The Doctor and Nyssa battle giant scorpions on prehistoric Earth and come face to face with The Boy That Time Forgot.
The Doctor and Nyssa battle giant scorpions on prehistoric Earth and come face to face with The Boy That Time Forgot.
THE BOY THAT TIME FORGOT
I admit I didn’t see this one coming. There were few, true “landmark” events in the classic Doctor Who series, and the death of Adric was one of them. To date, he’s the only long-term TV companion to die, and his death scene transformed “Earthshock” from an average Cyberman story into one of the most unforgettable serials. But “The Boy That Time Forgot,” the latest Big Finish audio from Paul Magrs, takes that death as a challenge, continuing Adric’s story beyond “Earthshock” and bringing a new end to a companion who could charitably be described as unpopular.
Predictably, fan reaction to this story first included outrage about the idea of undoing Adric’s death scene. While I don’t deny that the scene was powerful, and the character’s demise significant in series history, I don’t accept the suggestion that a plot like this is inherently “damaging” to the franchise. Similar complaints arose when Russell T. Davies supposedly “undid” the events of “Doomsday” by bringing Rose back for the end of series 4. Adric’s death scene was intended to be watched when it happened — a viewer who feels the episode is less effective because of an audio released 25 years later is, while entitled to their opinion, bringing their own biases to bear on a repeat viewing. The characters certainly aren’t retroactively changed by something like this — is the Doctor’s frustration, and the grief of the TARDIS crew, at the end of “Earthshock” any less valid because of this story? Obviously not.
On the other hand, stories like “Boy” ought to have good reasons for existing. It may not be inherently wrong to pursue Adric’s story after his apparent death, but a poorly-written or ill-thought-out script would still be a grave mistake. Fortunately, Paul Magrs delivers a solid, well-characterized script: unsurprisingly, the story is “out there” in a fascinating way — Adric’s survival led to the occupation of Earth by a race of sentient giant scorpions, who wiped out the dinosaurs with Adric serving as their king. Block transfer computation, one of the most fascinating ideas from the classic series, makes a welcome, well-executed return, and an elegant explanation for Adric’s survival. There’s also a clever subtext about the empowerment of sexuality: Adric, a frustrated virgin, only wants to find love, while Rupert (Adrian Scarborough) finally matures into a hero when he admits that he has never been “taken up the Limpopo.”
However, as with “The Death Collectors,” I felt curiously unsatisfied by this play. I struggled to find the point of the exercise: seeing Adric as a 500-year-old man allowed his personal frustrations to become more evident, but did this help us learn about the character? Even the Doctor comments that he’s still a petulant teenager at heart. His (second) death scene allows him a dignified exit, and one more heroic than his pride-fuelled demise on prehistoric Earth, but I didn’t feel like anything was improved by this decision. “Boy” may be a different ending for Adric, but I’m not so sure it’s a better one. Nor, again, is this a play in which a great deal actually happens: Magrs’s characters are so entertaining that it’s never a struggle to listen, but, as an example, the scorpions are utterly uninteresting, with boring political involvement. For such an audacious conceit for an episode, it’s surrounded by insignificant content — and thus I felt unsatisfied. There’s something missing here, and I’m struggling to identify it — which admittedly makes for an unsatisfying review, but I’ve never been a stranger to hypocrisy.
The decision to recast Adric struck me as a marked departure from Big Finish’s usual policy, but Andrew Sachs turns in an excellent performance. I have no idea if he reviewed the character’s previous appearances, but he actually sounds like what you’d expect from an aged, more experienced Matthew Waterhouse — and for better or for worse, you can’t ask anything more of the performance. Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton are on top form as well: this is difficult, emotional material at times, but it’s never a struggle for the leads. Harriet Walter is delightful as Beatrice Mapp — a character that sadly deserved more “screen time” — and she sparks well with Scarborough. Steve Foxon’s sound design is particularly effective — his portrayal of the scorpions’ speech, and the telepathic translation thereof, is fascinating to hear. The score, however, is rather unmemorable. The pace also bogs down considerably as the play progresses — perhaps director Barnaby Edwards is better-suited to the shorter, more kinetic McGann releases?
