The sixth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures rolls on with “The Haunting of Malkin Place,” a ghost story in the classical style from Phil Mulryne. It’s a straightforward story, well told, that doesn’t do much to distinguish itself and continues to make a mockery of the idea that this series is set in season 18.
I must say that I’m impressed with Mulryne’s ability to structure a story. The footsteps overhead in the early parts of the story are fully explained as it continues while simultaneously paralleling the story’s own future events. The events in “Malkin Place” hang together remarkably well. The characterization is solid without resorting to obvious clichés. I like the random introduction of the Doctor and Romana arriving by train to the main plot, and I like the emotional underpinnings of the resolution. I like that there isn’t a clichéd megalomaniac behind everything. I like the device of a séance, and I really like how the spiritualist Talbot (Simon Jones) isn’t shown up as a charlatan or an idiot even though his theories are wrong. Heck, I even like the third usage this month of the “Doctor waits a long time” trope involved in the resolution and how it ties back into the footsteps in the attic.
But I don’t have much to say about the story other than that. Despite the emotional ties the characters have to the story, it doesn’t have much resonance or thematic significance. Lalla Ward continues to play Romana as the least patient, most irritable person in the universe for reasons that are still unclear to me. I’m getting tired of belaboring this point, but I’ll keep doing it: there is literally nothing about this story apart from the theme arrangement that identifies it as part of season 18. It’s not even the bridge between seasons 17 and 18 that has been discussed behind the scenes – this is straight out of the Hinchcliffe era. It’s looking more and more like the “season 18” advertising was specifically and cynically designed to get people to subscribe without any concern about delivering on the promise. And while this doesn’t affect the individual qualities of the stories, I’m also not a fan of being lied to.
“The Haunting of Malkin Place” is a solid release, better than most in the range. The supporting cast is great, Nicholas Briggs directs very well, and the sound design and music from Jamie Robertson are first-rate. But it’s not especially memorable, not especially meaningful, and not especially faithful to its intended setting. Still, it’s a decent Doctor Who story, and there’s always room for those.
I’ve criticized the new UNIT range for being rather empty: everything has been solidly written and produced to Big Finish’s usual high standards, but the first two volumes amounted to little more than soldiers running around shooting things for four hours. The third set, “Silenced,” surpassed its predecessors – but now, with “Assembled,” from Matt Fitton and Guy Adams, we’re right back to soldiers running around shooting things. The only difference is that some of the soldiers were on TV in the 1970s.
“Assembled” is about a Silurian invasion of Earth and UNIT’s attempts to stop it. A series of coincidences gets Mike Yates, John Benton, and Jo Jones (née Grant) involved, and they team up with the modern UNIT team to save the day. Cool idea, though we’ll have to ignore that none of them appeared in “Doctor Who and the Silurians” and only Jo made it into “The Sea Devils,” so their alleged experience in these matters is questionable at best. The problem is the same problem with every other Silurian story: they’re all the same. Some Silurians have woken up, and while some of them are peaceful scientists happy to coexist with humanity, the rest are deranged, genocidal maniacs. Eventually, the murderous ones are defeated, the peaceful ones end up dead, and everyone sighs regretfully that peace could not be achieved. Fitton and Adams try to shake up this formula by getting rid of the peaceful Silurians and making them all violent killers – but I don’t think making the story less complicated is a stop on the road to higher quality.
Jastrok (Richard Hope), leader of this faction of Silurians, plans to conquer the island of Great Britain, fortify it, achieve recognition from the other human countries, then slowly take over the planet while threatening to destroy everything with the UK’s nuclear arsenal if anyone fights back. He’s a violent fanatic, in other words. Near the end, he is told that his people will deal with him if and when they are all awakened, for his genocidal ways are contrary to Silurian law. I’m not sure about that, given that they promoted him this far up the chain of command! The lack of subtlety really hurts the story, too, because there’s absolutely nothing interesting about the main villain. What does he want? To murder all humans! Why? Because he’s a racist, I guess? What does he plan to do when all the humans are dead? Who knows? Do any of his soldiers break with his desire to wipe out all of humanity? No, they’re all as fanatical as he is! Jo spends the last episode of “Assembled” insisting that they try to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict, and teleports herself right into the middle of the Silurian seat of power. After about five minutes of conversation, she realizes that these Silurians are fanatics and that diplomacy is hopeless. Not only is this utterly unrewarding, it also undercuts the message we normally get from these stories, teaching us that sometimes diplomacy really is worthless and there isn’t a better way.
