Victorian London harbours many secrets: alien visitors, strange phenomena and unearthly powers.
But a trio of investigators stands ready to delve into such mysteries – the Great Detective, Madame Vastra, her resourceful spouse, Jenny Flint, and their loyal valet, Strax.
If an impossible puzzle needs solving, or a grave injustice needs righting, help can be found on Paternoster Row.
But even heroes can never escape their past…
1.1 The Cars That Ate London! by Jonathan Morris
The advent of electric carriages on London’s streets causes a stir – until they start careening out of control. Elsewhere, factory workers lose their senses, while a brand-new power plant suffers mysterious outages.
Genius industrialist Fabian Solak has a vision of the future – free from pollution, running on clean electricity. But Madame Vastra knows such ideas are ahead of their time…
1.2 A Photograph to Remember by Roy Gill
The Paternoster Gang are shocked to discover a rival group on the streets. A Sontaran, a Silurian and a human – only their intentions are not quite so noble as Madame Vastra and friends.
And when the recently-photographed dead begin to return home, strangely altered, will this ‘Bloomsbury Bunch’ be more of a help or a hindrance?
1.3 The Ghosts of Greenwich by Paul Morris
Strange things are happening to the people of Greenwich. Phantoms of the living appear, while others are aged beyond their years. A cloaked figure stalks the streets, and time is out of joint.
Vastra, Jenny and Strax find all clues point towards the Meridian Line. Beneath the Royal Observatory lies a secret – something terribly ancient and horribly dangerous…
THE PATERNOSTER GANG: HERITAGE 1
I’ve been expecting this to come down the pipe for a while now: a Paternoster Gang set reuniting Neve McIntosh, Catrin Stewart, and Dan Starkey for new adventures in Victorian London. We had a preview in The Eighth of March, but this set provides three full-length stories to enjoy. Fans have been clamoring for this since these characters were introduced, so how is the set? Well, it’s… fine.
The first story, “The Cars That Ate London!” by Jonathan Morris, is a bizarre tale that attempts to unite historical technological progression with science fiction, and only barely succeeds. Electric carriages were first developed in the late 1800s, and Morris’s script engages with their impact on society – but also includes a mad scientist, influenced by aliens, introducing anachronistic technology and demanding the attentions of our heroes. This could potentially be interesting, but it’s mostly silly, as the cars in question are basically Transformers, robots that can change their configuration into vehicles or humanoid forms. There’s nothing wrong with a silly idea, but there’s really nothing else going on here. It doesn’t feel at all like the pilot episode of a new series; this feels like a filler episode in the middle of season 3. We get brief introductions to the characters but nothing definitive: they’re acting like they do on television with absolutely no development or additional detail. (This will be a trend in this review.) Still, there’s a brief moment of Strax singing a Sontaran death anthem that had me laughing out loud, and moments like that make a story worthwhile.
This leads us to “A Photograph to Remember,” by Roy Gill, the second story and easily the best. The concept is the best of the three: death photography is unnerving enough on its own, but the subjects coming back to life is an entertainingly creepy twist. Gill also ties this together with the introduction of the Bloomsbury Bunch, another trio of human, Silurian, and Sontaran investigators operating from a different part of London. The Sontaran and Silurian have switched roles, but this is still an easy way to gain insight into characters early on in a series: show their funhouse mirror reflections. It’s entertaining enough, and the interactions of the two “gangs” are amusing. I also like how the problem isn’t caused by villainy but rather by basic human failings. This caliber of script should be the baseline, however, not the strongest in a given set.
“The Ghosts of Greenwich,” by Paul Morris, rounds things out, and it’s about as unmemorable as it gets. First of all, the decision to put two ghost stories in the same set is a poor one, because it makes the stories run together in the listener’s memory. Secondly, while the story begins strongly, with a fascinating mystery to investigate, it ends in the most generic fashion imaginable. Third, I’m not sure Morris really gets the characters: Strax in particular is portrayed as a complete idiot and he’s absolutely not that. The “Green Witch” gag is good as a one-off, for example, but Strax getting it repeatedly wrong for the rest of the story just makes him look dumb. On the whole, though, the characters are flat recreations of their TV personas, and there wasn’t much to them in the first place. It was fine for the Paternoster Gang to be thinly-sketched on TV because they were supporting characters defined in part by their inherent absurdity. Here, though, they’re the lead characters in their own show. We need more out of them: we need difficult choices, we need conflict, we need complexity. I don’t expect a new range of stories to begin with earth-shattering revelations, of course, but “they’re exactly the same as they were on TV!” is just another example of Big Finish’s utter lack of ambition.
And that’s the problem with The Paternoster Gang: Heritage 1. (One of them, anyway. Why is this called “Heritage?” Are we doing the Doom Coalition thing where you don’t even find out the meaning of the title for months on end?) It’s too comfortable. We have the original cast, we have the traditional Victorian setting, so let’s not rock the boat, let’s just tell three generic stories that in no way feel like they’re launching a new series. Some elements are good, of course, but overall this is boring and pointless. I’m reminded of the UNIT series, which over thirty-two hour-long episodes still hasn’t bothered to develop its characters. Is that where The Paternoster Gang is headed? I hope not, but I fear so.
5/10