1.1 Stolen Goods by Matt Fitton
Jenny is new to the universe and keen to explore – but in unfamiliar spaceships, accidents happen. She’s lucky to have someone on-hand to help. A slippery, fast-talking someone, called Garundel.
Soon, Jenny is mixed up in cons and explosions. But she also finds something strange, inexplicable, and as new to universe as she is. She’ll call him Noah.
1.2 Prisoner of the Ood by John Dorney
Moving into Leafield Crescent, Angie Glazebrook is surprised by an unexpected caller. But not half as surprised as Jenny, suddenly transported to a suburban close on twenty-first century Earth.
And that’s nothing to the surprise of the neighbours when alien visitors start appearing. Visitors with tentacled mouths, carrying death-dealing orbs. The Ood have come for their prisoner…
1.3 Neon Reign by Christian Brassington
The Dragon Lord rules Kamshassa with fear. Half the oppressed population live in an addicted stupor, while the other half are forced into service. Factories belch poisonous smoke, and Dragon Guards patrol the streets, condemning dissenters to the Eternal Fire.
When Jenny and Noah arrive, it’s only a matter of time before they start a revolution.
1.4 Zero Space by Adrian Poynton
Out in deep space, in the middle of – quite literally – nowhere, Jenny and Noah believe they’ve found a safe haven. And, very possibly, some answers. But the space station holds many secrets, and it won’t be long before Jenny’s past catches her up.
Bounty hunter COLT-5000 is on her trail and will stop at nothing to hunt down its quarry… even in Zero Space!
JENNY: THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER: STOLEN GOODS
When the TV episode “The Doctor’s Daughter” ended, when Georgia Tennant’s Jenny flew off on adventures of her own, everyone basically assumed it was only a matter of time before she returned. But she never returned to the TV series, so it falls to Big Finish to engineer her return, and this long-awaited box set of stories kicks off with “Stolen Goods” by Matt Fitton.
The first and most obvious question is “why was this made?” We’ll pass over the thoroughly cynical explanation of “it will sell lots of copies” and examine the artistic reasoning: why did these stories need to be told? Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer to this question. Jenny is the Doctor in all but name: she’s intelligent, witty, brave, resourceful, willing to sacrifice herself in the name of the greater good, all in all a wonderful model of what a female Doctor might look like. The obvious problem here is that we’re about to get an actual female Doctor on television, so that can’t be the selling point of Jenny’s series. Instead, she needs to stand out as a character in her own right, and we’ll return to this question in the final review.
This story serves as a reintroduction to Jenny, and does so in an oddly stereotypical fashion: her ship breaks down and an unscrupulous mechanic attempts to swindle her out of her money. The swindle is orchestrated by Garundel, the slimy con artist voiced by Stuart Milligan doing his best Paul Lynde, returning to audio for the first time in quite a while. He’s great, but this is still the sort of problem Jenny should solve in about eight seconds, and after dawdling for half the episode she does exactly that. Matters are complicated by the introduction of the COLT-5000 (Siân Phillips), a robot bounty hunter tasked with capturing Jenny, and Noah (Sean Biggerstaff), a young man with a mysterious past and no memory of his identity. There’s not much to the plot – just a lot of running away once the COLT-5000 shows up – but “Stolen Goods” serves as a successful introduction of the major players in the set and an entertaining listen to boot.
7/10
JENNY: THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER: PRISONER OF THE OOD
I think this is the first time we’ve heard the Ood in a Big Finish story, and John Dorney’s “Prisoner of the Ood” is a fine way to introduce them to audio. The story is quintessential Doctor Who: alien visitors wall off a suburban neighborhood and Jenny and Noah show up in the middle of the action. There are some interesting layers to the plot, though as soon as you know there’s an alien warlord on the loose it’s screamingly obvious which character is the warlord in disguise. But this isn’t intended to be a shocking plot twist; instead, “Prisoner of the Ood” is rather breezy. It even ends with a character pleasantly asking the arriving authorities who wants a nice cup of tea, which is perfectly charming until you remember that character is standing amid a literal pile of corpses of the other people on her street. That’s the problem with “Prisoner of the Ood:” its tone clashes horribly with its subject matter. The material would work as a dark comedy; here, it just seems morally questionable. Most Doctor Who stories that kill off most of the characters end on a downbeat note; this one ends blithely unconcerned about what just happened. This would be very interesting if it was a feature of Jenny’s character: perhaps a springboard to an exploration of how her attitudes differ from her father? But no, we just move on to the next story. Disappointing for a piece of drama; entirely predictable for Big Finish.
