The Doctor has been disposed of, and the end of the universe is nigh. There will only be one winner, but how many will lose?
4.1 Ship in a Bottle by John Dorney
The Doctor, Liv and Helen are hurtling into a future that has been utterly destroyed, trapped inside a shuttle with no possible means of escape. But with the lives of everyone in the universe in the balance, they’ve got to find one. And soon. When the stakes are this high, you can’t just give up. Or can you?
4.2 Songs of Love by Matt Fitton
Left to fend for herself against a bunch of power-hungry plotters hell-bent on destroying the universe, what choice does a girl have but to throw in her lot with the winning side? Using her past to her advantage, River Song returns to the ancestral seat of the Time Lords to make her last stand.
4.3 The Side of the Angels by Matt Fitton
Cardinal Ollistra has plans for New York, plans which involve the Deputy Mayor and her sponsor, one ‘Reverend Mortimer’ – better known to the Doctor as the Meddling Monk. The Eleven arrives to stamp out the resistance, but that isn’t the only danger the Doctor finds lurking in the shadows – for New York is a city of Weeping Angels.
4.4 Stop the Clock by John Dorney
The time has arrived. Events are in motion. The end of the universe is at hand and the Doctor and his friends have one hour to save eternity. Starting now.
DOOM COALITION: SHIP IN A BOTTLE
The fourth and final Doom Coalition starts off with a surprisingly quiet story: “Ship in a Bottle” from John Dorney. As the title implies, this story features only the three regulars – and while there is definitely some good character work on display, the story is a bit too mechanical to be truly great.
The concept of the “bottle episode” has been around since the original Star Trek – a story with limited scope, usually featuring only the regular cast, and set entirely within one location. It’s normally employed as a budgetary tool – “bottle” episodes save money for larger-scale episodes later on in a season. Of course, that’s not as much of a concern on audio – and the title tells us that Dorney is doing this because he wants to. The story picks up with the Doctor, Liv, and Helen marooned on a time ship traveling uncontrollably into the future. That future, of course, is devoid of life due to the machinations of Padrac and the rest of the Doom Coalition – and there’s no apparent way for the TARDIS crew to get back to the unaltered timeline. So there’s not much of a plot, as they have to discover a way out of their situation and then put it to use. Naturally, they succeed.
But the lack of plot is acceptable in a story like this: the true interest comes from how these characters interact in an enclosed space when presented with an impossible situation. And this is where the mechanical feeling comes out: the characters take turns being fatalistic and talking each other out of their depressions. The Doctor always seems slightly out of character when he gets into moods like this: he discovers the time rudders aren’t there, so he gives up on trying and resigns himself to thousands of idle years reading and watching movies? I understand the aim here is to demonstrate Liv’s leadership and resourcefulness, but she discovers another escape route after examining the schematics for about 30 seconds. She also declares, quite seriously, that she’s a doctor and as a result she never gives up, thus inspiring the Doctor himself to keep going – and that’s thematically resonant, of course, but part of proper medical training is to learn when to give up!
Apart from that, there are some great moments in here, particularly near the start when Liv rightly berates the Doctor for abandoning them. Helen shies away when the Doctor snaps at her, and Liv even goes out of her way to defend Helen and build her back up again. I also enjoyed the Doctor rightly taking offense at the suggestion that one of the Eleven could be mistaken for him. There’s an interesting dynamic among the TARDIS crew, and it’s easy to forget they haven’t been traveling together for very long given the comfort and chemistry between the performers. When the Doctor finally devises a madcap scheme to escape their imprisonment, he starts to explain why it’s their only choice – but Helen and Liv are already on board. Despite the friction, there’s a lot of trust in this group. I hope this set doesn’t split them up for too long.
