Jim Thompson wrote a fantastic criminal retirement community in his 1958 crime novel The Getaway. It was called El Rey's, a sanctuary in Mexico designed as a Hell for criminals to suffer for eternity. You'd think a franchise that parodied Bulldog Drummond in City of Death would've done a much better job…especially on audio.
http://arcana.wikidot.com/el-rey
“Sargasso,” by Christopher Cooper, is an odd Torchwood story in many ways. We have Rhys on his own, only the second time Big Finish has featured Kai Owen atop the cast list, and he’s… on a transatlantic container ship? Cooper has an interesting idea: the ship runs into calm waters in the midst of one of the massive garbage patches that build in the ocean, and the plastic debris in the water is used by the Nestene Intelligence to take over the ship and eventually convert the crew into Autons. It’s up to Rhys, fellow passenger Kaitlin (Sydney Feder), and ship’s captain Anika (Chloe Ewart) to stop the Nestene and save the world. Scott Handcock’s direction and the FoxYason Studios sound design combine to create a claustrophobic, horror movie atmosphere as the characters are stalked through the corridors of the ship by plastic creatures. What I like best about the story is that nobody actually knows what’s going on: Rhys has never heard of the Nestene Intelligence, and the other two obviously haven’t, so they must figure out what’s happening on the fly. While the characterization is good in general, I find it hard to believe that people like Kaitlin in the Torchwood universe still think that aliens do not exist, given the sheer amount of catastrophe that has visited the planet. That said, Cooper does what I thought was impossible and gives an American character American English idioms in her dialogue, so I’m not going to complain too much. Oh, and the ending is great. Overall, “Sargasso” is a solid story that doesn’t break any boundaries but keeps the listener’s attention through strong writing and sound design. It’s also a unique take on the Nestene that gets you thinking. Give it a listen.
The final story in this box set is “Driving Miss Wells,” by James Goss, and unlike the first two installments it feels significantly less important. Trinity Wells (Lachele Carl reprising her TV role) has published a book in which she claims that the various world-shaping events of the RTD era were simply examples of mass hallucination, and that aliens are not real. Given the scale of these events, people are hesitant to accept this idea, and the story follows her on a UK book tour. She’s been hired by a media conglomerate to head up their “real news” broadcasts, even though there’s something unusual going on behind the scenes. And she has a new chauffeur: Jack Harkness. The story is simple, following Trinity and Jack from place to place as she denies alien involvement and Jack tries to convince her otherwise. Trinity is also having visions of alien flies infesting various people – but are these visions real or are they paranoid hallucinations? The story doesn’t answer this question until the very end, lending it an oppressive, suspenseful feeling. But there’s not much meat on these particular bones, as we don’t learn much about Trinity outside of a thinly-sketched relationship with her mother, and Jack is working undercover for Torchwood at a time in his life we’ve seen a great deal. It’s basically a forgettable Torchwood story, in other words, but at least for Big Finish a forgettable Torchwood story is still a decent Torchwood story. It’s a shame that the set doesn’t feature three brilliant stories, but it’s entirely worth it for the first two alone and “Driving Miss Wells” is a good palate cleanser.
“What Have I Done?” by Guy Adams is a very simple story: in World War I, in the wake of Gallipoli, Jack finds a wounded Ottoman soldier in no-man’s-land and tries to bring him to safety, all while a strange monster stalks them by their fears. It’s a two-handed character piece dedicated almost entirely to Jack, Ata (Atilla Akinci), and their relationship. Adams really captures the horrors of World War I, and the creature provides a window into the characters’ psychology. John Barrowman is utterly fantastic – this is probably his best audio performance – and he shows us parts of Jack’s character that we’ve never seen before. For example, we learn that Jack is terrified of death, because he knows exactly what death is like, and when he dies he never knows if that’ll be the time he doesn’t come back. Ata carries a lot of guilt over his relationship with his brother, and tries to reject Jack’s help because he doesn’t want even more guilt on his conscience. The ending is particularly bleak for this reason, because we know that Jack always comes back but Ata has no idea. There’s not much to discuss with a story like this, but it’s one of the best forms a drama can take: throw two characters together in stressful circumstances and watch how they interact. I don’t know if it’s the Torchwood influence or what but this is turning into a stunningly good box set.
The second volume of The Lives of Captain Jack kicks off with a bang: the sixth Doctor falls dying from the TARDIS into Jack’s arms, seemingly about to regenerate, and Jack must slip on the Doctor’s coat and resolve the situation that got the Doctor “killed” in the first place. It’s “Piece of Mind,” by James Goss, and it’s fantastic. Jack absorbs the Doctor’s regenerative energy, which he can do because he cannot die, and continues the adventure while the Doctor recuperates in the TARDIS. From there, we get what we never knew we needed: an utter farce featuring Jack doing an outlandish impression of the Doctor and attempting to save the day. It’s hilarious, and John Barrowman’s comically over the top performance had me laughing out loud on multiple occasions. It’s also a character piece that draws sharp lines between the Doctor and Jack: when things get desperate, Jack resorts to very un-Doctor-ish methods like gunfire and sex. He’s also careless, coming up with a seemingly flawless plan to save the day that ends up making things significantly worse because he didn’t have enough knowledge beforehand. And all of this sets up the conclusion, when the Doctor, back in good health, swoops into action as “Captain Jack Harkness” and saves the day. Barrowman’s “Doctor” accent is amusingly all over the map, while Colin Baker adopts a ridiculous Colonel Sanders accent that sounds absolutely nothing like Jack but still makes me laugh. The ending is pure fanservice but still delights, with Baker apologizing preemptively for Eccleston abandoning Jack, and dismissing the obvious continuity problems with a handwave. “Piece of Mind” is excellent. It’s thin as tissue paper, sure, but that’s okay – I could listen to Barrowman and Baker play off each other all day. What a great start to the set.
It is getting harder and harder to review these stories, as the average quality has been terrible for quite some time and there is no sign of impending improvement. The latest main range tale, “An Alien Werewolf in London,” by Alan Barnes, is absolutely awful, the sort of thing that sounds like it was produced by a bunch of rank amateurs and was written in pure ignorance.
I’ll start with the positive: the music by Joe Meiners is excellent, a unique and memorable soundtrack that is far too good for this production. And that’s literally it – every single other element of this story must be considered a failure. Normally, you can expect at least a basic level of professionalism from Big Finish: good acting, competent direction etc. But here, it’s all bad. Every single performance, without exception, is bad and unconvincing, from Sylvester McCoy all the way down to the end of the cast list. Whether this is due to director Samuel Clemens, the awful script, or both is unclear, but it’s quite clear that nobody knows what’s happening or has any idea how to approach the material. The editing and direction are incomprehensible: despite a frenetic script, the production drags endlessly, a problem exacerbated by inexplicably long stretches of silence scattered throughout.
But the real issue here is the script, something even more appalling considering that Barnes is supposed to be the script editor for this range. I’m genuinely unsure what tone Barnes wants to set: some of this is serious, some of it is overtly comedic, some of it is lampooning Australian soap operas. But rather than using comedy to balance drama or vice versa, these moments come and go with no sense of cohesion. Take the end of episode 3, in which Mags, standing in a largely silent TARDIS console room with the Doctor and Rufus (Jacob Collins Levy), takes us into the cliffhanger with a theatrical “NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!” This is utterly ridiculous and completely unconvincing, and it’s impossible to accept that the performers didn’t know it at the time. Was this written this way on purpose? Is that supposed to be a funny moment? It’s not played that way.
Let’s also look at the characterization. This is the end of the Mags trilogy, in which she and the Doctor have been searching for a cure for her lycanthropy. At one point in the story, the Sin Eater (Shiloh Coke) absorbs Mags’ transformative abilities. Aha, I thought, this will be the path to resolution for her character – but no, she is returned to “normal” with barely a passing comment and leaves with the Doctor at the end with absolutely no resolution. So, we’re doing more of these, I guess? The story is also notable for its presentation of Ace: this takes place after her departure from the TARDIS, as she calls the Doctor back to Earth to investigate mysterious happenings. You’d expect some sort of evolution in her character, some sort of new perspective gained from her time away, maybe even a return to the thesis of “A Death in the Family” that she can’t function on her own outside of the TARDIS. At the very least you’d expect her to behave like the middle-aged woman she has become, right? Nope – she’s functionally indistinguishable yet again from her season 25 portrayal. It is insulting to the listener’s intelligence to continue to put the same character out there time after time with no changes whatsoever. That Barnes could write this, that Nick Briggs and Big Finish as a whole could release this, shows a deep contempt for the audience: truly, we will buy any old crap with the Doctor Who logo on the front, and here’s the proof.
It’s sad to say, but it feels like Doctor Who is dying. Not in terms of sales or ratings – those may be perfectly healthy – but in terms of the creativity and sense of invention that has always defined the series at its best. The books have, with few exceptions, been a creative wasteland since the return of the series to television, and Big Finish has gone steadily downhill in this regard over the past decade, apparently happy to use all of its creative power on Torchwood stories instead. The most recent season of the TV series was one of the least ambitious in the history of the program, one that has for the first time left me largely uninterested in watching the next season, even in spite of Jodie Whittaker’s magnetic performance and the strong central cast. In that regard, “An Alien Werewolf in London,” while it may be one of the worst releases in Big Finish history, is still little more than another shovelful of dirt on the grave.
I’ve been expecting this to come down the pipe for a while now: a Paternoster Gang set reuniting Neve McIntosh, Catrin Stewart, and Dan Starkey for new adventures in Victorian London. We had a preview in The Eighth of March, but this set provides three full-length stories to enjoy. Fans have been clamoring for this since these characters were introduced, so how is the set? Well, it’s… fine.
The first story, “The Cars That Ate London!” by Jonathan Morris, is a bizarre tale that attempts to unite historical technological progression with science fiction, and only barely succeeds. Electric carriages were first developed in the late 1800s, and Morris’s script engages with their impact on society – but also includes a mad scientist, influenced by aliens, introducing anachronistic technology and demanding the attentions of our heroes. This could potentially be interesting, but it’s mostly silly, as the cars in question are basically Transformers, robots that can change their configuration into vehicles or humanoid forms. There’s nothing wrong with a silly idea, but there’s really nothing else going on here. It doesn’t feel at all like the pilot episode of a new series; this feels like a filler episode in the middle of season 3. We get brief introductions to the characters but nothing definitive: they’re acting like they do on television with absolutely no development or additional detail. (This will be a trend in this review.) Still, there’s a brief moment of Strax singing a Sontaran death anthem that had me laughing out loud, and moments like that make a story worthwhile.
This leads us to “A Photograph to Remember,” by Roy Gill, the second story and easily the best. The concept is the best of the three: death photography is unnerving enough on its own, but the subjects coming back to life is an entertainingly creepy twist. Gill also ties this together with the introduction of the Bloomsbury Bunch, another trio of human, Silurian, and Sontaran investigators operating from a different part of London. The Sontaran and Silurian have switched roles, but this is still an easy way to gain insight into characters early on in a series: show their funhouse mirror reflections. It’s entertaining enough, and the interactions of the two “gangs” are amusing. I also like how the problem isn’t caused by villainy but rather by basic human failings. This caliber of script should be the baseline, however, not the strongest in a given set.
“The Ghosts of Greenwich,” by Paul Morris, rounds things out, and it’s about as unmemorable as it gets. First of all, the decision to put two ghost stories in the same set is a poor one, because it makes the stories run together in the listener’s memory. Secondly, while the story begins strongly, with a fascinating mystery to investigate, it ends in the most generic fashion imaginable. Third, I’m not sure Morris really gets the characters: Strax in particular is portrayed as a complete idiot and he’s absolutely not that. The “Green Witch” gag is good as a one-off, for example, but Strax getting it repeatedly wrong for the rest of the story just makes him look dumb. On the whole, though, the characters are flat recreations of their TV personas, and there wasn’t much to them in the first place. It was fine for the Paternoster Gang to be thinly-sketched on TV because they were supporting characters defined in part by their inherent absurdity. Here, though, they’re the lead characters in their own show. We need more out of them: we need difficult choices, we need conflict, we need complexity. I don’t expect a new range of stories to begin with earth-shattering revelations, of course, but “they’re exactly the same as they were on TV!” is just another example of Big Finish’s utter lack of ambition.
And that’s the problem with The Paternoster Gang: Heritage 1. (One of them, anyway. Why is this called “Heritage?” Are we doing the Doom Coalition thing where you don’t even find out the meaning of the title for months on end?) It’s too comfortable. We have the original cast, we have the traditional Victorian setting, so let’s not rock the boat, let’s just tell three generic stories that in no way feel like they’re launching a new series. Some elements are good, of course, but overall this is boring and pointless. I’m reminded of the UNIT series, which over thirty-two hour-long episodes still hasn’t bothered to develop its characters. Is that where The Paternoster Gang is headed? I hope not, but I fear so.
