interceding at key points along the tale.
The two stories are polar opposites, one light and amusing and the other dark, grim and utterly enthralling.
Mixed feelings right off the bat. They dropped the singer from the intro titles, which is a great idea, but it leaves the music feeling empty. Glad she’s gone but you can tell that something’s missing, it doesn’t’ feel complete…
Things start fairly slowly with a nice gag about working, or not working, in pyjamas, lots of mud, and a man with a fairly deep Black Country accent. Hmmm…. Seems to be the industry standard so I wont complain specifically about it here. Fortunately things start moving once Miles Richardson’s smooth, commanding voice brings Irving Braxiatel to life. Again, like Adrian Wall, he doesn’t sound quite how the early books have depicted him but once again this is for the better. Given the subject matter it’s appropriate that Irving should have a brisk, businessman’s voice.
The story stands out in particular compared to the other plays of the series. There is no quest here, no grand adventure. Bernice and Brax appear at an auction… After an attempted murder is made on one of the sellers, Braxiatel sidles in for a potential discount bargain whilst Bernice worries about motives.
The main weak point of the play is the hypothetical question ‘why would they do that’, which would be more feasible if the aliens hadn’t been set out so evil. Whilst Brax is pondering the question, I just kept thinking ‘of course they would, they’re evil scumbags’, and when the revelation comes later that they ‘are’ evil scumbags this listener, unlike Brax and Benny, isn’t surprised at all.
Also why make a point of having Bernice and another woman have the same voice? Nothing is really made of this besides a quick excuse for the two characters to briefly meet. It just felt a bit… needless.
Fortunately the majority of it works, and it asks all the right questions about whether justice is justifiable. Brax was a good choice as companion, someone with enough moral ambiguity to make you wonder where he stands, but who ultimately comes through in the end.
And the use the bad guy, despite spending the majority of the play warbling incoherently, when he finally does open his mouth is ‘expletive, expletive, expletive’ brilliant. This is far more threatening and tangible than the last two plays, because for the first time you can see that things aren’t going to be all right after all.
The Halstad’s will be fondly remembered. But why, oh why, did they put the ‘full’ theme at the end of the play? The harp music was a brilliant way to end it, with just the right tone of sadness and hope… Why ruin that?
The Stone’s Lament is a small play. Really small. If you count Bernice and Adrian as regulars, then the only additional member of the cast is James Lailey as the elusive, lovestruck, refined gentleman Bratheen Traloor. The small cast suits the enclosed, isolated location, which is definitely the star of the play. Scenes with Adrian wandering around, worrying about his equipment being left out in the rain, instantly give you a natural sense of place.
And what a revelation Harry Myers is as Adrian Wall. He doesn’t quite come across quite as written in the books, but to this point the books haven’t given him much of note to base it off. Here Adrian is a strong, self important man but with a true heart of gold. He seems a perfect companion to Bernice, and although their arguments over the merits of JCBs vs. trowels for the purpose of digging drags a little, it sparks off a brilliant degree of banter. Thankfully no intrusive sound effects are used to accentuate his alien voice, so if you weren’t told he was a giant dog-man you honestly wouldn’t be able to tell.
For those who aren’t familiar with Adrian’s background from the book, there’s only a small mention made of Bernice’s previous indiscretions with this man. It’s immediately clear that he cares about her, and she sees him only as a friend, but the aside-line from Bernice to herself; ‘It’s not his fault you were possessed’ just feels slightly out of place, especially as it isn’t directly relevant to this story. The scene where he bursts into her room in the dead of night ready to please her is amusing though.
After an excellent start with a puzzling mystery and excellent setting, the story degenerates a bit towards the end. The Bratheen-House-Bernice love triangle is interesting, as is the twist of a haunted house that is terrorizing its guest because it’s jealous of them. Effective usage is made of the word bitch in one of my favourite scenes of the play, and although it was slightly obvious that it was Lisa Bowerman doing the computer voiceover the pay off is brilliant.
Unfortunately once Bernice firmly rejects him and he falls into the arms of the house, things grow a little stale. It all ends with a fairly standard monster plot, and a fairly standard explosion that saves the day. It’s not bad, just a shame after the excellent first three quarters.
All in all the Stone’s Lament is a brilliant small play, and an excellent introduction for Adrian Wall to the audio medium. The plot is tight and there are some unusual ‘romance’ related twists to the standard haunted house story that lift it above the standard fair.
If there’s one complaint I have about this release it’s the start… Not the strange, actually oddly effective introduction scene with Bernice stranded helpless on a desert island, but the light throwaway backstory that explains how she got there. Holiday cruising on a planet torn apart by bloody war? After her previous experiences in similar situations, really? Either she didn’t do any homework at all and walked into it blind or she really, really was drunk. It’s a small complaint, with no significant baring on the actual content of the play, but as a reason for Bernice being where she is I find it annoyingly out of character.
Whilst we’re discussing the start also of annoyance is the ‘Bondesque’ theme song, which makes an unwelcome return from Dragon’s Wrath. It made sense for that story, it was misplaced but at least you could see the ambition. Here it’s overly bombastic, clichéd, unashamedly crass tone is really, really offputting.
The play itself is fairly straightforward, if a little contrived. Lennox Greaves is instantly likeable as the disenchanted Captain Colley, although why he suddenly places an inordinate amount of trust in Bernice is a mystery. A polar opposite is General Brennan, who spends much of the play ranting and raving about ‘not trusting’ Bernice before finally opening up at the end.
In fact much of the story revolves around characters not trusting each other, and between the opening scene setting and the point when answers start to arrive most of the story is driven by Bernice, Captain Colley and the General circling each other suspiciously. Boring…
Fortunately, after this triangle is broken by the release of the General’s mysterious prisoner, answers start to arrive quickly. It’s a tense, emotionally charged situation with a nice symmetry to its ending.
All in all the Secret of Cassandra poses as a diverting, simple adventure for ‘new’ Bernice to sink her teeth into. What I’m not sure about is what she was doing there in the first place… Holiday cruising? Really?
As with all the other Gallifrey plays, I sat down before writing my review of Alan Barnes’ “Panacea” with the fantastic summaries at The Dr Who Guide to refresh my memory of the script. And, sadly, as with most of the other Gallifrey plays, I found myself bored and unable to recall many of the events I had heard not two days previously. I know I’m rejecting the entire concept of the series when I say things like this, but seriously: when did Gallifrey become so neutered? We’re to the point, in the fourteenth play, of the Time Lords being worried that they don’t have enough money and planning to sell their temporal weapons! Meanwhile, the dogma virus from the first season returns, and now it’s free and — sigh — turning people into zombies. 35% of the population, in fact, something that seems to have happened under everyone’s noses during the chaos of the war. So, with Gallifrey falling — and, by the way, there’s no mention of the destruction of the Matrix, something that turned out to be totally insignificant — we start to seed oblique hints about the new series Time War, with references to Daleks and foreshadowing of a great upcoming conflict. Braxiatel returns, stealing the entire Gallifreyan bio-data archive so that he can reconstruct the entire population after they all die. Convenient, no? Of course, the alternative is to eliminate the Time Lords’ ability to regenerate, which would prevent them from turning into zombies. And what does Romana choose when faced with this impossible decision? Nothing, conveniently, as the decision is taken from her. Fortunately, she has another plan up her sleeve to stop the impending disaster, but, as you’d expect, the series ends before she can say what it is.
When Big Finish’s Sarah Jane Smith series ended on an apparent cliffhanger, I loved it: the final scene was open to several different interpretations, and a resolution would have cheapened the effect. The Gallifrey series, however, ends abruptly in the middle for no reason whatsoever, as though the production team just got tired of making it. Fitting, though, because I’d long since grown tired of listening to it.
All in all, a series which didn’t exhibit much potential in the first place failing to live up even to that, withering into nonsense and dying a slow death. Fourteen plays later and all I feel is irritation.
I wasn’t happy with “Appropriation,” so discovering that “Mindbomb,” the 13th and penultimate Gallifrey release, followed even more of the same style of political machination did nothing to relieve my unhappiness. Fortunately, this is a Justin Richards script, and Richards has proven himself a master of weaving intricate, interesting plots. The fundamental problems I have with these Gallifreyan political disputes — the rules are made up as they go and it’s entirely unclear what the consequences of Romana’s failure would be — are still present, but Richards bends them in his favor, creating a rule about nullifying previous Presidential actions and then using it to re-introduce Braxiatel to the story. The twists come quickly in the play’s second half, and keep the interest, but ultimately “Mindbomb” is still about Time Lord political minutiae and unconcerned with character or theme. As an example, two plays ago, the Matrix, the ultimate repository of knowledge of the universe’s oldest, most powerful civilization, was destroyed. In “Mindbomb,” another consequence of this stunning event is revealed, something which has surely shaken Time Lord society to its core: the guy that runs the elections has to count the votes by computer, because the Matrix isn’t there to do it for him! My god, I don’t know how they’ll survive.
There are very few existing reviews of the third Gallifrey series floating around the internet, but one of the few I found described Paul Sutton’s “Appropriation” as “competent” — and I can’t really disagree with that sentiment, but I certainly have no desire to add to it. The first two plays in the third “season” seemed to focus more on their characters, but “Appropriation” subsumes everything in the service of political machinations: there is nothing going on here beyond naked ambition and desperation. I was not expecting this from the author of “Arrangements for War,” but yet again I found myself almost completely unconcerned with the action and its potential consequences. The Matrix was destroyed in the last story — naturally, this has no noticeable consequences whatsoever, apart from making communications more difficult.
We’re also back to the political negotiations with other temporal powers from the first season, and they’re still uninteresting — except this time we get a replay of “The Invasion of Time,” in which the transduction barrier is the only thing protecting Gallifrey from invasion. So it goes down, and the Sunari invade Gallifrey, and we’ve got two immensely powerful, time-active civilizations locked in combat, so this has to be compelling, right? No, actually — the invasion consists of running up and down corridors shooting at each other.
Soon, though, the invasion is repelled, setting up the second half of the story in which Romana, Darkel, and a number of faceless Time Lord characters debate the finer points of the rules of presidential succession. When your entire drama turns around an election, it’s remarkably ineffective to make the rules up on the spot — at least when Romana declared herself Imperiatrix, it resonated against her desire to maintain Gallifreyan democracy; here, when she declares that the law allows her to name her next regeneration as her own successor, it doesn’t resonate with anything apart from the need for convenience. Ultimately, “Appropriation” is little more than a treatise on the workings of a government that doesn’t exist and whose rules have rarely been established. I’m sure some find this interesting; I most certainly do not.
I’m not going to lie — I’ve lost interest, which is why these reviews are getting shorter and shorter. Fortunately, there are some effective moments in Stewart Sheargold’s “Fractures,” the second episode in the third and final season of the Gallifrey series. Start with Leela, who hasn’t been particularly interesting in the series to date, but who has been given a new lease on life, so to speak, by her blindness. She’s more reckless than before, more desperate, but still an effective, reliable ally, one who has adjusted quite well to her disability. The title, “Warfare,” can easily refer to the chaos inside the minds of Romana and Pandora, each possessed by echoes of the past — and the eventual resolution, which is quite elegant, making satisfying use of the assassin from the previous play. The rest of the play, though, is far too convoluted — while certainly comprehensible, endless sequences of twists and double-crosses merely bored me, as I still feel little to no investment in these characters, especially those who weren’t previously in Doctor Who. And then, at the end, the Matrix is totally destroyed — is this going to be a significant plot point for the remainder of the series? Hard to say. Frankly, the drama for me lies in whether I can find the energy to continue.
Finally — ten episodes and over two seasons into the Gallifrey series and we’ve been given an actual glimpse of impressive Time Lord technology. Admittedly, we don’t see much, but Stephen Cole’s “Fractures” uses lyrical names similar to those used by Russell T Davies — the Maelstrom Cloisters, the Anomaly Vaults, etc. Furthermore, the assassin Aesino (Lisa Bowerman) is a fantastic idea — an individual with near-infinite clones taken from one second in her personal future. The story also focuses further on character beats: Leela is blinded, and suffers a crisis of confidence as a result; Romana loses her identity and needs a friend to bring her back; Darkel, as usual, plays both sides; K9 serves Pandora but tries to break free, etc. Cole’s script wisely stays away from political machinations — this is somewhat natural, due to Pandora’s rise to power, but through focusing on the characters, “Fractures” is thus far the most accessible of the Gallifrey stories. The Gary Russell/David Darlington partnership of director and sound designer continues from the second season, and “Fractures” has the same confidence of all Big Finish productions of the latter Russell era. Unfortunately, I’m still not finding myself gripped, and so I’m reducing these reviews to one paragraph unless and until I have more to say.
There are some who say this could be the best production Big Finish have, and will ever, make. I hope that’s not true. It would be a shame if it was all downhill from the millennium onwards, but I can see where they’re coming from. Lisa Bowerman is on top form, Stephen Fewell actually gets something meaty to throw Jason at and, my most common gripe with this series, the bad guys are spot on.
It’s fair to say actually that the Nazi’s are the heart and soul of the play. It represents a dream, an idea and belief. It doesn’t judge, not too harshly. Here the Third-Reich is proven evil by the fact they hurt people, but they’re not the only ones to do it. During the plat both Bernice and Jason both get to bloody their conscience, only they’re convinced they did it for the right reasons…
There are five Nazi’s of note and each of them has something important to offer the story. No corners are cut in their portrayal, starting with two young men completely taken in by the Fuhrer’s propaganda, who don’t actually know what war really is. Simon Moore is perfectly loveable, if a little dim, low ranking, well intentioned German who mistakenly thinks he can make friends amongst the locals. He doesn’t mean any harm, and his shocking and abrupt death could rank as the most important fatality in Big Finish history. It justifies so much of this play…
Anthony Keech plays a similar young man, Gerhard’s best friend, and spends the second half of the play attempting to come to terms with his loss. His scenes with Maggie Stables, clearing out the last of the dead man’s things from the hotel, are heartbreaking on both sides.
Meanwhile Mark Gatiss throws his all into Standardtenfuhrer Joachim Wolff, exactly the kind of sadistic Nazi villain you’d expect from the movies. Mark clearly enjoys throwing his best menacing voice into the production, and certain scenes with Wolff will make the hairs on the back of your neck stick up. He’s accompanied by the slightly more scrupulous Nurse Rosa Kitzel, played by Nicky Golding. The two make an effective double act, and there’s a particularly powerful scene where a terrified, helpless Bernice asks Nurse Kitzel if she really believes that she deserves to be tortured.
The response is chilling.
But all of these characters exist primarily to serve beneath Oberst Oskar Steinmann, in what should be an award winning performance by Michael Wade. Oskar is a practical, believable man who initially appears to be sympathetic, almost friendly to Bernice and Jason. Beneath that calm, approachable exterior though lurks a heart of stone. He has love for his country, ambition for his ideals and logic is on his side. Steinmann’s committed belief in what he does, and constant rationalisation for fascism is truly terrifying. He gets what is probably the most important line of the play when he explains to Bernice why he doesn’t believe her story: “If you were really from the future, then you would be a German.” He knows that what he does hurts people, and that that makes it distasteful. But he knows, in every fibre of his being, that he does it for the right reasons.
Without spoiling the plot too much, Just War is set almost entirely on the occupied Guernsey. I’ve never been to Guernsey so I can’t comment on the accents, but they don’t hinder the experience. It is rare though to see a play about the occupation which tells you as more about the occupiers as the oppressed. This story is unflinching both physically and emotionally, and the observation that Bernice makes is true; she’s never in more danger than when it’s other humans who are trying to kill her. She can’t escape… and she can’t do anything to alter the situation because that would alter history. She’s helpless and she’s just completely lost the moral high ground.
“I’m scared of letting all these people down. At least if I get blown up as well they can say I died heroically. Assuming I ever existed at all.”
So far we have had a madcap adventure and a serious one played straight but no real grounding for the series yet. Tom Swift says in his review of Beyond the Sun that a middle ground between the zany and the heartfelt would be a good direction to try next, and Walking to Babylon seems to be trying to achieve this, as well as being the first attempt to have an arc running through several stories.
And so we embark on the first story in the Time Ring Trilogy, where Benny and Jason are catapulted from location to location, the first being ancient Babylon.
Having not read any of the books I am considering the audios purely from their own perspective, therefore I cannot comment on how well they have been adapted or what shortcomings they suffer compared to the original novels.
