Psychodrome by Jonathan Morris
Shortly after surviving the perils of Logopolis, Castrovalva and the machinations of the Master, the new Doctor and his new crew could be forgiven for wanting to take a breather from their tour of the galaxy. But when the TARDIS lands in a strange and unsettling environment, the urge to explore is irresistible… and trouble is only a few steps away.
The world they have found themselves in is populated by a wide variety of the strangest people imaginable – a crashed spacecraft here, a monastery there, even a regal court. And not everyone they meet has their best interests at heart.
With the TARDIS stolen, and the very environment itself out to get them, the travellers face an extremely personal threat. They’ll have to work as a team if they want to get out alive… but can you really trust someone you barely know?
Iterations of I by John Dorney
The house on Fleming’s Island had been left to rot. Ever since a strange and unexplained death soon after it was built, and plagued with troubling rumours about what lurked there, it remained empty and ignored for decades until the Cult moved in. As twenty people filled its many rooms, the eerie building seemed to be getting a new lease of life.
But now it is empty again. The cult found something in its corridors… and then vanished.
Trapped on the island one dark night, the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric look into the building’s mysteries, its stories of madness and death. Their only chance is to understand what terrible thing has been disturbed here… before it consumes them utterly.
THE FIFTH DOCTOR BOX SET
PSYCHODROME
Over their fifteen years of producing Doctor Who, Big Finish has slowly expanded its roster to include almost every single surviving cast member from the classic series. Only a few holdouts remained, a list that grew even shorter with the announcement of the casting of Matthew Waterhouse as Adric. Instead of bringing Adric back in the main range, however, Big Finish opted to release a “Fifth Doctor Box Set” containing two stories starring the fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan. The first of these, Jonathan Morris’s “Psychodrome,” is an obvious homage to season 19 that still manages to surpass almost every story of the era.
If there’s a common criticism of the classic TV series in light of the revival, it’s that the classic series did little to flesh out its regular characters. We learned about them through their actions, and some were quite memorable, but very little was established about their backgrounds or even their motivations. The TARDIS crew of the early Davison years is an appropriate example of this: with all the bickering and exasperation, it’s entirely fair to wonder why these people continue to travel together. Morris, perhaps recognizing this, gives the era something it desperately needed: a full-on character piece that explains the personalities and relationships of the Doctor and his companions. It’s set directly after “Castrovalva” – Tegan’s lipstick is still drying on the TARDIS walls – and shows, through living metaphor, how the crewmembers view one another.
As mentioned above, this is the first Big Finish story to feature Matthew Waterhouse – though not the first to feature Adric – and it’s fitting that it’s a better presentation of the character than anything we saw on TV. Adric was always easy to dislike, but why was he so unlikable? Consider, as Morris presents here, that this is a teenager, constantly needing to confront feelings of loneliness and abandonment. He lost his brother, he left his people – heck, he left his own universe – and he even lost his best friend and traveling companion when the Doctor regenerated. So why shouldn’t he constantly be trying to prove himself? Why shouldn’t he be passionately devoted to the Doctor, even if the Doctor is no longer the man he met? Yes, he’s irritating about it, but what teenager isn’t? And don’t forget about Waterhouse himself, who returns to his character with a confident, assured performance that only suffers slightly from his attempts to pitch up his voice to sound more youthful. If Adric had been like this on television, he would have been much more popular.
The other characters are served equally well by Morris’s script. Despite countless years and countless stories featuring Sarah Sutton, this is one of only a few that directly engages with her feelings of loss after the destruction of Traken. Sutton’s performance is touching and emotional, and you can finally see how her regal, scientific exterior is concealing her inner pain. We also get to see Tegan dealing with grief, with her anger over the death of her aunt and her frustration with the alien, unrelatable TARDIS crew. It’s easy to sympathize with her desire to leave and return home, as Morris presents her as a sympathetic human being instead of a lunatic desperate to make her flight on time. Even the Doctor is well served: his greatest fear is perfect for this incarnation, one always driven to lead his friends on great adventures but earn their approval in the process. Peter Davison is magnificent; he can’t recapture his youthful voice, but there’s an energy to his performance here that we haven’t heard in quite some time.