“Sync” is a bizarre little piece by Lisa McMullin that tells a story I’m surprised we haven’t had yet: Torchwood meets Margaret Blaine. But it’s not “Torchwood” that meets her, it’s Suzie Costello, and the script is functionally a two-hander for almost the entire running time. An alien spaceship crashes outside Cardiff, attracting the attention of two people: Suzie, looking to recover alien technology for personal use, and Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, disguised as Margaret and looking for a way to escape Earth. Each is working to their own agenda, and each needs to keep their activities secret. What follows is an entertaining back-and-forth, as each character probes the other’s weaknesses, searching for an avenue to betray them and escape. Shock bracelets from the crashed ship bind them together, meaning they can never be more than ten feet apart, leading to further difficulty. Suzie is emotionally unstable, and Indira Varma really leans into that side of her character, giving a truly odd performance often punctuated with prolonged, inappropriate giggles. Margaret, on the other hand, is perfectly stable, but her alien moral code still makes her repulsive by our standards, even if she’s oddly sympathetic. It’s a good script, with solid performances. My only complaint is that it feels somewhat unimportant: it doesn’t take us to any new or surprising places with these characters. We know their stories and we know how they end up, so a vignette like this doesn’t really flesh them out. Mind you, it’s still another solid Torchwood release, but it doesn’t have the dramatic weight of the range’s best.
“The Creeping Death,” by Roy Gill, is the least interesting of the three stories in this Tenth Doctor Adventures set. It tries to set itself most directly in series 4 – there’s an explicit comparison to “The Fires of Pompeii,” someone tells Donna “there’s something on your back” – but the story itself doesn’t measure up to the quality of the era. It’s 1952 London, and the Great Smog has settled over the city. The smog will kill somewhere around 12,000 people, but the Doctor can’t intervene to stop it – it’s an established part of history, a fixed point in time. Fortunately, we soon learn that microscopic alien organisms are living in the smog, using it to kill even more people – so now the Doctor has something to fight! That part of the story goes about how you’d expect; where Gill tries to distinguish it is in the supporting cast. We have a gay romance between Richard (Kieran Bew) and Terry (Theo Stevenson), something that was illegal and dangerous at the time, but though the script pays lip service to the social and legal stigma, it doesn’t really dig into the issue. No, it’s not that sort of story, but it still felt odd to me. Also, while I know one of Donna’s character traits is obliviousness, I find it very hard to accept that a character born in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s would have absolutely no idea that homosexual behavior was once criminalized in the UK, especially one with a bossy, tactless parent. Otherwise, the characters are largely unmemorable, drawing deeply on cliché. The primary difference between this and “One Mile Down” is that Gill does not quite capture the feel of the Tennant era, doesn’t quite capture the spark of the dialogue. It’s a decent enough story, it’s never boring, but it’s not the kind of thing you’ll remember after listening.
“One Mile Down,” by Jenny T. Colgan, is easily the most nostalgic Tenth Doctor Adventure of the first nine. Everything about it seems carefully constructed to evoke the feeling of a Series Four story – and it succeeds admirably in this, as it’s very hard to listen and not enjoy it if you enjoyed the era at all. The underwater city of Vallarasee has been preserved in a massive “airdome,” enabling tourists to visit without wearing dive suits. But the dome is springing leaks, and if it collapses, the thousands of visitors inside will die. The Doctor and Donna are there to save the day, of course, and they’re joined by the Judoon, acting as security for the underwater city. Let’s be frank: there really isn’t much here to capture the imagination. The plot is obvious – even the “twist” about who really sabotaged the globe is predictable from a mile off – and the characters are completely of the era. But the big advantage that “One Mile Down” has over, say, the Fourth Doctor Adventures, is that there aren’t already hundreds of existing Doctor Who stories featuring the Doctor and Donna to watch or hear or read. It still feels refreshing to hear these characters on a new adventure, even if it’s not breaking any new ground. And Colgan knows these characters like the back of her hand, teasing out all the important, appealing elements that made this cast so popular in the first place. Also, the Judoon are fantastic, their literal-mindedness providing a fascinating puzzle for the Doctor to solve. Overall, “One Mile Down” is a success. It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, save one or two facts about the Judoon, and it doesn’t push any boundaries, but it’s a fun, entertaining story that could easily slot into early Series 4. Do 100 more of these and I’ll change my tune, but for now this is a solid listen.
We’re back with a third set of Tenth Doctor Adventures, this one bringing Catherine Tate back to travel with David Tennant, and bringing Jacqueline King and Bernard Cribbins along for the ride. And the entire Noble clan is there for “No Place,” by James Goss, one of the scariest Doctor Who stories ever released by Big Finish. The plot seems simple on the surface: “Haunted Makeovers” is a home improvement show that takes as clients the owners of haunted houses. The Doctor buys a haunted house, and he and the Nobles pretend to be the resident family for the cameras while finding out exactly what’s causing the haunting. Goss tells the story in the found footage style – all the various scenes are presented as the recorded camera audio. While this style isn’t as effective as in other places – see Goss’s own “Dead Air” for BBC Audio as a superlative example – it still works, and Howard Carter’s sound design turns it into something special. An oppressive soundscape coupled with terrifying effects leads to a frightening atmosphere, something we haven’t really heard since what, “Night Thoughts?” And framing the story through the experiences of Justin (Joel Fry), the skeptic leading the filming, is a great idea, as he’s slowly forced to accept the existence of what he would consider the supernatural. Tennant is in his element, of course, and really makes the final twist work, even if it would be more at home in a McCoy story. Donna is great as always, and it’s fun to have the Nobles around: Sylvia doesn’t get much to do, but Wilf is given some significant, weighty scenes. Overall, “No Place” is excellent: it’s not quite the best Tenth Doctor Adventure but if they’re all this good this will be a fantastic set.
The other story in the fifth set of Third Doctor Adventures is “The Scream of Ghosts” by Guy Adams, and it’s… fine. Good, even, but nothing better than that. Much like “Primord,” it’s a recreation of the Pertwee era to exacting detail – and this time, instead of Liz Shaw, we have Sgt. Benton turning up. Adams is particularly good at capturing the voices of characters, and all of the regulars – the Doctor, Jo, the Brigadier, Benton – have lines so authentic you could swear they were written in 1972. Additionally, Treloar’s and Culshaw’s impressions are more effective without a different style of recast going on next to them. If you’re a Pertwee fan, this story is like wrapping yourself in a warm, fuzzy blanket.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t have much going for it besides nostalgia. There’s maybe enough plot here for a single 45-minute episode; as it stands, this is stretched so thinly we don’t even learn what the conflict is until the final episode. Prior to that, we have a bunch of characters running around not understanding anything, which rapidly grows tedious. Finally, though, we learn the identity of the villains: the Vardans! Yes, it’s one of Big Finish’s favorite returning monsters – and we even get a subtle reference to “The First Wave” that only serves to remind us how much better that story was. Unfortunately, this one is much more like “Wave of Destruction.” It’s not about anything significant, we learn nothing about the characters, and the Vardans are portrayed as utterly generic bad guys who want to take over the world, and, from there, all of time and space. As with “Primord,” I don’t have a lot to say: if you love the Pertwee era and all you need is something that sounds like the Pertwee era to make you happy, you’ll love this story and you’ll love this box set. If you want something with any substance, you’re better off looking elsewhere. But it’s entertaining enough.
For the fifth set of Third Doctor Adventures, Big Finish is wholly embracing the idea of the recast. The first story, “Primord” by John Dorney, is a sequel to “Inferno” that expertly recaptures the feel of the Pertwee era, though the story itself is fairly routine. But the main point of discussion is with the cast.
Big Finish has effectively recast the first three Doctors: the first Doctor is played by David Bradley in one range and Peter Purves in the others, the second by Frazer Hines, and the third by Tim Treloar. Apart from the First Doctor Adventures, all other recasts are based on impressions of the performer. But they’ve largely stayed away from doing this with companions, just the irreplaceable Doctors. Here, that goes out the window: in addition to Treloar, we have Jon Culshaw as the Brigadier and Caroline John’s daughter Daisy Ashford as Liz Shaw. Treloar’s Pertwee impression is excellent. Culshaw’s Nicholas Courtney is very good, though it has the Frazer Hines/Troughton limitation of only capturing one particular tone of voice. Ashford, on the other hand, doesn’t do an impression of her mother at all. And while that’s fine in a vacuum, it jars with the others: we have two people trying their hardest to sound like the regular cast and a third who we’re just supposed to accept as a new version of an old character. This is not to condemn Ashford’s performance, which is quite good – I would just prefer Big Finish pick a lane on recasting.
As for the story itself, it’s a Pertwee-era four-parter down to its bones. There’s nothing here you haven’t heard before, but the execution is first-rate. It’s basically a re-examination of the Primord “virus” from the Stahlman project: the change it induces is not purely physical but mental as well. Liz, endeavoring to find a cure, is infected – but because of her work suppressing the virus, she doesn’t endure the physical change and retains her considerable intelligence. So, naturally, she decides to take over the world, because that’s what happens in these stories. There’s lots of capturing and escaping, lots of scenes of the Doctor fighting off infection, lots of moments of Jo being optimistic – the usual. If you’re at all surprised by any of the plot twists or the resolution, it’s your own fault. But as I said, it’s an expert recreation of the era, even down to the bizarre music from Nicholas Briggs. It’s clear that Big Finish wants to tell full-on UNIT family stories: all we need is a Roger Delgado impersonator and we’re set.
“The Moons of Vulpana,” by Emma Reeves, continues the Mags trilogy in the monthly Doctor Who range, and it is absolutely terrible. There is not a single redeeming quality: the script is laughable, the performances are atrocious, and the production is horrific. It’s hard for me to review it because it is hard to control the anger and frustration I felt throughout its excruciatingly long running time. We return to Mags’ home planet Vulpana, but in the distant past, at the height of their civilization, to find… a stereotypical high-fantasy society with werewolves. Because Mags is pure-blooded, the local nobility wants to marry her, and we are tortured with endless scenes of two idiotic brothers attempting to seduce her. The third brother isn’t interested in such things, dismissing their traditions as primitive, and we’re encouraged to see him as the best option – but then it turns out he’s an incel and a mad scientist to boot. There’s also a ton of talk about “alpha” and “omega” males that seems like it wants to refute the entire idea but never actually gets around to doing so. Sylvester McCoy is terrible, Jessica Martin is terrible, and every single guest actor is terrible. This sounds like hyperbole but it isn’t: the script is so poorly written it is unsurprising that trained actors can’t do anything with it. At one point a background actor, attempting to do a werewolf growl, literally yells “Rarr!” I listened to this while driving. I contemplated steering into traffic.
More broadly, I’m getting progressively more tired of Big Finish and Doctor Who in general. I love Doctor Who down to my bones, but it is a very, very difficult time to be a fan at the moment. The TV show, which for all its faults was always an ambitious, audacious program, has thrown all of that away in favor of safe, boring plotting and a complete and utter lack of character development. The books were gutted in 2005 and never came back. (There was a brief period of occasional, great hardcover novels by famous authors, but those have been supplanted by James Goss novelizing anything that Douglas Adams once scribbled on a cocktail napkin.) And Big Finish, which once provided some of the greatest Doctor Who stories in any medium, has lost any semblance of pride, preferring instead to crank out as much Who product as possible no matter its quality. The writing is completely stale, the talent has slipped significantly, and the few skilled writers they have left in the stable are overwhelmed by writing endless scripts. Yes, every so often we’ll get a good story, but that’s a relatively rare event – most of it is competently made yet utterly unimaginative and unmemorable. I find it increasingly difficult to write these reviews because it’s not easy to find new ways to say exactly the same thing for the 100th time. “The Moons of Vulpana” is actually unique in that it isn’t even competently made, but not because it’s aiming high and failing. There isn’t anything admirable here, nothing to make you say “well, it didn’t work, but at least they tried ______.” And frankly, if “competent yet boring” was bad enough, “incompetent and boring” is utterly unacceptable. When non-fans make fun of Doctor Who, “The Moons of Vulpana” is what they think it’s like: overwrought, badly written, irritating melodrama. It is inconceivable that a professional company like Big Finish, who has been producing audio dramas for well over two decades, thinks that this story is acceptable. But if they’re trying to get me to stop listening, they’re coming close to succeeding.
The eighth UNIT box set, and supposedly the last one for a while, is “Incursions,” a set of three stories whose linking theme is “there are threats to the planet.” If that “theme” doesn’t inspire you, don’t worry, because none of the stories will inspire you either.
We begin with “This Sleep of Death,” by Jonathan Morris, a sequel to Morris’s own monthly range story “Static.” UNIT has secretly preserved the stone circle from Abbey Marston, occasionally using it to resurrect dead soldiers for debriefing. Apparently, the Brigadier decided to keep it around, or something – like everyone else, I’m really unclear on who was running UNIT at what times – but only the highest levels of the organization know of its existence. But the secret gets out, and when Sgt. Warren Calder (Andrew French) realizes he’s going to die, he contrives a way to ensure he’ll be resurrected. But when he comes back, he brings the Static with him, and the story is on. “Static” was a very good story, full of drama and character beats, and “Sleep” starts out that way – but funnily enough it turns into more of a runaround once the Static show up. It’s a nice callback – Big Finish should do more sequels to their original material – and it’s entertaining, but by the end it just feels like everyone is in a rush. The solution to Calder’s betrayal is “talk to him for two minutes,” which doesn’t feel right at all. But it’s a good start to an otherwise unimpressive set.
