Zagreus sits inside your head. Zagreus lives among the dead.
2 Comments
Styre
on May 7, 2016 at 11:47 PM
ZAGREUS
This was the big one. Every other range of Doctor Who products remained somewhat subdued for the fortieth anniversary: BBCi remade Shada, BBC Books released a novel by Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts, Telos just stuck a foil stamp on The Eye of the Tyger, and the folks behind the DVDs put a 40-year highlight montage on the discs over a new remix of the theme tune by Orbital. Big Finish, however, pulled out all the stops: their November 2003 release coincidentally lined up as the fiftieth in the range, and they planned to simultaneously resolve the stunning Neverland cliffhanger and deliver an anniversary story featuring a huge cast of former Doctors and companions. Given that this was the highest-profile and most important release in the history of the company, Big Finish obviously turned to one of its consistently excellent, critically-acclaimed authors like Rob Shearman, Marc Platt, or Lance Parkin, right? No? They turned to Alan Barnes and Gary Russell? Sadly, this was exactly the case, and the play turned out just as one would expect a play by those two authors to turn out: ludicrously overlong, boring, and full of awful characterization, poor scripting, and constant, pointless, and irritating continuity references. Zagreus is an absolutely horrible piece of audio drama, and shows BF falling so hard on its face that it’s unsurprising a number of listeners were turned off of the range after this “reward” for their longevity. Indeed, this reviewer didn’t listen to a single BF release for almost an entire year after hearing Zagreus for the first time — and my return trip was just as bad, if not worse, as the first.
The idea behind Zagreus, I gather, was to present a new type of anniversary story: one that did not revolve around reuniting multiple Doctors and glorifying fannish continuity. Instead, Zagreus was to continue Big Finish’s eighth Doctor arc and weave anniversary elements into their epic “turning point” story. In this the company failed — Zagreus isn’t a cheap excuse to bring multiple Doctors together but it’s certainly a cheap excuse to bring their corresponding actors together, and any claims to be avoiding continuity go completely out the window after only a cursory examination of the script. Lines that were among the best in the history of the series (“Is this death?” or “There should have been another way” are two examples) are dragged out and needlessly raked over the coals throughout the play. The Death Zone reappears, but this time it’s smugly (and badly) deconstructed, complete with snide comments about Wales and a needless retcon of the chessboard scene from The Five Doctors.
Of course, the play is also a continuation of the cliffhanger at the conclusion of Neverland — but it functions in this capacity in name only. There’s an endless, boring recap of the events of Neverland to start things off, which would have been great had ninety percent of the recapped scenes had anything whatsoever to do with Zagreus. As it stands, however, they do not, rendering the recap a colossal waste of time. After this, the story launches into the Grainer theme — it then closes part one with the Howell theme, starts part two with the Glynn theme, closes part two with McCulloch, opens part three with Derbyshire, and closes the play with the Arnold arrangement. Why?! Every single other anniversary, multi-Doctor story uses the incumbent’s titles — hell, even Dimensions in Time — and the departure from that tradition here is confusing and annoying in equal measure. Is this a McGann story or an anniversary party?
In yet another annoyance, Zagreus works in a long, painful scene in which alternate realities are viewed in order to — gasp! shock! — draw a line between the BF continuities and those of the books and comics. Ironic, of course, that an audio which ends with the main character abandoning his universe and starting anew cannot justify itself without first referencing all of the continuity it seeks to abandon — of course, this same annoying kick in the teeth happened in the books’ Sometime Never… and I don’t like it in either place.
Furthermore, the buildup to the release of Zagreus was deeply misleading. As far back as Project: Twilight, the Doctor has been making Zagreus references in Big Finish plays, something which built to a head in the previews appended to the conclusions of the villains trilogy. Every annoying repetition of the various stanzas of the Zagreus rhyme served to make one point: Zagreus was coming. Then Zagreus arrived, and it turned out that Zagreus himself had almost nothing to do with the play — indeed, the only contribution of Zagreus seems to have been an annoying tendency for every character to rhyme their lines from time to time for absolutely no reason.
Of course, if I focus entirely upon points of continuity I’ll hardly justify the tone of my review, but unfortunately the script itself is just as bad as the content it hopes to project. The entire thing functions on some level as an Alice parody, but any thematic parallels are obvious and unenlightening. For the most part, the script appears to reference Alice just because it can — and in one of my worst pet peeves, makes reference to this later on, apparently attempting to justify its own shortcomings by pointing them out before reviews can be published. Bad is bad, no matter how often you point to it and say “Look at how bad this is!”
Yet the script suffers from even more fundamental flaws than its lack of a thematic subtext. The dialogue in Zagreus is atrocious, frequently constituting nothing more than obvious exposition. The Schrodinger’s Cat scene, for example, is neither interesting nor enlightening — it merely regurgitates information to the listener that is completely obvious to anyone familiar with the theory and utterly boring to anyone that isn’t. The worst example of this by far is the Old Gallifrey sequence with Colin Baker, in which the character of Cassandra exists only to badly describe the environment and the characters speak in an awful formal speech pattern that fails to convince. Occasionally characters even come close to direct addresses to the audience for no reason, such as the scenes in which the Doctor references the BBC and Monty Python.