I’m not usually one to complain about realism, but some of the events of “Assembled” defy belief. The story takes pains to point out that only about 100-200 Silurians are awake, and they’re using dinosaur enforcers alongside fear-inducing technology to keep humanity subdued. For example, they have genetically-engineered pterosaurs patrolling the skies and destroying any military aircraft that attempt to breach the perimeter. I know the authors hand-wave all this away every time the Silurians dismiss the humans as “primitive,” but really, we’re just expected to accept that pterosaurs can easily and casually destroy jet-powered fighter aircraft traveling hundreds of miles per hour and loaded down with ordnance? The story also uses the ridiculous device that *only* UNIT soldiers are involved in stopping the Silurians, despite the Silurians residing in Westminster – but it has to, because the UK standing army has tens upon tens of thousands of active-duty personnel and would wipe the Silurians off the map in about eight seconds.
Fortunately, if you’re planning to pick this up because of the classic series characters, you’re in luck. The entire first episode is devoted to Benton and Yates helping Kate Stewart and the UNIT crew fight off a Silurian attack, and everything about it is great, from the initial childish bickering in the pub to the violence and heroism later on. This is only John Levene’s second Big Finish appearance, and he sounds absolutely thrilled to be performing alongside Richard Franklin again. The second episode is a tour de force for Jo, who proves her “diplomacy matters” philosophy by peacefully negotiating with a scientific faction of Sea Devils to help stop Jastrok and agreeing in return to keep them protected. And in the final episode, everyone is brought together – though it’s a little disappointing because Jo’s role is to look useless and Benton and Yates don’t get a lot to do. Still, it’s wonderful to hear these characters together again – and it’s fun to hear Osgood freak out just like any other good Doctor Who fan.
This is also the best UNIT set yet for Jemma Redgrave, as Kate takes an active role in the proceedings from start to finish and is forced to acknowledge the difficulties of following in her father’s footsteps. She doesn’t read all her lines in the same tone, either, which marks a massive improvement. Osgood is also very important, as she devises almost every step of the plans that ultimately save the day. Unfortunately, Josh and Sam continue their tradition of being utterly superfluous, though at least there’s a moment when a Silurian is baffled at her inability to snap Josh’s plastic bones. (But wouldn’t his joints still be susceptible? Oh, never mind.)
The production is excellent, from director Ken Bentley to sound designer Howard Carter. Nicholas Briggs provides fantastic Sea Devil voices. But “UNIT: Assembled” is an average story throughout – it’s basically four hours of various action sequences with nothing in the way of subtlety, character development, or theme. The heavy (and effective) nostalgia factor earns it an extra point, but it’s disappointing for this series to go right back to its unambitious ways. I was excited for the future after “Silenced;” now, I’m not so sure.
“Vortex Ice,” from Jonathan Morris, is the first of the two stories in the second split release, this one featuring the sixth Doctor and Flip, prior to her initial departure. It features the sort of complex time-travel plotting we’ve come to expect from Morris, great performances from the regulars, and an unexpected yet perfect twist.
We’ve seen this sort of story before: the TARDIS lands in a new location, and the Doctor and his companion(s) discover that they’ve already been there. But since they don’t remember being there, they must be seeing the impact of actions they will take in the future. And that’s what happens here, as the Doctor and Flip explore a mine in Mexico in search of artron energy particles, they stumble across massive “vortex ice” crystals and find themselves frozen within. The conclusion is simple: at some point in the future, they will be frozen in these crystals, and so they can’t do anything to change that future.
Of course, Morris doesn’t leave it there. Soon, the crystals thaw, and the “other” Doctor and Flip are thrown into the action. Things become a bit confusing at this point, since both Flips are generally “on screen” together – but that’s by design, as Morris never loses track of who should be where and when. Credit to director Ken Bentley and sound designers Joe Kraemer and Josh Arakelian for adopting a simple strategy to distinguish between the characters: one version largely speaks through the left channel and the other largely speaks through the right. When the big twist comes, it completely upends the story, challenging every assumption the listener has brought to the table. It all fits together quite well, as one would expect from a Morris script, and it’s eye opening in a way that strongly rewards a second listen. It also allows us to really understand Flip as a character. I’ve never been a fan of Flip, as I think she’s too often written badly: often she’s so ignorant that it defies belief that the Doctor would enjoy her company. But Morris understands her, and as a result “Vortex Ice” is the best Flip story we’ve yet had. There’s not a lot going on under the surface of this story, but the sharp plot and character work make this a model for other two-part stories.