Unfortunately, next we have “Tempest” by Lisa McMullin, a bizarre, off-putting story that fails to get anything interesting out of a decent premise. It’s a simple theme: what if a threatened, harmless alien race caused uncontrollable destruction merely by calling for help? While Osgood and Sam head to a remote Scottish island to investigate strange wind patterns, Kate visits an oil rig positioned almost on top of a crashed alien ship. McMullin seems to be aiming for anti-capitalist themes, as the cruel foreman of the rig cares only for his parent company’s profit margin, and the government appears to side with the company over UNIT. But it’s thinly-sketched and largely ineffective, as the foreman is such a caricatured jerk it makes you wonder why Kate doesn’t have her UNIT soldiers detain him. Meanwhile, over on the Scottish island, we have one of the most bizarre performances in Big Finish history. I’m not sure if Alexandra Mathie actually sounds like that, and if she does it’s an unfortunate coincidence, but Mother McCracken sounds like one of the old lady characters from Monty Python. To add to the problem, the alien voices are nearly incomprehensible, especially when coming through McCracken. The idea is fine; the production is not.
That brings us to the final story, the two-part “The Power of River Song” by Guy Adams. This is an overstuffed story with a ton of moving parts that never really coheres. It’s divided over three separate time periods: Kate and Josh in the present day, investigating her own murder; Osgood in the future, meeting River; Sam Bishop and Jacqui McGee in the past, battling Vikings and dinosaurs. (Yes, Jacqui McGee turns up for this one, presumably because they didn’t have Ramon Tikaram for this box set and they needed another character.) Adams never ties these time periods together satisfactorily: the Osgood sequences feel stagnant until River turns up, and Sam and Jacqui never get off the ground. As for River herself, the story appears to be doing something interesting: she’s the CEO of a company providing a new energy supply to the planet, but she’s quite secretive and stubborn about the whole thing. In other words, she’s acting totally out of character, which rightly makes the listener wonder what she’s really up to. So of course we get the worst resolution possible: it isn’t her at all, just an alien taking her shape. When the actual River turns up, she’s exactly the same as always, with none of the moral ambiguity that marks her best appearances. Rather than an epic, action-packed tale that unites beloved characters for the first time, we get a bland, overlong runaround that wastes its potential. Yes, it’s cute to hear Osgood say “You’re very annoying” to River and listen to River revel in it, but there’s no good reason given for River to be in this set at all.
UNIT is the most consistently dull Big Finish Doctor Who range. The stories are almost never terrible but they’re also almost never great. Each set provokes little more than a feeling of “eh, that’ll do” no matter what gimmick is attached to it. We’re eight box sets in and we still don’t know much about Josh Carter – and we know even less about Sam Bishop. Hopefully the hiatus after this set will enable Big Finish to actually do something interesting with the range, because right now you could wipe the whole range from existence and barely lose anything memorable.
At first glance, a crossover between Torchwood and classic Doctor Who seems uneasy – the tones are radically different, after all. But in David Llewellyn’s “The Green Life,” the pairing works surprisingly well. As the title implies, it’s a sequel to “The Green Death,” and it features Jo Jones (née Grant) and Jack Harkness investigating the return of the giant maggots to Llanfairfach. The story doesn’t tell us how they got together, but it quickly flags up the differences in approach: while they both want to accomplish the best outcome for humanity, Jo wouldn’t hurt a fly but Jack will shoot whatever gets in his way. Their arguments are a bit overwrought, but John Barrowman and Katy Manning have great chemistry and so it’s quite entertaining to listen to them bicker. With Stewart Bevan in the cast you’d expect the surprise return of Cliff, but instead he’s playing an old enemy and doing a fantastic job of it. There’s also a wonderful moral dilemma at the end of the story: what do you do when you uncover a plot, run by giant maggots, duping humanity into consuming food they wouldn’t want, but when you also realize the plot is feeding millions and not really hurting anyone? Suddenly, the companions’ positions are reversed: Jo is outraged and determined to stop it while Jack is pragmatic and willing to let it continue under supervision. Llewellyn really understands these characters, bringing their competing philosophies to the fore without making it sound overly forced. Jo and Jack work together surprisingly well. Ultimately, this is still rather slight for a Torchwood story, but it’s thoughtful enough and the performances and the nostalgia carry the day.
The third Ravenous set wraps up with “The Odds Against” by John Dorney, a bizarre story that doesn’t accomplish much and seems to exist purely as a setup for the fourth and final set. It’s a small-scale production, with only the regular cast, the Nine, the Eleven, and the Ravenous in attendance, and yet it’s set on top of the dimensional gateway that separates the Ravenous from our universe. The first half of the story is little more than stalling for time, as the Doctor and companions encounter the mysterious Abbot – but since he’s the only other character in the story you know something is up with him, and sure enough he’s actually the Nine in disguise. The Nine discovered that the Ravenous cannot eat him – they consume regeneration energy and his regenerations don’t work properly – and thus he’s working together with them to lay a trap for the Doctor. When the Eleven discovers this, he is appalled at the Nine’s selfishness: he’s immune to the Ravenous and the only think he can think to do is take revenge on the Doctor? It’s fantastic to hear the Nine and the Eleven talking to each other, especially when different incarnations talk to themselves – though it really underscores how good John Heffernan’s take on the character is compared to Mark Bonnar’s increasingly tired performance. It’s also increasingly clear that the Eleven is not an interesting villain: strip away the multiple personalities and the Eleven is just another megalomaniac. And while this story is fast-paced and entertaining, it’s all setting up for the final scene, in which the Eleven declares that he’s… going to be even more evil, I guess? This entire box set feels superfluous: you could lop off the middle two stories and not affect the plot in any meaningful way, and you could easily condense the other two stories into one. The words “treading water” come to mind.
I’m growing quite tired of a particular type of Doctor Who story, of which “L.E.G.E.N.D” by Matt Fitton is an example: the Doctor and his companions encounter a famous writer and the story revolves around that writer’s works. It always comes across as an effort by the author to demonstrate just how much they know about the writer in question. This time, the celebrity writers are the Brothers Grimm, and we have fables and fantasy coming to life thanks to an alien supercomputer. We also have the Eleven in a companion role and both Helen and Liv repeatedly saying how bad that idea is. Perhaps Fitton should have listened to his characters, because the Eleven is entirely pointless if he doesn’t pose a threat. At least they’ve toned down the “Silence, all of you!” outbursts but his dialogue follows a pattern: there are only so many times you can hear the Six scream about murder and mayhem before you get sick of it. The larger problem is that the Ravenous are now on the loose, and so a story like this feels superfluous: there’s no real justification for why the characters are here solving this problem when they are supposedly being pursued to the death by an army of ancient, slavering beasts. Nothing interesting or important happens, the story isn’t particularly compelling, and the performances are largely desperate and in search of substance. It’s not an actively terrible story or anything like that but there’s absolutely no reason for it to exist. At least the ridiculous fan-pleasing scripts like “Companion Piece” are entertaining.
The second story in this set is “Companion Piece” by John Dorney, a fannish conceit to end all other fannish conceits: the Nine goes through history and attempts to kidnap every single one of the Doctor’s companions! They’re all trapped in an inescapable prison, separated out by incarnation of the Doctor, which means we get cameos from Frazer Hines to Katy Manning to Matthew Waterhouse (and beyond) of companions demanding their release. But since it’s a McGann story at heart, we spend most of our time with Liv, Helen, River Song, a version of Bliss from before the Time War, and the returning Charlotte Pollard. As River knows the Doctor better than anyone, the Nine is using her to learn his next targets – but she’s working against him, secretly assembling a group of companions ideally suited to escape his prison. Obviously, the appeal here is listening to this diverse group of companions finally coming together to solve a problem. Dorney skillfully blends nostalgia with plot: Bliss, for example, has never met the Doctor, while Charley is exactly how we remember her. There are also a lot of fun little nods to continuity: Charley occasionally gets shuttled from wing to wing, and while she thinks it’s because she’s a temporal anomaly, it’s probably actually because the Nine can’t decide whether to put her in the Colin Baker or Paul McGann sections. So it’s definitely fun, but the problem is that there isn’t much to it. We don’t really learn much of anything about these companions, nor do they spend any time comparing experiences. The theme seems to be that the Doctor’s companions are all capable people who are good in a crisis and not just wastes of space who ask “What is it, Doctor?” every five seconds – which is fine, but if you know who any of these people are then you know that already. The end completely took me out of the story, though – River recovered Katarina’s dead body from space and put it in a special coffin?! Her residual mental energies lead to the Nine’s defeat? This is, put simply, silly – the holy reverence fandom holds for Katarina, a character that appeared in five whole episodes of Doctor Who, never made sense to me, and to give her this significant a role in a story in which she otherwise doesn’t appear is illogical and doesn’t work. Oh, and she’s obviously played by a new actor (Ajjaz Awad), so you don’t even recognize her voice. Overall, this is a fun story with a lot of nostalgia that hangs together reasonably well but doesn’t hold up under close inspection. It’s refreshing after the intensity of the first story.
Big Finish’s Torchwood range has really made a name for itself through bold, imaginative storytelling that actually pushes the boundaries of the series we saw on television. So, naturally, in this new series of monthly releases it’s time to… put them up against a bunch of Doctor Who monsters? The first of these is “Night of the Fendahl” by Tim Foley, which attempts to put a darker spin on “Image of the Fendahl” and somewhat succeeds. A small group of horrible people makes snuff films, but when they film their latest effort at Fetch Priory, the Fendahl is awakened! Eve Myles stars, and Gwen spends the vast majority of the story under the influence of the Fendahl, until she… just decides she doesn’t want to be and easily overcomes its control. So, there’s not much to the plot, but the atmosphere and themes are fairly compelling. It’s an incredibly dark story – only Gwen is a decent human being among the entire cast – that really wants to take a stand against exploitative treatment of women. Yes, this is accomplished as all of the exploiters are brutally murdered, but it still doesn’t feel right, largely because the script is constantly leering at Gwen. This is mostly done through the eyes of the filmmakers, but occasionally Gwen herself comments on just how revealing her costume is. Yes, we get it, she’s half-naked. The story is perhaps best at reflecting the banality of evil: none (well, almost none) of the snuff producers are cackling evil villains, they’re just human beings doing awful things to make money. It’s disturbing, it’ll make you feel a bit unclean, but it doesn’t go as far as some of the other stories in the range and it feels exploitative in spite of itself. Fortunately, Eve Myles rescues it with a fantastic lead performance, but otherwise this isn’t a great start to the new release year.
The third Ravenous set kicks off with “Deeptime Frontier” by Matt Fitton, a story that picks up from where the previous set left off. The Doctor and his companions are trapped and surrounded by the Ravenous – but they escape, and find their way to a Time Lord research station on the edge of the vortex. There, they encounter Rasmus (Damian Lynch), an old friend of the Doctor, and Visteron (Tania Rodrigues), a scientist Rasmus “convinced” to aid him in a mining project. Unfortunately, the Ravenous track them down, and much of the story is simply the various characters menaced through the station. Fitton gives the story a decent horror atmosphere, aided ably by Benji Clifford’s sound design and Jamie Robertson’s music – but this is very much a “base under siege” story with all the usual details. I’m also not particularly scared of the Ravenous, as I think their “evil clown” look is ridiculous and their halting “evil monster” dialogue is cliched in the extreme. Tasked with designing a creature so ancient, so dangerous that it stimulates a primal fear response in the oldest and most powerful race in the universe, and this is what you come up with? Compare to “State of Decay,” a story that communicated Time Lord terror much more effectively. The McGann sets seem to be getting less ambitious as they go along, which is worrying – but the non-arc stories are usually strong so I’m excited for those.
The first volume of Gallifrey stories set in the Time War featured four largely standalone stories, each involving a different character from the range. For the second volume, even though the four stories are all written separately, we are told one consistent story: the return to power of Rassilon and the fall of Gallifrey from democracy to dictatorship. Romana and Narvin are there to fight against it, but their efforts ultimately prove futile.
An oppressive atmosphere of paranoia quickly settles over the listener and does not disperse. Rassilon introduces the Internal Defense Unit (IDU) to serve as, essentially, his secret police, and over the course of the set brings all the various Time Lord agencies under the umbrella of the War Council. His only goal is to defeat the Daleks and win the Time War, and thus anything not directly related to fighting the war is irrelevant and unnecessary. It’s a bit different from real-world dictatorships in that the existential threat to society warned of by the leader is actually real, but the effects are the same: rights are progressively snuffed out as anything in defiance of the war effort is ultimately prohibited. The authors do a great job of compounding this sense of hopelessness as the stories proceed – and since we know that Rassilon “wins” in the end, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.
The first story, “Havoc” by David Llewellyn, is a fairly straightforward tale of a Time Lord traveling back from the future to warn of the damage Rassilon will cause if allowed to proceed unrestrained. While the resolution of that plot is largely unmemorable – and the “it’s actually one of our own future selves!” revelation is highly predictable – this story serves more to set the table for future events. We see the formation of the IDU, we see Rassilon consolidating power into his War Council, we see the emergence of Cardinal Mantus (Samuel Clemens) as Rassilon’s top deputy. We also see how Livia (Pippa Bennett-Warner) has lost virtually all independence as Prime Minister. Lastly, we see that the CIA under Romana has become a forgotten agency, with its most important work usurped by the War Council or the IDU.
