4.1 The Rise of the New Humans by Guy Adams
When a man dies after falling from the top floor of a multi-storey car park, the Doctor and Jo wonder why it should be of interest to UNIT. Then they see the protuberances on the man’s back… As he fell, he tried to grow wings.
Looking into the man’s past leads the Doctor and Jo to a remote private hospital where the staff aren’t as helpful as they could be, and the Chief Administrator is unavailable to meet with them.
Breaking into some restricted wards, the Doctor notes the presence of alien and futuristic technology. The whole thing bears the unmistakable hallmarks of one of his own people’s interference, one of his old foes. Except not perhaps the one he might have imagined.
The Monk is back. And this time his meddling may have gone too far.
4.2 The Tyrants of Logic by Marc Platt
The Doctor and Jo land on Port Anvil – a bleak, abandoned mining colony on the remote planet Burnt Salt. A huge armoured crate has recently arrived in the almost derelict Spacehub. No-one knows who it’s for. No-one knows what it contains.
Strange creatures lurk around the outskirts, and a rag-tag population of misfits inhabit what is left of the town: a saloon bar owner, a literal one-man band and a hunter of very unusual prey. If they want to survive the night, they’re going to have to work together.
Because the Cybermen want the contents of the crate. And they will stop at nothing to get hold of it.
THE THIRD DOCTOR ADVENTURES: THE RISE OF THE NEW HUMANS
We’re back into the Third Doctor Adventures, and we’re well into “x meets y” style of plotting – but fortunately the stories are written by Guy Adams and Marc Platt. First up is “The Rise of the New Humans” by Adams, which leads the Doctor and Jo into a confrontation with the Doctor’s old nemesis the Monk. While it’s good, it also demonstrates how challenging drama is too often avoided in Doctor Who in general and at Big Finish in particular.
The Doctor and Jo travel to a remote country hospital to investigate the death of a mutated man recently treated there. Once there, they discover technology far in advance of the 1970s among other evidence of experiments carried out on the patients. The Doctor immediately suspects that the mysterious Chief Administrator is in fact the Master, but instead discovers that it is the Monk, in his Rufus Hound incarnation. The Monk is working with Dr. Kurdi (Mina Anwar), the head physician, to conduct experiments into the human immune system, attempting to augment it to make humans instantly responsive to any threatening stimulus. Fall off a building? Grow wings before you hit the ground. Sink to the bottom of a lake? Grow gills before you drown, and so forth. Unlike the Master, the Monk isn’t fronting a global domination scheme – he’s just doing this to sell the treatment for profit. Sadly, however, the plot goes in that direction anyway: when the so-called New Humans realize that they’re practically invulnerable, they decide to conquer the planet and convert the population to be like them. And so it’s up to the Doctor, Jo, and the Monk to stop the disaster from occurring. It’s very basic, straightforward Doctor Who plotting that Adams executes will his usual skill. I love the Monk in this, especially when he points out that he’s not actually called the Monk. I think Tim Treloar’s Pertwee impression is his best yet, and Katy Manning is always wonderful.
My problem isn’t with the story as executed, it’s with what the story isn’t. There’s a moment early in the story, before the plot has been fully revealed, when the Doctor, Jo, and the Monk discuss his use of future technology to cure ailments untreatable in the 1970s. The Doctor is naturally appalled with this violation of the laws of time and declares that this must stop. The Monk counters that he’s saving lives and asks if the Doctor really wants to disconnect all the machines and sentence the patients to death. Jo is torn, and even appears to agree in part with the Monk’s position. And then… nothing. That conflict is disregarded and the story continues down the world-domination path, in which disconnecting the patients is objectively the right decision and the Doctor comes up with a way to cure them all anyway. The problem is that the original problem is much more interesting than what we end up with. That’s a decision the Doctor should be forced to grapple with: would he disconnect patients from lifesaving technology to protect the web of time? If he chooses to keep them alive, what other consequences does he face as a result? How does his decision impact his relationship with his companion? Is the Monk right? How important are the laws of time? Perhaps we can even grapple with the new series concept of a fixed point in time. But instead of presenting the characters with difficult or even impossible choices and seeing how they react, we disregard all that and give them a straightforward problem with an obvious solution, and that’s disappointing.