6/10
JENNY: THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER: NEON REIGN
We’ve had “sleepy English street with secret aliens,” so now it’s time for Jenny to tackle “toppling dictatorial regime in an afternoon” in “Neon Reign” by Christian Brassington. The world of Kamshassa is torn apart under the rule of the Dragon Lord: the male population is hopelessly addicted to a dangerous narcotic while the female population labors in servitude. As such, “Neon Reign” is an overtly feminist tale, emphasizing how Jenny seeks to liberate the oppressed women of the world. Unfortunately, it’s also a sledgehammer-obvious tale that beats its message into your brain at every opportunity. The dialogue is stuffed with awkward, clunky phrasing designed to emphasize the sexism of the society, and even more awkward, clunky phrasing about liberation. It’s difficult for me to pan this, because I always admire Doctor Who stories that are about something more than evil dictators, and I strongly agree with the story’s message – the problem is that it’s incompetently done. The performers make the best of it, especially Georgia Tennant, but this story more than any other in the set is a real struggle to get through. There’s also a B-plot about Noah learning more about his origins, as the palace treats him like a god and gives him security clearance to any area he likes. But in the end, nothing is explained, so it’s presumably being left for future sets. This is good character development, however: laying clues throughout stories prior to the big revelation, rather than just coming out and hitting the listener in the face with a frying pan. How these wildly varying degrees of subtlety exist in the same story is unclear to me, but they do, and “Neon Reign” doesn’t work.
3/10
JENNY: THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER: ZERO SPACE
After a bit of a stumble in the middle, we reach the final story in the set: “Zero Space” by Adrian Poynton. Fortunately, it’s quite good! There are several great ideas here: a scientific research station in the middle of “zero space,” the station staffed entirely by clones of the same two people, their research being able to uncover the secrets of Noah’s past, and so forth. The COLT-5000 is here again, but rather than being a rather one-note character it’s actually shaded reasonably well, employing strategy other than killing anything in its path. Poynton’s script builds tension throughout, and while the revelation of what’s at the heart of the station isn’t surprising, it’s still worthwhile after everything leading up to it.
Of course, then the story ends, and the denouement is a disaster. Here’s the problem with the box set in general: they don’t do anything remotely interesting with the central character. We don’t know exactly how long it’s been since her “birth,” but we know she still has significant gaps in her knowledge – but those gaps never seriously threaten her because she has an absolute wealth of knowledge on other topics. Her characterization doesn’t go anywhere: she’s basically the tenth Doctor in female form, with perhaps a bit more inclination toward physical violence. She talks repeatedly about being bred for war, and how the Doctor showed her a better way, but at no point in any of these stories do we see her struggling with this inner conflict in any serious way. Instead, she takes literally everything in stride, always handling her challenges in the most responsible way. As the story ends, we’re just expected to accept her as a wonderful person with no evident flaws, which is boring. Noah even says something like “You really are the Doctor’s daughter,” which is just slamming the point home with no subtlety and glossing over the fact that Noah hasn’t actually met the Doctor and has no way to make that comparison.
Fundamentally, the problem is this: Doctor Who on television has rarely been this safe and unimaginative. This is a spinoff, ideally the sort of place where you can push the boundaries without the restrictions of the parent show, and yet we just have a bunch of generic stories with a generic Doctor substitute. There’s a brief cameo at the end, and while it had me smiling, it also had me wishing I could just be listening to that performer instead. That’s not good for a box set that very obviously wants to be the first in a long line. Overall, most of the individual stories in this set aren’t bad, but the overall quality of the set isn’t very good. It’s rare to have something be less than the sum of its parts, but here we are.
Oh, and the theme tune is horrendous.
6/10