I admit, I’ve tired of Big Finish’s short story anthologies. While few of them have been poor, the quality simply isn’t consistently high enough to justify the rather exorbitant pricing. And I know that isn’t the fault of the company, but rather that of the exchange rate — but with the number of audios I still purchase, I can’t justify the expense on the hardbacks any longer. Fortunately, Simon Guerrier’s anthology “Time Signature” provided a surprisingly high note to go out on — and gave me positive feelings about a possible return to the range in the future.
An Overture Too Early — Simon Guerrier — I think it’s a bit rushed, but it’s fascinating and well-written, and shows a rare side of Pertwee. The events at the end provide nice setups for the recurring elements that run through the anthology. Intriguing, and a fine open.
The Ruins of Time — Philip Purser-Hallard — Purser-Hallard showed a real talent for worldbuilding in “Of the City of the Saved” and it’s on display again here, in a fascinating environment involving frozen and stolen time. The Doctor and Susan are as enigmatic and mysterious as ever, and this uncertainty is played upon to impressive effect.
Gone Fishing — Ben Aaronovitch — Oh, this is brilliant. Baker’s Doctor is perfect in this, just the right combination of flippant and insightful, and William’s continuing struggles with comprehending his situation are delightful to read. It almost has a new series feel to it, which leads me to a conclusion I’ve held for years: Doctor Who misses Ben Aaronovitch.
The Avant Guardian — Eddie Robson — Interesting concept that seems somewhat forced in the context of the story. The manner in which some of the regulars are imprisoned is amusing, but the overall tone of the story is too similar to its predecessor, especially when it comes to the style of humor. Still, Robson writes a great Troughton, and his interactions with Flora are the highlights of the story.
Second Contact — Jonathan Clements — Clements builds a convincing Scandinavian society within a limited page count, but unfortunately that makes up the vast majority of the story and doesn’t leave much room for anything else. Perhaps I was in the wrong mood, but I found the central conflict uninteresting, while the Doctor’s drifting through the story seemed almost ephemeral.
Resonance — Ben Woodhams — I read this a week ago, and I barely remember it. It’s competently written, with a passable Davison, but completely failed to hold my interest, the second consecutive story with this problem. Maybe it was me. I don’t know.
Walkin’ City Blues — Joff Brown — A very nice story, with a gloriously happy ending arising from a deep urban blight. The Doctor/William interplay is as strong as before, though the humor is a bit more forced, and the setting is deceptively complex. Good stuff.
The Hunting of the Slook — Marc Platt — The musical themes come to a head in this story, and Platt is the right author for the job, demonstrating his usual flair for the conceptual and his deep understanding of the seventh Doctor. The conflict is the standard human-greed-gets-them-into-situations-they-can’t-handle, but the threat is made primal enough to be frightening. Fine work.
The Earwig Archipelago — Matthew Sweet — Sweet shows the same talent for florid language and opulent tone that he demonstrated in “Year of the Pig,” and honestly the story of the earwig is much more interesting than that of the Doctor, the expositionary delivery of which does it no favors. Sweet, like Paul Magrs, seems to be all about his setting, his atmosphere, and his characters — and I’m not being negative at all when I say that. Quite the opposite, in fact. Enjoyable.
DS al Fine — Simon Guerrier — Very good, right up until the ending. Guerrier weaves a convincing web of the plot threads of the anthology, and the ebullient eighth Doctor is perfect for this. The brief scene with Benton might be the highlight of the whole book, while the showdown with the flower-adorned men is quite dramatic. I didn’t like the final revelation, though, which struck me as a twist too far, despite having been foreshadowed in the previous stories.
Certificate of Destruction — Andrew Cartmel — Another suburbia-with-dark-secret story from the master of the style within Doctor Who. I’ve always felt Cartmel’s stories are run through with a latent dread and suspicion of the ordinary, and this one is no different, despite its absurd overtones. Ultimately, it’s a much more sedate “Warchild,” which isn’t a bad thing, even if the story seems somewhat familiar. A fine way to go out after the epic climax in the previous story.
Despite flagging in the middle to some extent, “Time Signature” is a strong anthology featuring content from a range of excellent authors. The “arc” plot is fairly complex, and not spelled out for the reader, which can be rewarding. This collection is recommended for purchase.
Unfortunately, however, my odyssey through the Big Finish anthologies has drawn to a close for the time being. After 18 anthologies and close to 200 stories, I have grown weary of the format: while well-written stories still far outnumber their poorer counterparts, stories that push boundaries and challenge preconceptions are few and far between. Too many stories, and occasional entire anthologies, strike me as perfunctory. Perhaps I’ll return to the Short Trips range one day, but for now, I prefer to focus on the audios, for which I still have a passion.
I haven’t thought much of Ian Farrington’s short story anthologies to date, and I’ve grown more and more disillusioned with the range in general. A relatively innovative linking theme pops up in “The Centenarian:” the Doctor repeatedly meets the same man at different stages in both their lives. Would the content live up to the concept?
Prologue — Joseph Lidster — One of Lidster’s least “emotional” stories, and one that takes on a completely different meaning once the collection is complete. You’re meant to think this is a Hartnell story, I think — I certainly believed it.
Echoes — Gary Russell — I’ve noticed that Russell writes child characters better than almost any other Who author, and this coupled with his traditionally strong grasp of Pertwee leads to a poignant, if slight little story. Good stuff.
Direct Action — Ian Mond — Interesting. There’s a future perspective on Grainger that’s unique compared to the rest of the collection, and the actual concept is surprisingly innovative. Not sure I like Mond’s Tom Baker in this, but it’s made up for by the ending. Another above-average entry.
Dream Devils — Glen McCoy — The author of Timelash, of all people! Well, this is better than the TV story, but it’s still unnecessarily complicated and resolves itself with talk of souls and things. McCoy writes a good Pertwee, though, which isn’t easy.
Falling from Xi’an — Steven Savile — Gorgeous prose, wonderful characters, and the first real sight of Grainger as a person in this anthology. I’d call it great, except for one serious problem: Savile’s Davison is absolutely horrible. Honestly, he reads more like Tennant.
Log 384 — Richard Salter — I’m always a bit wary about stories like this. I think Salter has the right idea: Unit 731 isn’t something that most readers are going to know about, and putting Grainger through a first-person experience of the installation is a way to throw the reader into it. However, I’m not sure if a Doctor Who short story is the place for this, and I’m also not sure if the first-person perspective doesn’t somehow devalue the real suffering that went on there. It’s well-written, though — I just have some reservations.
The Church of Football — Benjamin Adams — One of the better jobs of writing Peri from the first person that I’ve seen, that very nearly makes her 100% convincing as an American. The plot is entertaining enough, if forgettable, while Grainger is at his least defined as a character.
Incongruous Details — Simon Guerrier — It’s a decent story, that makes good use of shifting perspectives. I have absolutely no time whatsoever for stories that are “concluded” in subsequent anthologies, however. At $30 per book, in a medium that is not used to advance an ongoing narrative, I like to see the stories end.
Ancient Whispers — Brian Willis — The backstory on Grainger is much, much more interesting than the plot itself. Everything seems to be building up to a dramatic climax, which is wasted on a villain that could have been fascinating had it not lacked all thematic resonance. And honestly, do we really need to have Pertwee adventures set during his TARDIS journey back from Metebelis III to regenerate? Really?
First Born — Lizzie Hopley — Well, someone’s been reading her physiology textbook. It’s a fine story, though, that actually captures all four regulars and puts them to productive use. The conversation between Tegan and Grainger is easily the best part.
Dear John — John Davies — Unmemorable, as with basically every other story that concludes with the Doctor giving the villain a stern lecture. And why are we getting Samson/Gemma stories? We don’t know anything about them, and we’re not supposed to know anything about them if Terror Firma is to work properly.
Checkpoint — Stel Pavlou — Delightful. A pristine fourth Doctor, who has almost-tangible chemistry with Grainger, and a plot that develops naturally and reasonably. Perhaps it concludes a bit too hurriedly, but there’s little to complain about here.
Childhood Living — Samantha Baker — Satisfying: decent prose, good characterization of the regulars, and an appealing central character that gives us a flattering, appealing perspective on Grainger. It won’t blow you away, but it’s a solid read.
The Lost — L.J. Scott — Deeply irritating prose. Tension should arise naturally from the text, rather than being forced upon the reader with lines like “Jamie decided to try his best clan yell into the concave head,” then a line break, and then “It worked!” It’s a shame, too, because it ruins a fine portrayal of the notoriously hard-to-capture Troughton crew and an amusing plot.
Old Boys — James Parsons & Andrew Stirling-Brown — You can see the same freedom with narrative that the authors exhibited in “Live 34,” and it’s interesting to see brief descriptions of sixth Doctor stories with each of his three major companions. It’s all a bit too slight to be memorable, though.
Testament — Stephen Hatcher — Very good. The seventh Doctor has to make a difficult, painful decision, to prevent a future that many people would no doubt embrace but that Doctor Who rejects: a stagnant human paradise. It doesn’t tie the previous stories together specifically as much as it references the fact that Grainger has met the Doctor on several occasions, though.
Forgotten — Joseph Lidster — A masterful (heh) reminder of why Lidster is still one of the best short story authors going. It totally alters everything that went on in the first story without changing a single event, and provides a handy sidestep around a particular continuity problem, if fans choose to accept it. A fine conclusion to an uneven anthology.
“Short Trips: The Centenarian” ultimately strikes me as more of the same. Yes, there are some good stories, and no, there aren’t any particularly terrible stories, but almost everything is flawed in one way or another and no story really jumps out at you. There’s really no way this book is worth the exorbitant cost. It seems like these anthologies are starting to tread water, and that’s not a good thing. Doctor Who short stories have come a long way since “Short Trips and Side Steps” from the BBC — unfortunately, they’ve been progressively heading in the wrong direction. I’ve got one more volume (“Time Signature”) to read, and I suspect I’ll be giving up after that.
The last time Jacqueline Rayner edited a BF short story anthology, it was “The Muses,” 12 books in the past. That release was brilliant, however, and with two solid volumes immediately preceding “Farewells,” expectations were expectedly high.
The Mother Road — Gareth Wigmore — This is Wigmore’s fourth Hartnell short story, and it’s up to his usual standard. The regulars are perfect and the story is lighthearted and amusing. And any Doctor Who story taking place in Chicago appeals to me. A fine start.
Father Figure — Steve Lyons — Downbeat, but well-written and gripping. This is potentially the most vicious, spiteful thing we’ve seen Daleks do, and it lays the groundwork for Victoria’s eventual departure. Something of a departure for Lyons, but very good.
The Bad Guy — Stephen Fewell — It’s an interesting idea, pointing out that while companions may fall in love seemingly at random with people they meet on alien planets, those aliens may do the same. However, this is a bit too forced and melodramatic for my taste.
Separation Day — Andy Campbell — I read this in a shopping mall food court, watching young lovers fawn over each other, and though I assume none of them had the high IQs of Campell’s central characters, I couldn’t help but think “There’s no way that lasts” in my cynical way. Predisposed to dislike this sort of thing to begin with, coupled with implied predestination from the “So free will is not an illusion” Doctor, of all people — no, did not like this one at all.
The Very Last Picture Show — Andrew Collins — Collins has a taste (and a talent) for the more humorous eras of the show, and here he tackles the relatively rare Williams-era Leela stories. The Doctor is patronizing as ever, Leela continues to be the most capable fish out of water of all time, and the story has that macabre underpinning of the best Williams stuff. Very amusing.
Into the Silent Land — Steven A. Roman — A new author to the range, and apparently a very good one — this is fine work. An explanation for the fourth Doctor’s changes in mood and behavior between S17 and S18 has never been presented, and here Roman frames it as the Doctor’s increasing awareness of his own mortality; this ties the story to the themes of S18. This sort of mood is unique to Tom Baker’s final season, and I wish we could see more set in this period.
Wake — Jake Elliot — Another new author, and another with talent. I like the experiment — setting a Doctor Who story in a large business-type enviroment, and then telling it through the eyes of one of the ordinary workers — but ultimately I don’t think it works, just because the story is too detached and the main character too uninteresting.
The Velvet Dark — Stewart Sheargold — Look, it’s well-written, and Sheargold captures the regulars competently enough, but this is exactly the sort of thing people talk about when they lampoon the Master. A ridiculous scheme to gain more regenerations, an over-elaborate trap for the Doctor, a silly villain’s lair (I ask you, sitcoms with the Master as every character on the television?), and lines like “Quite characteristically, the Master explained everything” — are we supposed to take this seriously at all? I’d say no, but the morose opening would suggest otherwise.
Life After Queth — Matt Kimpton — I’m not sure how Kimpton thought of a story featuring the Doctor, Tegan, and the Gravis, but I’m glad that he did. This is hilarious stuff — Kimpton shows a talent for literary comic timing, as well as an understanding of the Doctor-Tegan relationship and Davison’s underrated sarcasm. The ending is a delight as well.
Black and White — John Binns — The Doctor/Peri stuff is what makes this worthwhile, as the Doctor’s struggles with his evolution program are too esoteric to be sympathetic. The “give it a couple regenerations” ending is disappointing. But again, Binns does good work with the regulars, and it’s quite believable as the start of their time together.
Curtain Call — Joseph Lidster — Heartbreaking, really. The main character’s story goes exactly as it should be told — boring to start, followed by a needlessly elaborate description of a common scenario alien to the narrator, followed by a tragic ending. The desperate sixth Doctor is appropriate as well. Very uncompromising ending. Lidster continues to impress, even if this isn’t his best work.
Utopia — Darren Sellars — This is the same guy that wrote “Never Seen Cairo” in the first Christmas anthology? Really? “Utopia” is badly- and over-written, forced, preachy, and unenjoyable. I don’t doubt that this Doctor could talk someone into suicide in 15 minutes, but I’d need more convincing than this.
The Wickerwork Man — Paul Magrs — Amusing postmodern take on “The Wicker Man,” with suburbia replacing Christopher Lee’s cult. Magrs always writes on just this side of realism, and his central character is delightfully entertaining in his blithe acceptance of a time machine but his shock at his father sitting quietly at a backyard table. I’d be curious to see how Magrs would tackle a TV script.
The Three Paths — Ian Potter — I like the setting, and I like the image of Hartnell learning at the feet of a Time Lord older and wiser than himself, but ultimately I just can’t take a story where the TARDIS randomly lands Hartnell back on Gallifrey. It’s a fannish condemnation, I know, but it bothered me.
I wasn’t particularly impressed with this anthology. The prose standard is consistently high, as is the characterization, but only one story stood out as anything more than above average and several failed to impress me at all. It’s entertaining enough, I suppose, but that’s not enough to justify the cover price. Borrow, don’t buy.
The first Big Finish Christmas anthology, A Christmas Treasury, featured a diverse assortment of content, from board games to recipes to stories. This time around, under the stewardship of editor Simon Guerrier, only short stories feature — does the quality of these stories measure up to the excellent heights of the last holiday volume?
The Lampblack Wars — Matthew Sweet — I’m not familiar with the historical events referenced in this story, but the story itself has the gothic feel of an old Hinchcliffe story. The after-dinner speech is a bit much, but this is a solid start to the collection nonetheless.
Home Fires — Jonathan Blum — Very melancholy: the sixth Doctor, traumatized by the events of Trial (specifically the Time Lord relocation of Earth), helps some Australian people fight off an oncoming wildfire. It’s very NA-ish, despite the lead character — but the big surprise is how well this would work as an Eccleston story, with Gallifrey as the burning planet.
The Feast — Stewart Sheargold — Some of the better writing for Ben and Polly that I’ve seen, and of course the more enigmatic Troughton from the beginning of his tenure. The alien works well with the time period, too — all in all, a fine little tale. The ending is quite fitting.
Rome — Marcus Flavin — Everything about Rome works quite well, but the conflict with the unnamed, undeveloped bad guy falls flat. Flavin writes Davison really well. Maybe I’m not in the mood, though, but the end was eye-rolling. Average stuff, all told.
Set in Stone — Charles Auchterlonie and John Isles — A cute, fun story, with great characterization of the regulars, and I would assume it’s even more enjoyable if you know the real-world story this attempts to explain. Fine work.
The Thousand Years of Christmas — Simon Bucher-Jones — As you’d expect from Bucher-Jones, it’s high-concept — but it’s also a deeply personal character piece about the Doctor and his sense of honor and duty. One of the best offerings in the anthology, and one which really fits in well with the theme. Great stuff.
Presence — Peter Anghelides — Wraps the Doctor/Ace/Hex group into an NA-style story, wherein they run a mission to nudge New York into the ability to fight off an alien invasion. It’s an interesting perspective on shifting history, but it’s a bit too slight to be memorable. Still, it’s worthwhile in its own way.
Danse Macabre — Joff Brown — Ah, the old disgusting-violent-aliens-are-really-ordinary-folks-just-like-us story, tempered by lots of Pertwee moralizing, etc., etc. Nelson is hilarious, though. Not much to see here.
The Church of Saint Sebastian — Robert Smith — Two seasons on and the new series is still dealing with the recurrent guilt and loss that follow the Doctor through his travels. It’s unsurprising, then, that it doesn’t really work in six pages. Still, Davison’s melancholy is believable.
The Prodigal Sun — Matthew Griffiths — The best part about stories like this is seeing the fourth Doctor and Leela through the eyes of the other characters — it’s often hilarious, and yet somehow believable when they are accepted as heroes. It’s slight — again — but there’s some uplifting coming-of-age material buried in here. That title, though — oh no.
Be Good for Goodness’s Sake — Samantha Baker — You don’t usually expect Doctor Who stories to be set in a suburb of Springfield, IL, but here we are. It’s a bit twee, what with the Christmas spirit winning over the heart of a thief and all, but the Doctor works well and the Charlie/Charley mishap is amusing.
Ode to Joy — Jonathan Clements — Quite possibly the oddest Doctor Who story I’ve ever read, and I’ll leave it at that.
Nobody’s Gift — Kate Orman — More of the Doctor-as-myth theme from Orman, combined with Aztec iconography. It’s amazing how much can fit into five pages; this is a story to read.
The Innocents — Marc Platt — A story with the Geoffrey Bayldon Unbound Doctor. This is surprisingly effective, and touching — most of the plot is window dressing for Leonardo’s culture shock at the modern world, but the final scenes are gorgeous. Platt can write for these characters as long as he likes.
Comforts of Home — Pete Kempshall — Another story in the US, curiously enough. This one’s a Civil War story, with an unusually manipulative Davison and a wonderful Turlough — and its structure is fascinating as well. Good stuff.
Christmas on the Moon — Simon Guerrier — I loved this story. Guerrier shows a real talent for building suspense, but expertly defuses it with believable, quasi-comic resolutions. This story has a very traditional Doctor Who feel to it, and it’s all the better for it. The ending, additionally, is excellent.
The Anchorite’s Echo — Scott Andrews — Two wonderful images in this story: the Doctor confessing his sins to an unseen figure, sealed behind a wall, and that anchorite regaining his faith and driving out the devil. Beautiful.
The Revolutionaries — John S. Drew — Another story in America — what’s going on? This is a lot of fun — I never thought of George Washington in this sort of Doctor Who story, but his horror at the Doctor’s actions is hilarious. The regulars are great, too, something which is not always easy in a Troughton story, and the ending, wherein the Doctor and Jamie concede that they’re going to have to bite the bullet and party with the revolutionaries, is fun as well.
The Gift — Robert Dick — Despite everything else going on, this story presented me with an image that has stuck with me: multiple incarnations of the Doctor serving as pallbearers at the Brigadier’s funeral. It’s obvious, really, and maybe it should seem corny, but I’d never thought of it and I love it. Worth it for that image alone.
Callahuanca — Richard Salter — Very simple, but very elegant. The central conceit is something we should really see more of, and it’s nice to see it without someone screaming in the background about paradoxes or Blinovitch. Fine work.
Not in My Back Yard — Eddie Robson — It’s a Christmas story in Cheldon Bonniface, and honestly it comes across as a third-rate Happy Endings. Like an anniversary story without the charm, its cameos feel smug, its attitude feels wrong, its Doctor is misplaced, and its multiple-Doctor scene feels forced. I’ve liked Robson’s other stories, but this one fell flat.
She Won’t Be Home — Joseph Lidster — A Lidster story in a Christmas anthology?! Doesn’t sound like a good idea; do we really want people opening their wrists into their egg nog? And the first half of the story is classic Lidster human agony — but suddenly he pulls the rug out from under you, as the story takes a comic turn and everyone — except, ironically enough, the Doctor — gets a gloriously happy ending. Thumbs way up.
Saint Nicholas’s Bones — Xanna Eve Chown — The content isn’t bad, but the length is too short. This feels incredibly rushed, and probably should have been 3-4 pages longer to pad it out. However, despite this, it’s remarkably poignant at the end.
The Long Midwinter — Philip Purser-Hallard — Two companions that were created only as background to Terror Firma, and yet Purser-Hallard makes them three-dimensional and believable. The worldbuilding is masterful, reminiscent of Mortimore or Leonard at their best, and the conclusion is touching and hopeful without resorting to empty sentiment. Great stuff, and a wonderful way to go out.
This isn’t Big Finish’s greatest anthology, and classic stories are few and far between within its covers. Perhaps the shorter than usual length of many of the stories contributes, but overall the anthology feels rather slight. Regardless, it’s a great thing to dip into during the Christmas season, as most of the stories capture the spirit of the time without feeling overwrought.
Gary Russell’s first short story anthology featured the strongest linking theme to date: the repercussions of the Doctor’s actions throughout time. The Solar System’s central premise is much simpler: each story takes place on one of our solar system’s ten planets. Some great names in this collection — could Big Finish rebound after the poor A Day in the Life?
Mercury — Eddie Robson — Lots of great ideas on display in what serves as a very strong concept piece. I love the mobile dome, and the Mercurials are fine examples of “monsters” that appear frightening but turn out to be much more sophisticated. Robson’s best Doctor Who story to date.
Venus — Stuart Manning — It’s very traditional at the start, with unusual characters and the Doctor and Charley trying to fit into a group that simply isn’t designed to include them. But it all turns tragic at the end, and the Doctor’s decision not to interfere is beautiful. Heck, it even makes Charley sympathetic. “Do you think you’ll ever stop dreaming?” — one of the best lines in any of these anthologies. Stellar debut by Manning.
Earth — Jim Mortimore — Ridiculously high-concept, with planets dying and the Doctor caught in the middle of everything? And it’s brilliant as well? That’ll be a Mortimore story. The narrator is delightful, and using Tom Baker as the Doctor is a masterstroke — and the ants are beautiful creations. Sure, it conflicts directly with The End of the World, but who cares? Another hit.
Mars — Trevor Baxendale — We’ve seen stories like this a thousand times before, stories in which two different people, marooned in a wasteland, come to care for and protect one another. The key, then, is nailing the characterization — and Baxendale does this, providing a great story for Steven. The scenes with the Doctor and Vicki almost seem extraneous.
Jupiter — Andy Russell — The multi-national crew is a bit much, but otherwise this is a fine offering. Norma’s suffering is totally believable, and her reunion with her husband is touching. Ending it with a telepathic fist-fight seems somewhat crude, but Russell makes it work.
Saturn — Alison Lawson — Loss seems to be a central theme of these stories, as here Nyssa’s lost family is brought home by her encounter with a society that rejects families as a concept. I originally thought the Doctor’s irreverent behavior jarred with the story, but it works — he’s trying to fix what he perceives as a problem without stopping to consider the emotional consequences. This is everything Catch-1782 should have been. On Saturn.
Uranus — Craig Hinton — Hinton’s first short story since the Decalog days, and that’s a shame, considering just how good this is. He has a deceptively easy prose style that perfectly captures the feeling of Season 24 — there’s melodrama, there’s pathos, there’s a great deal of humor — and it’s all the better for it. One of the two best in the collection.
Neptune — Richard Dinnick — Another new author to the range, and some more great concepts on display. I’m not sure if the Siccati originally come from Dinnick or Andy Frankham’s companion piece, but alien artistry isn’t something commonly seen in Doctor Who and it’s refreshing. The regulars are note-perfect — I love the ending, which seems abrupt until you realize you’re being allowed to work it out right along with Sarah. Thumbs up.
Pluto — Dale Smith — Heritage is my favorite PDA, so I might be a bit biased, but this is exceptional. It’s bleak, and the atmosphere is positively oppressive at times, but this gives way to an ultimate sense of hope. The story takes the delicate relationship of the new second Doctor and his companions and shows how it came together, giving Ben and Polly believable new dimensions in the process. The second of the two best in the collection.
Sedna — Andy Frankham — I see now why Frankham likes to use Jeremy when nobody else does: he recognizes that the character really is useless, but endearing nonetheless. Hence, it’s easy to use him to show up Pertwee as an arrogant old blowhard, which amused me to no end. A fine end to the collection, and a great companion piece to “Neptune.”
Every story in this collection is above-average or better, and it deserves to stand with the classic anthologies. Highly recommended — this is the sort of thing we should be getting more often in a time when good Doctor Who prose is rapidly becoming endangered.
Apparently the linking theme here is that the “running time” of all the stories in this collection adds up to 24 hours, or one day. That’s remarkably esoteric for a linking theme, but it should allow more freedom to the authors — something which might help if this collection is to rise out of the depths plumbed by editor Ian Farrington’s previous two anthologies. Would the tide be turned?
After Midnight / Before Midnight — Andy Russell — Charley is irritating and C’rizz is defined by his chameleonic properties, the plot is nonsensical, the dialogue is cliched, and the attempt to actually tie the anthology’s stories together doesn’t work. Just not very good, I’m afraid.
Sold Out — Danny Oz — Irredeemable. The sixth Doctor enters virtual reality to enjoy a VR concert by a legendary rock star. Okay. The VR environment starts trying to kill him. Sure. The reason? The AI that writes the songs is influenced by the personality of its previous owner, who was apaprently a “cyberkiller,” and a dangerous one. What?! Oh, and it ends with an exploration of an AI’s intellectual property rights. This might be passable with excellent characterization and prose, but unfortunately both are horrible. How on earth did this get printed?
Undercurrents — Gary Merchant — Interesting concept, and “companions save the day while the Doctor is otherwise occupied” tales are always fun. Problem is that the regulars are poorly drawn: Jamie is so bloodthirsty it’s surprising he’s not a serial killer, while Zoe is irrational, illogical, and quick to anger. I’d like to see more about the development of these characters’ friendship, but I’d also like to see it presented believably.
The Five O’Clock Shadow — Nev Fountain — I love the idea. The revelation knocked me over. But why, why, why the poetry? Why structure it as though it has rhyme and meter if you’re going to break with both every other line? I struggled throughout because the poetry made my teeth grind. Maybe I’m taking it too seriously?
The Sooner the Better — Ian Farrington — Very, very straightforward, if you like that sort of thing. The characters are adequate, and Farrington keeps the story moving, but there isn’t an ounce of depth here. As for the explanation of the locked door at the end, think “Susan, do you know we use the word ‘hashashin’ in English today?” for the relevant degree of subtlety.
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast — Dan Abnett — “McShane” annoys me, but that’s hardly Abnett’s fault. No, this is the first good offering of the collection. It’s quite creepy, and Abnett nails the regulars — though they have quite the long conversation while running at full speed!
The Hero, the Heroine, and the Megalomaniac — Ian Mond — What this story really brought home to me is how much I prefer the seventh Doctor to the eighth. Yeah, McCoy is cruel to his successor, and his methods are questionable, but, damn it, he wins and he’s right! It also shows us the sorts of interesting stories Charley made possible before she was reduced to cardboard. Quite good, if a little disjointed.
Waiting for Jeremy — Richard Salter — Salter has always demonstrated an excellent grasp of the regular characters, and he continues it here, presenting a sympathetic Hartnell and capturing the mercurial Steven better than most. It’s their differing reactions to the “lesson” that elevate this story, and it’s very good indeed — but that last line jars more than a little.
A Life in the Day — Xanna Eve Chown — Funny. I think I would have stepped on Ba just to shut him up, but that’s why I don’t travel the universe. Peri is delightful in this.
Morphology — Ross Strow — Kobolds? Is this a D&D crossover? In either case, this story represents a cute concept driven into the ground and then buried under thousands of tons of dirt. Since English uses the letter “e” in most of the suffixes used to denote tense, this story becomes little more than an exercise in mangled tenses and needless vocabulary, and represents exactly the sort of smug wordplay that drives me absolutely insane. The concept also makes absolutely no sense. It’s personal taste, yes, but I almost tore the pages out of the book.
Making History — Trevor Baxendale — Up until now, it had been nothing but horror/ghost stories from the pen of Baxendale, so imagine my surprise to get an outright comedy! And it’s hilarious — the fake translator robot is especially funny, and lines like “Greetings of misery!” had me on the floor. Great stuff.
One Wednesday Afternoon — Alison Jacobs — Not sure I like the first-person perspective here. Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but it seems like the narrator — an ordinary person — is taking her encounter with the Doctor and Turlough completely in stride. This drains any excitement from the story and reduces it to an uninteresting runaround.
How You Get There — Simon Guerrier — Brilliant. Guerrier writes one of the most beautiful portrayals I’ve ever seen of the NA Doctor. The last story shows how not to write an encounter with the Doctor — this one might just be the definitive text. Best thing in the collection by miles.
The Last Broadcast — Matthew Griffiths — Sort of a halfway point between the previous two stories, as well as one of those meta-Doctor-Who-on-television stories, this is more strange than anything. Griffiths knows the regulars well, but the Sintons aren’t interesting enough to capture the attention, and the plot is nonexistent. Average.
The Terror of the Darkness — Joseph Lidster — Lidster’s greatest talent is bringing uncomfortable emotions to the fore in his characters without making them sound cliched or overwrought. Unfortunately, he pushes the boundaries a bit too far here — a sentient gloom that feeds on the anger inside all of us? Still, it’s incredibly well-written — the “Behind you” line is so hard to pull off, but Lidster does it.
Visiting Hours — Eddie Robson — It’s certainly uncomfortable, as the only truly sympathetic character in the whole thing is the Doctor. But this is deliberate, as two opposed characters end up as matter/antimatter oppositions. Either way, this is a solid character piece, but it really feels incomplete without any explanations.
The start to this anthology is the worst of any BF collection to date. Fortunately, things improve from there, but A Day in the Life never hits a consistent high, veering wildly from great to average to poor. There are certainly a few stories in this collection that are worth reading, but there are a disappointing number of stories that are not — ultimately, this just isn’t worth the cover price.
After three episodes featuring a decidedly uninspiring combination of diplomats arguing with each other on Gallifrey and diplomats arguing with Leela on a series of neighboring planets, Alan Barnes’ “A Blind Eye,” the final story of the first Gallifrey season, takes a sharp turn into a completely different setting. The entire play takes place on a steam train in the 1930s, and while it contains the series’ usual blend of repeated twists and intrigue, the new setting gives it a fresher feeling.
For the most part, it works: the needless complexity of the third episode is absent, and the twists arise naturally from the drama. The revelation of what truly happened to Andred isn’t too surprising, but Leela’s reaction is emotional and affecting. Louise Jameson has rarely been better than this. The play stretches plausibility to again involve Romana directly in the drama, but Arkadian (Hugo Myatt) is roguish and entertaining enough to get away with it. Unfortunately, I don’t think the revelation at the conclusion is particularly interesting: this has been a persistent flaw of the Gallifrey series in my eyes, and I’ll be interested to see how the series changes as it progresses into its second season. Regardless, this is a solid script and a good conclusion to the series, deserving of something like a 7/10.
…except for the parts with India Fisher. I don’t object to the inclusion of Charley’s sister in the script on its face — though I think it’s something of a mistake to make the play turn around a continuity point from “Neverland” — but the way she is written is insulting to the intelligence. Sissy Pollard (Fisher) is an English Fascist, supporter of the Nazi Party, and believer in the virtues of Adolf Hitler. It’s not easy to write a character like this without reducing her to a caricature, and Barnes proves this point, turning her into a one-dimensional cipher good for nothing more than reciting platitudes about racial superiority. Never fear, though — Leela is there to undercut Sissy’s attitudes by… picking a lock! Barnes also takes care to remind us that Hitler was evil — apparently alien races that admire brutal dictators like to collect Nazi uniforms. Oh, and let’s not forget to take undergraduate swipes at current events, by labeling the proponents of a more aggressive Time Lord foreign policy “neo-conservatives.”
Overall, not a bad production.. when it wasn’t irritating the hell out of me.
“It’s a Justin Richards script” should say a lot, and most of it positive: you’re going to get a twisty, well-constructed plot, solid characterization, and a foundation of good ideas. Richards has never been the type to challenge his audience, though, and occasionally he can veer sharply towards boredom. This is apparent in his Gallifrey script “The Inquiry,” which makes one incredibly significant mistake: it presents a lack of incident as drama!
I can’t help but think that Richards went the wrong way with this script. The ideas at its core are fascinating: there’s a great deal of intrigue regarding the timonic fusion device, the role of Braxiatel shifts around at least three times, and the mystery surrounding Andred’s disappearance is fleshed out somewhat. Unfortunately, Richards chooses to focus on the time-travel elements of the plot to the exclusion of almost all others, leading to an ongoing central debate over whether or not the timonic fusion device ever actually existed. This is totally uninteresting: it’s not a conflict in any relatable sense of the term, merely an abstract, academic discussion. I understand that this is the sort of thing that might be discussed on Gallifrey; I also understand why RTD (and, hell, Richards himself) blew the place up. There’s also a countdown to a virus being released into the Matrix, and potentially destroying it — but nobody in the play seems to treat this possibility half as seriously as you might expect.
Thing is, I enjoyed the supporting details of “The Inquiry” quite a bit. Yes, the event named in the title barely factors into the story, and Lynda Bellingham’s Inquisitor (given the deeply silly name Darkel) is sidelined from the opening minutes, but we get some excellent interaction between Leela, Romana, and the two K9s, as well as fantastic development for Braxiatel. I’m only familiar with the Benny range on the most basic level, so it’s interesting to watch this character grow — especially with Miles Richardson’s performance supporting the script.
Overall, “The Inquiry” should be better than it is, but it opts to focus upon an inherently undramatic conflict. It’s probably the best of the first three Gallifrey stories, and the generally strong writing quality elevates it, but it feels more like a missed opportunity than anything else.
Go on, say it. The blurb for this story doesn’t really excite… Especially disappointing is the fact that this is the finale of the ninth series and many listeners are expecting some resolution to the larger arc of Bernice’s life. Matthew Sweet provides no resolution, barely even recognises that things are not all great in Bernice’s larger life.
The truth is this is, for me, one of the best examples of what the range is capable of. The pre-title sequence had me laughing aloud with the above quote, introducing two of the most original characters/monsters I’ve heard so far, and who seem so perfectly designed for audio. That applies perfectly to the setting as a whole, Matthew Sweet’s fertile imagination has produced something both outlandish and extremely intelligent.
Bernice Summerfield is presented as someone desperate looking for a job, and arrives at the depository looking for a position. Whilst she interviews Peter is left in the care of Mrs. Tishpishti, a robotic cake lady played with great gusto by Beth Chalmers. In fact many of the characters are larger than life yet the whole story feels perfectly natural, the dialogue is simply too intelligent to feel farcical.
It isn’t all light hearted though, it is particularly melancholy in some places, and contains some interesting criticism of Bernice’s ‘single mother’ status from a very unusual source… Hopefully Barbara Cartland would approve of this interesting use of her literature.
But I can’t even complain that the story isn’t longer. It lasts almost exactly the right length, any longer and the joke would start to wear thin.
Although it provides no resolution to Bernice’s life, the Diet of Worms does show it continuing along exactly the right lines, with excellent, intelligent, adventures more than definitely worth the sale price.
But… I just can’t dare to give it perfect marks….
It’s not…. Epic enough for a series finale. If only there had been a fifth, final adventure to round out Bernice’s ninth series.
“We should have put the important stuff in Hull. Aliens never invade Hull.”
Paul Cornell’s introductory novel for the original Bernice Summerfield solo adventures is also the first Big Finish production. This is the first audio of its kind, adapted by Jac Rayner who streamlines the story into one, fantastic, pantomime adventure. This audio is a delight from start to finish, despite the drama deliberately undermiming itself every step of the way with a tongue in cheek wink at the audience. This is not a recipe for a successful series but on this one occasion the story manages to hold up as a whole, largely due to exemplary performances from the cast and wonderful a sound design that gives the play a deliberately creaky floorboard feel.
Lisa Bowerman’s voice seems a natural fit for Bernice, and although this is her first foray into the part she succeeds admirably. She is overshadowed somewhat though by the presence of Nicholas Courtney playing his strangest role to date, a talking cat. He clearly seems to enjoy the role, his voice perfectly suited to drawing Bernice, and the listeners, into a roaring adventure around the magical fairytale land. He also brings a natural gravitas that is essential for one of the plays rare, sombre moments, when Wolsley discovers his true secret identity.
