In a universe facing extinction, the Doctor, Charley and C’rizz find that even the best of friends may soon become enemies.
1 Comment
Styre
on May 8, 2016 at 12:23 AM
THE NEXT LIFE
With the new series on the immediate horizon, the Big Finish eighth Doctor series had to end, and because of this an epic story was commissioned, extended across six episodes over three discs. Unfortunately, I had no expectations whatsoever going into this play, given that it was written by Alan Barnes and Gary Russell, two authors who, whatever their other qualifications, had repeatedly proven themselves among the worst writers in BF history. Did The Next Life prove me wrong? In a way, yes, as it wasn’t as absolutely terrible as I expected — but as a Doctor Who play it still fails miserably and easily checks into the range’s bottom ten releases.
A common thread through Storm Warning, Neverland, and Zagreus is a complete inability to present convincing dialogue, and this continues in The Next Life. As usual, nothing is communicated through action: every major revelation in the play comes through endless expository speeches. Take the history of the Church of the Foundation and its behaviors, for example: we never see characters executing its belief system, we merely hear about it in long lectures from Guidance. Nobody discovers the Foundation/Foundry misnomer on-screen — we’re told about it after the fact by C’rizz. Writing like this strips the play of dramatic value, as there is no immediacy to events. Of course, these failings would be more acceptable if the dialogue itself was convincing, but it isn’t: the period dialogue in the scenes with Louisa Pollard, for example, is so cliched you could be forgiven for thinking it was satirical.
The structure of the play is bloated and vague. The first two episodes essentially take place within the minds of Charley and C’rizz — and much of the drama revolves around the two companions discovering that they’re in a fictional reality. Unfortunately, the nature of their perception is revealed almost immediately, yet again stripping the play of any drama. Perhaps if, at this point, something interesting was learned about either character, the episodes could be saved — but all we hear is an unbelievably poor scene about the guy whom Charley replaced on the R101 and more C’rizz/L’da angst.
The best parts of The Next Life are the hunting scenes: taken out of context, these are fun, generally lighthearted Doctor Who runarounds. However, considered as part of the greater whole, they’re completely mishandled: the Doctor is trying to win a race to the gateway back to his universe and is being pursued by a crazed maniac! Where’s the tension? Where’s the drama? Where’s the hostile, threatening jungle environment? Where’s the threat of death? The Next Life has *none* of this, making it an incredibly incompetent “epic” conclusion to an entire series.
This is something of a shame, because there are some good ideas on display here. The Divergent universe runs cyclically? That’s an interesting concept worthy of exploration, even if the previous stories in this arc didn’t really touch on the concept very often. Then again, copouts abound from previous stories: we never see the awful-sounding Divergents from Zagreus pounding at the borders of the universe, because they’ve all been absorbed by Keep.
The ending, however, is the worst of all offenses. At the conclusion of The Twilight Kingdom, the Doctor bellowed “RASSILON!” as the target of his quest, the one figure he aimed to confront above all others. So what happens in The Next Life? The two barely even meet, and Rassilon is defeated by Keep with the Doctor totally offscreen. How is Keep defeated? Not by the Doctor, not by his companions — heck, for all the talk about how the Doctor upset the balance of the universe, he plays no role whatsoever in the conclusion! Of course, once all the bad guys defeat each other, the Doctor has mere minutes to escape — so instead he makes his companions talk out their problems! I almost drove the car off the road when I heard that, maybe the most staggeringly poor example of writing from this duo. Then we hear Rassilon and the Kro’ka duplicating the initial scenes from Scherzo — and that’s right, Rassilon, most legendary Time Lord of them all, gets the dialogue of early 20th century human Charley Pollard. And then, just as things couldn’t possibly get any worse, just as the play should end, here comes Davros with his Daleks, yelling hilarious “IT IS THE DOCTOR!” and “Ah, Doctor… I… we… have been expecting you!” dialogue.