9/10
CORTEX FIRE
The other story in the set is “Cortex Fire” by Ian Potter. I was under the vague impression that these stories were meant to be related in some way, but that’s obviously not the case – “Cortex Fire” has absolutely nothing to do with “Vortex Ice” despite the inverted title. It’s still a solid story, fortunately, but there’s not a great deal going on beneath the surface.
The Doctor takes Flip to a planet from which they will be able to watch magnificent lights in the sky from a nearby supernova – but of course, within minutes of the TARDIS landing, they become involved in a tale of rebels vs. government and suspected by the authorities. The society of Festin is threatened by nihilists, people who threaten the very foundations of society – and who also burst into flames and murder people. Furthermore, it seems that whenever someone is close to discovering the reasons for the nihilists’ existence, they too become fiery killers.
From this setup begins a story that spirals out to almost ridiculous levels of complexity. The “nihilists” are created when they realize their own insignificance to the universe – and this is because of the Urge, an elemental underpinning of the consciousness of the people that seeks to free itself from generations of imprisonment. The entire society of Festin has been engineered from the beginning to reach a point where it destroys itself, finally freeing the Urge. Potter certainly doesn’t lack imagination, but once the Doctor figures out what’s going on the story reverts to a basic “Doctor vs. megalomaniac” structure that we’ve seen a million times before. And the ending is curious, using a technique we just saw in the Ninth Doctor Chronicles set.
It’s difficult to say more about either of these stories. “Cortex Fire” is a story with a strong plot that lacks the temporal machinations of its partner and doesn’t do much to develop its characters. It’s a fine display of science fiction imagination, but there isn’t much more to it than that. I like the two-episode format, though, and so far the stories have largely taken advantage of it. The production credits are the same as for “Vortex Ice” and are similarly successful. Overall, I’d recommend picking this up – the first story is better but these are two fine ways to pass a couple of hours.
The fifteenth Torchwood release (to say nothing of the box sets) marks a big moment for Big Finish: it features the return of the final regular cast member, Burn Gorman, to the role of Dr. Owen Harper. Set during the period of his living death in season 2, James Goss’ “Corpse Day” pairs Owen up with PC Andy in an investigation of a maniac that feels very similar to “Countrycide” – but also feels gratuitous and morally problematic.
It’s “Corpse Day,” an annual event in which Torchwood helps the local police solve their cold cases. Owen is sent to aid the Cardiff police, and Andy is his liaison. In short, their investigations lead them to a crazy person who is abducting young women from local clubs, keeping them prisoner as his “daughters,” and either feeding them to a captive Weevil or letting the Weevil mate with them. Goss doesn’t shy away from the details of this – it’s a rather sick, disturbing story, with lots of screaming and crying from the captive women and insane declarations from their captor. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, of course – I liked “Countrycide” and its nihilistic message about human nature – but it needs to be in service of some greater message, and “Corpse Day” does not succeed in that goal.
The biggest problem with “Corpse Day” is Owen himself. The story takes pains at the start to illustrate how Owen has lost most of his emotions since his death and how he now tries to live vicariously through others, such as the way he makes Andy eat a massive breakfast in front of him. But this goes seriously awry when he tries to appreciate life and emotion wherever he finds it and does so in a maniac’s basement. One of the revelations in the story is that the Weevil is just as much a victim of Glynn’s abuse as the three women, and that’s entirely fair, but Owen’s reaction at the end of the story is to leave well enough alone and not notify the authorities, because the women and the Weevil have formed a family of sorts. This is lunacy: these women are all severely damaged victims of years of rape and abuse, and while we don’t know much about the Weevils or their thought processes, one can easily imagine the Weevil isn’t healthy either. Leaving them to their new life is a baseless act of cruelty. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the story clearly underlined this as an example of Owen’s skewed morality, but virtually nothing is done to question Owen’s position. It made me feel sick to my stomach, and absolutely not in a good or appreciable way.