And then there’s the oft-mentioned emotional core of the play, which purports to examine the relationship between the Doctor and Charley. Throughout the history of Doctor Who, it’s been very obvious that the Doctor has loved many of his companions (platonically, of course). To this end it was not surprising that the eighth Doctor, arguably the most emotional of his incarnations, expressed his love for Charley in a touching (though amateurish) scene in Neverland. Nor is it surprising, then, that in Zagreus, poster child for excess and indulgence, the Doctor and Charley spend the last 15 minutes professing their love for one another like lovesick teenagers. Then comes the infamous “you’re dumping me” scene, in which we get to witness a domestic dispute between the Doctor and Charley featuring such brilliant dialogue as “It’s not you, it’s me.” It stuns me that, after this diabolical attempt at soap opera dialogue, anyone can accuse Russell T. Davies of writing “soapy” scenes into Doctor Who. That Davies’ writing isn’t soap is irrelevant — this isn’t even good enough to be called soap.
One would be forgiven for expecting, after the cliffhanger to Neverland and the buildup to Zagreus, that Paul McGann would feature as the lead character in an epic play. These expectations were dashed, however, as McGann is reduced to the role of supporting actor in his own series. He spends the entire first disc doing almost nothing but talking to himself, occasionally raving in Zagreus form or talking to the Cat, but he gets absolutely nothing in the way of a significant role in the action. It doesn’t help that he fails to convince as Zagreus, his cries of “GIRL!!!” being laughable. When he’s allowed to take center stage as the Doctor, he’s wonderful as ever, but sadly for a four-hour play that doesn’t happen too often.
The lead actor of Zagreus, rather, is India Fisher, as Charley takes center stage for 90% of the play’s running time. Throughout the second “season” of McGann plays, Fisher’s performances and the character of Charley steadily grew stronger — by Neverland Charley deserved to stand among the greatest companions. However, that’s all been forgotten here, as the character is sadly returned to the annoying cipher that climbed up my back for the entire first “season.” Presented with a bizarre fantasy world in which anything can happen and terrible, indescribable danger exists around every corner, what’s her reaction? Fear? No: chirpy, smug sarcasm. By the time her whining about her relationship with the Doctor rolls around, I’m desperately hoping for another character to horribly murder her just to shut her up. As I’ve said before, this isn’t Fisher’s fault — she plays the character as written — but bad is bad.
Coming straight off listening to Shada, the effect a good script can have on a production immediately becomes obvious. Lalla Ward plays Romana in both plays, but while in Shada she sounds bright and enthusiastic, here she just sounds bored. John Leeson is excellent as K9, but he’s in a unique situation: a script full of tiresome exposition actually suits his character. And then there’s Louise Jameson, who makes her long-awaited return to the role of Leela. This is an older Leela who has obviously spent some years on Gallifrey, and to make this point the authors attempt to make her sound wise and insightful. Of course, they fail in this attempt — her speech at the end, intended as a heartwarming tribute to the Doctor, is utterly unbelievable in both language and content. Furthermore, there’s no consistency to the character: despite having apparently spent years living in a civilized society, she still displays eating habits like those shown in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And the mortal-wound-but-not-really joke is so catastrophically out of place it wouldn’t have made it into community theater. Jameson does what she can with the material, but given the material that’s not much.
Don Warrington returns to the role of Rassilon, something which was foreshadowed both in Neverland and Seasons of Fear. However, somewhere in the interim the character was stripped of all subtlety, leaving Rassilon nothing more than a generic science fiction raving maniac. The moral ambiguity and mystery on display in a hundred previous Doctor Who television stories, novels, and audios? Gone. Rassilon, you see, was simply a paranoid bigot who took credit for the discoveries of his contemporaries, fashioning his own technology all in an attempt to shift the development of life in the universe towards his form. Of course, as Rassilon actually had the technology to pull this off — and appears in some ways to have succeeded — the play is just begging for an exploration of the moral and religious (and other) implications of these actions. But instead of that we get the other characters standing around telling us that Rassilon is a bad guy. And to add insult to injury, the script retcons the vampires! Vampires — the awful scourge of the universe who fought a horrific, bloody war with the Time Lords across a thousand star systems before finally being beaten entirely out of the universe. Vampires — a race so inimical to natural life that the Doctor is more than willing to sacrifice himself to kill them. Turns out that vampires were actually nice guys that ate only synthetic blood until Rassilon decided to oppress them. I’m fairly sure that even John Peel was forced to surrender at the sight of a retcon that big. Again, Warrington does what he can with the material, but as it’s impossible to care it doesn’t really matter.
Last among the “cast actually playing their own characters” (excepting Miles Richardson) is, surprisingly, Jon Pertwee. That’s right, the disembodied voice of the third Doctor voices itself to its future self in order to provide guidance. This amounts to an old, mostly inaudible interview of Pertwee’s being cut into pieces and thrown into the play, with some of the most ghastly written-in-response-to-previously-existing-lines material I’ve ever heard given to Paul McGann in response. The recent film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow tried this type of scene and it worked: the characters didn’t interact with the ghost and his lines were intelligible. In contrast, the use of Pertwee in Zagreus is little more than grave-robbing for a cheap thrill, and it might be the biggest offense in a play composed of nothing but.
As for the rest of the cast, well, there’s not much to say. There’s nothing exceptional or even out of the ordinary about the performances of the other three Doctors: Peter Davison sounds more desperate than usual, Colin Baker is more sinister, and Sylvester McCoy turns the wackiness up to 11, but as they’re simply playing slightly altered projections of their original characters, the entire exercise seems pointless. (Though Uncle Winky’s sudden transformation into a dirty old man on disc three is both tasteless and unsupported by the rest of the script.) Sure, the one scene at the end that actually features the four Doctors talking to one another is fun, but it just goes to underscore how the “FOUR DOCTORS — ONE DESTINY” line on the package is blatant false advertising.