Ken Bentley directs, while Benji Clifford provides the sound design and Jamie Robertson the score. The atmosphere is claustrophobic despite the comfortable-sounding ship interior, and the sequence of the Doctor clambering across the outside of the ship is very well presented. Overall, “Ship in a Bottle” is a very good start to the final Doom Coalition set. It’s not an all-time great or anything like that, but it’s good to hear a small-scale, personal story before we get into what will probably feature a lot of yelling and things exploding.
Very good.
8/10
DOOM COALITION: SONGS OF LOVE
“Songs of Love” from Matt Fitton is the second story in the fourth Doom Coalition set, and it also employs a surprising format: a “Doctor-lite” story largely featuring River Song. It’s good for what it is – a showpiece for River – but the more the Doom Coalition arc develops, the less inspiring it seems.
Set concurrently to “Ship in a Bottle,” “Songs of Love” features River on Gallifrey, trying not to arouse suspicion as she works to undermine Padrac’s schemes from behind the scenes. There’s always more for River to do when the Doctor isn’t around, and his absence here leads to a tour de force for Alex Kingston and her character. Simply put, she’s brilliant – she effortlessly manipulates those around her, she uses her knowledge and unique abilities to surprising effect, and she’s even allowed a couple of moments of failure to balance things out. (The vortex manipulator scene is quite good.) Her scene with the Sonomancer is great for River (though not for the Sonomancer, which I’ll get to in a moment) and her subsequent goodbye with Paul McGann is fantastic. If someone could just explain to me how she’s able to be here in the first place, I wouldn’t have a single complaint about her role in the story.
The problem with “Songs of Love” is that there isn’t much going on with the characters besides what River gets up to. Looking at the good guys, the Doctor is barely in it and Liv and Helen spend their small part of the story running almost constantly. The brief time we spend with the two companions does flesh out their relationship, though, which continues to be interesting. Liv does not like it when her friends keep secrets, while Helen has been torn about keeping River’s secret for precisely that reason. I also like the subtle hints we get about Helen’s romantic interests, though I hope we never get a grand, obvious revelation in that regard.
The villains struggle even more in this story. The problem with Padrac is simple: he’s utterly uninteresting. There’s no depth to his character, no shade – and he’s clearly intended to be a three-dimensional character given the amount of time we spend with him. I accept the first part of his development: he saw Gallifrey’s doomed future and it pushed him over the edge. But there’s nothing sympathetic about him, no way for the audience to think that maybe he has a point, because his solution – destroy all other life in the entire universe – is utterly insane. Next, he makes an impassioned plea to his fellow Time Lords to go along with his plan to save themselves. And what does he do with those who disagree with his idea? Why, he has them all murdered! I see that Fitton is trying to foreshadow how the Time Lords will one day become as bad as the Daleks, but that runs headlong into the fact that we’ve already seen this in “The End of Time.” In that story, Rassilon intends the Time Lords to ascend to a higher plane and leave everything else in the universe to destruction, which is basically Padrac’s “Harmony” scheme with different decoration. But Rassilon’s role in that story was to teach us more about the Doctor; here, Padrac has to carry an hour-long story and it doesn’t quite work.
The Sonomancer is another problem. Her characterization has been almost comically inconsistent throughout the series, and here we see her smitten with Padrac, calling him “my love” and doing whatever is necessary to protect him, because at this point, why not? Naturally, he takes advantage of her devotion, which leads to the aforementioned scene in the Matrix in which River essentially gives the Sonomancer a pep talk about asserting herself in her relationship. For River, it’s an effective bit of manipulation; for the Sonomancer, it makes her seem like a teenager.
The Eleven shows up at the end but doesn’t do too much – and thankfully we manage to get through an entire story with him without one “Silence, all of you!” And lastly, “Songs of Love” is starting to lay the groundwork to connect this story directly to the Time War, introducing Cardinal Ollistra from the War Doctor series and heavily implying that the oncoming catastrophe is the Time War itself. This is a nice bit of universe building; it’s unfortunate that it’s building toward Big Finish’s concept of the Time War, however, because that Time War is largely boring and unimaginative. Still, I suppose they get credit for trying, and it’s not Doom Coalition’s fault what comes next. Overall, “Songs of Love” isn’t all that bad. It’s a great River Song story that’s let down by almost everything else, but the River material is good enough that it remains enjoyable throughout.