This leads us into “Partisans” by Una McCormack, which sets up the primary conflict of the set. The planet Ysalus is consumed by civil war, with two nations attempting to destroy one another with others caught in the middle. But what neither side knows is that their planet is rich in a rare mineral oil, one that serves as an essential component of Dalek technology. And if one side wins the war, the other will retaliate with apocalyptic technology that will destroy everyone, leaving the raw materials behind for the Daleks to collect. It’s a little unclear why the vastly more powerful Daleks haven’t moved in force on this planet in the first place, but the Time Lords must intervene to stop the Daleks from acquiring their prize. Romana devises a plan to intervene in typical Time Lord fashion: infiltrate the planet and shape history from within, guiding Ysalus toward the most favorable outcome. But the War Council differs: Rassilon aims to destroy the planet utterly, to send a message to friends and enemies alike that Gallifrey is not to be trifled with. So we follow Narvin and a War Council agent as they work toward these opposing goals. There’s nothing groundbreaking here but it’s a good political drama that really brings Romana and Narvin’s frustrations to the fore.
After the situation on Ysalus is resolved, the aftermath is dealt with in “Collateral” by Lisa McMullin, in which Rassilon escalates the situation by proposing Ysalus be wiped completely from history, and Romana and Narvin must work behind the scenes to stop him. There’s not much to add about the story, except that the ending is particularly bleak – as we know Rassilon eventually presides over the destruction of Gallifrey, we know that Romana and Narvin cannot defeat him here, and that knowledge playing out in real time is quite affecting.
Finally, we have “Assassins” by Matt Fitton, in which Romana, pushed beyond her limits by Rassilon’s utter lack of morals, decides to assassinate the Time Lord President Eternal. I won’t ruin the specific outcome of her plan – though we know definitionally that Rassilon doesn’t die – but this is exactly the sort of drama we should be seeing: characters pushed to their limits and forced to make impossible choices. Not every episode must be a life-or-death struggle, but character is built on conflict, and we learn more about Romana and Narvin (and, to a lesser extent, Livia) in this story than we have in a long time as a result. I also like Fitton’s central concept of a race of assassins whose entire existence is paradoxically due to the Time War itself, and their only purpose is ending it. Very entertaining stuff here, and seeing Rassilon’s true colors as a paranoid zealot with a messiah complex is actually quite frightening.
Overall, “Gallifrey: Time War, Volume 2” is a strong release that uses its setting to the full. Instead of endless battles or increasingly ridiculous time weapons, we watch as the politics of Gallifrey are permanently shifted in a direction that we know ultimately leads to disaster. I’m curious about where the next set is going to go as it appears to be leaving Gallifrey, but that’s for another time. For now, count this a success.
COMIC STRIP ADAPTATIONS: DOCTOR WHO AND THE STAR BEAST
The second and final adaptation in the set is of “Doctor Who and the Star Beast,” also originally by Pat Mills and John Wagner and also adapted by Alan Barnes. This story is famous for two reasons: introducing Sharon, the first black Doctor Who companion, and the memorable villain Beep the Meep. Beep has appeared on audio before, way back in the Doctor Who Magazine special release “The Ratings War,” but this is the first audio dramatization of his first comics appearance.
The word that keeps coming to mind to describe this story is “juvenile.” There’s no complexity whatsoever to the plot: Beep’s ship crashes in Yorkshire, he evades capture by his pursuers by hiding with a local family, and he eventually returns to his ship, tries to escape, and fails, thanks to the Doctor and two local kids. This is all the plot you need for a 30-page comic story, where so much is described through the visuals, but a two-hour audio drama requires some sort of subplot so it doesn’t feel stagnant. Unfortunately, Barnes’ adaptation decisions are largely cosmetic and the story really drags. Fortunately, Barnes’ habit of having his characters describe every last thing in front of their eyes is somewhat kept in check during the story, but it’s not in service of anything greater.
The entire appeal of Beep the Meep is that he’s a fuzzy, adorable little alien creature who’s actually a murderous, megalomaniacal killer out to slaughter whole planets and species. He plays up his cuteness to distract those around him from his evil plots. He also has a fun little song that he sings that actually contains homicidal intent. “Beep’s Song” was first put to audio in “The Ratings War” and we have callbacks to it here that amply reward long-time listeners. But there’s nothing particularly interesting about Beep, especially once you get past the revelation that everyone knows is coming. Bethan Dixon Bate plays the Meep, and while the constant cries of “Meep! Meep!” are meant to be ingratiating I found them irritating.
Look, I know “The Star Beast” is incredibly nostalgic for Doctor Who fans who read it when it came out. And there’s stuff to like here: Sharon and Fudge are incredibly appealing characters, Beep is a villain you can’t help but notice, and the sound design is once again quite good. But it simply doesn’t appeal to me: it’s simplistic, it’s childish, and it deals almost entirely in juvenile themes. If the DWM comic had never been published, and “The Star Beast” was first heard as a random Big Finish monthly release, I very much doubt anyone would have noticed it. But if the comic resonates with you and you really want to hear what it sounds like on audio, you’ll probably love this to death. Sadly, I do not.
COMIC STRIP ADAPTATIONS: DOCTOR WHO AND THE IRON LEGION
For a time, Big Finish featured a Doctor Who Novel Adaptations line, audio adaptations of classic Doctor Who novels from the Virgin era. Despite the consistently high quality of this range, it apparently didn’t sell, based as it was on twenty-year-old spinoff novels with a relatively low readership. But now we have a new range of adaptations: forty-year-old Doctor Who Magazine comic strips! I’m not sure what’ll make this range successful, but let’s jump in with the first story, “Doctor Who and the Iron Legion,” originally by Pat Mills and John Wagner and adapted to audio by Alan Barnes.
Adapting a comic strip is a radically different task than adapting a novel. A novel contains a massive amount of prose, both description and dialogue, and must be reduced significantly to fit in a two-hour running time. A comic strip, on the other hand, contains a ton of visual information over a relatively short amount of space – in this case, 32 pages – and thus must be expanded and adapted to the dialogue-heavy audio format. Based on this, you would think Alan Barnes would be the perfect writer for the job: he wrote several acclaimed DWM comics and has also written and edited Doctor Who audios for 20 years. The problem is that Barnes, even after all this time, still thinks like a comic book writer and still struggles to write convincing audio dialogue. The same old issue rears its head in this story: characters describing everything they’re seeing in excruciating detail. No matter what’s happening, a character will be along to describe in great detail exactly what they see, even if they’re talking to someone who can see the same things. Barnes thinks in terms of impressive visuals but has never figured out how to put them across in an audio script – and it still ruins my enjoyment, every single time.
Which is a shame, because otherwise this story is a ridiculously good time. It’s full-on, unhinged season 17 Tom Baker, bellowing and laughing his way through the story with a massive grin on his face – and Barnes pairs it well with over-the-top comic book worldbuilding. I also like the structure of the story, the scale of which grows with each passing episode. Nothing about it feels realistic at all, which works quite well: the over-the-top dialogue and kitschy atmosphere are really quite entertaining, like watching a gloriously unashamed B-movie. Barnes adds two characters – the bickering Stockbridge couple Doug (Steve Hansell) and Viv (Esther Hill) – who give the plot an extra anchor and fit well with the tone of the piece. Much credit should also go to the production – Alistair Lock’s sound design and music are both excellent, matching both the epic nature and the humor of the script. Overall, “The Iron Legion” is a solid, fun adaptation let down by its continued reliance on awkward descriptive dialogue. It’s not the best story I’ve heard but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.
It’s the landmark 250th Big Finish monthly Doctor Who release, and to celebrate this milestone, they’ve done… absolutely nothing! Given their track record in other anniversary releases, it’s probably for the best that “The Monsters of Gokroth” by Matt Fitton isn’t packed to the gills with anniversary content – but unfortunately the story isn’t very good.
It may not be an anniversary release, but it’s still time to exhume yet another long-buried element of classic Doctor Who: an entire trilogy of releases featuring the return of Jessica Martin as Mags from “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy!” Even though the bottom of the barrel is getting rough from all the scraping, this still has potential: there are potentially lots of interesting stories to tell about a woman who is essentially a reluctant werewolf. Fitton has a great way to reintroduce the character: she’s traveled to the planet Gokroth to meet a scientist who may have the key to halting her metamorphoses, and the Doctor has followed her there. We never quite get an explanation of why the Doctor is doing this, but it feels like he’s tying up loose ends as he approaches the end of his seventh life. And this specific element of the plot resolves in an interesting fashion, as Mags is forced to confront her nature and decide whether her transformations can be stopped without changing her fundamental identity. If the story was all about this, it would have been fantastic, because Mags has depth rarely seen in classic series companions. Martin is great, too – her delivery feels more modern and less theatrical than most of those around her.
Unfortunately, most of the story is given over to a boring retread of any number of Frankenstein movies. A scientist’s castle up on a hill, mysterious and abhorrent experiments being performed within, and a town of backward, hostile people at the base who inevitably march on the castle with pitchforks! The scientist has an assistant named (I)Gor! There’s a carnival barker with a freak show and sinister motives! We also have monsters who irritatingly and loudly grunt all their dialogue in broken English, because how else should a monster sound? In the first two minutes of the story, Mags is given this line: “It’s not the monsters out there that scare me, it’s the one inside.” That is the level of subtlety at which the story operates: absolutely none whatsoever.
And that would perhaps be tolerable if the story was fun to listen to, but the production is abominable. The supporting cast is regularly asked to scream, growl, and bellow their lines, and it doesn’t work. The sound design is incomprehensible, all roars and transformation effects, which actually means it’s a good thing that the script is so unsubtle because otherwise you’d have no idea what was happening. I really don’t have much more to say about “The Monsters of Gokroth” – it’s too long, it’s hard to follow, it’s padded out ridiculously, and it’s irritating on the ears. Thankfully there’s Jessica Martin and some potentially interesting material featuring her character and her relationship with the Doctor, because otherwise this is hard going.
The fundamental problem with Kamelion as a character is that there’s apparently only one type of story you can do with him: he is possessed by some malign influence that twists him to its own ends. Big Finish gave it the old college try, and the trilogy ends with “The Kamelion Empire” by Jonathan Morris, which finally gives us the Kamelion origin story we… always wanted? Sure!
Morris always has interesting ideas rolling around in his brain and this script features some fine examples. Kamelion is from the planet Mekalion, once ruled by a race called the Kamille. When disaster struck the planet, the Kamille uploaded their consciousnesses into a machine called the Locus and created androids as vessels for their minds when they left the machine. Kamelion is, of course, one of these androids. So that’s why every Kamelion story involves him being possessed: because that’s literally what he was built for! Morris also presents an interesting idea that the Kamelion were used for diplomatic purposes: first as ambassadors, and then as infiltrators, subtly working their way into positions of power and controlling planets remotely for the Kamille. Yet they rule benevolently, and it all sounds rather benign – until the Doctor asks what happens to uncooperative planets and the answer is what it always is: genocide.
The big problem with “The Kamelion Empire” is its structure. Everything in the previous paragraph is described in the first two episodes, in which very little happens but we spend a great deal of time learning about Kamelion and his home world. But when Kamille warlord Chaos is unleashed the story takes a very wrong turn. Gone is all the subtle worldbuilding; taking its place is a dreary runaround featuring one of the most one-note villains in the history of Big Finish or indeed Doctor Who as a whole. Chaos stomps around, yelling and cackling – and then Morris decides to set much of the final two episodes on the TARDIS so we can hear Chaos stomp around the art gallery power station! The main console is destroyed, so the Doctor journeys to the secondary control room from season 14! It’s a weird, continuity-obsessed sequence that just feels dry and tired. And the denouement isn’t much better: it’s a long, labored setup for “The Five Doctors.” The TARDIS lands on the Eye of Orion, there’s an explanation for the new console, and it ends with Kamelion instructing the TARDIS crew to pretend as if he isn’t on board. We know why nobody mentioned Kamelion after “The King’s Demons:” the robot didn’t work! But in case you were wondering, now we have a scripted reason for it.
The characterization is quite strong throughout. This is very much the cranky, sarcastic later fifth Doctor, and Davison always enjoys playing the character that way. Turlough does what he always does, though his inevitable betrayal of the TARDIS crew is so transparently false that nobody falls for it except the bellowing one-dimensional maniac. Job done, I guess? And then there’s Tegan, who still wants to put Kamelion off the ship, but learns once and for all in this story that he’s her friend. Heartwarming, sure, but she was right in the first place – Kamelion is much more trouble than he’s worth. Also, the Doctor makes it very clear that his friendship with Kamelion is forever ended, which is why, at the end, he… builds him a special zero room and allows him to stay aboard the TARDIS indefinitely?
There’s a lot of good material in “The Kamelion Empire.” The characterization is great across the board, we learn a number of interesting things about Kamelion and his people, and Morris engages in some fantastic worldbuilding. Unfortunately, the plot is threadbare and the villain is laughably terrible while the story shies away from really engaging with its themes of identity. On balance, it’s fine, but I’ve heard better and so have you.
