The Doctor, Benny and Ace are in the wrong place at the wrong time as an ancient and evil cult prepares for armageddon.
The Doctor, Benny and Ace are in the wrong place at the wrong time as an ancient and evil cult prepares for armageddon.
THE DARK FLAME
After the (relative) success of The Shadow of the Scourge led to fans clamoring for additional New Adventure-based audios, Big Finish commissioned Trevor Baxendale to pen a new script. Baxendale never wrote for the original Virgin range, which perhaps explains why, as a piece of standard Doctor Who, The Dark Flame almost holds up — but why as a New Adventure it fails miserably.
The NAs aspired to tell stories “too broad and too deep for the small screen,” a motto that earned placement on the back cover of each novel. Generally, this meant multilayered plots, intelligent explorations of the regular characters and their motivations, and thematic arcs that rarely linked together in exact plot terms. Baxendale, though, writes an average “evil from the dawn of time” story that would not have been out of place in the mid-70s. There’s really nothing NA-ish about this at all, save perhaps Benny’s sarcasm: the Doctor is very much an early McCoy, and the story seems as though the dark nature of the script is being hammed up for camp effect.
Baxendale attests in The Inside Story that he desired to get away from the tone of the NAs — perhaps this seems like a silly thing to say, but doesn’t it sort of defeat the purpose of writing an NA-type script if you’re going to intentionally make it different? However, it should be noted that this functions fairly well as a Doctor Who script. It’s not particularly deep or well-developed, and some of the dialogue is horrendous, but cast Tom Baker in this thing and you might have a minor hit.
As mentioned above, this isn’t really an NA, and Sylvester McCoy isn’t anything like his performance in The Shadow of the Scourge. This is a late-season 24 or early-season 25 McCoy — he plays the role in a very lighthearted sense, putting odd emphases on his lines that, for once, actually work. His tortured screaming late in the play is virtually identical to that in Scourge, meaning that most people hated it and I enjoyed it for some reason I cannot fathom.
Sophie Aldred usually comes in for a lot of stick from me, but she’s surprisingly good here. Unlike her failure to grasp the part in Scourge, here she sounds almost exactly like you’d expect the character from the books to sound: a combination of hardened soldier and more mature Ace from television. When she threatens someone, you believe her, yet there’s an awful lot of sympathy for the character to be felt as well. I never found myself cringing when she spoke, which hasn’t happened since The Fearmonger almost forty releases ago.
Then of course there’s Lisa Bowerman, who’s been playing the role of Benny so often that she’s better associated with the role than the initial NA characterization. This is entirely to her advantage, as she sounds the most comfortable of any actor in this play — but a sarcastic academic has to be the dream role for most actors in terms of ease of portrayal. Baxendale, unfortunately, doesn’t give her anything *else* to do, as she’s either sarcastic or possessed for the entire running time — but then this isn’t too different from her portrayal in most of the poorer NAs.
Michael Praed is hilariously evil as Slyde, though he can’t measure up to Andrew Westfield as the two engage in a scenery-chewing contest that couldn’t have left any of the sets standing. Steven Wickham is good as Joseph, too — though I have to wonder why it appears as though the production was instructed to turn the humor up past the point of sanity.
In production terms, this play represents a return to form for Big Finish — Gareth Jenkins doesn’t have a great deal to recreate from the script, but this is yet another convincing outer space environment. Andy Hardwick’s score is suitably doom-laden, even if the dialogue doesn’t really back it up, while Jason Haigh-Ellery does a fine job with the direction, keeping the running time short and the pace high. The cover is beautiful, too — this is near the end of a run of brilliant covers from BF.
Ultimately, The Dark Flame is a disappointment simply because it tried to be an NA but failed. If you approach it as a standard Doctor Who story with the NA crew, it works much better — but one is forced to question why BF decided to waste its final attempt at a live-action NA on something so average. It’s not as poor as some will say, but it’s not really worth buying, either.
4/10