The year is 16127. Four decades have passed since the colonists of Nerva Beacon returned to repopulate the once-devastated planet Earth – and the chosen few are finding the business of survival tough.
Far beyond the sterile safety of sanitised Nerva City, transmat scientist Roger Buchman has brought his family to an island surrounded by what they once called Loch Lomond, hoping to re-establish the colony he was forced to abandon many years before.
But something else resides in the Loch. A pestilent alien infestation that the Doctor, beaming in from Nerva City, remembers only too well from his time aboard the Beacon…
The Wirrn are back. And they’re hungry.
WIRRN ISLE
After a miss with “The Curse of Davros,” and a hit with “The Fourth Wall,” the rubber match of the sixth Doctor and Flip trilogy arrives as William Gallagher’s “Wirrn Isle,” featuring Big Finish’s second use of the villains from “The Ark in Space.” While the story starts out as a promising, atmospheric horror script, it rapidly degenerates in the second half into something almost unlistenable.
This is Gallagher’s first full-length story in the main range, coming after his one-episode contribution “Doing Time” to “The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories.” That story was quite promising, and to be fair, there’s quite a bit of good in the early parts of “Wirrn Isle.” We finally get to see Flip spend some time with the sixth Doctor, and while their relationship is rather generic, Lisa Greenwood and Colin Baker demonstrate an appealing, parental chemistry. The tone of the play perfectly matches the setting on the frozen, wintry Loch Lomond, and the troubled family dynamic adds believable tension. Granted, there’s nothing earth-shattering here, but it sails along as an effective Hinchcliffe-style story… and then something goes dreadfully wrong.
The story makes clear that Roger (Tim Bentinck) is a transmat expert, and that a transmat failure caused his son Iron (Rikki Lawton) to be fatally fused with a Wirrn. Roger thus spends the story desperately trying to reconstitute his son from the Wirrn host. Fine, but at some point the story stops being about Roger’s efforts, the family’s horror, the Wirrn threat, or even the Doctor himself. Rather, it’s almost entirely about transmat technology. Every problem is caused and solved by the transmat. Entire sequences are dedicated to characters trying to get to or run away from a transmat pad or its controls. The Doctor saves the day by reprogramming a transmat and explaining his actions with nonsensical technobabble. This happens after multiple nonsensical arguments with Roger about transmat technology. Technobabble is fine to resolve plot threads, but only in stories that happen to be about something else. This one screeches to a halt the moment the Doctor executes his transmat plan. I’m not sure why this happened, because the first half of the story makes rational use of the technology. Why did it go overboard?
In fact, that question can be applied to most of the story. Over the first half, Gallagher rather convincingly portrays a family on the brink of falling apart. Roger brings Veronica (Jenny Funnell) and Toasty (Tessa Nicholson) on his colonization mission in a desperate attempt to hold his family together; there’s a surprising amount of subtlety in how the parents act closer than they really are in front of their daughter. But as the story progresses, this dynamic soars over the top, concluding as the Doctor discovers via (of course) transmat DNA test that Roger is not Toasty’s father! What the hell is this, Maury Povich? Veronica is also reduced from a multi-dimensional character to a screaming fool upon the disappearance of her daughter, not to mention every single time she’s confronted with Iron. I understand that parents act irrationally when it comes to their children, but she acts like the screamer from “The Fourth Wall,” so shallow is her characterization. If you’ve ever watched a zombie movie and wondered why the other characters don’t throw the screaming, panicky idiot to the zombies, you’ll get that feeling again here.
As a brief aside, what on earth is with the character names? It’s silly enough having a companion named “Flip,” but here we have characters named “Iron,” “Sheer,” “Dare,” and, most ridiculously, “Toasty.” This from a society that we know has people named “Noah” and “Vira” – I don’t remember anyone on Nerva named “Drum” or “Pants.” Did anyone stop to think that perhaps characters calling out desperately for “Toasty” would undermine the drama somewhat? Was the author being defiant about this when he actually had someone scream it over a cliffhanger sting? We may never know. Speaking of Toasty, she’s easily one of the most confusing characters in the history of Big Finish Doctor Who. It’s clearly established that she’s 19 years old, but she’s written like a precocious 10-year-old and acted by Nicholson as a 6-year-old. Someone, be it the script editor or director, needed to catch this – instead, it comes across as a dreadful mistake.
Lastly, much is made at the conclusion about the moral dilemma on display: the Wirrn are just trying to survive, after all, so what right have the humans to wipe them out? Unfortunately, this isn’t “Wirrn Dawn,” which made some attempt to give the Wirrn subtlety before reaching that conclusion. This is “Wirrn Isle,” in which the Wirrn are portrayed as single-minded killers with no goals apart from slaughtering all humans and using them as breeding stock. This is also the sixth Doctor, who will, when faced with a virtually identical situation, eradicate the entire Vervoid species himself to protect humanity. Where did this bout of conscience come from? And why on earth does Toasty back him up? Is it because she missed half the story in the transmat buffer and doesn’t know any better?
Even the production isn’t fantastic. Simon Robinson’s sound design is excellent, but his music is unnecessarily discordant in places. And while the pacing and editing is effective for a while, the way the story grinds to a halt in the second half, as well as the questionable performances, fall on the shoulders of director Nicholas Briggs. There’s really very little to recommend “Wirrn Isle” – and this marks two failures in three releases for Colin Baker, for years the greatest Big Finish Doctor. For a company with nearly fifteen years of Doctor Who experience, there’s no excuse for something this poor to reach the market – and especially not twice in three months.
Leave it on the shelf.
3/10