Then there’s the abortion debate. We learn that the Weevil has impregnated one of the captive women, and she is due to give birth within hours. Andy is absolutely horrified by this development and insists the child cannot be allowed to live. Owen argues that all life is precious, no matter its origin. Fortunately, both men agree that the choice isn’t theirs to make, and Owen is ethically obligated to deliver the baby if the mother desires – but this still veers dangerously close to a strict pro-life message, as crucially the mother is likely in no fit mental state to be making decisions about her health or consenting to the decisions of others. I see what the story is going for: the world is a dark, horrible place, and we should nurture any form of happiness, no matter how it might appear from the outside – but it’s very crudely and problematically delivered.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the production, though. Burn Gorman sounds like he never left the role, Tom Price is reliable as ever, and the guest cast is uniformly excellent. The sound design from Rob Harvey is appropriately disgusting and Blair Mowat’s music continues to capture the Torchwood atmosphere. So my complaints lay entirely with the story – and as I said above, the story left me deeply uncomfortable.
The final story in the set is “Retail Therapy” from James Goss, a story that marks the return of Camille Coduri to the role of Jackie Tyler. Of the four stories, this one comes the closest to the tone of the TV season – it’s set on Earth and features a strong focus on Rose and Jackie, their relationship, and their relationship with the Doctor.
The plot is simple, as these things go – Jackie is selling a hot new product, but that product turns out to be part of a plot to threaten the world. But the story isn’t about that; rather, it’s about Jackie’s frustration with the Doctor and his interference in her life. There are several conversations in which we learn about Jackie’s life: how she’s always struggled, how her primary goal has always been to provide for Rose, and how she’s jealous of the Doctor’s ability to take Rose on journeys that Jackie could never hope to replicate even if they were all on present-day Earth. Finally, she’s found her way to a modicum of success: she’s actually making money, and she’s even doing it in a way that would have made her late husband proud. So what happens next? The Doctor shows up, of course, and says that the secret of her success is dangerous and must be stopped.
The plot twist, if there is one, is that underneath their bickering and surface dislike, the Doctor and Jackie respect one another. There’s a moment where Jackie is shown doctored video supposedly showing the Doctor and Rose speaking badly of her and she doesn’t believe a word of it, even though she feigns offense. Ultimately, despite the Doctor’s supposed hatred of domestic affairs, he knows how important Jackie is to Rose. Similarly, despite Jackie’s envy of the Doctor, she knows how important it is for Rose to have access to the things the Doctor can show her. So the Doctor and Jackie are essentially bonded through their mutual, if dissimilar, love for Rose, and Goss lets us learn this through a series of conversations. The plot is resolved elegantly, but it’s hardly the point. The first season of the revived series was all about its characters, and it’s great to have a story that follows suit.
Helen Goldwyn directs the four stories in the set, with sound design from Joe Meiners and music from Ioan Morris and Rhys Downing. While the music provides a decent rendition of the Murray Gold style, the sound design is fairly minimalist, matching the talking-book format of the stories. Nicholas Briggs, as I mentioned in my first review, is an excellent narrator, and his Christopher Eccleston impression definitely calms down as the set proceeds. The Ninth Doctor Chronicles is worth a listen – hopefully, if they do more of these sets, the stories will be more like “Retail Therapy.”
Scott Handcock provides the third story, “The Other Side,” which features the long-awaited (?) return of Bruno Langley as ill-fated companion Adam Mitchell. The story doesn’t confirm ludicrous, ancient fan theories like Adam becoming Davros; rather, the story simply presents a first adventure for this short-lived TARDIS crew, set between “Dalek” and “The Long Game.” And while it’s written and performed to a high standard, it doesn’t do much with a potentially interesting setup, leaving me to wonder what, exactly, the point was.
