Stranded on Earth without the Doctor, Mel sets out to rescue him from an unworldly asylum where the Doctor is one of the patients.
Stranded on Earth without the Doctor, Mel sets out to rescue him from an unworldly asylum where the Doctor is one of the patients.
UNREGENERATE!
Since Arrangements for War left my CD player, I’ve been despairing Big Finish’s apparent inability to recapture — even once — the skill necessary to produce great Doctor Who. Looking back on the 2005 releases I’ve reviewed thus far, I’m starting to understand why: the ambition seems to have gone. Of the first five releases of 2005, only one — Dreamtime — made any attempt to push boundaries or offer gripping and/or thought-provoking drama, and it was let down by a rare spate of horrible acting. David A. McIntee’s Unregenerate! makes an attempt to explore an intriguing concept, but by wrapping the story in a flat, uninteresting traditional Doctor Who corridor runaround, one is forced to wonder just what the author was attempting to achieve.
The aforementioned concept is fascinating: artificial intelligences (if indeed that is the proper term for TARDIS minds) implanted into living bodies. This in turn is wrapped in a traditional device: the Faustian bargain, giving up control of one’s death — in this case, “donating” one’s body to the AI experiments — in exchange for a successful life. Right there, we have enough material for a successful, insightful drama, allowing of course for the insertion of a suitable plot and appropriate characterization. But McIntee doesn’t stop there: not only are alien beings experimenting on humans, but these alien beings are in fact Time Lords! Not only are they Time Lords, they’re CIA agents working in violation of the Laws of Time! Not only are the Time Lords implanting artificial intelligences into human brains, they’re implanting TARDIS minds into human brains! There’s a TARDIS-human walking around talking to TARDISes! Not only is the site of this experimentation a creepy, disused Victorian-era asylum, it’s a creepy, disused Victorian-era asylum.. ON AN ASTEROID!
Such an array of ideas is not necessarily doomed to failure; Douglas Adams, for example, was never known for a paucity of concepts in his Doctor Who scripts. But it is also important to note that all of the aforementioned revelations — save the asylum’s position on the asteroid — occur in the fourth episode. By the time we’re done learning about the involvement of rogue Time Lords and TARDISes and the Doctor is done shaking his head at all involved, we’re barely left with enough time to consider the implications of what’s going on. There’s little to no room for moral ambiguity: Louis reverses position on the Faustian scenario under the slightest pressure from Mel, for example, and its only enthusiastic proponent is the violent and obviously unbalanced Rigan.
So what do we have for the first three episodes? The first two alternate between scenes of a babbling, insane Doctor, and Mel and a cabbie trailing Louis and Rausch to the asylum and subsequently running around in its corridors and rescuing the Doctor. These scenes are fairly entertaining, but with a flippant tone and Keff McCulloch-style music cues they do not sit well with the play’s conclusion. Episode three is told mostly in flashback, and details how the Doctor came to be driven insane — something which seemed to happen almost entirely through complete carelessness on his part. Though this provides a transition into the final episode, it jars with the first two, as we go from a frantic runaround to a long conference with no intermediate steps.
I know Sylvester McCoy is a talented actor. I know this because of his strongest TV performances and because of his masterful turns in plays such as The Fearmonger. However, I’d never know it from this play, as yet again McCoy appalls the listener with an over-the-top this-is-the-first-time-I’ve-read-the-script performance. His attempts at conveying insanity are cringeworthy — forget about any subtlety or clues that McIntee may have attempted to hide in the dialogue — and his “sane” performance isn’t much better, as he maintains his bizarre tendencies to enunciate incorrect syllables and roll every single “R” in the script. Fortunately, Bonnie Langford is much better — and she ought to be, having featured in fully half of the 2005 releases to date — lending Mel an appealing strength of character that has grown in each of her performances. The supporting cast is mostly strong, especially Jennie Linden as Klyst, and Hugh Hemmings, who turns in a remarkably touching performance as the TARDIS-possessed Rausch. The cabbie is deliberately painted in broad strokes, and Toby Longworth gives a welcome sense of dignity to an already appealing character. Gail Clayton is a little over the top as Rigan, however, but this is a fairly minor complaint.
Ian Potter’s sound design and music, while very good, seems to be deliberately evoking a late-80s story, and I suppose the uncertain tone of stories such as Paradise Towers manifests itself here as a result. The subtle inclusion of aural clues pointing to the involvement of Time Lords is appealing. John Ainsworth’s direction is uninspiring, much like his previous efforts in Nekromanteia and A Storm of Angels, but it is sufficiently effective. Lastly, the cover is intriguing, but the title seems nonsensical.
Unfortunately, Big Finish is starting to lose my interest. After two monumentally uninteresting releases, here we are presented with a play overfilled with ideas and completely unsure of its own direction, crippled by a horrible performance from the lead actor. It’s not one of the worst releases of all, as it certainly starts well and features excellent characterization throughout, but it’s solidly below average and represents yet another disappointment from a company once reputed for consistent excellence.
