On a planet where time stands still, the Doctor meets a woman who is just minutes old. She wants the Doctor to be her assistant to locate the six segments of the Key to Time!
On a planet where time stands still, the Doctor meets a woman who is just minutes old. She wants the Doctor to be her assistant to locate the six segments of the Key to Time!
Judgement of Isskar is an audio that I have been excited about since May-ish time last year. My expectations of this just kept rising and rising. Was I disapointed?
NO!
The audio starts off with the Doctor searching for Peri. She has wondered off, as usual and he is trying to find her. Thats when he meets the newly born Amy. She starts off repeting everything he said. She tells the Doctor that she needs to find three segments of the Key to Time and that time will stand still on that planet until he has finished helping her. The Doctor tries to protest, but he really can’t. And this is the start of their adventures.
Amy starts off as an incredably innocent and naive person. Through out the audio, she grows and develops her own personality and identity. She picks up on the Doctor’s personality and adopts particular traits. She is a wonderful contrast to Zara, who has picked up on the selfish traits of Zinc.
There are some wonderful moments between Amy and Zara, where they bicker like sisters and Zara acts very much like the ‘big sister’. Zara mocks Amy for getting a name which results in her getting a name too. The Peter Davison Christening of Amy and Zara was particually funny!
It was very interesting to see the Ice Warriors before they became warriors and what lead them to becoming the monsters that we all know.
If you were worried that the Key 2 Time miniseries was going to step on the toes of the original series, then your worries are for nothing. Simon Guerrier has managed to keep elements of the classic story and has introduce enough new ideas for it not to be a re-write. Ciara Janson played Amy brilliantly with the right balance of innocence and knowing what is right to make her an incredably likeable companion. Laura Doddington’s Zara made a great contrast to Amy. Peter Davison was he normal marvelous self. Director Jason Haigh-Ellery did a wonderful job in keeping the flow and rhythm of the story. The balance of music to dialogue was perfect. The music wasn’t so loud that you couldn’t hear dialogue, but it wasn’t so quiet that you didn’t notice it. It helped build suspension in the right places.
The Judgement of Isskar is available from Big Finish for £14.99 and its worth every penny. The Key 2 Time is going to be one of the best series that Big Finish have ever produced. I’m sad that I am already half way through it. Bring on the Destroyer of Delights!
KEY 2 TIME: THE JUDGEMENT OF ISSKAR
With the dawn of 2009, Big Finish embarked upon a new Doctor Who main range release pattern: three-story mini-“seasons” featuring one Doctor and a plot arc. This had been tested with “The Haunting of Thomas Brewster,” “The Boy that Time Forgot,” and “Time Reef” — three linked Davison plays that demonstrated such a release strategy could be successful. The first “season,” the unfortunately-titled “Key 2 Time,” features the fifth Doctor and a new companion searching the universe for the hidden segments of the Key to Time, just as in television’s season 16.
The first story of the trilogy, “The Judgement of Isskar,” has the unenviable task of setting up the entire conflict and still managing to tell an interesting story that can stand on its own. Author Simon Guerrier has proven himself in the past with the brilliant “The Settling,” but “Isskar” tries to do too much and ends up falling down as a result. To begin with, the introduction and justification for the new Key to Time quest seems rushed, coming across as an aping of the first scenes of “The Ribos Operation” — we learn that something called the Grace created the Key, and need to collect it to correct the imbalance caused by the fourth Doctor’s use of a synthetic segment in “The Armageddon Factor.” I’m in two minds about this motivation: on the one hand, it’s an interesting twist on the resolution to that story; on the other, it’s built off the resolution to a story from 1978, and the Doctor’s comments that he’s done all this before rob the situation of its urgency.
What is interesting, however, is the introduction of new companion Amy (Ciara Janson), a living Tracer able to feel the presence of the segments. Amy is presented as a complete blank — she doesn’t even have a name when the Doctor meets her — and she is shown to develop her personality from the Doctor’s own, such that at the play’s conclusion she is showing selfless, heroic impulses rather than a single-minded desire to complete her mission. Guerrier does a masterful job presenting this character’s subtle development — she’s the best thing about the play. Of course, she’s not the only Tracer after the Key; her counterpart, Zara (Laura Doddington), is seeking it along with companion Harmonious 14 Zink (Andrew Jones). Zink is a self-centered opportunist, and so Zara has developed to match his personality — and it’s not until the end of the play, when Amy and Zara link minds, that we see how they share the same origins. It’ll be interesting to see how this “season” continues with a villain with a malleable personality, but thus far it’s worked rather well.
After the introductory material, the remainder of the first episode of “Isskar” takes place in an early Martian society: the predecessors of the Ice Warriors. These Martians are a peace-loving people who live in a gift-based society: they do not know conflict, apart from their legal propensity to execute people at the drop of a hat. These scenes afford a rare opportunity to see into the past of the Ice Warriors and see the event that started them down a warlike path — but they’re mainly in the play to give Isskar (Nicholas Briggs) a revenge motive against the Doctor. This is the sort of thing that deserves the attention of an entire story, but instead it’s a glorified plot device.
Instead, the focus shifts to a world called Safeplace and its inhabitant race, the Valdigians. There’s a massive tonal shift as well: the Valdigians are presented as incompetent comedy monsters, with “hilarious” voices and nonsensical plots. I’m not sure why Guerrier opted to take the story in a overtly comic direction: it doesn’t fit, and it seems doubly unusual when the story once again becomes serious in the final episode. Raquel Cassidy, Jeremy James, and Heather Wright chew the hell out of the scenery, which is fun to listen to, but doesn’t fit at all with Davison’s world-weary performance or Briggs’ wheezing dignity.
Once the Valdigians are pushed aside, the final episode becomes more interesting, but unfortunately no less cluttered: we’re given an interesting glimpse into life inside a segment of the Key, but I’m not sure if it serves any purpose other than to give the Doctor something to do to fill time. There’s also the ending — while the appearance of the Black Guardian was entertaining (if predictable), I’m confused by the Doctor’s attitude in the face of death. If we’re meant to be drawing near to “The Caves of Androzani,” this isn’t at all how the Doctor acted in that story. I understand that BF has been forging its own continuity, and I’m generally fine with that, but an open acknowledgement of the story’s placement relative to the TV series feels uncomfortable in that context. This is not to take away from Davison’s performance, however: it’s absolutely brilliant, and more fitting for his current age and approach to the character.
On the production front, Simon Robinson’s sound design is admirably convincing, considering the wide range of bizarre settings. Jamie Robertson offers his first score for the range, and it’s solid if somewhat unmemorable. I also enjoyed Jason Haigh-Ellery’s direction, keeping the production pacy and clear. Overall, “The Judgement of Isskar” is slightly above-average fare with too many flaws to be considered great. There are a number of fantastic set pieces, and some fine concepts on display, but the script veers too rapidly from place to place and the tone of the production is inconsistent at best. As with many Big Finish productions, the quality of the performances and the design elevate the affair — but ultimately I can’t shake the feeling that it doesn’t hold together.
Recommended, but with significant reservations.
6/10