Winter at the seaside. The wind blows. The waves crash. People are dying and a strange spindly figure stalks the cold, deserted streets. A typical holiday for the Doctor and Leela in other words.
When they stumble across a grotesque series of murders at the coast, the TARDIS travellers realise the local constabulary is out of its depth. Something supernatural has come to town, something evil. And it all seems to be tied in to a particular young family.
Monsters lurk behind strange doors. Tragic secrets wait to be uncovered. And somewhere, deep within, the Crooked Man sits. He is waiting for you.
THE CROOKED MAN
For the third story in the third series of Fourth Doctor adventures, Big Finish turned to the ever-reliable John Dorney for “The Crooked Man,” a script that goes all-in on the creepy gothic horror vibe before taking a bizarre right turn into sequel territory. It does not recover from that misstep, though other disappointing aspects follow close behind.
Let’s deal with this right off the top: I’ve never cared for “The Mind Robber” as a story, nor did I enjoy Big Finish’s recent attempt to provide a sequel to it. In theory, the concept of a dimension in which fiction comes true is brilliant, and should easily serve as the source for countless metafictional ideas – but in practice it just leads to wacky adventures with Gulliver, or Captain Nemo fighting Moby Dick in the Nautilus, or whatever. Dorney puts a new twist on the material: instead of legendary villains from great literature, the bad guys in “The Crooked Man” are second-rate garbage from self-published Internet fanfic. This is cute, but doesn’t contribute much to the story until the Doctor taunts the villain with it – why not be more cutting? This is the perfect opportunity to savage the sort of person who lives on TVTropes and thinks that gives them the right to call Russell T. Davies a crap writer, so why not? Satire is empty without a sharp edge, and this is a particularly dull brand.
Which, I suppose, would be fine if the story itself was interesting, but after a largely fantastic, creepy first episode, things quickly fall apart. If you stop at the cliffhanger, you’ll love this: a man forced to eat the works of Charles Dickens, page by page? The Doctor grimly investigating while Leela hovers on the edges, knife at the ready? Why do we go from here to endless scenes of the characters being chased by monsters and yelling descriptively a lot? I get it’s from the nursery rhyme – “They all lived together in a crooked little house” and all that – but when the villain himself does little more than cackle insanely it removes most of the threat from the play.
I do like how Dorney gives the story a bit of an emotional base, though. Some of the material featuring Simon (Robin Pearce) is eye-rolling – never get between a father and his child!!! – but at least there’s a sensible explanation for it. It does violate my rule of self-justifying clichés, but it does so in a matter that didn’t irritate me, so credit is due there. Sarah Smart was fantastic in “The Rebel Flesh,” but she’s shockingly off here – so unconvincing that I thought she was going to be the fictional character in the twist! Fortunately, I enjoyed Richard Earl’s endearing awkwardness, which helped ground the action. I also have nothing but praise for the regulars, even if Tom Baker bellows his way through the script. The Doctor and Leela solving murders – Doctor Who at its best.
The production is largely successful – it certainly doesn’t get boring, and much of that is down to Nicholas Briggs’ direction. Jamie Robertson turns in solid sound design, though there’s yet another example of an embarrassing crowd scene in here. Can we please stay away from scenes of characters urging their comrades to action? The response always sounds like what it is: four people in a studio yelling “Yeah!” and “Roar!” and such. Overall, “The Crooked Man” is shaky at best. It doesn’t do anything particularly interesting with its source material, it has a surprisingly poor guest performance, and it wastes a brilliant first episode on a tedious runaround. Still, that first episode is definitely worth something, and I don’t regret listening.
It’s okay.
5/10