The rest of the cast fit together well, with Mark Gatiss as the grand vizier deliberately throwing in an over the top ‘boo hiss’ performance as a scheming vizier. Added to the mix are a larger than life genie, an old exhausted king, several ‘dwarves’, a ladylike dame and several tongue in cheek Grell. No performance stands out as being below par, and all stand scrutiny under the warm panto-lights glare.
Perhaps the weakest area of the play is its beginning. It takes a few minutes to get into the spirit of adventure, but the scenes leading into the Grell attack on the ship seem slightly strange. As this is presumed to be the listeners first glimpse of Bernice, showing her nearly reluctantly seducing a student is not perhaps the best first impression. Fortunately the pace picks up once the topic of exploding stars and cross dressing are raised.
All in all Oh No It Isn’t is something that Big Finish obviously put a lot of time and effort into. A grand cast is assembled for a production every bit as bold and epic as it deserves to be. The only gripe I have is that although this is a standout play in its own right it does not set the best example for a series. It is a story where the majority of the cast suffer multiple identity criseses (including the titular character) for the majority of the play, a main character who almost accidentally seduces a student and a villain just as ridiculous as pantomime demand. Although this is fantastic we should all be glad it remains unique, and that although the series has continued it quickly changed its tone to something much more mature.
The first series of Bernice Summerfield suffers its ups and downs, but even at its blandest it is at least admirable. Unfortunately Dragon’s Wrath ends the series on a particularly sour note… And that could be directly due to the fact it is cut down to one disk of audio. For the first time the story desperately suffers in the transition to audio. Bernice’s first series up to now has explored big themes like pantomime, sexuality, time travel and war… This time it explores Bernice pretending to be James Bond only without the budget.
Justin’s Richard original novel boasted an intriguing mystery, great writing and simple pacing. The audio looses all three as huge swathes of the story are carved up to fit it on a single disk. Perhaps the biggest single loss is that of Irving Braxiatel, who presumably hadn’t been cast yet, a character who will go on to have great impact on the series future. Braxietel’s grand presence in the story is replaced by Garry Russel playing Mappin Gilder, its not a bad performance but Gilder is a relatively weak character with none of the gravitas Braxiatel’s presence would have brought to the story.
The plot unfolds quickly, walking in circles as Bernice is sent on a ‘cursed’ dig to uncover a statue that turns out not to be what it seems. Along the way she gets a ‘hunky’ male companion who helps her to break into a secret underground vault and fight off some cybernetic dogs. As the story unfolds a mock trial is begun and an ancient plot by legendary ‘Knights of Jeneve’ is revealed.
Richard Franklin does a decent job as Romelo Nusek but the character never quite manages to be as menacing as it should. Sadly thwarting interstellar warlords has never seemed quite so… easy.
Jane Burke puts in a credible performance as Truby Kamadrick, famous archaeologist with a dark side, but the rest of the cast doesn’t provide much menace. Jez Fielder puts in a particularly dodgy performance as Reddick, the ‘bizarre librarian’ who ‘never leaves Nusek’s vaults’ (check the Big Finish website). This character is just crying out to be punched as he dances around with the answers before the listener’s ears, smugly refusing to say a thing whilst being incredibly over dramatic at the same time. After all that baiting the corny cliff-hanger at the end smacks the reader as badly as the ill judged theme song at the start.
Ah yes, the theme song. The most obvious clue that this adaptation was inspired by James Bond. I won’t dignify it much criticism except for the simple question, ‘What were they thinking?’
The whole tone of Dragon’s Wrath is slightly off. Perhaps in response to the uber seriousness of Just War, but everyone treating this with far more obvious humour than they should. Oh No it Isn’t got away with it for a reason, and I said then they shouldn’t try to repeat it. To fit in a short running time the plot leaps forward in the narratives awkwardly and clever plot twists are thrown around so loosely they start to loose any meaning at all.
This is especially disappointing as it rounds out what had up till now been a very promising series.
A plea for help from an old friend brings Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart to Kriegeskind, a centuries-old German fortress that has been converted into a UNIT research facility. The Brigadier arrives to find that his friend Konrad (Toby Longworth), the facility’s C. O., has been driven insane, leaving the fortress under the command of the fearful Major Schrader, a “limited” soldier who is clearly out of his depth.
Feeling a sense of something wrong, the Brigadier resists Schrader’s attempts to get him to leave. His instincts are proved correct, when he finds the castle in under siege by the ghosts of soldiers from wars past, from Roman legionnaires to Nazi stormtroopers. The Brigadier sends for the Doctor immediately and, despite the friction left in the wake of the Silurian incident, the Doctor comes. But with the ghostly attacks becoming ever more relentless, and with Schrader preparing to take drastic action, it may already be too late!
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: This is one of Big Finish’s Companion Chronicles, essentially an audio book with dramatized scenes. As a result, it is left to the listener to imagine Jon Pertwee delivering the lines written for the Doctor. Fortunately, writer James Swallow has a good feel for the Pertwee Doctor, and while Nicholas Courtney is no impressionist, he captures enough of Pertwee’s vocal tics to make it quite easy to summon Pertwee’s image.
The Doctor is in very little of Episode One. When he does arrive, near the end of the first episode, James Swallow gives him an appropriately grand entrance, descending onto Kriegeskind by parachute while the UNIT soldiers look mutely on. Though he came when called, he remains irritated at the Brigadier – note how he almost instantly declares that this problem won’t be solved by blowing it up, a pointed reference to their last adventure. Despite this, he does show empathy at the end, laying a hand on the Brigadier’s shoulder and softly (and with perfect delivery by Courtney) extending comfort. The Third Doctor is well-captured throughout, though Swallow does perhaps have him spend just a tad too much time fiddling with gadgets and wires.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: This is, of course, very much the Brigadier’s story. The first, near-Doctorless episode is entirely carried by the Brig, and it’s reassuring to see him firmly in Season Seven mode: absolutely competent, and quite intelligent. Despite Schrader’s attempts to pacify him, he can sense that all is not well at
Kriegeskind, and knows to trust his instincts. When Konrad experiences a moment of lucidity and references something “alien” and how “they all died,” Lethbridge-Stewart finds his way to the facility’s records and, from experience at concealing certain types of deaths, knows exactly what to look for. Even in the second episode, when the Doctor takes charge of finding answers, the Brigadier conducts himself with absolute competence, taking charge of the soldiers in the fortress and leading them in holding off the phantom invaders.
When all is revealed, heavy parallels are drawn between the choices that led Kriegeskind to its current dilemma and the choice the Brigadier made at the end of The Silurians. Still, the Brigadier does not apologize for his decision. He tells us from the outset that he stands by what he did. He saw a threat, he tells us, and he removed it. He acknowledges that his decision at Wenley Moor was a difficult one, though, indicating that Lethbrige-Stewart was perhaps more conscious of the Silurians as an intelligent species than he may have let on.
THOUGHTS
Old Soldiers is an atmospheric and well-produced science fiction/action piece, one that sits quite comfortably in between Dr. Who and the Silurians and The Ambassadors of Death. The story is strong, and the nature of the story – once it is revealed – makes it a convincingly personal story to the Brigadier. I could believe this being an incident that Lethbridge-Stewart would relive over a drink or two, years later, and I enjoyed seeing the Brigadier’s more reflective side.
Swallow does well in bringing both the 3rd Doctor and the Brigadier to life. I missed the presence of Liz Shaw – referenced, but not actually “seen” in the story – though I’m honestly not sure that there would have been room for her, particularly with the single-disc format constricting the running time to less than 75 minutes. The image of blank-faced soldiers from the past stepping out of the walls, attacking with no expression, and disappearing noiselessly when “killed,” is a haunting one, and the high action content (particularly in Episode Two) keeps things moving at a tight pace.
I only have a few quibbles with the story. One is a quirk of Swallow’s writing style. Too much of the story has major scenes and conversations summarized, creating distance from the events at unwelcome points. Most of the Brigadier’s lines are clearly “recalled after the fact,” with only a few of his lines delivered as if “in the moment.” This lack of immediacy saps some of the urgency from the proceedings. I would have preferred these conversations be allowed to play out far more often than actually ended up being the case.
I also had problems with the character of Schrader. Konrad summarizes him as a decent soldier, yet limited – an adequate second-in-command who now finds himself in over his head. This type of characterization could have worked, could have made a nice contrast with the Doctor and the Brigadier (both of whom belong in command). But this isn’t the characterization we see. Schrader doesn’t come across as a decent X. O. abruptly elevated above his level of competence. He comes across as an idiot, a German Frank Burns, and I never believed that the Brigadier would have tolerated him for a heartbeat, let alone the Doctor. Some of this may be down to the demands of the 2-part format. A plot with reasonable meat on its bones in less than 75 minutes doesn’t allow a lot of room for subtleties with supporting characters. Still, even a touch of subtelty with Schrader would have been nice.
Special mention to guest star Toby Longworth, who voices both Konrad and Schrader, and creates completely different voices for both characters. If I had played the CD blind, with no credits to reference, I would have thought this Companion Chronicle had two guest actors rather than one. Both performances are decent; and if Longworth does better with Konrad than with Schrader, that is solely down to Konrad being a better-written character.
Rating: 7/10. A good addition to the 3rd Doctor’s era, one which fits very well within the season it has been placed.
Liz decides to spend a day off visiting Jean, an old university friend. When Jean fails to show up at their scheduled meeting, though, Liz goes to her house and finds that her friend has vanished. When the Doctor arrives at the scene, he tells Liz that there have been several disappearances in the Cambridge area.
As Liz investigates a link between Jean and another missing person – Jean’s dentist – the Doctor and the Brigadier follow up another lead: a particularly bizarre suicide-by-train. A look at the dead man’s body confirms the Doctor’s worst fears. The body has been infested, and partially converted, by Cybermats. The Doctor is about to pit his wits against the Cybermen once more…
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: Writer Nigel Fairs does a fair job of capturing the Pertwee Doctor’s gentler side. The Doctor is compassionate with Liz in every scene. He is also unfazed and unruffled by the dilemma. Even when Liz is herself infected, he refuses to give up, identifying the means of this new Cyber conversion process and using his considerable skills to find an antidote.
It’s a strong characterization, and Fairs does a good job of keeping the viewpoint Liz’s while at the same time keeping the 3rd Doctor in the foreground of the story. The only thing that’s missing from the Pertwee Doctor is the spikiness. Look at the televised stories from Season Seven, and Pertwee’s Doctor is very short-tempered, even downright antagonistic, to characters in each of those stories. Here, we only get the 3rd Doctor’s softer side. That makes for a more likable characterization, perhaps, but a slightly less interesting one. Still, Nigel Fairs captures the Doctor here somewhat better than James Swallow did in Old Soldiers, and Caroline John manages to suggest something of Pertwee’s style of line delivery, making it quite easy to picture Pertwee throughout.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: The Brigadier is very much on the periphery of this story, and he ends up being the one regular Caroline John can’t capture in her line deliveries. She basically just lowers her voice and grits out the Brig’s lines in gruff tones, making for a rather one-note Lethbridge-Stewart. Still, the story does convey both his efficiency and his chivalry, in trying to protect Liz from harm. He is definitely the worst-captured of the regulars in this audio, though.
Liz Shaw: The Blue Tooth is Liz’s story, so it comes as relatively small surprise that the character is recreated quite effectively. The best characterization comes in the early episodes, which Nigel Fairs uses to fill in a lot of backstory for Liz (including why a seemingly over-serious, studious Cambridge scientist has such a penchant for very, very short mini-skirts). It adds an extra emotional dimension to the character to have her personally affected by the Invasion of the Week this time; and while the audio never does quite answer its own question (“When did I decide to leave the Doctor?”), it at least points to some potential reasons for the character to have decided to move on.
THOUGHTS
The Blue Tooth succeeds in many respects. It really does recapture its era quite well. This feels very much like an extra Season Seven story, with the Doctor and the Brigadier working together but not 100% harmoniously, and with UNIT even setting up temporary offices on-site (in this case, at the college), rather than at UNIT headquarters (a set which did not exist until Season 8). There is a sense of seriousness to the proceedings, a sense that this story takes place in something very like “the real world.” Even the Cybermen are treated in a way that brings them closer to the real world, using a real world outlet that often is a source of anxiety (in this case, a dentist’s office) to make the threat feel less like science fiction and more credible. Honestly, if you were to take a time machine back to 1970 and commission the production team to bolt a 4-episode Cyberman story onto the end of Season Seven, I could easily picture the result playing out much like this story does.
One thing I do enjoy about the first set of Companion Chronicles is that Big Finish had not yet decided on a “set” number of episodes for each story. All stories were single-disc, but there were both 2-parters and 4-parters. That’s something I wish they would return to, the idea that different stories might benefit from being structured in different episodic formats. The Blue Tooth is very much structured as a 4-parter, and it benefits from that. The Companion Chronicles range has remained strong (it’s my favorite BF range at the moment), but I do regret the more rigid, “one disc = 2 episodes, every time” format.
In any event, most of this story works quite well, better than I had remembered it working in fact. Caroline John does an effective job as narrator, and recreates her performance as Liz with a good degree of success. The story is well-structured, for the most part, building to a rather gripping climax in Episode Four. It also benefits from particularly strong production values, with a nicely eerie score by Lawrence Oakley and Robert Dunlop.
My only major gripe with the audio, and one which does cost it a point I’m afraid, is that the resolution feels weak. The climax – with the Doctor and Liz in the midst of a nest of Cybermen – had me. I was quite gripped, and the images were vivid in my mind. And then… Liz passes out, and the Doctor fills her in on the denouement retrospectively, and not in a great deal of detail. It’s the equivalent of a TV episode cutting from the moment of greatest crisis to the tag scene, and having the Doctor tell the companion, “Oh, I sorted it out.” The summary of this off-screen resolution also feels a bit too easy, almost as if Fairs had written himself into a corner and couldn’t quite write his way out again. It still works better than “Pertwee wrapping a green tentacle around his neck and thrashing a lot” at the end of the otherwise-excellent Spearhead from Space. But it still seems like a very weak ending, one that lets down an otherwise first-rate story.
Frustrations with the resolution aside, though, it is a first-rate story. With a stronger finish, I’d give it an “8.” As it stands, it still gets a quite solid…
Comparatively speaking, reinventing Omega and the Master were simple jobs. Omega was only seen twice on television, aiming at the same goal both times, while Davros was always seen as the leader of the Daleks. Showing them in a new light was down to putting them in different situations — though excellent scripts provided the backbone for the reexamination. The Master, on the other hand, had been seen countless times in countless situations with countless motives: to reinvent this character would be a monumental task. Yet in Master, the final installment in Big Finish’s villains trilogy, author Joseph Lidster manages to provide an innovative, believable explanation for the Master, and the production backs him up with yet another strong release.
One of the central arguments in Master is that of nature vs. nurture. Much of the running time is devoted to the question of the Master’s motivation: did something happen to drive him to ruthless murder or is it inherent in his nature? The answer, interestingly, is something of a combination of the two — he was employed by Death, which qualifies as an outside influence, but as Death is an elemental force of the universe one can argue that such an influence is akin to one’s own nature. Lidster’s flashback sequences work quite well: the listener automatically assumes that the murder by the river was committed by the Master, and the revelation that the Doctor was responsible is shocking yet believable. Explaining the Master basically required the author responsible to reconcile his nature with his upbringing, and Lidster somehow pulls off a seemingly impossible task.
Much of the success of Master is due to its style and setting. This is every inch a chamber drama which could easily be done on stage; much like film versions of Sleuth or Glengarry Glen Ross, Master explores the stage environment but never allows the scope to grow too large. Unlike its predecessors, Master cannot be described as too long, simply because of its nature: it needs every one of its 132 minutes to allow the characters to talk and flesh themselves out. There is no realistic way for the production to “show, not tell” — and it’s a testament to Lidster’s writing that he keeps the material interesting throughout such a dialogue-heavy script. The framing device is also interesting; its ending may be predictable but it works well despite this.
Sylvester McCoy is, yet again, on fine form throughout Master, returning to his “dark Doctor” persona that served him so well in Project: Lazarus. This is very much a pre-TVM Doctor, one whose weariness is clearly on display and one who just wants to help an old friend. His screaming is anguished and painful, his anger is intimidating, and his tone is commanding — it’s performances like this that reaffirm my placement of McCoy among my favorite Doctors. Wonderful stuff.
Geoffrey Beevers once again assumes the mantle of the Master — at least in part. Mostly he’s the mysterious Dr. John Smith, and he’s great: his voice is perfect for audio, and it sounds very soft, soothing, and sympathetic as he interacts with his friends in the house. But occasionally he slips back into the Master, and here Beevers truly excels: he sounds more malevolent than all of his predecessors combined, with a vicious snarl to his voice that is truly frightening. The Keeper of Traken is truly no indicator of the excellence Beevers has brought to the part in his two Big Finish appearances — and here, unlike Dust Breeding, he actually has a decent production around him.
Philip Madoc returns to Doctor Who here as Victor Shaffer and he, too, is excellent, portraying a character suffering the “nurture” degeneration into madness. Lidster isn’t afraid to show harsh emotion, and this has earned him a large amount of unfair criticism — yes, Victor’s madness is painful to hear, but one hardly expects a real-life loss of sanity to be pleasing to the senses. Anne Ridler is a little more one-note as Jacqueline, though her performance is still well above average. Charlie Hayes’ turn as Jade/Death is fine when she’s playing Jade, but I think her turn of phrase as Death is a bit too flippant — there’s not enough gravitas no matter the filter placed over her voice.
David Darlington’s post-production work is excellent, demonstrating an understanding of the “stagy” nature of the script and allowing the performances to stand out. His music is dramatic and evocative. I’d say Gary Russell could have prompted a different performance from Charlie Hayes, but other than that the direction here is on fine form. Poor production values are a Big Finish rarity, and Master is certainly not among the exceptions — the production team clearly understands the demands of the script.
Master is not perfect: overdone in parts, overplayed in others, it certainly has its share of flaws. But much like with its two predecessors in the villains trilogy, it features exceptional performances from the two leads and strong production values, as well as another thematically-rich script. This is yet another worthy addition to the library of a Doctor Who fan, and continues the generally high quality of the anniversary year.
FACT: I shall be reviewing The Grel Escape from the Bernice Summerfield range.
ADDITIONAL FACT: I shall attempt to speak like a Grel for the entire review.
CONCLUSION: I hope it wil be more amusing than annoying.
FACT: The Grel Escape features Benny, 2 year old Peter Summerfield, Jason Kane, Joseph the Porter, Sophia (from The Glass Prison) and Bad Grel.
FACT: The story centres around Peter and the Time Rings. The story starts with Jason teaching Peter about the 20th Century, funfairs and seaside holidays (through Joseph the Porter showing documentaries).
ADDITIONAL FACT: Jason has found Benny’s Time Ring and was thinking about using them to take Peter to the 20th Century.
FURTHER FACT: Jason hears Benny approach, he tells Joseph to show another random video and hides the Time Rings in Peter’s toy airplane. Joseph intercepts a Grel transition where they announce that they are going to kidnap Peter to study him and find facts.
CONCLUSION: Benny is upset at this. She takes Peter, yells at Jason and tries to hit him, Sophia tries to take Peter from Benny because she is upset, Peter holds onto his airplane and says ‘Fair’ which transports all of them to a fairground.
FACT: This angers Benny but is very proud of Peter for saying a new word.
FACT: Peter says ‘sand’ which takes them all to Ancient Egypt.
ADDITIONAL FACT: Benny is very proud of Peter for taking them to an important archaeological site and tries to teach him about the Ancient Egyptians.
NEW FACT: The Grel have a time machine which they use to lock on to Peter and track him down. They turn up and shoot Benny. While Benny is unconscious, Jason is obviously scared and confesses his love for her.
FURTHER FACT: Jason seems to only ever confess his love for Benny when he thinks she is dead.
GOOD FACT: This shot does not kill Benny and they escape the Grel again.
CONCLUSION: Benny is very good at escaping death.
FACT: One of the Grel chasing Peter (who has the ultimate Grel weapon) recognises Sophia.
ADDITIONAL FACT: Sophia recognises the Grel as her son.
FURTHER FACT: The Grel choses not to kill Peter as Sophia has promised him more facts.
BAD FACT: The Grel conclude that the ultimate weapon does not work and proceed to investigate.
CONCLUSION: This does not end well for all involved.
FACT: The Time Rings take over Peter.
FACT: Peter does not have to say anything and they still transport them to random places in the universe.
ADDITIONAL FACT: This makes Peter red hot and impossible to touch. This also makes all involved feel very ill.
FURTHER FACT: The Time Rings make Peter grow up in front of their eyes.
BAD FACT: He kills Sophia’s son and the other Grel.
ADDITIONAL FACT: Sophia grabs the ultimate Grel weapon and uses it to destroy the Time Rings.
CONCLUSION: This results in Peter reverting back to a baby but leaves Sophia very upset.
FACT: Joseph announces that Benny, Jason, Peter and Sophia are the only life forms on the planet (excluding a few birds)
FACT: Benny and Jason seem to accept that they are stuck there.
GOOD FACT: The Grel were following the in a time machine which Sophia got working.
ADDITIONAL FACT: The machine can only make one trip and will take them back to their time but Sophia could not pilot it to the Braxiatel Collection.
CONCLUSION: They decide to risk it.
FIND FACTS! FIND FACTS! FIND FACTS!
QUERY: Who do you think of this audio?
QUERY: What do you think of the Grel?
QUERY: Do Benny and Jason make good parents?
QUERY: Is Peter annoying or cute?
Time Reef is the latest story in the Big Finish audio range staring Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton. Its a three part story with The Perfect World as a special one parter at the end.
I really enjoyed Time Reef. It showed Nyssa at her best, a sweet and caring soul. The Doctor was still annoyed with Brewster for taking the TARDIS and they discover that Brewster has been selling bits of the TARDIS off. Brewster doesn’t say how long he was away in the TARDIS but I was given the impression that he had been away for quite a while. The story was very interesting with a peculiar enemy and by the end, the Doctor had almost accepted Brewster (of course, Nyssa accepted and befriended him straight away). It seemed to be all wrapped up a little bit to quickly.
The Perfect World was a nice little surprise. It was focused on Brewster and a woman he met while he was travelling alone in the TARDIS. Set in present day London we get to see two parallel lives (well, sort of). Its interesting to see how and why Brewster affected this person but the ending was the biggest surprise. Brewster stays in London! I wasn’t expecing him to leave so quickly. I’m not sad about it though. I was never too sure about Brewster. I liked hat he brought to the stories but more than three stories of him and the Doctor arguing would have gotten very repetative. I do think that Nyssa works best when it is just her with the Doctor, which is why I love her audios so much.
This audio completely blew me away. It starts off with Peri and her mum, the day Peri met the Doctor. The Doctor and Peri then land on the moon in the future, Peri gets to watch the news from home. Someone she knew was murdered and she persuades the Doctor to take her to the funeral. This is where the fun starts.
We meet Peri’s mum, Janine, and discover that they have a very firey relationship and Peri’s best friend Kathy and her brother Nate. From the start, Kathy doesn’t seem like the type of person Peri would be friends with. The funeral happens four months after Peri meets the Doctor, and Janine is not impressed that Peri just left them. During those four months, Janine has become a mother figure for Kathy and Nate, which makes Peri extremely uncomfortable. There is an icredably moving scene where Janine and Kathy are talking about how they were there for each other and how much Peri has changed, while Peri listens at the door.
Nicola Bryant gives an amazing performance. She goes from the young and excitable Peri we first meet in Planet of Fire, to the grown up Peri we all know and love, but when she is with her mother again, she regresses back to a child. And to be able to convey this in a purely audio story is incredable.
Peri decides to stay with her mother instead of travelling with the Doctor, which is a complete heartbreaker scene. However, the story wraps up in a very different way to the ‘normal’ way.
Its an interesting Cyberman story. However, that comes secondary to Peri’s story. Peri (and the listener) go on a rocky rollercoaster ride during this audio, with very high emotional peaks. Nicola really the star of the show in this audio.
In short: Wonderful story, wonderful acting, wonderful music, very sad there will be no more Key 2 Time.
Judgement of Isskar was the lighthearted introduction of the Key 2 Time. Destroyer of Delights was the comedy episode and The Chaos Pool is the dark episode with serious topics and a hell of a lot of action!
Big Finish are sneaky things. They credit Lalla Ward as ‘Madam President’, not actually naming the part by name. When we first hear Lalla Ward, she is refered to as Madam President, a name she goes by a lot on Gallifrey. She is on a spaceship with Zara. However as the story progresses, she is revealed as Astra, not Romana! However, if you really wanted Romana, you only have to wait till episode 3, when she turns up! One actor, two characters. When Astra and Romana had scenes together, I did find it hard to tell which character was which. The only criticism I have.
Destroyer of Delights focuses on how Amy is becoming more human. The Chaos Pool focuses on how Zara is becoming more human. Through out the series, Zara is presented as an ‘evil’ character, however The Chaos Pool shows a different side to Zara. She is in love. This softens her. And, of course, its not a simple love story. She starts to realise the concequences of her actions and saves Amy (after pretty much killing her). Through out the story, the Doctor makes comments about how much a like Amy and Zara are which are seemingly throw-away comments, but of course they arn’t! And by the end, Zara and Amy have become very similar people. I’m all for an Amy/Zara spin off now. Please Big Finish?
I found The Chaos Pool very complex. I’ve just listened to it and I’m having trouble recalling it to write this review. Thats not to say I didn’t enjoy it. The complete opposit in fact. I loved every second, I just need another listen of so to fully appriciate it. Director, Lisa Bowerman did a wonderful job in keeping the story from getting out-of-control and keeping the attention of the listener. And of course, writer Peter Anghelides did a marvellous job tieing up all the loose ends, keeping us guessing and delivering a fair few shocks!
I’m just very sad that there are no more Key 2 Time audios to come. I’d love to hear more from Amy and Zara. Ciara Janson and Laura Doddington really made their characters come alive and, frankly, are wonderful actresses. There is so much more potential to Amy and Zara. Amy on Gallifrey and Zara with Pargrave.
Big Finish seems to be releasing the audios earlier and earlier. Not that I’m complaining!
Destroyer of Delights is wonderful!
WARNING: Spoilers galore!
There are 40 reasons why I enjoyed this audio. Well I’m sure I could come up with 40 reasons, but if you’ve picked up in the reference, then you’ve been concentrating!
Destroyer of Delights picks up from the cliff-hanger ending of Judgement of Isskar. We see a different side to the Black Guardian, he’s not all loud and shouty! And this sets up the rest of the audio. The Doctor agrees to let the Black Guardian transport him and Amy somewhere random – 9th Century Sudan. The Doctor and Amy get split up and Amy is not sure how to cope. Amy also looses her satchel and is desperate to find both it and the Doctor. Because of how she was made, she latches onto someone. In this case, she latches onto the slave girl Nisrin. Nisrin’s influence on Amy is interesting, but Amy is now too much like the Doctor to be affected too much. Amy becomes a slave to the Prince Omar and his father however Amy does not know how to be a slave, or what a mop and bucket are!
The Doctor is pottering around in the desert, doesn’t know where Amy or his TARDIS are, or whether Amy is alive or not and he runs into a tax collector who just happens to be the White Guardian! The White Guardian is stuck in this time and place. His powers are fading because the segments are decaying.
Neither the Guardians nor Amy can work out where the fifth segment is. It just doesn’t seem to exist.
There is an interesting almost love story going on between the slave, Nisrin and the master of the palace, Prince Omar. We can see just how much like the Doctor Amy has become because she is constantly speaking her mind. Nisrin thinks this is Amy trying to win over Prince Omar and becomes insanely jealous. She accuses Amy of ‘batting her eyelashes’ and the next time Amy sees Prince Omar, she says “Don’t look at my eyelashes!” showing just how innocent she still is.
Prince Omar’s father turns out to be the Black Guardian, who is also stuck in this time and place. He has a spaceship which he needs to power and the only resource available to him that will work is gold. Little does he know that the process he uses to turn the gold into the power he needs actually turns the gold into the fifth segment. Amy realises this and her and the Doctor escape in the TARDIS (which was in the same place and Amy’s satchel) and the Guardians are stuck in 9th century Sudan with no chance of escape. The audio ends with the two Guardians bickering like an old married couple!
I really enjoyed Destroyer of Delights. It’s just as good as Judgement of Isskar. It was a wonderful mix of the classic story, Aladdin, and an alien/sci-fi twist. It has a lot of layers and definitely needs more than one listen to be fully appreciated. The cast was absolutely wonderful. Normally, there is someone in the cast that I don’t think much of, but not this time. Peter Davison, Ciara Janson, David Troughton, Jason Watkins, Jess Robinson, Bryan Pilkington, Paul Chahidi, Will Barton and David Peart all gave wonderful performances. Lisa Bowerman directed this audio (her first main range audio, according to the interview extras!) and she did a marvellous job. The music was perfectly balanced with the dialogue which just added to the atmosphere that was created.
So all in all, a wonderful audio. I can’t wait for the next and final instalment, The Chaos Pool. I am sad that there is only one more audio to go. Key 2 Time is definitely one of the best audio series that Big Finish has ever produced.
Judgement of Isskar is an audio that I have been excited about since May-ish time last year. My expectations of this just kept rising and rising. Was I disapointed?
NO!
The audio starts off with the Doctor searching for Peri. She has wondered off, as usual and he is trying to find her. Thats when he meets the newly born Amy. She starts off repeting everything he said. She tells the Doctor that she needs to find three segments of the Key to Time and that time will stand still on that planet until he has finished helping her. The Doctor tries to protest, but he really can’t. And this is the start of their adventures.
Amy starts off as an incredably innocent and naive person. Through out the audio, she grows and develops her own personality and identity. She picks up on the Doctor’s personality and adopts particular traits. She is a wonderful contrast to Zara, who has picked up on the selfish traits of Zinc.
There are some wonderful moments between Amy and Zara, where they bicker like sisters and Zara acts very much like the ‘big sister’. Zara mocks Amy for getting a name which results in her getting a name too. The Peter Davison Christening of Amy and Zara was particually funny!
It was very interesting to see the Ice Warriors before they became warriors and what lead them to becoming the monsters that we all know.
If you were worried that the Key 2 Time miniseries was going to step on the toes of the original series, then your worries are for nothing. Simon Guerrier has managed to keep elements of the classic story and has introduce enough new ideas for it not to be a re-write. Ciara Janson played Amy brilliantly with the right balance of innocence and knowing what is right to make her an incredably likeable companion. Laura Doddington’s Zara made a great contrast to Amy. Peter Davison was he normal marvelous self. Director Jason Haigh-Ellery did a wonderful job in keeping the flow and rhythm of the story. The balance of music to dialogue was perfect. The music wasn’t so loud that you couldn’t hear dialogue, but it wasn’t so quiet that you didn’t notice it. It helped build suspension in the right places.
The Judgement of Isskar is available from Big Finish for £14.99 and its worth every penny. The Key 2 Time is going to be one of the best series that Big Finish have ever produced. I’m sad that I am already half way through it. Bring on the Destroyer of Delights!
Empthy Games is the latest in the Companion Chronicles series, featuring Leela. It starts with ‘present day’ Leela who is being held prisoner even though her captors are dead. Leela is dieing and she tells a story of the bravest warrior she knew, the Doctor. The story shows the Leela we all know and love, a true warrior. She gets chosen as a champion to compete in a hunting game. It was interesting to see Leela forced to hunt for sport, something that she did not like and seeing Leela’s vulnerable side, especially at the end when she realises who the crying person was.
Louise Jameson did an amazing job as Leela and several other characters. It was a lot of fun listening to. The extras were interesting. Empathy Games is the second in a trilogy of Leela CCs. However, from what they said in the interviews, I think the third Leela CC will have Leela dieing at the end.
Prisoner’s Dilemma is the Ace companion chronicle but the first part is very much Zara’s story. Ace and Zara meet in a prison cell. Zara tells us, not Ace, how she became who she is, what happened right after her ‘birth’ and the events that led up to her being in prison. Zara explains that she is very open to persuasion as she doesn’t now any better, which I think, will make it very interesting to compare her to her sister, Amy. Zara tells of Zinc, who taught her how to be selfish and jealous.
The second part is much more of an even split between Zara’s and Ace’s story. There is a lot of flashing back to the ‘present’ story between Zara and Ace, and Ace and Zara telling their own stories but it doesn’t get confusing. I found it very very easy to follow and incredably enjoyable.
And the extras were great! Writer, Simon Guerrier, was interviewing Sophie Aldred, Laura Doddington and Lisa Bowerman. Those four together are incredably funny! And they talked about the infamous Big Finish lunches!
Both parts have loads of random Doctor Who references shoved in which are funny if you recognise them and just add to the story if you don’t. This audio was directed by the wonderful Lisa Bowerman, who did an incredable job. She managed to keep the flow and rhythm of the story. The balance of music to dialogue was perfect. The music wasn’t so loud that you couldn’t hear dialogue, but it wasn’t so quiet that you didn’t notice it. It helped build suspension in the right places.
So all in all, an absolutly wonderful audio and worth every single penny. Its £8.99 from Big Finish and I highly recommend it. If this is the standard of the Key 2 Time series, then its going to be one of the best series that Big Finish have produced. I can’t wait for the rest of the audios now!
I’ll come right out and say it: the reason why this review took so long to write is that I couldn’t get through the story. Stephen Cole’s “Square One,” the second episode in Big Finish’s Gallifrey series, managed to put me to sleep no fewer than four times, each time around the same scene. On the fifth attempt, when I finally made it through, it struck me that the play is probably better than its predecessor — it just wasn’t catching my interest at all.
The main problem for me is that the central conflict of the series is monumentally uninteresting. I can see what they’re going for — there’s potential drama to mine in negotiations over temporal powers — but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. To this point, the negotiations have been represented by nothing more than diplomats arguing with each other, and no amount of demonstrative speaking from Lalla Ward or prim irritation from Liason Officer Hossak (Jane Goddard) can make these conversations interesting to me. Yes, it’s interesting that the Monan Host has some more advanced time technology than the Time Lords, but until we actually see it or experience it, it’s just words on a page.
Fortunately, “Square One” does not deal exclusively with negotiations. Cole sets the majority of the play on a synthetic planetoid with unchangeable robots providing all necessary services. There are a number of twists and turns in the plot, some of which are genuinely surprising: one expects the murders and the time distortions to be connected, for example, when in truth they are related only through coincidence. However, the drama is not particularly effective: Hossak appears to be acting merely out of personal obsession, while V’rell’s (Daniel Barzotti) sabotage is related to a revelation about the Time Lords that is too abstract to be shocking. Nonetheless, this is a competent whodunit plot.
What bothered me, though, was the disturbing sexual undercurrent. The delegates are known to enjoy unwinding after a hard day of negotiation, and naturally they prefer to unwind in the company of exotic dancers. Fair enough, but sending Leela undercover as an exotic dancer? Making light of Leela’s naïvete, but then revealing that she’s quite good at it once she figures out what’s going on? Was Cole writing this with one hand on the keyboard? And then we find out that Flinkstab (Daniel Hogarth) is a sadist and sexual pervert who has murdered at least one girl in the throes of passion? I’m not saying this sort of thing isn’t “real Doctor Who,” or anything, but it’s remarkably lurid for an otherwise clinical, dispassionate series, and it jars severely with the rest of the script. This is the sort of thing Terrance Dicks has been rightfully criticized for in his more recent novels.
Overall, “Square One” is a slight improvement over “Weapon of Choice,” but it’s lacking in significance and dramatic effectiveness. Certainly, though, it’s more of a step in the right direction — we’ll see where things go from here.
Five years after the first Sarah Jane Smith spinoff “season,” and with the new Doctor Who series (and Sarah Jane herself) back on television, Big Finish launched its second, and to date final, “season” of SJS audioplays. Rather than a series of loosely-linked plays by different authors, the second season consists of four closely-linked plays by “Test of Nerve” author David Bishop — and the first of these, “Buried Secrets,” is so unlike its predecessors it’s almost unrecognizable. This play is miles beyond the first season, with an impressive level of confidence on display: right from the new theme song, “Buried Secrets” almost feels like a completely new program. A new mythology is introduced, revolving around an ancient apocalyptic cult and the arrival of their prophet — naturally, this involves Sarah, who finds herself in Florence with Josh to help Natalie through some legal difficulties. Elisabeth Sladen takes a step back from the hard-bitten character we saw in the first season: here she’s a bit more cheerful, despite living as a near-recluse. Jeremy James and Sadie Miller are on good form as well: Miller in particular gives Nat more character development than she had in five previous releases, sounding here like a person with an actual life. Tom Chadbon, best remembered in Doctor Who as Duggan in “City of Death,” plays Harry Sullivan’s brother Will, and highlights the play with a wonderful restaurant conversation with Sladen. Backed by Steve Foxon’s expert sound design and John Ainsworth’s assured direction, David Bishop’s script inspires: the characters feel dynamic and real, the international flavor is present and believable, and the threat, while necessarily a bit perfunctory, is nonetheless compelling due to its impact on the characters. “Buried Secrets” is a very strong start to the second SJS season, and with the same creative team behind all four plays, I expect great things.