All of this is not to say that “The Rise of the New Humans” is bad. It’s not: in fact, it’s quite entertaining. But it’s ultimately disposable, and it could easily have been so much more than that.
7/10
THE THIRD DOCTOR ADVENTURES: THE TYRANTS OF LOGIC
To close out the fourth set of Third Doctor Adventures, we get what fans have been clamoring for: an adventure that finally pits the third Doctor against the Cybermen. It’s a surprisingly big deal – yes, he encountered them in The Five Doctors, and yes, there was a Companion Chronicle (“The Blue Tooth”), but this is the first full-length, full-cast encounter between the two. Even the books never did it, something that surprises me to this day. The result of all this is “The Tyrants of Logic” by Marc Platt, and it has a number of good elements, but like a lot of Platt’s output it leaves you wishing there had been more to it.
The setup is fairly basic: the Doctor and Jo arrive at an abandoned mining colony on a planet called Burnt Salt. Very few people are left, including Gusta (Linda Marlowe), who owns the local tavern, and Chad (Jeff Rawle), her partner and entertainment for the bar patrons. The colony was abandoned after the Cyber Wars, and the remnants of the conflict are seen in the survivors: Gusta has a cybernetic eye, and Chad plays music directly from his implants. Also present at the colony is Hollisen Grier (Ronan Summers), a Cyber-hunter tasked with eliminating any remaining Cybermen and investigating mysterious deaths. There’s also a research facility headed up by Professor Marian Schaeffer (Carolyn Pickles) but that doesn’t come into play until the second half. And into all this, the Cybermen arrive, trying to recover the Cyber-Leveler that arrived on the planet in an armored crate. Platt sketches the characters broadly but effectively; each is sympathetic in their own way with clearly understandable motives. The supporting cast gives good performances across the board as well. As with most Platt scripts, the plot tends to meander along, but everything makes sense and hangs together logically. It is, in short, a well-constructed story.
And yet I find myself thinking that there isn’t much to it. Platt has tackled the Cybermen before, of course, most famously in “Spare Parts,” and one consistent element through his and others’ Cyber-stories is the horror of conversion and the loss of individuality. Given that there have been over 50 years of these stories, it’s important to blaze new trails when featuring the Cybermen – but “The Tyrants of Logic” just seems repetitive. There’s a moment where the Doctor challenges the Cybermen on the importance of emotion – check. There’s a horrifying vision of a half-converted person – check. There’s a base-under-siege mentality and a presentation of the Cybermen as an implacable force inexorably advancing – check. The most interesting idea on display is naturally the only thing we haven’t seen before: a “Cyber-smoke” that contains nanobots that perform the initial stages of conversion, readying its victims for the final stages. The Doctor is infected, and we see how the conversion process affects his mind – Treloar emotionlessly repeating the rules of logic is a creepy thing to hear. Apart from that, it’s all stuff we’ve heard before – and we’re not too far removed from a TV story that provided a fresh, exciting take.
On the production front, everything is successful as usual. Nicholas Briggs directs both stories, Jamie Robertson scores both stories, and Martin Montague contributes the sound design to this one while Benji Clifford does the job for “The Rise of the New Humans.” Overall, I’m not sure how to rate “The Tyrants of Logic.” It’s certainly not a bad story, but it’s overly long and it doesn’t have much to say that we haven’t heard before. It’s certainly thrilling to hear a full-on Pertwee vs. Cybermen story after all these years, and for many fans that alone is worth the price of admission – but after you’ve experienced hundreds if not thousands of Doctor Who stories, this seems curiously empty.
6/10