The Point of Stillness. A place the Time Lords are forbidden to go. It cannot be drawn, it cannot be whispered, it cannot be thought. And yet somebody is very keen to reach it.
Deep within the TARDIS, something unusual is happening. One of the ship’s oldest secrets is about to be revealed, and once it is, nothing will ever be the same again.
As danger materialises deep within the ship, spectral strangers lurk in the corridors and bizarre events flood the rooms, someone long-forgotten is ready to reappear. The Doctor and Leela are soon to discover that their home isn’t quite the safe stronghold they thought.
THE ABANDONED
Finally. Finally, after almost three full years and twenty different releases in Big Finish’s range of Fourth Doctor Adventures, we get a story that tries to do something different with the format. That story, “The Abandoned” from Nigel Fairs and Louise Jameson, plays with different realities and the themes of perception and memory. While it doesn’t really work, it’s still refreshing to hear something that tries to be different instead of another action-packed 1970s pastiche.
Fairs wrote several Companion Chronicles for Leela, so it’s unsurprising to see the two pairing up on a script in this case. I’m also fairly sure this puts Jameson alongside Ian Marter as the only companions to write officially licensed Doctor Who stories. And while I see what they’re trying to do with the script, the first episode is too much of a misstep to allow the entire play to shine. I don’t generally like stories that overplay the effects of madness – cackling laughter, random acts of violence, a child’s voice reciting nursery rhymes, etc. tend to irritate me – and that’s basically all the first episode is, with the fourth Doctor and Leela battling insanity. There’s something to be said for allowing the listener to experience confusion along with the characters, but when that takes up literally half of your story, you’ve got the balance wrong.
The second episode clears things up, and sets out a number of interesting ideas – but because of the two-episode structure, it doesn’t explore them nearly as much as I would have liked. That said, I loved the idea of the Point of Stillness and why Time Lords cannot venture there. I also enjoyed the explanation behind the villains, which gave a nice, multilayered explanation in turn of the title. The revelations in this story remind of a recent Peter Davison play, but they work, and they answer a fundamental question about the Doctor and the TARDIS that I can’t believe hasn’t yet been asked.
While it normally goes without saying that Tom Baker gives an enjoyable performance, he deserves special praise for his work in “The Abandoned.” Of all the ways you could describe his Doctor, “vulnerable” would be near the bottom of the list, so when Baker brings that to the fore it’s genuinely surprising. Yes, we’ve heard this Doctor under mind control, being asphyxiated, and so forth, but hearing him beg helplessly for his sanity and for his life is an unsettling experience, and it’s a huge credit to Baker that he can still find new ways to play his most famous role. Jameson doesn’t break new ground as Leela, but she gets to be even more proactive and heroic than usual and it’s enjoyable to hear. And Stephanie Cole’s Marianna is a fascinating character in her own right, one I’d like to hear more of in the future. Unfortunately, my dislike for “madness” acting means I found the performances of Mandi Symonds, Andy Snowball, and Fairs himself to be deeply irritating, but they’re doing exactly what you’d want out of these sorts of parts.
The negative reaction “The Abandoned” has received is disheartening but, ultimately, understandable. I give it every credit in the world for trying to do something different with Big Finish’s most traditional range, but between the inexplicably confusing first episode and the unforgiving structure, inventiveness alone is not enough to make “The Abandoned” a success. I’d still rather listen to this than yet another “Energy of the Daleks,” though, and I’m already gritting my teeth in anticipation of “Zygon Hunt.”
Recommended, but with heavy reservations.
6/10