6/10
DOOM COALITION: THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS
The penultimate installment of Doom Coalition and the final installment from Matt Fitton is “The Side of the Angels,” an epic story that sets up what sounds like an even more epic conclusion. While I applaud the ambition on display here, the script simply includes too many elements to hang together properly over an hour.
As the title implies, “The Side of the Angels” features a new appearance by the Weeping Angels. It also features the Rufus Hound incarnation of the Meddling Monk, a previous incarnation of the War Doctor series’ Cardinal Ollistra, and of course all the surviving members of the Doom Coalition. This is way too much for a single hour of audio, and as a result the story comes across as disjointed and confused. The central concept is reasonable: a splinter group of Time Lords is setting up a hideout on Earth (in 1970s New York City for some reason) to protect themselves from Padrac’s destruction of the universe. But it goes off the rails with this detail: in order to get the energy they need to power their shield, they ally with the Weeping Angels, allowing them to feed on New Yorkers in anticipation of an energy release when the wave of destruction comes. And they retain the services of the Monk to organize everything, as though he’s the only one capable of such an act.
So you’ve got a few conflicts here: the Doctor and the Time Lords, the Doctor and the Monk, and the Weeping Angels and everyone else. The Doctor and the Monk is the most interesting, given the history between the two Time Lords in the latter days of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. But this isn’t the Graeme Garden incarnation, and irritatingly the story doesn’t establish whether Hound is an earlier or later Monk. While the Doctor is coldly furious with the Monk, the Monk is utterly enigmatic – and that’s poor writing. Both possibilities are interesting: either the Monk is equally furious with the Doctor over Tamsin’s fate or the Monk has no idea why the Doctor is so angry with him, but without picking a lane the story turns it into a continuity question and I have no time for those.
The other problem here is that the Weeping Angels are a dreadful choice for audio. This was a problem in “Fallen Angels” in the Classic Doctors, New Monsters set and it’s a problem here. Again: these are completely silent beings whose appeal is entirely visual. If you watched “Blink” with the picture off you’d have no idea what was happening. But we’re trying it again on audio, meaning that characters have to describe where the statues are and what they are doing – and it sounds exactly as clunky as you’d expect – and the only way to describe the sudden appearance of an Angel is to employ a musical sting, which gets hilarious after the 57th time. The story also conflicts with what we know about them – the Time Lords interacted with them and struck a deal? The Doctor even points this out, which is another device I hate: you can’t do ridiculous, unbelievable things and justify it by having the characters point out the silliness unless you’re writing something openly satirical. There is a great callback to the idea that the image of an Angel can become an Angel, though – Fitton does understand why the Angels work and has good ideas for them, but trying to present those ideas on audio is a non-starter.
I didn’t like the War Doctor series in general and so I don’t like Doom Coalition trying to tie itself forward into that season. Big Finish also presumes that their listeners buy and listen to everything: at the very end of the story, Ollistra regenerates into the Jacqueline Pearce incarnation, and her first words come just before the ending theme. That’s great if you both recognize Pearce’s voice and know she plays the character in the War Doctor series; if you don’t, you’ll have absolutely no idea why that scene is at all significant or necessary.