This one starts, as does Beyond the Sun, with a visit from Jason. The love-hate relationship Benny has with her ex-husband continues as he annoys her further, this time by bringing along one of the People. I know nothing about the People but the audio gives enough of an explanation to be going on with. This technique will become a common feature of the Benny range, as new situations are casually thrown in at the start with the briefest description, but they are introduced succinctly and naturally enough to get across the salient points of the plot without feeling like clumsy exposition. Oddly, it doesn’t irritate me not to know all the details, whereas in Dr Who I might want more explanation. Perhaps it’s the pace, the different structure of the Bennys, the different parameters it can operate within compared to Who, I don’t know, but with the Bennys I am much more likely to go with the flow and assume that if I need more back story I can read the books.
Anyway. The People are clearly immensely powerful and that’s all we need to know for the story to move on. After Jason leaves Benny she meets two more People, who ask for her help. The one Jason brought with him has, along with his accomplice and their droid, kidnapped Jason and used him to go back in time. There is now a time path going all the way back to Earth’s ancient history but the People as a whole have agreed not to time travel as part of a peace treaty, so they dare not risk going themselves. Benny realises that Jason has stolen her Time Ring to help the renegade People do this, so she will be safe to travel along it and agrees to go and deal with them – and, with a bit of luck, give Jason a thick ear.
As with Beyond the Sun, Jason is the instigator of this latest disaster. True to form he’s been duped and imprisoned by his partners in crime. For someone with his talent for technology and with his connections to the shadier elements of society, his overwhelming naivety is beginning to make it more unbelievable that he’s lived this long, because here he is again at the wrong end of another dodgy deal and once again Benny has to rescue him. Since this could get stale fast, there is at least more at stake this time. The actions of the renegade People may affect history, and let’s be honest – an archeologist turning down a chance to see Ancient Babylon? Not really happening is it? So, armed with nothing but her wits, a couple of universal translators and a device for measuring changes in the time stream, she’s off in hot pursuit.
When she arrives in Babylon, further complications arise when it becomes apparent that some time sensitive humans can also get onto the path and walk along it. Benny meets John Lafayette, a young man from the early 20th century who is initially out of his depth until Benny takes him under her wing, and he becomes a strong and well written temporary companion. Barnaby Edwards plays him as a dedicated man but with sensitivity, making even Lafayette’s old fashioned attitude towards sex and women seem more quaint than merely bigoted. It’s a great performance that makes the character hugely likeable. Benny’s brief relationship with him is done believably and tastefully, without coming across as the Hollywood style cliche of hero meeting someone and shagging them just to chuck a “relationship” in as a bit of gratuitous titillation between the bullets.
The other characters are all very well done too. There’s not a bad performance on show here, plus everyone seems to have had a great time doing it, which I always find infectious. Louise Morell is particularly good as the temple girl Miriam. Stephen Wickham is very funny as the drone and seems to be an early model for Joseph, the drone in the later plays. Even the small parts like the child and the traders are convincing, with everybody’s performances gelling and building on each other, but pride of place has to go to Elizabeth Sladen. Though her voice is instantly recognisable, her turn as Ninan-ashtammu is utterly committed and believable as she has a crisis of faith after talking to Jason, who manages to redeem himself somewhat in a great scene with her.
Again I must express admiration for Lisa, who has not read any of the books either, yet she remains convincing in all the plays regardless of the quality of the stories, and never feels like she’s sleepwalking through it or phoning in her performance. This play is all about the characters, who make the story special.
Stumbling straight out of the thrilling conclusion to ‘Walking to Babylon’, Bernice and Jason each arrive in two separate, terrifying worlds. The first scene stumbles between horror and melodrama, with an almost clichéd ‘terror stalking the streets of London’ once again. Jason then stumbles into a bleak post-apocalypse world with some very unhappy insects. And for reasons that initially seem incredibly clear but later become rather confusing both parties need to recover the Time Ring still held by ‘John Lafayette’ of the previous novel.
Fortunately Bernice is joined for much of the adventure by an intelligent Russian detective played by the incredible Colin Baker. He plays Mikhail Vladamir Popov with such reserved authenticity the listener can’t help but fall as deeply in love with him the way Bernice does. He literally saves this play from mediocrity.
Also of note is John Wadmore as Jared Khan and Jonathan Reason as Chief. Insp. Prior, one fanatically reserved and the other overstuffed and blustery to the point of annoyance. Whilst one evil mastermind clicks out words with timed precision the other struggles through the simplest sentence, giving the play a close approximation of Victorian London. Unfortunately, as Bernice is happy to inform them, neither of these villainous archetypes are anything she hasn’t seen before.
Once again Stephen Fewell gets to share the majority of his scenes with the villains; the incredibly ‘noble’ Charrl. The alien world has very little of interest to offer the listener, not due to the grating sound effects of the insects but because of the lack of audible characters. I counted three; the Queen, her daughter and her aid, all spouting the same repeatable dialogue about the noble Charrl and their need to survive. My main problem is that the more often I hear that something is ‘noble’ and ‘worthy’, the more I expect to see evidence of it. Of course it’s a deliberate lie, but from start to finish I found myself getting more and more annoyed at its constant repetition.
Scenes that should be full of visceral horror struggle to come across on audio, its slightly difficult to present the visual sight of a larder full of humans when you don’t see or even interact with any of ‘foodstock’. And once again Jason is pleading for his life and negotiating to get his way through difficult circumstances…
It looks like this may or may not be the fault of the novel’s transitions. I haven’t read the original Birthright but from a bit of scouting it appears that the scenes set on the Charrl homeworld appear to be laid out very differently to those played by the New Adventures ‘sexy warrior’ Ace. It also explains why he very uncharacteristically knocks Bernice unconscious when they meet up, something he would never do but Ace quite possibly would have.
Bernice’s half of the novel definitely fairs better, and though loosing the machinations of the Doctor in the background removes a layer of complexity it doesn’t significantly alter the story. Bernice still investigates the grisly murders and despite being sidetracked by her search for John Lafayette, events play out on course.
To be honest Birthright suffers from being a middle play. When it’s earnest it over dramatises, and when I want the story to advance it instead delves into a sub plot concerning John Lafayette’s future life. Whilst it’s good to know he lived happily ever after the only point of this section is to direct Bernice to Guernsey for the next instalment. Coming after Walking to Babylon, and before Just War, it is definitely a case of the middle instalment loosing out to the heavyweights either side.
Tellingly this stories best scene comes when an insect is ‘about’ to appear. Genuine fear and terror as a man unfamiliar with this fantastic world looses it and makes a run for the door, only to come back later with his tail between his legs. At that point the Charrl look mysterious, dangerous and elusive, and according to Bernice very confused.
It’s not bad, and it has some wonderful performances. Colin Baker delights as a character worthy of his own series, but neither the Charrl or Jared Khan really cut it as villains. Too much talk of nobility and worthiness, interplayed with gory action, with no meaningful middle ground. I can’t work out if it needs more flesh, or reigning in significantly. One or the other certainly.
Before I start the review can I just say ‘yes’ to the cover.
The covers for the first few novels weren’t ‘bad’ as such, but they weren’t very distinctive. The range changed with series two of the audios and Dave Stone’s Infernal Nexus, but fittingly the cover is as mad and ludicrous as the content of the book itself. Finally, on the fifth attempt, it all just seems to come together. It’s striking, evocative, moody and deeply personal. It’s just… right.
The novel comes from the range’s first returning author, who impressed by being the first of the new novels to really delve deep into Bernice Summerfield’s head and write a novel from an incredibly intimate perspective. This novel though is twice as intimate, twice as dangerous and ten times as rewarding.
Firstly the setting is perfect, showing a loved character at her most wonderful. Whilst hard to actually envisage practically, the concept of the Glass Prison is chilling. Once again the Fifth Axis are hard at play, and a particularly nasty character from the Doomsday Manuscript makes a long overdue return.
It’s no lie to say Bernice doesn’t actually do anything in this book. At the start she puts on a show of defiance and begins a half hearted murder enquiry, but it’s the cast of characters she surrounds herself with who carry the novel forwards. This is a book about loosing control, and eventually Bernice is forced to spend the book on her back wondering, worrying, about what is happening around her. It’s a powerful situation.
Fortunately her new companions; Claire, her midwife, and Sophia, possibly the best creation in the last five books period, are more than capable of carrying the book. Both characters are warm and instantly likeable, but both with their small areas of doubt. They are the only two characters for the reader to rely on in a novel full of loathsome creations.
The appearance of a cult is a familiar concept, but they play their role well and are important in bringing the story forwards. Gripper, Benny’s fourth cell mate, treads the fine line between menacing and misunderstood right to the end. But the real villain of the piece does nothing but stare from his vantage point on the next floor, watching, waiting.
And predictably Bernice leaves the novel with a baby, a beautiful boy. It all ends a little too neatly, (spoiler: glass shattering at the sound of babies cry, really? This one incident leading to the complete downfall of the Fifth Axis, really?) but the novel isn’t about that. It focuses on the inhabitants of the prisons, on the fear and love and loathing that fill the terrible place. And as a particularly dodgy doctor descends on Bernice with a knife to perform a caesarean the novel gains a momentum that leads right up to the last page.
Like the cover, this is just a book that gets it right. But, surely, in that picture, shouldn’t Bernice look a little more swollen?
After three novels that are each entertaining in their own way, the Bernice Summerfield book range has appeared strong but broken very few boundaries. That changes with the introduction of Dave Stone and his creation Jason Kane, in the de facto sequel to the oddball short story from the collection ‘The Door Into Bedlam’. For the first time in the range everything, literally, is up in the air. Dave Stone has literally created a world within which anything can happen.
Although he has not appeared as such until now Jason Kane’s shadow has hung over the Bernice range like an ugly smell. His image was important to the plot of ‘Doomsday Manuscript’, but the only significance of that it had to be someone close to Bernice. In ‘The God’s of the Underworld’ one of Bernice’s many aims, besides staying alive, is finding someone who allegedly knew the location of Jason, and she eventually found what she was looking for but still got nothing. And then in ‘The Squire’s Crystal’ references to him pop up again as again, as Jac Raynor tackles many issues close to Bernice’s heart. That he finally puts in an appearance is fulfilment after ages of expectation.
Expectation that Dave Stone couldn’t possibly meet. Could he?
There literally isn’t time for the fallout of such a titanic reunion with the inclusion of everything else happening in this mad novel. Look at the cover if your curious, it may look strange but actually it perfectly fits the contents. The closest I can compare this to is Douglas Adams, but Dave Stone approaches it with far less dry humour and enough of a cynical eye and steroids to not just cross, but speed over the line that Adams drew. It’s a crazy, knowingly ridiculous world he crafts full of counter arguments and impossibilities, that exists solely because it wants to. There is no rhyme or reason here, just madness.
Volan Sleed is certainly a menacing demon, but strangely it’s the characters like Mae An T’zhu who seem far more threatening, just because they may have sexual designs on Jason. Once the bad guys are revealed they become safe, because the lines are drawn, but there are still an assembled cast of characters who just don’t care if Bernice gets her husband home or not. That coupled with the journey of redemption of Suzi II, and the pig headed Mora Di Vasht give the story enough humanity to create drama and characters the reader can invest in.
The Infernal Nexus is not a perfect novel, and admittedly like its predecessors isn’t too proud to borrow good ideas from other mediums, and the writing definitely at time struggles under its own weight. Yes sentences are overlong and there’s far too much going on, it is full of distraction and self contradictions, but it is a bold statement that stands out. By being so deliberately utterly mad, yet so grounded in the ‘love-hate’ relationship between Bernice and Jason, it feels just right. And yes, you do get the payout in that glorious final scene in the bar, and not just from this novel, but from the Squire’s Crystal as well. Payout at last.
And then gloriously in the epilogue the entire plot is repeated, spelled out clearly in case anyone missed it happening with all the confusion the first time around. Only this time rather than as a mad science fiction caper, it’s in the synopsis of a porn film.
Having accused ‘The Gods of the Underworld’ of having very few highly original ideas, and just mashing together well known themes of Science Fiction to create something new, I ought to balk at sight of a ‘woman becomes man’ story.
Jac Raynor, already familiar with Bernice from her sterling work adapting the first series of audiobooks, cracks her whip at something original and fun. More than either of the other authors she delves inside the professor’s head, giving us deep insight into exactly what Bernice is thinking. She also gives her insight into what it is to be a man, deliberately shying away from crass cold biological descriptions and thrusting important and meaningful words such as ‘thingy’ in the readers face.
Most importantly though she doesn’t loose her sense of humour. And that is crucial. The story and its consequences are played straight, with danger and terrible events at every stage, but fortunately for the narrator everything is told slightly tongue in cheek. And walking that awkward line is where this book succeeds most.
It’s a much slighter book than its predecessors, with far loose plot twists. Perhaps that’s a good thing as the joke probably starts to wear thin after a while, although personally I do think there is room for more. As the hitherto nondescript Adrian Wall suddenly becomes a central character we are given only a brief glimpse of his seduction. References to what scandalous things Bernice has been getting up to on the Collection whilst off camera are made but given the dire consequences of what happens here will be later (bad reviewer, should be approaching this with a fresh mind) I almost wish we’d seen more than we do. Especially at the end, where the immeasurable fall out for Adrian as he has to come to terms with loosing the love of his life are made off screen…
Fortunately the novels main new attraction, Dominic Troy, is full of surprises and a surprise link back to the Fifth Axis of the Doomsday Manuscript. This kind of interlinking between novels is certainly a welcome development, and shows just how successful the elements seeded earlier in the series are turning out to be. That different authors are having the confidence to play with each other’s creations can only be a good thing.
The Squire’s Crystal is a brief, very welcome indulgence and despite the cliché ending (how can I prove she is not who she says she is) and the cliché start (Bernice gets an invitation off Collection to meet interesting discovery from client who turns out to have hidden agenda) and clichéd middle (woman becomes man, hilarious transgender confusion antics ensue) it’s a strong story with, most importantly, believable characters.
Aside from Brax who as always has all the answers. When’s something interesting going to happen with him?
Bernice Summerfield and The Gods of the Underworld
After Bernice Summerfield and the Doomsday Manuscript took us on an Adventure with a capital A, Stephen Cole introduces a much grittier, more visceral tale that is more akin to an action/horror movie like Rambo, than the petty highs and thrills of the Indiana Jones. Fortunately it features some characters just strong enough to stop this novel descending into an all out action fest.
Right off the start there’s some world building, with mentions of the Fifth Axis and the creation of the Earthlink Federation. As the opponents of what have already been revealed to be ‘brutal space Nazis’, surely these must be the good guys. Oh no, because in this book nobody is good. Very few people are even nice.
Fortunately Starl, who seems to be a generic Han Solo lookalike, instantly recognisable loveable rogue space pilot, is one of the few nice ones. And he occupies a lot of the novel, alternately teasing and praising Bernice between fantastic acts of derring do. Joining them are two Waskas, alien archaeology experts, and Shell, a fan of Bernice who has some pretty horrendous experiences.
There’s a lot of gore and violence in this book. Whereas the previous novel showed life struggling under an oppressive regime, here there is an impending extinction event. The cause turns out to be some parasitic creatures, who almost completely resemble something from ‘Alien’. There is a tribe of ignorant savages, angrily turning on anyone who comes near them, a space fleet orbiting the planet preparing to ‘contain’ the whole situation with a nuclear barrage, and a group of alien ‘heavies’ who sit halfway between the stars of ‘Predator’ and the ‘Godfather’.
As you may have noticed there are a lot of elements taken from other sources. What is impressive is the way everything knits together so well. Venedel honestly does feel like a living, breathing, troubled world and the characters are played so straight and honestly that the fact you’ve seen the equivalent thing happened before hardly matters.
Fortunately the Nishtubi make very effective ‘bad guys’, and despite being shown in hardly any detail definitely appear far more threatening than the fifth axis. The High Boor Bantagel is an oddly effective leader, unusual because characters incapable speaking any form of proper English usually come out looking stupid or silly, but here with the proper explanation it makes sense and seems all the more threatening for it.
I may be tainted from my experience reading this in a hospital bed but it’s not an easy novel to get through. There are pages after pages of violence and death, and it doesn’t have many highly original ideas, but it does what it does extremely well. The title is a clever pun on reader’s expectations and once you realise there’s hardly any archaeology or ancient curses to be revealed everything slowly starts to fall into place. It’s a shame then that when the Oracle of the Lost does briefly appear at the end, and references are made once again to the missing Jason, the situation feels like something of an anticlimax. I hope the Jason sub thread is going somewhere.
All in all the Gods of the Underworld is a fairly strong novel, with some very familiar and traditional science fiction archetypes crafted together to give a strong and gruelling mystery. Like its predecessor it doesn’t break any boundaries or tread far into new territory, but it does tell its own story in its own self assured way.