Meanwhile, eight million former companions appear as the various supporting characters in the play. This is an utterly meaningless exercise: if they’re not playing their original characters, why have them appear at all? Why not cast actors more suitable for the parts? Let’s be fair — when Sophie Aldred drives down to Big Finish to record a Doctor Who audio, she doesn’t stop on the way to pick up an Oscar, so why should I waste my time listening to her struggle with a character I don’t care about? To make matters worse, the script attempts to justify this: rather than just accepting that the voices are going to sound alike, the script makes the unbelievable assumption that all of the characters actually *look* like the former companions in question. This begs the question: was the endless, boring, and utterly drama-free TARDIS “holodeck” sequence framed that way for a reason or simply to explain why Louisa Pollard looks like Anneke Wills? Imagine the utter disaster if Meglos had explained why Lexa looked so much like Barbara — oh, wait, you don’t have to imagine, you can just listen to Zagreus. There’s not much to say about the performances — some are good, some are poor — but the casting limitations are hilariously apparent: Nicola Bryant with American accent and Nicola Bryant with English accent as two different characters, for example. And Nicholas Courtney is the cornerstone of possibly the biggest “jump the shark” moment in Doctor Who history: the TARDIS manifesting itself as the Brigadier and complaining about the Doctor’s companions leaving their dirty underwear around!
Perhaps the one saving grace of Zagreus is its production. Gareth Jenkins, apparently given less time than usual to do a double-length play, does a phenomenal job with the sound design — ironically enough, the only weak point is the Divergents, the most important design element in the play, as their sound effects don’t communicate anything other than the facts that they’re loud and they make pounding noises. Andy Hardwick’s score generally tries to stay out of the way, and it’s very good, but it’s a shame that Russell Stone didn’t have time to work on this — I could have paid attention to the music rather than the rest of the play. And Gary Russell is directing what is largely his own work — but I cannot pass judgment on his direction because I don’t believe he could have saved the script no matter what he did with it.
Divorced of context, Minuet in Hell remains worse than Zagreus, as its offenses to the senses were even more shocking than those of its successor. However, the fact remains that Zagreus must be considered within the context of its release. Not only does it have one of the worst scripts ever written for Doctor Who and not only is it founded almost entirely upon stunningly poor decision-making, it was also released to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Doctor Who and to serve as the epic centerpiece of Big Finish’s eighth Doctor saga. This is not a tribute, it is a disgrace to the series it thinks it’s honoring. And unlike Minuet in Hell, this play absolutely must be heard if one wishes to follow the McGann arc. Coming after the mostly excellent 2003 release year, it was unthinkable that Big Finish could ever fall on its face this hard and this fast, but Zagreus proved otherwise. As an anniversary story this is an abomination, as an arc story this is painful and boring, and as a culmination and celebration of Big Finish’s Doctor Who range this is a slap in the face to its loyal subscribers and casual purchasers.
I cannot and will not recommend this to anyone, ever.
“Whatever will the critics say? Melodramatic? Overlong? Derivative too.”
The impact of Zagreus is sometimes likened to how Twin Dilemma killed the show for many fans. Yes reputedly, this was an audio so bad that it chased many loyal listeners away from the range for a long time. But Twin Dilemma wasn’t exactly out of the blue, it was the concentrated culmination of everything desperate, forced and wrong-headed about the John Nathan Turner era and was simply the last word on a season that was full of character assassinations, cheap shock tactics and mean spiritedness. By contrast, Zagreus’ train wreck seemed utterly unprecedented and like the embodiment of everything that Big Finish had actually been trying to get away from.
For most of the Big Finish run, it seemed that letting the fans take over the asylum was the best move for the franchise. We could even kid ourselves that the fannish continuity porn direction of the JNT era wasn’t so bad in and of itself, except that by Chinese whispers amidst a fractured production team on the verge of falling apart, the fannish requests were misunderstood and treated as a superficial ends rather than a means, so we got what we asked for, but not what we wanted, but that if we fans had full control we’d treat it with far more care. Davros, Spare Parts and Dalek Empire are pure fanwank but they’re also amongst Big Finish’s finest works. But Zagreus proved us wrong.
Big Finish has made a deathly mistake here. On the one hand, the continuity navelgazing of the John Nathan Turner era had in many ways lent credibility and validity to what Big Finish was doing. If the TV show had sunk to doing its own fan fiction (and awful, apocryphal fan fiction that belonged in the furnace at that), then surely there was a place for fan-written add-ons to the era, and certainly we fans couldn’t do any worse with the same Doctors. Of course many fans remain frustratingly snobbish about the audios or anything else they consider non-canon. But the fact is the TV series will always inspire more loyalty than anything that can be conveniently dubbed ‘non canon’, which is why the audios, like the TV Movie are so open to be denounced as great pretenders. Sure in the bad periods of the show, the fans may howl and scream and demand that the current TV producer stands down, but they’ll keep watching all the same- indeed the recent gap year has revealed that some fans who constantly complained about every episode of the new show, are now complaining even louder about the fact that there’s no series at all on TV this year, begging the question of what exactly would satisfy them. Maybe they’re still watching for the occasional false dawn of quality that reminds them of the glory days or maybe because they’ve gotten used to having something to complain about in an unhealthy routine. Personally for me, I nearly gave up on the show after the train wreck of Last of the Time Lords, but I found myself curiously compelled to still tune into Voyage of the Damned when it was shown, for the simple reason that I just didn’t want to part with the New Series on bitter terms, and the story looked like it would have enough Christmas cheer to alleviate that. Fans can and have put up with far worse than this when it was on TV. They won’t do that with the audios, they’ll simply give up. That’s why Big Finish usually had to put in that bit extra to make their stories worthwhile, which makes this sudden downturn into utterly repellent material so hard to fathom.