Underneath it all, this is a fine performance from Paul McGann as the Doctor — it’s just a shame that it doesn’t match the plot at all. For some reason, after spending the last few plays in ambiguous fashion, here the Doctor is nothing but fun, not sounding threatened by anything and facing every danger with an absolutely cringeworthy pun. As mentioned above, he’s also completely sidelined, making this the second epic Doctor Who release in a row in which the Doctor doesn’t actually accomplish anything. Still, it must have been a fun role to play, even if it was basically useless.
And so we come to India Fisher. It’s common knowledge by this point that Charley Pollard is an outdated character, one whose relationship with the Doctor has been made unnecessarily complicated and one whose interesting backstory is long since over. But those statements imply character development, something which isn’t seen here at all. Charley acts like a fifteen-year-old girl throughout the play, worrying over issues (the R101) that were resolved years back, being fooled completely by obvious villain Keep, and, worst of all, engaging in a thoroughly irritating bitch fight with Perfection. Her bizarrely immature claims at the end that she doesn’t want to share the Doctor are completely at odds with her apparent “just friends” relationship with him, and they represent the final insulting claims that this disaster of a character should ever have been kept around after Zagreus.
On the other hand is C’rizz, who’s been criticized since his debut for not having much of a personality. Despite the fact that I don’t agree with these claims, there’s an explanation provided here anyway: not only are Eutermesans chameleonic on the surface, they’re the same way mentally, meaning that C’rizz’s thought processes will align themselves to those of whoever he’s around. Was there much evidence of this before? Not really — I think he’s had a fairly consistent personality — but if the future authors actually *use* this idea, it’ll make for a fascinating companion. Conrad Westmaas turns in an excellent performance in The Next Life, representing C’rizz’s internal conflicts very well.
Headlining the guest cast is Daphne Ashbrook, who is bizarrely given top billing over Paul Darrow because she was in the TV movie. I didn’t like her in the TV movie, I didn’t like her when she guested on DS9, and I don’t like her here — she reads her lines in that haughty, utterly unbelievable Katharine Hepburn voice that never fails to infuriate me. Perfection spends the majority of the play openly lusting after the Doctor, and guess what? Ashbrook did the same thing as Grace in the TV movie! Oh, what a hilarious inside joke! Let’s repeat it over and over and over again for an hour and a half! Indulgent writing like this wouldn’t be allowed into most fan fiction anthologies. She’s over the top as Perfection, but goes into ham overdrive once she turns into Zagreus, yelling her lines, shifting pronunciation styles, and enjoying the terrible puns she’s been given far too much.
With that out of the way, I can reveal that I actually enjoyed the rest of the supporting cast. Despite the fact that it rendered the character almost completely nonthreatening, I loved Stephane Cornicard’s performance as Keep, and Paul Darrow provided a stunning interpretation of a religious fanatic as Guidance. Although Rassilon is completely emasculated here and is reduced to the level of any other two-dimensional idiot villain in Doctor Who, Don Warrington is superb in the role, his dark, fluid tones lend a strong sense of menace to the character. Stephen Perring is given quite a bit to do as the Kro’ka, and he is made all the more interesting by the script — one of the few truly bright spots in this play. Finally, Anneke Wills gives a dignified performance as Louisa Pollard, even if the scenes themselves aren’t particularly good.
Gareth Jenkins’ sound design, as always, is exceptional, as he is asked yet again to reproduce a huge number of diverse environments and he manages this task without fail. Andy Hardwick and Russell Stone combine on the score, which lends the play an epic quality even if the dialogue fails to do the same. Gary Russell is directing his own material, and it must be said that the performances are generally good (Fisher and Ashbrook excepted) despite the quality of the script. The pace, though, is painfully slow.
In many ways, The Next Life is a perfect climax to the McGann arc: overblown, far too long, and generally boring, with a few good ideas presented from time to time. It’s not as disastrous as Zagreus, but neither is it even as good as Neverland. The best part about The Next Life? It ends the McGann arc, meaning that, for the foreseeable future, Barnes and Russell will not be writing any more “event” audios upon which fans will waste their money. This is, quite simply, a bad release, and it’s only worth buying if you haven’t already lost interest and absolutely have to know how the McGann arc ends. Otherwise, stay away.