Overall, “The Boy That Time Forgot” must be classified as a limited success. I can’t point to any specific flaws — but I am plagued by the feeling that the script is somehow incomplete, that it deserved to be more significant than it actually was. This is a bold release in many ways, but in many others it feels conservative. In many ways, I’m reminded of “The Gathering” — a very successful return for an old character, but a struggle around the edges.
Recommended nonetheless.
7/10
“You never even kissed me goodbye!”
As with Time of the Daleks, we pause to wonder if perhaps the curse of stories with ‘Time’ in the title has followed into the audios (though it’s something the marvellous Time Reef will dispel). This is certainly the weak middle-chapter in the otherwise very stong Thomas Brewster Trilogy. It’s a story that inherits from that trilogy a pretty compelling idea of the Doctor and Nyssa being stranded without a Tardis after young Brewster had scrumped it. And yet quickly that potential gets utterly squandered. The brief scenes in Girl in the Fireplace of the Doctor facing a life stuck on the linear slow path, gave far more thought to the concept of a Doctor stranded than this story does in its full length.
Part of the problem is that Big Finish no longer seems to make the effort to seduce the listener with its audio landscapes or build a proper sense of setting or space. Big Finish no longer seems to make that magical impression that they used to, and frankly they no longer seem to be trying. So the Doctor, Nyssa and the rest of his block transfer séance-circle find themselves stranded on prehistoric Earth, being menaced by giant sentient scorpions, and the directing does nothing to conjure the towering majesty of the monsters or the treacherous, savage environment. It’s presented in the most boring way possible. In many ways it seems done simply to ape the feel of the 80’s, back when JNT loved to bait controversy by threatening the removal of the iconic Tardis, particularly in Logopolis, Frontios and Attack of the Cybermen (mind you when this was done in The Impossible Planet it seemed almost like a welcome development in that it would have prevented the Doctor and Rose from going back to the bloody Powell estate again), but it amounts to nothing but a gimmick.
The sentient scorpions are reminiscent of the talking worms Paul Magrs created in The Wormery, but this doesn’t have any of the enchantment of The Wormery. The worms in The Wormery, given that a worm halved is a worm doubled were a lovely metaphor really for the two peas from the same pod angle that the story was going for, and of course it suited the wormholes concept, but here the scorpions just seem like a gimmick, who really have any potential mystique robbed of them from the moment we hear them talking like any other petty and colloquial characters, and its telling that when the real star attraction turns up in episode one’s cliffhanger, they become almost an irrelevant forgotten background detail and any sense of menace disappears, again making for a largely boring listen.
To finally drop the major spoiler, the eponymous character is indeed Adric, and to be fair they hid this little revelation very well, much like they did back in the day in Seasons of Fear and Dust Breeding. But as for whether this is a welcome revelation, that’s a whole different matter.
Given that Adric’s death was pretty much set in stone as an important part of the Doctor Who lore and that instead of Matthew Waterhouse, the role of Adric falls instead to ‘an actor’, we spend most of the story expecting him to turn out to be an imposter (since in casting terms that’s exactly what he is), and by the time we realise he’s the genuine article after all, it’s a little late to start caring. This is compounded by the fact that whilst Adric was hardly ever an endearing companion on TV (except for his earlier stories where he worked quite well alongside Tom Baker), the approach here seems to be to take the character’s obnoxious, arrogant and unpleasant qualities and turn them up to eleven, and in the process transforming Adric into a vindictive and cruel bastard and thus denying the listener any chance to feel sympathy for him. The nastiest moment is when Adric comes onto Nyssa and pretty much borderline attempts to rape her, which just leaves a horrible aftertaste for the rest of the play. It’s nothing short of character assassination and it’s far worse than anything Eric Saward ever did to the Doctor. Worse still it’s horribly man-bashing in showing an established character who’s a figure of empathy as a would-be rapist, as if that sums up the whole human male condition. It’s just a really defeatist, scornful view of humanity, much like the new Battlestar Pedantica with its needless use of rape as a sensationalist shock tactic. After listening to Night Thoughts I never wanted to hear the Doctor being put in a position of trying to kill a helpless child ever again, but at least that was somewhat justified by the plot, whilst this is just indulgent nastiness.
We could perhaps look back on The Wormery as a hint that Paul Magrs loves to bring sexuality into the mix, and yes the moment in The Wormery where the Doctor is carrying a drunken Iris and he has to fend off her wandering hands could be construed as sexual harassment too, but it was done there in a cheeky but charming way, as opposed to a sleazy or sinister way.
