The end of the world is nigh. That’s what everybody is seeing in their nightmares. That’s why they are congregating in Liverpool for the party to end all parties, hosted by Rufus Stone, a celebrity turned doomsday prophet. He claims he’s the only one who can save them when the day of judgement comes. Because he’s on the side of the angels.
The Doctor, Ace and Hector arrive to find the city in the grip of apocalypse fever. There are lights in the sky, earthquakes and power cuts. The Doctor is determined to investigate, while Ace is more concerned about finding a way of restoring Hector’s lost memories.
Meanwhile, in the river Mersey, hideous, slug-like creatures are stirring…
SIGNS AND WONDERS
It wasn’t too long ago that the Sylvester McCoy stories had supplanted the Colin Baker entries as the flagship releases of the Big Finish Doctor Who monthly range, a golden age of audio drama that reached its pinnacle with the twin brilliance of “Project: Destiny” and “A Death in the Family.” The story of the Doctor, Ace, and Hex came to a conclusion great enough to deserve to stand alongside the greatest Doctor Who stories in any medium. And then, inexplicably, it kept going, and despite a couple of high points it ended up crashing and burning in “Gods and Monsters,” one of the worst releases in the history of the company. And then, even though Hex was dead, the story still kept going! So finally, after years of waiting and countless unnecessary stories, we come to (I hope) the last conclusion, Matt Fitton’s “Signs and Wonders” – and it won’t surprise anyone to learn that it’s predictably terrible.
I’m not sure Big Finish ever figured out why “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” and “The Curse of Fenric” are great stories. They’re surprisingly character-focused and dripping with atmosphere – the fact that the Doctor confronts “Elder Gods” in both stories is almost incidental to their successes. Yet this recent arc has besieged our ears with Elder God after Elder God, culminating in the scene in “Gods and Monsters” where everyone stood back and watched two of them fight it out. So how do we one-up this for “Signs and Wonders?” Why, an even MORE powerful Elder God, of course – but this one’s actually pretty nice! Yep, that’s the dramatic twist: the bad guy isn’t bad at all, and just wants to die somewhere where he won’t hurt anyone. I admit I didn’t see this coming, but talk about boring revelations. Of course, something like this could work very well if it represented the central conflict of the story writ large, but it doesn’t. Instead, all the Doctor has to do is press a few buttons in the TARDIS and the problem is solved. Sure, he risks burning out his mind in the process, but since there’s virtually no foreshadowing of this risk, we’re not given any reason to be concerned.
It’s a shame, because the story starts brilliantly. English people suffering mass delusions suggesting the end of the world, an unlikely preacher guiding the people through a mix of religion and celebration – this is great, foreboding stuff, and could have made a fantastic story in its own right. Even when Rufus Stone (Warren Brown)’s angels are revealed to be aliens battling a plague of interstellar leeches, it could still work – it’s a bit ordinary for that introduction, but great Doctor Who has been done with less. But once the arc plot gets involved, everything falls apart at the seams. The Hector Thomas story is resolved so perfunctorily it’s insulting. Oh, turns out everything we learned about Hex’s lost memories was wrong, and here they are! And so Hector is written out, with no reaction from anybody. Wasn’t the whole point that Hector was a person in his own right, not just a vessel awaiting the return of Hex’s memories? Wasn’t the point that Ace was chasing a ghost and the Doctor couldn’t make her see reason? Fitton himself wrote “Afterlife,” setting all this up – or should I say NOT setting all this up, as you couldn’t ignore the themes of that story more if you tried. Don’t even ask if anyone cares that Hector has been destroyed, because you know the answer (of course not) if you’ve listened to Big Finish at all in the past couple of years. Nothing sums up “Gods and Monsters” better than the scene in which the Doctor realizes that Hector’s lost memories give him a unique ability to handle Rufus Stone, and so he sends Hector on a mission to find the prophet – and then Rufus gets killed, Hector gets his memories back, and the Doctor’s theory gets ignored. What?
You’d think that, with Hex back and in his final story, he’d be an integral part of the resolution. And sure, he attempts a heroic self-sacrifice to defeat a villain, but it’s not tied to his character in any meaningful way – save for Ace and Sally Morgan yelling memories at him from the background – and there’s certainly no thematic resonance with the story as a whole. Oh, did you notice how I waited this long to mention Sally’s involvement in the story? That should be a good hint about her importance to it. Ace is dreadful for the second story in a row, as Big Finish continues its apparent drive to suck any development out of her character and return her to the petulant teenager we saw on television. Remember all the stuff in “Afterlife” about how she’s been in the TARDIS for so long that she no longer fits in the real world? If not, I don’t blame you, since it hasn’t come up even once since then – and why would you expect it to be mentioned in a direct sequel written by the same author? Sally does point out that Ace sees everything as a competition, and while that’s true, that’s the sort of thing that should be explored in the story, not mentioned and abruptly forgotten.
I said back in my review of “Afterlife” that if the Hector arc ends with Hex back to normal and back in the TARDIS, it would be a colossal failure, and – with one obvious difference – that’s basically where we end up. Nobody learns anything! Ace spends every moment since “Afterlife” insisting against all logic and reason that Hex can be restored, despite everyone from the Doctor to Hector himself telling her she’s wrong – and then she turns out to be right! So what’s the message here? “Ace never gives up on her friends?” Christ, that’s the best we can do after 27 years with this character? And then, after she finally gets what she wants, what does she do? Gives him a big hug and then pisses off back to the TARDIS! What?! That’s it? They just leave quietly and then show up years later to check on Hex as husband and father?
Everything about this is clunky. The plot veers from point to point with no consistency, the characterization is sloppy, the performances are shaky, the sound design is from the “loud noises = exciting” school, the dialogue resorts to “Look, Doctor! There’s energy shooting from his arms!” stuff that sounded bad 15 years ago, the direction is flat – and this is what was supposed to conclude years of storytelling? This arc should have ended twice before, but I suppose beating a dead horse is exciting in some eyes. It’s even difficult to review, as it’s so disjointed I can’t figure out how to structure my commentary. But despite all of that, I’ll close on a positive note: it’s not nearly as bad as “Gods and Monsters,” so…
Hooray!
3/10