Bernice Summerfield and the Doomsday Manuscript feels like the archetypal template for a new series of Bernice Summerfield adventures, it lays down a new innovative, yet deeply traditional format and sticks to its guns through and through. And that format is, without a doubt, heavily Indiana Jones inspired.
Comparisons between Bernice and her male, Hollywood worthy counterpart from the 20th century have been made before but never so obviously. From the word go this ingenious, yet strangely active, archaeology professor is embroiled in a quest to uncover an ancient tomb, an exhilarating adventure of daring do, whilst pursued by those no good villainous space Nazis.
Although Straklant makes a good villain by the end of the novel he is the only member of the fifth axis to be fleshed out significantly. Oppressive regimes require more than one face to be taken seriously. The entire concept of the fifth axis seems slightly ‘too obvious’, so taking the comparison at face value it’s probably a good thing the novel focuses far more of the lives of individuals under the regime than the occupiers themselves.
I have a slight problem through the first half of the novel, where Bernice remains completely unaware of her companion’s true nature. As the audience is shown almost immediately how villainous Straklant can be, it makes Bernice seem a little stupid in comparison. At first this is fine but it drags on for three quarters of the book.
Fortunately once the action settles on one planet, trapped under fifth axis occupation, the pace slows down considerably and the book finds its feet. There is an excellent description of the occupation, with some genuinely moving tragedies to work through before the finale, which despite being terrifically clever, does feel something of an anticlimax.
As a new, exciting type of adventure the Doomsday Diaries succeeds admirably. It showcases Bernice and her role in the collection, giving us a suitably menacing villain and a clever hook in the form of Jason’s mysterious photograph. The majority of the novel does feel light and frothy though, the literary equivalent of Indiana Jones big screen adventures with simple evil space Nazis who do horrific things seemingly just to make the audience hiss at them. Fortunately the last third of the book is truly excellent, giving it the depth and real world grounding it needs to work.
A recent thread on Gallifrey Base got me thinking about why I haven’t yet felt satisifed with Big Finish’s Gallifrey miniseries. As part of a debate about the presentation of Gallifrey and the Time Lords throughout Doctor Who history, a poster outlined the morally-questionable things we’ve seen from them. They’ve planned to execute the Doctor on multiple occasions to cover up other crimes. They’ve imprisoned some of their greatest leaders and scientists. There are strong hints of an imperialist, despotic past. They gladly massacre the population of Earth to cover up some stolen secrets. Ancient pieces of Time Lord technology are the subject of myths. And they’re always cast in opposition to the Doctor, with his irreverent, human-like behavior casting the Time Lords into sharp relief. Take the Doctor out of the series, though, and we lose our point of reference. Yes, Romana is there, but despite her urges toward reform, she’s the Lord President, the embodiment of the establishment. Leela is the closest thing we have to an outsider, but even she’s been on Gallifrey for decades without aging.
And so we come to Stewart Sheargold’s “Imperiatrix,” the final story of the second Gallifrey season, and we find ourselves, in many ways, exactly where we started. Yes, it’s impressive to finally have a play in which things happen — tensions come to a head, there are bombings, and regular characters meet tragic ends — but throughout I kept asking myself why I was supposed to find any of this interesting. Certainly Gallifrey itself isn’t — the irony about the drama revolving around Romana’s reforms is that those reforms would stop Time Lord society being fascinating. Seriously, we’ve spent nine stories in the heart of one of the oldest, most powerful civilizations in the universe, one which commands authority over time itself, and I can’t remember a single moment in which I felt at all impressed. Yes, there has been temporal intrigue, but at its core the Gallifrey series is about political machinations — and this strikes me as wasted potential. “Imperiatrix” ends on a gripping cliffhanger, to be sure, but the possible consequences exist only in the abstract.
I hate to take these feelings out on Sheargold’s story, since it’s easily the best script yet in the series and he’s an author whose work I’ve generally enjoy, but as the “end credits” rolled, I found myself thinking “okay, so what?” — and that’s a feeling I cannot abide.
Admittedly, I don’t know what to expect in the upcoming second season finale of Gallifrey, but the buildup has been remarkably slow. Here, in “Insurgency,” the penultimate story, we see Steve Lyons telling an allegorical tale of Time Lord isolationism and the racial tension that erupts as a result of open borders. It’s fairly successful in this regard, but as a piece of drama it’s once again uneventful and feels more like treading water than progressing towards a conclusion.
While I know immigration is a persistently hot topic in UK politics, I won’t pretend to be familiar — but I’m more than familiar with similar debates here in the US. While nobody cares about the virtually open border with Canada, and while the influx of immigrants from places like Europe and Asia provokes little more than raised eyebrows, the idea of Mexican immigration raises the ire of conservatives like little else. “Insurgency” shows a contingent of Time Lords, led by the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham), who believe that allowing the lesser races access to the Academy will cheapen Time Lord secrets and weaken Gallifreyan power. This plain feeling of superiority over “lesser races” and desire to protect national superiority is hardly an unfamiliar one, and Lyons captures a strong sense of growing paranoia, as well as a deserved sense of oppression among the visiting Academy students.
As for the over-arching plot, all the pieces are now in place for the finale — Romana has resolved to use the power of her position to its full extent, while Darkel is declaring a presidential challenge. There are some surprising events at the conclusion involving Andred (Andy Coleman) that will certainly develop. It’s also enjoyable to hear John Leeson modifying his traditional K9 voice to represent the Pandora personality drawn from the Matrix, and he serves as an effective oracle. The behind-the-scenes duo of Gary Russell and David Darlington continue their effective work on a series that continues with a consistent level of quality — but still seems incapable of achieving greatness.
Near the end of “Spirit,” the preceding Gallifrey play that served primarily as a character piece, a new mystery was introduced: a Time Lord, mutilated beyond recognition and unable to communicate, arriving in a TARDIS still residing in the docking chambers. Justin Richards’ “Pandora” gets to the bottom of this mystery, and in true Richards fashion it’s intricate, twist-filled, and well-constructed.
As with other stories in this series, “Pandora” doesn’t feature much incident: there are many scenes in which characters like the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham), Braxiatel (Miles Richardson), Narvin (Sean Carlsen), Wynter (Ian Hallard), and Romana herself debate the finer points of Time Lord politics. I confess that I’m still not especially interested in the political consequences of appointing a Chancellor, nor the implications of making Braxiatel the first such Time Lord since Flavia. However, unlike some of the first season’s longer scenes, “Pandora” doesn’t focus on these matters to the exclusion of all else. K9’s investigation into the nature of the “broken man” is fascinating, Richards using mutiple in-story flashbacks to reveal more and more about his identity. I wasn’t happy with the prolonged, brutal violence when we see how the “broken man” became so mutilated, however — while certainly well-acted and disturbing, it didn’t fit at all with the tone of the rest of the play and seemed more distracting than anything.
Richards also clears many of the pieces off the board going forward. Pandora (Barbara Longman), the ancient Imperiatrix lurking in the Matrix, is removed from the equation at the same time as Braxiatel, a move that seems to explain his divorce from Gallifreyan society and progression into the Bernice Summerfield audio series. And while CIA types like Narvin were always going to be slimy individuals of questionable morals, this story allows the Inquisitor to come into her own as one of the true villains of the piece. Bellingham is the true star of this story, her shadow hanging over every scene as she expertly manipulates events to undermine Romana’s authority and the Presidency itself. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how her plans develop in the final two stories of this season. I’m also looking forward to the resolution of the problems between Leela and Andred (Andy Coleman) — though in this case mostly because I find the conflict to be repetitive and distracting.
Gary Russell and David Darlington continue to do a fine job as director and composer/sound designer, respectively. With such a static play, it can be difficult to maintain the interest, but the pacing never flags and this listener, at least, never got bored. Overall, “Pandora” continues the upward trend in quality of the Gallifrey audios, and bodes well for what will surely be a epic conclusion.
After the somewhat esoteric linking theme of Destination Prague, Short Trips: Snapshots gets back to a much more basic framework: stories that show what it’s like to encounter the Doctor, however briefly. With expert short story author Joseph Lidster editing the anthology, expectations were high — and for the most part the anthology follows through.
Golem — Lizzie Hopley — What an odd way to start. Written from the perspective of a monster ready to rise from the ground, it casts our modern society and our obsession with technology and inward-looking entertainment as cacaphonous and evil. Fortunately (or not) the second Doctor is there to stop the upcoming massacre. Well-written, but somewhat inaccessible.
Indian Summer — James Goss — Excellent. A touching journey through the life of a man who starts as a servant and ends up owning a hotel, all while watching the ghost of the first Doctor consign people to the grave. That’s not what’s actually happening, of course, and the way in which this is revealed, plus the last line, make this story a keeper.
All of Beyond — Helen Raynor — Another new series author takes a crack at the classic series, and despite the stylistic devices I hate of fragmented spelling and syntax, presents an uplifting tale. This is one of the best stories in the anthology at showing how essentially alien the Doctor is, and how miraculous he must seem to many.
The Eyes Have It — Colin Harvey — Goes downhill quickly after the humorous first line. It’s far too short, and spends half its length developing a character in ways that have no relevance to the story at hand. I’m not sure what the point was.
The Misadventure of Mark Thorne — Andy Frankham — Also incredibly short, showing us an arrogant, ignorant man who is punished for his sins by being ground into the dirt and then eaten by aliens. The Doctor and Turlough are barely in it — one wonders if Frankham had a particularly nasty boss named Mark Thorne, or something.
Attachments — Scott Handcock — Divorce yourself from context and this reads like the ravings of a madman, which is certainly the idea. However, as emails go, Oliver does tend to go on and on, doesn’t he? This story also creates a new companion for the Doctor, a device I don’t like unless done really, really well, as in Lidster’s “Terror Firma.”
There’s Something About Mary — Simon Guerrier — I’m not entirely sure the story is all that interesting, but the prose is so good, and Guerrier does that multiple-Doctors thing so well that I didn’t really notice.
My Hero — Stuart Manning — The new series, especially, has hinted that the Doctor leaves suffering in his wake in addition to all the good things he does, and Manning shows a person unwillingly caught up in the Doctor’s life who is consigned to a life of misery as a result. It’s bleak, yes, but certainly not pointless. Worth reading.
Plight of the Monkrah — John Davies — Tom Baker is easily the best selection of Doctors for this book, considering the man seems half-alien in real life — and Oliver acquits himself well in this story, which is a bit lightweight but entertaining nonetheless.
Remain in Light — Eddie Robson — It doesn’t read at all like an American narrating, but that’s a pedantic thing to complain about. Focus, instead, on how this story brilliantly captures the uneasiness of returning from college to see your high school friends in a new light. Too heavy-handed to represent this in a new friend who turns out to be a soul-sucking alien? Nah — that’s what science fiction is for.
In Case of Emergencies — Ian Farrington — A curious story, from the perspective of an individual whose personal history starts when the story begins and ends when it finishes, yet appears to have picked up (or been programmed with) revolutionary thoughts. Is this about the hopelessness of the individual in the face of sweeping, oncoming change? I suspect so, but it again feels uneasy as a Doctor Who story.
Puppeteer — Benjamin Adams — Another story about the utter bizarreness of the Tom Baker Doctor, and an abrupt conclusion to the tenure of Oliver as companion. I like the Puppeteer — a legitimately frightening villain — and the ending is both melancholy and elegant.
Osskah — Gary Owen — Possibly the best story in the anthology. Written from the perspective of an avian species, and using just enough unusual language to convince. The story is structured beautifully, revealing the plot in natural, surprising ways. My only complaint is with the portrayal of the Doctor himself — regretting the outcome of work he was doing with the Time Lords to block off another universe?
Piecemeal — James Swallow — I love the structure of this one, too, using various recordings to tell the story. There’s one huge twist near the end that fits easily into the story. One of the better portrayals of Turlough I’ve seen, too.
The Report — Gary Russell — I’ve always thought Russell is at his best doing short stories and character pieces, and this is another example: he does a fantastic job of capturing the seventh Doctor, Ace, and Hex, and how they must appear to outsiders. Not sure the story needed to incorporate another Time Lord, but that’s a minor complaint.
You Had Me at Verify Username and Password — Stel Pavlou — Ha! Great stuff, presenting a one-sided email conversation and smartly omitting the Doctor’s responses. Imagining what he must have written is the most entertaining part.
She Knew — Nigel Fairs — One thing I love about the Doctor Who creative community is that, eventually, there will be a story told about every moment you can possibly think of. And here, for the first time, a story with a melancholic third Doctor immediately after Jo’s departure in “The Green Death.” Fairs’ lead character is quite sympathetic, and the stories of the two relationships dovetail nicely. Good stuff.
The Glarn Strategy — Brian Dooley — Perhaps the most fitting story in the anthology: the fourth Doctor shows up, resolves a problem, and the characters who remain behind decide to go to the pub! Dooley easily captures the Doctor/Romana I relationship in this entertaining little tale.
Salva Mea — Joseph Lidster — The other contender for best story in this anthology, Lidster plays against type and writes a beautiful, uplifting story about the Doctor, Charley, and C’rizz doing a favor and bringing inspiration to an average person’s life. It’s a great companion piece to Paul Magrs’ story at the end, because this reaction is exactly how the television show makes us feel.
The Sorrows of Vienna — Steven Savile — It’s a little overwritten, but worthwhile to see the Doctor meet Goethe after so many other stories have been told. I saw echoes of Faust in this — though perhaps I was reading too far into it.
Fanboys — Paul Magrs — It’s not a Doctor Who story, it’s a story about Doctor Who, and it’s all the better for it. After all, what are we doing when we watch an episode other than having our own brief encounter with the Doctor? Wonderful. It’s the sort of thing you should give someone if they ever ask you why you’re a fan of a silly old science fiction program.
Overall, Short Trips: Snapshots should be considered a success. It’s not on par with the greatest Big Finish anthologies, but it takes a great premise and spins a wide range of effective stories from it. Recommended.
I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting this from the next chapter of the Gallifrey series. Stephen Cole’s script diverges significantly from the pattern seen thus far: it has almost nothing to do with political maneuvering or with Gallifreyan intrigue, opting instead to present a character piece focusing on the relationship between Romana and Leela. And in this regard it works rather well, serving not only to teach us more about these familiar characters but also to foreshadow upcoming events in the series.
It’s genuinely interesting to listen to this play in ways not seen in its predecessors: these two characters exist at possibly the most extreme ends of the spectrum of Doctor Who companions, and thus their approaches to and opinions about life and existence are radically different. The idea of Leela living on Gallifrey for this long has always sat uncomfortably, and here the tensions come to a head, as she longs to depart the ordered society and return to her preferred way of life. Naturally, then, she and Romana retreat to a secured planet that features both the amenities of Gallifrey and the wilds known to Leela. Cole then puts both characters together in both environments and lets them spark off one another — and it’s entertaining, enlightening stuff.
Naturally, though, I have a couple of complaints: first, the debate about evolution is so simple and obvious as to almost be embarrassing. Perhaps it would have sat better if Lalla Ward wasn’t married to Richard Dawkins, but Romana’s lines and Leela’s counter-arguments are copied almost word-for-word out of “The Blind Watchmaker.” As a result, Leela doesn’t come across as enlightened, she just appears ignorant, which substantially undermines the intent of their scenes together. Second, there’s a great idea here in which Romana and Leela switch personalities during a group hallucination — but unfortunately Ward is laughably unconvincing as a “savage” Romana, using a high-pitched, breathy voice to represent a lack of refinement.
Despite these complaints, though, “Spirit” is the best Gallifrey story yet, one that bodes well for its successors. For the first time, I found myself thinking “I genuinely enjoyed that” as the credits rolled — it probably shouldn’t have taken six attempts to reach this point, but I won’t complain too much now that it has.
The first “season” of Gallifrey audios heavily featured “old hands” as the authors: Justin Richards, Stephen Cole, and Alan Barnes all wrote for the series, and “Lies,” the first play of the second season, features a script by then-Doctor Who range producer Gary Russell. I commented that you always know what’s coming from a Justin Richards script, and the same holds true for Russell’s work: continuity overload. Fortunately, it works for the most part: Russell is obviously adept with his Time Lord history, and weaves it together into an entertaining story that appears to be laying the groundwork for future developments.
It’s important to understand the role of continuity in this script. While attempts are made to explain past events, “Lies” requires a basic familiarity with “The Ribos Operation,” “The Armageddon Factor,” “Destiny of the Daleks,” “Neverland,” “Zagreus,” and of course the first season of Gallifrey audios. I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume anyone that listens to this play is going to be a serious Doctor Who fan, but the number of references can be overwhelming. The retconning is a bit much: we are asked to believe that Romana’s comedy regeneration scene at the start of “Destiny” is in fact a desperate attempt to force her own regeneration in order to purge the influence of an ancient Time Lord Imperiatrix from her mind. She certainly handled it well!