There’s some good stuff in here despite my complaints. Paul McGann is fantastic, especially in the scenes with Rufus Hound – he is furious with the Monk, and his refusal to intervene on the Monk’s behalf at the end is both chilling and utterly in character. The first Dark Eyes set started with the Doctor trying to recover from the trauma of Lucie’s death, which was promptly ignored from then on, so it’s nice to see the idea reappear here. It’s odd that any references to those stories are delivered in vague terms, though – so we’re assuming that everyone listening has listened to the War Doctor stories but making concessions for people that never listened to the Eighth Doctor Adventures? Nonetheless, McGann really nails these scenes and expertly communicates that the trauma of losing a friend has stayed with him all this time. Hound himself is great throughout, especially in that final scene – he genuinely seems in disbelief that the Doctor would abandon him and his anguish is painful. And while Liv and Helen are often on the periphery of the story, their relationship continues to grow and deepen. The sound design and music are effective as well, even with the repeated Angel sting. Overall, “The Side of the Angels” is a mess, but there’s enough here to make it something of a worthwhile listen. Hopefully the finale will pick up the slack.
5/10
DOOM COALITION: STOP THE CLOCK
And so we arrive at the final Doom Coalition story, John Dorney’s “Stop the Clock,” tasked with wrapping the extensive plot arc that has wound its way through sixteen stories. It certainly accomplishes that goal in a satisfactory manner, but there’s virtually nothing distinguishing about it apart from its competency.
I’ll start with the things I liked, because there’s certainly nothing overtly bad about “Stop the Clock.” Dorney weaves the various threads of the Doom Coalition sets together with consummate skill: River’s questioning of the Sonomancer’s relationship comes back to the fore, Padrac’s self-interest and manipulative behavior blows up in his face, and we even get an explanation for who the Red Lady from the second set actually was. The story neatly closes off the plot while leaving a few plot strands open, presumably for the upcoming The Eighth Doctor: The Time War set to explore. And the performances are excellent across the board, including what is easily Mark Bonnar’s best turn as the Eleven. Dorney even effectively mocks the “Silence, all of you!” line that undercut the character. In short, “Stop the Clock” is well written, entertaining, and a reasonable conclusion to the story.
The problem is that, as conclusions/”season finales” go, “Stop the Clock” doesn’t distinguish itself in any meaningful way. Two stories earlier, River started to question the Sonomancer’s love for Padrac, so in this story that becomes the fault line that fractures Padrac’s plan. There’s nothing surprising, nothing inventive, nothing we learn about either character that we didn’t already know: Dorney has simply taken Chekhov’s gun from the wall and fired it. The Doctor doesn’t have a great deal to do – after his attempt to impersonate the Eleven fails, he just stands there and tries to talk the Sonomancer onto his side. Liv is even more sidelined, as she accepts a dangerous mission to plant a bomb on Gallifrey, but then we spend about five minutes with her as she runs into practically no difficulty. Helen gets the most to do, as she is captured by the Eleven and then influenced by the Sonomancer, but even that seems perfunctory – as she attempts to sacrifice herself, she says something about wanting to matter, just to hammer home the character trait in case anyone was in danger of figuring it out on their own. Oh, and the story is called “Stop the Clock,” and it involves a one-hour time limit that lines up with the running time – and promptly underplays the time limit to the point that I wondered if it was still ticking down. If this is supposed to be a tense race against time, it doesn’t come across.
Name any modern Doctor Who season finale and it’s easy to think of memorable images or ideas. “Stop the Clock” doesn’t have anything like that – it’s like watching a chess computer play itself. All the pieces are there and used appropriately; all the resolutions flow organically from what came before. But there’s no excitement, no soul, both elements that should be present in a story that purports to conclude sixteen hours of audio drama. Perhaps the best scene involves the Eleven talking his captor into freeing him so she can kill him without getting caught – but that’s just good villainy targeted at an unimportant character. Something like that playing off Helen’s insecurities would be much better, though admittedly Doom Coalition has already paired Helen off with the Eleven.
Overall, I still enjoyed “Stop the Clock,” and most listeners should enjoy it as well. But as the last story in the Doom Coalition saga, it’s a bit of a nonentity – it’s basically just another Doctor Who story. Wouldn’t it be great if one of these box sets ended with something as good as “A Death in the Family?” Ah, well. One can dream.
Recommended all the same.
7/10