Adam’s function in the revived first series is to illustrate by contrast what makes Rose a good companion for the Doctor. He’s a bit overawed by new situations, but he’s intelligent and resourceful – the problem is that he’s also selfish. Rose, on the other hand, has her selfish moments, but she’s largely a selfless person concerned for the welfare of the less fortunate. You’d expect “The Other Side” to explore this dynamic even further – but in fact it does the opposite, showing Adam’s good side with few of the questionable elements. There are brief hints at arrogance, but none of his actions here are driven by selfishness – the worst you can say is that he’s more concerned for Rose’s welfare than the Doctor’s. In fact, by the end of the story, the Doctor is conceding that he’s “fantastic” at times and actively wanting to keep him around. Of course, had this aired on TV, it would make Adam’s ouster in the following episode even more shocking – but since we’re getting it 12 years later and we all know how the story ends, why not engage with it? This seems like a massive wasted opportunity.
Fortunately, Handcock’s story is very well structured, with sure-handed characterization leading to a logical story progression. Two moments struck me – first, when the Doctor and Rose are separated into two different time zones, I wondered why the Doctor didn’t just use his time-traveling mobile phone to call her – and almost immediately after thinking that, he did! Then, I wondered why he wouldn’t just wait around for 30 years to meet up with Rose – and then he did! I know “answers my questions right after I ask them” isn’t the entirety of a good story, but it certainly illustrates that Handcock wrote something I enjoyed. The story is entertaining, too – I like the characters visiting different time periods revolving around a music hall/theater. And let’s not forget Bruno Langley – he sounds like he just stepped off the set in 2005. Overall, “The Other Side” is a very good story that nonetheless wastes its chance to be great. Nonetheless, it is recommended listening.
THE NINTH DOCTOR CHRONICLES: THE WINDOW ON THE MOOR
The second story, Una McCormack’s “The Window on the Moor,” is in the vein of the “celebrity historicals” beloved by the modern series. Yet it puts a peculiar twist on the format, as the celebrity in question, Emily Brontë (Laura Riseborough), doesn’t meet the TARDIS crew until halfway through the story. On a distant planet, a heroic duke and his evil uncle, a prince, battle for control of a glass city even as the prince has imprisoned the duchess in the city’s glass prison. Matters are complicated by technology that can open “windows” to other places and times – the duke uses this to protect his people while the prince wants to use it to conquer other worlds. Naturally, one of these windows opens onto early 19th-century Earth – and we discover that the duchess and Emily Brontë are doubles! (This allows Riseborough to play both parts.) I’m fairly certain that these experiences are intended to be the inspiration for Brontë’s early poems, but I can’t say for sure. I’m also curious about how she is represented, as she’s friendly, open, and brave, whereas in real life she was famously shy and reserved.
It falls to the Doctor to help defeat the evil prince and stop the use of the time windows. McCormack writes the ninth Doctor brilliantly – I can absolutely picture Christopher Eccleston grinning widely up at a slavering, murderous monster and calling it “fantastic” – capturing his heroism, his desperation, and his sense of humor. Rose doesn’t leap out of the speakers in the same way – she’s certainly recognizable but she’s cast in a traditional companion role for most of the story. The ending works, and I love Rose’s reaction to the Doctor’s actions, but we’re still in familiar territory: the Doctor must make a difficult decision, and a guest character sacrifices their life to save the day and preserve our heroes. There’s not a great deal going on in this story, in other words, despite its literary trappings – most of the plot involves running from place to place in an attempt to get the duke and the prince together. Which isn’t to say I disliked “The Window on the Moor,” but I’m ready for something a little more adventurous.
The biggest problem with Big Finish’s new series license has been actor availability: while they’ve secured many peripheral characters, one box set with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and the late John Hurt, they’ve been unable to get most of the major actors in studio. They’ve tried to work around this, most notably with “The Churchill Years” set, and finally with “The Ninth Doctor Chronicles” they’re dispensing with any pretense and just doing narrated audiobooks. Free of the need to cast Christopher Eccleston or Billie Piper, they’re storming ahead with four new stories from the revival, the first of which, Cavan Scott’s “The Bleeding Heart,” takes place prior to series premiere “Rose.” And, pleasantly enough, it’s good!
As mentioned above, these stories are audiobooks, with Nicholas Briggs doing the reading and all the characters opposite one guest voice. The guest voice here is Claire Wyatt, playing reporter Adriana Jarsdel. Let’s get this out of the way, because Briggs’ role in this set has been controversial: he’s a very good narrator. Even when he’s not doing voices, his tones and inflections capture the feelings of the characters he describes. He’s also able to put on several different and recognizable voices – you never lose track of what character is speaking at any given time. The only fault is in his Christopher Eccleston impression: it’s way too comedic and one-note. When the Doctor is being silly or sarcastic, Briggs nails it. When the Doctor is being serious, Briggs sounds like he’s mocking the script. It’s not a big deal – since it’s an audiobook, not an impression contest, you just need to know it’s the Doctor speaking – but it’s a noticeable step down from his performance in “Night of the Whisper.”
