Missy… alone, unleashed and unfettered. What does she get up to when the Doctor isn’t around?
Well, Missy has a plan. And to carry it out, she’s going to have to break some rules. And people. And planets. Look out universe, Missy is on a mission. And nobody is going to stop her…
1. A Spoonful of Mayhem by Roy Gill
In a spot of bother in Victorian London, Missy is forced to take on governess duties. But she has another scheme in mind, and her charges are simply in the way. She’s going to have to teach the children some rather harsh lessons about getting what you want.
And there will be tears before bedtime.
2. Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated by John Dorney
Missy arrives in Tudor England, throwing the plans of another renegade Time Lord into chaos. King Henry VIII is on the throne, and aliens are stomping through the countryside. Missy just wants to be Queen.
And the Monk? Once he knows who else is on the scene, he’ll be glad just to stay alive…
3. The Broken Clock by Nev Fountain
Tonight, on Dick Zodiac’s America’s Most Impossible Killers, Detective Joe Lynwood hunts the most impossible killer of his career. There’s a trail of bodies. Impossible bodies. And Joe has one long night to solve the case.
Luckily, DI Missy Masters from Scotland Yard in England, London, England is here to help…
4. The Belly of the Beast by Jonathan Morris
Missy’s scheme nears completion. All she must do is subjugate one little planet and bend the inhabitants to her will. Not too much to ask…
But slaves will keep rebelling. It’s almost as if they don’t want to unearth an ancient artefact to fulfil Missy’s plans for universal domination.
She’ll have to do something about that.
MISSY
I imagine Missy is a difficult character to write. Unlike her various Master predecessors, her motives aren’t always clear and her morality is cloudy at best, especially when you get to series 10 on TV. So after a guest appearance in a River Song set, Missy gets her own Big Finish box set, and it’s an interesting effort that is largely successful.
Big Finish has assembled an all-star writing team for this set, starting with frequent original and spinoff contributor Roy Gill’s “A Spoonful of Mayhem.” This story leans hard into the “evil Mary Poppins” idea, showing us Missy trapped in Victorian London and forced to work as a governess. The story is wisely told from the perspective of her charges, Oliver (Oliver Clement) and Lucy Davis (Bonnie Kingston). To them, Missy appears to be a character straight out of a fairy tale, teaching them mysterious secrets and showing them hidden, magical parts of London. It’s very Neil Gaiman, with mythological figures existing just out of sight and around the corner, and Missy is the door between the two Londons. Michelle Gomez is fantastic, showing Missy’s complexity – she’s utterly self-interested, of course, but her relationship with Oliver and Lucy almost feels affectionate in places. Or maybe it’s simply that she decides not to murder them for no reason. Either way, it’s a strong opener.
John Dorney handles the second story, “Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated,” which gives us a pairing we’ve never seen before: Missy and the Meddling Monk. It’s the Rufus Hound Monk, naturally, and he pairs shockingly well with Gomez, constantly thinking he has the upper hand while Missy dismisses him with withering disdain. We learn the Monk survived the Time War in a very similar fashion to Missy, using a Chameleon Arch to disguise himself as a human – except he was on Earth, and has since involved himself in human history, going so far as to impersonate Henry VIII. The plot is silly in a good way, but the attraction here is the interaction between the two Time Lords. I absolutely love that Missy refers to him as the Meddling Monk despite having no reason to know him as a monk – and that he’s utterly frustrated that everyone calls him that because of one encounter with the Doctor. This might be Dorney’s funniest script – it’s an onslaught of witty dialogue and cutting comebacks that is based in a deep understanding of what makes the two Time Lords tick. It’s the highlight of the box set for sure.
The next story is “The Broken Clock” from Nev Fountain, and it features the metatextual approach to the format we’ve come to expect from him. The story opens as an episode of “Dick Zodiac’s America’s Most Impossible Killers,” a satirical – and absolutely terrible – American true-crime series that reenacts famously unsolved mysteries. I’m assuming this is supposed to be a parody of “Unsolved Mysteries” itself, but the parody is so over the top and intentionally terrible that it falls somewhat flat. It honestly feels a bit mean-spirited toward American TV – but an era of American TV that died out thirty years ago. I certainly hope this isn’t supposed to be satirizing more recent true crime podcast efforts like “Serial,” because if it is, it completely misses the mark. Fortunately, as the story progresses the parody elements fade into the background. We learn that the characters are trapped within this recreation, and that the narrator actually has mental control over what happens. In a delightful twist, the murderer – the man with a pointed beard – is revealed as a sentient TARDIS that fled Missy’s malign influence. Unfortunately, in its search for a new pilot, it has led several humans to their deaths. The story hints that the killer is a previous incarnation of the Master, so this revelation is quite surprising, not to mention affecting. Overall, it’s a smart, entertaining story that would have been better served to turn down the parody a bit.
Finally, we have “The Belly of the Beast” by Jonathan Morris, a story that turns almost entirely around its plot twist and what that tells you about Missy. Fortunately, that twist is quite insightful. Missy has enslaved the inhabitants of a peaceful planet and transported them to a mine, where she puts them to work excavating an ancient artifact. The story follows the perspective of one of these slaves, Aleyna (Abbie Andrew), as she tries to rebel against Missy, liberate her people, and flee servitude. There’s even a rebel force for her to join in her efforts to escape. The grand revelation is shocking, especially since we learn it through Aleyna’s eyes – the entire slave workforce was cloned, and nobody was abducted from anywhere. The clones have no history, no inherent desire to rebel. Indeed, everything about them was created by Missy, out of boredom with a two-year excavation process. Instead of sitting around checking daily progress reports, now she has a “rebellion” to fight. Instead of mindless labor, she has individuals desperate to return to their world of origin. It’s all for her own amusement – and when she finally gets what she wants and the project is complete, she leaves the slaves to die and the story ends. As a result, it’s unrewarding, but it’s supposed to be – it’s impressive how completely Morris subverts the listener’s expectations. And just in case you found yourself liking Missy in the first three stories, this is a reminder of just how cruel she can be.
Overall, this is a strong box set. It does not fall into the usual Big Finish trap of telling traditional stories; these are all ambitious and even experimental in their own ways. There isn’t even a weak entry – there were elements I didn’t care for but nothing that brought down an entire story. Between the recent War Master set and this, Big Finish may have something with this character, whether it’s the Master or Missy, and I’m genuinely interested to hear more.
8/10