The Doctor has returned Mags, formerly of the Psychic Circus, to her native world: Vulpana.
Not the savage Vulpana that Mags was taken from, but Vulpana in an earlier era. The Golden Millennium – when the Four Great Wolf Packs, each devoted to one of the planet’s four moons, oversaw the height of Vulpanan civilisation. A time when the noblest families of the Vulpanan aristocracy found themselves in need of new blood…
A golden age that’s about to come to a violent end!
THE MOONS OF VULPANA
“The Moons of Vulpana,” by Emma Reeves, continues the Mags trilogy in the monthly Doctor Who range, and it is absolutely terrible. There is not a single redeeming quality: the script is laughable, the performances are atrocious, and the production is horrific. It’s hard for me to review it because it is hard to control the anger and frustration I felt throughout its excruciatingly long running time. We return to Mags’ home planet Vulpana, but in the distant past, at the height of their civilization, to find… a stereotypical high-fantasy society with werewolves. Because Mags is pure-blooded, the local nobility wants to marry her, and we are tortured with endless scenes of two idiotic brothers attempting to seduce her. The third brother isn’t interested in such things, dismissing their traditions as primitive, and we’re encouraged to see him as the best option – but then it turns out he’s an incel and a mad scientist to boot. There’s also a ton of talk about “alpha” and “omega” males that seems like it wants to refute the entire idea but never actually gets around to doing so. Sylvester McCoy is terrible, Jessica Martin is terrible, and every single guest actor is terrible. This sounds like hyperbole but it isn’t: the script is so poorly written it is unsurprising that trained actors can’t do anything with it. At one point a background actor, attempting to do a werewolf growl, literally yells “Rarr!” I listened to this while driving. I contemplated steering into traffic.
More broadly, I’m getting progressively more tired of Big Finish and Doctor Who in general. I love Doctor Who down to my bones, but it is a very, very difficult time to be a fan at the moment. The TV show, which for all its faults was always an ambitious, audacious program, has thrown all of that away in favor of safe, boring plotting and a complete and utter lack of character development. The books were gutted in 2005 and never came back. (There was a brief period of occasional, great hardcover novels by famous authors, but those have been supplanted by James Goss novelizing anything that Douglas Adams once scribbled on a cocktail napkin.) And Big Finish, which once provided some of the greatest Doctor Who stories in any medium, has lost any semblance of pride, preferring instead to crank out as much Who product as possible no matter its quality. The writing is completely stale, the talent has slipped significantly, and the few skilled writers they have left in the stable are overwhelmed by writing endless scripts. Yes, every so often we’ll get a good story, but that’s a relatively rare event – most of it is competently made yet utterly unimaginative and unmemorable. I find it increasingly difficult to write these reviews because it’s not easy to find new ways to say exactly the same thing for the 100th time. “The Moons of Vulpana” is actually unique in that it isn’t even competently made, but not because it’s aiming high and failing. There isn’t anything admirable here, nothing to make you say “well, it didn’t work, but at least they tried ______.” And frankly, if “competent yet boring” was bad enough, “incompetent and boring” is utterly unacceptable. When non-fans make fun of Doctor Who, “The Moons of Vulpana” is what they think it’s like: overwrought, badly written, irritating melodrama. It is inconceivable that a professional company like Big Finish, who has been producing audio dramas for well over two decades, thinks that this story is acceptable. But if they’re trying to get me to stop listening, they’re coming close to succeeding.
Utterly execrable.
1/10