In moderation, Zagreus’ dependence on continuity fanwank might have been manageable, but instead it drowns in its excesses. This makes it hard to summarise how many things that Zagreus botches. But a single scene shows up in microcosm just how wrongheaded Zagreus is, where the current Doctor has a conversation with his third incarnation. This is done by way of taking barely audible excerpts from Jon Pertwee’s interview recordings and going to contrived lengths to make it sound like Paul McGann is having a dialogue with him. Nobody can believe in this ‘conversation’ for a minute and worse still it doesn’t affect the plot one iota. It’s simply gratuitous and arguably takes fanwank to the level of necrophilia, and marks one of many points where Zagreus ceases to even function as a workable audio drama. Which is baffling given that Gary Russell’s long term experience with audio should make him up to Nick Briggs’ standard. For all the faults of The Mutant Phase, it at least had competence as an audio drama and some kind of momentum and believability. This has none. Rather like The Rapture, it feels like the audio equivalent of a really bad fan video with amateur film students let loose with a video camera. It’s a major and thoroughly unsatisfying chore to just listen to one disc all the way through. So at three discs length, the listeners end up thrice as lost and thrice as impatient with this mess.
In-fact just like War of the Daleks, much of its continuity vandalism has a whiff of contempt about it, as if the whole exercise is to scorn the final ten years of the classic show’s run. Regarding the retconning of the vampires in State of Decay in such a way that retcons the Doctor of that story into a fascist who’s unwittingly assisted the Time Lords in a campaign of ethic cleansing, and not to mention the cheap shots at The Five Doctors with the characters noting the similarity between the Death Zone and Wales. That kind of contempt for the JNT era is more than understandable (even if it’s misdirected at some of the better JNT stories), but it makes for a bitter, miserable piece of storytelling.
Actually there are some opinions amongst fans that this retconning of State of Decay is a good thing in terms of questioning the show’s own morality by having the Doctor go back on past events and realise he made a mistake. That might hold water if there were grounds in the source material for doing so, and if such revisiting was done as a full blooded exercise, integral to the plot of the story that has an actual point and payoff. A good example is the Unbound stories which are deeply faithful to the feel and spirit of the Hartnel era in a manner that shows love for its roots rather than contempt for them. But frankly this particular retcon is so disposable, unsubstantiated and ultimately pointless that it simply feels snidey and spiteful (much like the retconning in War of the Daleks and Warriors of the Deep did).
This is simply us reviewing the story in and of itself, so imagine how much more offensive the story is as a resolution to Neverland, which sees all that promise wasted. Infact from Neverland’s impressive cliffhanger ending, it only takes ten minutes into the opening for the tension to evaporate to the point of terminal boredom for the listener. Having it all take place in a fantasy world immediately removes any drama from every situation, since none of it matters and nothing can hurt the characters, and all the guest characters are complete ciphers who it’s impossible to care about. And that’s the problem with it as a resolution to Neverland. It ends little different to how it began, except for taking the Doctor on an emotional journey into his own madness, but leaves us with not a single reason to care. Not a single point to draw our empathy on, because seemingly all that the story cares about is contriving retcons for the show’s continuity. There’s no sense of passion in the story itself, much like how Lewis Carroll isn’t so much homaged as witlessly plagiarised.
It’s even more offensive as an anniversary story that insults most fans’ loyalties sorely, with the past Doctors brought back only to have them play completely different characters who take up the runtime doing absolutely nothing useful in confusing, tedious scenes that never lead to anything, even at the end. But even approached as a standalone without any particular expectations, it’s still going to be positively repellent.
So what actually happened? When Alan Barnes wrote Neverland, it treated us to fan pleasing material but done in a pacy, engaging and to the point way. He wasn’t just writing it for his own indulgence, every scene played its part and had something to say. Unfortunately we have the rather nagging sense that when he wrote Neverland, he was as much in the dark about how he’d resolve it as we were, or more to the point, he wasn’t sure how he could make the resolution stretch a regular CD’s length, let alone an extended one.
Enter Gary Russell into the fray, and too many cooks spoil the broth. It would be most atypical for Gary Russell to force himself onto another writer’s work, so although the anniversary period might have given him a rush of blood, we give him the benefit of the doubt of believing that it was a mutually decided joint writing venture, and that Alan needed the assistance to stretch out a fairly easy resolution. What we get then from the other writer’s padding is a lot of out of synch material that adds nothing to the story, and worse still, the many concepts of Neverland being discarded whilst near-identical concepts are laboriously introduced as a replacement. i.e. the anti-time people are replaced by the Divergents.
Some joint writing ventures in Doctor Who have produced superb results like The War Games, Pyramids of Mars, Brain of Morbius and City of Death, and this is as much true to audios like The Church and the Crown, The One Doctor and The Wormery. They can at best be a means of tightening the discipline and producing more conflict, narrative friction and unpredictability, but at worst they can lead to the dullest, most confusing excesses. Whether the writing agreement here was mutual or not, the results are far from symbiotic, which leaves the story seeming utterly vacuous and soulless because there’s no consistent conviction of what it’s all about.
To be fair though, there are fans who like this story and almost consider it ‘cherishably strange’. The mere fact of Zagreus existence reinforces that Big Finish is still a free, permissive writing environment for fans who are writing for the love, and aren’t having their scripts sullied or sanitised. It’s still raw product and unfortunately that sometimes means writers let off the leash with free reign are as likely to produce self indulgent rubbish, as they are unsullied rare art. The question Zagreus left many fans with is whether the latter is going to be worth the former.