Apart from that, though, there are some fine scenes on display in “Lies.” You’d think a scene involving both Romanas and both K9s would be incomprehensible, but Russell writes it brilliantly, easily capturing the differences between the performances of Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward — and then the two actors, aided by a double John Leeson, execute it well. The development of Andred (Andy Coleman) is interesting, following naturally from the events at the end of the first season. Coordinator Narvin (Sean Carlsen) becomes more sympathetic as events spiral out of his control, and Lynda Bellingham impresses in her first extended performance as the Inquisitor, lamenting the lack of inquisitions under Romana’s rule.
My only serious complaint is that, much like in the previous season, there is very little incident to speak of. We learn a great deal about Braxiatel’s past, we get to meet a hapless new Castellan (Ian Hallard), but the actual conflict involves Pandora (Brenda Longman) issuing threats from the Matrix until a simple stun blast from K9 solves the problem. It’s fairly obvious that this will carry over into the subsequent stories, but nothing much has actually happened after 70 minutes. Credit, though, to Russell, who also directed, and sound designer David Darlington — much like the changes between seasons of Sarah Jane Smith, “Lies” seems much more confident and polished than its predecessors. I’m reluctant to give it a particularly high grade, but for the first time I’m optimistic about the future.
Reading Paul Cornell’s first anthology of short stories feels slightly strange, and now that ten series have passed and the characters have developed it presents a very raw and unexploited origin of the Braxiatel Collection. In one respect it’s a very competent selection, but in another it feels more like a showcase of intention and facts. It’s almost too obvious in the way it sets out to announce ‘This is Bernice Summerfield, this is how sarcastic yet serious she is, this is how she drinks and cavorts yet gets the job done when it matters’.
1: A Question of Identity
Nowhere is this more obvious that Caroline Symcox opening chapters, telling the story of Bernice attempting to force herself to be a posh, serious, academic only to realise that it really doesn’t suit her. Set on the collection it shows her, Braxiatel, and their collection in all too clear colours, although with not much depth applied anywhere else.
6 / 10
2: Steal From the World
Kate Orman is known for writing harrowing, emotional and physical trauma in her novels, and this story is a gruelling ordeal… In a good way. I’ve a feeling I’ve heard Bernice recount this story before, only in nowhere near as much lurid detail. It’s a fantastic piece, well written and paced, containing equal parts drama and tension.
8 / 10
3: The Light That Never Dies
Eddie Robson, who would later go on to write extremely well regarded short, generally independent, inventive stories, and eventually producer of the range, offers an interesting offering that shows both Bernice and Brax facing an ethical dilemma regarding a very controversial video.
7 / 10
4: Heart of Glass
On first read-through I was slightly confused exactly what happens here. It feels like a set up for a much longer, and deeper story. Out negotiating with a faceless corporation Bernice has something rather important stolen from her. Very well written but also deeply confusing.
6 / 10
5: The Monster and the Archeologist
After four stories that quickly introduce Bernice and her new home, this is the first story that shows her job and work life. Arriving to help a family of Gandagum archaeologists, she is pursued by the self important Professor Niwlog, determined to claim the treasure of her own. Fun, engaging and brief.
7 / 10
6: Step Back in Time
Matt Jones showcases Bernice’s currently single state of affairs, by recounting a brief dalliance with Porl, a troubled and very attractive alien with a secret. Star of the show is her gay friend Anderson, and an interesting question about second chances. Of the stories set entirely on the collection this is probably the best and most interesting.
7 / 10
7: Christmas Spirit
Christmas time comes to the collection, quickly followed by a funeral for one of Bernice’s students. At the funeral one of the young man’s friends suffers a mental breakdown, and Bernice investigates to find out exactly what is going on. After a promising start though it devolves into a fairly standard ghost story.
6 / 10
8: The Door Into Bedlam
After seven stories which resolutely centre around Bernice Summerfield, it’s good to have a story that shares the limelight with someone else, and the highlight of this story is definitely Jason’s trip through Hell. Dave Stone’s imagination has come up with something both dark, creative and revealing, it’s an important story laying down threads that will hopefully be picked up later.
7 / 10
9: The Least Important Man
Definitely the highlight of the collection. By now you should be familiar with Steven Moffat’s script writing, but this is the first time I’ve seen any literature and all I can say is it’s a shame there isn’t much more of it. Again Bernice doesn’t take centre stage, and instead Gavin Oliver Scott, a completely normal, slightly nerdy, lovestruck boy is introduced and this is his story.
9 / 10
10: Digging Up the Past
In order to gain more publicity for the collection Braxiatel introduces Bernice to a very potentially hazardous PR contract for her own TV show. A fairly simple end to the collection.
6 / 10
As a Whole:
The Dead Men Diaries is intended as a semi-autobiographical novel, showing highlights of key moments in Bernice’s recent life. It shamelessly showboats the character and the setting, which is fair enough as it was intended to introduce new readers to Bernice. However, apart from Bernice herself, of the other regulars, only Braxiatel and Jason are shown in any kind of detail, and even Braxiatel has very little to show for himself. Every writer seems to create their own character to play with, which succeeds in creating a small community, but no one reappears with enough depth. It’s a shame, most of the novels highlights feature characters other than Bernice who we probably won’t see again.
It’s a fairly competent collection of stories, and a good introduction to the ‘character’ of Bernice Summerfield and the ‘concept’ of the collection and the kind of stories that can be had on it. Let’s just hope for slightly more depth next time, now the foundations are laid, and they are solid if not stellar.
After ‘Beyond the Sun’ introduced Jason Kane and then gave him hardly anything to do, this adaptation of Walking to Babylon gives him exactly twice as much material, and a far better script to work with. Unfortunately there’s an almost exact repetition of the ‘Jason in trouble, gets mixed in with wrong people, kidnapped, Bernice must rescue’ story. However whereas the alien ‘Sunless’ were hardly explored in the previous novel, here his captors are the heart of the story.
I gather that there was some trepidation about ‘The People’ appearing in this audio, as it could be potentially confusing for new listeners. Fortunately this worry was unfounded, as it takes only two minutes to explain who and what they are, and there’s plenty of new material to explore. It neatly toes the line, setting up a situation of extreme peril without delving into unnecessary detail. Joining Bernice on this quest is the Barnaby Edwards, now playing John Lafayette, a familiar voice that fits in very naturally as the new reserved companion character. Initially scared of Bernice, Barnaby Edward’s warm voice and natural performance quickly endear him as the heart of the story.
As seems to be a theme for this series there is a familiar voice from Doctor Who playing a key role, and Elisabeth Sladen seems to mesh perfectly with the role of the lady Ninan-ashtammu. She and Steven Wickham are probably the main characters of note in Babylon. The city, and the play, successfully capture a strange, otherworldly, but extremely ambient location. This is partly from the good direction but also thanks to the music and sound design, it really feels like a living exotic city. The sense of fun and innovation from ‘Oh No It Isn’t!’ is back, and the exotic combination of this ancient world and the threat of destruction from the future gives a credible threat.
The story follows two paths, with Jason attempting to work his way free from the People who have brought him here. It’s unusual for a play to have such unthreatening villains, but it suits the mood of this piece perfectly, and the banter between them is excellent. Whilst Bernice and Lafayette attempt to mingle with Babylonian society in their search, the People show an inability to learn from their experiences. Slightly odd is the inclusion of their drone, who strangely is an almost exact clone of Joseph, who provides much wit and menace to the proceedings.
Walking to Babylon is a very strong release, with an equal measure of danger and great characterisation. Although it starts with a few, annoying moments of Bernice talking herself and once again remonstrating Jason Kane’s many failings, it very quickly matures into an excellent adventure set amongst one of the ancient wonders of the world.
The second Bernice Summerfield audio play is a distinctly more sombre affair than the bells, whistles and pants down ballsiness of ‘Oh No It Isn’t!’. Like its predecessor it starts out with Professor Bernice, out on a dig with students, discussing the ‘business’ of archaeology when something interesting turns up. Previously it was a world of pantomime and exploding suns, now it’s her ex husband Jason Kane.
The series has shown incredible success in the casting of its regulars. Stephen Fewell delights as a man just walking on the right shade of a deviant, a self depreciating man who is all too trapped by his own failings. His interplay with Lisa Bowerman is nearly spot on, despite the story hardly giving him enough to do. Bernice’s initial appraisal of him though seems almost forced and within five minutes (the only time we have to get to know him properly) he’s gone, whisked away by the plot. When he returns he’s given almost nothing to do apart from vainly protest that he’s got the bigger picture at heart. Although Fewell gives a spirited performance, the character just doesn’t have enough to do here and comes out rather weak. So not the best of introductions…
Far more attention is paid to his ‘accomplice’ in his suspected arms smuggling business, a devious young woman called Miranda, played with admirable gusto by Doctor Who stalwart Sophie Aldred. I’ll come back to her later though…
This time Bernice is accompanied nearly at all times by two students, Tameka and Emile, two bickering young characters supposed to give the story some emotional heart. Unfortunately Emile just comes off as whiney, and Tameka is in places downright annoying. I can’t work out whether this is due to the script, the actors, or their direction, as all of them are good in places and dire in others. In fact the exact positioning of the whole thing seems slightly off, toeing a fine line between adult science fiction, a sexual emotional rollercoaster and snarky comedy. Most of the comedy seems to be sarcasm, and most of the science fiction is so basic it toes a slightly awkward middle ground with no clear tone of its own.
Annoyingly the tracks tend to be fairly long, averaging around twelve minutes a piece. There seems very little reason to only have four tracks a CD and it makes navigating around the story a pain. Also annoying is the reappearance of Bernice’s constant scribbling in her diary. It has a reason, later on in the story where everything suddenly becomes about personal morals and ethics, but at the start it makes an awkward framing device.
The other actors are almost all spot on, with Barnaby Edwards, Nicholas Pegg and Anneke Wills filling out a well rounded and intriguing cast of native Ursulans. Once the drama settles in their settlement it quickly becomes clear the true heart of the play is in the struggles of ordinary people. Sadly, as good as the moral codes and key principals which become so important to the story are, the actual enemies are strangely lacking in description.
The alien ‘Sunless’ are hardly shown at all, and only have Miranda to voice their evil plans. This problem is compounded by the fact Miranda has almost no character to her, aside from back-story attributed to her by other people, and a simple and obvious lust for power. In fact strangely she seems to shift halfway through from ‘collaborator’ with the alien invaders to their de facto leader. This is clearly about life under tyranny, not the tyrants themselves.
Beyond the Sun ticks a lot of boxes, and shows clear ambition in the range of topics it tackles, but doesn’t really ever excel. The play has its strengths, and none of the performances are bad. Its lowest point is probably the car chase, which just comes across as crass on audio. At its best it discusses the important values key to each individual, and Emille’s high point in particular is a discussion with Scott where he amusingly tries to steal the man’s principals, only to be offered Sex in return.
It tries hard, and passes through all the right hurdles, but the story doesn’t seem to have quite found its feet yet. It’s good, certainly, but not great. And I don’t, quite, know what it is that’s missing. That’s the worst thing. All the key ingredients are there and very nearly gelling. It’s a competent adventure, with deep complex characters that evolves into a deep discussion about individuality. For certain it’s definitely far more traditional than its predecessor, and a clear middle ground between them with the firsts ingenuity and this ones heart seems to be the way forwards.
Having not read ‘Beige Planet Mars’ I have no idea who professor Scoblow is, what academic conference Bernice nearly turned into a nuclear war or exactly how Jason Kane’s erotic fiction business came about. That doesn’t matter however because the essentials are explained in such deliciously lurid detail, with such tantalising innuendo throughout, I almost wish every Bernice story was this… delicious.
With Peter sidetracked with his father for the majority of the play, Bernice is left alone to pursue some of Jason’s funds. The concept of money and other real life problems have been slowly raising their ugly head in the background of the last few plays and here they take centre stage, with cheap shots at politics, prostitution and the Inland Revenue on display. But the whole production is so gloriously tongue in cheek, right up to a gigantic speech at the end that is Cringeworthingly brilliant yet utterly deviant.
Jo Castleton and Luke Sorba should be commended for forming a very strong pair of characters for Bernice to navigate around, with a brilliant script to let their vocal talents shine. You could easily see both of these characters returning to the range at a later date, but unless the script sparkled as brilliantly as this it would undoubtedly be something of a disappointment.
To accompany them Ian Brooker plays a typical political idiot, but with just the right amount of menace in the correct places. Rounding out the cast is Sean Connolly, playing a suitably slimy tourist with a hidden agenda, and Alex Mallinson’s almost invisible presence as extra voices. All in all this is a very strong cast.
And they are rewarded with a script that constantly delights, poking fun and sexual innuendo but with just enough human drama to prevent it from falling into a farce. Bernice’s first romance since Jason’s death is well handled, and highly inventive. If I have any complaints it’s that the political outrage on Eros has no depth, the crowd changes from violent to placid without comment, however this isn’t about the larger picture it’s about a few special people who like war rockets just pass in the night.
I played this to a friend of mine with a taste for good comedy, and after a very quick introduction to the concept of the series (yes, it is complicated. SPOILERS: Bernice got pregnant with a dog-like alien when she was possessed by another alien, gave birth to the child and raised it with her husband, who used to have a career writing erotic fiction. Then her son killed her husband, after being manipulated by her boss who turns out to have been a closet psychopath with an obsession with her, secretly manipulating events to try and control her life. Now she and her son are on the run and broke… Phew, hope that covers everything…) and after that quick intro he loved almost everything he heard. In fact I don’t think more than two minutes passed without him laughing out loud. In fact, up until then he had admitted having doubts about the audio medium as a whole, so he wasn’t just a novice to Bernice Summerfield but the concept of Audio at all. Whether this will change his heathen way’s I’m not sure, but safe to say he was very impressed.
The story ends by tying up something that’s been going on in the background since ‘The Final Amendment’ and asks bluntly why more people haven’t noticed Bernice is an exact double of the president of Earth? It also ends on a cliff-hanger that leads directly into the Series finale ‘Secret Origins’. Can’t wait…
As I said earlier I’m not overly familiar with the early days of Bernice Summerfield’s solo adventures, and this is the most recent of several stories to hark back to those days. However as long as the references are handled like this, with only a brief amount of explanation for past events, that doesn’t look like it’ll be a problem. This isn’t just a spate of continuity references but a rich world to tell continuing stories in. All in all this isn’t a play that takes itself overly seriously, but if Lisa Bowerman didn’t have a ball recording it then she definitely is an amazing actor, because joy shines out of every crevice.
For the restaurant, elevator and speech scenes alone: 10/10
Mark Clapham has put together a short story collection featuring nine separate and very distinct short stories featuring Bernice Summerfield. Each story is distinct and separate, linked together by a framing sequence that is both unusual and distinctive. Bernice is asked to recount stories about life, memories, and death, to try and stir some recollection and clue about the dead as she uncovers them.
A Game of Soldiers
Lance Parkin’s first story strikes me as the most traditional ‘high sci-fi’ story I’ve seen Bernice in for a while. An alien invader attacks and for once nobody is around with a workable plan to save the day. Events rapidly spiral out of control, and the focus of the story is firmly on the human cost and confusion. The story is told from a human perspective, observing the breakdown of society faced by a situation it cannot retaliate against. Bernice is well written, her reactions perfectly natural for such a bleak atmosphere and an excellent introduction to Bernice’s history. As this story shows, her adventures aren’t all fun and games.
8 / 10
Cooker Island
Whereas the first story shows simple, high concept Science Fiction with human cost, Paul Farnsworth gives a suitably oddball reaction story that demonstrates the importance and endurance of life, even in the most unusual of situations. On an expedition with several other people Bernice discovers an outbreak of household appliances, and a conflict regarding one of her colleagues personal history. This story starts down the Doctor Who approach of taking the mundane and turning it into something fantastic with some beautiful imagery, and then rounds it out with a solid human drama concerning disappointment and family drama.
7 / 10
A Gallery of Pigeons
It’s a slight spoiler to announce that this appears to be a de facto sequel to Jim Smith’s fantastic ‘Adventures of the Diogenese Damsel’, however Mycroft Holmes is inched out of centre stage by the appearance of John Watson. It’s the first story not to feature Bernice as its narrator or central character. It’s a short piece, that wraps itself in a very neat circle, despite the obvious unanswered questions that all time travelling stories generate. An almost pointless run-around, a highly amusing distraction and a brilliant excuse to give Mycroft Holmes more mileage.