March of 2004, a year before Russell T. Davies’ relaunch of Doctor Who was to hit the airwaves, and Big Finish once again found itself dipping into the spinoff well. This time, the target was Gallifrey: home planet of the Doctor and his fellow Time Lords, and final destination of several television companions. It’s obvious from the first play, Alan Barnes’ “Weapon of Choice,” that this series aspires to be a political action thriller in the vein of “State of Play” or “Spooks” or “24,” but it’s also obvious from the first play that BF did not start things off on the right foot.
What annoys me the most about this script is its treatment of Gallifrey itself. The planet — and its Time Lord civilization — has always been treated as having one foot in mythology: either from the outright incomprehensible powers of “The War Games” or Lawrence Miles’ books or to the backstabbing, self-absorbed political environments of “The Deadly Assassin” or “The Trial of a Time Lord” that have black hole converters in the basement and move entire solar systems across galaxies to cover up conspiracies. Even Barnes himself accomplishes this in “Neverland” — I didn’t care for the story, but the idea of Neverland itself adds texture to what we know of the planet. “Weapon of Choice,” though, adds absolutely nothing. There’s no mystery here, no hint of greater powers working under the surface, just endless back-and-forth political banter. Lalla Ward plays Romana exceptionally well, but the way the character is written makes me wonder how on earth she ever got elected President. It’s down to Gary Russell’s direction and David Darlington’s sound design, too: there’s absolutely no sense of scale to the place. This is supposed to be the oldest, mightiest civilization in the universe, and it sounds like a few rooms in a faceless office building. I admit that this is only the first story in three seasons’ worth of material, but as a vehicle to capture the attention, this story fails.
As for the plot itself, well, the fact that the titular weapon is called a “timonic fusion device” — that’s “time-onic” — should tell you all you need to know about the level of imagination on display. All the characters hit familiar beats: Leela is savage-but-wise, both K9s are smarmy, there’s a sub-Robert Holmes con man named Mephistopheles Arkadian (Hugo Myatt), and there’s a fanatic protestor/terrorist (Helen Goldwyn) who demands that time travel be made free to all races. It’s competently presented, if you like this sort of thing but don’t demand any semblance of originality. The pacing drags a bit, but with only one CD to work with, Barnes’ usual rambling is curtailed significantly. Overall, “Weapon of Choice” is disappointing because it seems to lack ambition — but it does achieve a basic level of competence that earns it an average grade.
At this stage of Big Finish’s production of Doctor Who stories, the list of “authors to watch” has changed drastically from ten years ago. Though I haven’t been stunned by the quality of any audio (read: given a 10/10 score) since 2006’s “The Kingmaker,” I would presently put Eddie Robson atop the list of Big Finish writers. His scripts are crisply-plotted, well-characterized stories with an appropriate amount of humor, and he has become reliable for producing some of the best stories in any given release year. “The Raincloud Man” is another example of Robson’s writing at its best, and provided a strong, if somewhat frustrating, means through which to end the 2008 release year.
I found the construction of “The Condemned,” the story that “The Raincloud Man” sequelizes in part, to be somewhat unique to Doctor Who. Of the many genres the series has attempted, crime drama of the Law & Order or Homicide: Life on the Street variety has not been among them. Since it was done so well in “The Condemned,” I enjoyed an opportunity to return to this format — though as DI Menzies (Anna Hope) is now established as a detective into alien affairs in Manchester, the story needs not spend time on setting up its characters. Freed of this constraint, the plot quickly spirals in several interesting directions, involving a pound coin from the future, Charley’s continued need to protect her identity from the Doctor — and the contrary insistence of a time-sensitive — an interplanetary casino, and a war between two unusual alien races. Robson’s design of the Cylox is fascinating: a species conceived as a form of sentient virus, always manifesting itself should the behavior of the warlike Tabbalac grow too aggressive.
As with “The Condemned,” the set pieces and ideas of “The Raincloud Man” are its strengths. Opening on the Doctor and Charley at breakfast is a nice break from the usual TARDIS openings, the casino is a wonderful combination of the extraordinary and the familiar, and the streets of Manchester give the story the audio equivalent of Jon Pertwee’s beloved “Yeti in the loo” — the alien coming to our backyard. The dialogue, too, is precise and witty without feeling unnatural, and allows Colin Baker especially to get his teeth into the material.
Unfortunately, much like “The Condemned,” the story frays somewhat around the edges. Unlike in her previous appearance, here Anna Hope goes over the top in her performance. Menzies is so gruff and monotone that hearing her voice becomes comical after a time. Furthermore, Charley again seems to act out of character: she devises a solution to a problem, involving a time machine, with which she will directly controvert the First Law of Time — while I don’t blame her for her desires, this companion of all companions ought to understand the devastating effects thereof. It strikes me as deeply out of character. And yes, there’s the ongoing problem of Charley’s secret: it has been theorized that the Doctor knows what’s going on, and is letting Charley expose herself, but here it is made quite clear that the Doctor is as ignorant as anyone else. This would be believable hadn’t Charley’s secrecy been presented as quite so ham-fisted — instead it frustrates, compounded by the ongoing false promises of revelation. At least this time we learn that Charley’s reticience is a serious problem; this is the first development of this issue since this pairing was devised.
The cast approaches the material from a comedic perspective, which jars slightly with the source material — Jeremy James in particular as the Tabbalac leader goes into ham overdrive, but as it’s entertaining I enjoyed it. Many of the performances are unmemorable, though Michael Fenton Stevens, last seen in “The Kingmaker,” turns in a fine acting job. Andy Hardwick’s sound design is effective, though the score, like many of late, is unmemorable. Nicholas Briggs directs, easily capturing the pace of the script and driving events forward.
Overall, as mentioned above, “The Raincloud Man” is a fine way for the 2008 release year to end. While unfulfilling regarding long-running plot threads, the story is nonetheless well-composed and effective. With excellent acting performances from the lead, a strong supporting cast, and the usual solid production from Big Finish, this release is strongly recommended as a highly-entertaining piece of Doctor Who and another successful script from Eddie Robson.
Despite my general dislike of Alan Barnes’s writing, I finally saw some potential in his last release, “The Girl Who Never Was” — it actually moved along at a decent pace, abandoning his usual reams of exposition in lieu of actual events, which made it easier to overlook some of the usual flaws. Barnes’s latest play to cross my desk, “Brotherhood of the Daleks,” is a regression in some ways and a progression in others: it’s nowhere near as gripping as “Girl,” but for the first time it actually aspires to be something thought-provoking, rather than incoherent nonsense. Does it succeed? Mostly, but then I always appreciate attempts like this.
To begin with, I’m entirely unsure what point Barnes is trying to make about Marxism. “Brotherhood” seems, in part, to be a criticism of naïve undergraduates who discover the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital and have the epiphany that communism is the way to utopia. Murgat (Michael Cochrane), half-Thal half-plant scientist, does exactly this: he deduces that the way to tempt the Daleks away from their policy of extermination is to introduce them to the concept of collectivism, and uses hallucinogenic plants (last seen in the solid but forgettable “The Mind’s Eye”) to corrupt the Daleks to this end. Of course, the Daleks never completely overcome their nature: they know something is missing, a single word which has been lost to them through the brainwashing. Indeed, the Daleks are shown as seeking this word as the key to complete their philosophy and restore their beliefs. While credit must be given to Barnes for presenting a scenario that’s so whacked-out it’s fascinating — Daleks singing “The Red Flag” in unison is almost indescribable — I’ve seen this described as a brilliant, new look at the Daleks, and I can’t figure out why. We don’t learn anything about them that we don’t already know. The Doctor insists throughout the play that every race in the universe is capable of changing its spots except the Daleks — and of course he’s absolutely right! The use of “the word” the Daleks struggle to rediscover is the most intelligent part of the play — so of course it’s completely spoiled by the post-credits ending, which spells everything out in fifty-foot-high flaming letters for those who struggle with the concept of subtlety.
I’m also confused by the structure of the narrative. For the most part, the play is presented as a straightforward Doctor Who adventure, but occasionally it becomes needlessly self-referential. The cliffhanger to part 2 is only dramatic if you’re a long-time listener: it has no relevance to the play itself. Then there’s the second credits sequence in the fourth episode — why is this here? Are we suddenly to think that we’ve been listening to a narrator the entire time? There’s no reason to think there’s anything metatextual going on until the fourth wall is broken here — and then it’s never referenced again. This strikes me as a writer trying to be clever for no reason.
Lastly, there’s the persistent issue of Charley traveling with the sixth Doctor instead of the eighth. I still don’t like this idea, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it — so why can’t Big Finish just get on with it? Instead, Barnes drags out the “drama” of Charley’s secrecy, even going so far as to have her admit her situation to a Dalek replicant posing as the Doctor! This is a great scene, but it begs the question of what they’re going to do when she actually does admit it. Colin Baker’s Doctor also looks like a complete idiot: there are explicit references to Charley’s appearance in “Terror Firma,” and yet the Doctor still can’t or won’t put two and two together.
I will say, however, that Barnes’s usual unconvincing dialogue is much more effective here, simply because the sixth Doctor is more prone to stilted, bombastic monologues. His banter with Charley is the usual sub-noir unconvincing rubbish, of course, and Charley is as smug and unlikable as she is in every other Alan Barnes play — but finally, finally her obnoxious attitude results in negative consequences, and this time she doesn’t shrug them off. The supporting actors are fine, but the script does nothing to distinguish the individual “Thaleks” from one another. Loved Colin Baker as the replicant, though — “KILL! KILL!” And Nicholas Briggs is excellent as ever as the Daleks; I don’t know why people complain about him doing so.
The production front sees Steve Foxon tasked with recreating the sounds of Spiridon from Planet of the Daleks, and to his credit it sounds a great deal like the TV episode. These Daleks seem to have more new series effects, including the whirring noises when they move, and this is effective as well. I can’t say the same about the score, though — can’t remember a note, and I finished listening a few hours ago. Briggs directs, and keeps the pace high — episode 2 is almost all exposition, and yet it flows very well, a credit both to Barnes and Briggs.
Overall, “Brotherhood of the Daleks” is a flawed release with much to recommend it. If you enjoy Alan Barnes’s work, you should love this; if you don’t, the wacky assortment of ideas on display should keep your attention. Yes, it tries too hard, and yes, it’s too clever for its own good, but finally Barnes appears to be harnessing his boundless imagination into something interesting.
The forty-fifth anniversary of Doctor Who in November 2008 was a rather low-key affair when compared to its predecessors — but then that only makes sense, with a new series on television! Nonetheless, Big Finish produced another anniversary release: four one-part stories starring Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, and Philip Olivier. As I didn’t detect much of a linking theme, I am reviewing the four stories separately.
FALSE GODS
The first offering, Mark Morris’s “False Gods,” is fairly traditional in style, with a downbeat ending. Egyptian settings seem to lend themselves naturally to drama, especially when they involve the exploration of unearthed tombs. Benedict Cumberbatch features as legendary archaeologist Howard Carter, and things look like they’re heading toward a suitably Gothic outcome — but then suddenly the play takes a sharp right turn and then we’re talking about time travel and rogue Time Lords. This isn’t inherently bad, but it doesn’t come across in a particularly interesting way — until the twist ending, which is rather surprising. Sylvester McCoy sounds angrier here than in any other audio save perhaps “Death Comes to Time,” and he actually sells it convincingly. An average, unmemorable, start to the anthology.
5/10
ORDER OF SIMPLICITY
I’m not sure who author Nick Scovell is, but Google seems to indicate that he’s written some Doctor Who-based stage plays. Anyway, “Order of Simplicity” in a word: bizarre. Okay, so there’s a cult that believes that technology is the root of all evil facing the universe — this is fine, but their solution is to try to reduce the IQ of every sentient being in the universe to 45? That’s not just crazy, that’s tap-dancing on the ceiling making dolphin noises. The plot is muddled, and much like the above story the creepy country house setting is treated as perfunctory rather than essential. There’s some fun Ace-Hex banter, though, and Jon Glover goes delightfully over the top as Dr. Verryman — he’s probably the #1 reason to listen to this episode. Of course, when overacting is the biggest draw, you probably haven’t hit on a classic Doctor Who story… but hey, the score’s great.
4/10
CASUALTIES OF WAR
Wow, didn’t see this coming. After the first two plays, which were little more than slightly-confused traditional Doctor Who plots, Mark Michalowski’s “Casualties of War” (not to be confused with Steve Emmerson’s novel) blows the status quo right open. A small-time crook has been stealing technology from the World War II-era Forge, and the Doctor and companions become involved — the plot itself is relatively straightforward, with an uneasy, troubling resolution, but where this story shines is in its character work. Ace again encounters her young mother Audrey, this time as a toddler, and for the first time in dozens of BF appearances, struggles with her past — and Sophie Aldred turns in a fine performance, as this time we hear a more mature Ace minus the teenage volatility. A truth device, meanwhile, almost forces the Doctor to reveal to Hex the secret we’ve known since “Thicker Than Water” — but at the last minute he avoids the revelation. This had better come out in the next few McCoy audios: BF has an infuriating tendency to introduce plot threads and then leave them unresolved for years at a time, for no apparent reason. However, that takes nothing away from this story, which is excellent, and a masterclass in structuring drama to a 25 minute time limit. The best one-part BF story yet.
9/10
THE WORD LORD
…and this one’s just as good! Absolutely fascinating choice of villain, with a “Word Lord” (Paul Reynolds) introduced as a parallel universe equivalent of a Time Lord, dealing with language instead of time. Author Steven Hall expertly ties together the “45” motif from the preceding stories, and makes a smart, believable character out of Nobody No-One. Linda Marlowe is also very effective as Claire, using just a few lines to endear her character to the listener. Sophie Aldred goes a bit over the top in her TARDIS scene, but it’s understandable given Ace’s frustration. My only complaint is with the behavior of Nobody No-One himself: he’s not cruel enough. Psychopathic villains with a cheery exterior only work if they’re absolutely ruthless, and this one doesn’t go far enough. But that’s a relatively minor complaint about an otherwise excellent play.
9/10
Two average episodes followed by two absolute belters. “Forty-Five” is recommended on the strength of the latter two alone, though certainly nobody should be offended by the first two.
And so we come to the final episode of the Sarah Jane Smith series, “Dreamland.” It’s hard to say what would have happened to this series had the title character not returned to television and given her own spinoff program, but circumstances mean that the story ends here. After the explosive drama of “Fatal Consequences,” David Bishop dials back the intensity: “Dreamland” is a quieter, character-oriented piece with a painful sense of inevitability about it. The opening scenes show the effectiveness of the series as a whole: it’s genuinely gut-wrenching to hear the “team” falling apart at the seams, despite only eight episodes spent in their company. The private space mission foreshadowed throughout the season finally comes to the fore — and as above, Sarah’s participation seems inevitable, even if, examined logically, there’s no good reason for her to go up there. Stephen Grief gives a believable, sympathetic performance as Sir Donald, but the real stars of the final scenes are the regulars — Jeremy James in his final moments, a helpless Sadie Miller pleading through the communications system, and a resigned Elisabeth Sladen facing reality. And then, the ending — just what is that glow? The returning Mandragora Helix, and the prophecy coming true? The Doctor, arriving in the TARDIS to save his old friend? Or, based on Bishop’s other work, is it merely a tragic, final hallucination induced by oxygen starvation? We’ll never know, and rightfully not — it’s a beautiful, fascinating final image, and an effective way for the series to end. Compliments should also be paid to sound designer Steve Foxon, who has been excellent throughout the second season but whose design for “Dreamland” is the best of all. I recently watched HBO’s excellent “From the Earth to the Moon,” and Foxon’s sound design still convinced me I was on a shuttle heading into space. Lastly, credit to John Ainsworth, whose direction has given the second season a confident, capable feel throughout all four stories.
Wow! I was waiting for the second season of Sarah Jane Smith audios to kick into high gear, and it absolutely happens in “Fatal Consequences,” a nailbiter of a story from David Bishop that ratchets the intensity higher and higher and charges past any minor inconsistencies with amazing confidence. The series has been flirting with the concept of bioterrorism from the first episode, but it’s here, with the development of a weaponized Marburg virus, that the foretold apocalypse has never seemed closer. Bishop’s script portrays the horrifying onset and spread of the virus, with a feckless group of protesters reduced to effectively tragic figures — related performances from Patricia Leventon and Katarina Olsson stand out. I suppose the twist revelation about Josh was something we should have seen coming from the start of this season — and ordinarily it’s the sort of thing I criticize as over-egging the pudding, but in this case it’s portrayed effectively. Credit, too, to Elisabeth Sladen, who gets better with each successive play, and Jeremy James, who has been a revelation in this season. Tom Chadbon is also quite impressive, as his Will Sullivan has developed rapidly from Harry’s brother to something altogether more interesting. We’ll see what happens in “Dreamland,” the concluding episode, but from here it appears that the Sarah Jane Smith series is charging towards going out on a high. Thumbs way up.
The problem with “whodunits” is a necessarily-limited group of suspects. If the central conceit of a drama is “who’s going around killing people?” then the answer is going to be a character the viewer has already met. This is the problem with “Snow Blind,” the second Sarah Jane Smith release of the second season: with such a small cast of characters, there’s very little mystery or tension. Logic dictates that Sarah and Josh obviously aren’t murderers, and the timing of the attack on Morgane (Julia Righton) eliminates both her and Munro (Nicholas Briggs) as suspects — so we’re already down to Jack (Jack Galagher) as the only possible guilty party. Credit to David Bishop, though, for credibly creating — along with sound designer Steve Foxon — an Antarctic setting and a sense of claustrophobia brought on by a storm. Bishop also continues to lay the groundwork of this season’s mythology with some fine twists — it’ll be interesting to see how things develop in the final two plays. The acting is uniformly strong, though even Jeremy James and Tom Chadbon struggle to pull off the silly jealousy-fuelled arguments over Sarah. Briggs is effective, too — I know some complain that his voice has become over-familiar in the past few years, but he’s a talented actor all the same. John Ainsworth’s direction is first-rate, continuing the fresh, confident feel of this new season. Ultimately, “Snow Blind” is not without its faults, but certainly none of them are serious.
“Your overriding urge is to consider the needs of your species. You feel only irritation when a Dalek battlefleet is lost. But humans and Thals, they’d imagine a hundred thousand souls in agony.”
Coming fast on the heels of the excellent Time Reef, Brotherhood of the Daleks provides another promising indication that things are starting to look up a bit for Big Finish. Mind you at this point in the range it’s a nice change to get something that actually prompts repeat listens. On those grounds alone Brotherhood of the Daleks just may be the best main line release of 2008. Indeed it’s one of the few recent scripts to make us wish Big Finish was still releasing script anthologies so we could savour this properly. But still there’s a nagging sense of how much better it could have been.
It certainly seems that Alan Barnes hasn’t renounced his fannish tendencies since Neverland, which is good really because it means he’s one of the few Big Finish writers who’s holding nothing back and has no insecurities about appearing too nerdish and uncool, should any New Who fans be listening. The story takes heavy cues from classic Doctor Who. From Dalek lore, this revisits Spiridon and the stranded Thal platoon from Planet of the Daleks, the experiments to find the human factor and the Dalek’s counterculture workers’ revolution from Evil of the Daleks, and the human duplicate paranoia angle from Resurrection of the Daleks. It also takes the fabricated environment and shared hallucinations of The War Games, The Deadly Assassin and Time-Flight, the botanical warfare and body horror of The Seeds of Doom, and the agromophobia psychology and character tropes of Kinda. So it takes a lot of old school inspirations, mixes them nicely and milks them well for all their mileage. Unlike The Condemned, Assassin in the Limelight or the overstretched joke that was The Dark Husband, there’s actually enough material to fill a four part story, more than enough actually and perhaps where it falls down is that since so much is going on, the plot sometimes trips over itself, and ultimately everything gets rather rushed at the climax. Once the sky opens and the real threat is unveiled in part four, it barely gets a chance to impact the story before being all too quickly vanquished.
But that aside, what perhaps makes this story strong is that in some ways it gets back to what Big Finish did best in putting plasters over the mistakes of the old show. Big Finish doesn’t really do this anymore since the show has now been redeemed in the public light anyway, but before then Big Finish’s reparations to the 80’s were part of the heart and creativity of many stories. This made them into beautiful stories of redemption and hope, taking great care to salvage something precious and veritable from the ugly mess, and in a way making sense of the disillusioning, violent, chaotic mid-80s period of the show became a means of making sense of the wider disillusioning, violent and chaotic modern world we live in.
Brotherhood of the Daleks manages to hark back to that. Particularly in the way it seems to make the closing argument for the defence concerning the rehabilitation of Colin Baker’s Doctor. Not only does this revisit the world of Spiridon, but there’s a lot of Pertwee’s characteristics resurfacing in this Doctor. His moral condemnation of the Thals for their brutality in bitch-slapping Charley (but oh how we laughed) and the sadism of their experiments on the Daleks is particularly Pertwee-esque and very refreshing. But there are also inevitably aspects of his more aggressive TV persona, but applied with justification in this situation which calls for the Doctor’s most reckless and ruthless incarnation. His loutish heckling of the ‘traitor’ Murgat is a delight, whilst his nasty taunting of the enlightened Daleks to bring out their true nature is uncomfortable listening, and it’s hard to imagine any other Doctor doing the same, or at least not with the same infamous bull in a china shop methods. That scene would have made strong evidence for the prosecution if the Valeyard had done his research properly, but again it’s justified later when the Doctor is proved right. It’s possible to imagine the other audio Doctors actually being convinced by the redemption of the Daleks at the end and all in favour of such progress, but this Doctor is not going to give them any chances and he vows to destroy them even whilst they’re at their most placid. This is of course how we like to see the Sixth Doctor, as a missionary crusader figure who is ruthlessly shrewd and pragmatic but never acts out of cruelty.
Given the apparent apathy of Colin’s performances lately, particularly in Assassin in the Limelight, it seems that now he’s back on form and all it needed was a compelling script for him to get his teeth into. His performance here is one of his best and rawest in a while. The scene where he tears into the Daleks for killing Nyaiad should be another one of those transparently obligatory moral outrage moments that became particularly contrived in Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, but he lifts it off the page wonderfully with such raw venom that’s straight from the gut, and even manages to spit the word “Daleks” and make it sound like a swearword.
We’re onto the third story between Charley and the Sixth Doctor, and whilst it begs the question of how long they can keep up Charley’s secret before it gets old, it does present a nice opportunity to really contrast the two different Doctors that Charley has been with. As with River Song in the sublime Silence of the Library, Charley has to bear the heartbreaking fact that this isn’t yet the man she loves, and he’s incapable of loving her back. Whilst Paul McGann’s Doctor was warm, trusting and romantic, Colin’s Doctor couldn’t be more hard-hearted and treats her with cold suspicion. The scene where she confesses everything to his replicant is beautiful in its tender vulnerability. It helps of course that this is written by the same man who created Charley. The scene is particularly notable since we’re dealing with the only incarnation of the Doctor who could feasibly be mistaken for his own cold, homicidal Dalek replicant, and Charley speaks for a generation of fans who lived through the 80’s when she demands “what have you done with the real Doctor?” The moment where the replicant Doctor becomes a broken record and keeps repeating “kill you!” to Charley is far more unnerving and subtly effective than the vulgar scene from the Twin Dilemma that it homages, managing to be at once poignant and menacing and absurdly comical in its juxtaposition. In a way the replicant scene is a beautiful and effective exorcism of the Sixth Doctor’s nastier Hyde side, and oddly enough it’s a quite tragic one that makes us almost sad to hear his nastier side being left alone to his own confused, looped insanity and isolation.
Speaking of replicants, Brotherhood of the Daleks has other reparations to the 80’s to make. It utilises the more potentially interesting ideas from the messes that were Time-Flight and Resurrection of the Daleks. It uses a similar first cliffhanger to Time Flight, where the Doctor breaks them all out of their shared hallucination, but it doesn’t give the game away beforehand so it actually works as a twist. Likewise Resurrection of the Daleks had all the potential to be a real primal, paranoia survival horror story, but this was undermined by both its violent excesses, and by the typical Sawardian contrived, defeatist nature of the deaths that required characters to behave with forced and suicidal ineptness or recklessness, which undermined any tension or genuine sense of the characters sharing a primal survival instinct with the audience which is what horror needs in order to work. That’s why Maximum Overdrive is such a bad film.
Actually in one regard Resurrection of the Daleks deserves some slack. At its noblest, it was an attempt to reflect the violent, chaotic war torn and unjust state of the world at that time with unflinching brutal honesty and no real moral centre because morally speaking we were all lost at sea. However a reflection of life and the world at its most messy does not good drama make, unless through well crafted narrative and characterisation it manages to make some kind of cathartic sense out of that mess, and Resurrection just had none of the writing discipline it needed to do that. In theory the Dalek replicants were a good idea though, and the way that Resurrection depicted unstable killer replicants in policemen’s uniforms and within the higher political echelons, suggests that Eric had strong aspirations towards doing Doctor Who in the style of surreal political fringe theatre, as does his seeking out of Philip Martin. Since narrative depends on a sense of cause and effect and palpable motivations, it’s very hard to reflect the kind of predatory violence and abuse that often takes place in our society, such as domestic violence, which is seemingly unprovoked and out of the blue and is just as quickly ‘forgotten’ by the volatile, manipulative perpetrator who in Jekyll and Hyde fashion acts completely innocent or disaffected afterwards so that even their victim half believes it didn’t happen. This kind of senseless, unmitigated cruelty is hard to get across in a narrative form so the concept of the replicants makes a fitting allegory for that. The idea of calculating, pitiless evil hidden by a mask of personality, void of empathy and waiting to strike at the most vulnerable moment, of their true nature being something they can simply switch on and off, of someone being ‘badly wired’ in the most literal sense of the term is instantly nailed.
So this story follows in the footsteps of Resurrection of the Daleks in proscribing a pessimistic future that’s almost a natural evolution from the state of our world today. We’re shown a nightmarish militaristic future of perpetual war with a mechanised fascistic enemy, where human endurance is tested to its limits by constant fear and paranoia. The scene where Nyaiad is being tortured by the Daleks conveys it all in one go, this monolithic inescapable future of mechanical, technological evil that will keep cutting deeper and will not stop for mercy- the future seen in tunnel vision. Human screams of pain and terror echoing through metal walls amidst the relentless barking of psychotic monotone machines. And it’s this succinctness that makes the story far sharper than Resurrection, and brings this environment and future vision into vivid, believable clarity and which still leaves enough room for moments of charm and frenetic plot developments. Basically once it establishes the horror, it doesn’t need to dwell on it.
But as I said, there’s a nagging sense that it all could have been better. There is an irritatingly smug tendency in the latest audios towards stretching a running gag and general smart arsery, with The Dark Husband and Assassin in the Limelight being the worst offenders. This of course runs with the idea of Daleks going communist and predictably the script can’t resist turning it into a joke, with Daleks bleating rhetoric about common ownership of the means of production and even singing ‘The Red Flag’, which in its own way is quite utopian and poignant but it’s nowhere near as funny as hearing ‘I Will Survive’ being sung in Bang-Bang-A-Boom. There’s nothing particularly offensive about this (infact we’d much have preferred the full length version of ‘The Dalek Flag’ as a bonus track, instead of those tiresome, mood-spoiling ‘making of’ extras) but there’s a nagging sense that when Alan Barnes wrote the idea, he wanted to actually say something. He wanted to conjure a vision- in the words of Murgat, ‘a dream worth having.’ But if so, very little of it survives the humorous dilution. Some of it does though. Charley expresses an earlier cynicism about the Communists, and how it’s just another form of ‘you’re either with us or against us’ totalitarianism and brutal conformity wrapped up in naïve ideals of equality. It seems that this is the point the story was trying to make, where the Daleks’ becoming communist doesn’t make them any less fascist, and where the stranded Thal soldiers are so unified and collectively fixated on the evils of the enemy and the ’us against them’ mentality that they don’t even realise they’ve become just as bad, as paranoid and as uniformed as the Daleks. In a way the group hallucination is commenting on the dangerous, delusional power of group think. This is meant to be a story about the bad seed at the heart of idealism (in much the same way that Greatest Show in the Galaxy was) and about the dangers of trusting seemingly innocent political groups that always have bullies and megalomaniacs in there somewhere who usually go unaccountable and can manipulate the group into closing ranks by drawing on their collective naivety and their sense of having the world against them. Same as how The Settling presented us with the real Oliver Cromwell in all his nasty, tyrannical, genocidal glory and provided a proper historically accurate dose of reality to any listeners who heralded Cromwell as the first true socialist hero (I’m guilty as charged there, actually). Thus it’s a story perfectly suited to the more morally disillusioned mid-80’s period of the show. This gets to another nagging issue that’s been bugging me ever since the once humanistic Dalek Empire spin-off turned all mean-spirited recently. It seems that nowadays Big Finish is not only reluctant to come across to any new fans as being humourless or pretentious, but it seems they don’t want to really tackle moral issues anymore. They don’t come across as though they’re using the audios as a springboard to vent their own generational issues and complaints with the modern world, lest they come across as curmudgeons or as ‘uncool’ parental figures trying to lecture them with outdated values. Again it’s the way that Big Finish is now selling an image, and is no longer selling us the writer’s nobility, beliefs or values. In that regard, Brotherhood of the Daleks is something of a compromise where the moral lesson is hidden but it is there for those with the inclination to see it.
The other area where the story is somewhat lacking is in characterisation. The Daleks come across as evil enough, but in many of the Dalek audios, the commander Dalek usually stands out from the ranks, not merely because of their hierarchy but because they’re characterised as being that bit nastier and spiteful than their minions. Here the Black Dalek arrives too late and gets too little chance to make any impression before being blasted to pieces. Of course that’s the problem with having a twist heavy story, in how it dwarfs the characters and leaves little room for character development.
Murgat, as the architect of the communist dream is perhaps the most realised and memorable of the Thal characters, and this is largely down to Michael Cochrane’s superlative performance as the eloquent, caddish scientist. He actually makes a good case for his experiments, despite the Doctor’s condemnation. He proscribes to integrate his revolutionary Daleks into the Dalek Empire and use them to cause chaos from within. The story has shown us the evil of the Daleks and the torture and death that they have brought onto millions, and conveys them as a nebulous, expansive threat to whole galaxies, so any potential final solution to the Dalek race seems laudable. By contrast the Doctor seems initially like a moral nuisance, protesting that the experiments are cruel to the Daleks, until we get to the later scene where the Thal-Daleks finally see their own reflections and beg the Doctor to destroy them, which proves the Doctor’s earlier words to be right. But of course the writer then has to give Murgat villainous actions to dent his credibility. The moment where he orders Tamarus to terminate Nyaiad and then coldly observes her being eaten by the Atilodi and then records a scientific observation about it just about escapes being contrived villainy by being justified by the ongoing events with Nyaiad reverting to her Dalek conditioning and becoming a threat. It also fits with the theme of the military and the bad seed at the heart of this ‘brotherhood’ with the leader of the group ordering his young follower/grunt to make their first kill or do something equally unpleasant to prove their loyalty to the cause. Murgat is a supposed pragmatist but in truth he is a coward who renounces any moral responsibility, and predictably when trouble arrives he either runs away or sells his allies out to save his own skin.
Other than that, the Thal soldiers unfortunately rather blur into one with very few of them standing out as individual characters, partly because there’s too many of them to keep track of. Nyaiad is perhaps the only other character who stands out simply because she’s the other antagonist and of course because the story takes the ‘pain builds character’ approach to her torture scenes, and also because it sounds like she’s trying to figure out her performance on the spot which actually comliments the naivety of her character beautifully. Indeed when Jesic becomes the Doctor’s temporary companion in a hallucination, it reads as a rather cynical and unfunny in-joke about the Doctor’s companions having no proper character or personality anyway. But we can afford to be forgiving on the rather trepid grounds that since this is a story about military uniformity and shellshock trauma and how this leads to identity issues and personality disintegration, such lax characterisation just about fits. Although to be fair this would hold more water if No Man’s Land hadn’t dealt with the same issues but been a far greater success of memorable characterisation. Actually no, this does convey very succinctly the experiences of war, specifically the never ending days of hoping this madness will be over soon and they can go home, only to find themselves trapped in a never ending cycle, as the war never ends, like a nightmare that they keep thinking they’ve woken up from only to realise they’re still dreaming each time. Or to push the Vietnam metaphor further, this could be about the former soldiers who’ve come home, but are still fighting the war in their own minds years later. Hell if we’re judging this story by its source material then the characters are at least more realistic and substantial than in Planet of the Daleks.
In a sense though the heart of the story isn’t the characters, it’s that long running thematic conflict running through the audio Dalek stories from The Genocide Machine onwards- the war between technology and nature, and really this is the best applied theme of the story. Even before the Kyropite are revealed, their insidious and fast spreading effect is aluded to early on when Charley falls foul of one of Spiridon’s fungal infections. The Doctor even conjures an imaginary rose to sniff to break the spell of the shared illusion. The Daleks use technology to pervert nature in cloning humans and Thals, and by using the Kyropites as a weapon of conquest. The Daleks represent technology as something heartless, aggressive and driven by the need to conquer, as if this degeneration in morality and empathy are natural consequences of technological existence. The Thals represent humanity, brotherhood, camaraderie and the ability to empathise with their fellows and mourn their dead in a way the Daleks never could. The Kyropites, whilst being an aggressive form of plant life, represent something pacifying and hopeful in a manner that is galvanising. The question at the heart of the story is whether the Kyropites can succeed in pacifying the Daleks? Will nature win against technology?
Brotherhood of the Daleks is essentially about the duality of man- a recurring theme in Alan Barnes’ stories, from Storm Warning onwards. With Murgat being liteally half-man, half Kyropite, and experimental Daleks housing the humanitarian consciousness of Thals, and the Doctor himself veering between his nice and nasty TV personas, it all comes down to a flip of a coin whether the Daleks will be finally redeemed or ultimately revert to their old nature, or whether characters will follow their better angels when the time comes for them to say ‘the word’ that could safeguard the galaxy.
So in a way the greater themes of empathy and humanity against Dalek nature just about compensate for any character shortcomings and make the story work very well. For all these complaints and the occasional nagging plot hole and changed premise, Brotherhood of the Daleks is a very entertaining and involving story. It’s a layer cake of intrigue and developments that continues to delight in repeat listens. Or maybe not so much a layer cake, as a raspberry ripple with a chewing gum ball at the bottom. As with The Juggernauts though, it’s a shame that this project that could have expanded and waged war on the Daleks doesn’t come to fruition and is instead lost to a reset button. It really could have left imponderables and been the beginning of a historic chapter in the canon that we’d have to leave to our imagination. But all things considered, the ending we get is a natural and inevitable one which has a certain poignancy about a utopia lost. Indeed it’s easy to miss but the conclusion of the story is actually an appropriate allegory for Chernobyl. Although this story perhaps could have been better, it feels a little rude to fault it for what it is, and it shows how even an above average effort by Big Finish like this one has infinitely more freshness, charm and wit than a whole season of any given modern portentous American sci-fi series. For instance, Battlestar Pedantica frequently gave us storylines featuring sleepless, war weary soldiers stranded on enemy occupied worlds, awaiting rescue, and constantly fearful that any one of their number could be an enemy clone, and on the side they tackled issues about military endurance and the treatment of prisoners of war. Brotherhood of the Daleks does all that, and even gives us a cowardly amoral scientist much like Baltar, but in a manner that’s succinctly crammed into a satisfying two hour runtime and with charm, humour, a playful script and likeable characters too. There is no contest.
“I’ve seen and heard more people die today than I have in my whole life and I’ve had enough!”
Now that Big Finish has pretty much jumped the shark, the Dalek stories are the last great hope, the one thing still worth looking forward to for fans and the one thing they can’t really afford to get wrong, much like the Robert Holmes stories were during the 80’s, and the Steven Moffat stories are today. So it’s unfortunate that Enemy of the Daleks is in so many ways an infuriating disappointment, although at the same time it seems to be a very marmite story.