As for “The Bleeding Heart” itself, it’s a solid, entertaining story. The central conceit – people becoming so overcome with empathetic feelings that they murder the target of their empathy – is a unique idea that is very Doctor Who. It also enables the story to focus on its characters, with Adriana taking pills to suppress her latent empathic abilities and the Doctor fighting to control his emotions over the recent Time War. Cavan Scott presents a very raw, damaged Doctor, one who has papered over his wounds with silliness. There’s a moment where he asks Adriana to use her abilities, she says she’s in pain, and he says “I don’t care!” that really made me sit up and take notice – it’s the sort of dangerous characterization that marked the Doctor in that first series and I enjoyed it quite a bit. The actual mentions of the Time War seem a bit unnecessary, though I’m not concerned about continuity problems when it comes to things like that. And I’m not a huge fan of the ending, which goes for the very tired scenario where the only way to save the day is for the Doctor to sacrifice himself and another character steps in at the last moment to give up their life in his stead. Yes, it sets up the importance of meeting Rose later on, but I think this device has been very overused.
Overall, though, there’s a lot to enjoy in “The Bleeding Heart.” It feels like it could have been lifted straight out of series 1, it has some impactful emotional beats, and it really understands its central character. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to get a good story from an author I respect a great deal, but nonetheless this was much better than I expected. Hopefully the rest of the set will follow suit.
The fourth release in the sixth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, “Dethras,” comes from range newcomer Adrian Poynton. While it’s not a particularly interesting story, it has the advantage of being quite well written, leading me to want to hear more stories from this author.
I really enjoyed the storytelling in “Dethras.” The characters speak with a more naturalistic tone than the mannered speech we often get in Big Finish Doctor Who, and the scenes aren’t presented in purely linear fashion. In other words, we get flashbacks and visions and all sorts of devices designed to get the listener paying active attention to the story. I’m less sure about any particular themes besides the obvious one of hubris leading to science run amok, but the structure and the bizarre plot held my interest throughout.
I mentioned in a recent review that I’m always leery of stories named after places or characters introduced in those stories, because that often implies that there’s not much worth remarking upon in the script. “Dethras” is a character in the story, and the cliffhanger is devoted to him revealing his identity: “I am Dethras!” That’s great, but we don’t know who or what Dethras is. As it turns out, he’s a scientist who unlocked the secrets of evolution, designing beings that would evolve into forms perfectly adapted for their environments. This leads to humans transforming into creatures that can survive the vacuum of space; the story is less clear on how significant the environmental changes need to be. We also see characters evolving traits of people around them – the Doctor and Romana’s latent telepathic abilities manifest and intensify in Dethras’ creations. But that’s not really evolution – acquired characteristics are quite the opposite, in fact.
The characters tend to stay away from stereotype, which is nice – everything seems to be setting Dethras (Alistair Petrie) up as a deranged mad scientist, but his failure arises from his trusting, naïve nature, not from any malevolent intent. Less successful was Flague (Sheila Ruskin), the dictator who wants Dethras’ discoveries to form an army. Poynton tries valiantly to give her some shade: she’s not just insane, she actually has an understandable motive driving her actions. But her actions are still those of a megalomaniac, and it’s hard to give the character the benefit of the doubt in the moments when those traits come to the fore. She also experiences a complete personality reversal in the story’s final moments, and this coupled with the confusing resolution makes for a weak ending. There’s also an intelligent chimpanzee hanging around, played by John Banks – and unfortunately he sounds like a man trying to do chimp noises. Because he eventually starts talking, you can charitably argue that this may have been intentional, but I seriously doubt it.
There’s a lot to like about Dethras. The structure is interesting, the direction from Nicholas Briggs and sound design from Jamie Robertson are first-rate, and there are some good ideas at its core. But the overall execution is flawed, leading the story to sound more disjointed and less rewarding than it otherwise could. Not bad, then, but it could be better.