THE NEXT LIFE
With the new series on the immediate horizon, the Big Finish eighth Doctor series had to end, and because of this an epic story was commissioned, extended across six episodes over three discs. Unfortunately, I had no expectations whatsoever going into this play, given that it was written by Alan Barnes and Gary Russell, two authors who, whatever their other qualifications, had repeatedly proven themselves among the worst writers in BF history. Did The Next Life prove me wrong? In a way, yes, as it wasn’t as absolutely terrible as I expected — but as a Doctor Who play it still fails miserably and easily checks into the range’s bottom ten releases.
A common thread through Storm Warning, Neverland, and Zagreus is a complete inability to present convincing dialogue, and this continues in The Next Life. As usual, nothing is communicated through action: every major revelation in the play comes through endless expository speeches. Take the history of the Church of the Foundation and its behaviors, for example: we never see characters executing its belief system, we merely hear about it in long lectures from Guidance. Nobody discovers the Foundation/Foundry misnomer on-screen — we’re told about it after the fact by C’rizz. Writing like this strips the play of dramatic value, as there is no immediacy to events. Of course, these failings would be more acceptable if the dialogue itself was convincing, but it isn’t: the period dialogue in the scenes with Louisa Pollard, for example, is so cliched you could be forgiven for thinking it was satirical.
The structure of the play is bloated and vague. The first two episodes essentially take place within the minds of Charley and C’rizz — and much of the drama revolves around the two companions discovering that they’re in a fictional reality. Unfortunately, the nature of their perception is revealed almost immediately, yet again stripping the play of any drama. Perhaps if, at this point, something interesting was learned about either character, the episodes could be saved — but all we hear is an unbelievably poor scene about the guy whom Charley replaced on the R101 and more C’rizz/L’da angst.
The best parts of The Next Life are the hunting scenes: taken out of context, these are fun, generally lighthearted Doctor Who runarounds. However, considered as part of the greater whole, they’re completely mishandled: the Doctor is trying to win a race to the gateway back to his universe and is being pursued by a crazed maniac! Where’s the tension? Where’s the drama? Where’s the hostile, threatening jungle environment? Where’s the threat of death? The Next Life has *none* of this, making it an incredibly incompetent “epic” conclusion to an entire series.
This is something of a shame, because there are some good ideas on display here. The Divergent universe runs cyclically? That’s an interesting concept worthy of exploration, even if the previous stories in this arc didn’t really touch on the concept very often. Then again, copouts abound from previous stories: we never see the awful-sounding Divergents from Zagreus pounding at the borders of the universe, because they’ve all been absorbed by Keep.
The ending, however, is the worst of all offenses. At the conclusion of The Twilight Kingdom, the Doctor bellowed “RASSILON!” as the target of his quest, the one figure he aimed to confront above all others. So what happens in The Next Life? The two barely even meet, and Rassilon is defeated by Keep with the Doctor totally offscreen. How is Keep defeated? Not by the Doctor, not by his companions — heck, for all the talk about how the Doctor upset the balance of the universe, he plays no role whatsoever in the conclusion! Of course, once all the bad guys defeat each other, the Doctor has mere minutes to escape — so instead he makes his companions talk out their problems! I almost drove the car off the road when I heard that, maybe the most staggeringly poor example of writing from this duo. Then we hear Rassilon and the Kro’ka duplicating the initial scenes from Scherzo — and that’s right, Rassilon, most legendary Time Lord of them all, gets the dialogue of early 20th century human Charley Pollard. And then, just as things couldn’t possibly get any worse, just as the play should end, here comes Davros with his Daleks, yelling hilarious “IT IS THE DOCTOR!” and “Ah, Doctor… I… we… have been expecting you!” dialogue.