At its best, Big Finish Dalek stories have tapped into all the neglected potential and dramatic mileage of the unseen Terran versus Dalek wars with the titanic galaxy spanning conflict between humanity and their mechanised, relentless foes, telling tales of hunters and prey, leaders and followers, and superhuman endurance and heroism during the darkest times. As this is Nick Briggs’ favourite storytelling topic, it has inevitably become more of a focus of late. Unfortunately of course Doctor Who as a franchise has long been a stranger to quality control, and can exhaust its freshest ideas or dynamics and run them into the dirt with remarkable speed. Dalek Empire prolonged its story far past its natural end point and the latest New Who Dalek stories tend nowadays to prompt despondent groans of impatience rather than the awe they initially did. To a long term follower of Big Finish, Enemy of the Daleks will probably sound deeply uninspired and lacking in anything really worthwhile to say.
Now fair enough that might sound like a snobbish criticism of something that doesn’t aspire to be too deep but is instead just content to be an action romp. There are plenty of stories that don’t really have high intellectual ambitions, but often the more worthwhile content comes about spontaneously more than anything. Dalek Empire was always a very outrageously cartoonish series and its moral themes seemed initially to come about as an accidental by product of the organic writing, and once the series had worked out what it was all about, it started restating and dumbing down its message more blatantly with each successively weaker season. It’s the same spontaneity that made for unpredictable and rich audio classics like Church and the Crown and Sympathy of the Devil, and which makes classic Doctor Who worth such plentiful repeat viewings, (well excluding the mostly drab period after Tom Baker left and before the show got its mojo back with Season 25). The trouble is, like many recent Big Finish stories, Enemy of the Daleks is deeply contrived and has all natural spontanaeity sucked out of it with no room for any heart or inspiration or even ambiguity. Even the cliffhangers feel deeply contrived.
For a lesson to see just how the Dalek wars story can be done so horribly wrong, then look no further. For this is simply an exercise in the ghastly excesses of vacuous action cinema, with a sickeningly self-destructive macho ethos, far too many pointless deaths and the worst, most pathetic melodramatic displays of emotional self-pity and self-aggrandisement- much like Dalek Empire IV really, but even that wasn’t as unimaginative as this.
More than that though, Enemy of the Daleks suffers from poor direction and appalling acting right from the very beginning (only Sylvester McCoy and Eiji Kusuhara seem to be putting in the real thespian effort). The opening attack on the Valkyrie ship suffers to shockingly amateurish acting and direction, and unlike The Council of Nicaea, it doesn’t recover from its shaky start into something good and worthwhile. Kate Ashfield never convinces as Lieutenant Beth Stokes, but part of that is down to the fact that none of her character motivations make any sense whether logical or emotional. Even in that introductory scene she goes from telling her unruly subordinate that the Daleks don’t take prisoners to signalling the Dalek fleet and asking them to show some mercy on the civilian ships and being shocked that the Daleks won’t listen.
On paper, the idea of Beth Stokes holds promise in showing how the Dalek war’s high turnover and forced conscriptions would see positions of command going to those who are perhaps incompetent and ill suited to the job and prone to either paralytic ineptitude or making the most panic-induced self-defeating decisions and inspiring nothing but insubordination (lets face it, it’s a story that Doctor Who is no stranger to, given its inexperienced producership during its declining years). It is a kind of counterpoint to how Dalek Empire depicted the war as an opportunity for ordinary people and misfits to suddenly become the heroes and leaders of the day. But there’s no real humanity to the portrayal of Beth Stokes, simply a horrid bombardment of self-pity. Like the worst episodes of New Who, it plops scenes of mawkish, melodramatic emoting at random into the story and thinks it has told an ‘emotional journey’. From shutting down the defence grid when no-one’s looking to her final pointless self-sacrifice, not a single thing the character does is remotely plausible, or even given the benefit of any tangible sense of emotional transition, its just contrived to the point of being involuntary. This is not a story interested in making believable narrative sense, or making its character’s actions believable or understandable, and that is a huge problem because it presents an enormous barrier to our empathy, the very empathy which all survival horror depends on. Beth’s descent into madness and childhood regression is totally forced and artificial, done in such ridiculous leaps and bounds that no thought or consideration seems to have gone into it at all, and Beth’s recounting of the death of her sister is not merely poorly scripted but has clearly been written without any genuine heart. Like New Who at its worst, this is a story that quite simply has no respect for itself.
Oh and the Ace and Hex companion team have never been so annoyingly immature, obvious and unconvincing. As we said before, the approach to comedy in the audios has changed since Gary Russell left. Whereas Bang-Bang-a-Boom gained humour that evolved naturally from the spontaneous, wild narrative and clash of ostentatious characters, here humour is something that the makers put in wherever they can to avoid scaring away new listeners with anything too solemn. God forbid a Big Finish story should actually mean anything these days. The worst example happens in the opening episode where the Doctor and company are trying to get into the shelter of the complex before they’re torn to pieces by flying piranha but the automated door system isn’t co-operating. At that juncture in the script it might have looked on paper like a cue for a ‘hip’ gag about Hex needing to show some ID because he doesn’t look 18, but when it comes to the scene itself, it’s tedious and it destroys the momentum and the tension in an instant because none of the characters seem to be taking their predicament seriously, so why should we? And it’s not like the gag was even funny.
Actually no, there’s a far worse gag earlier on where Hex cuts his hand on a thorn and behaves hysterically over it whilst at length -without any prompting from other characters- making a laboured asinine point of how sissy-like he is being. At this point the laughs cannot get more desperate. It’s a shame because the sound design of the botanical gardens environment itself is very good and very tactile, building a lovely sense of atmosphere and exotic audio scenery in a way I couldn’t in all fairness say about most other recent Big Finish releases.
Part of the problem seems to be that since Philip Oliver as Hex provides something of a connection to the mind bogglingly atrocious Hollyoaks, the writers seem to be pitching this at the Hollyoaks audience with the same kind of patronising ‘youth’ humour and pretentious cliché laid on with a melodramatic trowel, and they have an appaling cast to match. It doesn’t get any more Hollyoaks than Hex telling a threatening Dalek rather weakly to ‘stick it’ in the weakest display of moral outrage and one of the worst cliffhangers ever (even ‘go to hell’ would have sounded more realistic, but alas Big Finish has become really sanitised these days). It may have been an attempt to paint Hex as a stoic, defiant hero who stands by his principles but it makes him sound like an unruly and particularly stupid child who insists on lying in the road simply for a dare. It all seems to be trying to emulate a bit of scouse wit without the actual wit or quickness. Sophie Aldred’s performance is particularly awful, but to be fair to her she is being called upon to play the New Adventures heartless battle hardened Dalek killer version of Ace, which is so far removed from the comfy TV Ace role that Sophie is pretty much miscast. Which is a double blow because it means she’s playing a hardened, unsympathetic character, and not giving the character the humanity or dimension she needs to be sympathetic. When Ace observes Beth racing into the path of the Daleks, and in a disconcertingly chirpy tone marvels with pride at how the soldier woman is facing her fears, or telling Hex how Beth would be better off dead than in a Dalek labour camp, it almost makes it impossible to care for the character of Ace ever again. This is in many ways a New Adventures story, and the idea of a Valkyrie unit of all women soldiers is typical of the NA’s emancipating, self-hating misandry. The New Adventures writing crowd were of course impenetrably pretentious and sickeningly right-on and politically correct, despite being the most elitist and petty bunch of snobs you’ll ever meet. Its certainly typical of that mindset to consistently portray the human military as scum, unless they’re all women soldiers and are fighting the Daleks in which case it’s suddenly championed, and the more macho and steel hearted, the better, in much the same way as the obnoxious NA crowd pretentiously herald female and gay fans as being the only intelligent and worthy fans out there. Basically this is all so macho and rhetorical that it’s completely, hellishly void of any genuine compassion.
The music score, which usually underpins the Dalek’s audio presence doesn’t help here, infact it does nobody any favours, it’s just overblown ‘hip’ indie rock aural sludge that refuses to be background music and tries so ineptly to pump the adrenaline. The previous music scores on Dalek stories were evocative mood pieces or tortured compositions that conjured the vast distance of space, the heartbreaking passage of time and history, reality going sour and technological viral biomasses swallowing all in its path. This score just says ‘this is an exciting action scene, so be excited’. Lately it seems Big Finish just isn’t bothering with conveying evocative environments. The most the music does is to give the environment a grungy, dirty feel, but again there is just nothing sympathetic about the music. More to the point it compounds the problem that every other scene is contrived to try and be a big climactic dramatic moment and the music becomes so monotonous that it only compounds the meaningless blur that it all becomes.
The Daleks are unfortunately treated as nothing more than action film fodder and the relentless horror aspect is completely neglected, and they certainly never come across as a galactic technological virus. The scene where the Daleks despatch the piranha locusts should be the big game-raising moment of spectacle, but it’s just so limply done without any effort gone into making it frenetic or devastating. The main problem with the idea of doing this as an action story is that there are only three other members of the cast, so most of the fighting involves voiceless, nameless fodder who we don’t care about, being blasted. The big dramatic moment is of course meant to be Hex getting his first taste of the depths of Dalek cruelty when he witnesses the Daleks massacring his patients. But as we barely got to hear a single one of the patients say a word, let alone get to know any of them, and the massacre itself is so blatantly forewarned and repeatedly threatened that it has no shock value whatsoever when it happens, we can only rely on good directing that conveys the horror of the massacre in a straight for the jugular way, but instead we get the opposite, with the massacre almost sounding deliberately muffled and obscured as if listened to through a wall. Unfortunately Philip’s performance fails at selling Hex’s horrified reaction, not that the script does him any favours and as such we feel like we’re being heavy-handedly told to feel horrified when everything about its squeamish presentation has made it impossible to do so. Ideally what should have been done is to have the death toll escalate gradually around Hex so that we can absorb and digest each loss with him and thus feel closer to being able to share his anguish rather than bombarding it to us in one gulp, but again that’s not going to happen now that Big Finish has become so sanitised. There’s a rule of thumb that if a character in a film cries, then it takes away the audience’s ability to cry. Likewise the best examples of horror are muted works such as Ringu, The Quatermass Conclusion and Threads that take the audience to the peak of nightmarish, inescapable terror but never allow the emotional release of a horror movie scream. This is of course the complete opposite in that it’s all about laboured, melodramatic reaction with no substance to its source, or at least nothing that we can care about.
There’s much talk on the ever tiresome extras of this being a relentless action thriller, but its nothing of the kind. Every time the heroes get cornered by a Dalek, it’s predictable that the soldiers will simply turn up and attack them from behind and save the day, and after a while it becomes boring. Furthermore there’s a particularly clumsy scene jump where a Dalek is menacing a helpless Beth Stokes and causing her to break down, and then in her next scene, Beth is still distraught but the Dalek has gone, apparently having decided to let her go free. But more importantly it simply fails to work as a horror or a dramatic festival of death because its deaths are so predictable and contrived. As with Resurrection of the Daleks, it doesn’t show the Daleks at their most relentless and all conquering, it just shows the humans at their most defeatist, inept, reckless and suicidal, and therefore giving us no sense of struggle for survival at all since the only meaningful deaths that occur involve humans who were determined to get themselves killed for no other reason than so the writer can wash their hands of them in the most contrived and nasty fashion. As with Resurrection of the Daleks there’s no heart to it, so there’s no emotional connection to the character’s primal desire to survive. Beth’s ultimate self-sacrifice is sold as the completion of her character journey of accepting her fate with bravery, but the sacrifice itself is so needless and pointless, that like much of Season 21’s slaughter fests it simply makes the whole thing feel like nothing more than a pointless, senseless waste, and as is often the case, it pretty much blackens the whole story as a pointless and nasty exercise with the most unpleasant aftertaste. Worse still it ends with a final scene in the Tardis where Ace is already making cheerful quips in a manner which just feels utterly tasteless and calloused in light of all that’s happened.
The same is true of Professor Shimura’s ultimate self sacrifice, but let’s face it he didn’t have much character to take on a journey in the first place, he was simply a mad scientist, just about brought to life by actor Eiji Kusuhara’s charming way with broken English and occasional moments of parental tenderness, and for the first half of the story he at least has an intrigue and seems like he’s going to be a villain worth listening to. But otherwise he exhibits the same kind of overblown villainy that marred the kind of dark story of exploitation and addiction that Nightmare of Eden could have been. The mad scientist has kind of become a staple character in Dalek audio stories, acting as a surrogate Davros to provide a context of the Daleks’ origins from an almost inevitable collision of technology, genetic science and unscrupled human ambition. Basically all good sci-fi comes down to the relationship between humanity and its technology and how we use or abuse the tools we have. It’s something of a means of recreating the moral polarising dynamic between the Doctor and Davros from Genesis of the Daleks, except that this time the mad scientist’s aims are the same as the Doctors in wanting to destroy the Dalek menace forever and can therefore argue with credibility against the Doctor’s ‘do I have the right?’ position by proposing the final solution to the Dalek menace in a way that the Doctor never could.
But this story seems to conspire to rob Shimura of all credibility from the beginning, tuning him into just a clichéd mad scientist who bizarrely never even considered the obvious flaws and dangers in his creations. Surely having witnessed them birthed in human flesh for a long gestation period should give him some idea of how its breeding habits present a problem to humanity. The moral discussions between him and the Doctor couldn’t be more dull and uninspiring and there’s just no attempt to characterise Shimura as anything but a cipher. None of the Mentor’s tragic obsessive compulsive control freak personality or sincere belief in her own heart of gold, or Murgat’s communist dreams of utopia. There’s an attempt to have him share in Martez’ paternal love of her creations, but done in a blasé manner that gradually just treats the relationship almost like a poor joke, even at one cringeworthy point having Shimura try to pursue one of his unruly creations and declaring ‘Come back here, I would talk with you’.
Ah, the Kiseibyaa. In many ways they are almost the saving grace of the story. Mind you they’re the only side worth rooting for. Again, thanks to poor directing and sound production the creatures’ dialogue is often inaudible, and to be honest they never really say anything interesting anyway, but the idea of them being an artificial sentient creation that quickly, almost supersonically grows beyond anyone’s control comes off wonderfully, as does the idea of them being the Daleks’ only natural predator. The Kiseibyaa come across as effectively savage and repulsively slimy, with a supersonic speed and viciousness, and the scene where they make a meal of the Black Dalek like a school of piranhas is a gem. So too is the delicious moment where the so far utterly ineffectual Doctor gloats over the dying Black Dalek, challenging it over why the Daleks should be spared the horrors they’ve inflicted on other innocent species, and for one false dawn of a moment it looks like the story is going to finally become daring and for a moment it looks like the Doctor is going to let the Kiseibyaa breed after all and allow this pandora’s box to remain open because causality demands it, and maybe the Kiseibyaa will turn out to save humanity in the long run. For a moment it seems like there’s finally going to be a twist in the tale, or at last that this mediocre story is going to hint at an unseen greater story yet to come.
But alas, the story goes down the predictable route where the Doctor decides to destroy the Kiseibyaa and effectively commit genocide which turns out to be the great historical atrocity he was prophesising about at the beginning. It’s a final revelation that leaves us feeling both cheated and sermonised at. We’ve seen no great atrocity, simply a reset button being pressed, and one that destroys all evidence that the Kiseibyaa ever existed, which begs the question of how or why the Doctor even noticed it as a future history event, let alone the greatest atrocity of the vast Dalek wars. As such it simply makes the whole story feel like a pretentious and hollow excuse for itself.
It has to be said that this story is something of an unoriginal copy of Brotherhood of the Daleks where the Doctor and company land in a weapons research facility during the Dalek wars and encounter shell shocked soldiers and an amoral scientist working on a biological weapon against the Daleks, except without all the interesting bits. Actually no, to credit Enemy of the Daleks with noble intentions, it was an attempt to take the idea of Brotherhood of the Daleks but do it in a far less ‘knowing’ and more newbie-friendly way, with Hex being a fresh pair of eyes through which to see what’s effectively business as usual. But if it’s a backlash against the ‘knowingness’ of Big Finish’ previous Dalek stories then it’s a backlash too far that tries too hard and with too much overstatement to force a sense of awe, horror and excitement when we’ve seen it all before and are given nothing to surprise us. And that’s unfortunately the most generous thing I can say about it. Even treating the story as a lightweight, box-ticking, comfort food kind of Doctor Who romp, the pointless death of Beth still feels utterly wrong and sours the milk.
For a while it looked like Big Finish had become such bland product that it would never again plumb the depths of stories like Zagreus or The Rapture, but at least The Rapture and Zagreus tried for something original and different. Enemy of the Daleks simply amounts to little more than vulgar senseless noise. A story so disappointing, and so content to be nothing more than fluff that it initially made me wonder whether Big Finish was worth bothering with anymore.
Infact aside from the fan’s wet dream of Colin Baker’s ‘Lost Season’ stories and the next Dalek story Patient Zero (which has a trailer that sounds like an Emilie Autumn song), there’s nothing coming up that seems promising enough to suggest greater things to come. For a while Big Finish were the one good thing to emerge from the JNT disaster area and its car crash soulless nerd trap that always reeled us in but never satisfied us, particularly when the show ended. Big Finish provided the satisfying continuation and redemption of the show and its despot Doctors as was its raison d’etre, and in the process gave us the kind of underground creativity and mature intelligence that would never have been possible if the series had stayed on air. For many they were a welcome, dignified and mature alternative to the New Series approach which often amounted to little more than an advert for itself with its forced zaniness, fawning self-congratulation and proclivity for deliberate irritation. Now that’s come to an end and Big Finish now looks long past its best too. But we’re not bitter, honestly. How can we be when the Big Finish staff gave us such rich creativity and redemptive new adventures for the pariah Doctors for much of their lifespan? We’ll always remember them for their art and showing us just how great Doctor Who could be when stretched to its full potential, unfettered by visual limitations or the superficial. This is unfortunately as deep as a puddle.
“Trolleys! I hate trolleys. They’re just Daleks without the interesting bits.”
The gimmick is that the Doctor has become a woman (which is typical of Nick’s gender bending approach to the Daleks in Dalek Empire), and what’s impressive is how something that once seemed like such a taboo, eventually becomes simply taken for granted. Arrabella Weir is immediately natural and comfortable in the role as the Doctoress, and almost feels like she’s always been there. Her blend of righteous indignation and womanly ditziness actually works “Surrender the Tardis key” “Never! Oops, I dropped it!”, it feels highly appropriate that she’s meant to follow from Troughton’s Doctor, and her firey confrontation with ‘the Master’ shows that ironically she actually has more balls than most of the male Doctors we got after Tom Baker.
We wouldn’t have wanted this to be anything more than a non-canonical one-off, especially since there’s more than enough man-bashing in modern entertainment as it is, without transforming one of the few remaining positive male role models into a woman. All indications are that this is the kind of one-off Doctor who deserved a better story than this wasted opportunity. Quite simply Arrabella Weir seems like the only one here who gets what kind of comedy story this is meant to be. This is meant to be quirky, cringey comedy in the same vein as a Mike Leigh film, and only Arrabella seems to get to grips with the banal, believable, human element of it. Making a reassuring reminder of how we can all be as drunk, dumb and embarrassing as this sometimes. But the rest of the characters are played as shallow, artificial caricatures of the most obnoxious kind, and that’s what spoils the suspension of disbelief, rendering the story relentlessly false.
We’re not sure whether it’s down to a writer who’s only put the effort into making the protagonist credible, or that only Arrabella is making the effort to bring her two-dimensional characterisation to life. Certainly the more poignant moments where the Doctor wonders why she’s running away from a noble and proud life of heroism seems in concert with Nick Briggs existential themes in Dalek Empire of a modern life that’s so consumed with work and blotting things out by turning to the bottle that we no longer live our dreams or be who we want to be.
But that aside this story, moreso than He Jests at Scars really feels like nothing more than the runt of the litter of inspiration for the Unbound range, and as with the worst excesses of New Who, the overly flippant treatment of the story will probably leave us no longer believing in it or caring. A witless farce might just work on TV on a visceral level, but not really on audio. As with Aliens of London’s body function humour, the constant burping and vomiting isn’t so much offensive because of its crudeness (I mean Tenko, Once Upon a Time in America, Robocop, Meet the Feebles and Trainspotting are superb examples of films and TV shows that actually feel so much more human and sensory simply by reinforcing that just like us, its characters do need to pee sometimes), but because of just how condescending and patronising it is, using it almost like its very own laughter track, with umpteen burps to try and get across the obvious point that this is meant to be a ‘funny’ scene. As with The Dark Husband, the sheer cynicism of it all cancels out much of its occasional charming moments, with an uneven tone that shifts from poignancy to horribly cynical humour. And what really puts the nail in the coffin is how the story elects to end in a final ‘last laugh’, of a particularly cruel kind.
“I was going to be the best playwright since Shakespeare. Hell with it, I’d be better than Shakespeare…. As the years go by you realise you aren’t as good as Shakespeare, and you aren’t as good as those other nine writers to watch out for…. You scale down your ambitions. You pride yourself you can always meet deadlines. Then you’ll be proud if no-one sacks you when you stop being able to meet them…. And you end up with nothing left to write because you’ve got nothing left to say, and you’re not sure you ever did.”
Deadline is one of the few Big Finish audios to actually generate controversy. It’s a marmite story in the same league as Two Doctors, Happiness Patrol, Ghostlight and Love & Monsters. Some love it for Robert Shearman’s script and for being so off the wall. Others hate it for being such a degrading, miserable, almost hostile story, to the point where they may even prefer He Jests at Scars to it.
As with Jubilee, the listener is not entirely sure whether it’s a celebration of Doctor Who, or an outright attack on it. And that’s what lends the story interpretations of simple bitterness. What’s interesting about Deadline is that it seems to be the product of a fan’s wish fulfilment to actually cure themselves of being a fan, to purge their love for Doctor Who and to reckon with that thin line between love and hate that most fans know all about. It’s about a burned out, bitter fan who’s been plagued by the germ of an imagination that wouldn’t die and wouldn’t leave him in peace. As if Doctor Who was nothing but a curse to him that brought him nothing but frustration. After all, towards the end Doctor Who became simply a miserable chore to watch, or at the very least it had clocked up enough years that the weaker stories had gradually accumulated to form a critical mass that eroded most of our appreciation and good will towards what the show had been in its prime, but we still watched it anyway just in-case it improved and we got treated to a veritable jewel.
I’ve often wanted to dismiss everything after Season 17, but I could somehow never dismiss the worth of stories like Revelation of the Daleks, Greatest Show in the Galaxy and Parting of the Ways that really had things to say about society at the time and inspiring messages about individuality in a crushingly conformist world, and thus the rock bottom period of the show and a less than satisfying revival was perhaps just about worth it for their existence. Likewise Deadline realises the dream of what if Doctor Who never existed, and looks at what a more grey and unforgiving world it would be if that happened. Don’t forget that Doctor Who itself had been burned in the 80’s by the decline of society’s values, a decade where idealism was being crushed and demonized, and in the show itself the same thing was happening to the Doctor.
From that, some of us might have developed a sense of shame for being fans of the old show. Certainly much of our merciless mockery of the old show is because we’re afraid to be too enthusiastic having been let down by the show before. One poster on Outpost Gallifrey summed up the forum’s vicious pecking orders, its bitchiness, its sychophancy, its stifling of any articulation of criticism, and its fixation with greater audience figures and what the ‘not-we’ thought and all the other displays of fannish self-hatred, with the words “frankly I’ve never felt so pathetic”. Deep down some of us maybe felt that Michael Grade was right when he called mid-80’s Doctor Who a waste of the licence fee, and maybe it was a waste of precious hours of our lives.
As much as I’ve taken cheap digs at the JNT/Eric Saward era, the strength of Robert Shearman’s writing, both here and in the New Series story “Dalek”, is that instead of shying away from the ugliest periods of the show, he as a writer actually revels in them, digs deep and manages to draw something beautiful and rare out of it.
Some may hate the character of Martin Bannister, but the relationship between Martin and his neglected creation is one that suggests the possibility of redemption for him. That for all his callous, dishonourable and despicable quirks, his creation of the character of Doctor Who was his means of creating a more noble, heroic alter ego of himself. That his frank rudeness and spiky social skills would have imbued his art with a rare honesty and sincerity. That he had an overwhelming desire to give something of his soul to the world, and give the people something life-changing. And thus Martin stands as a pathos-ridden symbol of wasted potential. Derek Jacobi is of course superb in the role, and brings the character into memorable sharp relief. Many of us would have given anything for him to have played the Master all the way through the atrocious Series Three finale. The important thing is he plays Martin as someone who’s out of touch and who’s compelled to be brutally honest but never really means ill and thus seems completely ignorant of his own hurtful behaviour. As Martin repeatedly tells us, the only thing he ever cared about was Doctor Who, and Derek Jacobi hones that passion in a piercing way.
The story of Martin Bannister’s failed writing career, and the making of a Doctor Who that never really happened makes for an honest assessment of what Doctor Who is. A rather childish, pulp sci-fi series in inception but with enough blood, sweat and tears put into its creation and greater possibilities in its format that it became art through its struggle to be made, it became meaningful and an opportunity for the writer to really reckon with issues and demons. As with Jubilee, Doctor Who is rendered essential and affirming by comparing it to the kind of mindless shoot-‘em-ups of modern entertainment (this time in the violent computer game that Martin’s grandson is playing like he’s dead to the world), and emphasising how Doctor Who was about thought and empathy over action, which alone made it something rare and precious.
Then we have Martin’s son, Philip as played by Peter Forbes. It’s strange to hear the headstrong Dan Culver from Dalek Empire III in what’s effectively a Mike Leigh film, but he plays the part wonderfully, and instantly belongs in this realist haphazard family tree as a branch that tried to get as far away from its roots as possible, wanting to be a complete contrast to his dad. He was a son who’d deliberately do everything his dad doesn’t. Martin was a womaniser and Philip is neurotically loyal to his wife to the point of shunning all other female company, out of the fear that he shares his father’s curse. Philip’s failed marriage seems down to a world where there’s no positive male role models like the Doctor to show the middle ground between men who treat women like disposable sex objects and men who can’t even speak to women without having a crisis of conscience about it. Doctor Who was perhaps something beautiful in an absolutist sensationalist media that’s obsessed with sexuality, whether by glorifying or demonising it.
In some ways this story is familiar to Doctor Who’s declining 80’s period, where a show that depended on natural change turned instead to militant backlash and shunning everything from the previous era, and thus became limited, neurotic and half-hearted. When the humour and spontanaeity of the Williams era became forbidden by JNT, we got a miserable, arrested show and even Robert Holmes got blacklisted from the writing team for the first three years. When the mean spirited violence of the mid 80’s became forbidden by the BBC, we got Season 24’s harmless pantomime instead (we suspect that this was the point where Rob Shearman felt let down by the show). This is all those politics pinned down to a personal level, to a man’s own prison of withdrawal and self-imposed restrictions and it’s beautifully done.
It’s obvious that this is inspired by The Singing Detective in a manner that takes the range full circle back to The Sirens of Time, where a helpless paralysed man finds freedom in his imagination and his distorted rose tinted memories, and though I’ll get into trouble for saying this, it has an advantage of succinctness over Dennis Potter’s classic serial. As demonstrated in The Holy Terror, Robert Shearman has a talent for writing observational, descriptive dialogue as something naturalist and almost subliminal so that the listener is never conscious of the writing, and so here we get a perfect, authentic representation of the real world. It’s a beautiful piece of mindscape drama with moments of mundane reality turned sour as imagination subverts the antihero’s surroundings as his grip on reality slips away. In this world without Doctor Who, the inviting, beckoning first notes of the theme tune are firmly divorced of the familiar connotations of a children’s show or nostalgic pop culture laughing stock, and become something with reality-bending possibility. The same is true of the cabinet in his room that is gradually revealed to be a Tardis, except now it’s an unfamiliar Tardis just like it was in that first William Hartnel story before the Doctor Who universe became familiar and known. A gateway to new realms which promises possibilities and adventures anew, and takes us back to the show’s roots. Indeed it’s this new realms idea that seems to have inspired The Nowhere Place.
As a declaration of love for Doctor Who, it almost reads as an attempt to follow up Survival with a Talking Heads episode about Doctor Who, and having the series effectively end where it begins. But in terms of where it’s all going, then it’s crucially a Mike Leigh film (and the nursing home setting is perfect for this), where lonely, desperate and pathetic characters meet and implode with each other and the climax of it all is a family reunion that’s been much built up to, and which sees the budding emotions explode to the surface in a cathartic way, if not a triumphant one. It’s probably no surprise that it all goes horribly wrong for Martin, and it would be less than realistic or faithful to the character for him to have a happy ending. He’s an old man so stuck in his ways that there’s only one way downhill for him. But in place of redemption, there’s catharsis as Martin surrenders to madness and it’s the only thing that could ever make him truly happy, living in his fantasy world. As with The Apocalypse Element, a story of endurance amidst misery can be inspirational and beautiful, even if it doesn’t see hope ultimately triumph.
Actually no, the ambiguous ending doesn’t really make things very clear. Perhaps the cabinet really was a Tardis, and Martin was the Doctor all along a la Human Nature. Perhaps it was all a dream. But what seems most likely was that Martin died in the cabinet, but in the moment of death, his mind created his own euphoria of his dreams coming true. Similar to a plague victim’s feverish dreams of saying goodbye to their father in Dalek Empire III, or David Bowie dreaming of making amends with his brother in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. But for all the ambiguities, the real point is the choice that Martin eventually made, choosing the fantasy world of Doctor Who over the misery of the real world and his own family.
New Who’s approach to the fan stigma is a deeply nasty one where a story like Last of the Time Lords is so full of blatant plot holes and contempt for the viewer that it practically yells at the grumbling fan ‘who cares? Move on, it’s over. Let go you obsessive saddo’. Not to mention the way it uses the trendy, snoggable Tenth Doctor as a mouthpiece to renounce all the negative stereotypes of fandom by means of cruel deflection, the most ugly example is in Army of Ghosts when the juvenile Doctor announces to Torchwood in front of Jackie, that he wouldn’t be seen dead travelling with his companion’s mother tagging along (the point where I decided that this mean spirited and immature new series was not ‘my’ Doctor Who anymore). By comparison Deadline presents us with the most sad, bitter, anti-social and repellent fan but still draws our empathy with them and makes the case that they have as much place in fandom as anyone, and as much right to enjoy the show as anyone.
In first impressions Deadline does inevitably seem fan bashing, given its treatment of the anal Juliet Bravo fan, but gradually it becomes apparent that it’s the fan character who is the most happy and content, and it’s the people who do the fan bashing and the people who are most down to Earth who are the most miserable. Unlike Love & Monsters with its elitism and blatant Ian Levine bashing, it’s not dictating what the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ kind of fan is. Whether it’s a joy at the show’s imagination, themes and drama, or simply a joy at lists of figures, continuity references and inconsequential minutia, such joy is rendered truly beautiful in this world of misery. As things are now, we may never hear something this fan-proud ever again.
Let’s make one thing clear though, if this story is simply bleak, nasty and mean spirited to you then it will no doubt be nasty and mean spirited in a way Doctor Who has never been to you before. Even mid 80’s Doctor Who was made passable by its sci-fi fantasy escapist elements that distanced its nastiness from reality. Deadline however is uncomfortably closer to home. What’s more, for a Robert Shearman story it’s surprisingly void of humour.
But for those of us with the inclination to appreciate it, it’s crucially the sincerity that counts. As I discussed in Spare Parts and The Dark Husband, there’s not many Big Finish stories that are truly sincere, but sincerity was always guaranteed when Robert Shearman was behind the typewriter and this is possibly his most sincere work of all. This is an anniversary story that goes completely against the grain, emphasising a love of Doctor Who by imagining the depressing horror of its absence. It’s the antithesis of anniversary stories that dot the history of Doctor Who with a tick box, and instead is doing Doctor Who at year zero, and thus is far more about the possibilities of the show and about how it felt the first time, how haunting and mind expanding the first viewing of the show was. You never know quite what you’re going to get with a Robert Shearman story and that’s no moreso true than here, and so this is actually the ultimate Unbound story that far exceeds the range’s ambitions. It’s a masterpiece.
Arguably this is the worst of the Unbound stories. This is effectively a sequel to Trial of a Time Lord which is devoid of even the better qualities of that turbulent yet compellingly unusual season. The most interesting thing about Trial of a Time Lord is how because it was made whilst the show was under the axe, the story itself almost felt like the show having a moment of mortal awareness and existential angst. In that regard the character of the Valeyard was a chilling symbol of that bell tolling mood, and the temporal vertigo of wondering how far into the future the story could go.
But anyone hoping for even the barest insight into the Valeyard’s mind will be sorely disappointed. Here all potential for the character is completely squandered. A sense of complete lack of thought permeates every aspect of this story. You never for a second, get the sense of a calculating, ticking mind underneath there, you barely even get the sense of two brain cells rubbing together in him (the same problem plagues the Master in New Who). Nor do you get the sense of wonder and horror at seeing the unreachable, forbidden truths about the Doctor’s future, there’s nothing remotely haunting or dramatically satisfying about this story. This story succeeds only in turning the figure into a shallow mindless killer and a spree anarchist, not unlike Nuclear Man in the collection of contrived set pieces that made up Superman IV- The Quest for Peace. Essentially he’s a villain who without motive, rhyme or reason becomes the contrived tool for Gary Russell’s favourite hobby of continuity vandalism.
Continuity may be a dirty word amongst some fans but here it’s certainly for good reason. This story is not outright unfathomable in the way the incompetent 80’s continuity fests could be, but it’s so random and vacuous that nothing actually carries the listener from one scene to the next. As I said in Flip-Flop, a story about time travellers changing history benefits from an emotional impetus for the act, but this has none. This is continuity at the cost of everything else that makes a story work as a piece of drama- characterisation, imagination, tension, discipline. It doesn’t even have any atmosphere, at all.
Gary Russell can pen a decent story when he disciplines himself. He did after all write one of the best Audio Visual stories, Deadfall which still stands as a masterpiece today. His problem has always been when he revisits too many elements to the point where it becomes unmanageable, and this story finds him revisiting the Valeyard, the Doomsday Weapon and Logopolis. For the last example it’s clearly trying to do for Doctor Who what Trials and Tribbleations did for Star Trek in having the present characters interact with the past, but it’s never going to work on audio, it’s simply going to expose the falseness of it all (same with Jon Pertwee’s cameo in Zagreus). When we’re comparing Doctor Who unfavourably to Star Trek you know you’re in trouble. This is very much Doctor Who being fixated on the letter whilst ignoring the spirit, and for all its fannish encyclopaedic details not a shred of thought or imagination seems to have gone into the story.
In homage to The One Doctor, the Valeyard is teamed up with a young common cockney simpleton woman, but unlike in The One Doctor, there’s no character or humour to her, or even tragic naivety of her being a natural follower. For instance the listener feels no empathy with her or concern for her survival when the Valeyard sends her on a dangerous errand. She’s simply a stereotype, much like the Valeyard himself is. The story has missed the irony in a big way, particularly when it comes to the Time Lords. We see the President and Vansell from The Apocalypse Element discussing the problem of the Valeyard, and whilst it gets across the stuffy, lethargic nature of the Time Lords it shouldn’t mean the scene itself has to be boring too, or bogged down with the most asinine dialogue. It’s a sequence that’s honestly painful to listen to and might even make some listeners press eject there and then. No matter what atrocities the Valeyard, or even Mel commit, it simply leaves the listener cold and feeling that none of it is worth caring about. This is of course the problem with continuity in hoping that fans will care now about a revisited story element just because they cared back then. As with the JNT era, relying on continuity and past niche elements can unfortunately become an excuse to be half-hearted in the scriptwriting.
The Valeyard sets off the entropy of Logopolis again but there’s nothing in the story to compliment the theme of decay or delicacy or to get across such an apocalyptic concept. Perhaps revisiting a force of destruction that’s silent wasn’t a good idea on audio. The best that can be said about He Jests at Scars is that the tragic ending just about belatedly makes us care and seems unusually inspired, despite the utter soullessness of everything beforehand. It’s also the only part of the story that has any atmosphere. But the main reason it doesn’t connect with the rest is that the scene seems to be trying to tell us some moral about how evil always undoes itself, but everything about the story tells us that the Valeyard only failed due to being so determinedly and stupidly self-destructive in such a contrived way that it just fails to mean anything representational about natural human folly.
The intent behind He Jests at Scars seems to be to speculate on the question of what if Eric Saward’s more bleak ending had been used for Trial of a Time Lord and the story had ended with the Doctor and Valeyard merging, and thus Michael Damien Grade wasn’t satisfied with it and decided to axe the show there and then. There’s almost a sense that the story is exploring the possibility with glee, and that this is pitched at those of us who partly wished this had happened to spare us the indignity of Season 24 (in truth though, Gary Russell is a confessed Ghostlight fan). Which is fair enough, I often wish the show had ended with Castrovalva before it all turned sensationalist and nasty. The purpose then of He Jests at Scars seems to be to write the final conclusion of Doctor Who. An ultimate finale that kills off every loose end and finally sees the destruction of the universe.