Not worth owning.
4/10
Unregenerate!
Big Finish main range #70. 2 CD’s, 4 episodes. Written by: David McIntee. Directed by: John Ainsworth.
THE PLOT
The Doctor has gone insane.
No, really. He’s an inmate of the Klyst Institute, which appears to be a Victorian-era nursing home. The staff are running experiments on their inmates, each of whom has signed an agreement to come here on the day before their deaths. The Doctor apparently interfered with an experiment, resulting in his current condition… though the institute’s security chief, Rigan (Gail Clayton) believes the Doctor is just faking it.
Back on Earth, Mel follows a message from the Doctor which leads her to the institute. She knows the Doctor must be inside. But when she climbs a tree for a better vantage point, she makes a shocking discovery.
The building is just an empty shell, with no rooms, no doors – not even a real roof!
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: Save for a single, brief scene, the first two episodes show us a Doctor who has lost his mind and his very identity. This might be interesting… but writer David McIntee has chosen to avoid dealing with the insane Doctor, who probably gets a total of 10 minutes’ “screen time” across the entire first half of the serial. This is not entirely a bad thing, since “insane acting” not only doesn’t play to Sylvester McCoy’s strengths, it actually plays directly into his weaknesses! In fairness, McCoy occasionally pitches his voice just right and lets out a perfect line delivery. There’s a conversation between the Doctor and Klyst in Part Two, where a few of McCoy’s deliveries chill the spine. But most of the time, he’s just overacting painfully, warbling his voice in a way that makes it all too easy to picture him pulling bizarre faces. Given that these moments are all we have of the Doctor until well into Part Three, it’s… unfortunate, to say the least.
Fortunately, when we do get to see the Doctor being the Doctor, McCoy’s performance is much better. It’s far from his best, but when we flash back to the Doctor’s original involvement with the institute, McCoy is enjoyably in charge. He also does fairly well with an overly-talky climax in Part Four. And at least he doesn’t mangle any sayings for “comedy” value.
Mel: One positive effect of a relatively “Doctor-lite” story is that Mel is brought front and center. And yes, that is a positive. Mel’s character is far better served on audio that it was on television. She’s allowed to be smart and proactive, without compromising her basic naivete. She effectively takes charge through most of the story, until the Doctor finally comes back to himself, and she’s entirely up to carrying the plot. Bonnie Langford, who really wasn’t that bad on television (even in Time and the Rani, the writing was what was wrong with Mel, not the acting), is terrific on audio, and obviously enjoys having an actual character to play.
THOUGHTS
I’ve been a fan of Big Finish’s audio Who output for several years now. A handful Who stories that are among the very best ever recorded have been among their output, and I think there are only a handful of times in the television run (new or old) in which the average episode quality has been higher than Big Finish’s average quality. There are many stories in Big Finish’s catalog that I sorely wish had been made for television.
Unregenerate! is not one of those stories.
The story is explicitly set shortly after the Doctor’s regeneration, directly following Time and the Rani. This makes it the 7th Doctor’s second performed story, in terms of story chronology. If this had been a televised story, McCoy’s second serial would have been a story he barely appeared in, with material seemingly tailored to his worst acting traits. It would have been a disastrous follow-up to a disastrous debut, and I’m rather glad this story is effectively an ancillary product.
So, moving beyond the sidelining of the Doctor and McCoy’s often-poor performance, the next question: Is the story any good? My answer, sadly, is no. The Doctor’s insanity aside, it comes across as a rather generic runaround. Part One gets a lift from the in media res start, intriguing us to stick with it to find out what’s going on. Those mysteries just about carry it through Part Two. The second half is far less interesting, though. There’s some potential in the nature of Klyst’s experiments. But that potential is largely unexplored, in favor of a subplot with the tediously one-dimensional Rigan. What little interest the story builds up is easily washed away by a climax in which the characters talk at each other endlessly before one commits a heroic self-sacrifice (TM), followed by more talking.
As a writer, David McIntee is strong on story structure. Unregenerate! is a competently-told story, and it does actually hang together when all is said and done. From a purely objective standpoint, it is definitely a better story than Time and the Rani. But for all its faults, there was something vaguely charming about Time and the Rani. It was dreadful, but also bizarrely likable in spite of itself. If nothing else, there was a sense of energy and fun to it. Unregenerate! has very little energy, and very little fun. I know it’s slightly the better of the two stories. But I also know that I’ll watch Time and the Rani again, while I strongly suspect that I will never again listen to this.
This is not the worst Doctor Who story I’ve reviewed. I didn’t hate listening to it. I just didn’t particularly enjoy it, either. Neither good nor overwhelmingly bad, Unregenerate! ultimately was just… there.
In the end, maybe that’s the most damning thing I can say about it.
Rating: 4/10.