Underneath it all, this is a fine performance from Paul McGann as the Doctor — it’s just a shame that it doesn’t match the plot at all. For some reason, after spending the last few plays in ambiguous fashion, here the Doctor is nothing but fun, not sounding threatened by anything and facing every danger with an absolutely cringeworthy pun. As mentioned above, he’s also completely sidelined, making this the second epic Doctor Who release in a row in which the Doctor doesn’t actually accomplish anything. Still, it must have been a fun role to play, even if it was basically useless.
And so we come to India Fisher. It’s common knowledge by this point that Charley Pollard is an outdated character, one whose relationship with the Doctor has been made unnecessarily complicated and one whose interesting backstory is long since over. But those statements imply character development, something which isn’t seen here at all. Charley acts like a fifteen-year-old girl throughout the play, worrying over issues (the R101) that were resolved years back, being fooled completely by obvious villain Keep, and, worst of all, engaging in a thoroughly irritating bitch fight with Perfection. Her bizarrely immature claims at the end that she doesn’t want to share the Doctor are completely at odds with her apparent “just friends” relationship with him, and they represent the final insulting claims that this disaster of a character should ever have been kept around after Zagreus.
On the other hand is C’rizz, who’s been criticized since his debut for not having much of a personality. Despite the fact that I don’t agree with these claims, there’s an explanation provided here anyway: not only are Eutermesans chameleonic on the surface, they’re the same way mentally, meaning that C’rizz’s thought processes will align themselves to those of whoever he’s around. Was there much evidence of this before? Not really — I think he’s had a fairly consistent personality — but if the future authors actually *use* this idea, it’ll make for a fascinating companion. Conrad Westmaas turns in an excellent performance in The Next Life, representing C’rizz’s internal conflicts very well.
Headlining the guest cast is Daphne Ashbrook, who is bizarrely given top billing over Paul Darrow because she was in the TV movie. I didn’t like her in the TV movie, I didn’t like her when she guested on DS9, and I don’t like her here — she reads her lines in that haughty, utterly unbelievable Katharine Hepburn voice that never fails to infuriate me. Perfection spends the majority of the play openly lusting after the Doctor, and guess what? Ashbrook did the same thing as Grace in the TV movie! Oh, what a hilarious inside joke! Let’s repeat it over and over and over again for an hour and a half! Indulgent writing like this wouldn’t be allowed into most fan fiction anthologies. She’s over the top as Perfection, but goes into ham overdrive once she turns into Zagreus, yelling her lines, shifting pronunciation styles, and enjoying the terrible puns she’s been given far too much.
With that out of the way, I can reveal that I actually enjoyed the rest of the supporting cast. Despite the fact that it rendered the character almost completely nonthreatening, I loved Stephane Cornicard’s performance as Keep, and Paul Darrow provided a stunning interpretation of a religious fanatic as Guidance. Although Rassilon is completely emasculated here and is reduced to the level of any other two-dimensional idiot villain in Doctor Who, Don Warrington is superb in the role, his dark, fluid tones lend a strong sense of menace to the character. Stephen Perring is given quite a bit to do as the Kro’ka, and he is made all the more interesting by the script — one of the few truly bright spots in this play. Finally, Anneke Wills gives a dignified performance as Louisa Pollard, even if the scenes themselves aren’t particularly good.
Gareth Jenkins’ sound design, as always, is exceptional, as he is asked yet again to reproduce a huge number of diverse environments and he manages this task without fail. Andy Hardwick and Russell Stone combine on the score, which lends the play an epic quality even if the dialogue fails to do the same. Gary Russell is directing his own material, and it must be said that the performances are generally good (Fisher and Ashbrook excepted) despite the quality of the script. The pace, though, is painfully slow.
In many ways, The Next Life is a perfect climax to the McGann arc: overblown, far too long, and generally boring, with a few good ideas presented from time to time. It’s not as disastrous as Zagreus, but neither is it even as good as Neverland. The best part about The Next Life? It ends the McGann arc, meaning that, for the foreseeable future, Barnes and Russell will not be writing any more “event” audios upon which fans will waste their money. This is, quite simply, a bad release, and it’s only worth buying if you haven’t already lost interest and absolutely have to know how the McGann arc ends. Otherwise, stay away.
3/10