Sadly He Jests at Scars might as well be something written for 1986. It’s archaic in every way. It’s devoid of anything progressive or forward looking, it’s bogged down in depressingly shallow clichés and patronising stereotypes. For an expansive range like the Unbounds that was about pushing boundaries of what Doctor Who is capable of, this derivative regurgitation and stubborn parochialism is almost insulting. Even Michael Jayston and Bonnie Langford can’t save it. It feels true to the era it’s trying to homage, but for all the wrong reasons. It perfectly compliments an era where Doctor Who wasn’t just killed by poor budgeting or scheduling or BBC politics, but by its own introspectiveness and hollow indulgences leading to uninspired directionless lethargy and ultimately outright self-contempt.
“I know the Daleks. I was there at their birth. I fought against them in countless wars. Seen their legacy in the burial pits of a hundred worlds.”
It was nice to get a BBC7 radio series, for no other reason than to hear what sounded like an alternative New Series comeback that was more true to the feel, the substance and tone of the classic series. At the time of this story’s airplay, we’d witnessed New Who indulging the Tenth Doctor-Rose love affair and making it out to be the most important thing in the world. To be fair though, what many commentators often missed was that there was a subtle questioning of whether Rose’s travels with the Doctor are actually healthy, in exposing her to alien wonders and emotional highs the human mind wasn’t designed to see or experience, resulting in her developing a power trip, an insatiable rush, deep insecurities and ultimately a death wish. A theme reflected and complimented by Rose seeing a parallel universe where her parents are married and rich and yet deeply unhappy, and by human astronauts surveying a black hole to find the sight of it driving them mad. But much of this was buried under schmaltz and vulgar sappiness and recently The Stolen Earth compounded the felony by undoing the final goodbye and thus made the whole show seem pitched exclusively at the shipper audience who wanted their favourite onscreen couple to get together so that all would be right with the world again. In that regard it was no longer ‘my’ Doctor Who which was actually once all about coming to terms with the fact that there’s a *lot* that’s not right with the world.
There’s some indication though that they’re pitching this story slightly towards the fans who’ve been less than happy with New Who’s populist and trashy traits. Infact the antagonism here between McGann’s Doctor and Lucie is refreshing, and a welcome relief and a reminder of a time before the Doctor and companion fawned over each other and acted like the most punchable, cliquey couple you’ll ever meet. And it must be said that Sheridan Smith shows a lot of spunk and attitude as Lucie. We’ll be complaining a lot about Big Finish’s growing tendency towards contrived and winceful humour, but the thing about Sheridan Smith is that she brings a real energy to even the most contrived dialogue and is a natural at making each gag sound genuinely spontaneous and sharp.
When it comes to the version of Blood of the Daleks that got radioplay, it should be stressed that on paper there are all the makings of an important morality play here. Steve Lyons is one of the few writers who isn’t at all enamoured with the New Series, and thus he’s the only one using Big Finish to rise up to the challenge of ‘if you think you can do better….’ and is aiming to prove exactly that, and he’ll prove it again with the superb Son of the Dragon which shows up how New Who would never dare to commission anything that’s remotely as challenging. Crucially what Steve Lyons is trying to get back to is the Doctor as a decisive, pro-active element of the plot and most importantly ‘a man with a plan’, not someone who ambles aimlessly through stories and is useless until his companion or a magic lever or token self-sacrifice turns up to save the day. It’s the same way that Steve’s Gallifrey stories mythologised the events of The Invasion of Time as the stuff of Greek legends, allowing us to remember the Doctor as a titanic giant of heroes and wipe from our memory the ineffectual cowardly eunuch that the Doctor was reduced to by JNT and Eric Saward. Mind you even I can’t help thinking that even the Fifth Doctor at his most neutered would probably have done more to sabotage the Daleks’ genocidal plans in Journey’s End than the current model did.
The Doctor is presented here as a fascist, but in a world of lynch mobs and alien hating, trigger happy rednecks, the Doctor is clearly the lesser of two evils. The Daleks describe the Doctor as a genocidal terrorist and from their perspective they’re not exactly lying. But the Doctor’s perspective of Dalek existence being like ‘a perpetual nightmare’ justifies his Dalek-destroying actions as that of a vet delivering a mercy killing. His final confrontation with two surviving Daleks from opposing factions blindly still trying to shoot each other is an inspired, missed opportunity from the many 80’s Dalek civil wars (just when we thought Remembrance of the Daleks was perfect the way it was). Furthermore it shows the Doctor’s conscience clearly playing on him. He has to face them and see them being compulsively evil right to the end, to prove to himself that he did the right thing in condemning the Daleks to death. Paul McGann is clearly relishing playing a spiky, darker Doctor and he really conveys the Doctor’s weary attitude in this scene, seemingly trying to appeal to the Daleks’ better nature simply because he’s bored of what they are. “Come on, just for once surprise me!”
Unlike the New Who season finales which just use the Daleks superficially as basic CGI action flick fodder, this doesn’t lose sight of what the Daleks represent. The story of Eileen Clint is a beautiful, poignant portrayal of the burden of leadership, and the humanity behind an unfairly scorned public figure. As a final poetic note, the Daleks shot down the evacuation ships, but were in turn destroyed when the mobs of humans poured the wreckage onto them.
Unfortunately though, as with Warriors of the Deep, it only takes a few misjudged rewrites and edits to turn the original author’s well-meaning morality play into something rather warped and twisted. For those not in the know, Johnny Byrne’s original script for Warriors of the Deep actually had worthy things to say about the stupidity of nuclear stockpiling without the kind of twisted scorn on humanity that ended up on screen. It didn’t portray the Doctor as an appeaser or have him scorning the humans for defending themselves, or reviving the Silurians so that they can kill more people (you know it’s an Eric Saward rewrite when the Doctor’s behaviour is so recklessly out of character and makes him such a liability that it almost seems like someone’s got a voodoo doll of him and is making him act involuntarily, and when the monsters are being gassed with something lethal and yet they’re refusing to retreat and are able bodied enough to kill off the last surviving guest characters, not to mention the inexcusably stupid and nasty scene where the Silurians only bother to send one Sea Devil to the chemical store, who clearly isn’t going to stand a chance alone and thus has only really been sent there to kill off a guest character). Those were additions made by Eric Saward on the petulant insistence of Ian Levine and JNT (so its not entirely surprising that it comes off so bitterly), which turned a potent tale of human folly into a vile tale where the Doctor’s pascifist ideas and sanctity of life makes him a petty tyrant who gets everyone else killed just to prove himself morally superior. And here history is repeating itself. Just like the humans in Warriors of the Deep, most of the violence the new stock of Daleks exhibited was in self-defence against a genocidal foe. One that they’d initially welcomed with open arms (or rather open plungers) before being attacked without provocation, yet we’re supposed to take their defensive violence as evidence of their scorn-worthy aggression and hostility that leads them to deserve their fate and justifies the turncoat Doctor’s loyalty to and assistance of that far worse enemy. It’s a nasty circular argument of ‘they’re clearly savages that deserve to be killed because they exhibited violence when we tried to kill them’.
It’s a shame because in its original script, there was meant to be more to the story that would have lent actual credence to the Doctor’s merciless judgement on the new Daleks. A thread where Martez gradually mutates herself into a Dalek, only to find her individuality and will being overtaken by the Daleks’ single minded megalomania, which had it made it to the final product, would have instantly ruled out the possibility of the Doctor being able to reason with this new stock, and would also have meant that Martez’ martyrdom and the Doctor’s all too eager willingness to let her die would have made more sense and seemed far less forced or cold blooded. Likewise the point where Eileen accuses the Doctor of being a fascist was clearly meant to go somewhere and lead to an actual moral debate where the Doctor really becomes questionable, but this is quickly forgotten and chickened out of and the listener is left with the impression that we’re meant to be on the Doctor’s side, simply because we must be.
And so the glory days of free reign for writers who want to write something raw and pure and from the heart without having their work being sullied, rewritten or interfered with by the mainline producer have ended, as Big Finish has itself sanitised for radioplay.
All this material that would have given the story more moral depth and, well… fairness was cut out to make way for more crowd pleasing action scenes, so it becomes just another fascistic action popcorn flick that’s all about attitude rather than soul (just like with the vile Dalek Empire IV), and so the dark days of Resurrection of the Daleks are upon us again.
But on those terms it’s very engaging and well paced, and as an audio action experience it’s impossible to fault. Sure the first half is reliant on a bit too much coincidence, much like The Awakening, but otherwise it holds the interest superbly, especially the gripping, all-bets-are-off moment where new companion Lucie, under threat of death from the Daleks, finally agrees to betray the Doctor and sounds like she really means it (this would never happen in New Who of course). The fact that there’s a more noble, but morally uncertain story trying to get out means that it bears relistening, and the fact that this moral angle is demonstrated by plot points rather than sermonised with a hammer makes it far more accessible than Warriors of the Deep was. The directing is cinematic and really conveys a volatile spiky mood, and vividly presents Red Rocket Rising’s nuclear winter of biting winds, pitch black skies and choking pollution, which was well suited for its winter broadcast.
It’s a serviceable pilot. The Doctor’s immediately alien, ambiguous and unpredictable. It’s pacier than Storm Warning, whilst still echoing its mandate as a pilot to show that the psychological adventure and the cosmic are one and the same thing, with the Daleks representing our own dark side, our autisms, rage and psychosis. Moreso it shows newcomers a second ‘genesis’ of the Daleks, in such a way that instantly presents the Daleks as an inevitable product of mankind’s ruthless ambitions, and thus makes Davros superfluous. It’d just be nice if it caught Doctor Who’s morality too.
As with Time of the Daleks, we pause to wonder if perhaps the curse of stories with ‘Time’ in the title has followed into the audios (though it’s something the marvellous Time Reef will dispel). This is certainly the weak middle-chapter in the otherwise very stong Thomas Brewster Trilogy. It’s a story that inherits from that trilogy a pretty compelling idea of the Doctor and Nyssa being stranded without a Tardis after young Brewster had scrumped it. And yet quickly that potential gets utterly squandered. The brief scenes in Girl in the Fireplace of the Doctor facing a life stuck on the linear slow path, gave far more thought to the concept of a Doctor stranded than this story does in its full length.
Part of the problem is that Big Finish no longer seems to make the effort to seduce the listener with its audio landscapes or build a proper sense of setting or space. Big Finish no longer seems to make that magical impression that they used to, and frankly they no longer seem to be trying. So the Doctor, Nyssa and the rest of his block transfer séance-circle find themselves stranded on prehistoric Earth, being menaced by giant sentient scorpions, and the directing does nothing to conjure the towering majesty of the monsters or the treacherous, savage environment. It’s presented in the most boring way possible. In many ways it seems done simply to ape the feel of the 80’s, back when JNT loved to bait controversy by threatening the removal of the iconic Tardis, particularly in Logopolis, Frontios and Attack of the Cybermen (mind you when this was done in The Impossible Planet it seemed almost like a welcome development in that it would have prevented the Doctor and Rose from going back to the bloody Powell estate again), but it amounts to nothing but a gimmick.
The sentient scorpions are reminiscent of the talking worms Paul Magrs created in The Wormery, but this doesn’t have any of the enchantment of The Wormery. The worms in The Wormery, given that a worm halved is a worm doubled were a lovely metaphor really for the two peas from the same pod angle that the story was going for, and of course it suited the wormholes concept, but here the scorpions just seem like a gimmick, who really have any potential mystique robbed of them from the moment we hear them talking like any other petty and colloquial characters, and its telling that when the real star attraction turns up in episode one’s cliffhanger, they become almost an irrelevant forgotten background detail and any sense of menace disappears, again making for a largely boring listen.
To finally drop the major spoiler, the eponymous character is indeed Adric, and to be fair they hid this little revelation very well, much like they did back in the day in Seasons of Fear and Dust Breeding. But as for whether this is a welcome revelation, that’s a whole different matter.
Given that Adric’s death was pretty much set in stone as an important part of the Doctor Who lore and that instead of Matthew Waterhouse, the role of Adric falls instead to ‘an actor’, we spend most of the story expecting him to turn out to be an imposter (since in casting terms that’s exactly what he is), and by the time we realise he’s the genuine article after all, it’s a little late to start caring. This is compounded by the fact that whilst Adric was hardly ever an endearing companion on TV (except for his earlier stories where he worked quite well alongside Tom Baker), the approach here seems to be to take the character’s obnoxious, arrogant and unpleasant qualities and turn them up to eleven, and in the process transforming Adric into a vindictive and cruel bastard and thus denying the listener any chance to feel sympathy for him. The nastiest moment is when Adric comes onto Nyssa and pretty much borderline attempts to rape her, which just leaves a horrible aftertaste for the rest of the play. It’s nothing short of character assassination and it’s far worse than anything Eric Saward ever did to the Doctor. Worse still it’s horribly man-bashing in showing an established character who’s a figure of empathy as a would-be rapist, as if that sums up the whole human male condition. It’s just a really defeatist, scornful view of humanity, much like the new Battlestar Pedantica with its needless use of rape as a sensationalist shock tactic. After listening to Night Thoughts I never wanted to hear the Doctor being put in a position of trying to kill a helpless child ever again, but at least that was somewhat justified by the plot, whilst this is just indulgent nastiness.
We could perhaps look back on The Wormery as a hint that Paul Magrs loves to bring sexuality into the mix, and yes the moment in The Wormery where the Doctor is carrying a drunken Iris and he has to fend off her wandering hands could be construed as sexual harassment too, but it was done there in a cheeky but charming way, as opposed to a sleazy or sinister way.
Actually no, that distinction doesn’t qualify, and I feel guilty of chickening out there, and playing devils’ advocate for a modern culture that’s so immersed in sexuality, irony, card-pulling priviledge and nostalgia for some good old political incorrectness that unless the accused is an unpopular misfit who ‘looks the type’, it’s actually very hard for a victim of sexual harassment to be taken seriously these days, because sexual contact is so perjoratively associated with frivolity and sensuality that it’s hard to even think of the behaviour as ‘brutality’. There are several Big Finish stories, like The Kingmaker and The Greatest Shop in the Galaxy where the female comanion has to fend off sleazy advances and wandering hands, and this is done for comical effect, recalling the cosy nostalgia of the frivolous woman chasing in The Romans and Revelation of the Daleks and many a Carry On film, although with a modern updating in that it’s the guilty man we’re most worried for, since we know the fondled woman is going to be on the warpath now. Yet when the presentation of sexual harassment is done in a more serious and ugly way that conjures a feeling of utter helplessness as in here and in Nekromanteia, suddenly it becomes upsetting to the fans. But the actual fact of sexual harassment isn’t ever funny at all and shouldn’t really be presented as such. Infact quite worryingly sexual harrasers often use humour as a front for their sleazy taunts and mechanical aggression or as a sinister means of grooming, disorientating and dominating their victim (as shown in the film Watchmen), and then publically dismissing their complaints. So maybe its presenation should make the listener uncomfortable, and shouldn’t be shown in a cosy, humorous way. But no the real issue here, as with Nekromanteia is that there just doesn’t feel like there’s enough dramatic substance here, and so the displays of mean spiritedness and perversion just feel like unwarranted and cheap attempts to create artificial drama, hence it just feels gratuitous and nasty.
Of course Adric never showed any inclination for sexuality in the series, despite having something of a crush on Nyssa. Adric was conceived when the show was radically transformed into a nerd trap of computers, endless continuity and with socially awkward, sexually arrested figures of audience identification, and a dynamic in which any interaction between the sexes was chaste and deliberately antagonistic. No wonder Romana had to leave- you couldn’t have a sexually confident woman who was completely comfortable in the company of men in the Tardis anymore. Maybe that’s the point of this story, to argue how a puritanical society based on sexual repression of adolescents can lead to confused, disassociated and sexually harmful behaviours later in life, and a disturbing ‘all or nothing’ view of all male-to-female interactions. In a way Adric is presented here as a creepy corrupt priest or cult leader, using his hypnotic and divine authority to take advantage of his prey.
It seems as if the thinking was to channel Sergio Leone’s brutal masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in America and the way the film shows a juvenile delinquent emerging from prison as an adult but still having the undeveloped, angry and sexually confused mind of a teenager, and to show that enough years of complete loneliness can turn anyone into a desperate lusting monster who’s incapable of empathy. Perhaps the reason it doesn’t work has something to do with the way that Big Finish has become so diluted and lacking in real bite in its approach.
This may sound like a contradiction of every other complaint I’ve made about the audios since Gary Russell left, but this is one story that is sorely in need of some of Paul Magrs trademark humour, because without it this play is simply depressing to listen to. Now Once Upon a Time in America was very melancholy but it worked because it went for the rawest passion and the operatic and drew all the pain and desperation and humanity out of it in powerful bursts. Likewise Dalek Empire and Creatures of Beauty utilised the same primal scream approach and really went for the emotional ecstasy of grief. This however is just miserable, colourless and drab and unshakeably, repulsively bitter. Indeed comparing it to the intense and engaging Creatures of Beauty really shows up how tedious and uninvolving this all is, and shows how really Big Finish has lost its sense of dynamism and visceral power.
Under Gary Russell the audios had been becoming more brutally downbeat with stories like Nekromanteia, No Man’s Land, Singularity, Red and the Divergent Universe arc (and much the same thing had happened back in the day with the Audio Visuals), and now of course Nick is aspiring to reverse that trend and making the range more cosy, fluffy and sanitised, but in this case it simply means that the nastiness is more left field and snidey and goes unreckoned with.
It’s not without its positives but it’s a tedious and miserable wait to find them. Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton give beautifully sensitive performances, particularly when called upon to grieve Adric a second time (again in a manner that puts the crass insincerity of Time-Flight’s grieving scene to the shame it deserves). There are very memorable moments where the Doctor’s reminiscence of Adric’s angry growing pains really does capture the tragedy of the headstrong, confident man that Adric might have grown into if he’d had a proper adolescence, and the scene where Adric returns to the console room and his memories start flooding back is a genuinely charming moment, albeit too little too late.
But it’s not really doing anything that Spare Parts hadn’t done already, and at least that had the wisdom to redefine Adric as a beloved, tragic character post homously and did so through his absence, like the empty school desk of a deceased classmate. So bringing him back on the scene was only going to spoil the mood, especially bringing him back as this creepy, bitter old abomination and still expecting us to sympathise with him. It’s typical of the era it homages in that regard with Davison’s Doctor desperately trying to tell us what a tragedy of misunderstanding this is whilst events around him utterly fail to even remotely support his words.
At its noblest, The Boy That Time Forgot is meant to be a story of redemption, both for Adric to rediscover the good man he once was, and for the Doctor to reckon with his guilt over his failure to save Adric, and its quite inspired that it’s the Doctor’s subconscious guilt that manifests itself as the saviour of Adric. But it’s done so didactically in such a drawn out way that offers nothing else to hold our interest whilst the Doctor talks at Adric at length to change his ways again and again. And ultimately it’s not the redemption that leaves the lasting impression, but the bitterness and nastiness that preceded it. Still, the next Davison story will be the masterpiece Time Reef which carries the same idea of the Fifth Doctor being an inept parent but at the same time makes for a refreshingly beautiful, feelgood and good-spirited contrast to this depressing and repugnant tale.
In conclusion if we asked whether it was worth undoing the impact of the dramatic demise of Adric in Earthshock for the sake of seeing him once again and seeing what he could have become had he lived, then the answer is a definite ‘no’. Although some might say with justification that Adric’s death in Earthshock was the beginning of the end for the show, marking the point where it became fashionable to rely solely on shock tactics like the mean times demaded, and to undermine the Doctor’s competence and encouraged the production team to do stories like Warriors of the Deep, Resurrection of the Daleks and Mindwarp that were so desperate to be downbeat that they had to reduce the Doctor to a shadow of his former self and end on the kind of note of senseless failure that would probably leave the audience feeling like the butt of some tasteless practical joke.
But at the same time Adric’s death was a fixed point, and Big Finish had always managed to add to the Davison era without taking anything away from it, until now that is. Infact by undoing Adric’s death, Big Finish have taken away what might have been the only tenuous but plausible explanation for the neurotic, voodoo-doll-spell characterisation and ghastly histrionics of the Fifth Doctor and his companions. The way character reactions veered erratically from melodrama to apathy, or the Doctor became prone to robotic or reckless, self-defeating actions or complete inertia, or an obtuse outlook of complete denial. You could almost, at a stretch have put these down to very real symptoms of depression and grief over Adric’s death. But this story goes and rewrites history and takes all that away and worse still it doesn’t replace it with anything interesting or worthwhile.
All things considered, we’re left wondering why the new audience-aware and supply and demand-driven Big Finish bothered with this idea. It’s not like Adric’s character has had a resurgence of popularity lately. Infact given that the New Who episode The Long Game was a contrived and pointless exercise in introducing an Adric-clone as companion only to insult them and have the new Doctor shown to be too ‘cool’ to tolerate him (infact most viewers not privy to fan opinion would probably be simply baffled by the Doctor’s hostility in that story), it seems Adric is as maligned and scorned just as much today as he ever was, and I honestly don’t think any Adric-fans would like this story anyway. So the only reason we can think of for Big Finish indulging this derivative desperate fanwank is that they must be running sorely low on inspiration and are running out of slots to fill, and thus are having to contrive new gaps to plug, just like Dalek Empire has recently had to double back on itself in order to keep going.
Whilst most post-2006 Big Finish audios have simply been bland and forgettable, this is one release alongside Dalek Empire IV that sees Big Finish actively undoing and tarnishing all the good work it has done so far, and along with Creed of the Kromon and Night Thoughts, it’s one of the few audios to make me want to thank the Mighty Kroll that Big Finish isn’t canon. This is nothing but an insult to the TV lore that it’s leeching off. And that’s coming from someone who couldn’t care less about the JNT era’s canonicity.
Following on from something as thinly stretched and mediocre as The Condemned (which for an Eddie Robson story was unusually uninspired), things are not looking good.
So what’s the nub of why this story is such a failure? Well Lawrence Miles, in one of his usual poison pen blogs, cited writer David Quantick’s personal history of mocking Doctor Who and its ‘sub-human’ fans as proof that he’s a fraud looking to cash in on the show now that it’s lucrative, and heralded the commisioning of this story as a sign of Big Finish going down the pan. But this doesn’t really wash because hardly anyone in the ‘elite’ of fandom doesn’t see themselves as superior from the vantage point of their own pomp, or regard the ‘lesser’ fans with utter contempt. Just read Jon Blum’s GB postings where in a desperate effort to get a writing job on New Who, he plays the role of RTD’s personal bulldog and reminds the fans of their inferiority whenever he hears an opinion he doesn’t like, or try to watch Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat talking about fandom on the confidentials or commentaries without wanting to throw things at the screen.
Fandom is very business minded, moreso because it’s something of an underworld, and it’s all about trampling others to get to the top and treating your audience mean and keeping them keen, and frankly Lawrence’s dig at David Quantick is the epitome of the pot calling the kettle black. Lawrence’s two favourite terms of endearment for the fans are ‘scum’ and ‘vermin’ (mind you, given his caddish conduct with a certain slash fiction writer, Lawrence really should know better than to throw stones when living in a glass house). In-fact the few exceptions to this rule that come to mind are Robert Shearman and Steve Lyons. Like all subcultures that get a bad rap from the mainstream if they get noticed at all, its pecking order is especially vicious and its members have learned to weather the bullying, stigma or ostracism from society by becoming the snobs of their own little elite (though they’ll usually play the victim when someone bites back). Don’t forget that fandom is the only place where these high flyers and superfans have a name that matters, and the only place where they can behave like middle management scum, and many of them know that the comeback of Doctor Who has curtailed their shelf-life.
But such pretension, cynicism and snobbishness generally doesn’t impugn their talents as writers. Just listen to The Fearmonger as an example of the rich creativity that Jon Blum is capable of when he’s not busy taking cheap shots at straw men on GB. Even Russell T. Davies can write well sometimes (Tooth & Claw, Midnight), but when writing for Doctor Who he suffers from spreading himself too thin and he is very resistant to taking risks or doing anything that might compromise the show’s populism, which is where the trashy, dumbed down content and cop-out endings come from. For instance it’s clear that New Earth and Last of the Time Lords should have ended in utter misery rather than quasi messianic rubbish, but would anyone have wanted to watch the show anymore if they had? Maybe, but to Russell it wasn’t worth the risk. At its best, Russell’s writing plays safe in a deceptive way, where a seemingly innocuous moment or line of dialogue catches you far later as being far more poignant and meaningful than you first realised. At worst it means a serious thread of dialogue will suddenly turn flippant in a manner that’s almost brutally jarring and drama bursting. New Who is quite simply one of the most insecure shows in existence and sometimes in its desperation to be popular it seems to honestly have no real respect for itself.
But compare a Russell T Davies story to this (even Partners in Crime) and it’s clear that this has far less substance or heart. The worst Russell episodes are time fillers with tedious inane humour and equally repetitive protracted character material making up the deficit. This isn’t even that. The whole premise of the story is one lame joke stretched over an hour and a half. In other words I’ve seen plenty of Russell T. Davies’ stories that completely squandered their potential, but Planet of the Dead was the only one that shared this story’s complete lack of any poential from the outset.
It’s clear that David is writing this to press fandom’s buttons, filling it with humour and making its first cliffhanger out of the Doctor’s declaration of marriage. To be honest this is nothing new for the fandom elite either, indeed it’s something Paul Cornell did regularly, the most over-earnest and spiteful example of course being Death and the Daleks. It’s that desperate fannish insecurity of not wanting to seem too enthusiastic, by not so much curbing their enthusiasm as giving the object of their enthusiasm a major kicking and treating the old show with pretentious disinterest, and it’s something that’s certainly creeped into the new show itself, with its flippancy and anti-intellectualism.
The fact is the New Who revival has made it more fashionable than ever to talk down and sneer at the classic series as if the New Series has suddenly rendered it obsolete and worthless. When under the producership of Gary Russell, who is as shamelessly fan proud as they come, Big Finish used to be about fighting against the shortcomings of the old series to get straight to the heart of all that the series could and should have been. Now it’s afraid to be seen as being that sad as to bother polishing an embarrassment, unless they can claim to be being ‘ironic’ about it. And so from now on we’ll be seeing an increasing trend in the audio writers adding their own mocking commentary into the script itself whether we want to hear their ‘oh so witty’ remarks spoiling the actual story or not. The worst example will be the way the concept of the Guardians is destroyed in the Key 2 Tme trilogy.
The trouble with how The Dark Husband tries its hand at the same, is that it doesn’t even manage to make us angry because it’s not even half as provocative as it thinks it is. The real problem here is how weak and groansome it all is. No-one believes for a moment that anything life changing is going to happen to the Doctor here. Even The Doctor’s Daughter might have had us more fooled. After the utterly weak marriage cliffhanger, the subsequent twist cliffhanger involving the blue flame is also nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is, and the resolution can be seen a mile off.
Furthermore the opening action scene where the Doctor and his companions have to dodge lazer bolts from a battleship is perfunctory enough without having Hex throwing schoolyard insults at the villains to completely destroy any tension, and from there it makes the world here and any threats contained within damn near impossible to believe in or care about.
There was a time when the Doctor Who audio stories that fitted into the comedy genre were something groundbreaking and special. In The One Doctor, the humour was truly charming because it was imaginative and spontaneous and yet very well structured, and because it parodied our own ‘knowing’, celebrity obsessed media so well. In The Holy Terror, the humour really worked as something life affirming that complimented the story’s existentialism, and was used to really rail against and attack something that deserved ridicule. The same was true of Jubilee which used cruel humour to portray a frightening, vapid world of madness, callousness and ever changing rules and a minefield of etiquette. Likewise The Wormery had a certain heartbreaking sense of each transient beautiful moment of life passing into the ether, beneath its joy de vie humour (in a manner that harks back to when Doctor Who really was about the essence of life, the preciousness of each moment and each decision and the unstoppable momentum and shape of grand historical events, before the 80’s saw the show stagnate and degenerate into soulless, po-faced meandering continuity porn and self-destructive nihilism). The Kingmaker worked for the same reasons that Black Adder did, because it was about how history can be more absurd than fiction, and presenting us with the compelling dynamic of an anti-hero who was shrewder than the times he was living in. And Bang-Bang-A-Boom just generates such wonderful natural frission between its outrageous and larger than life characters. But now Big Finish seems to be doing comedy stories as an ends in themselves, as a cynical requirement rather than for artistic reasons. It’s Big Finish in the wake of New Who’s popularity crying out to be seen as an approachably fun and frivolous team and not like the serious, humourless kind of fans. But now the humour is no longer complimenting the story, so much as completely diluting and sanitising it. It’s the same way that the promising Assassin in the Limelight has its dramatic intrigue and pathos diluted into insignificance by excess smug humour. Likewise this isn’t spontaneous humour, it’s really very tedious and patronising, and far from being life affirming, it brings home the whole falseness of it all.
True there are points where The Dark Husband feels genuinely adventurous which makes it occasionally feel charming. The concept is an impressive one and very Doctor Who at heart, where warring cultures have a ritual of putting down their arms and coming together in celebration once a century before going back to war again, though it’s a tedious journey to get there with time wasted on reading the travel brochure, which recalls the cumbersome days of Season 22 where we’d have to waste time on Tardis bitching scenes and setting up inflight seat belts when we just wanted the damn story to start. Basically the sheer insulting dumbing-down and cynicism of the whole thing means that the charm doesn’t last long.
The final climax feels truly spooky and adds a new magical, elemental feel to this world, only to be spoilt by the smug, knowing resolution which feels like it would have been more in place in a Katy Perry song, and certainly would have been far less tedious for it. A pervading, patronising feel of ‘this’ll do’ runs through the whole thing, and ultimately it’s a story that bears an intriguing listen once, and just might make you laugh once, but you’ll probably never want to hear it again afterwards.
“War is horrible enough but incompetent war is an abomination.”
Although it probably comes in for more flack than it really deserves, there’s no denying that this is where Big Finish majorly jumps the shark. Big Finish was once a boundless free-reign venture for fans who owned Doctor Who and could do what they liked with it, making it the way we always wanted it to be and were happy to prove that actually yes they could do Doctor Who better than the most recent producer. Now Doctor Who no longer belongs to us, and anyone knows that since the return of New Who, the mood of fandom has become particularly rancorous again. In particular, on the late Outpost Gallifrey, one poster expressed the opinion that they thought Rennaisance of the Daleks was a better, more substantial Dalek story than Journey’s End, and they were swiftly pounced on and stripped for this by half a dozen opinion-nazi sychophantic creeps. Then again OG was one of those elitist, view by membership only type fan forums that nearly always have a sinister underworld, cultish, pretentious secret society vibe to them complete with vindictive back alley creeps who love to make up a whole history with you when they’ve never met you, and are usually ran by shadowy middle management scum. Fandom now seems to be a place where personal expression and expectations for anything greater than what we’ve got are ruthlessly stifled, mocked and smacked down. In short whatever side of the fence you’re on, the New Series is seen as being as good as it gets. There’s either no room for improvement, or no redeeming Doctor Who from how low it’s sunk, and so on each side of the fence, the fandom that once possessed such drive and creativity, has never become so entropic.
Now, Big Finish lives in the shadow of Doctor Who’s new found success and wants a piece of the pie. Now Big Finish is geared towards apeing the qualities and formulas that make New Who a success and no longer aspiring for anything more than that. Now Big Finish is making product, not art. Big Finish’s audience was assured by the absence of the TV series. Now that the series is back on our screens, some fans are likely to lose interest in the audios and would be reluctant to bother with any substitute. Besides some fans might have simply gotten bored with the well Big Finish was reusing. But New Who’s success has led Big Finish to try to market itself at the new fans.
As I said above, a writer no longer has free reign to write what they want without interference from the range producer. This was once a Christopher Bidmead story but it was so heavily rewritten that Bidmead eventually wanted his name taken off it. This would not have happened under Gary Russell who respected a writer’s integrity and allowed their work to have the purity that made Big Finish so special. Of course Bidmead has very little regard for the New Who approach, as he made clear in a recent DWM interview which surprisingly the magazine had the courage to actually print, though predictably it desperately tried to paint Bidmead as a phenomenally unhinged grump who doesn’t know how to be hip enough to join the party, in a manner that just confirms how low the magazine’s maturity level has sunk since the revival. I don’t agree with Bidmead’s views on the Williams/Adams era, but all his points about New Who are spot on. Suffice it to say, Bidmead’s writing was always about the journey being as important as the destination, and indeed it was the moments of realist banality and the vaguely real-time presentation of Logopolis that made it such an effective, subversive story, so he’s certainly antithetical to New Who’s ‘cut to the chase’ fast food television approach, so no wonder Bidmead and the new regime Big Finish aren’t going to work symbiotically, which is a shame because Doctor Who stories pretty much live or die by their creative symbiosis. This is perhaps the biggest problem with Big Finish now, in that the quieter atmosphere building moments are now being treated as a vacuum that needs to be filled with attention seeking winceful humour and routine character motions that somehow manage to make the audio feel even more tedious. Say what you will about Castrovalva’s dull patches, at least they hinted at the plot going somewhere greater.
You can hear echoes of Bidmead’s themes and concepts in this- the Zero Room gets put to healing use again; the world of Logopolis and block transfer computations are name dropped and we see walls of Daleks standing on each other’s heads, which should be a nightmarish vision. We see Daleks cut down to size in much the same way as the Tardis was in Logopolis (and in that regard the mini-Daleks briefly conjure the same charm as the Gremlins), but this is sadly too short lived. Also like Logopolis, the first half of the story is spent arbitrarily introducing a crowd of temporary companions from various locations seemingly on a whim and the Tardis doesn’t reach its destination until the second half. But crucially there’s nothing underlying to give these concepts or images meaning or memorability like there was in Bidmead’s past efforts. Logopolis and Frontios had their themes of decay, Castrovalva had its theme of identity. Whatever got lost in the rewrites, it’s left this story without a point.
This is definitely a post-New Who story, in the sense that to paraphrase Ace, the plot moves so fast it ceases to exist. The Doctor’s developing war of words with General Tillington happens completely out of the blue as though we’ve missed several weeks of backstory and developing antagonism and as such this just comes across as hollow sound and fury from the outset. This thread is then discarded quickly as the Doctor runs away, as if Big Finish is deliberately undoing all its good work by regressing the Fifth Doctor back into the spineless coward he was on TV. There’s an interesting moral question raised by this encounter in that the Dalek invasion of Earth in the 22nd century has been prevented and Earth has been saved, but the Doctor, in trying to put history back on its proper course is going to ensure the invasion does happen after all. This is also in line with Bidmead’s themes in Logopolis and Frontios of the Doctor sometimes having to let terrible atrocities happen if causality demands it. If Bidmead had been allowed to make the story his own, maybe that theme would have come to the fore and made for a much more challenging story, rather than this angle being effectively discarded. Then there’s the new companions. Tillington’s nephew Wilton throws himself at the Doctor’s feet to get on board, in a manner that’s completely random and forced. It’s also all too close to the frequent meanness of New Who of showing the Doctor being chased and fawned over by tagalong fans that he has nothing but contempt for. It’s particularly saddening to see the nice guy Fifth Doctor retconned this way here, just like it was in Time Crash.
Contrived random stops are then made to pick up Nyssa who is joined by ye old English knight Mullbery, and then to pick up Floyd and Alice from historical American warzones, the American Civil War and Vietnam respectively. It’s clear what the story is trying to do, in linking humanity’s history of warfare to the evil of the Daleks, in the same way that Genesis of the Daleks did. Whilst it gets across the horrors of both wars, the death pits where soldiers are helplessly shot like fish in a barrel, or the poisonous fumes of Agent Orange, it only does this in a transitionary way which is immediately forgotten when they change location. There’s no sense of a mood or tone being carried or applied consistently. Instead what we’re left with is a Tardis crowded with particularly annoying, obnoxious Yankee stereotypes. For many listeners this was the point in the audio when the wall of sound became completely repellent and inaccessible. We recall Bidmead’s approach to Logopolis and Castrovalva of crowding the Tardis as a means of thrusting ordinary people into extraordinary situations and showing how they manage to cope, and it’s not really till the end that they get to do anything pro-active. When they do it requires them to take the hint of the Doctor’s inspiring clue of singing ‘three blind mice’ (a moment which Peter Davison actually manages to make quite charming), but even that is an anticlimax which achieves nothing constructive.