“Narcissus,” by Sarah Grochala, is a UNIT story, but it differs from the others in an important way: it is set later in the UNIT timeline, sometime after “The Zygon Invasion/Inversion.” In that TV story, we never found out which Osgood, human or Zygon, survived “Death in Heaven,” and the Zygon two-parter leaves it even more ambiguous, a state of affairs thematically designed to mirror the human/Zygon stalemate engineered by the Doctor. Here, all that ambiguity is tossed out the window: the human Osgood survived the first story and, while the other UNIT personnel cannot tell the true Osgood from her Zygon counterpart by sight, they know one is a Zygon and make use of her shapeshifting abilities when necessary. None of this is necessarily bad, but it drastically alters the status quo from TV in a way that seems less interesting – yes, the idea of a Zygon UNIT operative is fun, but is it worth the cost of the Osgood ambiguity? (“The Osgood Ambiguity” should be the title of a future story.) Ingrid Oliver is fantastic in this – she has multiple scenes in which she plays both Osgoods in conversation, and it’s never difficult to understand or to follow. Apart from all that, the story is fairly standard UNIT fare: an alien is hijacking a dating site to abduct and use the beauty of its users as an energy source. It’s just Kate, Josh, and Osgood in this one, and it’s a neat little piece that doesn’t outstay its welcome. My only complaint is that Kate and Osgood both get “crisis of confidence” scenes that feel out of character for both women, taking me out of the story – but apart from that this is solid. It’s probably the best story in the set, though unfortunately that’s not a high bar to clear. I’m curious to see if this heralds a jump forward in time for the UNIT range or if this is a one-off.
“Inside Every Warrior,” by Gemma Langford, is something like a backdoor pilot for the upcoming Paternoster Gang audios. We haven’t heard these characters together on audio – Vastra was in a Churchill Years story and Strax showed up in Jago & Litefoot, but separately – and it’s delightful to have them together again. This is the clear strength of Langford’s story: she expertly captures the relationships between each member of the group, and spends a lot of time on the nuances and subtleties of Vastra and Jenny’s marriage. All three characters support one another in various ways, and all three are variously saved by the others over the course of this story. I particularly enjoyed how involved Jenny was with the plot, as she’s often been the overlooked character of the three – but no such trouble here, and Catrin Stewart is at home being at center stage in a story like this. Unfortunately, while the characterization is the clear highlight of the story, the story itself isn’t very good. Pinch is written as such an over the top misogynist – and is played that way by Nigel Fairs – that it’s obvious he’s not going to be the true villain of the piece. And the plot is thinly-sketched at best – there are neat ideas like draining fluids from characters into cocktails with pun titles, but it barely hangs together and is honestly rather difficult to follow. The sound design is partially to blame here – multiple scenes degenerate into cacophonies of sound effects and yelling and leave the listener in the dark. Overall, though, “Inside Every Warrior” is entirely worth hearing as a solid audio debut of the Paternoster Gang.
After a disappointing opening story, The Eighth of March follows it with a story featuring Benny and Ace: “The Big Blue Book” by Lizzie Hopley, presumably part of that “New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield” range I haven’t heard.
(Continuity question separate from the review: when exactly does this take place in Ace and Benny’s relationship? At one point, Benny defers to Ace’s knowledge of the TARDIS, stating Ace has been traveling in it a lot longer than she has – but didn’t Ace leave in “Love and War,” the same story in which Benny first joined? Yes, Ace later rejoins the TARDIS crew, but at what point would Benny’s lack of knowledge of the TARDIS lead her to defer?)
There’s no way to sugarcoat this: “The Big Blue Book” is absolutely dreadful, one of the worst things Big Finish has ever produced. It’s badly written and badly performed. There’s a cool idea at its heart – alien technology that imprisons people by turning them into books and storing them in a massive library – but absolutely nothing interesting is done with this idea at any point. This is supposed to be a story featuring Ace and Benny, but Benny gets turned into a book within the first five minutes and we don’t hear Lisa Bowerman for the majority of the run time. As a result, much of the story is consumed with Ace wandering around talking to herself. Carrying a solo audio story for multiple minutes is a supremely difficult job for a performer, and unfortunately Sophie Aldred isn’t at all up to the task. She’s not always alone, though – sometimes she’s accompanied by Vassa (Rosemary Ashe), a deeply, deeply irritating creature that Ashe plays like a cackling fantasy gremlin. The plot is also nonsensical – it’s basically a runaround that could fill a 15-minute story at best. There’s virtually no characterization, the library idea isn’t meaningfully explored – it’s hard to express just how irritating and unrewarding this story is. It should not have been released.
To commemorate International Women’s Day, Big Finish released a special Doctor Who box set: “The Eighth of March,” hitting the shelves on that date and featuring four stories starring prominent female Doctor Who characters, all written and directed by women. This is an admirable effort for a company whose record on female representation was generously described as “questionable” for much of their existence – though to be fair their record in that department has improved significantly over the past few years. Unfortunately, the first story, “Emancipation” by Lisa McMullin, is not very good. It’s a Diary of River Song story, judging from the theme music, and it features River infiltrating a Galactic Heritage convention by posing as Romana. Leela is there, however, on a separate mission from the Time Lords, and she obviously knows River is not Romana. The two must learn to trust each other as they attempt to save a princess from a sacrificial altar. The plot is fairly straightforward and the twists are predictable, at least until the end. It falls down in the interactions between the leads: neither River nor Leela distinguish themselves, and their relationship boils down to River deciding to interfere in history and Leela telling her it’s a bad idea. Yes, at one point Leela holds River at knifepoint, but then River asks her not to so she stops and it’s never mentioned again. River, of course, knows everything about Leela based (presumably) on the Doctor’s stories, but that knowledge never factors into the story in a meaningful fashion. It feels like a missed opportunity, and that’s before the ending, where two episodes’ worth of plot are condensed into about 10 minutes for no particular reason. Had the story ended after the initial rescue it would have been fine – did they need to pad out the running time? In any case, a disappointing start.
Picking up right where its predecessor left off, the second volume of “series six” of Torchwood also picks up the same level of quality. I’m continually impressed with these Torchwood stories, how they capture a modern storytelling sense while simultaneously staying true to the characters we know – and this “new” Torchwood team now feels every bit as natural and believable as the originals.
The latest set kicks off with “Flight 405” by Lou Morgan, an interesting little story that reintroduces Norton Folgate to the Torchwood team and makes Samuel Barnett a member of the regular cast. An airplane vanished from the sky over 60 years ago, but now it’s coming back thanks to the Rift, and the alien technology aboard will destroy a good chunk of Earth if the plane crashes. Naturally, it’s up to Norton and Andy to save the day, and this time Yvonne is along for the ride as well. There’s a lot going on in this story that sets up the rest of the set, but the draw here is the interplay between the characters. It’s great to have Norton back, and Morgan’s script wisely brings back his dynamic with Andy – and Andy’s “it’s complicated” relationship with Yvonne leads to some fantastic dialogue. “Flight 405” is a slight story, and the resolution doesn’t entirely make sense, but it’s still a strong way to start off the set while reacquainting the audience with old friends.
The second story, “Hostile Environment” by Ash Darby, is one of the darkest, most affecting Torchwood stories ever told. Tyler’s life has fallen apart, to the point that he has become homeless, and though he insists to himself that his homelessness will only last for a few days, days rapidly become weeks and weeks rapidly become months. Early on, he meets a homeless woman, Kirsty (Jessica Hayles), who takes him under her wing and teaches him how to survive on the streets. All of this is played completely straight, with a haunting sense of realism – Tyler spirals into depression as he learns that more fortunate people barely even notice the existence of the homeless and nobody has any desire to help him. Of course, there’s a sci-fi twist: someone has invented an app that scans homeless people and sends converted Sorvix drones after them, giving them the choice of being a pharmaceutical test subject or death by fire. Tyler is constantly scanned by well-meaning people, and the drugs keep him in a constant haze, unable to think clearly to find a way out of his situation. The comparison to street drugs is painfully obvious, yes, but it’s no less effective as a result. But the most effective moment comes at the end, when Tyler’s life is finally back in order and he has the opportunity to return Kirsty’s kindness. His decision leaves you feeling sick, but it’s thematically perfect. This is a masterpiece.
The third story, “Another Man’s Shoes” by Tim Foley, is a complete departure from the second, and an old standby for science fiction television: the body swap episode! Andy and Yvonne swap bodies, which leads to Yvonne taking a performance review on Andy’s behalf and botching it horribly, while Andy learns the secrets Yvonne has been hiding from Torchwood. Jack and Colchester switch places, which doesn’t come off quite as well: John Barrowman adopts an English accent but Paul Clayton doesn’t adopt an American accent and the questions of intimacy between Jack and Colin feel repetitive after the previous set. But when Norton and Tyler switch bodies, it completely makes up for any deficiencies in the other pairings – while I’ve seen this idea in other sci-fi properties, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a body-swap story in which two people that swapped bodies have sex with each other. It’s raunchy, it’s hilarious, and Samuel Barnett and Jonny Green mimic each other so well you forget the body swap even happened. There’s some important information in this story, but it’s mostly a pleasant palate cleanser after its predecessor.
And that leads to the conclusion, “Eye of the Storm” by David Llewellyn. It’s full to bursting with plot, and it’s probably too convoluted, but it flies along on its own confidence so well that it’s hard to notice. There’s an abandoned Sorvix power station at the bottom of the ocean leaking energy, people are turning to stone, the airplane from “Flight 405” is back, the Committee is reintroduced, we get to learn more about God, and there’s also a massive action set piece in the sunken power station in which our heroes fight to save the world. Llewellyn keeps almost all of the balls in the air successfully, and the cast is clearly having a great time: this is one of the first times we’ve heard this new Torchwood team actually working together as a cohesive unit and it’s delightful, even if one of them ends up betraying the others and the Committee’s tentacles are visible in every part of the story. All of that leads to a fantastic cliffhanger: a massive tsunami is about to hit Cardiff, destroy most of the city, and kill countless thousands of people. I genuinely have no idea how this is going to wrap up but I’m very excited to find out.
Overall, volume 2 of “God Among Us” isn’t quite as strong as volume 1, but it’s still an excellent listen featuring one of the best Torchwood stories in Big Finish history. The production team is running on all cylinders and I expect a fantastic conclusion in the third volume. I’ve often complained about Big Finish oversaturating the market with mediocre stories; if they can keep this level of quality up they can do as much Torchwood as they want.
THE FOURTH DOCTOR ADVENTURES: THE PERFECT PRISONERS
And so we come to “The Perfect Prisoners” by John Dorney, the “season finale” that also wraps up the Syndicate arc plot running through this series of Fourth Doctor Adventures. Perhaps the best thing about this series is that they’ve finally abandoned the obsessive drive for nostalgia that characterized the first seven series and aren’t merely trying to recapture the feeling of watching Doctor Who in 1977. I’m genuinely pleased about that, but to replace it instead with a story that basically requires a detailed knowledge of a long, complicated, largely-missing story from 1965 is an interesting decision. At least it’s not presented like a 1965 story, so thank heaven for small mercies.
The central concept turns around the Dream Machine, a device that alters your perception of reality. Implanted into the brains of everyone on Earth, it enables the creation of an unknowing slave caste: while they are actually being worked to death in a factory, they believe they are working a highly-paid, luxurious job. The story takes pains to indicate that the Dream Machine is not a mind control device but merely something that alters your perception – and thus it doesn’t really make any sense. The device doesn’t alter physical reality, so what exactly are the slaves perceiving when they are being worked to death in a factory? Their bodies must actually be doing the physical labor and making the movements to manipulate the real-life machinery, and they must be doing this consciously as they are not being mind-controlled, so what are they seeing that makes them think they’re on a beach? We also see characters start to break free when they notice inconsistencies. It’s a fascinating idea – the perfect prisoner is one who doesn’t know she’s a prisoner – but it doesn’t make much sense as executed.
We discover Ann’s real identity here: she’s a deep cover sleeper agent for the SSS whose real name is Anya Kingdom. Is she related to Sara Kingdom? We never find out! Yes, in a story that requires an encyclopedic knowledge of each delegate in “The Daleks’ Master Plan,” we leave this character’s heritage a mystery, apart from a couple of vague hints from the Doctor. Still, that’s not that important – but by the end of the story, when we realize that not only was Ann a false personality but Anya was also the victim of perception-altering brainwashing, it becomes clear that we know almost nothing about Anya Kingdom at all. It’s curiously unrewarding, and while the Doctor’s decision not to travel with her makes perfect sense – and is excellently performed by Tom Baker – it leaves an empty feeling.
That feeling pervades all four episodes, as the story proceeds at such a lightning pace and with such a heavy amount of exposition that it never has time to breathe or get to know its characters. And while, on balance, this has been the best series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, I still hesitate to call it “good” – it’s just more in line with the usual sort of thing Big Finish produces. Dorney is quite good at writing character pieces, or stories built around an expectation-subverting twist, but he’s not nearly as good at this sort of all-singing, all-dancing action spectacular. As I’ve said with a lot of stories in this series, “The Perfect Prisoners” is an entertaining listen, and it’s certainly not a bad story, but there isn’t much to it.
