The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa are fugitives on a world that has suffered a global ecological disaster resulting in a disfiguring genetic disease.
The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa are fugitives on a world that has suffered a global ecological disaster resulting in a disfiguring genetic disease.
CREATURES OF BEAUTY
After the experiment in narrative strategy that was Doctor Who and the Pirates, Big Finish offered another production in the same vein: rather than exploring the technique of the unreliable narrator, Nicholas Briggs’ Creatures of Beauty uses the fragmented narrative style popularized by the Christopher Nolan film Memento. Rather than adopting that film’s backwards-narrative style, Creatures of Beauty rearranges its scenes in thematic fashion — and succeeds admirably, resulting in a second consecutive Big Finish success.
Many have pointed out that the actual plot of Creatures of Beauty is weak, and this is a legitimate opinion: the Doctor and Nyssa arrive on a planet, become involved due to a misunderstanding, explain the misunderstanding, and are allowed to leave. However, the entire point of the script is that the actual events of the plot are unimportant: what Briggs chooses to emphasize is the difference in perspective between each set of people involved in the situation. There’s a great plot twist at the end that simply would not work without the restructured narrative, but other than that the plot is generally insignificant.
The strength of Creatures of Beauty, then, lies with the way in which Briggs rearranges his scenes to draw attention to his characters. Each character is introduced so that the listener perceives them in a certain way — a way which is subsequently undercut in a later scene. Only the Doctor and Nyssa avoid this treatment, mostly because we already know about them, but this allows them to serve as a grounding element for the play; their intermittent discussions help to frame events in comprehensible fashion for the listener. This is very much a shades-of-gray play as well, as no character is out-and-out good or evil — even the fearsome Koteem are shown to be somewhat sympathetic in their actions by the play’s conclusion. Unfortunately, Big Finish’s persistence in using the Doctor Who format of approximate 25 minute episodes interrupted by cliffhangers somewhat damages the play’s effectiveness, as its entire structure defeats the purpose of cliffhanger endings.
Peter Davison gives one of his more brooding performances in Creatures of Beauty, a turn quite evocative of what would become his season 21 characterization. This is a Doctor becoming disillusioned with his role in the universe, contemplating whether or not it is truly worth saving; it’s refreshing to have an author that recognizes the path along which the character was treading at this point in his development. Davison, of course, is brilliant in the role — you can hear the weight of the universe on his shoulders with each line, yet his traditional heroism comes to the fore when necessary.
After her extremely successful turn in Spare Parts, it’s wonderful to hear Sarah Sutton remain on form here as Nyssa. She gets put through the wringer in this episode — a common occurrence with BF companions in this period — and convinces throughout, bringing a heartfelt emotion to her voice that, in many cases, wasn’t even seen on television. Briggs uses the character as a perfect companion: rather than being a near-idiot that asks the Doctor questions for the sake of exposition, Nyssa intelligently questions the Doctor’s actions and motivations. All of the companion pairings have benefitted from the BF range (save perhaps Ace), but it’s between Nyssa and Mel for the greatest improvement.
The guest cast is, as usual, excellent, but David Daker’s performance as Gilbrook is one of those legendary BF guest appearances that will be remembered for years. This is a million miles away from Irongron — Gilbrook is tired yet vicious, world-weary yet driven, and he represents one of the most threatening characters we’ve yet seen. David Mallinson gives an exceptionally nuanced performance as Brodlik, something which develops along with the theme (and, incidentally, Brodlik is a great name — it’s nice when authors take the time to write names that sound good on audio). Jemma Churchill is effective as Forleon, and Emma Manton is sympathetic in limited screen time.
Nicholas Briggs handled virtually the entire job of post-production, and it is thus no surprise that Creatures of Beauty sounds as polished as it does. He knows his own material well enough to design appropriate, non-intrusive sound while his direction seems to improve with each play — this time all of his authors are absolutely spot-on and the pace is stellar. The cover art is a little odd, but that’s obviously a minor complaint — and I continue to love the use of the Howell theme.
Overall, Creatures of Beauty is another success for the Big Finish line. I think that these experimental releases would benefit from being freed from the standard Doctor who episode format, and this marks the only significant negative about the play — otherwise, this is a well-written and well-acted piece of drama that deserves to stand amongst its counterparts at the height of the BF pantheon.
Highly recommended.
9/10
“Our civilisation isn’t dying, it’s already dead. All that’s left is the rotting corpse”
The Tardis has landed in an unfamiliar and hostile world. The linear narrative has been swiss-cheesed. We don’t know where we are, and the presentation makes us feel seriously disorientated. But like the brutal parallel universe in Inferno, we know we desperately want to escape this world, just like the Doctor and Nyssa do. Not necessarily because they’re under threat of death or that there’s any greater scales, but because there’s a fear that if we stay a moment longer, the suffocating, deathly misery of this world might become contagious.