7 / 10
The Firing Squad
Eddie Robson retires from being producer of the Big Finish range by personally tackling the story of Adrian Wall, one of the few remaining characters from the larger entourage previously built up on the Braxiatel Collection. Set concurrently with ‘A Gallery of Pigeons’, Adrian faces much a more gruelling, both mentally and physically, challenge than Bernice as he struggles for his own survival across war torn France. Eddie writes a fast moving adventure with short, but directed and well intentioned moments of brutality that reflect Adrian’s character, that is very different from the usual Bernice viewpoint.
8 / 10
You Shouldn’t Have
After Adrian’s introduction in the firing squad this story shows him and Bernice paired together, in a brief amusing hark back to the earlier days when they both worked for Braxiatel. It’s a simple enough idea, highlighting the obvious assumptions that both characters make when faced with an alien tribe. Both characters make outrageous statements and momentarily feel stupid for it. Light and inconsequential, it is exactly what it tries to be.
6 / 10
The Illuminated Man
This piece from Mark Michalowski reflects Peter’s experience, concurrent with the events Benny and Adrian went through in earlier stories. It’s well written and shows a bleak but interesting assembly of characters, members of a freak show banded together for their own survival. It’s interesting to note the angrier aspects of Peter’s personality occasionally bubble to the surface, but actually the story shows his curiosity and detective work as he uncovers the secret of a fellow freak. Perhaps though, as Bernice notes in the framing sequence, the story is only what Peter was willing to recount, and it feels like there’s more to tell. For a story like this though that isn’t a bad thing at all.
7 / 10
Redacted
Presumably Jonathan Dennis has read 1984, because this short story takes a society on the verge of becoming that one and shows Bernice trapped, observing the changeover in horror. There’s some overly simplistic taunting of guards, and no moral ambiguity in what’s happening but for a short story the black and white approach pays dividends to the overall feel.
7 / 10
The Song of Old Man Bunyip
Another time travelling story, and Richard Freeman drops Bernice straight into the history of the aborigine people. Although it starts fairly light hearted and inconsequential, with a brief introduction into a new ‘alien like’ culture from our own history, things take a turn for the worth in a shockingly brief appearance of some White men. From there on it slowly delves into a downwards spiral as Bernice observes the death of something very old and sacred, and a good friend’s mind slowly unravel as he gives up on life. There are some interesting concepts here and I really feel for Adoni, but in a way this feels almost too large to be crammed into a short story.
8 / 10
Turn The Light On
The finale is Nick Wallace’s psychological horror, showing Bernice at her most vulnerable. Stranded, alone, rescued from a near death experience she can only vaguely remember, Bernice begins to wonder who has rescued her and what she was doing. It’s a real page turner that’ll drag you eagerly to the end of the book.
9 / 10
Book as a whole:
These short stories are all suitably different, in both tone and content, giving a very satisfying read. The framing material where Bernice leads from one story into another feels fluid and organic, however my main complaint would be lack of explanation or resolution to the mysterious God Machine that leads the characters into the stories ‘A Gallery of Pigeons’, ‘The Firing Squad’ and ‘The Illuminated Man’.
That is a minor complaint though. As a whole the collection fills out Bernice’s recent life thoroughly, with welcome appearances from both Adrian and Peter, with brief recollections of moments from and before her Collection days. Unfortunately, after some initial promise, the framing sequence struggles to mature into a full story of its own at the end of the book and just ends with a quick, almost too simple resolution. However it serves its purpose, introducing and framing the other fantastic short stories, and there are nine in here that admirably show many of the best aspects of Science Fiction.
This story is told from the perspective of Bernice Summerfield, reporting directly to an audience of (presumably) millions, from an expedition to the isolated planet Badblood, cut off both from the rest of the universe after the empire pulled out several generations ago. Split into small segments or ‘reports’ Bernice talks us through the arrival on Badblood and describes her coworkers in just enough personal detail to keep us interested.
Badblood is a strange place, with a freak (dust???) storm around the planets atmosphere preventing all but the strongest transmissions through the surface. Mags L. Halliday presents an interesting society, using Bernice’s own reporting instincts to present the survivors of the planet’s vampire plague. With just enough detail to keep things interesting she proposes a simple solution to a planet where the night time brings terrible danger, and then proceeds to show simply what can go wrong.
Unfortunately the vampires, when they finally do appear, only seem half as interesting as the measures society has taken to avoid them. The story told to them of the whistling night seems interesting at first, but once the creatures attack they do very little interesting besides drink blood. This is a story about people’s reaction to horrors, not the horrors themselves.
Also problematic is the fact the story is entirely written after the fact, so even when Bernice is placed in peril it is never possible to consider that she herself is in any danger. There is a significant death toll, and emotional consequences, but no sense of danger.
The Badblood diaries is constantly interesting, well written science fiction that successfully gets inside Bernice’s head. It doesn’t do anything interesting with vampires per say, but it does explore the casts preconceptions and reactions to them effectively.
7 / 10
Possum Kingdom
I have to admit that I got lost very quickly in this one. Kelly Hale wrote a very exciting story, that unlike it’s predecessors actually does something potentially very interesting with vampires, but it took me a long time to realise exactly what it was. By that point I had already decided not to bother re reading the middle half of the story which passed me by in a confused daze.
It’s not badly written, the narrative just jumps through both place and time to give us a larger picture of events. Though it starts and ends with Bernice uncovering, and then solving, the dilemma the middle of the story shows so many consequences and causes of the main plot that I very quickly got lost. It feels like a hark back to the New Adventures, stories larger than the small screen could possibly do justice to.
I really enjoyed Possum Kingdom, but without a re read I think the finer elements of the story will escape me. The concept of a time travel tourist trip to visit famous vampires of history is a good idea but it isn’t explained very clearly at the start. Perhaps only limited information was revealed to keep the air of mystery around the monsters, but it also kept one around Bernice herself which stopped me from understanding her motives clearly until the very end.
Interesting, exciting, and ambitious.
6 / 10
Predating the Predators
Philip Purser-Hallard’s conclusion story is told like a research project, pulling together several historical sources and arranging them chronologically to tell a story. This means like the Badblood Diaries it is told entirely from the first person, through various diary entries, written letters and academic transcripts. However unlike the Badblood Diaries it has several P.O.V. characters and the death count more than underlines a sense of danger throughout.
It is set at an academic conference set up to discuss the concept of vampires, with dignitaries from a range of backgrounds come to present opinions. A P.H.D physicist is due to stand on the same podium alongside dignitaries from the church, several emanant historians, psychologists and a distinguished man who claims to be an ‘actual’ vampire come out of the closet (coffin) at last. Also arriving is an elderly Bernice Summerfield, fresh from a horrific dig on the planet Alukah, accompanied by her granddaughter Ellie.
Accompanying the characters accounts of events are several excerpts of speeches made by those attending the conference. The end result is a story that contains both the human attention to detail of the Badblood Diaries, a living, breathing society for the story to take place in and a plot that is just as ambitious (if simpler) than Possum Kingdom.
I guessed who the villain was exactly one chapter before the revelation, and it is a good twist. All of the P.O.V. characters are well explained, and Bernice’s horrific recount of her dig on Alukah (specifically, her second recount) is exactly the kind of horror writing that a subject of vampirism calls for.
8/ 10
Whole book:
Predating the Predators is my favourite, definitely, but it is not perfect. As with the Badblood diaries, once the vampire threat is out in the open they prove far less interesting than they did before. The only story which does something genuinely new with vampires is Possum Kingdom, which still leaves many things unexplained at the end.
As a whole though this trilogy of novellas proves an exciting read with many things to recommend. There are three very different takes on how to tell a vampire story, some more traditional than others. However this is exactly what the Bernice Summerfield range is good for, exciting self contained science fiction stories with just the occasional guilty reference back to its parent series.
“It doesn’t matter to whom the cruelty is inflicted. The cruelty itself is wrong!”
Castrovalva is a heavy inspiration on this story, which is fitting since Castrovalva was something of a landmark story. For some, Castrovalva was a bad omen of things to come, since it was the point where Doctor Who was moved in the schedules from its traditional place in the Saturday night slot, to weekday evenings instead. This in itself seemed like a sign that maybe the BBC didn’t really care about the show anymore and no longer saw it as special. We all know that from then on, BBC apathy and neglect would play a big part in the show’s decline with the show being increasingly underfunded, the Head of Serials no longer micro-managing the show like they used to, and the inexperienced John Nathan Turner being kept on in the job too long because no-one could be found to replace him, when really there should have been a production team changeover right after The Five Doctors.
But then again some fans would argue that Castrovalva is where the show lost it soul, and maybe even where the show should have been ended. The argument is simple enough. Doctor Who was a show that in many ways made us smarter. The show encouraged us to learn, to be open-minded and to be shrewd, and to always look beyond the superficial surface and see the very heart of things. And so Doctor Who taught us to see beyond the highly stylized surface of the JNT era and to realise that there was no substance behind the glitter, and it taught us to feel severely cheated and conned. For some fans they would say they spotted it early on from the beginning, and for them it was only the presence of Tom Baker in Season 18 that made this new superficial, hollow, sensationalist, brand-based, po-faced era still feel like ‘real’ Doctor Who, and so when Castrovalva severed those last ties, Doctor Who was dead to them.
But not to writer, Robert Shearman. To him, Castrovalva was the beginning of a new era. The point where the Doctor became the kind of fallible, modest, almost reclusive and out of his depth figure that an awkward, confused teenage boy could really relate to. It was apparently the story that made Robert a fully fledged fan, and to him it was the point where the series changed, and because the BBC management and head of serials clearly no longer cared enough to supervise and micro-manage the show like they used to anymore, it became ungoverned and unpredictable, and from that point on, for better or worse, you never knew what you were going to get next, and that’s certainly the kind of unpredictability that Robert has always aimed to recreate in his work.
Robert Shearman saw a lot of inspirational material in the era we’ve written off, so perhaps art or substance really is in the eye of the beholder. Robert seemed to see not so much a vacuous show populated by ciphers, but one with an ambiguous, uncertain blank slate that the viewer was invited and challenged to fill in for themselves, which made it rather refreshing during such a bland and ruthlessly conformist decade of entertainment.
Castrovalva of course represents that dichotomy of ciphers and stereotypes suddenly developing a real consciousness, and it’s principally what this homage to Castrovalva is about too. It shares Castrovalva’s existentialist themes about free will and identity, in which the Doctor concludes that even these figments of someone’s imagination constitute life-forms capable of independent thought and deserving of the same respect and preservation as any other humans, and it even manages to hint at the Tardis having sentience, just to complete the homage. It’s a common theme in Robert Shearman’s stories of how the imagined can become real by willpower alone, and that given an extended life in isolation and captivity, an ‘irredemable’ psychopath with no conscience might eventually develop a soul.
We’re introduced to this environment and its characters by a wonderful process of osmosis in a world where news travels. Firstly we’re introduced to Eugene, which is appropriate because this story will start with him and it will end with him. It’s also appropriate we begin with him because he’s the town scribe so he will be our eyes in this world, relaying the visual details with poetic accuracy. We get a very quick and comical sense of how this fanatically evangelical society works, and how Eugene has been here so long that nothing surprises him anymore and he’s learned nonchalant passivity and to not have strong feelings or opinions about anything either way and to just go along with the tide. It’s a wonderfully tense and yet amusing set-up where we learn that each time a living God dies, he is replaced by his son and the previous believers are charged with blasphemy and threatened with execution, but all they have to do is to recount and change their faith to the new incumbent and fill in a few forms. It not only highlights the absurd lunacy of religious dogma, but it establishes from the get go that this society has everything ritualised, ordered and performed as an act, even it’s drama and threats of death. In some ways it’s not far off our own culture that’s driven by high drama and trivial showmanship in that regard. But it immediately sets us up for a scenario where the mere arrival of the Doctor and Frobisher as random elements will completely overturn this society.
We are then introduced to Lavilla, servant and future daughter in law to the now widowed Lady Berengaria. Very quickly and economically we get a full blooded characterisation of them both, from the vacuous Lavilla’s half-hearted scrubbing of Berengaria’s toenails to the way Berengaria delights in making Lavilla sore from work, demanding to be able to see her own reflection in her toenails, despite being too fat and bloated to be able to, immediately conveying Berengaria’s sadism, vanity, greed, stubbornness, demanding nature and indulgence.
We are then given a scene in the Tardis, with Frobisher the talking penguin fishing for a hologramatic gumblejack in the Tardis swimming pool before the Doctor admonishes him for his cruelty. The curious thing is, the transition from the castle to the Tardis doesn’t feel like such a leap. They both somehow feel like part of the same surreal space. It might be down to the frequent references to King Peppin’s untimely death in the bathtub, but it establishes in some unspoken way that the Castle and the Tardis environments have similar otherworldly properties, and are both characterised by the larger than life. From here we get a sense of the Tardis being a sentient being, and more importantly of it being the conscience of the travellers, as it takes objection to Frobisher’s sadistic indulgence and goes on strike, and then takes them both to an environment where Frobisher might learn his lesson – which he eventually does.
Then we meet Berengaria’s two chalk and cheese sons, the naively good natured, well meaning Peppin, apprehensively destined for Godhood and his power-hungry scheming, despicable illegitimate brother Childerick. They are both on opposite sides of the fence and equally inept at their respective roles. But when we met them the dialogue takes a turn further into the kind of verbose, far fetched articulated introspection and metaphysical and metatextual dialogue that defines the works of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and even Dawson’s Creek, and it pulls off the same trick of going with the almost parodic caricaturish self-referential dialogue in a way that’s done with such conviction that no matter how absurd the articulation, the emotions, thoughts and characterisations behind it, and the past experiences that shaped this character feel utterly real and raw and seem to somehow define the human condition with pinpoint accuracy. It’s hard not to be won over by Peppin’s naivety. Like Eugene, he strives to be as agreeable a soft touch as possible to the point of aloofness, but he also has strong philanthropic hopes to always do the right and honest thing and to make this a better, more benevolent society, free from the moral tyranny of before, but as with the Governor of Varos he finds the burden of leadership and the legacy of the political infrastructure doesn’t allow him to be as noble as he’d hoped.
As with the era it homages, The Holy Terror revels in the fallible and dysfunctional, and in many ways, like The Church and the Crown and Jubilee, it gleefully harks back to the liberated carefree days of countercultural thinking when family and the institution of marriage were being seen in a more cynical and disparaging light as something to avoid and get away from, as was the ethos expressed in classic TV and cinema like Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, Abigail’s Party and Til Death Us Do Part. There’s something amusingly affirming about Peppin’s family and how it’s populated by the stubbornly unsentimental.
The Holy Terror goes seamlessly from comedy of manners to period drama to fringe theatre to all out horror. Robert Shearman somehow keeps the story full of twists and turns that hold the listener’s interest and keeps up a firm pace and yet still maintains a solid sense of structure, theme and soul, because in a way he’s capturing the unpredictable essence of life itself. It starts as a typical sci-fi story about our futuristic heroes being revered as a God by a primitive alien people, though with an appropriate Monty Python-esque absurdity and biting satire. But when Frobisher suddenly begins to demonstrate God-like invincibility he didn’t even know he was capable of, suddenly all bets are off, and anything can happen now and the listener has to listen on to really find out the ever-changing mystery at the heart of this world.
This is also an important development because it subverts a story that previously seemed very secular and completely outside the fantasy genre and it sets us up nicely for the supernatural twist to come. It’s the same way that if Fight Club had been a straightforward martial arts buddy film, then its metaphysical/supernatural twist in the final act wouldn’t have worked because it would be too out of the blue to belong to the same film. But in the screened version the surreal tone and the early meditation scenes in which the main character discovers his power animal actually sets up an early hallucinatory precedent for this unlikely turn of genre. But it’s also important on a character level, driving Frobisher towards an evangelical sense of divine purpose, and wrongly believing he can bear and solve all this world’s problems.
This is the perfect environment for Frobisher to be brought to life in all three dimensions, and infact he perfectly suits this story as a wise cracking urbane character that laps up the fame and the limelight but also has a naïve whimsy, humour and inate goodness but doesn’t quite get how the harsh realities of the world work, which is both touching and appropriate for what’s essentially a cartoon character. In a manner not dissimilar to the film La Femme Nikita, it’s actually about how etiquette and sophistication are irrelevant and valueless to a good moral sense, and how you don’t have to be the smartest or classiest person to understand decency, compassion and the value of life far better than some of the higher ups and church goers ever could.
From stories like this, Big Finish have lately developed the wrongheaded idea that filling a story with funny bits is worthy in and of itself- which was to miss the point entirely. The humour here is genuinely life affirming and makes the characters alive and makes their ultimate tragedy all the more poignant and hard hitting. The comedy actually works by having something to rail against and attack and point out the absurdity of. This is a very delicately crafted audio story, using the traditional events of describing rituals and having characters present symbols and tools, and making its main guest character Eugene the people’s scribe as a way of keeping the dialogue natural whilst vividly describing surrounding events without sounding expositional, patronising or breaking the spell. In every faucet of this story, it demonstrates what a wonderful, underrated medium audio drama is and how inventive and creative a writer can be when they face adverse challenges of the medium and can’t simply rely on superficial spectacle anymore.