The third story in the set, John Dorney’s “Swan Song,” is a bit of a departure from the typical Jago & Litefoot format. It’s set between two time periods, with a group of scientists around the present day performing time experiments and accidentally opening portals to the Victorian age, while Jago, Litefoot, and Leela investigate the effects of those portals from the other side. The story has a hallucinatory quality, as characters on each side of the time breach have dreamlike visions about potential futures – and it’s all tied together by Alice (Abigail Hollick), a paraplegic scientist who lost her ability to walk on the way to a ballet performance, and her desire to finally deliver her performance. While I appreciate the desire to do something different, I don’t think “Swan Song” holds together especially well – I think the “spirit of the theatre” is a difficult concept to entertain. The focus on the theatre also leads to one of my least favorite elements of drama about drama: endless quotations. It is not entertaining to hear characters quote Shakespeare at each other when they are not performing Shakespeare, nor is it fulfilling to have any subtlety robbed from the story when a character spells out the meaning of Swan Lake at the end. About the only element I enjoyed was Jago’s almost complete ignorance of Shakespeare contrasted against Litefoot’s much more comprehensive knowledge. Still, “Swan Song” is entertaining in spots, and it’s nice to know the series won’t be repeating the same plots over and over.
Big Finish has settled into an annual format for the monthly range: one trilogy for each of the fifth, sixth, and seventh Doctors, one anthology release, and one trilogy featuring multiple Doctors with some sort of linking plot element or gimmick. We’re heading into that “gimmick” trilogy, and this year the selling point is that each release is actually two linked two-episode stories. The first story this month is “Alien Heart,” by Stephen Cole, and it’s rather bland and uninspiring.
As the cover blurb says, the Doctor and Nyssa stumble across a trail of destroyed planets and, with no explanation evident, decide to investigate. This leads them to a secret human installation on the moon of Traxana, which appears to be the next planet in line. But the humans aren’t responsible – they’re also investigating – and nobody knows why the planets are being destroyed. This is a reasonably mysterious setup, but Cole immediately goes all in on a group of giant spiders with incredibly sticky skin running around the base and on the planet. Nyssa gets carried off, of course, and that splits up the TARDIS crew, leaving the Doctor with the human crew and Nyssa with a Traxanan in an underground mine. The Doctor then spends the rest of the story going from room to room in the base, while Nyssa spends the rest of the story going from tunnel to tunnel in the mine.
My reviews say this a lot, but there’s not much that’s particularly wrong with “Alien Heart.” I’m sure Stephen Cole can write Doctor Who stories in his sleep by now and he’s always been a reliable, consistent voice in the spinoff media. But there isn’t much going on here: it’s an utterly generic Doctor Who plot surrounded by some irrelevant detail. Sure, I suppose it’s interesting to know the political and strategic reasons that the humans have a secret base on the moon, but when they’re not relevant to the story, why should I care? The best revelation in the story is the mysterious heartbeat – and it’s hardly a spoiler to say it’s actually a distorted form of the famous Dalek base “heartbeat” effect since the Daleks are all over the cover. The Dalek scheme is almost incomprehensible – though “needlessly convoluted” seems to be an implicit part of Dalek schemes – and it’s unclear how much of it was intended from the start and how much of it is lunacy from a disconnected Dalek science group.
Basically, if you really want to listen to a generic Doctor Who romp with Daleks, this is as good a choice as any. If you want something that’ll stimulate your mind, well, skip to disc 2, because that one is much better.
5/10
DALEK SOUL
I imagine it’s difficult to write Dalek stories these days. They’re the most common villains in Doctor Who and many utterly fantastic writers have tackled the Daleks over the years. It has to be intimidating to attempt to write something unique involving a monster that has already been tackled by luminaries like Whitaker, Davies, and Shearman. And yet that’s exactly what Guy Adams does in “Dalek Soul,” which is one of the best Dalek stories in years.