The actual final confrontation takes place in the Dalek lair, which should be an awe inspiring, nightmarish vision of the show’s lore being subverted. Of Logopolis being ran by Daleks who now have the power to change, pervert and crush the very form of the universe. But it just doesn’t conjure anything of the kind. It just feels like any other Dalek headquarters. No worse, it feels like a headquarters made out of sandcastles. There we meet the Graylish, which probably amounts to the biggest wasted opportunity of the whole thing. The Graylish is basically a humanoid Dalek with future sight and which believes itself to be an impartial God that’s indifferent to the evils of the Daleks. There’s so much more that could have been done with this concept but the Graylish arrives too late into the story, which by this point is swamped by the crowded cast and info dumps of the Daleks’ latest dastardly plans and thus the Graylish is never able to come into its own presence.
Worse still, it only takes the Doctor a few words in its ear to turn the Graylish against the Daleks and destroy their world in an almighty cop-out that rivals Terror of the Autons and The Daemons in the rankings of anticlimaxes. The difference is that Terror of the Autons and The Daemons just might leave the viewer with the impression that the Earth has been saved by a lucky fluke. Renaissance of the Daleks however never managed to convey that anything was ever really at stake in the first place and so the threat might as well have been rubbed out with an eraser. So lacking is the sense of danger that Mulberry’s sacrifice simply seems pointless and feels rather wrong and hollow.
Christopher Bidmead wasn’t the best Doctor Who writer, especially when it came to phonetics and dialogue, but there was a method to his writing, his themes, concepts, imagery and longeurs that produced some of the more musing, haunting and memorable stories of the 80’s. Frankly the show needed a tedious perfectionist like him and if he’d stayed on as script editor during the JNT years, the decline of the show might have been averted. Judging from Logopolis and Frontios, he had a greater sense of the show’s utilitarianism than Eric Saward did, and he could craft suspenseful, downbeat stories without having to completely castrate or character assassinate the Doctor. But if Bidmead’s TV stories were sharply memorable with a visual sting, then this rushed, disposable, forgettable audio story is the complete opposite. Even though Peter Davison does his best to inject urgency into the story, the whole thing is just a washout, and if it’s not a washout then it’s probably simply very annoying. There’s a nagging sense that this is all down to Bidmead’s original ideas being compromised, sanitised and overwritten, and it’s the same compromised, diluted feeling we’ll get when we come to Assassin in the Limelight, The Condemned and (although we quite like it) Brotherhood of the Daleks. Frankly if things had always been done this way, we never would have gotten masterpieces like Davros or Jubilee, or Natural History of Fear, and now there’s a worry that we may never see their like again.
“Perhaps the Cybermen have the right idea. They don’t have to go through this.”
The Doctor running from the cops on the streets of Baltimore, gratuitous references to Miami Vice, and with Babylon 5’s Claudia Christian as special guest star. As with The Juggernauts, part of the appeal of The Reaping is that it feels like a speculation of what would have happened if America had taken over and produced the show themselves immediately after the ‘85 cancellation crisis, and thus ensuring Colin Baker got a deserved full run as the Doctor. The Reaping feels like a glimpse of what that series might have been like, or rather what we hoped it would be like. Bold, cinematic, futuristic, media savvy and distinctly teen orientated. It also shares with The Juggernauts a rather retributive conclusion that doesn’t care if it contradicts continuity or makes the Doctor a hypocrite, as if it’s being pitched towards an American audience that expects such harsh justice. This is Doctor Who as many of us would have wanted it to be. A Doctor Who that could look respectable and have a real cool and street cred rather than the pitiable freakshow it had become in the 80’s. In other words, something that would have the rich production of the McGann movie, but with the bullish, irascible Sixth Doctor there to prevent things from getting sentimental or Hollywoodized.
Ultimately though, The Reaping is very much a Season 22 story, and not a good one. It’s little different to how Joe Lidster’s The Rapture encompassed every negative notion of the McCoy era, i.e. angsty, tonally schizophrenic stories directed by film students let loose with a video camera. From the Doctor’s threat to throw scaldling hot cyanide in the brainwashed cop’s eyes, to the crass and hollowly manipulative killing off of Peri’s last ties to Earth, the Reaping has plenty of deplorable moments that leave a bad taste in the mouth. As with most of Season 22’s output, it doesn’t help that there’s a wafer thin plot to expose the pointless deaths as gratuitous and make the Doctor’s more devious and thuggish behaviour seem unprovoked and unmitigated. Particularly here where the Doctor is up against an already pretty beat up enemy, who doesn’t take any effort to vanquish, infact they practically die of natural causes in the end. As is too often the case, a gratuitous midway twist is added which only serves to cheat and disappoint by making the story smaller and less urgent as the invasion of the marching dead is revealed to be a hoax in a major copout.
What it does have over Season 22 though is a touch of humanity. Ever since New Who came along with its self involved emotional mush and spoilt crybaby companions, Big Finish, like a lot of fans heralded it as ‘full blooded drama’ and developed a major case of amnesia, and misremembered all Doctor Who on TV and audio before New Who as somehow being emotionally vapid all along (as if The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The War Games, Inferno and The Geen Death never happened). This story where Peri is returned to her family is the proposed remedy to something that wasn’t a problem in the first place, certainly not in the audios (well, if you don’t count the Gary Russell ones). Doubtless many of the fans who hated the domestic/soap approach in New Who will hate it here, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea and certainly in New Who it was forced down our throats, repeated to the point of becoming hollowed out and making the whole so-called ‘adventure’ series feel stuck on a council estate. It was almost as if the makers were determined to get a negative response from fandom and would keep doing it till they got a reaction.
What we have here is fairly shrewd material. Peri’s relationship with her mother is a very human one, a relationship that’s deeply antagonistic and yet oddly functional for that reason. There’s clearly a strong mother-daughter bond beneath the harsh words and furious passions. And of course it provides a precedent for Peri’s relationship with the Sixth Doctor. On TV, the Sixth Doctor and Peri were simply bickering adolescents, reflecting the show at its most petty and immature and leaving most viewers baffled as to why Peri willingly travelled with such a bully. Here the dynamic is redefined as something Freudian, giving a soul to what was once simply shallow attitude. More importantly when the Cybermen attack, it gives Peri a chance to answer back to her mother’s judgement of her being a failure by showing how capable she is in a crisis. But what’s really touching and human is that her mother can’t accept that, feeling that her daughter has now been brainwashed or transformed beyond recognition.
But as with a lot of Season 22, The Reaping lacks the right kind of symbiosis. These domestic scenes feel like a requirement rather than the heart of the tale. They shouldn’t because effort has gone into trying to make it cohesive. The Cybermen of the 80’s were particularly characterised by their masculinity. Earthshock indulges a particularly homo-erotic exhibition of Cyberman troops. As much as it sums up the style over substance of the era, Earthshock is a very good entertaining story that catches Eric Saward’s brutal actioneering approach to Doctor Who at its most fresh and dynamic, as opposed to the horribly slow, leering, contrived and cynical approach to Seasons 21 and 22. Then there’s Attack of the Cybermen which makes the Cybermen’s masculinity more clear by pitching them against the Cryons in a battle of the sexes, and of course continues the 80’s Robocop macho storytelling tradition of ‘pain builds character’, in the way the much derided hand crushing scene is meant to represent Lytton’s resilience and penance in one go. Silver Nemesis continues with this battle of the sexes with Ace, Lady Peniforte and the Nemesis Statue herself causing the biggest Cyber-colatteral. In that regard here the deliciously cheeky notion of the deceased father of the household becoming a Cyberman and bursting from his grave, announcing in a metallic voice ‘It is me. It is…. Daaaaad’ at the cliffhanger is firmly in line with this. The same is true of when the lead Cyberman sees what it believes to be the perfect all-Cybernised future, puts the Doctor in a fatherly hug grip and insists he watches and takes pride in its handywork in a manner that can only be seen as an emotional desire to bond with the Doctor and share its philosophy. It’s a strangely poignant moment of cyber-pathos.
This is in many ways a story which takes the usual 80’s father-son bonding exercise of having video nights of watching Miami Vice and Zombie movies together and runs with it, imagines it’s all real and that the family home really is under siege from the real cops and zombies, so having the Cybermen and their brainwashed police minions here fits very cosily here. Perhaps too easily, because it gives the Cybermen such an assured place in the story that they do little to subvert it. As with Cuddlesome this story has aspirations of being very 80’s pop-culture savvy, where the Doctor’s first trip to the future is to a visual media repository called the Gogglebox, and he can marvel at the prospect of watching a marathon of the Police Academy films without it seeming out of character.
As I said before, this gives the story a distinctly ‘cool’ and ‘hip’ feel but in a way that speaks to the fans, particularly of the Colin Baker era. Peri does demonstrate the character growth we knew she was capable of, showing how the once spoilt, self-involved brat has learned empathy, heroism and utilitarianism as second nature from the Doctor. It’s a revisit that’s bittersweet, aware that sometimes a return home to family after a long breathing space apart reveals the depressing truth that nothing ever changes, which again makes the rigid, single-minded Cybermen a perfect foil to the story. We have a particularly snobbish and suffocatingly parochial family at its heart (this is definitely how the show would have done domestic back in the 80’s), the despised vagrant Daniel Woods who is wrongly suspected of murder and made a pariah out of by the bereaved family, and we have Kathy Chambers, the geeky best friend who welcomes Peri’s return with some anxious reservations of how the return of the popular girl is going to make her seem insignificant and ignored again. And amidst this we have the Sixth Doctor, the alien non conformist who despite being just as much of an outsider as the rest, has enough natural authority and sense of purpose, dignified decorum and quick wit to stand apart and proud. The scene where the Doctor delivers a promise of vengeance to the Cyberleader after killing one of the innocents is most welcome to those who remember how this Doctor’s unscrupled ruthless streak sets him apart from the rest, and this would be doubly welcome to fans after recently having to endure David Tennant’s messianic “I forgive you” and “make this society’s foundation that of a man who never would” rubbish.
But again it gets back to the needlessly nasty moments, which amidst the above plot points, come completely out of left field. The death toll is actually fairly mild by Doctor Who standards but the deaths themselves are unpleasantly cheap. Take Daniel Woods for example. A wrongfully accused man with a name to clear, but who doesn’t want to face the Cybermen again, and so he declares defeatism. But the Doctor rather deviously manipulates him into getting involved, by using the man’s grief of his deceased wife against him. So Daniel joins the noble fight, finds understanding with the unpopular teenager Kathy Chambers who offers understanding about the loss of his wife, and just when he seems to be on the halfway point of completing his character journey of healing process and turning from weasel into hero, he’s suddenly killed off, and the Doctor’s culpability in involving him and failing to protect him is almost cavalierly brushed aside.
This is meant to be an exploration of the Doctor’s failings and death as his constant companion and the opening of questions about how trustworthy the Doctor is, which will be followed up and presumably answered in The Gathering. This particularly shows in the Doctor’s confrontation with the Cyber-leader, who reveals the gullible failings of the Doctor that made him easy to manipulate, and how it killed Mr Chambers to use the Doctor’s compassion against him. The Cyber-leader also demonstrates a philosophy of linear time and causality that makes the Cybermen seem suddenly at odds with the Doctor’s judgement of them being an entropic lost cause. Not to mention that when the Cyber-leader calls the Doctor’s bluff and has Nathaniel killed, it’s making a point about how the Doctor’s private war with the Cybermen has a cost when they finally learn to push back. But like much of the Eric Saward era, it tends far more towards shock than substance, and comes across not so much as challenging and more like a cheat, of making the audience the butt of a particularly tasteless practical joke. The culmination of which is of course the death of Peri’s mother, killed by a malfunctioning plot device that the Doctor carelessly left in her hands. I’m sure many of us would have loved this to have happened to Rose’s mother in New Who, but even if this is wish fulfilment of killing off the companion’s last ties to Earth and barring future excursions into the land of soap, it’s still unpleasant to hear. It’s so obligatory and required as to be cold blooded. Peri’s tearful grieving scene is poignant, Nicola Bryant’s performance in the scene is brilliant and there’s a real naïve tragic beauty of her distraught wondering if maybe the emotionless Cybermen have the better life if they don’t have to go through this pain. But other than that it’s such an afterthought to the story that it just can’t help but feel crass and manipulative. It also makes the Doctor seem like a manipulative opportunist in taking her back to the Tardis whilst she’s at her most vulnerable. When Terror Firma viewed a bereaved family, it reckoned with the grief in a thorough and cathartic way that was borderline therapeutic. This just feels like striking at a raw nerve of something we all go through, and more importantly as an add on to the Colin Baker years on TV, it just feels like the last word on an era that delighted in abusing and tormenting Peri.
It’s a solid production with wonderful sound design and atmosphere. The script is witty, intricate and intriguing and it always bears a relisten and is never any less than engaging. If anything there’s a disheartening shame in how the quality of writing should be above such cheap tactics. Come on Joe, you’re better than this.
“Juggernauts, Doctor. The name has been copyrighted!”
The Juggernauts is essentially Big Finish’s Greatest Hits. It’s a sequel to Davros that certainly suffers from sequelitis. Infact it’s a carbon copy of Davros, right down to the Bejeweled-style space age music score and Davros’ crocodile tears of faux guilt, but done with a more populist lean, taking out the talky monologue approach and replacing it with more elaborate, actioneering scenes and bringing the Daleks and Mechanoids to the party to spark fireworks. It’s basically a second, more polished go at the full-blown cinematic fanwank of The Apocalypse Element, and in that it’s more successful. Whilst Davros was mainly about ambience and reminiscence, this is altogether a more immediate and visceral beast.
Cinematic is perhaps the key word here. Colin Baker often spoke about doing American conventions leading up to the cancellation crisis, and how various TV network heads asked Colin if when he got back to Britain, he could maybe persuade the BBC to increase their run of episodes because there was a demand amongst American viewers for more Doctor Who. John Nathan Turner’s excessive promotion of the show was a double edged sword that the show ultimately fell onto, as the media tabloids that JNT believed he was so savvy with, predictably built up the show and then knocked it down. But making mid-80’s Doctor Who into something sellable to the Americans, given that it already had an American companion, and a more domineering, violent and retributive Doctor who was more in the mould of 80’s American TV heroes, could have held much promise. If America had bought the series there and then, and given it a decent budget, the show probably would have survived the 80’s and the Sixth Doctor would have gotten the chance to complete his journey, unstripping and mellowing the character as he’d hoped to do, and the members of rec.arts.drwho would have not had the ‘atrocious’ McCoy era to bitch about (more on this later).
In many ways this feels like wish fulfilment of what such an American 80’s take on the series would be like, with a beautiful idyllic colony world setting and credible corporate sci-fi environment that sounds like it looks like a million bucks (if that makes sense). It’s also got something of a frat party feel to its guest cast, which makes us wish for a world where 80’s Doctor Who actually got the youth element right. The teenage audience would much rather see the female companion be lusted after by some confident young hunk like Geoff, than slimy, balding creeps like Jobel. And to top it off, Davros gets his comeuppance early into his character journey, which really makes this feel like American television at its most gratifyingly retributive.
It doesn’t fair too badly as a sequel to Davros and manages to avoid being one long excuse for itself, but put all the Davros audio stories together and it’s the one that has the least intrigue or surprises to offer. It does also rather repeat some of the minor faults of the original Davros audio. Again it feels rather too knowing and as though the cast has already watched Remembrance of the Daleks before it’s meant to have happened. A nitpicky point but the Doctor describes the Daleks that are hunting for Davros as the ‘renegade faction’, even though Davros doesn’t yet have the imperial authority over the Daleks for them to even be called ‘renegade’. Furthermore Krisen’s death isn’t really justified beyond the fact that the bad guy has to kill someone to remind us he’s the bad guy and to demonstrate how dangerous the Mechanoids are, so it might as well be Krisen, even though Davros’ reasons for killing him are unusually petty even for him, and it requires the spineless Krisen to be uncharacteristically defiant and unruly in order to provoke Davros to do it.
That aside though it manages for the most part to avoid the mistake most sequels make (particularly in Doctor Who) of having established characters inexplicably changed and forced to act upon false or contrived motives. It never really feels insincere as a story. I’d highlighted before how the final moments of Davros seem to show the Doctor making an unspoken promise to destroy Davros the next time they encounter each other, and how the Doctor’s actions in The Juggernauts rather invalidate that, but since it was open to interpretation in the first place it hardly qualifies as a retcon, let alone an offensive one.
As with Davros’ previous audio outing, it places our villain in a corporate environment and displays just how well he fits in there with the other yuppie scum and narcissistic personality disorder types. For all that it felt unpleasant and wrong in Season 22 to see Peri being constantly lusted after, given the show’s increasing awareness of how corporate the world was becoming in the 80’s in stories like Vengeance on Varos and Revelation of the Daleks, perhaps the treatment of Peri was a fair reflection of that corporate, all-commodifying world where unfortunately such sexual harassment and abuse of power were depressingly common.
Davros is therefore just another workplace bully, namely the Jekyll and Hyde type bully who wears a mask of politeness but exploits and intimidates his co-workers whenever he has the opportunity to drop his guise. As with the political backbiting in the Gallifrey spin-off, only a fan writer who’s seen the elitist, business minded side to Doctor Who fandom could appreciate and capture so faithfully such a backstabbing and spiteful villain with such authenticity.
To make the metaphor more concrete, Davros adopts the moniker of Vaso to be his affable Jekyll side. Terry Molloy manages to make Vaso a character in his own right, like the witty and warm eccentric old University lecturer that was everyone’s favourite teacher and who we all wanted as a grandfather. And that’s the tragic beauty of the act, since we want the character to be real, just like the characters in this story want to see Vaso as the true side to Davros.
In many ways this does a far more credible job of showing how manipulative the Skarosian villain can be in winning the hearts and minds of the masses, than Dalek Empire III did. But essentially Doctor Who’s best monsters and villains define how villainy and evil intentions can be somehow shielded or masked, whether by a Dalek’s shell of armour, or the Master’s caddish charms or the Auton’s deceptive appearance as shop mannequins. That’s rather why Resurrection of the Daleks and The Two Doctors get such a bad rap from fandom for their unsubtle presentation of surface level nastiness, typical of the scab picking exploitation cinema (a la I Spit on your Grave) and any of the more gonzo style ultraviolent 80’s movies. By contrast this is closer to the more interesting and layered David Cronenberg, Aliens or Robocop notion of body horror in a corporate setting, of the sight of blood and organs placed incongruously inside a cleaning robot in a gleaming cream white office hub.
Actually for all that this may be Davros’ most mediocre entry in the audios, it’s still far more inspired than nearly all of Davros’ TV appearances sans Genesis of the Daleks, infact in terms of clever ideas it completely knocks spots off The Stolen Earth. If there’s one thing that’s felt wrong with the Davros saga, ever since Destiny of the Daleks, its how quickly the writers seem to have forgotten that in Davros’ last moments before being blasted in Genesis of the Daleks, he was actually about to destroy the Dalek project completely in a fit of disillusionment (though as character assassinations go, that is forgivable compared to what Season 21 did to the Doctor). The Juggernauts then is the belated follow-up of that character turn, where Davros regains that sense of purpose and in all sincerity proposes to use the Mechanoids to eradicate his own creations. To be honest, giving Davros something new to utilise in the Mechanoids is a particularly sad missed opportunity for the series.
Having said that, the Mechanoids never quite rise above being an item on a shopping list. The story tries to sell them as a potential intergalactic force to rival the Daleks but it never really happens, as it’s hard to imagine them in anything other than the domestic context they’re presented. In other words they’re simply there to do what’s required by the shopping list brief and they never really threaten to do anything more or expand beyond that. Nothing really subversive is done with them. More importantly the Doctor’s moral outrage over their fusion of machines and bodily organs achieves little except making Davros sound comparatively like nothing less than the voice of reason, and the story doesn’t do enough to justify the Doctor’s position of sabotaging something that could represent a solution to the Dalek menace. The Doctor protests how life is imprisoned and enslaved within the Mechanoids, but the story never really conveys this.
The inclusion of shopping list items almost always dwarf the story in such a way that the Doctor doesn’t get to come off well, and he is particularly ineffectual here, reduced to being pretty much everyone’s pawn and forcing Mel to fill the hero’s shoes for him. As highlighted above, the Sixth Doctor could potentially have become science fiction’s answer to the Equalizer, if only he was freed from the creative control of Eric Saward and John Nathan Turner who seemed determined to make sure the character could do no right. Instead the Doctor here is the usual ineffectual passive figure, but rather more matured and pensive and self-assured about his approach and his place in the grand scheme of things. It’s like revisiting the schizophrenic despot that JNT and Saward reduced the character to and having to count it as a victory that some twenty years on, the character finally gets who he is and what his purpose is. As with Davros, the ineffectual presentation of the Doctor is somewhat justified by presenting him in an omnipotent God-like manner. His divine intervention is slight because he believes in free will and in never taking life, and in not upsetting greater causality.
There’s a wonderfully haunting moment where Davros asks the Doctor if he’s witnessed a future where the Daleks are destroyed forever, which the Doctor doesn’t answer- a subtle hint that the Doctor always knew the outcome of the Time War perhaps? The basic idea is that the Doctor does little in the story because he places his faith in the journey of fate and natural come-uppance, and in the better angels of the humans around him.
Since the aim of a greatest hits package is to be as agreeable as possible, then The Juggernauts is morally speaking a halfway house between Jubilee and Flip-Flop. Flip-Flop was about whether political correctness has gone too far and The Juggernauts wanders into similar waters, even though it avoids the ‘rivers of blood’ territory. We all have different views and agendas as to why, whether it’s down to political correctness, nanny state, or simply the way that our modern society is defined by self-involvement and an emphasis on womanly virtues of sanitisation and empathy, but the fact is that modern society is made up of the most spoilt masses, and in our ‘me, me, me’ society based on an insatiable sense of entitlement, it seems it’s never been easier for the nastiest, most manipulative bullies and predators to get a long way ahead and gain a hold over people, simply by playing the victim. The recent episode Midnight (which was Russell T. Davies’ most intelligent script for the series) also highlighted this.
Doctor Who’s values can be attributed to left-wing ideals, tolerance and empathy, and occasionally it’s wandered into the trash of such ideologies but at its core Doctor Who was always crucially about personal moral responsibility, and this story is applying that value to attack a modern age that’s based on selfish hedonism and irresponsibility.
Davros is the perfect villain who takes no responsibility for his actions as he indulges in self-pity and blames the Doctor for everything. Ideally speaking, the Sixth Doctor’s journey has perhaps always been leading up to this. This Doctor has been successfully redeemed and rehabilitated, but because he started life as the monstrous figure in The Twin Dilemma, he knows better than anyone when other people’s claims of guilt, victimhood or redemption are insincere, and he knows all about how the minds of self-pitying bullies work because he once was one himself.
This story balances the depressing realism of the modern world and the optimism of the show. The Doctor is out of his depth since everyone else sees Davros simply as a crippled innocent victim. Even Mel has been got to, and the Doctor can’t convince her to see Davros for what he really is, in much the same way that we often have to respect the right of our close friends to associate with the most loathsome people if they so choose to be friends with them, and just hope that they learn the hard way.
So the Doctor has to play the waiting game, to see if Davros ever gets careless and shows his true colours, or gets his come-uppance, but the Doctor’s faith in natural justice and how Davros’ black and cyclical nature makes his exposure and deathly demise self-fulfilling and inevitable is eventually rewarded. And so to press home the theme of responsibility, the Doctor refuses to be instrumental in Davros’ death, when he’d have a much cleaner conscience by letting fate deliver the inevitable killing blow. So whilst this story renders the Doctor ineffectual, it makes him seem more dignified for it, the perfect restrained gentleman and stoic moral model.
Maybe this is an unjust world where the villains do go unaccountable and get undue privilege and adulation, but resorting to violence and brutality only weakens the hero’s position. As Full Fathom Five demonstrated, if the Doctor were to commit violence against the enemy, it would instantly alienate and betray the trust of those around him and leave him without a leg to stand on, particularly since Davros holds most of the cards of trust, victimhood and sympathy here. But of course the divide between the Doctor and Mel isn’t so easily resolved, and infact this story ultimately becomes a counterweight to Full Fathom Five in which it’s the Doctor’s pascifism and mercy that horrifies and alienates his companion.
As I said above, the main characters manage to stay true to their basic founding principles. That’s quite an achievement when homageing a TV era that cared little for consistent characterisation and certainly wasn’t below forcing contrived actions and insincere motivations onto said characters. But this is a story that’s all about conscience, and about how beneath all the shades of grey of a person, there is a true dominating personality trait that firmly decides whether they’re fundamentally good or bad.
This is a strong entry for Mel- she’s still the TV companion we remember, who’s thankfully toned down and more seasoned, but still has the spontanaeity and enthusiasm of being the first 80’s companion who seemed to actually like travelling with the Doctor. Certain reminders of her appearances in Childrens’ TV manage to be wonderfully charming against such a dark backdrop, such as her leaving a music box on the Dalek ship or her christening of the Mechanoids as Sooty, Sweep and Sue. This story takes Mel into rather dark territory, but revealing a firey, vengeful side to the brash redhead is fairly in character. It takes the scene in Terror of the Vervoids where Mel is angry and horrified by both the Vervoid’s body mounds and by the Doctor’s rather warped empathising with the killer Vervoids, and expands on that rift between the intelligent man of peace who sees too much complexity and consequences to ever be able to act in good conscience, and the angry compassionate woman who can’t understand why the Doctor doesn’t just destroy Davros and the Daleks to prevent any more innocent deaths.
In other words Mel’s ultimate actions as executioner are made plausible by getting us completely behind her, emotionally. But of course once she does the vengeful deed, she realises she wasn’t prepared to live with the consequences of taking a life, and the guilt is immediately overwhelming and she finally realises why the Doctor holds the principles he does, and that she will have to live with what she’s done forever. Again this emphasises the theme of responsibility. It’s made all the more poignant by being the sour ending to three months of what looked to be an idyllic life for Mel amidst new friends and new possibilities, and her budding romance with Geoff, and there’s something genuinely tearful about her goodbye to Sonali, having to leave behind that now tainted life.
So inevitably we must address the question of how Davros is meant to survive this particularly nasty fate. Well maybe it was another clone decoy as in Revelation of the Daleks, or the Daleks managed to transmat Davros’s head to safety at the last moment, or maybe Davros had some other elaborate escape plan. We don’t get any explanation for how Davros survived and how he’s meant to be able to return for Remembrance of the Daleks, but then again it fits with the TV Colin Baker era’s unreliable grasp on continuity, where the Master could return unscratched from being burned to a crisp in Planet of Fire without any explanation (although the audio story Master finds a rather inspired and succinct way to explain away every time the bearded one returned from the grave), or where the Doctor could leave the Trial with Mel, even though he hasn’t met her yet. It also fits with the ruthlessly retributive ethos of its era, so maybe continuity had to be put aside to make sure Davros got what he deserved at the end. The fact is that Davros’ death here is so harrowing and disturbing and manages to finally tug sympathy for the evil scientist and press home why the Doctor could never do something like this, that it’s a shame it couldn’t be the real end for the character as a sharp and horrifying symbol of why the show’s values of non-violence and compassion matter.
For some listeners this may be wish fulfilment of contradicting Remembrance of the Daleks and thus disavowing the McCoy era from the canon, and setting up the Sixth Doctor audios as what we should have got instead after Trial of a Time Lord. For Doctor Who to have remained an adult, hard sci-fi show with a credible bold, cinematic and futuristic feel, rather than a magic based children’s pantomime show filmed on crude video. For the show to have built on Revelation of the Daleks (to many McCoy-bashers, Revelation was the last time the classic show was ‘cool’), in all its corporate satire, gruesome glory, right down to the tasteless innuendo of Geoff instantly recognising a woman’s headless body as one of his past conquests. For Davros to have suffered a different ultimate fate, allowing the Daleks to take centre stage, for Skaro to have not been blown up, for the Sixth Dctor to get his chance at redemption, and for Mel’s character to have been taken in a darker, edgier direction, that would be unsustainable in Season 24.
Personally we would always defend Remembrance of the Daleks as bringing a real renaissance to the show, and one 80’s story that John Nathan Turner should be proud to have his name on. But this can’t really be proved as an overt trashing of Remembrance, and even if it is, it’s hardly as obnoxious or snidey as War of the Daleks. But all this is immaterial, since as much as The Juggernauts is probably a fugue and a spanner in the canon, it’s really been too easily forgotten as a story to give anyone sleepless nights, unfortunately.
If The Juggernauts is less successful than the rest of the Davros audios, it’s mainly because it’s essentially a character piece- one that addresses the self-involved modern world but does so by becoming part of its media. Unlike the other Davros audios, it doesn’t really do anything monumental with the character of Davros, it’s never really building personal ambitions into something that really threatens to overthrow life as we know it or bring empires to rise or ruin. As such it never really feels like an ‘event’ story. Essentially this is just a futuristic soap opera with a new girl to the colony becoming a high flyer and developing sparks of romance, and the evil business tycoon plotting to ruin a rival company whilst an old enemy arrives to expose his dirty past. The Daleks and Mechanoids are really just there on sufferance to fill the action quota. This is of course exactly how American sci-fi would have done Doctor Who.
But on those terms it’s hard to fault. It is at least a soap opera we’d like to watch because it’s firmly in line with the right ideals about what’s wrong with our society, and because the characters are irrepressibly appealing strong personalities (even the initially annoying Geoff gets under the listener’s skin with his persistence eventually), and Bonnie Langford as Mel is perfectly in her element and given a real opportunity to show how good she could be. We all wish Mel had been given a story and performance like this in the TV years.
Another reason why this story perhaps makes little impact is that despite Big Finish’ initial best intentions when it comes to the Daleks, this actually is a Dalek story where Davros’ presence demeans the Daleks. Even though the effort has been made to keep the Daleks and Davros largely separated, it has to be said that this particular squad of Daleks sent to capture Davros must comprise of their most useless members, and it seems ridiculous that they should even need the Doctor to go in as their agent, let alone wait so long to act when they could have stormed the colony any time and destroyed the Mechanoid program long before it even reached prototype stage. And it has to be said that the Doctor and Mel’s final escape into an unguarded Tardis is rather too easy.
But overall the inept Daleks can perhaps be excused as being a faithful homage to the era at hand. Furthermore, Geoff’s heroic one man fight with the battered Daleks to save the rest of the colonists fares far better and is actually a great punch the air, poignant sequence that’s in tune with the story’s optimism and theme of better angels. Standing as a vital, affirming presentation of the human capacity for brave nobility in times of evil.
The final verdict on The Juggernauts is that it’s satisfying if not monumental, it’s somewhat indulgent but enjoyably so, and any routine academic tick boxing is made up for by the spontanaeity that the characters bring to the story, and indeed it shows the TV characters at their best and gives them some brief, treasurable moments that would make any fan proud.
And so we venture further into this Divergent Universe and quickly we wonder if it might have been better to have ended the McGann run with Zagreus and leave the question of what the Doctor will find in the Divergent Universe as an imponderable open-ended cliffhanger. Because whatever the listener might imagine will happen next for the Eighth Doctor and Charley, it’s got to be better than this.
It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that this story sees the return of Philip Martin as scriptwriter, and the story even name-checks Zeiton 7 and Varos to ram home the point for anyone who didn’t read the back cover. But it’s immediately clear that Philip doesn’t really have a proper grasp on writing audio Doctor Who.
The first half of the story mostly holds up well, but even then there’s nitpicky flaws that threaten to bloat and spill over in the second half. Despite the detailed background sound effects that convey a windy desert landscape, Paul McGann and India Fisher just sound like they’re talking in a studio booth which hints that we’re in for severe apathy on the part of the lead performances. There’s also the scene where they have to pass the gate-keeper and Charley suffers a mental attack on her fear sensors. Well that’s what she tells us anyway, but she verbalises it in such an unrealistic way that exposes it as dodgy scripting at perhaps the worst point in the story for this to happen. That aside, it more or less works as an ominous sharp opening, but it sets us up for a story that runs on the shallow philosophy that pain builds character. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it was the same ethos that much of Season 22 was built on, and indeed much of 80’s cinema- Robocop being a case in point since Murphy only had fifteen minutes to make a sympathetic impression with the audience, so they opted to ensure audience sympathy by making his death as nasty as possible. In the JNT era, a companion departure was nothing special unless the character got a bridge dropped on them, Lytton’s out of the blue redemption was symbolised by the crushing of his hands representing ‘penance’, K-9 and Peri seemed to be the two companions the show enjoyed abusing the most, and Nyssa losing her home planet seemed to add nothing to her personality.
In the same way we’re introduced to C’rizz as a new companion who is characterised solely by his anger and misery over losing his significant other, and we learn nothing else about him. In the same way, Charley spends a huge length of the story being cruelly experimented on, and unlike in Dalek Empire’s tales of endurance, her suffering doesn’t really tell us anything new about her character. And without that display of individuality, this parade of pain simply becomes oppressive.
Basically this goes over the same material of Vengeance on Varos, its corporate satire, the companion being transformed into an animal, and really it shares many of Varos’ major gaping flaws, and the main defining flaw is that there’s no real urgency to the events. The first half of the story manages to hold our interest by building up its complex dome environment of many levels and its own ecosystem, and really communicates the sense of a giant hive, and this somewhat adds to the jeopardy of trying to find L’da but once the Doctor and his companions escape, things become too easy for them, and they face very little in the way of challenge or worthy opposition. At one point they happen onto an abandoned computer terminal which lets them erase their own criminal records, and at another they rescue C’rizz from an execution squad successfully by simply throwing mud balls at them. The threats against them seem so terribly slight, much like how Varos presented guards who’d literally fall to their deaths if you tapped their shoulder, which presents real problems in the second half.
Before we get to that though, we get the cliffhanger where C’rizz discovers L’da being turned into a slug and begging for a mercy killing. Even this is botched by the inattentive scripting that leaves us in the dark as to what has actually been done to L’da until we get a belated visual explanation, by which time it’s a bit too late to empathise with C’rizz’ actions in killing her, and thus our only possible reaction is one of numb shock. There are several examples of this lax, belated relaying of visual information, but this is the most frustrating for happening in such a dramatically crucial moment. It’s perhaps the worst time to be left in the dark and consciously waiting for the script to help us to make sense of it.
And then the urgency is lost, and that’s the trouble with making a story so shock heavy, because gratuitous shock is so transient ultimately. There are some interesting moments that follow such as the tribunal where Charley is being suggested for replacing L’da as the next experimental subject, and we realise that the Kromon’s evil deeds are based far more on bureaucracy than sadism. Also when the Doctor is told the history of the Kromon race, and learns that they were once an oppressed race and thus were taught by the experience to become the oppressors, it’s a lovely turning of its head of Star Trek’s sanctimonious notion that we’re never and should never be responsible for the development of other races and cultures, as if Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden and many of the other most evil figures of the modern world didn’t learn their methods first from the Western powers. But other than that there’s very little that holds the interest after this point and so the story drags terribly, and every time the script builds up what a slimy, ugly and dark environment this is, it simply becomes more depressing and unsympathetic, giving us little reason to want to carry on.
The main problem is that like how Vengeance on Varos indulged Season 22’s favourite pass-time of torturing Peri, because Charley’s transformation into a slug is so prolonged, it just feels gratuitous and sadistic and simply unpleasant to hear. Because we know that Charley will be back to normal at the end, we know that the whole transformation is pointless and nothing to get worried about, and furthermore there’s no real sense of the ticking clock here at all. At whatever point they got round to rescuing Charley, it would make no difference at all.
And thus just like the morally deplorable moments of Vengeance on Varos, because there’s no urgency and because the threats against the heroes are so vague and slight, the conclusion in which the heroes simply wipe out the entire complex, killing all the Kromon creatures, feels like a completely unmitigated atrocity, and leaves the nastiest aftertaste of any main range Big Finish story so far (or at least until Night Thoughts). Whilst the Doctor didn’t do the killing, he certainly didn’t prevent or condemn it either. And that’s what the moral issue always comes down to. We may know in any given Doctor Who story, such as Power of the Daleks or Brain of Morbius that the situation called for a violent solution and called on the Doctor to abandon his principles and take ruthless action as the last resort, but the story needs to make us feel it as well as know it, it needs to cultivate a sense of urgency and insurmountable odds, and this meandering story does nothing of the kind, and certainly does nothing to justify destroying a whole city of inhabitants. The only impression it gives is that the writer simply wanted to wash his hands of the whole plot as quickly and ultimately as possible, and that’s the only sense we get. There’s no sense of an empire falling or a brave new dawn. It’s the same way that when we witness two Kromon guards being needlessly torn to pieces by the rebels, it feels like nothing more than an excuse for the story to revel in being gory and gruesome for the sake of it.