I’ve written about the characters; what of the plot? Morris gives us a world generated from the minds of the regular characters, with inhabitants based upon their perceptions of one another. This isn’t a cheap, shock revelation, either – each group of supporting characters is instantly recognizable once you understand what’s happening, and each tells us more about the characters we already know. Yes, it’s a thin plot, and yes, the ending is straight out of “The Dæmons,” but none of that really matters: this is a character piece, and the plot is almost incidental. If I have one complaint, it’s that Morris over-eggs the pudding with continuity references, some of which – including a Time War reference – are far too on-the-nose.
I haven’t even mentioned the production, which is fantastic. Ken Bentley is one of Big Finish’s best directors, but the star of the show is the sound design from Fool Circle Productions, who recapture the music of the era so expertly you’d be forgiven for thinking they employ Paddy Kingsland. Overall, “Psychodrome” is a strong success. It manages to combine nostalgia for a classic TV era with modern, character driven sensibilities, and does so with confidence and skill. If this had gone out instead of “Four to Doomsday,” we might all be calling season 19 one of the greatest in Doctor Who’s long history.
Highly recommended.
9/10
ITERATIONS OF I
The second entry in the Fifth Doctor Box Set is “Iterations of I” from John Dorney, celebrated writer of “Solitaire” and other successful Big Finish scripts. It’s not a character piece; it’s a haunted house story involving some rather speculative writing about sentient numbers. And for the most part it works, propped up at its weaker moments by the excellent central performances – but it still can’t quite reach the heights of its companion piece.
“Iterations of I” is also consciously part of season 19. It’s a Bidmead-style story through and through, using realistic scientific names as window dressing around fantastic, fairytale concepts. Does it make any rational sense that the Doctor can build a jamming device against sentient numbers using a calculator from 1981? Absolutely not, but it doesn’t have to: the threat is real, the concepts are understandable, and the science just has to sound right as it sails along largely forgotten. It’s certainly strongest in its first half, when the characters have no idea what’s going on and it’s a straight haunted house story: the repetition of “I” is genuinely creepy in places, with Sarah Sutton especially doing a great job conveying that feeling.
If there’s a problem, though, it comes in the second half of the story as the conceptual heart of the piece is revealed. The drama largely revolves around the supporting characters, and those characters are largely clichéd and predictable. The story feels like it’s about to wrap up until one character goes rogue and takes Adric hostage, and from there things are drawn out even further with the revelation about the numeric predator. At times it felt as though the script was being stretched out to fill the running time – and while this certainly isn’t unusual in Doctor Who, it’s not exactly welcome when it happens. The fourth episode in particular grinds to a halt with the aforementioned calculator scene, which seems almost unnecessary in that it sounds like the Doctor and companions could just run into the TARDIS and leave but are dicking around outside for reasons unclear.
No complaints about the characterization, though! This is a fantastic script for Peter Davison, and he runs with it, giving a tour-de-force performance that runs the gamut of emotions and sounding even more like his 1981 self than in “Psychodrome.” And, as before, it’s also a great script for Matthew Waterhouse, whose Adric is still a brat but much more sympathetic than he was ever allowed to be on screen. His Alzarian healing powers are a bit much, though – a close-range shotgun blast will take a leg clean off, not just inflict a flesh wound!
The production credits are the same as “Psychodrome” – Ken Bentley directing, Fool Circle sound designing – and the result is just as impressive. The synths of the Radiophonic Workshop were often self-consciously sci-fi, but both this and “State of Decay” demonstrate how that style can contribute to a scary atmosphere. Overall, “Iterations of I” is a strong release and part of an excellent set. If the biggest criticism I can level against it is “It’s not as good as ‘Psychodrome,’” I think that’s pretty darn good.
Highly recommended.
8/10
Box set average: 8.5/10, rounded up to 9/10