Six years after being captured by the galaxy-spanning organisation known only as The Consensus, the Doctor lives inside a hi-tech complex at the heart of an unstable sun, condemned to an eternity maintaining its systems. A moment’s carelessness could cause the star to collapse – and the deaths of billions.
Watched over by liquid guards, the Mercurials, the Doctor’s only company at the heart of the sun is his assistant ‘Daphne’ – the latest in a line of android helpers. But rebels have their eyes on the sun, and its lonely controller – and are prepared to risk even a galactic cataclysm to secure the Doctor’s release…
PRISONER OF THE SUN
With only one story to go before the epic season/series finale, and with Lucie and the Doctor having parted company at the conclusion of “Relative Dimensions,” Eddie Robson’s “Prisoner of the Sun” takes the opportunity to tell a very unique story. I believe this is the only Big Finish eighth Doctor story that does not feature a companion, and Robson takes this opportunity to ask some intriguing questions about the Doctor’s psychology.
When the play opens, we are in the middle of a rather long story: the Doctor has been living on a base inside a volatile sun for six years, maintaining a machine preventing a disastrous reaction. He is watched by the Mercurials, de facto prison guards whose name belies their nature. And he has constructed android companions for himself as a way to stave off the boredom of years. We’ve seen the Doctor in prison before, but the stroke of brilliance from Robson is to make this imprisonment voluntary: the Doctor can leave at any time, but if he does, billions of people will die. He’s thus forced to weigh his freedom against the lives of innocents – and while we know what decision the Doctor will always make in that situation, it can’t be a coincidence that this follows soon after “The Resurrection of Mars.” I suspect the Monk, for example, might not make the same choice.
The primary conflict arises between the Doctor and a rebel, Hagan (Antony Costa), who casts significant doubt into the Doctor’s mind by suggesting that there’s nothing wrong with the sun. If true, this would mean that the Doctor has been kept prisoner purely by his own morality, something that usually isn’t quite so literal. But then the Doctor knows that Hagan has other motives, and as he says, he won’t risk the lives of billions based on the word of one man. To prevent himself from going stir-crazy, the Doctor has programmed androids to act as companions, and as the story starts he’s programming the fourth model. He gives them desirable personality traits – morality, sense of humor, etc. – but gives them all the same voice: Lucie Miller’s, proving he’s still not over his former companion even after six years.
The problem with “Prisoner of the Sun” – and, unfortunately, it’s a big one – is that there’s really nowhere to go with this intriguing setup. There’s never going to be any drama about the Doctor’s decision, and so all Robson can do is threaten the Doctor with forcible removal from the station. The Doctor also admits that he’s suspected he’s been lied to from the beginning, so it makes one wonder why it takes him six years to get a definite answer. The plot is essentially reduced to wondering how he’s going to get out; to Robson’s credit, he introduces multiple elegant, well-thought-out twists to complicate matters, but ultimately the action remains necessarily static.
Paul McGann does a convincing job of portraying the Doctor as a combination of resolute yet bored out of his skull. Sheridan Smith, meanwhile, gets billing but not as Lucie – she’s quite funny as companion-bot Daphne and predecessor Chloe and also demonstrates quite a sadistic side as the latter. Jason Haigh-Ellery directs, nicely indicating the scale and pace of the story, while Howard Carter opts for incidental music stings reminiscent of blockbuster films.
Overall, “Prisoner of the Sun” is an intriguing little interlude before the upcoming finale. The setup is brilliant and thought-provoking, and while the second half certainly starts to drag, there’s enough meat here to make it worthwhile. It’s a step down from the preceding stories, but that’s hardly a sin considering how good they were.
Recommended all the same.
6/10