ZAGREUS
This was the big one. Every other range of Doctor Who products remained somewhat subdued for the fortieth anniversary: BBCi remade Shada, BBC Books released a novel by Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts, Telos just stuck a foil stamp on The Eye of the Tyger, and the folks behind the DVDs put a 40-year highlight montage on the discs over a new remix of the theme tune by Orbital. Big Finish, however, pulled out all the stops: their November 2003 release coincidentally lined up as the fiftieth in the range, and they planned to simultaneously resolve the stunning Neverland cliffhanger and deliver an anniversary story featuring a huge cast of former Doctors and companions. Given that this was the highest-profile and most important release in the history of the company, Big Finish obviously turned to one of its consistently excellent, critically-acclaimed authors like Rob Shearman, Marc Platt, or Lance Parkin, right? No? They turned to Alan Barnes and Gary Russell? Sadly, this was exactly the case, and the play turned out just as one would expect a play by those two authors to turn out: ludicrously overlong, boring, and full of awful characterization, poor scripting, and constant, pointless, and irritating continuity references. Zagreus is an absolutely horrible piece of audio drama, and shows BF falling so hard on its face that it’s unsurprising a number of listeners were turned off of the range after this “reward” for their longevity. Indeed, this reviewer didn’t listen to a single BF release for almost an entire year after hearing Zagreus for the first time — and my return trip was just as bad, if not worse, as the first.
The idea behind Zagreus, I gather, was to present a new type of anniversary story: one that did not revolve around reuniting multiple Doctors and glorifying fannish continuity. Instead, Zagreus was to continue Big Finish’s eighth Doctor arc and weave anniversary elements into their epic “turning point” story. In this the company failed — Zagreus isn’t a cheap excuse to bring multiple Doctors together but it’s certainly a cheap excuse to bring their corresponding actors together, and any claims to be avoiding continuity go completely out the window after only a cursory examination of the script. Lines that were among the best in the history of the series (“Is this death?” or “There should have been another way” are two examples) are dragged out and needlessly raked over the coals throughout the play. The Death Zone reappears, but this time it’s smugly (and badly) deconstructed, complete with snide comments about Wales and a needless retcon of the chessboard scene from The Five Doctors.
Of course, the play is also a continuation of the cliffhanger at the conclusion of Neverland — but it functions in this capacity in name only. There’s an endless, boring recap of the events of Neverland to start things off, which would have been great had ninety percent of the recapped scenes had anything whatsoever to do with Zagreus. As it stands, however, they do not, rendering the recap a colossal waste of time. After this, the story launches into the Grainer theme — it then closes part one with the Howell theme, starts part two with the Glynn theme, closes part two with McCulloch, opens part three with Derbyshire, and closes the play with the Arnold arrangement. Why?! Every single other anniversary, multi-Doctor story uses the incumbent’s titles — hell, even Dimensions in Time — and the departure from that tradition here is confusing and annoying in equal measure. Is this a McGann story or an anniversary party?
In yet another annoyance, Zagreus works in a long, painful scene in which alternate realities are viewed in order to — gasp! shock! — draw a line between the BF continuities and those of the books and comics. Ironic, of course, that an audio which ends with the main character abandoning his universe and starting anew cannot justify itself without first referencing all of the continuity it seeks to abandon — of course, this same annoying kick in the teeth happened in the books’ Sometime Never… and I don’t like it in either place.
Furthermore, the buildup to the release of Zagreus was deeply misleading. As far back as Project: Twilight, the Doctor has been making Zagreus references in Big Finish plays, something which built to a head in the previews appended to the conclusions of the villains trilogy. Every annoying repetition of the various stanzas of the Zagreus rhyme served to make one point: Zagreus was coming. Then Zagreus arrived, and it turned out that Zagreus himself had almost nothing to do with the play — indeed, the only contribution of Zagreus seems to have been an annoying tendency for every character to rhyme their lines from time to time for absolutely no reason.
Of course, if I focus entirely upon points of continuity I’ll hardly justify the tone of my review, but unfortunately the script itself is just as bad as the content it hopes to project. The entire thing functions on some level as an Alice parody, but any thematic parallels are obvious and unenlightening. For the most part, the script appears to reference Alice just because it can — and in one of my worst pet peeves, makes reference to this later on, apparently attempting to justify its own shortcomings by pointing them out before reviews can be published. Bad is bad, no matter how often you point to it and say “Look at how bad this is!”
Yet the script suffers from even more fundamental flaws than its lack of a thematic subtext. The dialogue in Zagreus is atrocious, frequently constituting nothing more than obvious exposition. The Schrodinger’s Cat scene, for example, is neither interesting nor enlightening — it merely regurgitates information to the listener that is completely obvious to anyone familiar with the theory and utterly boring to anyone that isn’t. The worst example of this by far is the Old Gallifrey sequence with Colin Baker, in which the character of Cassandra exists only to badly describe the environment and the characters speak in an awful formal speech pattern that fails to convince. Occasionally characters even come close to direct addresses to the audience for no reason, such as the scenes in which the Doctor references the BBC and Monty Python.