Speaking of which, it is perhaps time to discuss Big Finish’s rehabilitation of the Sixth Doctor. As an actor Colin Baker had certainly shown the same fresh aptitude as ever in Sirens of Time and The Apocalypse Element but they both felt simply like they were picking up where Slipback had left off. Here of course is where the mellowed and softened Big Finish version of the Sixth Doctor really gets to make his stamp. Actually we saw the Sixth Doctor’s nicer side in The Spectre of Lanyon Moor, but there more by accident than design, given that it was originally written for Tom Baker. But Tom Baker is notorious for his refusal to be involved with Big Finish, which was probably his big mistake because now that he finally has returned to the role in audio, he seems ten years too late. The Hornet’s Nest has been rather a non-event and nowhere near as exciting or special as it might have been ten years ago, before Doctor Who returned to our screens, back when in the public eye Tom Baker was still the definitive Doctor and to all intents and purposes the show might as well have ended with Logopolis. But now with New Who back on our screens and Big Finish having given us many brand new audio classics like Davros and Chimes of Midnight, a story like The Hornets Nest had to do something pretty remarkable to get any more than the lukewarm reception it’s gotten. Doctor Who now simply doesn’t need Tom Baker anymore.
But in the 80’s things were different, as the departure of Tom Baker left the show seeming very directionless, soulless and desperate, and the series was producing so much dreck that it was accumulating into a critical mass that was destructive even to any good will there’d been towards the show’s golden age. And really Colin’s Doctor suffered from the show’s failure to find a proper identity, so he never developed a consistent character beyond ‘angry’, ‘arrogant’, ‘tasteless’ and ‘homicidal’, and a lack of good scripts denied him the chance to make his mark properly. Even Colin’s very first bullish lines at the end of Caves of Androzani somehow manage to instantly kill the mood and cheapen the Fifth Doctor’s poignant demise, and make the Sixth Doctor impossible to like from the beginning.
The Sixth Doctor era still remains a troubling era for many fans today, particularly in regards to Twin Dilemma, and even today it’s hard to understand how the show could have been heading for such an inevitable fall that not even something of the calibre and quality of Caves of Androzani could turn things around.
To be honest I believe enough accumulation of bad, trashy television or entertainment made without humility can have a very negative and destructive effect on culture, when there’s a severe dearth of the kind of quality narrative entertainment that exhibits decent problem solving and resolution, reinforces hope and our connection to our fellow man and humanity as a whole, or reinforces our intelligence and resourceful potential. And I don’t doubt that mid-80’s Doctor Who was very destructive to fan culture.
The Sixth Doctor era was marked by fan-pleasing continuity excesses, superficial attempts at grittiness, and a cheaply sensationalist attempt to return the Doctor to his morally ambiguous purist roots, so it’s become something of a grim ritual to blame the fans for steering the show into this direction with their petulant demands, and to see the vulgar, maladjusted, petty-minded, mean-spirited, borderline misogynistic and adolescently stunted results on screen as a sad and shameful reflection of what some fans are like. And it’s this kind of fannish self-hatred that’s been continually forced down our throats ever since the show’s revival, as if we fans still represent a threat to the show’s quality, accessibility and hysteria-inducing ratings, and I think this self-hatred and shame amongst fans wasn’t helped by an era where the Doctor stopped being the endearing, good-natured, empowering role-model of self-respect and proud individuality that he once was.
Is there a kernel of truth to this snobbery? Well unfortunately some fans who are particularly arrogant, simple minded and contemptuous and who have a warped sense of entitlement realy can contaminate everything they touch. There’s plenty of Sixth Doctor fans who’d defend the Twin Dilemma. But some of them are incapable of seeing things from anyone else’s point of view and would spitefully lambast all the critics of Colin’s era as ‘disloyal fans’, ‘PC-er crybabies’ or ‘Tom Baker fanboys who couldn’t let go’ (as if we’re somehow supposed to be sad that Tom Baker smelled where the wind was blowing under JNT and left quickly enough to save his character’s dignity), such fans tend to have a pitifully limited tunnel vision, and an impenetrable persecution complex leading to a self-perpetuating cycle of antagonism and unrelenting belligerence and can be obnoxiously provocative and obtuse and have a knee-jerk complex about people thinking they’re better than them, making it clear that the shoe fits. They’re fans with a siege mentality within a siege mentality, and everything with them is a performance, hence their incapability of seeing things from anyone else’s point of view. They’re the kind of people who’ve completely given up on society and good-will, which in this day and age is sadly understandable.
The fact is that the 80’s was a time when ‘society’ was an outdated concept and everything was about demographics and harsh lines. In almost every area of 80’s culture everything was very politicised and polarised, and a mentality of ‘you’re either with us or against us’ and an absence of any middle ground seemed to rule in all situations, including the show and its fanbase. Indeed the show seemed to only be getting by on tapping into some horrendous fannish tribalism, and unfortunately the nasty underworld factionalism bred by the mid-80’s still exists today. It’s disheartening that a show all about intelligence, tolerance, imagination, empathy, perspective and good-naturedness can produce so many fans that share none of these qualities.
If these were the kind of fans with such a warped sense of entitlement that had the ear of the 80’s production team and were able to put pressure and demands on the show, then it’s no wonder the show went to pot so quickly because they’re the kind of fans that contaminate everything they touch. It’d be hard for any producer to please such a demanding and increasingly vocal fanbase, particularly in a decade defined by demographics and overwhelming market forces, but it didn’t help that John Nathan Turner was the kind of producer who would adamantly follow fan suggestion and his own unfathomable and wrongheaded instincts about what would boost the ratings or publicity, to the point where it didn’t matter how many of his staff told him it was a bad idea, nothing deterred him from seeing his decisions through.
Though this should tell you why some fans prefer 80’s Doctor Who to the current New Series, because at least back then the producer wasn’t surrounded by so many yes-men, and so at least the bad ideas and worst directions were being somewhat resisted by people on the production team like Eric Saward and Robert Holmes, who were fighting to inject some quality and substance into the show even if it was a leaking vessel, whereas nowadays everything in Russell T. Davies’ version of the show seems so approved, so complacent, so self-congratulatory and ultimately uninteresting. But in any case JNT’s instincts were depressingly in synch with what was contemporary.
In the 80’s, style, shock, and pretension over substance, as well as sensationalism and mean spiritedness were all the rage in TV and cinema. Style over substance and mean spiritedness are symbiotic since to forge drama and conflict out of nothing substantial generally means having to portray your characters as neurotically petty and belligerent as possible. Some of this was down to 80’s consumerism, since most areas of the media had learned that the best way to sell their products, films and shows was to make people more insecure, which somewhat explains the JNT production team’s decision to go for a more unreliable or unwelcoming Doctor, the fixation with controversy and tabloid headlines and threats to destroy the iconic Tardis (see Frontios and Attack of the Cybermen), the furious backlash against the Williams era’s ‘comfort viewing’, and why several 80’s stories feel like some tasteless practical joke on the viewer. Maybe, just maybe the McCoy era renaissance was where JNT stopped pandering to the fashions of a demographic, in favour of a more let loose style that weeded out the previous stiffness, uncertainty, soullessness and pretension, and replaced it with something more refreshing, more sure and which seemed in many ways more reflective of John’s own flamboyance, campness and pensive sharpness.
It’s a cliché to say the Sixth Doctor was the yuppie Doctor complete with narcissistic personality disorder and an absence of any moral scruples. But more than that, the Sixth Doctor, like the Fifth Doctor before him, was the Doctor as a reductio ad absurdum parody of himself. This was the characterisation that defined most 80’s entertainment, from the Nightmare on Elm Street films to Star Trek: The Next Generation (which particularly stands out when contrasted with the more organic, spontaneous and human Star Trek films of the time), with their cast of very simplified and hysterically exaggerated reactionary stereotypes. So basically there was a stranglehold on the Sixth Doctor’s character, so Colin’s best moments were when he was playing against type, such as his atypical moments of compassion in Revelation of the Daleks, or when Robert Holmes was writing for him and really nailed the character as a God-like purveyor of the big picture who couldn’t afford to be sentimental over a single life lost, as in the existential moments of The Two Doctors and Trial of a Time Lord. But then if you wanted a more dangerous, unpredictable and untrustworthy Doctor then one look at the jaw dropping first cliffhanger to The Deadly Assassin confirms that Robert Holmes is your man for the job. Sadly Robert Holmes seemed the only writer with the right idea and he was the one JNT didn’t want on the show (JNT just didn’t want anyone on the show he couldn’t control), and Holmes’ cold grander perspective approach for the Sixth Doctor was overwritten by dozens of scenes where the Sixth Doctor is being characterised as indescribably petty and immature. The best, most realistic thing to say on the Sixth Doctor is that beneath all the nastiness, vulgarity and schizophrenia, there was a good Doctor somewhere in Colin Baker that was waiting to come out, and here it finally happens.
There are many idealised fan notions of what the Sixth Doctor was supposed to be or should have been. Most are too sophisticated to suit the childish, amateurish, contrived and nasty TV era at hand, but then all the best examples of Big Finish hang on the writer’s faith and ability to see inspiration and the potential for polarised, primal art in an idea or character. One view is that the Sixth Doctor was naturally conceived as a bodily defence mechanism after the demise of his passive predecessor; that the Sixth Doctor was a pragmatic reaction to a nasty universe and he was ruthless and calloused as a necessary compensation for his nicer predecessor’s failures and squeamishness. The more popular view which is adopted here is that the Sixth Doctor’s pomposity and sharp tongue for tasteless remarks was all insecure bluster hiding a vulnerable compassion underneath it all, and the audios are about bringing out that vulnerability.
Robert Shearman can write very affirming, positive and optimistic stories that highlight all the shades of humanity and finer details. Of course a cynic would say that enjoying the Sixth Doctor era very much requires a glass-half-full view. The Sixth Doctor era was a botched, but possibly right minded attempt to tell a tale of fall and redemption, with the Sixth Doctor starting life as a reprehensible figure and from there growing into something better. Several stories in the era compliment this theme, like Vengeance on Varos’ redemption of the Governor of Varos and Attack of the Cybermen’s rather more clumsy and pretentious attempt to sell Lytton’s redemption out of the blue. But this was somewhat undone by the nasty, unforgiving fascism of The Two Doctors, and the bottom line was that the sensationalist show was simply yet again presenting us with utterly unsympathetic hate figures and trying to force us to like and care about them anyway.
But here the Sixth Doctor, the anti-hero and black sheep of Doctors on a mission of redemption finally has something worthy and appropriate to rail against- the evils of moral dogma. Perhaps this is what the moral ambiguity of the Sixth Doctor era was always meant to be championing. Modern TV and Cinema has long tended to chastise and patronise and to sermonise and dictate conformist morality to its audiences, telling us what’s right and wrong. This was particularly true in the reactionary and conformist 80’s. Sure the 80’s was a boom time for the excesses of smutty and violent cinema like Porkys, Scarface, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Hitcher, Robocop, Rita Sue and Bob Too etc but mostly these melodramatic films tended to still treat the audience like moral children, as if demanding at gunpoint that the audience be shocked and disapproving of what they were seeing (or approving when the bad guys or sinful teenagers get their come-uppance). The same applies with the Davison era’s chaste companions and pointless high body count massacres mixed with ghastly hypocritical moralising speeches. Ideally the morally ambiguous Colin Baker era was perhaps an attempted antidote to all that.
The Holy Terror, like Robert Shearman’s later story Jubilee, is a bold statement that moral dogma is nothing but a hindrance on society and its people. Not only is it a tyranny that gives authority to the worst, most pious bullies (just look at sinister, borderline unhinged media figures like Bill O’Reilly or Jeremy Kyle – actually I take that back, they are in a way essential to our society because they are both such prominent and blatant figures of moral dogma that they are easy to spot for what they are and recognise as a problem, unlike some of the more insidious moral tyrants and accusatory figures. A shout is always easier to deal with than a whisper) but it also leaves ordinary people ultimately weak of will because they’ve never had their morality properly explored or challenged before, and because morality has become something abstract that they’ve never learned to develop for themselves and take responsibility for. And we see this when the snivelling, cowardly Clovis proves incapable of being noble or dignified even in his moments of death, even though he’s trying really hard to break form. At first it seems to be attacking religious dogma, and then seems to be attacking bureaucracy in general, and then in a manner suited to its fringe theatre ethos it actually becomes about how fictional narrative conventions have an oppressive moral dogma of their own in the way they build up heroes to unreachable standards of virtue and surety and easily demonises the misfits and outsiders and boxes them into a stereotype. So much so that when it’s finally revealed that this environment was a prison after all, a place of judgement and reinforced rehabilitation, it makes perfect sense.
It even draws something workable and strong out of The Twin Dilemma’s undercurrent phobia of precocious children, and it takes from Twin Dilemma’s (marginally better) novelisation the notion of parental fears of losing control and committing infanticide. And this really works wonderfully on such a primal level. This murderous boy with God-like powers is frightening because he’s unpredictable, uncontrollable and insatiable, just like any spontaneous tantrumous four year old is. He’s also out of place in this environment of ritualisation and moral certainty and the threat comes from how easily he tears that all down, and even the eccentricity of how he is voiced is wholly appropriate to this horror mood. Horror is always more frightening and effective at making the threat seem more volatile and believable when the writing genuinely is spontaneous and unpredictable, rather than just contrived and superficial. Infact the murderous boy is a perfect pair of eyes through which to see just how meaningless and petty these adult social conventions and traditions, obsessions with status and tyranny of etiquette really are. Children always see through how absurd the adult world really is. This is what made The Simpsons such a warm hearted show in its prime before it jumped the shark. And there’s almost something gratifying about seeing a child with the power to do so, tearing down this shallow world and reducing the self-important to nothing.
The carnage and bloodshed is beautifully described with such savage poetry. We’re presented with many character points where hope was built up and salvation was within their reach only for them to be slaughtered without dignity. Even a little example like the mute man who is ecstatically elated when the little boy heals and restores his voice, only for the boy to reveal he did it just to hear the mute man’s dying words, is hard hitting and that bit more uncomfortable because of the way the rug is laid out at our feet only to be pulled from us. The accumulation of deaths of people we have grown to know and love and hope for is so hard hitting.
So the punishment is kept fresh and anew by teasing Eugene with hope and the presence of things that matter to him before sticking in the knife and tearing it all down, so that the pain always feels raw and never leaves him numb. Indeed it makes perfect sense that this society of religious bureaucracy, blind faith, self-deception, and gratuitously cryptic obfuscation of out-dated values, all along had its foundations in one man’s wish to forget the terrible sins of his past. But it’s so fitting and emotionally satisfying when Eugene, having shied away from any displays of passion or individuality, is suddenly overwhelmed by emotion, and has to overcome his parental fears and learns to recognise and love his son after all in his defining last moments. It’s a moment that has a lovely precedent in the dying moments of reconciliation between Peppin and his mother.
As with Robert Shearman’s later Dalek TV episode, this story embraces the post-80’s idea that everything is shades of grey, and that the most monstrous people can still be redeemed. And it shows the Doctor lavishing sympathy and compassion on a child murderer as a beautiful demonstration of the Doctor’s alien morality allowing him to do something that no human could.
It felt nauseatingly wrong when the 80’s Doctors praised the nobility of supposedly ‘misunderstood’ cold blooded killers in Warriors of the Deep and Attack of the Cybermen. Mainly because in both cases the Doctor was showing actual favouritism to the murderer, and unconditionally forgiving someone who’s unrepentant whilst twisting everyone else’s arms into turning the other cheek. And also because neither 80’s story possessed the sophisticated humanism or emotional dimension they needed to earn our empathy with the two-dimensional ‘misunderstood’ villains. But here we get a story with genuine heart, where the murderer is a multifaceted person who has relived a life so many times and shown the potential to change and redeem himself, has played the role of hero’s helper, victim, underdog and ultimately the man who nobly gave his life. Our sympathy and admiration is earned by his final act of courage. By the end Eugene has clearly suffered more than enough and learned his lesson long ago- actually no, he’s learned only self-loathing and the belief that he deserves to die, so this hardly represents humane justice or rehabilitation.