At its heart, Doctor Who’s morality is not based on pascifism, and that’s a misconception that’s usually adopted by the worst Doctor Who stories that seem to assume there’s anything to be learned at all from seeing the Doctor taking a stance of passive inaction, or showing moral dilemmas being magically resolved by fairy dust. Doctor Who is actually about moral responsibility for your actions and their consequences and when presenting the viewer with scenarios which ask ‘what would you do?’ the show is at its most challenging. That’s what made Creatures of Beauty such an evocative, beautiful portrayal of guilt and remorse. It’s also the reason why Series Two of New Who left many of us feeling betrayed at how it seemingly endorsed the worst, most spoilt, irresponsible and self-involved aspects of modern youth culture that we’d hoped the new show would be railing against. But what’s troubling about this story is how callous it all feels, and there’s no sense of remorse about any of it. It’s partly down to Paul McGann’s apathetic performance but at the end of the story the Doctor walks on from the atrocity he assisted in and seems completely unfettered by any sense of responsibility, or awareness of the consequences. There’s no expression of guilt, not even in the form of the cheap, insincere and indulgent guilt of the Eric Saward era which made the Doctor’s sins or failures seem done as little more than an excuse for him to act all remorseful and noble about it afterwards. The story doesn’t even pretend to care.
Many have complained that the biggest offence of Creed of the Kromon, and indeed of nearly all the Divergent Universe stories is that it seems pointless to do an arc set in a strange new pocket universe only to fill it with the most traditional stories that could have been set anywhere. We might be able to argue that two of the eight arc stories, Scherzo and Natural History of Fear really couldn’t be told in any other context, and by Doctor Who standards that’s a fair percentage, since Warrior’s Gate was the only E-Space story to actually be about E-Space. But the fact remains that Creed of the Kromon is a missed opportunity. On TV, sending the Doctor into another universe has always been a means of placing him somewhere where the normal rules of the show don’t apply, even in the most traditional story, which means there’s suddenly a big chance that the Doctor can lose. That’s what made the parallel world of Inferno the most frightening and chilling world that the show has ever depicted, and hence why the Third Doctor still seems haunted by that experience in The Mind of Evil, and why the all-knowing and ever confident Fourth Doctor came out from E-Space seeming that bit more shaken and vulnerable and aware of living on borrowed time. In a way The Creed of the Kromon does create the sense of a far more hopeless, animalistic and savage pocket world that’s cut off and abandoned from the rest of the universe and thus its population is unleashed upon itself to fend for what it has left, which is something that Natural History of Fear explores well, although here it’s somewhat more repellent than compelling. But what’s so frustrating is how despite this, the Doctor emerges from the adventure unchanged and completely disaffected by any of it.
We perhaps forgave and overlooked the flaws and sins of Vengeance on Varos because it was one of the few highlights of an uninspired era, and because it was pretty much ahead of its time in many ways, in anticipating the power of the media and the sadistic human degradation of reality TV. It drew art out of brutality at a time when blatant brutality was usually all there was and art was ancilliatory at best. Come to think of it, Mindwarp was unlike any other Doctor Who story before it too. Indeed Vengeance on Varos and Mindwarp seemed almost as concerned about the moral degeneration and lost innocence of the show and the mean spirited climate of the times as we were. Like Revelation of the Daleks, Vengeance on Varos was like a really strong, raw, intelligent, brilliant song track on an otherwise patchy and self indulgent album from a once great band that’s now losing its touch, bitterly falling apart and heading for implosion and yet which couldn’t have produced rare jewels like this otherwise, and we’re forever grateful to have both those stories in the canon.
But its not 1985 anymore and this story couldn’t be more behind the times. Worse still, it’s regressive and really vividly reminds us of a morally ugly period of Doctor Who that we’d rather forget, but which has seemingly made an unannounced and unwelcome return. The almost mythologised nasty brutality of the Colin Baker era may have been softened by familiarity and nostalgia but this story manages to make the nastiness and betrayal feel raw and painful like new, and it’s enough to make a fan want to literally weep bitter tears of disillusionment. The only impression it leaves is a strong wish that we’d never listened to the damn thing. As I said of Zagreus and Deadline, there isn’t really any turning back once you become a Doctor Who fan. It’s not really possible to turn away from the TV show, no matter how bad it gets, but giving up on the audios is always far easier and this story of tedium compounded with unpleasant brutality must have made many of those who braved and endured Zagreus and decided not to jump ship wonder why they bothered giving Big Finish a second chance. The worst thing is, we’re only a quarter of the way through the Divergent Universe arc and things can only get more depressing from here. It’s Season 21 all over again!
“Whatever will the critics say? Melodramatic? Overlong? Derivative too.”
The impact of Zagreus is sometimes likened to how Twin Dilemma killed the show for many fans. Yes reputedly, this was an audio so bad that it chased many loyal listeners away from the range for a long time. But Twin Dilemma wasn’t exactly out of the blue, it was the concentrated culmination of everything desperate, forced and wrong-headed about the John Nathan Turner era and was simply the last word on a season that was full of character assassinations, cheap shock tactics and mean spiritedness. By contrast, Zagreus’ train wreck seemed utterly unprecedented and like the embodiment of everything that Big Finish had actually been trying to get away from.
For most of the Big Finish run, it seemed that letting the fans take over the asylum was the best move for the franchise. We could even kid ourselves that the fannish continuity porn direction of the JNT era wasn’t so bad in and of itself, except that by Chinese whispers amidst a fractured production team on the verge of falling apart, the fannish requests were misunderstood and treated as a superficial ends rather than a means, so we got what we asked for, but not what we wanted, but that if we fans had full control we’d treat it with far more care. Davros, Spare Parts and Dalek Empire are pure fanwank but they’re also amongst Big Finish’s finest works. But Zagreus proved us wrong.
Big Finish has made a deathly mistake here. On the one hand, the continuity navelgazing of the John Nathan Turner era had in many ways lent credibility and validity to what Big Finish was doing. If the TV show had sunk to doing its own fan fiction (and awful, apocryphal fan fiction that belonged in the furnace at that), then surely there was a place for fan-written add-ons to the era, and certainly we fans couldn’t do any worse with the same Doctors. Of course many fans remain frustratingly snobbish about the audios or anything else they consider non-canon. But the fact is the TV series will always inspire more loyalty than anything that can be conveniently dubbed ‘non canon’, which is why the audios, like the TV Movie are so open to be denounced as great pretenders. Sure in the bad periods of the show, the fans may howl and scream and demand that the current TV producer stands down, but they’ll keep watching all the same- indeed the recent gap year has revealed that some fans who constantly complained about every episode of the new show, are now complaining even louder about the fact that there’s no series at all on TV this year, begging the question of what exactly would satisfy them. Maybe they’re still watching for the occasional false dawn of quality that reminds them of the glory days or maybe because they’ve gotten used to having something to complain about in an unhealthy routine. Personally for me, I nearly gave up on the show after the train wreck of Last of the Time Lords, but I found myself curiously compelled to still tune into Voyage of the Damned when it was shown, for the simple reason that I just didn’t want to part with the New Series on bitter terms, and the story looked like it would have enough Christmas cheer to alleviate that. Fans can and have put up with far worse than this when it was on TV. They won’t do that with the audios, they’ll simply give up. That’s why Big Finish usually had to put in that bit extra to make their stories worthwhile, which makes this sudden downturn into utterly repellent material so hard to fathom.
In moderation, Zagreus’ dependence on continuity fanwank might have been manageable, but instead it drowns in its excesses. This makes it hard to summarise how many things that Zagreus botches. But a single scene shows up in microcosm just how wrongheaded Zagreus is, where the current Doctor has a conversation with his third incarnation. This is done by way of taking barely audible excerpts from Jon Pertwee’s interview recordings and going to contrived lengths to make it sound like Paul McGann is having a dialogue with him. Nobody can believe in this ‘conversation’ for a minute and worse still it doesn’t affect the plot one iota. It’s simply gratuitous and arguably takes fanwank to the level of necrophilia, and marks one of many points where Zagreus ceases to even function as a workable audio drama. Which is baffling given that Gary Russell’s long term experience with audio should make him up to Nick Briggs’ standard. For all the faults of The Mutant Phase, it at least had competence as an audio drama and some kind of momentum and believability. This has none. Rather like The Rapture, it feels like the audio equivalent of a really bad fan video with amateur film students let loose with a video camera. It’s a major and thoroughly unsatisfying chore to just listen to one disc all the way through. So at three discs length, the listeners end up thrice as lost and thrice as impatient with this mess.
In-fact just like War of the Daleks, much of its continuity vandalism has a whiff of contempt about it, as if the whole exercise is to scorn the final ten years of the classic show’s run. Regarding the retconning of the vampires in State of Decay in such a way that retcons the Doctor of that story into a fascist who’s unwittingly assisted the Time Lords in a campaign of ethic cleansing, and not to mention the cheap shots at The Five Doctors with the characters noting the similarity between the Death Zone and Wales. That kind of contempt for the JNT era is more than understandable (even if it’s misdirected at some of the better JNT stories), but it makes for a bitter, miserable piece of storytelling.
Actually there are some opinions amongst fans that this retconning of State of Decay is a good thing in terms of questioning the show’s own morality by having the Doctor go back on past events and realise he made a mistake. That might hold water if there were grounds in the source material for doing so, and if such revisiting was done as a full blooded exercise, integral to the plot of the story that has an actual point and payoff. A good example is the Unbound stories which are deeply faithful to the feel and spirit of the Hartnel era in a manner that shows love for its roots rather than contempt for them. But frankly this particular retcon is so disposable, unsubstantiated and ultimately pointless that it simply feels snidey and spiteful (much like the retconning in War of the Daleks and Warriors of the Deep did).
This is simply us reviewing the story in and of itself, so imagine how much more offensive the story is as a resolution to Neverland, which sees all that promise wasted. Infact from Neverland’s impressive cliffhanger ending, it only takes ten minutes into the opening for the tension to evaporate to the point of terminal boredom for the listener. Having it all take place in a fantasy world immediately removes any drama from every situation, since none of it matters and nothing can hurt the characters, and all the guest characters are complete ciphers who it’s impossible to care about. And that’s the problem with it as a resolution to Neverland. It ends little different to how it began, except for taking the Doctor on an emotional journey into his own madness, but leaves us with not a single reason to care. Not a single point to draw our empathy on, because seemingly all that the story cares about is contriving retcons for the show’s continuity. There’s no sense of passion in the story itself, much like how Lewis Carroll isn’t so much homaged as witlessly plagiarised.
It’s even more offensive as an anniversary story that insults most fans’ loyalties sorely, with the past Doctors brought back only to have them play completely different characters who take up the runtime doing absolutely nothing useful in confusing, tedious scenes that never lead to anything, even at the end. But even approached as a standalone without any particular expectations, it’s still going to be positively repellent.
So what actually happened? When Alan Barnes wrote Neverland, it treated us to fan pleasing material but done in a pacy, engaging and to the point way. He wasn’t just writing it for his own indulgence, every scene played its part and had something to say. Unfortunately we have the rather nagging sense that when he wrote Neverland, he was as much in the dark about how he’d resolve it as we were, or more to the point, he wasn’t sure how he could make the resolution stretch a regular CD’s length, let alone an extended one.
Enter Gary Russell into the fray, and too many cooks spoil the broth. It would be most atypical for Gary Russell to force himself onto another writer’s work, so although the anniversary period might have given him a rush of blood, we give him the benefit of the doubt of believing that it was a mutually decided joint writing venture, and that Alan needed the assistance to stretch out a fairly easy resolution. What we get then from the other writer’s padding is a lot of out of synch material that adds nothing to the story, and worse still, the many concepts of Neverland being discarded whilst near-identical concepts are laboriously introduced as a replacement. i.e. the anti-time people are replaced by the Divergents.
Some joint writing ventures in Doctor Who have produced superb results like The War Games, Pyramids of Mars, Brain of Morbius and City of Death, and this is as much true to audios like The Church and the Crown, The One Doctor and The Wormery. They can at best be a means of tightening the discipline and producing more conflict, narrative friction and unpredictability, but at worst they can lead to the dullest, most confusing excesses. Whether the writing agreement here was mutual or not, the results are far from symbiotic, which leaves the story seeming utterly vacuous and soulless because there’s no consistent conviction of what it’s all about.
To be fair though, there are fans who like this story and almost consider it ‘cherishably strange’. The mere fact of Zagreus existence reinforces that Big Finish is still a free, permissive writing environment for fans who are writing for the love, and aren’t having their scripts sullied or sanitised. It’s still raw product and unfortunately that sometimes means writers let off the leash with free reign are as likely to produce self indulgent rubbish, as they are unsullied rare art. The question Zagreus left many fans with is whether the latter is going to be worth the former.
“I believe you journalists would call it a ‘smoking gun’”
It’s Colin’s personal favourite and is often recommended as the best choice to play for the uninitiated. After all it’s familiar territory to fans of the TV series, fitting snugly between Eric Saward’s Dalek stories and presenting the Doctor with temporary companions who are conveniently killed off at the end. More importantly it would demonstrate to a newbie how Big Finish has redeemed both the Sixth Doctor and the overused, ranting Davros, and demonstrated their unfulfilled potential for greater things. Whilst on TV, both Davros and the Sixth Doctor were one dimensional engines of hollow sound and fury, here they are reinterpreted as titanic idealist figures representing flip sides of the same coin in a way the Doctor/Master rivalry never quite did. It’s been said that the Sixth Doctor’s refusal to kill Davros is out of character for this particular incarnation, but for the purposes of this story, the Sixth Doctor is drawn as the antithesis of Davros- mild mannered, compassionate, incorruptible and incapable of killing. Someone who refuses Arnold Baines’ bribery, and will only fire a gun at a computer terminal.
There have been times in the TV series where the writers have taken the Doctor’s ‘sanctity of life’ angle too far, in a manner that makes him truly a tyrant and a monster who will forcibly revive the grateful or deserving dead against their will and thus cause far more death, indignity and suffering- namely in Warriors of the Deep, Love & Monsters and Last of the Time Lords. This story doesn’t go that far and has more respect for the character, infact it goes the whole hog to have the Doctor renouncing the hypocratic oath and refusing to revive the doormant Davros when asked to. But still this story asks the daring question of whether the mercy that separates the Doctor from Davros actually makes him just as monstrous for allowing such an evil creature to go on living so that they can kill again. Infact that is what the play is about, in how the philosophies and ideals that keep us going are the ones that become a cyclical prison.
Whilst the Doctor of the 70’s was never this emancipated, this is firmly taking the show back to its 70’s roots as a morality play where each character represents an idea and the follies that go with it, and showing how idealism is not enough by itself, and thus manages to show rather than tell and to avoid sermonising. It’s getting back to Genesis of the Daleks as a story about playing God and one man’s ambition bringing about the fall of empires, when Doctor Who really could capture the whole spectrum of history and humanity.
To all intents and purposes, in such a morality play, Davros should have remained dead after the end of Genesis of the Daleks. There’s much of 70’s Doctor Who that left an astonishing legacy that sadly only we fans know about, because that legacy was itself outlived, cheapened and disgraced from the 80’s onwards by the continuation and decline of the show itself as it resorted to sensationalism and garish style over substance whilst eating its own tail. Doctor Who as a long running TV show, unfortunately never heeded the advice of ‘leave the party before you’re asked to’. Much the same is true of Davros himself, and there’s been nothing that really justified bringing him back for all the remaining TV Dalek stories, and after War of the Daleks we were really sick of him and glad to see him finally killed off for good. When the character has become this redundant, doing an audio story centrally about him should be a non-starter. I expected to learn nothing new about Davros from this story, or if I did, it would be something out of character that couldn’t be reconciled with what was on TV. On that basis, this story couldn’t afford to get it wrong, and I was pleasantly surprised by its quality and how unmissable this audio was.
As an add-on exercise to the TV stories with Davros, it really adds a lot and retroactively improves the lesser stories. Genesis of the Daleks has its world expanded upon, simply by introducing us to female Kaleds, and the tragedy of that lost civilisation is conveyed by the dimming ember of memories. Destiny of the Daleks, in reviving the character by means of cock and bull, really could have done with this kind of take on Davros’ immortality, defining him as a force of will, preserved by hate, clinging to life like a grudge – something complimented by the notion of Davros as a grave-robber. And of course it’s nice to have the incoherent set pieces of Resurrection and Revelation of the Daleks retconned as being bookends to an actual plot between them. Actually I’ll take some of that back, the set pieces in Revelation of the Daleks have a climactic payoff by presenting the whole story as a journey into the centre of the labyrinth, and unlike Resurrection, it ends in an explosion of violence that isn’t made to look like an anticlimax by a dozen other massacres that preceded it. Revelation of the Daleks was Eric Saward’s best story and proof that he was a decent writer even if he was a menace of a script editor. Revelation was the point where he finally grasped moral ambiguity strengthened by thematic content. It presented us with characters who were shades of grey, rather than nasty ciphers. Keeping the Doctor apart from the action for once worked in allowing conventional moral roles to be subverted and questioned with Davros becoming a medical missionary, and an assassin taking on the Doctor’s hero role by doing things the Doctor couldn’t. With such diversity it managed to present a vision of the future that was both dark and yet hopeful, and thus achieving Eric’s most optimistic and forward looking story. It’s only real precedent was Warrior’s Gate.
This story really builds on that. It also provides a prequel to Revelation of the Daleks’ allegory for the Ethiopia famine, and with its vision of capitalist conglomerates, its providing representation of that cruel absurdity of people dying of want in a world of surplus. It manages to take the best elements of Season 22, such as its monstrous allegories of the corporate monstrosities, and ruthless social Darwinism of the 80’s – where the Saward era’s scorn on humanity was briefly directed at the right targets.
Actually in some ways Season 22 did a far better job of representing the yuppie culture of the times. The conglomerate bad guy figure here, Arnold Baines as played by Bernard Horsfall isn’t the most inspired or well rounded of characters, infact he’s pretty bland and shows a general apathy to events around him, like one of those poor Star Trek movie villains of the 90’s who spends most of the film just standing around trying to look menacing. The nature of morality plays sometimes means that characters are defined strictly by ideals, but Arnold Baines is simply a talking advert for capitalism. As other astute listeners have pointed out, he does very little to sell the message that ‘capitalism is bad’, and the only time he does is when he kills someone which comes across as both out of character and a contrived cop-out. Still at least having him do the dirty deed at both bookends of the story just about makes it consistent enough for the writing to get away with it.
In some ways looking at Bernard Horsfall play the role of Goth in The Deadly Assassin, made him seem ideal for the role of playing Arnold Baines- a villain with a dignified gentlemanly manner in public but showing his true savage nature emerge later, but it just doesn’t happen. Unlike the great vitriolic performance that Bernard gave whilst drowning the Fourth Doctor, here the character and the actor just never break form. The Deadly Assassin is of course the perfect template for this story, with the Doctor travelling alone, but assisted by temporary companions, a theme about the serpent in paradise, about an advanced civilisation failing to reckon with the barbarism of its past, and of course the use of media spin to sell a sanitised version of the ugly truth and to use a narrative approach to news to make false heroes out of the worst people. What’s interesting here is that we are shown the methodology of underground counter-spin, with both Mr. Willis’ right-on left wing news reporting, and Lorraine Baines’ promotion of the ‘cult of Davros’ as something new age and progressive, and how both forms of spin are both restricted by agenda and trying to out-sell and out-sensationalise each other, and both are incapable of thinking outside the box and both are ultimately proved wrong. Mr. Willis in particular is so driven to prove a point about anti-consumerism and how Arnold Baines is a bogeyman than it blinds him to the evils of Davros.
Davros’ success has been put down to the same success of Big Finish’ Dalek audios, in having Davros segregated from the Daleks so that neither upstages the other. But really the beauty of this story is in having Davros taken completely out of his environment and context and asking if he could change, if given a different life. As with Jubilee, this isn’t just some twee tale of redemption, of a villain changing their ways. This is a full blooded psychological introspective story that really gets inside Davros’ mind. As I said above, the two problematic issues with characterising Davros are best represented by Eric Saward’s stories. Resurrection shows up how madness is less a characterisation and more a cop-out, whilst Revelation tried to give Davros a more noble side in a manner that was interesting but ultimately rang false (Eric’s writing does that to established characters).
This story is the answer to both those problems, where all the contradictory faucets of Davros’ character are reduced to the authentic symptoms of manic depression or depressive psychosis. For a long, fascinating runtime Davros seems to be expressing sincere guilt and deep, revealing introspection. So authentic that the listener believes it, and for a moment the Doctor looks like the villain of the piece, vindictively determined to not give the poor man a chance and to sabotage him at every turn (much like in City of Death). Only at the end do we realise that this wasn’t a journey of discovery to redemption at all, but simply part of the neverending cycle of depression, where for him guilt and self-pity always gives way to persecution complex followed inevitably by renewed warped conviction and unshakeable evangelical self-righteousness. Thus it achieves something beautiful in ending as required with nothing changed for the character but making that inability for him to change into something deeply tragic.
It’s a very talky audio story but the quality of dialogue always justifies its length. Plus Terry Molloy puts in an exemplary gripping performance that makes each monologue shine. Besides, having recently treated us to a second season of an action packed Dalek spin-off, there’s nothing wrong with Big Finish giving us something more cerebral- especially when this story is so well written that nearly every line is quotable, and each next scene of intellectual discussion and catharsis trounces the one before. As with the Dalek Empire series, and The Sandman, there’s a focus on the importance of learning the right lessons of history, which in turn leads to a conscious effort to give this setting a history, one that’s deeply personal and which makes the story feel both authentic and epic. Davros’ monologues about his past, his formative years on Skaro, and his experiences of consciousness in suspended animation give this story a wonderful sense of temporal vertigo. It’s a wonderfully expansive environment, from its vision of galactic trade routes to thesis books you wish you could read, like Lorraine Baines’ “The Dark Side of Skaro”. It’s a grand view that is at once optimistic in its scope and beautiful details, but also conveys how far reaching Davros’ power could be and how the greater galaxy is at stake. All aided by its excellent space age musical score which conveys a sense of viewing past memories through polished, stainless windows in a towering Perspex glass building.
Davros’ flashbacks to Skaro convey a very realist sense of the Kaled/Thal war, and the scenes between him prior to his accident and his protégé/love interest Shan feel very reminiscent of the romance between Winston and Julia in George Orwell’s 1984. This is particularly fitting in his story of Davros’ own emotional repression making him the monster he is and how he plans to implement the communist ‘year zero’ idea by destroying the economy, making Davros here far closer to Stalin than to Hitler. Davros has Shan killed both to deny his affection for her, and to eliminate any competition, and justifies it based on social Darwinism. What’s more disturbing is how he also declares that any guilt he feels abut his actions is something he now seems to savour as something ecstatic that gave him his purpose and drive. It’s also poignant and chilling how Shan’s statement that ‘life on Skaro is doomed’ sounds like she’s having a Shakesperian premonition of her own death. It’s a thread that at once captures a lost age when British television tried to encompass the entire human experience and when literature on love and romance wasn’t so toothless as to ignore the terrifying and cruel side to love, the furious passions and the way love can bring out the unreasoning tyrant in all of us. This isn’t a twee story about a woman’s love teaching a man how to acknowledge his repressed emotions; it’s about the cold blooded mechanised monster that such repression creates. It’s also quite interesting that given the drawing of the Doctor and Davros as flip sides of the same coin, that Davros’ relationship with Shan somewhat mirrors the borderline abusive relationship between the Sixth Doctor and Peri, even though she’s absent here. Actually the flashback scene where Davros is quizzing Shan on her knowledge of Skaro’s food chain is like the kind of mental exercises that the Seventh Doctor would frequently test Ace with.
Davros starts out seeming like a tale of the redemption of a villain who was a product of his violent environment but is given a chance to start again in a safe, civilised and prosperous new life. But eventually its message becomes clear about the dangers of recovering relics and regressing to the barbarism of the past. In a manner reminiscent of Brain of Morbius, this is a tale of the evils of immortality. The preservation of the Sisterhood of Karn led to an entropic society that for generations never escaped the dark ages with a stagnant society maintaining the xenophobia, human sacrifices and witch hunts of the past. Likewise Davros’ immortality allows his tyranny to outlive his natural lifespan, and for him to embody the undying values of fascism, and as he gets older, so his ideals become more rigid. All things considered, given the above listed weaknesses of Arnold Baines as a villain, it’s a good thing he’s at the backdrop and that Davros is centre stage instead. Infact Arnold serves his purpose at laying the conglomerate, economic landscape for Davros to rule and manipulate at his leisure. Exposed to the world of economics, Davros almost predictably aims to use the stock market as a weapon of devastation.
This has brought an element of criticism too, in how the story has gone the whole length raleighing against the evils of capitalism and corporate rule, only to conclude that civilised society cannot function without them. This is an odd criticism since it misses the point of Doctor Who’s morality. The point of Doctor Who’s morality was in its grasp of narrative and depicting crossroads of difficult choices when faced with a problematic, and from there exploring and weighing up which is the morally and pragmatically right choice, and the consequences of said choice. This ranges from Ian preventing the first Doctor from bludgeoning a wounded caveman, to Tom Baker pondering whether the Daleks, as a unifying mutual threat might actually be a solution of sorts to a conflict-based universe. As such the show has sometimes grasped the nettle of having to choose between the lesser of two evils, like how the propaganda in The Deadly Assassin redefining Goth as a hero, actually demonstrates how sometimes there’s a good reason for media lies and spin. This is especially the case in this story where the crossroad choices of history are studied and Davros is fundamentally asked if he would live his life differently if he could go back in time.
And yet in some ways the final minutes of the play are still something of a disappointment. Whilst much of the story’s length has been dialogue heavy, and monologue heavy, having it all climax with violence and action sequences shouldn’t necessarily jar, but the torture of the innocent Kimberley is needlessly prolonged and nasty, an intense assault on the listener that comes out of nowhere to force a sense of urgency. Brotherhood of the Daleks was a good example for using torture sequences to bring a brutal, inescapeably monolithic vision of the future into sharp clarirty, but here it just feels unpleasant and out of place. It’s also a let down that having spent the whole story conveying a full blooded sense of authentic characterisation and realist experiences, the action scenes feature the most flippant lapses of logic about the laws of physics. Where the Doctor can survive a nearby nuclear explosion (though Davros’ gallows humour as the talking bomb in that scene is a gem) and a leap down a lift shaft in a multi storey complex, and where Davros can still use the earpieces as a weapon even after the Doctor destroys the computer console. It’s fitting that in a story about the scorpion and the frog, that the seemingly disabled Davros uses his poison injector as a weapon to hold Kimberley hostage. But her eventual act of martyrdom is at once unclearly directed and ludicrous in a pointless, mean way. Essentially she disarms her captor only to use his weapon to kill herself with it (well let’s face it she couldn’t kill Davros could she).
But that aside, the faults of the story’s end can be overlooked by the greater quality of its overall content. It’s clear why Colin Baker has picked this as his personal favourite, particularly for the role he gets in it. This is perhaps the definitive story for rehabilitating Colin’s Doctor, in his mission statement of over-compensating for both his own ruthlessness and his predecessors’ incompetence. It’s notable too that this is the first time Big Finish actually acknowledges the Sixth Doctor TV era. Prior to this point Colin’s audio adventures had been much like Paul McGann’s, pitched at fans who liked the idea of this particular actor playing the Doctor, but wished to pretend his actual TV stories never happened. By being a strict prequel to Revelation of the Daleks, namedropping the same Stella Stora incident that was mentioned in Terror of the Vervoids to reinforce that this Doctor has particular connections in this future era, and of course explaining Peri’s absence by means of an in joke reference to how The Two Doctors did the same to explain Victoria’s absence, this is where the Sixth Doctor era itself is brought out of the closet.
As I said in Jubilee, the trick is to take what was patchy, chaotic and schizophrenic about the era on TV and make it fully cohesive and with a proper sense of identity. There’s no gratuitous effort to overcomplicate or contradict the story at hand, or to have the Doctor do spontaneously out of character actions to shock the audience. Some may bemoan this being a prequel to Revelation of the Daleks, and thus a missed opportunity to do the audacious and have the Sixth Doctor meet a future Davros out of sequence, but it’s hard to see how that would be an interesting enough gimmick to justify going against simplicity. Besides the fact that the Doctor and Davros meet in sequence, really adds to the idea of these being drawn together by the forces of fate, like star-crossed foes. This compliments the notion that the Doctor and Davros adhere to a higher power and that each is essential to the other’s existence, hence why one can’t kill the other. Like in Destiny of the Daleks, the Doctor’s presence itself seems to bring back to life the doormant Davros, as if giving him a purpose in being, and this time we’re left in no doubt that it certainly wasn’t coincidence.
The portrayal of the Doctor and Davros as titanic, all knowing figures means that Arnold Baines’ offer of conglomerate godhood to them seems both ironic and superfluous. When we see the Doctor sabotaging Davros’ work it’s an effective but restrained throwback to his nasty Season 22 persona, one that’s both comical and provocative. At once getting us behind Davros, but it also manages to make the Doctor’s spiteful behaviour speak volumes, particularly by showing up the Doctor’s limits as much as his lengths. The actual workside discussion they have is particularly compelling with some lovely asides from Colin.
Davros: “I thought I would go insane”
Doctor: “No comment”
The key thing is that as much as the Doctor is questionable and fallible, he’s also affirming. For all that we may pity Davros, all he stands for is self-pity and megalomania, and whilst he indulges us in that individualism and nearly sways us, the Doctor is there to reinforce the strict values of utilitarianism and is never swayed by Davros’ words. The Doctor’s firm belief that this society shouldn’t execute Davros isn’t based on pity so much as believing that utilitarianism requires the maintaining of humane ideals and a merciful justice system that gives everyone a chance of life. But ultimately the Doctor’s utilitarianism is proved to be correct, and Davros’ individualist position is proved to be evil and his promises of rehabilitation prove to be hollow words indeed. This is a story that makes a vital, affirming reminder that you can’t judge people by what they say, only by what they do. Twisted stories like Warriors of the Deep and Attack of the Cybermen which featured the worst kind of 80’s individualism that saw the Doctor become the worst apologist for mass murderers and doing more to save the lives of the ‘misunderstood’ villains than the many actual innocents, are so far from those ideals, it’s depressing.
But this story is firmly about building back the good Doctor’s image. Not only redeeming the Sixth Doctor, but it also pulls out all the stops to provide a full rebuttal of Eri-, sorry Davros’ contemptuous evaluation of the Fifth Doctor’s weakness and cowardice in Resurrection of the Daleks, something that the Doctor in that story never even had the courage to answer. For the most part it works admirably. Davros himself redresses his past words by building up the Doctor as his ‘equal’, which of course has sinister implications when we learn the story of Shan and find out what Davros does to his equals. What really stays in the memory is Davros’ theorising of how each of the Doctor’s incarnations is a mask of manners and quirks and his description of dreaming about seeing the Doctor’s ‘true’ face is something that really characterises the Doctor as God-like. It’s done with just enough conviction and poetry to not sound silly. However a later scene where Davros describes the Doctor as a cunning manipulator and setter of traps comes across as far too knowing, as if Davros has already watched Remembrance of the Daleks long before appearing in it.
To get back to the scene in Resurrection of the Daleks, there are Eric Saward defenders that point out that the Doctor’s refusal to pull the trigger is very moral and in character, which misses the point that the Doctor shouldn’t need a gun but the scene is essentially saying the Doctor is useless without one. Davros redresses this however, by reasserting the Doctor’s capability and competence by means of near overcompensation, where we really see the ideal notion of the Doctor winning against an armed enemy by using only his words and intelligence. Truth be told the TV series rarely ever showed the Doctor achieve this, with Ghostlight being the only exception that comes to mind. By drawing attention to Davros’ poison injector as a suicide weapon that Davros never had the courage to use, the Doctor renders Davros completely powerless and demolishes Davros’ belief that he has the power over life and death. So ultimately the Doctor wins, in a manner that fits so neatly with the continuity of Revelation of the Daleks. But it’s a hollow victory that comes at a cost of losing the most innocent characters that made up his temporary companions. We see this vindictive Doctor exacting rather harsh justice on Lorraine, making a citizen’s arrest on her and digging up evidence to ensure her imprisonment by the authorities, even though she’s learned her lesson, and it’s a great scene of moral ambiguity that emphasises the Doctor as a law unto himself. But it’s also poignant because we know he’s simply desperately holding onto his only consolation prize in this.
The Doctor’s final words of hollow victory are a condemnation of his own failings, of being just as powerless as Davros and just as cursed to survive whilst everyone else dies, and he seems to make an unspoken promise that he’ll never make the mistake of being merciful with Davros again, which rather disappointingly is undone and irretrievably forgotten the moment The Juggernauts gets penned. But just like how the exquisite ruthless streak the Doctor showed in Planet of Fire, Remembrance of the Daleks and Human Nature/Family of Blood will probably rarely surface again, much to our dismay, it’s something we fans will always have to grin and bear about this show that depends on reboots and reaffirmed innocence. We have to treasure the moment whilst it lasts, and ultimately Davros is a story well worth treasuring wholeheartedly.
“Ghettoes, Curfews? Sounds like they’re having a simply unwonderful Christmas time.”
Agendas.
Doctor Who has always fallen victim to them. From Barry Letts’ Buddhist peacenik agenda for the Pertwee era, to Eric Saward’s mercenary agenda, to RTD’s current atheist agenda (hint, it’s in the first scene in Torchwood’s pilot). It seems fashionable for fans to declare their left-wing credentials by slamming The Dominators for its pro-military right wing ethos whilst bigging up Warriors of the Deep as a potentially great, radical script sold short by production faults. Which is odd because it’s even more bullying and mean spirited in its pacifist appeasement message than The Dominators was in its message. It’s simply that the latter message is more in tune with those fan’s favour and politics.
It’d be nice if we could have avoided the point where the show really became a religion and its pacifist morality became dogmatic. But now that we’ve reached the point of no return, the best we can do is to embrace all agendas, and thus neutralise this cultish conformity of telling us what to think. It’s only fair and democratic for the show. So occasionally something right wing is needed to balance things out.
The Apocalypse Element somewhat danced with the asylum seeker issue in the most effective way by using refugees from the Dalek wars seeking sanctuary on Gallifrey. That said refugees turn out to be Dalek replicants hints that the writer could have a negative view of immigration, but it could equally be that they’re not interested in sermonising either way, but that they like playing on cynical paranoias to make the story scarier.
But Flip-Flop is blatant in its reactionary message. This is consistent with Johnathan Morris’ work, after all Bloodtide was a much welcome backlash against the peacenik appeasement messages of the previous Silurian stories. Flip-Flop is about political correctness taken to its nightmare conclusion of becoming an effective weapon of conquest that stifles and ties the hands of everyone. Where a troubled colony is being overran by alien immigrants who are gaining more and more power by pulling the race card and playing the victim. It’s a story about the letter of equality crushing the spirit of it. Indeed the way that the humans are reduced to sight guides to the Slithergees seems to be a deliberate metaphor for the blind leading the blind.
To be honest though, the abstract nature of this story in using aliens to represent immigrants makes it hard to imagine which, if any ethnic group Johnathan Morris personally has it in for. This is simply speculative fiction that takes current anxieties and runs with them. Doctor Who has always homogenised its alien cultures as merciless conquerors and shown the dangers of human gullibility and trust, something that Jubilee heavily critiqued. This is doing what’s traditional but for the modern world in exploding our worst fears and demons as a release of them. This is far more a reckoning and exorcism of issues we may have with the modern PC world than an actual preaching of BNP bullshit. Okay maybe Johnathan Morris does have a pro-BNP agenda but once something becomes art it becomes independent from the author’s interpretations, and the more artistically rendered it is, the more interpretations and possibilities it’s open to. And this story certainly paints a vast emotive picture.
Infact this is a story that aims to speak to as many listeners as possible. The gimmick of the Black Disc/White Disc was that each disc could stand alone. So much like Dalek Empire, this is being consciously written in the style of 70’s era Doctor Who where stories were specifically written to be engaging and understandable even to a random channel hopper who’d only tuned in halfway through the last eposide – that’s what makes the era so classic and why it’s so timelessly accessible even today. The 80’s era of course made no such concessions, since it was the beginning of the age of demographics. As such a single image from The Sea Devils of reptilian corpses rising to the side of a Navy Ship could instantly communicate the story’s meaning and morality about the blind, cavalier aggression of mankind’s military and our failure to understand the alien to even an ADD-suffering channel hopper, whereas Warriors of the Deep spends four episodes desperately and heavy handedly trying to sell its insincerely pious, hypocritical moral message and coming off as simply laughable or downright offensive. As we discussed in He Jests at Scars, the problem of the JNT continuity-driven stories is not so much in failing to explain elements from the past to a casual viewer, but failing to give them a reason to care. But Flip-Flop aims straight for the heart and gets us to care from the get go with an unmistakable and infectious mood of pathos, presenting us with characters that we immediately ‘get’ and we find ourselves with an immediate emotional stake in the story, and whilst much of the message is controversial, some of it is bound to strike a universal chord with everyone’s feelings of helplessness, of wasted words, futile efforts and of walking on eggshells and being stifled by the letter of the law of etiquette, and how in many ways authority is wielded crucially by instilling guilt in its subjects. In-fact if you were to look at it from a left wing perspective, the story’s depiction of a government using the current spate of bomb attacks to chop down on civil liberties could be seen as a lambasting of the Bush administration and the War on Terror.
