1983: as the country goes to the polls, two ‘Urban Explorers’, together with a freelance journalist, break into the long-defunct Cadogan Tunnels, once a secret wartime facility… and later, so rumour has it, the site of an experimental laboratory with a nasty sideline in vivisection.
What they find, in its twisting underground corridors, is something the most cynical conspiracy theorist could never have imagined: a highly-evolved society of questing, intelligent creatures, living right under humanity’s nose for decades.
But there’s no way out of the tunnels – as the Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough are about to discover when the TARDIS brings them, too, into the complex. It’s a rat trap – and they’ve all been caught!
RAT TRAP
As the second trilogy featuring the fifth Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, and Turlough drew to a close, Big Finish found themselves without a script, and turned in the emergency to IDW Doctor Who comic scribe Tony Lee. The result, “Rat Trap,” attempts to offer commentary on animal experimentation and early-‘80s social mobility, but unfortunately ends up as a confused mess marred by bad characterization and over the top performances.
The central premise is straight out of science fiction B-movie stock: a scientist experiments on rats, giving them increasing levels of intelligence, until they gain independence and decide, sensibly, to take over the world. There’s an attempt here to provide commentary on vivisection, as the rats seek to gain revenge for being the object of experimentation. The problem, of course, is that the rats lose all possibility of sympathy when they aim to eradicate human life from the planet. Why should I care about their history if, with one exception, they’re all deranged, murderous lunatics? The worst moment comes when the Rat King (Terry Molloy) declares, hilariously, that since humans made them run in treadmills, he will do the same to them – and then we’re presented with a human jogging in a hamster wheel and apparently producing enough electricity to power an entire underground base!
The play is also set on the day of the 1983 UK elections, in the heart of Thatcher’s government, which allows room for some social commentary. This, too, is incredibly superficial, with both Clifford Andrews (John Banks) and Sally Lucas (Alison Thea-Skot) revealing themselves as traitors to humanity – but Sally’s doing it because she feels oppressed by a class-based society! And even though she’s telepathically connected to the rats, and gladly following their orders, she’s still utterly shocked to discover the rats aim to betray and kill her. It’s the eternal fate of the Doctor Who collaborator: trust the ridiculously evil bad guys beyond reason and then drop your jaw at their inevitable betrayal. Molloy’s other character, Dr. Wallace, is himself a heap of clichés – he’s Caitlin’s father! He betrayed humanity but now understands the error of his ways! He takes the Doctor’s place and sacrifices his own life to save the day! Give me strength.
There’s also a ton of continuity, which isn’t particularly surprising coming from the author of “The Forgotten.” Tegan frightens some rats off with her memories of the Mara, Turlough fights rats off using a spark-wire from “The Whispering Forest,” and Nyssa finds herself in the unlikely situation of finding a cure for Richter’s Syndrome. This, too, is handled superficially: Nyssa’s progress is totally unchanged at the end of the play, we learn nothing more about the disease, and while she says she’s not okay and Tegan says she’ll discuss it with Nyssa later, we never hear that conversation. Hopefully we will in the subsequent trilogy, but as this stands it’s meaningless false drama masquerading as character development. Even the Doctor is mostly sidelined for the second straight release: cut off from the others by a cave-in, he spends most of three episodes wandering the tunnels, conversing aimlessly with the urban explorers. Then he finds some equipment and happily constructs a device that essentially saves the day. Well done.
Fortunately, the production design is significantly improved on the past two releases. Andy Hardwick and director Ken Bentley expertly capture the claustrophobia of enclosed subterranean corridors, and the filter used on the rat voices is actually comprehensible. The actors go way over the top as the rats, but that’s not a production fault – that being said, whenever the Rat King spoke, instead of picturing a number of rats tied together by their tails, I pictured the villain from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood for this story, but it seemed to strike every wrong note – there’s nothing insightful, creative, or inspiring about this. It’s generic Doctor Who, and worst of all, it’s not even good generic Doctor Who.
Don’t bother.
3/10