Actually no, that distinction doesn’t qualify, and I feel guilty of chickening out there, and playing devils’ advocate for a modern culture that’s so immersed in sexuality, irony, card-pulling priviledge and nostalgia for some good old political incorrectness that unless the accused is an unpopular misfit who ‘looks the type’, it’s actually very hard for a victim of sexual harassment to be taken seriously these days, because sexual contact is so perjoratively associated with frivolity and sensuality that it’s hard to even think of the behaviour as ‘brutality’. There are several Big Finish stories, like The Kingmaker and The Greatest Shop in the Galaxy where the female comanion has to fend off sleazy advances and wandering hands, and this is done for comical effect, recalling the cosy nostalgia of the frivolous woman chasing in The Romans and Revelation of the Daleks and many a Carry On film, although with a modern updating in that it’s the guilty man we’re most worried for, since we know the fondled woman is going to be on the warpath now. Yet when the presentation of sexual harassment is done in a more serious and ugly way that conjures a feeling of utter helplessness as in here and in Nekromanteia, suddenly it becomes upsetting to the fans. But the actual fact of sexual harassment isn’t ever funny at all and shouldn’t really be presented as such. Infact quite worryingly sexual harrasers often use humour as a front for their sleazy taunts and mechanical aggression or as a sinister means of grooming, disorientating and dominating their victim (as shown in the film Watchmen), and then publically dismissing their complaints. So maybe its presenation should make the listener uncomfortable, and shouldn’t be shown in a cosy, humorous way. But no the real issue here, as with Nekromanteia is that there just doesn’t feel like there’s enough dramatic substance here, and so the displays of mean spiritedness and perversion just feel like unwarranted and cheap attempts to create artificial drama, hence it just feels gratuitous and nasty.
Of course Adric never showed any inclination for sexuality in the series, despite having something of a crush on Nyssa. Adric was conceived when the show was radically transformed into a nerd trap of computers, endless continuity and with socially awkward, sexually arrested figures of audience identification, and a dynamic in which any interaction between the sexes was chaste and deliberately antagonistic. No wonder Romana had to leave- you couldn’t have a sexually confident woman who was completely comfortable in the company of men in the Tardis anymore. Maybe that’s the point of this story, to argue how a puritanical society based on sexual repression of adolescents can lead to confused, disassociated and sexually harmful behaviours later in life, and a disturbing ‘all or nothing’ view of all male-to-female interactions. In a way Adric is presented here as a creepy corrupt priest or cult leader, using his hypnotic and divine authority to take advantage of his prey.
It seems as if the thinking was to channel Sergio Leone’s brutal masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in America and the way the film shows a juvenile delinquent emerging from prison as an adult but still having the undeveloped, angry and sexually confused mind of a teenager, and to show that enough years of complete loneliness can turn anyone into a desperate lusting monster who’s incapable of empathy. Perhaps the reason it doesn’t work has something to do with the way that Big Finish has become so diluted and lacking in real bite in its approach.
This may sound like a contradiction of every other complaint I’ve made about the audios since Gary Russell left, but this is one story that is sorely in need of some of Paul Magrs trademark humour, because without it this play is simply depressing to listen to. Now Once Upon a Time in America was very melancholy but it worked because it went for the rawest passion and the operatic and drew all the pain and desperation and humanity out of it in powerful bursts. Likewise Dalek Empire and Creatures of Beauty utilised the same primal scream approach and really went for the emotional ecstasy of grief. This however is just miserable, colourless and drab and unshakeably, repulsively bitter. Indeed comparing it to the intense and engaging Creatures of Beauty really shows up how tedious and uninvolving this all is, and shows how really Big Finish has lost its sense of dynamism and visceral power.
Under Gary Russell the audios had been becoming more brutally downbeat with stories like Nekromanteia, No Man’s Land, Singularity, Red and the Divergent Universe arc (and much the same thing had happened back in the day with the Audio Visuals), and now of course Nick is aspiring to reverse that trend and making the range more cosy, fluffy and sanitised, but in this case it simply means that the nastiness is more left field and snidey and goes unreckoned with.