And then there’s the oft-mentioned emotional core of the play, which purports to examine the relationship between the Doctor and Charley. Throughout the history of Doctor Who, it’s been very obvious that the Doctor has loved many of his companions (platonically, of course). To this end it was not surprising that the eighth Doctor, arguably the most emotional of his incarnations, expressed his love for Charley in a touching (though amateurish) scene in Neverland. Nor is it surprising, then, that in Zagreus, poster child for excess and indulgence, the Doctor and Charley spend the last 15 minutes professing their love for one another like lovesick teenagers. Then comes the infamous “you’re dumping me” scene, in which we get to witness a domestic dispute between the Doctor and Charley featuring such brilliant dialogue as “It’s not you, it’s me.” It stuns me that, after this diabolical attempt at soap opera dialogue, anyone can accuse Russell T. Davies of writing “soapy” scenes into Doctor Who. That Davies’ writing isn’t soap is irrelevant — this isn’t even good enough to be called soap.
One would be forgiven for expecting, after the cliffhanger to Neverland and the buildup to Zagreus, that Paul McGann would feature as the lead character in an epic play. These expectations were dashed, however, as McGann is reduced to the role of supporting actor in his own series. He spends the entire first disc doing almost nothing but talking to himself, occasionally raving in Zagreus form or talking to the Cat, but he gets absolutely nothing in the way of a significant role in the action. It doesn’t help that he fails to convince as Zagreus, his cries of “GIRL!!!” being laughable. When he’s allowed to take center stage as the Doctor, he’s wonderful as ever, but sadly for a four-hour play that doesn’t happen too often.
The lead actor of Zagreus, rather, is India Fisher, as Charley takes center stage for 90% of the play’s running time. Throughout the second “season” of McGann plays, Fisher’s performances and the character of Charley steadily grew stronger — by Neverland Charley deserved to stand among the greatest companions. However, that’s all been forgotten here, as the character is sadly returned to the annoying cipher that climbed up my back for the entire first “season.” Presented with a bizarre fantasy world in which anything can happen and terrible, indescribable danger exists around every corner, what’s her reaction? Fear? No: chirpy, smug sarcasm. By the time her whining about her relationship with the Doctor rolls around, I’m desperately hoping for another character to horribly murder her just to shut her up. As I’ve said before, this isn’t Fisher’s fault — she plays the character as written — but bad is bad.
Coming straight off listening to Shada, the effect a good script can have on a production immediately becomes obvious. Lalla Ward plays Romana in both plays, but while in Shada she sounds bright and enthusiastic, here she just sounds bored. John Leeson is excellent as K9, but he’s in a unique situation: a script full of tiresome exposition actually suits his character. And then there’s Louise Jameson, who makes her long-awaited return to the role of Leela. This is an older Leela who has obviously spent some years on Gallifrey, and to make this point the authors attempt to make her sound wise and insightful. Of course, they fail in this attempt — her speech at the end, intended as a heartwarming tribute to the Doctor, is utterly unbelievable in both language and content. Furthermore, there’s no consistency to the character: despite having apparently spent years living in a civilized society, she still displays eating habits like those shown in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And the mortal-wound-but-not-really joke is so catastrophically out of place it wouldn’t have made it into community theater. Jameson does what she can with the material, but given the material that’s not much.
Don Warrington returns to the role of Rassilon, something which was foreshadowed both in Neverland and Seasons of Fear. However, somewhere in the interim the character was stripped of all subtlety, leaving Rassilon nothing more than a generic science fiction raving maniac. The moral ambiguity and mystery on display in a hundred previous Doctor Who television stories, novels, and audios? Gone. Rassilon, you see, was simply a paranoid bigot who took credit for the discoveries of his contemporaries, fashioning his own technology all in an attempt to shift the development of life in the universe towards his form. Of course, as Rassilon actually had the technology to pull this off — and appears in some ways to have succeeded — the play is just begging for an exploration of the moral and religious (and other) implications of these actions. But instead of that we get the other characters standing around telling us that Rassilon is a bad guy. And to add insult to injury, the script retcons the vampires! Vampires — the awful scourge of the universe who fought a horrific, bloody war with the Time Lords across a thousand star systems before finally being beaten entirely out of the universe. Vampires — a race so inimical to natural life that the Doctor is more than willing to sacrifice himself to kill them. Turns out that vampires were actually nice guys that ate only synthetic blood until Rassilon decided to oppress them. I’m fairly sure that even John Peel was forced to surrender at the sight of a retcon that big. Again, Warrington does what he can with the material, but as it’s impossible to care it doesn’t really matter.
Last among the “cast actually playing their own characters” (excepting Miles Richardson) is, surprisingly, Jon Pertwee. That’s right, the disembodied voice of the third Doctor voices itself to its future self in order to provide guidance. This amounts to an old, mostly inaudible interview of Pertwee’s being cut into pieces and thrown into the play, with some of the most ghastly written-in-response-to-previously-existing-lines material I’ve ever heard given to Paul McGann in response. The recent film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow tried this type of scene and it worked: the characters didn’t interact with the ghost and his lines were intelligible. In contrast, the use of Pertwee in Zagreus is little more than grave-robbing for a cheap thrill, and it might be the biggest offense in a play composed of nothing but.
As for the rest of the cast, well, there’s not much to say. There’s nothing exceptional or even out of the ordinary about the performances of the other three Doctors: Peter Davison sounds more desperate than usual, Colin Baker is more sinister, and Sylvester McCoy turns the wackiness up to 11, but as they’re simply playing slightly altered projections of their original characters, the entire exercise seems pointless. (Though Uncle Winky’s sudden transformation into a dirty old man on disc three is both tasteless and unsupported by the rest of the script.) Sure, the one scene at the end that actually features the four Doctors talking to one another is fun, but it just goes to underscore how the “FOUR DOCTORS — ONE DESTINY” line on the package is blatant false advertising.