“Fever Island,” by Jonathan Barnes, is, from one point of view, a James Bond pastiche, but from another it’s a Doctor Who story. Scientific experiments have released energy from another dimension that brings imagination to life, focused primarily on Jason Vane (Gethin Anthony), a Bond-like member of “Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” He’s cool, he’s suave, he’s elegant, he has a dastardly Russian opponent, he has weapons and gadgets – you know the drill, and Anthony plays the part well. But of course none of it is real, to the point that when he narrates his own adventures the people around him can hear him doing it. And that’s why I don’t think the satire holds up very well: it’s viewed at a remove by the regular characters. Rather than gently mocking the spy genre from within, the script is essentially pointing and laughing at it. Admittedly, there’s room for some fun performances: Tom Baker as the evil Okulov is a particular delight. There’s also a bit of philosophy, as K9 suddenly wonders what it’s like to dream – and how do you explain that to an artificial life form? I wish the story would spend more time on questions like that, but it’s more interested in danger and melodrama. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but coming on the heels of a similarly over-the-top story it’s a bit much. Also, as predicted, the revelation that Ann is a sleeper Time Agent has absolutely nothing to do with the story – and while that was quite predictable it’s still disappointing. Still, “Fever Island” is an entertaining way to pass an hour, and for this range to be even consistently entertaining is quite an achievement.
If you thought the first half of this story was ridiculous, you ain’t seen nothing yet. “Time’s Assassin,” by Guy Adams, turns the knob to 11 and keeps it there for the entire running time, cramming in so much incident, so much over-the-top villainy, and so much fan service that it’s impossible to keep track of everything. It’s an interesting story in that the characters are taking everything quite seriously but the author clearly isn’t – this is a nonsensical tribute to “The Daleks’ Master Plan” featuring the “return” of Zephon, a man who thinks he’s Mavic Chen, Varga plants, and a star turn from Blake Ritson as possibly the maddest mad scientist in Doctor Who history. I don’t even know how to review this, so I’ll just talk about the big revelation: Ann Kelso is actually a sleeper Time Agent on a mission against the mysterious Syndicate! This explains her occasional personality lapses as well as her acceptance of futuristic technology, and in committing two murders we see the lengths she is willing to go to complete her mission. Fortunately, there are only two stories left in this set – the final one in two parts – so there won’t be much time to return to the status quo. I’m still not at all confident that Big Finish will be able to satisfactorily complete an arc like this, since like always it appears they’re leaving everything until the final episodes, but at least we have one big revelation out of the way. Perhaps now we’ll see more from Ann besides “generic companion who likes asking questions.” Returning to “Time’s Assassin,” I really don’t know what to say. It’s impossible not to be entertained because of the frantic pace and endless barrage of information, but I’m not sure it actually holds together as a story. Ultimately, I enjoyed listening to it, and that’s the deciding factor.
We have a surprising break from the usual format in the monthly range – #248 contains two, two-part stories: “Black Thursday” by Jamie Anderson and “Power Game” by Eddie Robson. Both feature the fifth Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, and Kamelion, and both tell what is apparently the only possible Kamelion story: he comes under the malign influence of someone or something dangerous. “Black Thursday” is similar to “Black Orchid” in that it’s a two-part Davison historical, but rather than a murder mystery we have Kamelion running amok. The TARDIS lands in 1902 in a Welsh coal mine right before a massive explosion collapses the mine, kills several workers, and injures several more. Most of the first episode involves the Doctor and his companions trying to save as many miners as possible, and while Anderson writes the supporting characters well and gives them an appropriate amount of pathos, “carrying people out of a mine” feels rather unimportant for a Doctor Who story. Things pick up in the second half, as a woman’s grief at losing her family overwhelms Kamelion and he resolves to take revenge on the mine owner. The desperate struggle to find him is entertaining enough, but the ending is dreadful. Kamelion carries the owner’s daughter up a building like a robotic King Kong and there’s lots of screaming and wailing by the supporting cast in an unimpressive, unimaginative soap opera revelation. I’m not sure what the point of this story is. We don’t learn anything interesting about the historical period – surely everyone knows that coal mining was a horrendously dangerous occupation – and the regular characters, Kamelion included, are used in the most obvious possible ways. Much like “Black Orchid,” this feels like filler, but it’s not even as good.
4/10
POWER GAME
I know that there are a lot of Doctor Who stories, and that they often take inspiration from their fellows, but seriously, what story am I describing: One of the Doctor’s companions is abducted via teleport and forced to compete in a game show (based on the game shows of the time) that appears innocuous at first but turns out to be deadly. It’s “Bad Wolf,” right? Well, it’s also “Power Game,” and while there are some differences, the similarities are hard to ignore. The biggest twist is that the evil host of the game show is actually Kamelion, under the influence of an alien being trying to bring dangerous materials from its universe into our own. Robson does a fine job with the characters: he really captures the individual voices of the regulars and the 1980s supporting characters all have unique, recognizable personalities. The plot is straightforward and entertaining, even if it never really hits any surprising beats. My question is about Kamelion: honestly, why is the Doctor keeping him around? Literally every single time the TARDIS lands, something takes control of him and he becomes a serious danger to everyone around him. I understand the desire to teach Kamelion, a sentient being, to interact with the universe in a controlled, healthy manner, but at some point, the Doctor is just willfully endangering the people around him by bringing Kamelion along. I also understand that Kamelion isn’t going to be in every Davison audio, and so the writers want to use him while they can, but isn’t there any other story we can tell? How about a story that takes advantage of his shapeshifting abilities without incorporating a malign psychic influence? But these complaints aren’t really about “Power Game,” which is a solid, entertaining piece of Doctor Who, even if it doesn’t feel wholly original.
I imagine Missy is a difficult character to write. Unlike her various Master predecessors, her motives aren’t always clear and her morality is cloudy at best, especially when you get to series 10 on TV. So after a guest appearance in a River Song set, Missy gets her own Big Finish box set, and it’s an interesting effort that is largely successful.
Big Finish has assembled an all-star writing team for this set, starting with frequent original and spinoff contributor Roy Gill’s “A Spoonful of Mayhem.” This story leans hard into the “evil Mary Poppins” idea, showing us Missy trapped in Victorian London and forced to work as a governess. The story is wisely told from the perspective of her charges, Oliver (Oliver Clement) and Lucy Davis (Bonnie Kingston). To them, Missy appears to be a character straight out of a fairy tale, teaching them mysterious secrets and showing them hidden, magical parts of London. It’s very Neil Gaiman, with mythological figures existing just out of sight and around the corner, and Missy is the door between the two Londons. Michelle Gomez is fantastic, showing Missy’s complexity – she’s utterly self-interested, of course, but her relationship with Oliver and Lucy almost feels affectionate in places. Or maybe it’s simply that she decides not to murder them for no reason. Either way, it’s a strong opener.
John Dorney handles the second story, “Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated,” which gives us a pairing we’ve never seen before: Missy and the Meddling Monk. It’s the Rufus Hound Monk, naturally, and he pairs shockingly well with Gomez, constantly thinking he has the upper hand while Missy dismisses him with withering disdain. We learn the Monk survived the Time War in a very similar fashion to Missy, using a Chameleon Arch to disguise himself as a human – except he was on Earth, and has since involved himself in human history, going so far as to impersonate Henry VIII. The plot is silly in a good way, but the attraction here is the interaction between the two Time Lords. I absolutely love that Missy refers to him as the Meddling Monk despite having no reason to know him as a monk – and that he’s utterly frustrated that everyone calls him that because of one encounter with the Doctor. This might be Dorney’s funniest script – it’s an onslaught of witty dialogue and cutting comebacks that is based in a deep understanding of what makes the two Time Lords tick. It’s the highlight of the box set for sure.
The next story is “The Broken Clock” from Nev Fountain, and it features the metatextual approach to the format we’ve come to expect from him. The story opens as an episode of “Dick Zodiac’s America’s Most Impossible Killers,” a satirical – and absolutely terrible – American true-crime series that reenacts famously unsolved mysteries. I’m assuming this is supposed to be a parody of “Unsolved Mysteries” itself, but the parody is so over the top and intentionally terrible that it falls somewhat flat. It honestly feels a bit mean-spirited toward American TV – but an era of American TV that died out thirty years ago. I certainly hope this isn’t supposed to be satirizing more recent true crime podcast efforts like “Serial,” because if it is, it completely misses the mark. Fortunately, as the story progresses the parody elements fade into the background. We learn that the characters are trapped within this recreation, and that the narrator actually has mental control over what happens. In a delightful twist, the murderer – the man with a pointed beard – is revealed as a sentient TARDIS that fled Missy’s malign influence. Unfortunately, in its search for a new pilot, it has led several humans to their deaths. The story hints that the killer is a previous incarnation of the Master, so this revelation is quite surprising, not to mention affecting. Overall, it’s a smart, entertaining story that would have been better served to turn down the parody a bit.
Finally, we have “The Belly of the Beast” by Jonathan Morris, a story that turns almost entirely around its plot twist and what that tells you about Missy. Fortunately, that twist is quite insightful. Missy has enslaved the inhabitants of a peaceful planet and transported them to a mine, where she puts them to work excavating an ancient artifact. The story follows the perspective of one of these slaves, Aleyna (Abbie Andrew), as she tries to rebel against Missy, liberate her people, and flee servitude. There’s even a rebel force for her to join in her efforts to escape. The grand revelation is shocking, especially since we learn it through Aleyna’s eyes – the entire slave workforce was cloned, and nobody was abducted from anywhere. The clones have no history, no inherent desire to rebel. Indeed, everything about them was created by Missy, out of boredom with a two-year excavation process. Instead of sitting around checking daily progress reports, now she has a “rebellion” to fight. Instead of mindless labor, she has individuals desperate to return to their world of origin. It’s all for her own amusement – and when she finally gets what she wants and the project is complete, she leaves the slaves to die and the story ends. As a result, it’s unrewarding, but it’s supposed to be – it’s impressive how completely Morris subverts the listener’s expectations. And just in case you found yourself liking Missy in the first three stories, this is a reminder of just how cruel she can be.
Overall, this is a strong box set. It does not fall into the usual Big Finish trap of telling traditional stories; these are all ambitious and even experimental in their own ways. There isn’t even a weak entry – there were elements I didn’t care for but nothing that brought down an entire story. Between the recent War Master set and this, Big Finish may have something with this character, whether it’s the Master or Missy, and I’m genuinely interested to hear more.
While I haven’t particularly enjoyed any of the historicals in the First Doctor Adventures, the sci-fi stories have been significantly better. Perhaps that’s due to the content being a much better match for the format: the slow 1963 style of drama lends itself better to a careful explanation of a sci-fi concept than it does to a historical epic. This brings us to “Tick-Tock World” by Guy Adams, which is probably the weakest of the three sci-fi First Doctor Adventures but still much better than its historical counterpart.
There isn’t much plot here – “Tick-Tock World” is a story almost entirely about its concept, a world on which time runs differently and ghosts of potential futures appear to warn people of their fates. Adams, following the house style, takes a long time to reveal what’s going on, so much so that the first two episodes are basically ghost stories. No explanation is given beyond this being the peculiar nature of the place the TARDIS crashed, but fortunately the story doesn’t need more than that. This is, instead, a character piece, something I’ve seen described as this cast’s version of “The Edge of Destruction,” and something that holds up quite well. The Doctor is separated from his companions for most of the story, and they are trapped on a dying world, pursued by creatures eager to devour them. And it’s genuinely great: we get to see Ian, Barbara, and Susan all pushed beyond their limits, gaining a window into the deepest elements of their personalities. We see just how deeply devoted Ian and Barbara are to one another, and we see how desperate Susan is for family and connection beyond her grandfather. The supporting characters are unfortunately not given anywhere near the same development – that’s the weakest part of the story, but Adams’ work with the regulars helps make up for it.
We also get to see the Doctor surrounded by alternate versions of himself, something which naturally irritates the hell out of him but also gives us a look into his relationship with his companions and with his granddaughter. He’s naturally protective of Susan, unwilling to let her spread her wings, wanting to keep her safe from the horrors of the universe – he’s just like any other (grand)parent in that respect, but it’s still fascinating to see how much love and fear hides below his gruff exterior. And then there’s the big selling point: one of the alternate, older versions of Susan is played by Carole Ann Ford herself. It’s a real credit to Claudia Grant that they sound like the same character at different ages – her performance isn’t much like Ford’s at all but she’s still recognizable. And while it’ll never be the same as William Hartnell, hearing Ford and David Bradley interact should warm the heartstrings of any fan.
This isn’t a perfect story – the plot is threadbare and the supporting characters are thinly sketched at best. But it’s a great look into this TARDIS crew and their relationships – and while the characters aren’t going to remember the details of this story, I hope future authors keep these scenes in mind as we flesh out this new cast.
The pattern is now well-established for these recast First Doctor Adventures: each set contains two four-episode stories, one of which is a historical and one of which is a sci-fi tale. This is in keeping with the series format in its first season, but is also indicative of how this range has absolutely no ambition in 2019 beyond telling stories made to sound exactly 56 years old. And that’s where we find “The Phoenicians,” by Marc Platt, a carbon copy of other historical stories without an original thought in its head.
