The TARDIS arrives on a human colony world, where the city dwellers rely on advanced technology to create their children, while shunning the primitives who live outside the city. But neither group realises that a third force threatens their very existence…
PHILIP HINCHCLIFFE PRESENTS: THE GENESIS CHAMBER
Evidently, the Philip Hinchcliffe Presents box set was successful enough, despite its comically high price point, to prompt a new series of Big Finish audios. I’m not sure what, exactly, Philip Hinchcliffe is Presenting here – it seems as though these are simply his story ideas adapted to script form by Marc Platt. So what makes these functionally different from Lost Stories, and why are they so expensive? And, more to the point, is this story, “The Genesis Chamber,” worth it? Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the answer is “no.”
There are a ton of good ideas on display in “The Genesis Chamber.” There’s a colony of people terrified to venture into the outside world, and a group of outsiders who ventured out there and never returned, with all the requisite prejudice and mistrust. There’s a computer at the heart of the city with the capability to terraform the entire planet or reprogram the human genome. There’s economic drama and crime drama, and an alien race with motives ranging from merely evil to ridiculously evil. None of this is surprising coming from Marc Platt, who has always been one of the strongest world-builders in the BF stable, but unfortunately the story doesn’t do much of anything with these ideas.
One of the major problems is with the characterization employed in the story. Almost all of the supporting characters are derived from various archetypes, and all are played to the hilt, from the star-crossed young lovers to the blinkered president to the kindly old grandfather to the sadistic security chief. Platt makes it work through some particularly pleasant dialogue, but nothing especially interesting or surprising happens to any of them. You can predict the various angles of character development almost from the moment each character is introduced. That’s apart from the few of them that die, of course, and that brings me to another strange element of the story: multiple characters turn unexpectedly murderous whenever it’s time to show things getting serious. Grillo (Dan Li), for example, goes from a disagreeable person who embraces prejudice to a sadistic, violent psychopath at the drop of a hat. Similar things happen with Volor (Gyuri Sarossy) and the rest of his people. I don’t mind an unexpected death being used to increase the dramatic stakes, but when it happens multiple times within one story I question the necessity of the device.
Of course, part of the reason it happens multiple times in this story is that the story is six episodes long. I like classic Doctor Who as much as the next person, but there were very few six-part stories that couldn’t have been told in four, and “The Genesis Chamber” is no example. Fans like to insist that a three-hour running time gives the story “room to breathe” and allows for complex world- and character-building, but it usually just leads to additional capture-and-escape plots. Guess what happens in “The Genesis Chamber?” We see the Doctor and Leela variously captured by the colonists, the outsiders, and the aliens – and often changing places with changing partners from the supporting cast. There’s not enough here to justify the running time, and while this is certainly a well-written, interesting world to spend time in, the story nonetheless starts to drag.
Perhaps most surprising is the story’s treatment of the fourth Doctor. With Leela constantly under threat, and at one point thought dead, the Doctor is unusually emotional, both vengeful and regretful. We’ve seen the fourth Doctor angry before, of course, but the gentleness he exhibits when comforting and complimenting his companion is unexpected. Tom Baker nails it, too; it’s great to have the occasional reminder that underneath the “Tom Baker” OTT performances one can still find a talented actor.
Overall, I did not enjoy “The Genesis Chamber.” There are some solid ideas on display, but the story seems resolutely uninterested in exploring any of them, content instead to spend time with generic, boring characters. The production, from director Ken Bentley and designer Andy Hardwick, is capable but unmemorable. It’s not a terrible story by any means – it’s pleasant enough, even if it’s far too long – but if this were in the actual Hinchcliffe era, it’d be down at the bottom with “Revenge of the Cybermen.”
Not worth the price.
5/10