Meanwhile, eight million former companions appear as the various supporting characters in the play. This is an utterly meaningless exercise: if they’re not playing their original characters, why have them appear at all? Why not cast actors more suitable for the parts? Let’s be fair — when Sophie Aldred drives down to Big Finish to record a Doctor Who audio, she doesn’t stop on the way to pick up an Oscar, so why should I waste my time listening to her struggle with a character I don’t care about? To make matters worse, the script attempts to justify this: rather than just accepting that the voices are going to sound alike, the script makes the unbelievable assumption that all of the characters actually *look* like the former companions in question. This begs the question: was the endless, boring, and utterly drama-free TARDIS “holodeck” sequence framed that way for a reason or simply to explain why Louisa Pollard looks like Anneke Wills? Imagine the utter disaster if Meglos had explained why Lexa looked so much like Barbara — oh, wait, you don’t have to imagine, you can just listen to Zagreus. There’s not much to say about the performances — some are good, some are poor — but the casting limitations are hilariously apparent: Nicola Bryant with American accent and Nicola Bryant with English accent as two different characters, for example. And Nicholas Courtney is the cornerstone of possibly the biggest “jump the shark” moment in Doctor Who history: the TARDIS manifesting itself as the Brigadier and complaining about the Doctor’s companions leaving their dirty underwear around!
Perhaps the one saving grace of Zagreus is its production. Gareth Jenkins, apparently given less time than usual to do a double-length play, does a phenomenal job with the sound design — ironically enough, the only weak point is the Divergents, the most important design element in the play, as their sound effects don’t communicate anything other than the facts that they’re loud and they make pounding noises. Andy Hardwick’s score generally tries to stay out of the way, and it’s very good, but it’s a shame that Russell Stone didn’t have time to work on this — I could have paid attention to the music rather than the rest of the play. And Gary Russell is directing what is largely his own work — but I cannot pass judgment on his direction because I don’t believe he could have saved the script no matter what he did with it.
Divorced of context, Minuet in Hell remains worse than Zagreus, as its offenses to the senses were even more shocking than those of its successor. However, the fact remains that Zagreus must be considered within the context of its release. Not only does it have one of the worst scripts ever written for Doctor Who and not only is it founded almost entirely upon stunningly poor decision-making, it was also released to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Doctor Who and to serve as the epic centerpiece of Big Finish’s eighth Doctor saga. This is not a tribute, it is a disgrace to the series it thinks it’s honoring. And unlike Minuet in Hell, this play absolutely must be heard if one wishes to follow the McGann arc. Coming after the mostly excellent 2003 release year, it was unthinkable that Big Finish could ever fall on its face this hard and this fast, but Zagreus proved otherwise. As an anniversary story this is an abomination, as an arc story this is painful and boring, and as a culmination and celebration of Big Finish’s Doctor Who range this is a slap in the face to its loyal subscribers and casual purchasers.
I cannot and will not recommend this to anyone, ever.
0/10
“Whatever will the critics say? Melodramatic? Overlong? Derivative too.”
The impact of Zagreus is sometimes likened to how Twin Dilemma killed the show for many fans. Yes reputedly, this was an audio so bad that it chased many loyal listeners away from the range for a long time. But Twin Dilemma wasn’t exactly out of the blue, it was the concentrated culmination of everything desperate, forced and wrong-headed about the John Nathan Turner era and was simply the last word on a season that was full of character assassinations, cheap shock tactics and mean spiritedness. By contrast, Zagreus’ train wreck seemed utterly unprecedented and like the embodiment of everything that Big Finish had actually been trying to get away from.
For most of the Big Finish run, it seemed that letting the fans take over the asylum was the best move for the franchise. We could even kid ourselves that the fannish continuity porn direction of the JNT era wasn’t so bad in and of itself, except that by Chinese whispers amidst a fractured production team on the verge of falling apart, the fannish requests were misunderstood and treated as a superficial ends rather than a means, so we got what we asked for, but not what we wanted, but that if we fans had full control we’d treat it with far more care. Davros, Spare Parts and Dalek Empire are pure fanwank but they’re also amongst Big Finish’s finest works. But Zagreus proved us wrong.
Big Finish has made a deathly mistake here. On the one hand, the continuity navelgazing of the John Nathan Turner era had in many ways lent credibility and validity to what Big Finish was doing. If the TV show had sunk to doing its own fan fiction (and awful, apocryphal fan fiction that belonged in the furnace at that), then surely there was a place for fan-written add-ons to the era, and certainly we fans couldn’t do any worse with the same Doctors. Of course many fans remain frustratingly snobbish about the audios or anything else they consider non-canon. But the fact is the TV series will always inspire more loyalty than anything that can be conveniently dubbed ‘non canon’, which is why the audios, like the TV Movie are so open to be denounced as great pretenders. Sure in the bad periods of the show, the fans may howl and scream and demand that the current TV producer stands down, but they’ll keep watching all the same- indeed the recent gap year has revealed that some fans who constantly complained about every episode of the new show, are now complaining even louder about the fact that there’s no series at all on TV this year, begging the question of what exactly would satisfy them. Maybe they’re still watching for the occasional false dawn of quality that reminds them of the glory days or maybe because they’ve gotten used to having something to complain about in an unhealthy routine. Personally for me, I nearly gave up on the show after the train wreck of Last of the Time Lords, but I found myself curiously compelled to still tune into Voyage of the Damned when it was shown, for the simple reason that I just didn’t want to part with the New Series on bitter terms, and the story looked like it would have enough Christmas cheer to alleviate that. Fans can and have put up with far worse than this when it was on TV. They won’t do that with the audios, they’ll simply give up. That’s why Big Finish usually had to put in that bit extra to make their stories worthwhile, which makes this sudden downturn into utterly repellent material so hard to fathom.