Most historical stories involve a well-known historical period or well-known historical figure. Almost all of them involve the TARDIS crew getting wrapped up in events beyond their control, unable to change things and simply wanting to escape. Here, the TARDIS lands in ancient Tyre, where they meet Pygmalion – not the mythological figure known from various plays and operas, but the king of Tyre whose sister Dido eventually founded Carthage. This isn’t particularly well known, but there’s nothing wrong with learning about a new era of history – except Platt doesn’t distinguish Phoenicia in any particular way and decides to portray Pygmalion and Elissa (later Dido) as petulant, irritating teenagers.
The first episode goes as these things usually do, with the TARDIS crew getting in over their heads and a cliffhanger ending with at least one of their lives in danger. But from there, nothing really happens in the story – the pace is glacial, there’s very little peril, and it’s not clear why the characters are even sticking around. They have the ability to leave from the middle of episode three, and for some reason they choose not to – there’s nothing keeping them there, they’re not enjoying themselves, and they sound bored, but they stick around for another 45 minutes for… reasons? Of course, historicals with low levels of plot incident can still be great – look at Big Finish’s own “Farewell, Great Macedon” for a perfect example – but those stories require excellent character work. Here, we learn nothing about our regular characters, except for an extended “are Ian and Barbara together???” subplot that sounds like a 12-year-old wrote it. And our only two guest characters of note, Pygmalion (Jo Ben Ayed) and Elissa (Ajjaz Awad), are incredibly childish, and the actors pitch their performances to be as irritating as possible.
In short, we have a dreadfully boring story with irritating characters and little incident. This is every bit as bad as “The Great White Hurricane” and significantly worse than “The Barbarians and the Samurai” – but I guess if Big Finish really want to ape the 1960s, they might as well strangle the historical genre to death just like Doctor Who itself did.
The easy way to write River Song is as an analogue for the Doctor: someone who makes the right choices, who outsmarts the bad guys, and who saves the day in the end. The challenging way is to recognize the very real differences between River and the Doctor, both in terms of morality and competence, while still maintaining River’s character. She tries and often fails to find the “other way” that saves everyone; the Doctor virtually always finds it. She occasionally resorts to violence and death to escape trouble; the Doctor (at least in the modern series) never does. And that brings us to the Master: the Doctor virtually always defeats the Master, but can River do the same? We’ve seen her in an uneasy truce with Missy, we’ve seen her run circles around Beevers and Roberts – but in “Concealed Weapon,” by Scott Handcock, she’s up against the War Master at the height of his powers and things do not go to plan. Every time the Master shows up in the modern series, disaster strikes and the Doctor barely wins. Multiple encounters have ended with companions departing or even the Doctor regenerating. And this makes sense: the Master was conceived as the Doctor’s Moriarty; the two were intended to be intellectual equals. All of this is to say that I loved “Concealed Weapon” because the Master proves this by outsmarting River. Yes, she foils his plan, but he manipulates her throughout like the NA Doctor at his finest, and by the end of the story even has River unwittingly carrying out his plans. Handcock’s script handles this well: River is every bit as capable and intelligent as always but the Master retains the upper hand. Unfortunately the rest of the story is a letdown: the plot isn’t very interesting, the pacing is off, the guest performances aren’t good, and there are odd mistakes like a character sucked into naked vacuum and yet somehow still being able to gasp for breath and say “Not like this.” But the River/Master relationship is a true highlight and “Concealed Weapon” is the best story in the set.
THE DIARY OF RIVER SONG: THE LIFEBOAT AND THE DEATHBOAT
“The Lifeboat and the Deathboat” by Eddie Robson is the headline-grabber of this set: it features the return of Eric Roberts to the role of the Master for the first time since the 1996 TV movie. It’s genuinely cool that Big Finish got him to do this, as you don’t hear a lot of Oscar-nominated Hollywood actors in Doctor Who audios, but unfortunately, he sounds like he did this in an hour to pick up a check. The Master in the TV movie was wildly over the top and camp – “I always dress for the occasion” and such – but here he’s subdued and bitter after decades of isolation. This would be fine if the script dug into his psychology, but Robson instead opts for the “is this really the Master?” angle which means the script can’t reveal too much. The revelation that he’s been the Master the whole time is indeed surprising, but that’s largely because we’ve never had a Master defined by bored, flat line readings. The story is utterly ridiculous – VHS tapes of 1980s teen movies inexplicably factor prominently – and yet uninteresting, as virtually nothing significant happens and the characters mostly just explain the plot to each other. It is interesting to hear how well River takes to accompanying the Master, as this is the only story in the set in which she doesn’t know the Master (and Missy) is a Time Lord in advance – but Alex Kingston’s energetic performance jars with Roberts’ attempt and sounds bizarre as a result. Admittedly, I have no idea if Roberts’ performance is a deliberate acting choice or simply due to a lack of interest, but either way it doesn’t work and therefore neither does the story as a whole.
“Animal Instinct,” by Roy Gill, takes River into the classic series era once again for a meeting with the Geoffrey Beevers Master – and yet Gill puts a smart twist on the idea. River is actually on an archaeological mission – it’s amazing how often we forget why she’s “Professor” in the first place – and when she discovers an ancient tomb containing a two-hearted individual in stasis, she expects to exhume the Doctor, but gets a completely different Time Lord instead. This is definitely the less serious Beevers Master that we’ve seen in the Fourth Doctor Adventures – the story almost plays as though they wanted Roger Delgado or Anthony Ainley but couldn’t have them. This Master is a gentleman killer, suave and debonair, always ready with a witty aside, not the snarling murderer desperately clinging to life we remember from television. At one point, he effortlessly climbs a tree! But all of this works because the story smartly presents this Master as a man caught out of his comfort zone. He thinks he’s in a classic series Doctor Who story but he’s actually caught in a modern story and he hasn’t a clue how to react. River’s playful, sexually charged conversation is completely alien to this Master, and he’s constantly on the back foot as a result. It’s no surprise that the story ends with River rather easily outsmarting him. Most interesting, though, is that the story tries to show us the darker side of River’s morality but she ultimately doesn’t do anything the Doctor didn’t do in the classic series. Overall, this is a solidly entertaining story that generates a lot of enjoyment from the unlikely pairing of lead characters.
After the surprisingly impressive fourth series, which largely stayed away from Doctor Who continuity, The Diary of River Song jumps back in with both feet in its fifth series: in each story, River encounters a different incarnation of the Master. The first story in the set, “The Bekdel Test” by Jonathan Morris, brings River together with Missy in Michelle Gomez’s first audio appearance. Missy, like River herself, is one of those characters that was largely (if not entirely?) written by Steven Moffat on television, and so it’s up to Morris to ape Moffat’s style. He largely succeeds, but there’s a surprising amount of continuity on display. The story is entertaining: first River, then Missy, are brought to an “inescapable” prison as part of a marketing plan. If even they can’t escape, nobody can, that sort of thing. But the problems arise from the title and the subject matter. The title is obviously a play on the Bechdel Test, a rough estimate of whether a particular work gives its female characters definition apart from how they relate to men. It’s disconcerting enough to have a male author write a story called “The Bekdel Test,” but Morris basically seems to mock the idea, as the first conversation between River and Missy is quite long and is entirely about the Doctor! Indeed, the entire rest of the story is about the Doctor – it turns out the prison brought River and Missy there to attract the Doctor after all – and even though River and Missy solve the problem on their own and the Doctor never shows up, they’re both still defined almost entirely in terms of their relationship with the absent male lead. It almost defies description how ill-considered this is, especially in light of the title. It’s a solid story apart from that – honestly, if it had a different title, I probably wouldn’t be this critical. But it doesn’t.
The first half of this series of Fourth Doctor Adventures ends with “The False Guardian” by Guy Adams, the first half of a two-part story that is spread over two box sets because profit. It’s obvious from the first minute that something is going on with new companion Ann Kelso – suddenly, she’s obsessed with tracking down the Sinestrans from the first story and she’s growing increasingly irritable and impatient with the Doctor. She also exhibits a subtle (but not as subtle as they think) familiarity with future technology, meaning that at this point I’m just waiting for the grand revelation that she’s actually not a 1970s police officer after all. This isn’t in keeping with her portrayal in the previous two stories, but at least they’re (apparently) trying something different. All this happens in a story that appears to be… a bizarre sequel to “The Daleks’ Master Plan!” It sounds ridiculous, and it is, but it’s also incredibly entertaining. Adams slowly parcels out story developments – Varga plants, the planet Kembel, someone who thinks he’s Mavic Chen – but never provides a direct link until the final, inexplicably entertaining cliffhanger. I’m curious about how this ends – will the darkly comedic tone continue? Will the sense of looming disaster pay off? Will we find out what, exactly, is going on with Ann? I’m actually eager to find out, which is a rare feeling in this range.
THE FOURTH DOCTOR ADVENTURES: THE ENCHANTRESS OF NUMBERS
“The Enchantress of Numbers,” by Simon Barnard and Paul Morris, is a unique, fascinating story that actually puts a modern spin on a Tom Baker story, and as such I have no idea how the script made it past the editing stage. It’s a “celebrity historical” like we see on TV, but it features a lesser-known historical celebrity: Ada Lovelace, a mathematical prodigy influential in the early development of computers and the only legitimate child of Lord Byron to boot. That she isn’t better-known is a commentary on how society ignored the achievements of women; sadly, the extent of her influence is unknown but many regard her as the first computer programmer. Finty Williams gives a great performance as a woman who sadly doesn’t recognize her own importance, but the Doctor’s clear admiration of her talents is all we need to understand. The plot is almost too ridiculous for words, but it works incredibly well: an alien virus, based on block transfer computation, has time traveled back from the future in an attempt to change the course of history, intending to take Ada’s notes on computing and translate them into physical reality, starting the computer age early with Ada as its greatest pioneer. Naturally, this will completely alter the course of human history and thus the Doctor is compelled to stop it, but it’s also a wonderful metaphor about Ada herself: if only we’d listened properly to her, the story appears to argue, we could be so much further along. Incidentally, I haven’t talked about Ann much in these last two stories, as she hasn’t had anything to do except act a bit rude and perform the usual companion tasks. She’s such a non-factor that they’re probably keeping some grand revelation in store for us – otherwise, this is the worst new companion rollout Big Finish has ever done. But that doesn’t really take away from “The Enchantress of Numbers,” which is quite good.
THE FOURTH DOCTOR ADVENTURES: PLANET OF THE DRASHIGS
If you dig deep enough into Doctor Who, you can find an homage to practically anything, and this time around we’re checking the Jurassic Park box with Phil Mulryne’s “Planet of the Drashigs.” The Doctor and Ann land on DrashigWorld, a place where an entrepreneur (Jeremy Clyde) has brought together every known species of Drashig to entertain the visiting public. Keeping a bunch of Drashigs in captivity is stupid enough, and there has already been a fatality – but the park is also experimenting on the Drashigs, trying to get inside their minds and learn how they think. This story really is Jurassic Park in microcosm, and most of it is spent running around the park trying to control a Drashig outbreak before everyone is eaten. It’s silly, it’s action-packed, and everyone takes it deeply seriously, which makes the whole thing feel vaguely ridiculous. That said, the pace never flags, making the story a very easy, entertaining listen. I’m surprised it took Big Finish this long to get around to a story featuring the popular creatures from “Carnival of Monsters,” but I’m thankful they didn’t try to blow this up into a four-part story: it’s thin enough as it is and doesn’t overstay its welcome. There’s not much to say about “Planet of the Drashigs,” so if you want to see Doctor Who do Jurassic Park for 45 minutes in fairly entertaining fashion, take a listen, but it’s certainly not required.
To close out the fourth set of Third Doctor Adventures, we get what fans have been clamoring for: an adventure that finally pits the third Doctor against the Cybermen. It’s a surprisingly big deal – yes, he encountered them in The Five Doctors, and yes, there was a Companion Chronicle (“The Blue Tooth”), but this is the first full-length, full-cast encounter between the two. Even the books never did it, something that surprises me to this day. The result of all this is “The Tyrants of Logic” by Marc Platt, and it has a number of good elements, but like a lot of Platt’s output it leaves you wishing there had been more to it.
The setup is fairly basic: the Doctor and Jo arrive at an abandoned mining colony on a planet called Burnt Salt. Very few people are left, including Gusta (Linda Marlowe), who owns the local tavern, and Chad (Jeff Rawle), her partner and entertainment for the bar patrons. The colony was abandoned after the Cyber Wars, and the remnants of the conflict are seen in the survivors: Gusta has a cybernetic eye, and Chad plays music directly from his implants. Also present at the colony is Hollisen Grier (Ronan Summers), a Cyber-hunter tasked with eliminating any remaining Cybermen and investigating mysterious deaths. There’s also a research facility headed up by Professor Marian Schaeffer (Carolyn Pickles) but that doesn’t come into play until the second half. And into all this, the Cybermen arrive, trying to recover the Cyber-Leveler that arrived on the planet in an armored crate. Platt sketches the characters broadly but effectively; each is sympathetic in their own way with clearly understandable motives. The supporting cast gives good performances across the board as well. As with most Platt scripts, the plot tends to meander along, but everything makes sense and hangs together logically. It is, in short, a well-constructed story.
