To continue Leela’s education, the Doctor promises to take her to the famous Morovanian Museum. But the TARDIS lands instead in a quiet English village, where they meet the enigmatic collector Harcourt and his family.
When people start to die, reality doesn’t appear quite what it was. There’s something sinister going on within the walls of Harcourt’s manor, and the stakes are higher than they can imagine.
The Doctor is about to discover that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
THE RENAISSANCE MAN
After the disappointment that was “Destination: Nerva,” Big Finish needed a rebound success for the second installment of their new Tom Baker range. Fortunately, Justin Richards was there to pick up the slack with “The Renaissance Man,” a solid story with an intriguing central concept that doesn’t outstay its welcome.
While Justin Richards doesn’t have a history of writing brilliant Doctor Who stories, he’s almost always good for a solid, entertaining script or novel with something interesting at its heart. This is absolutely true of “The Renaissance Man,” which starts with the “Ghost Light”-like idea of an individual trying to catalog every piece of information in existence and thereby become a true Renaissance man. Richards wraps this idea in the traditional Doctor Who setting of a quiet English village with a mysterious manor and lord, giving it an impressively mysterious tone at the beginning. Ian McNeice is great throughout as Harcourt – he’s turning into quite the Doctor Who veteran between Big Finish and television! I enjoyed both the setup and the resolution: it’s reasonably obvious for the Doctor to save the day simply by telling lies, but Richards executes it convincingly enough to ignore the predictability.
The problem with “The Renaissance Man” is in the shifting realities. When characters change identities at first, it adds an intriguing dimension to the story. When entire realities start to change, from secluded village to Western and so on, the story loses cohesion – it’s difficult to appreciate the conflict. It feels like padding – it adds little to the story apart from increasing the running time, and delays the inevitable conclusion for no particular reason. The final twist also seems unnecessary, because Harcourt has worked perfectly well as the villain and the story would have worked very well had his confrontation with the Doctor been the end of it.
Balanced against this, though, is Richards’ superlative work with the characters. Where “Destination: Nerva” seemed to present caricatures of the fourth Doctor and Leela, “The Renaissance Man” has no such trouble. Tom Baker gets some fantastic, laugh-out-loud lines – I’m still giggling over his phone conversation with the dog, which is precisely the sort of ludicrous scene he can pull off like nobody else. Louise Jameson is great, of course, although even here Leela is a bit too stupid – “runny-science” seems less like an affectation like “blue guards” and more like a simpleton not grasping the point.
The production design is fantastic for the second story in a row. Ken Bentley keeps the story from sagging, even in the padding in the middle, and Jamie Robertson’s sound design is entertaining, easily besting the challenge set by the shifting sets. The sound continues the gentle homages to the Dudley Simpson scores of the time, something I’ll enjoy if it continues throughout this series. Overall, there’s not a great deal to say about “The Renaissance Man” – it’s a Justin Richards story, with all the associated positives and negatives, it doesn’t have a great deal to say beyond “the unlimited acquisition of knowledge is a poison pill,” and it’s put together well. It’s a solid midseason story, in other words, and it’s a good step up on the premiere.
Recommended.
7/10