“When the river is gone, ships shall sail in the sky, monsters bring fire from the heavens. All will fall into a grey and endless sea, and Doomsday has come.”
Florence, the sixteenth century. No one thought to pay much attention to the prophecies of the so-called seer Michel de Nostradame, otherwise known as Nostradamus. Until the canals of Venice dried. Until the soothsayer’s sayings started coming true…
Because Master Nostradamus is right, in all respects. The end of the world is nigh. The ships are coming. The monsters are coming. The fire is coming. There’s only one thing he didn’t see coming, in fact: the sudden apparition of a certain strange Doctor, in his even stranger TARDIS. Today, the Earth dies screaming. And all the Doctor can do is watch.
THE DOOMSDAY QUATRAIN
After the brief diversion into “Recorded Time and Other Stories,” the Big Finish main Doctor Who range returns to the Sylvester McCoy trilogy with Emma Beeby and Gordon Rennie’s “The Doomsday Quatrain,” a historical adventure featuring Nostradamus that is in no way what it seems. It’s nice to see Big Finish getting away from mining classic series continuity quite so often, but unfortunately there’s not a great deal here to hook the interest.
A large part of the drama of “The Doomsday Quatrain” centers around its twist concluding the second episode, which I will now ruin: the Earth on which the Doctor lands is actually an artificial planet populated entirely by life forms grown from a biologic goo. As a central twist, this is fantastic, especially in how it undercuts the format: the story looks for all the world like a celebrity pseudo-historical, but is revealed to be nothing of the sort. Sadly, two major flaws let down both the twist and the script as a whole. First, the setup is incredibly dry and uninspiring. Nostradamus (David Schofield, excellent) is being driven mad, not just by his visions but by the constant pressure of people wanting to know the future. One race of bureaucratic aliens is selling Earth hunting rights to another group of stupid lizard aliens. Eventually, the lizard aliens start killing people. Some of the bureaucrats feel guilty. The Doctor leaves Earth to try to stop it. That might sound like a good amount of story for two episodes, but that’s literally the entire summary. There’s no depth, no particular humor, no interesting character beats, nothing – just killing time from plot point to plot point.
So then the twist hits, and we reach the second major flaw: the authors take the least interesting route possible. “The entire planet is an artificial construct!” is a fascinating starting point. “The Doctor lectures people about the sanctity of life!” is not where we need to go at this point. There’s nothing here about identity, about individualism, hell, not even anything from the hoary old cliché about what it means to be human. It’s just the Doctor and Garilund (Caroline Keiff) saying “They’re sentient, so you can’t kill them!” and Brors (John Banks) saying “Yes I can!” It’s utterly uninspired. Even when we learn that fake-Nostradamus has the power of precognition and has foreseen his own conversion back into goo, the only use for that revelation is as evidence that Nostradamus is sentient. Do the authors really have nothing else to say? No curiosity about their own ideas? This is basically “Carnival of Monsters,” a story written for a 1973 audience, without the interesting parts.
After “Robophobia” made such brilliant use of the solo seventh Doctor, “The Doomsday Quatrain” does not follow suit. Sylvester McCoy gives a perfectly good performance – though the rolling “r” gets to be a bit much, even for him – but it’s in a perfectly generic role. Nothing sets this apart as the seventh Doctor. I suppose this isn’t a crucial flaw, but it’s terribly incongruous as part of a trilogy containing “Robophobia.” Schofield and Keiff alternate in the companion roles well enough – Schofield in particular mines all that he can from the “man from the past experiences the future” role. Derek Carlyle and Nicholas Chambers are suitably nasty as the Cro (Crow? Crowe? I can’t find it anywhere official) but really, their only entertainment comes from the sound design depicting the eating of brains.
Director Ken Bentley and sound designer Andy Hardwick are there to save the script from tumbling to unfortunate depths. It’s difficult to pace material like this, but Bentley just about manages it, and Hardwick goes beyond the call of duty to make this entertaining. The score is delightfully epic for a story that probably doesn’t deserve it. Overall, though, “The Doomsday Quatrain” is uninspiring Doctor Who. It’s not badly written by any means, it’s just dull. This is the sort of thing American networks churn out to fill gaps in a 22-episode season. In short, not why I’m a fan.
Not necessary.
5/10