Athens, 421 BC. An ancient civilisation of philosophers and poets and the birthplace of theatre. The Doctor has decided to show Ace and Hector how it all began, with help from the great comedian Aristophanes.
But life in Athens is no laughing matter. There’s the ever-present threat of invasion from the Spartan horde. The plague that turns people into the walking dead. The slavery. The tyrannical rule of the paranoid, malicious Cleon and his network of informers. And the giant flying beetle with knives for wings that stalks the city streets at night.
What Athens needs is a hero. And who better to be a hero in ancient Greece than a man called Hector?
MASK OF TRAGEDY
I’m not even sure what to call the current seventh Doctor arc – the Hector arc, I guess? – but its penultimate story, “Mask of Tragedy,” comes from James Goss, one of the few writers to start on the new series and migrate to classic series work. Unfortunately, inconsistencies of tone and some surprisingly poor performances and sound design let down what could have been a very successful script.
To begin with, I love the audacious conceit around which Goss frames his story: ancient Greece is such an important period of human history, it is besieged by alien tourists and time travelers, so much so that the Greeks themselves are aware of their visitors. This sounds ridiculous – even stupid, honestly – but Goss makes it work, so much so that it seems like one of the most natural elements of the story. Cleon (Alisdair Simpson) interrogates aliens for information and exiles them if he doesn’t like their answers; Aristophanes (Samuel West) drafts them into his theatrical performances. The Doctor floats around in the middle of it all, both manipulating events from the background and enjoying a holiday.
The problem is how all this comes together – or, more accurately, doesn’t come together. I’m entirely unsure what “Mask of Tragedy” is trying to be. It’s full of comedic moments, many of which provoke genuine laughs, but it’s also full of violence and cruelty. There’s nothing wrong with mixing tones for dramatic effect, but this story veers from comedy to drama far too often – sometimes even in the same scene – to feel anything but disjointed. For example, Ace is exiled from Athens and doomed to confront the Spartans, but then the Spartans turn out to be a gang of equality-minded women, but then they reverse field and start brutally slaughtering the Athenians, but then they stop to drink and watch theater. It feels careless, as though Goss was being pulled in several different directions as he wrote the script and couldn’t keep it all together. And none of that mentions the ongoing tale of Hector, who spends 99% of the story acting as a typical Doctor Who companion but flips out in the very last scene about how cruel and manipulative the Doctor and Ace can be. The “real” Hex wasn’t like this, they argue – yes he was! That was Hex’s entire arc – the ordinary person who wasn’t built to handle TARDIS trips like the Doctor and Ace! We did this leading up to “A Death in the Family,” then we did it again leading up to “Gods and Monsters” – do we really have to do it a third time? I get the point, guys!
I normally praise the production of these stories but “Mask of Tragedy” is an unfortunate exception. Big Finish has been producing Doctor Who stories for fifteen years and they still can’t produce a convincing crowd scenes – this isn’t a big problem unless you have a script like this that calls for a ton of them. Emily Tucker just about pulls off the sound of a Spartan leader inspiring her troops to battle, but an enthusiastic command followed by the sound of a few swords clanking together just doesn’t sound convincing. Worse yet, the script has Ace joining in on these yelling scenes, and Sophie Aldred is absolutely dreadful in them. I don’t really blame Aldred, since she’s been playing the part for over 25 years and the writers should know her weak points by now, but it’s distressing to hear something so unconvincing. Director Ken Bentley should have intervened.
Overall, “Mask of Tragedy” isn’t bad. It’s a historical in the style of the new series, with celebrities (Aristophanes, Cleon), aliens, and people speaking with modern idioms. But there are too many flaws for me to give it a positive score – my reaction when it was over was “Well that was a bit of a mess,” after all. But it sounds different from the usual Big Finish offerings of late, and it’s still refreshing after “Revenge of the Swarm.”
Not bad.
6/10