The Doctor demonstrates his alienness by forgiving the unforgivable in a way few humans could be capable of, and thus he represents a light of hope in a world of dogma, a world eternally without forgiveness. The veneer of pomposity is broken through and the Doctor’s inner compassion, for so long hidden, is allowed to shine beautifully. There may be no greater poignant words of regret in Doctor Who than “He didn’t have to do that!” and Colin delivers it beautifully.
The Holy Terror is about the dichotomy between the roles we play in society, and the individual soul within us, just like in Father’s Day. It’s about what happens when people can’t perform the roles they’re given in society and fall to impossible standards. From Peppin feeling unable to be a perfect God, to how Eugene’s story is about what happens when a father can’t find it within themselves to be a good, loving parent and finds themselves mentally broken by the demands of the role. So it’s the perfect place for Colin’s Doctor to discover his own soul and recognise the value of life, and the ending gets back to that Holmesian notion of the Sixth Doctor’s detached God-complex, except that just this once, a little microcosm of the universe’s cycle of death and tragedy, rise and fall of civilisations and hope met by cruel disillusionment has really gotten to him this time.
This is a story very much about the inner child and about the preciousness of innocence. It’s solid, powerful and deeply ingrained with heart and purpose and like The Fearmonger, it is light years ahead of its contemporaries. The closest thing there is to a fault is that the music is a little dated and doesn’t quite find its groove with the story, but even that somehow suits the tacky musical backdrop of many a modern American church. But that aside this is probably the most seminal and inspirational Big Finish story of them all in terms of how it presents a world view imbued with rich history that makes its landscape all feel so much more real and inhabited. Add to that a disciplined story and such warmth and thematic power and punch that would make any fan feel proud to love a show like Doctor Who, for its ability to get to the heart of what’s important, expand a world view and rail against all that is petty, insular, vindictive and shallow about our modern world. We have ourselves a writer to watch out for, and a beautiful story to treasure forever.
In some corners of internet fandom, Jon Blum has made a reputation for himself as one of the more obnoxious and belligerent defenders of New Who, who makes no bones about his perma-sneery attitude to fandom as part of his argument as to why no-one else’s opinions matter. It’s the usual modus operandi- ignore any sensible points in the critical post and just quote the bits you disagree with to score points from, move the goal posts when convenient, use ratings to try and point out that the critic is in a minority, and be as derisive and aggravating as possible in order to provoke the critic into blowing their top and making a fool of themselves. It’s mainly the knee-jerk ubiquitousness of Jon’s behaviour towards complete strangers he’s in no position to judge that’s so annoying (mind you as sychophants go, Jon Blum comes across as a saint compared to vermin like Paul Mount, GB’s resident laughable bitter has-been of a Starburst reviewer who’s only joy in life apart from New Who, seems to be in kicking other people’s sandcastles). Yet whilst that’s all true, it’s clear from this story that Jon knows how to channel his obstinate narcissism and sycophancy to craft a very focused, concentrated and confident labour of love. The Fearmonger is a sparkling reminder of the creativity Jon is capable of when he’s not busy harassing straw men on GB.
The Fearmonger is a very well paced, very disciplined and incredibly confident story that particularly stands out as firing on all cylinders from the first go, at this early time when other BF writers seemed to still be finding their feet. At this point in time it’s a breath of fresh air, and you can hear how it heavily influenced both Time of the Daleks and Live 34. It’s clear that this was a dream opportunity for Jon to not only write for his favourite Doctor and companion but also to have it actually performed by the real McCoy.
Whereas most of the McCoy audios capture the feel of the McCoy era in a way that simply means the Seventh Doctor and Ace come across like they’ve never been away, this goes one further and actually hones the part of the McCoy era that really mattered to the fans, the final season that finally began to reward and justify the fans’ sorely tested perseverance and commitment to the show after enduring the critical mass of ugly nadirs that came before. Season 26 was the point where the show once again became important enough to be potentially life-changing, and as such it was a particularly frustrating and heartbreaking point to bring down the axe on the series (ending the show with Season 18 or 25 would have been a natural end point, and ending it anywhere in between would have been a mercy killing).
Jon Blum is a huge McCoy fan, and has always been a massive JNT apologist. For him the fact that John Nathan Turner kept the show going against the odds should be utterly applauded, because right to the end it was producing worthwhile and important gems that in Jon Blum’s eyes cancelled out any weaker stories. For him presumably the problem was that the 80’s was simply the wrong time and the wrong cultural climate for Doctor Who, and the JNT years were actually no more superficial, shallow, garish, hypocritical, nihilistic, mean spirited or excess-driven than the times themselves were. To him maybe the show only got into trouble in the 80’s because in spite of JNT’s stern wishes, it had dared to start getting political, in stories like Vengeance on Varos and Remembrance of the Daleks, and because maybe the public just wasn’t ready for stories like Black Orchid, Enlightenment, Caves of Androzani, Revelation of the Daleks and Survival that held a mirror to society at a time when people knew damn well that they were shallow, selfish and materialistic but they didn’t want anyone else pointing it out. But in the 90’s and beyond, this radical, political underground form of Doctor Who positively thrived in the New Adventures novels and The Fearmonger is actually the one audio that captures and articulates that ethos best, and leaves nothing unsaid. There’s such a density to this story that it doesn’t even seem to matter that the NA novels have now been deleted from publication because this story somehow seems to compensate for their loss alone, and to nail everything that those books had to say.
The opening scene recalls the Deadly Assassin, which is appropriate since this is a story firmly about media spin. The show’s frequency of excursions to Gallifrey and the token exposure of yet another corrupt Time Lord (which I’m sure we’ll have more to say on when we get to Zagreus) have really taken away from the impact of The Deadly Assassin and how it captured a new uncertain world where the media and education system could no longer be trusted, and the truth of the world suddenly seemed suspect, intangible and prone to being rewritten. This is one of many audio stories to come that takes the benchmark of Robert Holmes’ The Deadly Assassin and The Sunmakers, in being primarily concerned with the power of the media, and how it can be used to enrage or sedate a populace, to unify or to divide the masses, to empower the common man or make helpless pariahs of the lesser and prejudiced, and how it can ignite the flames of revolution, or it can saturate people with so much information and politics that it all becomes an ambiguous, meaningless blur that demoralises political motivation. It’s something that will run right through Neverland, Jubilee, Davros, The Natural History of Fear, Live 34, The Reaping, Dalek Empire, Gallifrey and ultimately Masters of War. Infact whilst this might belong with the magical realism stories of the McCoy era, it feels very earthy and real, to the point where it even sounds and feels like a documentary. And that’s what especially makes this story stand out and demand to be taken seriously amidst the rather more traditional sci-fi pulp audios at this time.
The performances too sell the reality of it consistently. Sylvester McCoy gives one of his best performances as the Doctor here, making an unforgettable sting of an impression in each scene. For all I might sometimes knock her, Sophie Aldred was superb when given the more naturalist and raw material of the BBV audios (managing to beautifully play the kind of sensitive material that could so easily have come across as sensationalist and tasteless in lesser hands), and given the strong material here she absolutely shines.
Whilst this brings back the feel of the McCoy era, it also takes great care to acknowledge and overcome the conceptual limitations of the period. The Doctor’s first scene with the radio presenter is an intriguing opening, even if it feels like we’ve arrived a bit late in the story, and it establishes the Seventh Doctor’s omnipotent manipulator trademark from the get-go. To be fair this is done by placing him against rather weak opposition. If the Doctor was going up against a really formidable and aggressive right wing talking head modelled after a real media bullyboy like Bill O’Reilly, then we’d have a far stronger hook. But no matter, because the Doctor’s principle enemy is far greater, and the story exposes the point that there’s no sense in having the Doctor be an omnipotent superbeing unless his enemy is a serious match for him. As such whilst much of the story’s content is as rhetorical as one would expect Jon’s writing to be, the art and craft is in how the story gets it all to collide and conflict and ultimately dovetail. In this story the Doctor is up against something nebulous and idea based that can’t be killed, and this is what makes the story so compelling and gets the listener’s anticipation from the beginning. It’s the same way the excellent midway cliffhanger exposes the usual naivety of the McCoy era by showing what happens when the ‘look me in the eye, pull the trigger, end my life’ empathy trick doesn’t work in the real world. This isn’t just a gratuitous cliffhanger moment though. It defines the story’s theme of how communication is failing in a society ruled by fear and paranoia, where words can become a weapon to instigate chaos and hatred or to emotionally beat down any dissenters and outsiders with esteem-crushing rhetoric and moral superiority, so no-one dares listen anymore. It also defines the predicament of Ace and the supporting heroes, afflicted by handicaps, both physical and metaphorical, and firing blind against an unseen enemy.
The presence of a poisonous mind parasite feels like a lovely throwback to the Audio Visual days, and as a concept it still works so well in the audio medium on a primal level in the mind’s eye. And just like the Daleks, the main reason the mind parasite works as an enemy is the sense that it represents us, it represents the thoroughly nasty aspects of the human mind unleashed, as if surgically removed from the more tempering and reasoning, redeeming aspects of man. That what the alien is void of is what makes it more terrifying than what it does possess, and it’s an idea that will be revisited to chilling effect in the later Seventh Doctor story Red. So in the tradition of Doctor Who at its best, it’s a monstrous concept that’s terrifying and yet at the same time really optimistically affirms all that is good and redemptive about humanity.
But of course this would be nothing if it weren’t directly connected to very real issues of the day. George Orwell’s 1984 concept of being punished for ‘thought crimes’ might sound like sci-fi absurdity, but ask any of the Magdelene Sisters and they’ll tell you it really happened to them. Likewise in The Fearmonger the telepathic parasite can destroy minds, but so can the very real world cults that the story is really about. The Fearmonger is actively about the destructive power of poisonous, predatory, manipulative leaders and vindictive, accusatory, bottom feeding people who run and raleigh cults, lynch mobs and supremacist groups and the damage they can do to society by demonising people and raleighing insecure people that have little identity into unthinking collective hate. The way they can make a destructive, insane idea into something self-sustaining and transferrable from person to person. Accusatory behaviour and rhetoric is always the tool used by the most evil, destructive people in history. Hysterical, vulgar people fixated with maddening degrees of control, painting the world black and white, and enforcing arbitary rules, cultivating hate, fear and guilt, playing on the worst aspects of humanity and presenting a world view plagued by an overblown perception of sin and destroying all hope of anything better. People who can destroy personal development, destroy communities and communication and all capacity for reason, cultivating disillusioning and impenetrable all-consuming contempt, leaving people in monologue rather than dialogue and forcing the pariahs they persecute onto a dead end path of depravity and self-destruction from having nothing to lose or being trapped in a mental cage of guilt complexes.
Indeed the story’s scattered locations compliments this sense of a society that’s divided and falling apart and descending into internecine conflict and anarchy, although these are disparate elements that gradually dovetail beautifully. The Fearmonger is about the horror of what happens when these ideas become normalised and virtually mainstream, and how decent, noble people are forced to go underground into guerrilla lawlessness, but stand little hope of doing anything except playing into the enemy’s hands, the same way terrorists always end up making things worse by only destroying any sympathy or credibility for their cause and provoking their opponents to cause more destruction to hunt them down, and creating the state of fear that makes the people gravitate more to the protection of the government. This is of course why this world needs the Doctor, someone wisened by centuries’ experience, and who can second guess the enemy and do the unpredictable.
It’s no surprise that such issues should be at the forefront of Jon Blum’s writing, given that he spent many years on the rec.arts.drwho online newsgroup and watched it degenerate into a repulsive haven for trolls, flame wars and some utterly reprehensible racist and homophobic propaganda. It’s clear why Jon Blum had to get that exposure to such poisonous rhetoric out of his system, and why he’s developed a distain for any signs of fandom’s tendency to degenerate into lynch mob thinking and the blame game. But here it’s all articulated in a way that’s raw and yet so affirming and right.
The fascist characters of Remembrance of the Daleks, Made in Britain and American History X (which I consider to be the definitive information age movie) all subscribed to some warped sense of utilitarianism, and all articulated the fears that the white working classes were being criminalised and made to apologise for their nationality in a society ran by pervasive guilt, and they all asked the difficult question of why the right to freedom of speech stops when it comes to racist or fascist views, and even watching Remembrance of the Daleks at the age of 11 (it was my Christmas present that year), the story seriously got me to ponder if Ratcliffe had a point. This story gives the best answer to that conundrum by showing the spreading unending madness that ensues when this hateful rhetoric isn’t nipped in the bud at the earliest point. When frustrated people are captivated by bottom feeding ideas, they can never stop digging or ever come to the end because there is no end and no victory, it’s an unrelenting bottomless pit. Racist attitudes are never something that can be easily purged or forgiven. We’ve been trying to eradicate fascism as an idea for nearly a century but the idea just still won’t die.
This is all going on the first three acts of the play and there seems to be a risk that the story has dealt its hand too much already and by giving us too much, maybe it now has little left up its sleeve to surprise us or maintain the intrigue at a point where it needs to deal its biggest hand. But with rioting mobs colliding amidst a media circus, and the Doctor at his weakest as his masterplan seems to go wrong as the monster finds its main target, there’s no way the ending couldn’t be a climax. Ultimately we get a hard-hitting spiralling apex of panic where brilliant performances come to a beautiful head, and it leaves us both exhausted and satisfied.
In some ways it’s a shame that it doesn’t look like Jon is going to get that writing job on New Who that he’s clearly touting for, because frankly this would make a wonderful adaptation for television, it’s sharp and pacy whilst still being cerebral and intelligent and is as contemporary and relevant today as it was when first released. Mind you, if that did happen we’d never hear the end of its AA figures would we?
Some time ago, I concluded my review of Short Trips: Time Signature by announcing I would no longer be purchasing Big Finish’s Short Trips volumes. While the anthologies rarely struck me as poor, too many of them struck me as average, and the failing exchange rate meant that I could no longer justify the purchase price for the content I was receiving. Several months ago, however, I was contacted by Richard Salter about his upcoming anthology Short Trips: Transmissions and his desire to have it reviewed — and so I have returned to the range, perhaps briefly, to offer this review. In the interest of full disclosure, I must point out that the anthology was provided to me at the editor’s expense — but as it is common practice to provide review copies, I do not feel that this has affected my ability to remain unbiased.
While “Transmissions” does not have an obvious linking plot like some of its fellow anthologies, it does feature a strong, consistent theme: means and methods of communication and understanding. This is a powerful central idea, but do the individual stories measure up? Let’s find out.
Doctor Who and the Adaptation of Death — Graeme Burk — I like the central idea here. While we’ve seen the Rashomon thing in a million other places, a story about inaccurate film representations is a fun twist on the material. It’s a funny story, too, but ultimately I think it tries a little too hard — the commentary on celebrity culture (yes, Jude Law the Third, we got it the first time) feels forced and the reversal by the Kubthukians, while amusing, isn’t a plot device I enjoy.
Policy to Invade — Ian Mond — I love the seventh Doctor, and I love when he brings down entire companies and/or governments from within, so I’m predisposed to like this story, but it’s really rather good. It’s easy to misdirect the reader’s attention with this sort-of-epistolary style, and Mond does it brilliantly — by the time you realize what’s happened it’s already passed you by. The Rachel Lane passages are worth the read just on their own.
Only Connect — Andy Lane — A bizarre conflation of Doctor Who and Taxicab Confessions, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work. The idea that the Doctor drives a cab in his spare time is something that’s “out there” even for Doctor Who, and yet Lane pulls it off, presenting the image of the Doctor dipping his toe into the flow of time and gathering what information he can. It’s uplifting, in one since, arguing as it does that everyone has a part to play — the Seeds of Doom connection is interesting — but yet it’s also painfully depressing, as it shows a man who (apparently) dies thinking just the opposite. Intriguing yet uneasy reading.
Gudok — Mags L. Halliday — It’s a fairly typical murder-on-a-train story, with the fairly typical setting of the Orient Express, and there’s a tenuous connection to the anthology’s theme involving the train’s ability to deliver messages over long distances. Two things set it apart: the regulars and the setting. Tegan and Turlough’s relationship is captured effortlessly: Turlough’s motives are entirely unclear, Tegan clearly can’t stand him, and yet there’s that faint hint of a spark of romantic tension. Secondly, the setting — and the period characters — are utterly believable. I think it’s unquestionable at this point that Halliday is one of the best Who authors at presenting historical settings, and this story is further proof.
Generation Gap — Lou Anders — It’s a typical Pertwee-off-Earth story, full of belabored explanations and broad characterizations, but fortunately it has a few interesting quirks. The perspective — second-person — is unique, and yet it works, easily putting the reader into the central character’s head. Secondly, I love the inversion of the whole intelligent design “debate:” here, there is scientific evidence for a higher power interfering in the development of a species, and those who believe in random evolution — for which there is no evidence — are rightly dismissed as quacks! Of course, there’s the chance that some might read this story as some kind of endorsement of intelligent design in real life, but I hope not. Solid stuff.