As for the reason for doing this non-linear gimmick, it fails. Before twist endings and wool over the eyes games of perception became trendy and obligatory for cinema, it had a potency in confronting ordinary people with their fallible perceptions and proclivity for prejudice. This is using twists and perception games to the same end, but it needn’t have bothered. The Koteem would have been revealed as ‘good’ aliens after all at the same point in the narrative, even if the chronology had been straight and linear. Not to mention the final twist could be seen a mile away. However what prevents the gimmick from being just a gimmick is the way it almost personalises the world of Veln as a mindscape, representing someone’s depression. That the story is a collection of repressed and fractured memories that are so traumatic they can only be reckoned with a piece at a time. So what could feel like a cynical, cold technical gimmick, actually feels organic, deeply human and intimate in a mind’s eye kind of way.
The fractured linearity also has the effect of making this world far more alienating and cold. It’s literally representing a disconnected world. Everyone in this story represents a faucet of depression. Chief Gilbrook represents a lifetime’s bitterness and a spiteful, morbid obsession with interrogating some kind of hidden truths of everyone else’s deceptions. Brodelick represents helplessness. Lady Folian lives in an ivory tower, trying to block out the horrors of this world, which of course means that she represents denial. And then there’s the Koteem who represent overwhelming guilt. Nyssa too represents guilt in her reaction to Veleen’s death, which Sarah Sutton plays superbly, making you wish she could have gotten even half as decent material to work with when having to grieve Adric by numbers in Time-Flight. Whilst on the subject of making cheap digs at the 80’s, when this story is about guilt, it’s not in the crass, manipulative way of the mid 80’s where the Doctor causes or allows terrible things to happen just so he can have an excuse to pretentiously act all remorseful and noble about it afterwards. This is guilt as something truly beautiful, humanistic and noble that thrusts the story and brings people together, drives people to care for and help one another every way they can.
When Nyssa encounters Veleen committing suicide, the impact is as shocking and disorientating as a car crash, it’s presented wonderfully as a blind panic of unpredictable, numbing disbelief, and it’s both poetic and authentic in a way that cuts to the bone. What prevents the death itself from being a contrived shock tactic is the way it gives a tragic symbol to the suffocating misery of this world, where there’s only one way of escape for its inhabitants. It’s the same way that Nyssa’s jailbreak isn’t just an exciting sequence, but a desperate burst of life and freedom for a lethargic, dying world where everyone has given up.
It’s hard to think of a Doctor Who story that could be compared with it, because it’s unlike any other story. Like many Doctor Who stories it is specifically about the way bureaucratic or totalitarian societies effectively criminalise the little people, treating them as being guilty of something they don’t understand. But the particularly nasty police brutality is one indication that we’ve left the fictional Whoniverse far behind and have taken an unprecedented sidestep into the ‘real world’ and the tactile attention to detail in Nyssa’s interrogation scene, from her description of having a dry throat to her psychologist interrogator morbidly scrutinising her every facial expression makes it all the more real and tactile and places us firmly within that world and gives us no way out. As such it gets closest to the idea of the Davison era in presenting the Tardis as the savage universe’s only sanctuary. It is a rather defeatist story, and shows the Doctor at his most ineffectual, which places it as having most in common with Season 21, but whilst that vile season would only succeed at making the viewer weep at the contemptuous, cheap degradation of a once great, admirable hero, Creatures would make you weep for all the right reasons. The Doctor is shown from the other person’s perspective as being an arrogant, sanctimonious nuisance who thinks himself judge and jury of alien situations he doesn’t even understand, which makes his final decision to atypically refuse to force his moral view onto others, very poignant. In other words the Doctor chooses to be ineffectual for all the right and noble reasons.
It’s also heavily in tune with the Davison era’s aspirations to depict complex villainy and shades of grey, and easily surpasses them. The most poignant final words are ironically from the story’s antagonist as he poetically describes passed on memories of that disaster that could almost be an artists painting representing generations of pain and helplessness. All summing up to show how, although Gilbrook will never stop hating or bullying the rest of the world, everyone here is a victim, and everyone is in pain.
From its picturesque landscape building of a world in nuclear winter, its beautiful use of imagery and music, with a sense of mood and pathos that can be cut with a knife, and it’s morbidly mesmerising scenes of Nyssa under police interrogation, every bit of heart and soul seems to have gone into this play and the results are simply a crystalline masterpiece, rich in humanity and emotion, with or without the central gimmick. When I said earlier that Nick has a certain proclivity for relentlessness of tone, here the story really benefits from that, and by its unfaltering efforts, the art actually transcends writing to become ‘being’.