Once, Jo Grant travelled in Space and Time with the Doctor. Now, she is travelling with trans-temporal adventuress Iris Wildthyme.
Arriving in Los Angeles in the 1930s, Jo and Iris are caught up in the glamour of Hollywood.
Monster movies are all the rage.
But sometimes monsters are real…
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE ELIXIR OF DOOM
The penultimate Companion Chronicle of the monthly range is Paul Magrs’ “The Elixir of Doom,” a story that follows on from the largely excellent “Find and Replace” to tell of Jo and Iris having an adventure together in the classic era of Hollywood. While that sounds amusingly entertaining – and it is, generally – it’s let down by a significant problem: absolutely nothing interesting happens.
I should point out right off the bat that I haven’t listened to or read any Iris Wildthyme material outside of her appearances in Doctor Who media. No Big Finish audios, nothing from Obverse Books, etc. I like the character and how she functions as a walking metafictional Doctor Who parody, but I don’t know much of her backstory. So when she says, for example, that she is incapable of regeneration, I don’t know what she’s talking about. We’ve seen at least one other incarnation in “The Wormery,” for example, so is she lying about this? If so, why? Is she somehow unaware? If so, why? Is this supposed to be something I noticed? This is how I felt throughout the story: that there was some other story I hadn’t been told running just behind the scenes, but that story never came to the surface.
And that wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that nothing of importance seems to happen in this story, either. Jo and Iris go to a few Hollywood parties and get embroiled in a misguided actor’s plot to use the titular elixir, and that’s about it. The Doctor is there, too, so it’s like they’re running around as secondary characters in a Doctor Who story – but the story doesn’t do anything with this idea. Or maybe the Doctor is the secondary character in their story? It’s hard to say. It’s Paul McGann instead of Jon Pertwee, too, for no particular reason, though there’s a great subplot where Iris tries to keep Jo away from the Doctor out of fear that she’ll feel compelled to go off on adventures with this dashing Doctor and leave Iris alone.
Magrs also plays with narrative, though not nearly to the extent seen in “Ringpullworld” or “Find and Replace.” Here, it’s limited to Jo and Iris exchanging the narrative duties, and Iris occasionally saying things like “Oh, is it my turn to narrate?” Again, as amusing as this is, the story doesn’t do anything with it: there aren’t any metafictional elements apart from the presence of Iris herself. It feels as though Magrs is hitting all the notes he’s expected to hit but doesn’t have anything in mind to do with those notes. Actually, that’s a good description of “The Elixir of Doom:” it feels perfunctory, as though it was done to have one more Iris story before the character retired from Big Finish.
I enjoyed listening to “The Elixir of Doom,” of course. I love the idea of a Hollywood actor turning her succession of husbands into the monsters in her horror films. Katy Manning is fantastic as ever, both as Jo and Iris, and most of the supporting cast to boot. They didn’t really need Derek Fowlds but I suppose Manning can’t do every single voice in the story. Lisa Bowerman directs well, and the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is fine, though it doesn’t really evoke a Hollywood setting. Overall, “The Elixir of Doom” is fun but disposable. It’s good for what it is, but as one of the final releases in a series known for weighty, experimental material, it feels oddly out of place. But I suppose now, two years down the line, that doesn’t matter as much.
Not bad.
6/10