It’s not without its positives but it’s a tedious and miserable wait to find them. Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton give beautifully sensitive performances, particularly when called upon to grieve Adric a second time (again in a manner that puts the crass insincerity of Time-Flight’s grieving scene to the shame it deserves). There are very memorable moments where the Doctor’s reminiscence of Adric’s angry growing pains really does capture the tragedy of the headstrong, confident man that Adric might have grown into if he’d had a proper adolescence, and the scene where Adric returns to the console room and his memories start flooding back is a genuinely charming moment, albeit too little too late.
But it’s not really doing anything that Spare Parts hadn’t done already, and at least that had the wisdom to redefine Adric as a beloved, tragic character post homously and did so through his absence, like the empty school desk of a deceased classmate. So bringing him back on the scene was only going to spoil the mood, especially bringing him back as this creepy, bitter old abomination and still expecting us to sympathise with him. It’s typical of the era it homages in that regard with Davison’s Doctor desperately trying to tell us what a tragedy of misunderstanding this is whilst events around him utterly fail to even remotely support his words.
At its noblest, The Boy That Time Forgot is meant to be a story of redemption, both for Adric to rediscover the good man he once was, and for the Doctor to reckon with his guilt over his failure to save Adric, and its quite inspired that it’s the Doctor’s subconscious guilt that manifests itself as the saviour of Adric. But it’s done so didactically in such a drawn out way that offers nothing else to hold our interest whilst the Doctor talks at Adric at length to change his ways again and again. And ultimately it’s not the redemption that leaves the lasting impression, but the bitterness and nastiness that preceded it. Still, the next Davison story will be the masterpiece Time Reef which carries the same idea of the Fifth Doctor being an inept parent but at the same time makes for a refreshingly beautiful, feelgood and good-spirited contrast to this depressing and repugnant tale.
In conclusion if we asked whether it was worth undoing the impact of the dramatic demise of Adric in Earthshock for the sake of seeing him once again and seeing what he could have become had he lived, then the answer is a definite ‘no’. Although some might say with justification that Adric’s death in Earthshock was the beginning of the end for the show, marking the point where it became fashionable to rely solely on shock tactics like the mean times demaded, and to undermine the Doctor’s competence and encouraged the production team to do stories like Warriors of the Deep, Resurrection of the Daleks and Mindwarp that were so desperate to be downbeat that they had to reduce the Doctor to a shadow of his former self and end on the kind of note of senseless failure that would probably leave the audience feeling like the butt of some tasteless practical joke.
But at the same time Adric’s death was a fixed point, and Big Finish had always managed to add to the Davison era without taking anything away from it, until now that is. Infact by undoing Adric’s death, Big Finish have taken away what might have been the only tenuous but plausible explanation for the neurotic, voodoo-doll-spell characterisation and ghastly histrionics of the Fifth Doctor and his companions. The way character reactions veered erratically from melodrama to apathy, or the Doctor became prone to robotic or reckless, self-defeating actions or complete inertia, or an obtuse outlook of complete denial. You could almost, at a stretch have put these down to very real symptoms of depression and grief over Adric’s death. But this story goes and rewrites history and takes all that away and worse still it doesn’t replace it with anything interesting or worthwhile.
All things considered, we’re left wondering why the new audience-aware and supply and demand-driven Big Finish bothered with this idea. It’s not like Adric’s character has had a resurgence of popularity lately. Infact given that the New Who episode The Long Game was a contrived and pointless exercise in introducing an Adric-clone as companion only to insult them and have the new Doctor shown to be too ‘cool’ to tolerate him (infact most viewers not privy to fan opinion would probably be simply baffled by the Doctor’s hostility in that story), it seems Adric is as maligned and scorned just as much today as he ever was, and I honestly don’t think any Adric-fans would like this story anyway. So the only reason we can think of for Big Finish indulging this derivative desperate fanwank is that they must be running sorely low on inspiration and are running out of slots to fill, and thus are having to contrive new gaps to plug, just like Dalek Empire has recently had to double back on itself in order to keep going.
Whilst most post-2006 Big Finish audios have simply been bland and forgettable, this is one release alongside Dalek Empire IV that sees Big Finish actively undoing and tarnishing all the good work it has done so far, and along with Creed of the Kromon and Night Thoughts, it’s one of the few audios to make me want to thank the Mighty Kroll that Big Finish isn’t canon. This is nothing but an insult to the TV lore that it’s leeching off. And that’s coming from someone who couldn’t care less about the JNT era’s canonicity.