1934: the TARDIS lands on a snowy island off the coast of Alaska – one that wasn’t there four years, three months and six days ago, according to the Doctor. The island is dominated by a vast, twisted citadel. Inside it, the Lurkers lie dreaming. It’s said when they wake the world will end…
Led by the ruthless Emerson Whytecrag, an expedition has come to the citadel, to exploit the horrors in its ebon-dark interior. Horrors just like those published in the pages of the pulp magazine Shuddersome Tales, where a hero’s only reward is madness, death… or worse.
Horrors that the Doctor and his companion are about to wake up.
LURKERS AT SUNLIGHT’S EDGE
I’ve talked extensively in my previous reviews about how the Sylvester McCoy era has undergone a Big Finish renaissance: starting with “Forty-Five” and proceeding through “A Death in the Family,” every release has been very good at the least and most have been excellent. Of course, all good things must end, and Marty Ross’s “Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge” is just the release to do it, bringing the McCoy momentum to a crashing halt in a stunning display of everything that can go wrong with audio drama.
It’s very easy to be unduly harsh on something that is merely average after the stunning twin-bill of “Project: Destiny” and “A Death in the Family,” but the problems with “Lurkers” occur at an obvious, fundamental level. This is the 141st release of the main range, part of over two hundred full-cast Doctor Who dramas released by Big Finish – and yet we’re still beset with eye-rolling descriptive dialogue. “Doctor! It’s full of some sort of goo!” “Look! The goo is reshaping itself!” and so forth. Audio drama always carries the problem of describing visual events, but this is the clunkiest, least satisfying way of doing so. It’s one thing not to care for a script’s ideas, or think a given actor is not up to one’s taste, but Big Finish should be past releasing stories that commit this cardinal sin.
I also rarely fault Big Finish production, as their sound designers typically do a masterful job. Steve Foxon’s actual design work here isn’t bad, and the score does its job admirably, but director Ken Bentley often loses control of the action sequences. It’s unclear how much of this is down to the script, but there’s lots of roaring, and yelling, and screaming “NO!” and so forth with very little explanation of what, specifically, is happening. There’s also very little explanation of the titular Lurkers – they’re tall, and they roar a lot… and that’s pretty much it.
Of course, the story is going for a Lovecraftian influence: the setting and the tone certainly seek to replicate Lovecraft, and the inclusion of a writer named CP Doveday reaches beat-you-over-the-head levels of obviousness. Lovecraft thrived on suspense: the various eldritch horrors in his fiction were never fully described, only in pieces sufficient enough to terrify the reader. Had this been the approach of “Lurkers,” it would have been quite successful. As it happens, the monsters mostly stomp around and roar, igniting little to no terror beyond the obvious in those who view them. Not knowing their appearance doesn’t mystify, it annoys. Doveday himself occasionally metamorphoses between human and alien states, but mostly does this by yelling incomprehensibly in an alien language. It’s never scary, never interesting, and never dramatic.
I can’t say I’m a fan of the performances, either. Sylvester McCoy is generally very good, though he’s surprisingly underused, and Philip Olivier is reliable as ever. It seems like overkill to put Hex through another “The Doctor is dead!” story so soon, but Olivier plays it with the ragged edge of someone who can’t take much more of the constant stress. Sophie Aldred, though, is much less convincing. Her quieter attempts to bond with Doveday are heartwarming, yes, but her attempts to get emotional don’t work at all. The nadir is the bellowing “HE WANTED TO DIE A HUMAN!” which almost had me reaching for the fast forward button. Michael Brandon sounds awful to start as Doveday, but it quickly becomes apparent it’s an acting choice – and to my mind an effective measured one. Stuart Milligan, meanwhile, goes way over the top as Whytecrag, but I rarely fault that sort of choice in a Doctor Who villain. Kate Terence, though, is just woeful – I’m not sure what accent Dr. Gabriel is supposed to have, I’m not sure if it’s the actress’s own, but it’s appalling. She’s also rapidly reduced from a capable character to a helpless whiner over the course of two episodes.
Ultimately, there’s little to commend here. Marty Ross’s script contains some interesting ideas at its heart, but fails at too many basic tenets of audio drama to be effective – and unusually for Big Finish, the acting and production aren’t there to lift the script. The string of McCoy excellence wasn’t going to last forever, of course, but did it have to come crashing to earth this hard?
Not good.
3/10