In moderation, Zagreus’ dependence on continuity fanwank might have been manageable, but instead it drowns in its excesses. This makes it hard to summarise how many things that Zagreus botches. But a single scene shows up in microcosm just how wrongheaded Zagreus is, where the current Doctor has a conversation with his third incarnation. This is done by way of taking barely audible excerpts from Jon Pertwee’s interview recordings and going to contrived lengths to make it sound like Paul McGann is having a dialogue with him. Nobody can believe in this ‘conversation’ for a minute and worse still it doesn’t affect the plot one iota. It’s simply gratuitous and arguably takes fanwank to the level of necrophilia, and marks one of many points where Zagreus ceases to even function as a workable audio drama. Which is baffling given that Gary Russell’s long term experience with audio should make him up to Nick Briggs’ standard. For all the faults of The Mutant Phase, it at least had competence as an audio drama and some kind of momentum and believability. This has none. Rather like The Rapture, it feels like the audio equivalent of a really bad fan video with amateur film students let loose with a video camera. It’s a major and thoroughly unsatisfying chore to just listen to one disc all the way through. So at three discs length, the listeners end up thrice as lost and thrice as impatient with this mess.
In-fact just like War of the Daleks, much of its continuity vandalism has a whiff of contempt about it, as if the whole exercise is to scorn the final ten years of the classic show’s run. Regarding the retconning of the vampires in State of Decay in such a way that retcons the Doctor of that story into a fascist who’s unwittingly assisted the Time Lords in a campaign of ethic cleansing, and not to mention the cheap shots at The Five Doctors with the characters noting the similarity between the Death Zone and Wales. That kind of contempt for the JNT era is more than understandable (even if it’s misdirected at some of the better JNT stories), but it makes for a bitter, miserable piece of storytelling.
Actually there are some opinions amongst fans that this retconning of State of Decay is a good thing in terms of questioning the show’s own morality by having the Doctor go back on past events and realise he made a mistake. That might hold water if there were grounds in the source material for doing so, and if such revisiting was done as a full blooded exercise, integral to the plot of the story that has an actual point and payoff. A good example is the Unbound stories which are deeply faithful to the feel and spirit of the Hartnel era in a manner that shows love for its roots rather than contempt for them. But frankly this particular retcon is so disposable, unsubstantiated and ultimately pointless that it simply feels snidey and spiteful (much like the retconning in War of the Daleks and Warriors of the Deep did).
This is simply us reviewing the story in and of itself, so imagine how much more offensive the story is as a resolution to Neverland, which sees all that promise wasted. Infact from Neverland’s impressive cliffhanger ending, it only takes ten minutes into the opening for the tension to evaporate to the point of terminal boredom for the listener. Having it all take place in a fantasy world immediately removes any drama from every situation, since none of it matters and nothing can hurt the characters, and all the guest characters are complete ciphers who it’s impossible to care about. And that’s the problem with it as a resolution to Neverland. It ends little different to how it began, except for taking the Doctor on an emotional journey into his own madness, but leaves us with not a single reason to care. Not a single point to draw our empathy on, because seemingly all that the story cares about is contriving retcons for the show’s continuity. There’s no sense of passion in the story itself, much like how Lewis Carroll isn’t so much homaged as witlessly plagiarised.
It’s even more offensive as an anniversary story that insults most fans’ loyalties sorely, with the past Doctors brought back only to have them play completely different characters who take up the runtime doing absolutely nothing useful in confusing, tedious scenes that never lead to anything, even at the end. But even approached as a standalone without any particular expectations, it’s still going to be positively repellent.
So what actually happened? When Alan Barnes wrote Neverland, it treated us to fan pleasing material but done in a pacy, engaging and to the point way. He wasn’t just writing it for his own indulgence, every scene played its part and had something to say. Unfortunately we have the rather nagging sense that when he wrote Neverland, he was as much in the dark about how he’d resolve it as we were, or more to the point, he wasn’t sure how he could make the resolution stretch a regular CD’s length, let alone an extended one.
Enter Gary Russell into the fray, and too many cooks spoil the broth. It would be most atypical for Gary Russell to force himself onto another writer’s work, so although the anniversary period might have given him a rush of blood, we give him the benefit of the doubt of believing that it was a mutually decided joint writing venture, and that Alan needed the assistance to stretch out a fairly easy resolution. What we get then from the other writer’s padding is a lot of out of synch material that adds nothing to the story, and worse still, the many concepts of Neverland being discarded whilst near-identical concepts are laboriously introduced as a replacement. i.e. the anti-time people are replaced by the Divergents.
Some joint writing ventures in Doctor Who have produced superb results like The War Games, Pyramids of Mars, Brain of Morbius and City of Death, and this is as much true to audios like The Church and the Crown, The One Doctor and The Wormery. They can at best be a means of tightening the discipline and producing more conflict, narrative friction and unpredictability, but at worst they can lead to the dullest, most confusing excesses. Whether the writing agreement here was mutual or not, the results are far from symbiotic, which leaves the story seeming utterly vacuous and soulless because there’s no consistent conviction of what it’s all about.
To be fair though, there are fans who like this story and almost consider it ‘cherishably strange’. The mere fact of Zagreus existence reinforces that Big Finish is still a free, permissive writing environment for fans who are writing for the love, and aren’t having their scripts sullied or sanitised. It’s still raw product and unfortunately that sometimes means writers let off the leash with free reign are as likely to produce self indulgent rubbish, as they are unsullied rare art. The question Zagreus left many fans with is whether the latter is going to be worth the former.