Problems beset the Doctor and Evelyn Smythe as they travel by train to the Wild West town of Fortune. A young woman is investigating the murder of her father nine years earlier, and a wanted poster indicates that the Doctor is the killer!
Problems beset the Doctor and Evelyn Smythe as they travel by train to the Wild West town of Fortune. A young woman is investigating the murder of her father nine years earlier, and a wanted poster indicates that the Doctor is the killer!
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: A TOWN CALLED FORTUNE
I was excited for Paul Sutton’s “A Town Called Fortune,” the fifth release in the fifth series of Companion Chronicles, for several reasons, chief among them the involvement of Maggie Stables in a script from the author of “Arrangements for War” and “Thicker than Water.” What I got was a generic Western, bereft of anything interesting. Perhaps it was my fault for getting excited in the first place?
The motivation behind the Companion Chronicles seems to be twofold: first, the ability to tell stories featuring unavailable Doctors; second, the ability to tell stories through narrative instead of the traditional “full-cast” style. Since, at the time, pairing Maggie Stables with Colin Baker in the studio was something Big Finish was doing, I assumed “A Town Called Fortune” would be the latter: something that would tell a story in a way that a traditional audio could not. And at the start, this appeared to be true, with a unique framing device involving Evelyn and Sam (Richard Cordery) trying to get their stories straight before an inquiry. But this is quickly left by the wayside in lieu of a straightforward, unimaginative Western, something that could be told in any format and remain just as boring. Why is this a Companion Chronicle? Just to tick a box and say “We did one with Evelyn, hooray?”
Russell T. Davies has commented in the past that every historical story can be livened up with the introduction of monsters, and while I don’t agree with him in every case, it’s certainly true here. Not every story needs monsters, but every story needs some sort of dramatic hook: in historicals, it can be a famous individual, a well-known event, or a life-or-death struggle facing the TARDIS crew. Leave all of these things out and you get “The Smugglers,” a story that virtually nobody knows or talks about. You also get “A Town Called Fortune,” which has no ambitions beyond being a Western. Even “The Gunfighters” had the OK Corral and that bizarre ballad – this has nothing save for a few generic characters and a dry, dusty setting. There are saloons and wanted posters and characters named “Rachel Ann” and dreadful American accents, so I suppose if you like this sort of thing and you don’t own a DVD player this is worth checking out, but otherwise I just told you everything you need to know.
It is nice to hear Maggie Stables narrating a story, though it’s not enough to rescue it, and her impression of Colin Baker needs to be heard to be believed. Lisa Bowerman directs well enough, and the sound design from Nigel Fairs is suitably Western-y, but it’s not enough to rescue the story. What was the point of this? It tells us nothing important about the regulars, it’s in no way a character piece, and the plot is so clichéd and straightforward that it fails to distinguish itself in any way. Oh, and the cliffhanger is among the worst in Big Finish history. It’s a competent enough story, I suppose, but honestly, they could have skipped this month in the release calendar and not lost anything.
Blaaaahhhhhh.
4/10