And yet I find myself thinking that there isn’t much to it. Platt has tackled the Cybermen before, of course, most famously in “Spare Parts,” and one consistent element through his and others’ Cyber-stories is the horror of conversion and the loss of individuality. Given that there have been over 50 years of these stories, it’s important to blaze new trails when featuring the Cybermen – but “The Tyrants of Logic” just seems repetitive. There’s a moment where the Doctor challenges the Cybermen on the importance of emotion – check. There’s a horrifying vision of a half-converted person – check. There’s a base-under-siege mentality and a presentation of the Cybermen as an implacable force inexorably advancing – check. The most interesting idea on display is naturally the only thing we haven’t seen before: a “Cyber-smoke” that contains nanobots that perform the initial stages of conversion, readying its victims for the final stages. The Doctor is infected, and we see how the conversion process affects his mind – Treloar emotionlessly repeating the rules of logic is a creepy thing to hear. Apart from that, it’s all stuff we’ve heard before – and we’re not too far removed from a TV story that provided a fresh, exciting take.
On the production front, everything is successful as usual. Nicholas Briggs directs both stories, Jamie Robertson scores both stories, and Martin Montague contributes the sound design to this one while Benji Clifford does the job for “The Rise of the New Humans.” Overall, I’m not sure how to rate “The Tyrants of Logic.” It’s certainly not a bad story, but it’s overly long and it doesn’t have much to say that we haven’t heard before. It’s certainly thrilling to hear a full-on Pertwee vs. Cybermen story after all these years, and for many fans that alone is worth the price of admission – but after you’ve experienced hundreds if not thousands of Doctor Who stories, this seems curiously empty.
THE THIRD DOCTOR ADVENTURES: THE RISE OF THE NEW HUMANS
We’re back into the Third Doctor Adventures, and we’re well into “x meets y” style of plotting – but fortunately the stories are written by Guy Adams and Marc Platt. First up is “The Rise of the New Humans” by Adams, which leads the Doctor and Jo into a confrontation with the Doctor’s old nemesis the Monk. While it’s good, it also demonstrates how challenging drama is too often avoided in Doctor Who in general and at Big Finish in particular.
The Doctor and Jo travel to a remote country hospital to investigate the death of a mutated man recently treated there. Once there, they discover technology far in advance of the 1970s among other evidence of experiments carried out on the patients. The Doctor immediately suspects that the mysterious Chief Administrator is in fact the Master, but instead discovers that it is the Monk, in his Rufus Hound incarnation. The Monk is working with Dr. Kurdi (Mina Anwar), the head physician, to conduct experiments into the human immune system, attempting to augment it to make humans instantly responsive to any threatening stimulus. Fall off a building? Grow wings before you hit the ground. Sink to the bottom of a lake? Grow gills before you drown, and so forth. Unlike the Master, the Monk isn’t fronting a global domination scheme – he’s just doing this to sell the treatment for profit. Sadly, however, the plot goes in that direction anyway: when the so-called New Humans realize that they’re practically invulnerable, they decide to conquer the planet and convert the population to be like them. And so it’s up to the Doctor, Jo, and the Monk to stop the disaster from occurring. It’s very basic, straightforward Doctor Who plotting that Adams executes will his usual skill. I love the Monk in this, especially when he points out that he’s not actually called the Monk. I think Tim Treloar’s Pertwee impression is his best yet, and Katy Manning is always wonderful.
My problem isn’t with the story as executed, it’s with what the story isn’t. There’s a moment early in the story, before the plot has been fully revealed, when the Doctor, Jo, and the Monk discuss his use of future technology to cure ailments untreatable in the 1970s. The Doctor is naturally appalled with this violation of the laws of time and declares that this must stop. The Monk counters that he’s saving lives and asks if the Doctor really wants to disconnect all the machines and sentence the patients to death. Jo is torn, and even appears to agree in part with the Monk’s position. And then… nothing. That conflict is disregarded and the story continues down the world-domination path, in which disconnecting the patients is objectively the right decision and the Doctor comes up with a way to cure them all anyway. The problem is that the original problem is much more interesting than what we end up with. That’s a decision the Doctor should be forced to grapple with: would he disconnect patients from lifesaving technology to protect the web of time? If he chooses to keep them alive, what other consequences does he face as a result? How does his decision impact his relationship with his companion? Is the Monk right? How important are the laws of time? Perhaps we can even grapple with the new series concept of a fixed point in time. But instead of presenting the characters with difficult or even impossible choices and seeing how they react, we disregard all that and give them a straightforward problem with an obvious solution, and that’s disappointing.
All of this is not to say that “The Rise of the New Humans” is bad. It’s not: in fact, it’s quite entertaining. But it’s ultimately disposable, and it could easily have been so much more than that.
We’re into the eighth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, the range that has produced one truly excellent story in over 50 tries, and we’re finally trying something new: Tom Baker gets a new companion. It’s an exciting future, full of potential, until you listen to “The Sinestran Kill” by Andrew Smith and realize they’re making this move as risk-free as possible.
The new companion is played by Jane Slavin, a friend of Tom Baker who’s been in what seems like every one of his audio stories. She’s WPC Ann Kelso, a police officer who encounters the Doctor in a gangland incident. And that’s all we know about her. She’s nice, she’s patient, she’s inquisitive – she’s an excellent police officer, in other words, but that’s about the extent of what we learn. I’m sure they’ll reveal more about this character as the series continues, but this is her introductory story – we need more than “occupation.” Again, it might be 1979 in the story, but it’s 2019 in the real world – think of every companion introduction we’ve had in the modern series and realize just how underdeveloped Kelso is after these two episodes. It’s disappointing but entirely in keeping with Big Finish’s approach to this range. Still, Tom Baker is quite pleased with having Slavin as his companion, and as long as the actors are having a jolly old time that’s all that matters, right?
The format is a bit interesting, if only because the fourth Doctor is wildly out of place in any sort of formal setting, police investigations included. I love Frank Skinner as DCI Neilson, someone who knows the Doctor from UNIT and just wants him to leave the police alone and let them get on with their work. I also love the central concept of a man in witness protection turning out to be an alien already in witness protection on Earth. But Smith doesn’t do anything interesting beyond that: the story is rote, unimaginative Doctor Who, complete with unnecessarily over the top villain and implausible conclusion. As with so many other releases in this range, most of my review boils down to “That was indeed a Doctor Who story,” which doesn’t bode well for the future. Still, there’s plenty of time and room for improvement, and at least the Doctor/companion dynamic is friendly and appealing, so we’ll see where this goes.
To kick off the 2019 release year, the Big Finish monthly range turned to Cavan Scott to reintroduce Kamelion to the series. Kamelion may be the single least-explored “companion” from the classic series, as even the novels barely touched upon him. The result, “Devil in the Mist,” is a decent if uninspiring reintroduction, but it struggles with enough problems that it never truly becomes good.
Kamelion is a decent enough idea: a sentient robot that can change its appearance to look like virtually anyone, controlled by telepathic commands. We first saw him in “The King’s Demons,” in which he was controlled by the Master to impersonate King John – and then not again until “Planet of Fire,” where he was once again controlled by the Master. I suppose it’s inevitable, then, that Scott writes a story in which Kamelion is controlled by other minds, but it’s already making the character feel one-note. As Gerald Flood passed away thirty years ago, a recast was necessary, and so Big Finish turned to talented impressionist Jon Culshaw. His performance is excellent; he explains in the extras that he started from Flood’s performance and made it a bit more natural and less mannered to reflect Kamelion’s time away from King John. But the material isn’t there to tell us much about him, as he spends most of the story under the control of one person or another.
Scott structures the script so that it never slows down: we split time between a prison ship and a dangerous alien world, and the pace (and Ken Bentley’s direction) never flags. It’s positively frantic at times, though some of the yelling and running around, especially in episode four, is incomprehensible. The cast is also quite small: apart from the TARDIS team, there are only three other characters, one of whom drops off the map halfway through. I also like how the script misleads you: the villain of the piece is telepathic war criminal Nustanu (Simon Slater), so you automatically assume he’s the one possessing Kamelion, but the actual answer to the possession is much subtler and more complicated. Sadly, that’s all replaced by a second, much more straightforward possession in the final episode that doesn’t come off nearly as well. The last episode falls into a well-known trap characteristic of other Doctor Who stories: the story leaves all the explaining to the end, so the final episode must be both full of exposition and action that resolves the plot, leaving it feeling garbled and the first three episodes feeling slight.
The character work is quite good, particularly for Tegan. It’s easy to write her as the stereotypical “mouth on legs” but Scott imbues her with more depth, fleshing out her sarcasm and hostility as manifestations of her emotions. Turlough doesn’t get much to do. The story tries to do something new with the Doctor: he is paralyzed from the waist down in a spaceship crash and must now operate without the ability to walk. At first, the story embraces his emotions: he tries to put on a brave face for his companions, but ultimately passes out while desperately trying to warn Turlough that he may soon regenerate. The problem, though, is that the Doctor’s newly-acquired disability doesn’t meaningfully impact the narrative. How do we move the Doctor around? Oh, just build a hover-sled from the spaceship wreckage. Mere minutes later, he’s already figured out how to super-power the sled to fly far into the air and save Turlough from falling from a cliff. And by the end, he’s figured out how to heal himself. It’s perfectly in keeping with the Doctor’s character to figure things like this out, and I’m certainly not suggesting an ableist narrative of the Doctor being utterly unable to function as a consequence of his injury – but none of it feels earned. Look to the TV show: when Peter Capaldi’s Doctor was blinded, we spent a few episodes watching him adapt to his inability to see. And while we know the fifth Doctor must eventually regain the ability to walk, there’s no law saying it had to happen by the end of this story. You’ve got a trilogy of stories – explore it! Don’t cram it all into an episode and a half! Think of how much we could learn about this Doctor and his companions! But instead, we immediately hit the reset button, and it’s off to the next story, with paralysis left as a minor inconvenience that happens occasionally.
Sadly, I didn’t particularly care for this story. I appreciate its ambition, I like how it tries to flesh out the Doctor, Tegan, and Kamelion – but I think it falls short. The last episode is overcrowded. The story throws out some fascinating ideas but doesn’t meaningfully grapple with them. It’s certainly not boring – this is not the usual carbon-copy Big Finish monthly release – but I still don’t think it works.
The latest series of Early Adventures wraps up with “The Crash of the UK-201” by Jonathan Morris, a story that gives us a glimpse of a previously unexplored part of Doctor Who: Vicki’s life before her ship crashed prior to “The Rescue.” And it’s good, though it struggles against its biggest problem: it has no reason to be 4 episodes and well over 2 hours long.
If you saw “Father’s Day” on TV, you’ve seen “The Crash of the UK-201,” except shorter and better. Nonetheless, “Crash” is a fantastic look into Vicki, a character we’ve only ever learned about through Companion Chronicles. Due to an accident on the TARDIS, Vicki wakes up in her cabin on the UK-201 near the day it is fated to crash on Dido. Given this chance to rewrite history, she takes it: Steven appears on board shortly thereafter, and he is able to repair Bennett’s sabotage of the engines and pilot the UK-201 out of Dido’s atmosphere and back on course. (The story never indicates whether this is in the past or future relative to Steven’s history, but given the ease with which Steven effects these repairs, I’m assuming he’s from Vicki’s future.) This has what seems to be a wonderful effect: the crew survives, the ship proceeds to arrive at the colony Astra, and Vicki goes on to live a long, happy life, first with her father and later with her husband and children. Unfortunately, mysterious hooded creatures haunt her, and while they don’t look or sound like the Reapers from “Father’s Day,” they seem to have the same purpose: erasing paradoxes from the timeline.
Vicki has the ability to keep traveling back in her personal history, and so, having done it once, she keeps trying to fix “mistakes.” But these decisions have consequences. Her father is killed in a disaster at an observatory, but Vicki meets the doctor that tries to save him, and they later fall in love and are married, living a happy life with two children. But when she tries to go back and save her father, history changes, and she no longer falls in love and has a family. Yet when she tries to put that right, the essential randomness of sexual reproduction means that her two children are no longer the same children she had on a previous attempt. This is the thematic core of the piece: life is determined by a series of random events that chain together to establish our histories. Some of these events are wonderful, some are tragic, but together they form our lives. And if we had the power to change individual events, we would forever change the tapestry, and our lives would become unrecognizable. Vicki learns this the hard way – she tries and tries to engineer a perfect life for herself but realizes no matter what she does she will experience pain and loss. This is a fantastic theme, and Morris captures it well – but he belabors the point.
This story could have been told in two episodes. By the time Vicki is cycling back through her life for the 5th time, the story passes the point of feeling important and instead starts to feel tedious. We know what’s happening, we know what ultimately has to happen to return things to normal, and we spend the second half of the story in a holding pattern. When Vicki finally decides to return things to normal, we have to sit through multiple false starts before she even gets that right. This isn’t the sort of story we would have seen on TV in the 1960s, but the obvious padding fits right in with Doctor Who of that period and is unnecessary in a modern audio drama.
Fortunately, the performances carry us through the tedium of the story’s second half. Maureen O’Brien is excellent throughout, really selling Vicki’s alternating happiness and frustration. Peter Purves handles most of the narration as well as a supporting role for Steven, and he’s excellent as usual. Lisa Bowerman directs well, and Toby Hrycek-Robinson’s sound design nicely captures the different time periods. The major selling point for “The Crash of the UK-201” is learning more about Vicki, and O’Brien’s performance is the reason to stick around. Sticking around, unfortunately, is the tough part.
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