Lonely — Richard Wright — I love stories that play with form, and this is certainly unique for Doctor Who: a story told through a chatroom transcript! The characters come across perfectly, and the Doctor’s text just screams McGann even if, like me, you overlook which Doctor is in the story. The threat is surprisingly creepy, too. Would it work for someone that wasn’t an experienced veteran of internet chats? I don’t know, but it worked for me. My only concern was with the very end, which felt a bit forced.
Blue Road Dance — James Milton — Loved it. Effective worldbuilding is an easy way to win me over, and Milton’s society draws you in immediately. Dancing is a powerful means of expression, and creating a people able to affect reality through dance makes for fascinating reading. There’s also the Doctor-as-deity feeling which crops up from time to time, and Troughton is absolutely perfect here, his impish Trickster type a fine contrast to the seriousness of the situation.
Tweaker — Dan Abnett — I’m digressing a bit here, but sometimes I think the tendency to explain everything in Doctor Who fiction can be a hindrance. Collins is a great character, and the limited perspective Abnett employs expertly shows how even the fifth Doctor can seem utterly alien to an ordinary person. But why does it go on after the handwritten message on the album cover? The last section is written from a different perspective, contains unnecessary exposition, and a ridiculous final line — it seriously undermines the rest of the story. Sometimes it’s better just to let things go. Digression over.
Link — Pete Kempshall — More Pertwee-off-Earth, but it works for two great reasons: first, the central concept is intriguing; second, the Doctor doesn’t win. The Doctor sees the beautiful telepathic symbiosis that has formed, admires it, tries to protect it, and speaks powerfully in its defense — but it doesn’t matter, as ultimately Hrinth does what he had planned all along. I’m surprised just how well Pertwee works in melancholy mode — though after “The Green Death” I suppose I shouldn’t be.
Driftwood — Dale Smith — Smith is one of my favorite Who authors, largely because he understands my favorite Doctor — the seventh — better than most, and writes him perfectly. It’s an interesting exploration of the human/dolphin relationships seen in Heritage, and there’s some great imagery — glass coffins on beaches — but the scenes of the Doctor talking down Victoria and her colleagues are what make the story. Great stuff.
Methuselah — George Mann — Straightforward Doctor Who, really. Of course, the great thing about the series is that a story about messages from an experimental spaceship in the future manifesting themselves in the thoughts of a 10th century poet can be described as “straightforward” — but that’s what this is. It’s heartwarming, rewarding in all the right places, and funny in others, but it only stands out in its portrayal of Peri.
Nettles — Kelly Hale — For all that this anthology is about communication, there’s also a repeated exploration of the universal scale on which the Doctor operates. We’ve seen the Doctor make terrible decisions before, but rarely do we see such a direct depiction of the effects of those decisions on “ordinary” people. Love the way Bazima first meets the Doctor: thinking she’s being picked up for sex! Her argument with the Doctor near the end is powerful, and the final lines — “the potential for wings” — are excellent. This is the flip side of what I discussed above: we don’t need to see the resolution to this conflict, because that’s not important to the story being told. Excellent.
Larkspur — Mark Stevens — The Falklands conflict isn’t part of my national consciousness, so perhaps some of this story eluded me. Nonetheless, this was very, very good, an NA-style story years after that glorious range ended. Great images throughout — dead time machines strewn across a coastline, massive sinkholes on alien landscapes thousands of years in the future — and of course my favorite Doctor combine to produce a story I enjoyed quite a lot. Benny is perfect, too. I’ve read it twice, though, and I’m missing the hint about who the previous TARDIS owner was!
See No Evil — Steve Lyons — With the amount of writing that Lyons has done in the past about communication, I was looking forward to this one. Sadly, it read like Lyons on autopilot. The idea of nanites implanting themselves in the brains of a population to censor sense itself is a great one, but it’s told like a caricature. Really? There’s a Mary Whitehouse analogue sitting in a giant control room telling people how to think? Then I realized I’d read this before, when it was called “The Stealers of Dreams.” Disappointing.
iNtRUsioNs — Dave Hoskin — Dark, creepy, downbeat, and delightful. A simple, frightening message attached to a letter manifests itself as a corrupting influence in the reader’s brain. We watch firsthand as it transforms narrative focus Sam into a killer, a carrier — and we get a rare outsider’s perspective of the Hartnell Doctor, a force unto himself. It gets under the skin even as it entertains.
Breadcrumbs — James Moran — A new series author turning his hand to the classic series, and he goes from the serious “Fires of Pompeii” to this lighthearted, hilarious season 17 pastiche. Moran nails the regulars — the argument scenes in the TARDIS are great — and the plot, while relatively simple, is expertly constructed. We need more paradox stories like this one, and we need more from Moran full stop.
Transmission Ends — Richard Salter — I like the technique of lifting scenes from the various stories of the anthology and using them as points of communication within the final story. It adds a metafictional level that really gets the brain working. But man, this story is dark. Which isn’t to say that it’s bad, but the relentless blood, death, and crumbling of society certainly wasn’t what I expected as I completed the anthology. Not sure it gels with the rest of the stories in its attempt to serve as a conclusion — but on its own, it’s quite good. Alex’s sacrifice is heartbreaking.
Overall, Short Trips: Transmissions is one of the best anthologies offered in the range. The central theme is consistent throughout, leading to some thought-provoking material, the prose is first-rate, and the story quality is excellent, with even the worst offerings merely average instead of poor. Highly recommended.
As Short Trips collections go, Destination Prague is more unusual than most: as a linking theme, it features stories set in one specific location — Prague — and it features a number of authors new to Doctor Who but apparently familiar in other circles. Unfortunately, it isn’t very good: the setting is predictably repetitive, and many of the authors struggle with the material.
Midnight in the Café of the Black Madonna — Sean Williams — The first story to feature Prague somehow separated from Earth. There’s an interesting alien race on display, and Pertwee is well-presented with a moment of surprising poignancy at the end. This is a solid start to the anthology, though it’s emblematic of this anthology’s odd decisions when it comes to ordering its stories.
Room for Improvement — James A. Moore — Oh, what an ironic title. Bad characterization: Hartnell sounds nothing like the Doctor, and every supporting character, Ian included, is nothing more than a cipher positioned to ask “What is it, Doctor?” in increasingly breathy tones. The social commentary is amateurish, the resolution lacking in drama.
Life from Lifelessness — Keith R. A. DeCandido — The first of many explanations of the Golem story in this anthology. DeCandido easily captures the Doctor/Romana relationship, and makes for an entertaining and surprisingly forthright story.
The Long Step Backward — Mike W. Barr — Very odd story about evolution that features a believable presentation of what happens when disagreements occur at the highest levels of academia in a universe of alien monsters and retrograde mutation. Hartnell does much better in this story as well.
Strange Attractor — Paul Kupperberg — A second story with Prague cut off from the rest of Earth, this one uses a heady sci-fi concept involving an alien being who is a literal embodiment of entropy. It’s well-written enough, though it sort of undercuts the story when the Doctor defeats his foe by pointing out how ridiculous it is.
Gold and Black Ooze — Robert Hood — A third story with Prague cut off from the rest of Earth, and a second explanation for the Golem. Unmemorable, but for the wonderful perspective writing of Peri subsumed by the ooze, which makes the story worthwhile.
The Dogs of War — Brian Keene — Wait, what? By the year 2400, a race of sentient dogs developed by human science rise up, take over, and reduce humanity to a feral slave species that runs in packs? Didn’t this sound idiotic to anyone else at the submission stage? Also, what does this have to do with Prague?
Sunday Afternoon, AD 848,988 — Paul Crilley — A fun little time-twister of a story, sort-of-involving Time Lords and a refreshingly lighthearted McCoy/Ace pairing. The comedy double-act is cute, too — overall, this is quite entertaining.
Nanomorphosis — Stephen Dedman — The first of two stories about Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and it’s quite interesting. The robot police, assembled where needed by nanomachines, are fascinating, and I loved the idea of the Doctor, Sarah, and Harry running around Prague with a giant cockroach as a de facto companion. The resolution is sub-Agatha Christie, but it doesn’t detract from an otherwise entertaining story.
Spoilsport — Paul Finch — One of the best jobs of writing Pertwee that I’ve seen in quite a while. I find that Pertwee stories work much better if the author can achieve a note-perfect capturing of the Doctor, and Finch certainly does that. The subject matter is perfect, too — supernatural phenomena with a scientific explanation — and it involves just enough of Prague to be appropriate. Good stuff.
War in a Time of Peace — Steve Lockley & Paul Lewis — A fourth story with Prague cut off from the rest of Earth. It’s mostly unmemorable, but it does present one interesting character: a general doing what he thinks is the right thing in light of very limited evidence. Solid enough, for what it is.
The End of Now — Chris Roberson — Another oddly earnest season 17 story, complete with the sci-fi trope I’ve never understood of the unusual character who speaks in incorrect tenses. It works here, though, with the constantly shifting perspectives and times, and Roberson tries, somewhat successfully, to ground the threat in human desire.
Suspension and Disbelief — Mary Robinette Kowal — So short it’s over before it starts. What’s with the deus ex machina thing? “Inconsequential” would be the best word here.
Leap Second — Bev Vincent — More Time Lords, more time travel, and more conflicts in academia. This is competently-presented, to be sure, but everything is starting to blend together by this point in the anthology and I’m finding myself with less and less to say.
Lady of the Snows — James Swallow — Despite being the fifth story involving Prague cut off from the rest of Earth, this is the best story in the anthology. It’s a heartbreaking story — Yan is a desperately lonely yet sympathetic artist who meets and falls in love with an amnesiac Charley — with a brilliant perspective on the Doctor, floating in and out of events. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Swallow is one of the few authors in here who’s written Who before.
The Time Eater — Lee Battersby — A third explanation for the Golem here, and a badly-written Troughton, compensated for by an excellent Jamie. The ending is poignant, which makes up for the incomprehensible proceedings leading up to it.
Fable Fusion — Gary A. Braunbeck & Lucy A. Snyder — Perhaps the worst writing for any set of regulars in any published Doctor Who media in history. I don’t know who these characters are, but they bear as much resemblance to the seventh Doctor and Ace as I do. This completely ruins the story — the rest of it doesn’t even matter. And this took TWO authors?
Men of the Earth — Kevin Killiany — A fourth explanation for the Golem myth, and this one contains a run-of-the-mill sci-fi debate about mining for precious raw materials threatening a previously-unknown species. Again, it’s not a bad story by any means, but it’s not especially interesting.
Across Silent Seas — Tim Waggoner — It’s almost exactly the same story as “The Time Eater,” except much better-written: Waggoner nails Troughton, and even gives him an interesting, if sudden, recent history to lend credence to his inner moral conflict. Very good stuff.
The Dragons of Prague — Todd McCaffrey — Ludicrous, cavalier rewriting of Earth (and Doctor Who) history aside, this is delightful. McCaffrey clearly knows these regulars, and puts a perfect Tom Baker on the page. I also enjoyed the central conceit — a cooking contest — that gave the story a very Doctor Who-ish twist of absurdity.
Omegamorphosis — Stel Pavlou — The plot is silly at best, incomprehensible at worst, but Pavlou makes up for it with his scenes between the Doctor and Callum. The last paragraphs in particular are beautiful — shame about the Master, who really adds nothing by his presence.
Overall, Short Trips: Destination Prague has some distinct flaws: first, it’s terribly repetitive, with several stories seeming incredibly similar. Doctor Who has presented multiple explanations for historical events in the past, sure, but never multiple times in this close proximity! The setting is too limited: most stories strike me as wanting to “do Prague” by talking about the Astronomical Clock, the Golem, Kafka, etc. — but when these features turn up in almost every single story, they turn into an eye-rolling game of “spot the reference” by the end of the book. Secondly, it’s obvious that most of these authors have limited experience writing Doctor Who: only a few stories have commendable presentations of the regulars, and many feel more like Star Trek plots, complete with technobabble resolutions. I see this anthology for the experiment it was, but unfortunately I cannot deem that experiment a success.
Some time ago, I suspended my reviews of Big Finish’s series of short story anthologies because the price had become prohibitive. Now, with the unfortunate announcement of the end of the range, and the corresponding reduction in prices, I have been able to complete my collection, and am returning to my reviewing odyssey. I begin with the 19th volume in the series, a collection of stories related to or based upon Nicholas Briggs’s Dalek Empire miniseries.
Kalendorf — Nicholas Briggs — One of a series of stories that broadens the backgrounds of the characters from Dalek Empire. There’s a brief reference back to “The Sirens of Time,” and we get some insight into the functioning of the Knights of Velyshaa, but for the most part this is here to set the tone of the anthology, and it accomplishes its goal.
Natalie’s Diary — Joseph Lidster — Another type of linking story that runs through the anthology in four parts, this shows a student studying the history of the initial Dalek invasion in anticipation of the next one. In a shocking reversal from Lidster’s usual offerings, this one comes to an optimistic ending, with the actions of the Doctor, Ace, and Hex inspiring hope in the face of insurmountable odds. Expertly presented, with some gripping writing.
Alby — Sharon Gosling — Repeating the hope theme, and getting in some fascinating scenes with a helpless Dalek alongside the enjoyably abrasive Alby Brook. Surprising that this is Gosling’s first published fiction — it’s free of many of the usual hallmarks, and easily captures the essence of one of Dalek Empire’s best characters. Solid stuff.
Private Investigations — Ian Farrington — This seems familiar for some reason: a story told in flashback through assembled news clips and articles, recounting the exploits of the seventh Doctor and companions trying to raise a planet to resist the Daleks. I like the way it’s presented, though: the Doctor as myth, someone for whom there is never enough evidence, who just happened to come along and save the day — essentially a personified vision of hope.
Suz — Sharon Gosling — Poignant, and easily summarizing the horrific choices faced by the main character of the first series, but ultimately this felt like a rehashing of what I’d already heard. The execution scene is powerful, but the rest feels strangely flat.
The Best Joke I Ever Told — Simon Guerrier — I think the use of humor in the face of tragedy is one of the more fascinating debates one can have. Between that, the struggling comedy writer, and his final, climactic push for heroism, there’s a lot to inspire in this story, even if it includes the utterly bizarre notion of Daleks voluntarily participating in a comedy series. The Doctor, like in many of the stories here, seems oddly out of place.
Hide and Seek — Ian Farrington — It never fails: put Pertwee in space, and invariably he’ll be resolving some archetypal conflict of morality. This one’s fairly poignant, for what it is — someone betrays her people out of a desperation to save them — but it’s still preachy, and full of “What is it, Doctor?” questions out of Jo. Pertwee isn’t tough to capture, but I’ve noticed the Short Trips anthologies consistently struggle with making him interesting.
The Eighth Wonder of the World — Simon Guerrier — Wow. Fun, sweeping adventure, with only the most tenuous connection to Dalek Empire, but that doesn’t really matter. The epigraphs neatly tie the story to historical record, while Guerrier has the audacity to have a lone Dalek shoot down the Colossos of Rhodes while pursuing the Doctor through its insides! Mix in a fine turn from Evelyn — who works very well on the page here — and you’ve got a wonderful little story. Great stuff.
Mutually Assured Survival — Justin Richards — It’s decent enough, but I didn’t really enjoy Dalek Empire III at the time, and this story isn’t evn strongly connected to [i]that[/i]. It’s typical Richards: solid prose, decent characterization, and there’s a plot twist, but I don’t feel like it earns sympathy for its characters.
Museum Piece — James Swallow — Astonishing. As clear a reference to the new series as you’re going to get; Swallow expertly pairs an elderly Kalendorf with a clearly haunted McGann, and lets them talk. The Dalek is note-perfect, and its choice of victim is heartbreaking. If this wasn’t the story selected for the “greatest hits” anthology, there’s something wrong.
Return of the Daleks — Nicholas Briggs — The script of the audio drama by the same name. I didn’t read through the whole thing, as I’ve heard the story, but it is interesting to see the scripting style of the audios.
Overall, Short Trips: Dalek Empire is a very impressive collection. You need to hear the various Dalek Empire series to have a hope in hell of understanding this, but at least they’re pretty explicit about that on the back cover. The Doctor seems out of place in many of these stories, but then he felt out of place in “Return of the Daleks” as well. I suspect that’s because the Dalek Empire universe is about humanity finding its own inspiration to combat evil, and having the Doctor around to guide them seems somehow disingenuous. But it’s nice to have more Dalek prose stories, and the final entry by James Swallow is worth the price of admission all on its own.
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From Tom Swift on 09 – The Big Hunt
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From Styre on Dalek Empire
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