When the First Doctor and his grand-daughter Susan escape through the cloisters of Gallifrey to an old Type 40 Time Travel capsule, little do they realize the adventures that lie ahead… And little do they know, as the TARDIS dematerializes and they leave their home world behind, there is someone else aboard the ship. He is Quadrigger Stoyn, and he is very unhappy…
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE BEGINNING
The advent of Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary in 2013 led the entire expanded universe of Doctor Who to announce anniversary plans, including multiple options across multiple ranges from Big Finish. One of the most intriguing came, naturally, from the Companion Chronicles, announcing Marc Platt’s “The Beginning” – which, as the name implies, tells the story of the Doctor and Susan’s initial flight from Gallifrey. With such a compelling, anticipated concept, how could it possibly go wrong? The answer, unfortunately, is “quite easily.”
The biggest problem, for me and likely almost everyone else that doesn’t care for “The Beginning,” is self-inflicted. This is the first-ever adventure in the TARDIS, after all. What glorious, amazing wonders must have awaited the Doctor and Susan as they set off into the universe? Perhaps it wasn’t a voyage of discovery at all – perhaps it was a nerve-wracking escape, with Time Lord pursuers breathing down their necks until they finally got away. So I was quite disappointed to get such a standard, average story – and while I appreciate that’s my own fault, I don’t think I’m out of line for expecting something groundbreaking for such a historic tale.
Sure, there’s lots of stuff here to tickle the fan gene. The story references “The Name of the Doctor,” with the Doctor and Susan initially selecting one TARDIS before being convinced to take another one by a mysterious outsider obviously intended to be Clara. There are references to Platt’s own novel “Lungbarrow” as well. Platt opts to leave vague any details about why they left Gallifrey: all we know is that the Doctor had caused some sort of trouble by speaking out in favor of interference. So when the Doctor and Susan encounter an alien race seeding life on an unfamiliar planet, but insisting that life follow their rigid structures, the Doctor has a new authority against which to rebel. And can you possibly guess which unfamiliar planet this life is being seeded upon? Why yes, it’s Earth! About the only thing about this plot that made me sit up and take notice was the conclusion, when the alien engineers try to wipe out life on Earth but are blown to smithereens when the humans retaliate with a missile attack while the Doctor and Susan run away.
“The Beginning” also introduces a recurring character for the trilogy, Quadrigger Stoyn, played by Terry Molloy. I’m not really a fan of this idea – the Doctor and Susan escaped Gallifrey, but little did they know a repairman was still in the engine room! I understand why Platt incorporated him, because it’s an easy way to juxtapose the Doctor’s morality against that of his fellow Time Lords even at this early stage of his development. The problem is that Stoyn is, by definition, uninteresting: he doesn’t want to interfere and he’s terrified of the unknown. He’s a static character, in other words, who wants nothing more than to return to Gallifrey and set things back to their proper order. He’s also clearly the Doctor’s intellectual inferior, which doesn’t help matters. Some attempts are made to make him sympathetic – his face is inadvertently burned when the Doctor starts up the TARDIS, for example – but they don’t entirely work. Molloy isn’t the problem, of course, but his performance can’t save the character. Fortunately, Stoyn gets more interesting as the trilogy progresses, but in “The Beginning” it’s fair to ask why he needs to be around at all.
The production is generally faultless. Lisa Bowerman directs, and Carole Ann Ford gives a fantastic performance that really captures the travelers’ nervousness at stepping into the unknown. The sound design from Toby Hrycek-Robinson is effective as well. Overall, though, “The Beginning” is a colossal letdown. Generic in almost every way, it displays none of the imagination and inventiveness that characterized Doctor Who in its earliest days. It’s competently produced and professionally acted, but it feels like any random middle-of-the-road Companion Chronicle instead of a 50th anniversary story.
Disappointing.
4/10