This is a story that’s very much about the state of modern society, and the sad contradiction of living in a supposedly ‘enlightened’ age amidst violence and chaos and a pervading mood of injustice and helplessness, and a pessimism born of knowing that if this really is an enlightened age then all this mess really is as good as it’s going to get. Where TV from morning to midnight, from the Jeremy Kyle show’s nauseating diagnosis of the rotten state of modern Britain from a position of pathological narcissistic snobbery that would make even some the biggest egos in fandom blush, to Eastenders to Big Brother, constantly reminds us that we live in an age of no hope where human beings have lost the ability to live together harmoniously and have instead reverted to tribalism and apparently need the helping hand of a supernanny to restore them to civilisation. We also live in an age where the more we know and the more sense of entitlement to rights we have, the more we become stuck in a depressingly ubiquitous argument culture. Where peole can find all kinds of clever and cryptic ways to convolute, controvert and complicate serious issues to the point where the nastiest people can get away with the most hideous crimes because the ordinary people and victims just can’t be bothered protesting and arguing anymore over what should be a simple issue.
It uses its emotiveness well. It’s a deeply poignant, bittersweet Christmas story in which the Christmas snow is the result of nuclear winter and which bears stains of blood, and where the Christmas spirit of good will and charity to all has been taken advantage of and exploited. The nature of reactionary thinking is that there was once a mythlogical golden age, a time in living memory where people were happy and safe and had control of their lives. Flip Flop presents this world of perpetual helplessness and weak wills, and wasted years of bitter regret in the icy cold of a forever nuclear winter and thus makes the listener share in the character’s pathos and fixated desire for retroactive salvation, to go back to a time when people weren’t helpless and could make a difference. It’s that kind of emotional impetus to change history that He Jests at Scars completely lacked.
What’s perhaps cause for complaint is that the Doctor is probably at his most ineffectual here, reduced to a complete bystander and his only function seems to be to bring the Tardis to this world and make it ripe for hijacking. Mel has been an absolute revelation in the audios and is on brilliant form here, even though fans might be sceptical about her presence in such a serious story, she actually fits here like an anti radiation glove. When the Tardis is hijacked she reveals a particularly firey side of her personality (which will emerge again in The Juggernauts) and displays more guts in standing up to the hijackers than the Doctor does. But what justifies it barely is the way it poetically matches the all encompassing theme of helplessness. Like Genesis of the Daleks and Logopolis, the Doctor is presented as a slave to predeterminism.
It’s appropriate that their mission back in time leads them to a night when the well meaning president and her secretary were having sex. Whilst it may have been an excuse for the writer to indulge in X-rated naughtiness, there’s no better juxtaposition than sex and death, and it perfectly suits the mood of the play and almost seems to represent the last time someone in this world was happy, a warming memory coming to life before their eyes. Like the jailbreak in Creatures of Beauty, it’s an ecstatic, desperate burst of life in the middle of an environment of misery and spiritual death.
As with Dalek Empire III, the fatalistic conclusion will no doubt infuriate some. You can look at it as the logical conclusion of the story’s pessimism and view of the future as a Catch 22. But otherwise you might see it as not being a conclusion at all, simply a cheap cheat and obfuscation for the sake of it, made even more infuriating by the story’s post-modernist smartarse smuggitude, coupled with its sense of xenophobic superiority. But personally I find myself liking so much about the story, its beautiful saddening score and its history and world building, and how every character has such a rich past, that I tend towards the former. Maybe I’d even say that like Dalek Empire III, its story is so alive and full of history that it’s like real ongoing life and it can’t be constrained by narrative demands for an ending, and thus this inconclusive imponderable approach makes its world more real and memorable. Plus it gets in some pleasing fannish references to Quarks and infamous Billy-fluffs, and as a little fun exercise, try to see if you can spot the Groundhog Day reference.
It’s clear from the later McCoy audios like Dreamtime and Live 34 that Big Finish had tried to clean up its act to compensate for this story’s attitude to immigration, which is certainly laudable, and it represents how there’s always hope that there’s enough good messages in Doctor Who to cancel out the occasional bad one. But again this goes back to the point that the art can overcome the inherent meanness, as with the best vintage Robert DeNiro vehicles, like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull or Once Upon a Time in America. Put it this way, if you were to listen to this story after watching a 70’s exploitation film, whether it be I Spit on Your Grave’s vile misogyny or Coffy’s disturbing celebration of vigilanteism and black self genocide, Flip Flop would actually seem soul-cleansing by comparison.
“Our civilisation isn’t dying, it’s already dead. All that’s left is the rotting corpse”
The Tardis has landed in an unfamiliar and hostile world. The linear narrative has been swiss-cheesed. We don’t know where we are, and the presentation makes us feel seriously disorientated. But like the brutal parallel universe in Inferno, we know we desperately want to escape this world, just like the Doctor and Nyssa do. Not necessarily because they’re under threat of death or that there’s any greater scales, but because there’s a fear that if we stay a moment longer, the suffocating, deathly misery of this world might become contagious.
As for the reason for doing this non-linear gimmick, it fails. Before twist endings and wool over the eyes games of perception became trendy and obligatory for cinema, it had a potency in confronting ordinary people with their fallible perceptions and proclivity for prejudice. This is using twists and perception games to the same end, but it needn’t have bothered. The Koteem would have been revealed as ‘good’ aliens after all at the same point in the narrative, even if the chronology had been straight and linear. Not to mention the final twist could be seen a mile away. However what prevents the gimmick from being just a gimmick is the way it almost personalises the world of Veln as a mindscape, representing someone’s depression. That the story is a collection of repressed and fractured memories that are so traumatic they can only be reckoned with a piece at a time. So what could feel like a cynical, cold technical gimmick, actually feels organic, deeply human and intimate in a mind’s eye kind of way.
The fractured linearity also has the effect of making this world far more alienating and cold. It’s literally representing a disconnected world. Everyone in this story represents a faucet of depression. Chief Gilbrook represents a lifetime’s bitterness and a spiteful, morbid obsession with interrogating some kind of hidden truths of everyone else’s deceptions. Brodelick represents helplessness. Lady Folian lives in an ivory tower, trying to block out the horrors of this world, which of course means that she represents denial. And then there’s the Koteem who represent overwhelming guilt. Nyssa too represents guilt in her reaction to Veleen’s death, which Sarah Sutton plays superbly, making you wish she could have gotten even half as decent material to work with when having to grieve Adric by numbers in Time-Flight. Whilst on the subject of making cheap digs at the 80’s, when this story is about guilt, it’s not in the crass, manipulative way of the mid 80’s where the Doctor causes or allows terrible things to happen just so he can have an excuse to pretentiously act all remorseful and noble about it afterwards. This is guilt as something truly beautiful, humanistic and noble that thrusts the story and brings people together, drives people to care for and help one another every way they can.
When Nyssa encounters Veleen committing suicide, the impact is as shocking and disorientating as a car crash, it’s presented wonderfully as a blind panic of unpredictable, numbing disbelief, and it’s both poetic and authentic in a way that cuts to the bone. What prevents the death itself from being a contrived shock tactic is the way it gives a tragic symbol to the suffocating misery of this world, where there’s only one way of escape for its inhabitants. It’s the same way that Nyssa’s jailbreak isn’t just an exciting sequence, but a desperate burst of life and freedom for a lethargic, dying world where everyone has given up.
It’s hard to think of a Doctor Who story that could be compared with it, because it’s unlike any other story. Like many Doctor Who stories it is specifically about the way bureaucratic or totalitarian societies effectively criminalise the little people, treating them as being guilty of something they don’t understand. But the particularly nasty police brutality is one indication that we’ve left the fictional Whoniverse far behind and have taken an unprecedented sidestep into the ‘real world’ and the tactile attention to detail in Nyssa’s interrogation scene, from her description of having a dry throat to her psychologist interrogator morbidly scrutinising her every facial expression makes it all the more real and tactile and places us firmly within that world and gives us no way out. As such it gets closest to the idea of the Davison era in presenting the Tardis as the savage universe’s only sanctuary. It is a rather defeatist story, and shows the Doctor at his most ineffectual, which places it as having most in common with Season 21, but whilst that vile season would only succeed at making the viewer weep at the contemptuous, cheap degradation of a once great, admirable hero, Creatures would make you weep for all the right reasons. The Doctor is shown from the other person’s perspective as being an arrogant, sanctimonious nuisance who thinks himself judge and jury of alien situations he doesn’t even understand, which makes his final decision to atypically refuse to force his moral view onto others, very poignant. In other words the Doctor chooses to be ineffectual for all the right and noble reasons.
It’s also heavily in tune with the Davison era’s aspirations to depict complex villainy and shades of grey, and easily surpasses them. The most poignant final words are ironically from the story’s antagonist as he poetically describes passed on memories of that disaster that could almost be an artists painting representing generations of pain and helplessness. All summing up to show how, although Gilbrook will never stop hating or bullying the rest of the world, everyone here is a victim, and everyone is in pain.
From its picturesque landscape building of a world in nuclear winter, its beautiful use of imagery and music, with a sense of mood and pathos that can be cut with a knife, and it’s morbidly mesmerising scenes of Nyssa under police interrogation, every bit of heart and soul seems to have gone into this play and the results are simply a crystalline masterpiece, rich in humanity and emotion, with or without the central gimmick. When I said earlier that Nick has a certain proclivity for relentlessness of tone, here the story really benefits from that, and by its unfaltering efforts, the art actually transcends writing to become ‘being’.
“Just one Dalek survivor. All on its own. Quite without purpose…. quite insane”
When discussing the failings of the show in its final declining years, what frequently comes up is the changing nature of society and politics in the 1980’s that saw idealism being cheapened, crushed and even demonised. At this backdrop the shallower understanding of the show, the creeping defeatist tone and the crippling emancipation of its main character in the 80’s suddenly make more sense (see the graphic novel Watchmen for more on this).
Robert Shearman however has always professed a fondness for this troubled era and saw potential for the show at this point to do real uncompromising, unpredictable provocative punk art that dissected and questioned the very nature of narrative. This, more than any other story he’s written is in tune with those ambitions. He’s shaking off the writing discipline, letting himself off the leash and going for the rough cut.
It helps that Robert is a fan of this era. The 80’s very much simplified the Doctor, in the same way it simplified a lot of idealist characters. The Doctor stopped being a complex, adaptable character and became instead a trademark (at least until Sylvester McCoy came along). With Peter Davison the understanding of the Doctor’s peacemaker role had become so shallow that he became an inept appeaser. With Colin Baker, attempts to make the Doctor feel dangerous and unpredictable were based around another shallow and superficial approach of making him simply insane. The depth of philosophy was no longer there. But if you believed in the character, then you brought your own understanding of the Doctor’s depth of philosophy to fill in the gaps and make the erraticness consistent with a well rounded character. By all indications, that’s what Robert Shearman did as a viewer, and he brings that extra bit of work to his rendering of the character now. Just compare Robert Shearman’s full blooded portrayal of the psychotic, volatile Doctor in the 2005 story Dalek, with the artificial, childish and desperate precedent in Twin Dilemma.
Likewise here we have the Doctor being ineffectual, but he retains a complexity and rich idealism that the Saward era Doctors never had. Effectively its using the conception of the 80’s Doctor as an anti-hero or reluctant hero to really demonstrate all that’s wrong with the idea of the conventional hero or the modernist ‘might is right’ way of thinking and how limiting, conformist and perjorative it all is. The Doctor colludes with Rochester’s tyranny, in the hope of influencing and changing this fascist Britain from within, only to realise that Rochester is beyond all reason and hope. Evelyn takes him to task over his prejudice of the Daleks and proves him wrong, and ultimately the Doctor has to stand back and let a Dalek of all people save the day. Meanwhile, hints at an alternative timeline where the Doctor helped the Britains to defeat the Daleks are like heartbreaking memories of the reliable hero the Doctor once was.
Evelyn has grown into a wonderful companion by now, and in this story she gets to be on an equal footing to the Doctor and to divide our viewpoint in much the same way as Leela did back in the 70’s. It truly is a shame that the horrendous ageism of New Who would prevent us from having such a companion on screen right now. She displays both courage and heart, and stands as the only character in this story with the capacity for empathy. She gets to really stand up to the most arrogant of Doctors, but crucially she does it at the climax of spending the whole story dividing our viewpoint so that her perspective already has the greater validity.
This is a story where the Doctor’s noble role is sorely challenged. What made the Doctor the perfect left wing hero was that in refusing to become an executioner or the next leader after toppling the previous regime, he was refusing to let himself become the very tyrant he once railed against. After all, the Doctor by nature does frequently force his moral views onto others, so perhaps he knows it’d be wrong for him to have long term power over a populace. But in this story he makes a return visit to find that even in his absence, his legacy and legend has become a fascism and tyranny in and of themselves.
In this way the presentation of the ineffectual Doctor isn’t simply the parade of misery and defeatism it was in the 80’s, because here it actually is about the relationship between the Doctor and the reactionary, shallow society that crushed him. This is a world where consumerist culture has cheapened the Daleks, turning ideals into commodities; in much the same way as cinema of the time turns heroism into macho trash of big guns and one-liners. Jubilee really understands the paradox at the heart of the shallowing of society, as things become simplified, they become more confusing- more rule driven and society grows ever more petty and belligerent which leads to confusion, people not knowing where they stand, the crisis of masculinity, Generation X and post modernism. It would be easy for this story’s attack on our consumerist society to come across as mean-spirited and shaming towards the average consumer, but infact this is a story which sympathetically understands that we are an anxiety driven society and that we consume and buy ourselves a lifestyle as a form of aversion therapy, to feel secure. As with a lot of the stories of the 80’s, Jubilee emerges as a very schizophrenic one, but one that’s fully aware of the toll of issues its reckoning with, and has a symbiosis that most 80’s stories couldn’t even dream of.
Infact its one story that leaves a different impression with the listener every time it’s played. In one listening it may sound bogged down by the worst excesses of Season 24, where the comedy, caricatures and winks to the fourth wall threaten to erode all believability. In another, all the humorous moments do nothing to offset just how depressing and bleak the story is at heart. Infact its fluctuations in tone are genuinely terrifying in how it conveys a society gone mad which changes its own minefield of deathly rules of etiquette with the mood of the day. In that it is very close to the ethos of Genesis of the Daleks, where the more attentive of you may notice how the Daleks’ parameters of racial conformity narrowed as the serial went on. At first in Genesis of the Daleks it was only the Doctor that didn’t fit the mould, but by the end of that story even their own creator and blood relatives could no longer be accommodated, so conceivably from there the road to Dalek civil wars over minor mutations and genetic deviations were inevitable.
Whilst it may be a fan taboo to show a Dalek that has been degraded and has had its will broken by human society, Jubilee gives us the very society that could believably do that. Where stereotypes live and breathe as prisoners of convention, and even the Dalek’s nature is drawn as a tragic victim of obsessive compulsive disorder, and through the Dalek’s journey, we see the true horror of what it means to be made a pariah of. There’s some brilliant, distressing audio work from Nicholas Briggs as he gets across the creature’s soul being at war with its own mechanisation. Infact the portrayal of a Dalek as an introspective misfit having a personality crisis matches perfectly with what the Daleks are. Armoured, walled up creatures detached from the world outside, so having a Dalek become withdrawn in itself and going mute for half a century is a surprisingly logical extension of that. In such confusion, repression and isolation, anyone can lose their sense of purpose and become defeatist about everything they used to have convictions in.
As with Neverland, it puts a Dalek up for public execution amidst a lynch mob crowd and asks who the worse fascist of the two is. But it goes deeper than that. It goes deeper than the dangers of war nostalgia too. This is a sensationalist society that needs perpetual enemies to define itself against, where women only trust and seek oppressive husbands in the belief that their violence will protect them from themselves. It’s a nightmare world where humanity has overthrown its oppressors only to find itself unable to function without them. As such the Doctor’s final forgiveness of the Dalek doesn’t invalidate his later ruthlessness in Remembrance of the Daleks, so much as redefines his destruction of the Daleks as being something of a mercy killing, in the knowledge that if the Daleks ever did achieve universal supremacy it would become their own personal hell.
What’s really terrifying and discomforting though is that there’s so much about Jubilee’s society that’s true to our own. This is Doctor Who for a depressing modern world of Guantanamo Bay, Jeremy Kyle, and the most vindictive tyranny of manners that rules in all social situations. In that regard it’s amazing and cherishable that the story ends on any note of victory or hope at all.
So it’s an odd, intriguing beast, which can be best summed up as being Doctor Who as parodied by The Comic Strip Presents, where the show itself comes under attack for its traditional values and black and white morality, and homogenous portrayal of alien cultures. It’s savage and yet simultaneously vital and means every word of it. Coupled with Robert Shearman’s beautiful talent for conjuring imagery with audio, it has something that 80’s Doctor Who with its style over substance rarely achieved- an iconography that links images to ideals in much the same way as The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Green Death did.
Like The Mutant Phase, it ends on a paradox reset switch where none of it happened. In some ways it’s as if the story’s dissecting of narrative and character roles have finally unravelled the whole story, making the reset switch feel inevitable. But it isn’t necessarily a copout. Not if something is learned from all of this, not if characters are changed in the most unlikely way, and certainly not if it hangs on a crucial decision, especially one made by a character who previously had no courage for making decisions. It feels like we’ve seen an alternate world where so many things were possible that the human characters could become their worst enemy and a Dalek could perversely become the most heroic and honourable of them all, and so the deletion of these possibilities feels honestly like a sacrifice. Making it overall less a dream and more a warning, which was always the point of its Orwellian source material.
It’s often said that this is a great story for highlighting the dark side of humanity, which does Jubilee an injustice. It’s actually about decoding the dark side of humanity and the dehumanising nature of modern Western society, and does so exhaustively. Sure it’s occasionally didactic and verbose and heavily overstated, but the intrigue and broken taboos add up to being Robert Shearman’s most compelling and unpredictable story of all, which more than compensates for any didactism, and to make a Dalek story unpredictable is definitely no small feat. It is best thought of as an undisciplined, experimental run up to the more lean and accomplished Dalek. The Dalek story that Robert Shearman wrote for the New Series in 2005 was something populist, pacy and mainstream (though with a beautiful visual literacy to compensate for its less wordy script), but this, unlike Dalek is specifically pitched at speaking directly to the misfits and outsiders of society, and it’s arguably a better work of art for that reason, for being able to reach wider (and deeper) than mere demographics. When Rob Shearman reviewed The Sea Devils in DWM, he noted how the scene where the Doctor laments Trenchard is done two completely different ways in the TV story and the novelisation, but both are equally meaningful and both are amongst his favourite moments in Doctor Who. Likewise in giving us a more complex and pointed version of Dalek that can crack open mindsets and be honestly life changing, we can only say God bless him for giving us the rough cut as well.
“Poor Adric. We never really stopped to mourn him did we?”
A short review is that this is a Season 20 story except with sayable dialogue. It’s clear why this story was picked for adaptation in the New Series. In many ways, to be a fan of this story means to be part of the self-proclaimed fan elite. It means being able to enjoy the continuity and fanwank of this story whilst feeling more socially adept and able to appreciate its poignancy and emotional content. That way such ‘sensitive’ fans can feel like a cut above the usual ‘sad’ continuity-loving anoraks that they sneer at.
Like a Paul Cornell story, it can’t help but feel manipulative and of dubious sincerity for those reasons. But also like a Paul Cornell story, dubious sincerity isn’t the same thing as being insincere and it takes an act of will not to be taken in by its magic.
As fans we were certainly inclined to be fond of it because it was written by Marc Platt, who had also given us Ghostlight- one of several stories that just in Doctor Who’s final days, finally justified and rewarded our long term perseverance and loyalty throughout a long depressing string of nadirs that had been accumulating into a corrosive critical mass. And listening to this audio will certainly make most fans wish he’d been allowed to write for the show more often back then.
As with the best Big Finish stories, Marc Platt is clearly someone who loved the era at hand. Since this is the Peter Davison era, that’s a relief because it means the story is written by someone who ironically cares more about Doctor Who than anyone who was actually producing the show at the time. Marc Platt is clearly someone who really saw Peter Davison’s vulnerable and fallible qualities as something beautiful and human, whilst Eric Saward just saw it as an opportunity to push the Doctor out of the way in favour of his favourite mercenary characters and killing sprees, and of course to keep weak plots going without a competent decisive hero to efficiently resolve them. Spare Parts also rather homages State of Decay’s sense of curfew atmosphere, which is close to the era. More importantly it treats Adric’s tragic death with the respect it always deserved but never got.
The impact of Adric’s death and indeed the impact of Earthshock as a story overall was huge. Unfortunately it was followed up by the almighty shark-jumper Time-Flight. It was a shark jumper for many reasons – its failure at telling a coherent story, that it was so stale and joyless that even the outtakes were deathly dull, and given that Earthshock was one of the few 80’s stories to achieve the same kind of impact as the best Tom Baker stories, then quite frankly any story that followed Earthshock and inherited its buzz and audience boost simply couldn’t afford to be as awful as Time-Flight was. Sadly I think millions of viewers tuned into that story and assumed the whole series was as cheap and embarrassing as that, and could never take the show seriously again.
But the main reason Time-Flight represents the rot setting in for me is the fact that in the beginning of the story, the Doctor, Tegan and Adric have an obligatory grieving scene over Adric’s death, being hysterical and dramatic about it which lasts about a minute, before they immediately change the subject and started acting bored again. It’s one of the most crass, offensively false scenes in Doctor Who and a sign that something nasty, soulless, cheapening and insincere had creeped into the show. The very insincerity and cheapening of life that paved the way towards Warriors of the Deep and Resurrection of the Daleks with their contrived pointless massacres followed up at the end by some hypocritical moralising speech from the Doctor, and of course the coup de disgrace of The Twin Dilemma’s unrelenting character assassination of the Doctor for the sake of cheap shock tactics.
But the mouthy, domineering Tegan is absent here, which gives Nyssa a chance to step forward and be a felt presence. The beauty of which is that Nyssa was always a quiet and meek contrast to loud, brash Tegan, but in Spare Parts we see that Nyssa too needs to scream about Adric’s death in order to grieve properly. So we have two completely different women reacting to grief in the same way. And for that moment, the vile insincerity of that token grieving scene in Time-Flight is wiped from memory, and in his absence Adric is almost remembered as a real person rather than the unpleasant cipher he was in the show. And of course that love begats more love as a good script compels the actors involved to give it their all. Sarah Sutton and Peter Davison are at their best here, really showing what a waste their potential dynamic was. Peter is especially giving his most energetic, passionate performance as the Doctor and for once he really sounds like he’s never been away from the role.
It’s clear that the Doctor Who fan writers have taken to the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh as an inspiration as something that could fit comfortably in Doctor Who. After all the TV series was apparently going the way of social realism dramas in its last story Survival (which was written by Rona Munro who went on to write the superb screenplay for Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird). When Doctor Who came back in 2005, the depiction of the Doctor bore an uncanny resemblance to the volatile antihero of Mike Leigh’s warped existentialist masterpiece Naked. Indeed there are moments in Naked where the lead character’s monologues seem almost like a continuation of some of Sylvester McCoy’s tirades against the Gods of Ragnarok, and he’s even given his own Master to play against. Furthermore it’s impossible to get any more Mike Leigh than Father’s Day and Parting of the Ways.
It should be said that the reckless, youthful Fifth Doctor was perhaps accidentally a very current approach back in the 80’s, and in synch with Brookside. The switch towards the elder brother type character becoming the role model, rather than the father figure. The 80’s was a time when heroes were getting younger which suited a time when fathers were being made redundant and youth culture was freed up to place its stamp on the media. In that regard the Fifth Doctor really can feel at home in the kitchen sink drama, even though the TV series never placed him there.
So this is very much a Ken Loach film with Cybermen, and there’s little wrong with that, after all Dalek Empire is basically Tenko with Daleks. The story mainly focuses on a northern typical nuclear family representing a proud, nostalgic, salt of the Earth vision of the working classes. It’s a particularly cosy vision of that family unit, far closer to Vera Drake than to Meantime. As with Kes, the destiny that awaits the young ones is already mapped out for them. Getting called up to work is a euphemism for Cyber-conversion, which isn’t out of synch with what the Cybermen are. They are an automated workforce, a socialist Communist ideal turned nightmare.
Of course it’s been argued with a certain justification that the domestic focus of this story rather constrains the potential scope of this all. But the point is that it instantly conjures a sense of old fashioned utilitarianism, which was the basic ethos of Doctor Who until the 80’s battered it to the ground. You may see plenty of deaths in any era of Doctor Who, but it’s only in the 80’s where characters are no longer dying for something. Doctor Who of the 60’s and 70’s may seem less emotionally resonant now because it was pitched to a generation that was assumed to already feel a personal stake in their fellow man and the greater society, without needing emotional prompting. New Who on the other hand is pitched at a more individualist age which needs an immediate, intimate emotional connection with the lead characters.
Anyhow, Spare Parts manages to tap into that forgotten ethos and as such, it effectively conjures and raleighs support in the Doctor’s actions to liberate the people even though we know the Doctor is doomed to fail. In a manner that goes in the opposite direction to the TV series, Adric’s death becomes a reason to keep fighting the good fight, rather than a reason to give up, lose all faculties and only look after number one from now on. It’s the Doctor’s pro-activeness, determination and conviction to make a difference that prevents this story from being defeatist in the way most of the mid-80’s stories were, and as such the Doctor maintains our faith and the bleak fate of Mondas becomes a tragedy rather than a requirement.
Compared to the rather overblown New Who remake, this is far superior. Mainly by virtue of not featuring the unsavoury macho trash that Age of Steel did. Likewise the scene that is lifted from here, featuring a defective Cyberman remembering its emotions and its past life is far more effective here by concerning a character we got to know beforehand, and it’s far more brutally done. Looked at in a particularly cynical light, this seemed a perfect choice for the New Who model because it suits the New Series’ insular conception that in order for the audience to care for an alien world, it must be rendered identical to our own, or at least feature humans that are just like us. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Part of what made Genesis of the Daleks work in its depiction of the planet Skaro was how it’s blatant allegories to the Third Reich and the First World War trenches made its world resemble the ultimate vision of hell and therefore perfect ground for spawning the ultimate evil, where we see all the worst periods of human history anachronistically brought together in one place. The rules here were different and thus this was a world where the Doctor could lose.
As with Genesis, the Doctor’s failure here is suited to the kitchen sink drama where the inevitability of defeat is always hanging there. Come the final reel, the hero must eventually realise that he can’t change the world and he must accept his lot and count his blessings. The Doctor has to leave Mondas taking what little victory he can from delaying the inevitable, allowing the people to be happy and human for that bit longer.
Likewise this is a world that exists in our own collective memory lane of the good old days, but relocated to an alien world. The winter of discontent becomes represented by the cracking of the planet opening up a frost fountain and the very people becoming cold, metaphorically. The moment that really achieves the magic is the scene where the father of the household invites us to look at what previously seemed like a Christmas tree, only to reveal that the baubles actually represent planets, making up a cosmic map of where Mondas is in the universe. This is the ordinary and familiar poetically subverted and turned otherworldly, like a child’s imagination playing let’s pretend with everyday props.
Of course the most obvious point is that the human element is essential when it comes to the Daleks and Cybermen. The Daleks are an extrapolation of the worst aspects of our own psyche, and the tragedy of the Cybermen is that they may be unrecogniseable and inhuman but they were once like us. This is a story that works on character contrasts, most notably the Holmesian double act between the anal, prissy Sisterman Constant and her alcoholic, cynical aide Doctorman Allan. The latter woman becomes a particular staple of the ‘dying world’ audio stories, such as Creatures of Beauty and Flip-Flop. A well-meaning character at core, who’s world weary humour and sarkiness adds such poignancy to the pessimism, someone who laughs at the hopelessness of the situation because otherwise they’d have to cry. Of course there are moments where the script is too quick to overstate and jump the gun, and to presume its own success and tell us how clever, poignant and sentimental it thinks it is being. But overall the pacing and the ticking clock to Mondas’ spiralling and inevitable demise keeps it from lagging and leaves us little time to notice its portentousness, and by the end, the story has earned its final analysis as no less than a success. The best TV story to have really conveyed this sense of pathos about the Cybermen, by contrasting them to the warm, emotional aspects of the humans is Tomb of the Cybermen. But this goes one further and really shows us this tragedy of the Cybermen first hand, reminding us that they are as much victims as monsters. As such, amidst the fannish derivativeness of the 80’s, this kind of revisitation feels like it’s been an obvious missed opportunity for too long. Seven years on and so far it still stands as Big Finish’ best Cybermen story and seems in no danger of being knocked off the top spot anytime soon.
A remake of the 1985 Audio Visual play of the same name. It’s obvious that at the time, this was far superior in quality, substance and morality to nearly everything that the actual TV show was producing then. Mind you that’s almost damning with faint praise.
The Doctor’s morality is in proper swing here. He refuses to let Karl kill the Dalek agent, even though ultimately it’s a mercy that leads to his downfall. But at the same time he knows when to be ruthless if the situation demands it. He’s the alien Doctor we always imagined who would pragmatically sacrifice one life if it would save billions more. His belief that the Mutant Phase should wipe out the Daleks is very much in line with the Seventh Doctor’s darker, omnipotent persona who knows the universe would be better off. It actually takes a lot to convince him that he should help the Daleks, as opposed to the same Doctor’s sudden, inexplicable and reprehensible turncoat behaviour in Warriors of the Deep. But again it achieves one of the TV show’s missed opportunities, in following up the Doctor’s speculation in Genesis of the Daleks that ‘out of their evil must come something good’. With the Doctor and Daleks working together to destroy a far greater threat to the universe out of a mutual cause of survival, the Doctor comes to recognise that even the Daleks have their place in the universe. Unfortunately this achievement is all lost as the story presses the ultimate reset switch at the end, which is very hard to forgive.
In an age where twist endings have become obligatory, this is the first of several times where a late twist in the tale will only serve to make it less interesting if not an all out copout that leaves the listener feeling cheated. See also The Reaping and Dalek Empire IV.
Nick Briggs themes get a real spurt on here. In many ways this is like Logopolis, with the Doctor teamed up with his greatest enemy in an uneasy alliance to help defeat a mutual threat. Incidentally the scenes of Thals and Daleks working together and irritating each other and becoming strangely used to each other are a gem. It is also, like Logopolis, about the clumsy breaking of the delicate chain that holds the universe together. As with Nick’s earlier Sirens of Time, the Doctor’s interference in the timeline is shown to be a real minefield where history swings on the simplest of pivots. It also hones Nick’s eco-concerns, the belief that nature’s delicate balance and food chain is essential to our survival and that changing nature’s delicate balance by genetic tampering, hunting species to extinction or our environmental recklessness could create a chain reaction of catastrophic consequences that rebound vengefully on us. In this case genetically modified crops lead ultimately to a galactic disaster that even the Daleks can’t withstand.
It helps that Nick has a real talent for conveying the apocalyptic, and gives us the human race stuck in one room like a bunch of students in a house share having to make do, whilst desolate wilderness surrounds them. You can tell that when this was first written in the mid-80’s, Threads was the main inspiration on Nick’s mind, with a bit of The Young Ones and David Cronenberg’s more AIDS-conscious remake of The Fly thrown in for good measure. He also in the early scenes on the Thal ship, manages to capture the haunting, uninviting coldness of space, in such a way that makes the galactic scale of the threat really tangible, in terms of both the Dalek expansion and the spread of the mutant swarm. Had one of these environments been the consistent focus of the play, rather than quickly discarded for somewhere new, then it might have been a more stolid achievement.
It’s the paradox story that Nick seems to have major trouble making into something credible and plausible. Just as it begins to make logical sense, Nick adds a misjudged twist that reduces it to even greater illogical nonsense and renders the whole story inconsequential and pointless, and furthermore makes the dramatic emphasis and urgency put on whether Ganatus will smash the antidote, seem simply forced, laughably over-earnest and pretentious, much like the contrived lengths the story goes to cast ridiculous suspicion onto Ganatus, and indeed him turning out to be a traitor feels like just a forced development. Infact the scene where the Doctor is grilling Ganatus over the ’suspicious’ act of passing out during in-flight turbulence comes across as a desperate over-compensation for the gullibility of the Fifth Doctor on TV who gladly invited Turlough aboard without getting suspicious, and one that doesn’t feel genuinely natural on Davison’s part, infact it makes the Doctor seem outright neurotic. It’s the same way that when Red Dwarf replaced Rimmer with Kochanski, they tried to force the same antagonistic dynamic between Kryten and Kochanski as with Lister and Rimmer, but in a way that never felt like the relatable, natural character friction of old, but only served to make Kryten seem uncharacteristically picky and petty and mean spirited in his attempts to find and highlight fault with Kochanski.
The thing about Nicholas Briggs as a writer is that he tends to go for a certain tone, and tends to do it relentlessly, with little in the way of levity or contrast. Just like the later Dalek Empires, it suffers from Nick’s lapses into pretension with twists that detract from rather than enhance the story, and a desperate, laboured attempt to have something to say. Case in point; the Doctor’s stick in the mud moral stance with the Emperor Dalek when he hasn’t a leg to stand on and is obviously just the writer trying to fill the runtime because there’s no story here (rather like in Warriors of the Deep).
It quickly becomes clear that this is all gimmick and no story, and its running quickly out of mileage, and the results simply feel heavy handed, and slightly repellent, and with the final cop-out it’s all proved to have been empty sound and fury all along. Given the ‘knowing’ flippancy of its final word that it wasn’t meant to make sense, some listeners would rightly feel insulted and cheated by the ending and would perhaps even have given up on the range. Which is a shame because it demonstrates Big Finish’s new found competency in really going for the cinematic, vivid and multi-textual. Incidentally it also drops subtle hints at the fragility of the web of time, which will become prominent in the McGann and Charley adventures. Greater things are ahead now.
From Styre on Time Signature
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From Styre on The Centenarian
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From Styre on Farewells
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From Styre on The History of Christmas
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From Styre on The Solar System
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From Styre on A Day in the Life
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From Styre on 1.4 – A Blind Eye
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From Styre on 1.3 – The Inquiry
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From Tom Swift on 9.4 – The Diet of Worms
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From Tom Swift on 1.1 - Oh No It Isn't
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From Tom Swift on 1.6 – Dragons Wrath
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From Jphalt on 2.3 – Old Soldiers
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From Jphalt on 1.3 - The Blue Tooth
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From Styre on 049 – Master
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From sneakyangel on 5.1 – The Grel Escape
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From sneakyangel on 113 – Time Reef and A Perfect World
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From sneakyangel on 086 – The Reaping
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From sneakyangel on 119 – The Key 2 Time – The Chaos Pool
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From sneakyangel on 118 – The Key 2 Time – The Destroyer of Delights
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From sneakyangel on 117 – The Key 2 Time – The Judgement of Isskar
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From sneakyangel on 3.04 – Empathy Games
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From sneakyangel on 3.08 – The Prisoner’s Dilemma
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From Styre on 1.2 – Square One
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From Styre on 2.1 – Buried Secrets
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From Styre on 1.1 – Weapon of Choice
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From Styre on 116 – The Raincloud Man
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From Styre on 114 – Brotherhood of the Daleks
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From Styre on 115 – Forty-Five
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From Styre on 2.4 – Dreamland
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From Styre on 2.3 – Fatal Consequences
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From Styre on 2.2 – Snow Blind
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From Tanlee on 114 – Brotherhood of the Daleks
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From Tanlee on 121 – Enemy of the Daleks
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From Tanlee on 6 – Exile
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From Tanlee on 5 – Deadline
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From Tanlee on 4 – He Jests at Scars…
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From Tanlee on 1.2 – Blood of the Daleks Part 2
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From Tanlee on 110 – The Boy That Time Forgot
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From Tanlee on 106 – The Dark Husband
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From Tanlee on 093 – Renaissance of the Daleks
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From Tanlee on 086 – The Reaping
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From Tanlee on 065 – The Juggernauts
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From Tanlee on 053 – The Creed of the Kromon
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From Tanlee on 050 – Zagreus
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From Styre on 048 – Davros
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From Tanlee on 046 – Flip-Flop
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From Tanlee on 044 – Creatures of Beauty
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From Tanlee on 040 – Jubilee
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From Tanlee on 034 – Spare Parts
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From Tanlee on 015 – The Mutant Phase
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