“Dalek Soul,” as the name implies, is about what it means to think like a Dalek and how that differs from what we consider normal. When “Alien Heart” ended, the Daleks took the Doctor and Nyssa prisoner, and when “Dalek Soul” opens, Nyssa is working with them as a virologist and the Doctor is aiding a rebel group. Clearly, we’ve just skipped ahead in the story: the Doctor must have escaped, and Nyssa is surely doing what she can to hamstring the Dalek plans from within. But events rapidly become uneasy as we hear Nyssa oversee a biological weapons test on defenseless prisoners, something we know she would never countenance. Our suspicions that something is wrong are confirmed when the Doctor betrays his rebel group and turns them over to the Daleks – in fact, that ruins the drama of the rest of the story, because we know that nobody would ever write (or be allowed to write) the Doctor as a willing Dalek collaborator, so we therefore know that these aren’t the real Doctor and Nyssa.
Fortunately, Adams’ story doesn’t rely on this revelation to succeed. Rather, it’s a device to explore how the Doctor and Nyssa would behave were they possessed of Dalek “souls.” The most interesting outcome is that the Doctor is a ruthless, heartless collaborator, while Nyssa still retains much of her essential decency. It’s never spelled out, but one imagines that the Daleks were very careful to stamp out the Doctor’s positive qualities, knowing how much of a threat he posed in the past. I’d also speculate that they didn’t do the same with Nyssa, as they probably viewed her as just another weak-willed, inferior species. So while the Doctor is the lead villain, Nyssa is the anti-hero: she’s responsible for terrible things, but a part of her knows that and works to stop those things from happening. As with many stories in this vein, when they discover their true identities, everything melts down, which is predictable but satisfying. Lastly, the device of a faceless rebel leader talking Nyssa through her identity crisis is a bit clunky but effective enough to drive the plot.
Ken Bentley directs both stories and the sound design and music come from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason, and all are to Big Finish’s usual high production standards. Despite a few flaws here and there, “Dalek Soul” is an excellent story, one that actually attempts a different type of storytelling with meaning to boot. “Alien Heart” you can take or leave; this release is worth the purchase for “Dalek Soul” alone.
I’ve been quite impressed with Big Finish’s Torchwood audios. The standard releases have cleared a high bar of excellence, while the special box sets have been entertaining and expertly produced, if not quite as well written. So I was dismayed to hear Juno Dawson’s “The Dollhouse,” which stands without competition as the worst Big Finish Torchwood release of all and is arguably the worst product ever released under the Torchwood banner.
To be fair, I see what they were going for, and I appreciate the attempt. Set in Hollywood in the late 1970s, “The Dollhouse” involves a Torchwood outpost on the West Coast of America with a secretive male leader (Guy Adams) employing three female operatives. It’s a Torchwood take on Charlie’s Angels, in other words, and the tone matches the irreverence of the source material. I like that the story uses three capable, intelligent women in the lead roles. I really like that the range has commissioned a transgender author. I like that the range is trying different things and not just pumping out generic stories month after month. Unfortunately, what I absolutely do not like is the result.
Almost nothing about “The Dollhouse” works. Of the three lead actors, Kelly-Anne Lyons as Charley (no, not that one) is by far the best, but they lumber her with a Southern accent that she dials up to 11, robbing scenes of their dramatic impact. Marlow (Laila Pyne) should be a great character – she’s a black scientist who grew up in the civil rights era of the 1960s. Unfortunately, the only part of that description the script is interested in is “black,” so she’s constantly yelling things like “My ass!” and “God damn!” This is clearly intended as a pastiche of blaxploitation film – there’s even a Richard Roundtree reference to hammer the point home – but it feels uncomfortable. Pyne, furthermore, is dreadfully unsuited for the role, as her diction is so precise and free of personality that she sounds like a vocal coach reading off a page. And then there’s Gabi (Ajjaz Awad), the Latina stuntwoman that rounds out the crew. There’s no pastiche here: she’s simply a broad ethnic stereotype. She’s not a bad character in other respects – like the others, she’s heroic, resourceful, intelligent – but she’s constantly calling people “mama” and “papi,” making references to conversations with her abuelita, criticizing the enchiladas at local restaurants, and so on. Also, does Awad have any Hispanic/Latina heritage? If not, that adds an extra problematic layer to an already difficult character.
The plot is functional enough, if incredibly basic. There are aliens buying actresses to use as “dolls,” hence the title. Our heroes stop them. Okay. But there’s a more fundamental question here: why is this story being told in the first place? It doesn’t feature a single familiar element from the Torchwood series. It doesn’t flesh out anything about Torchwood – you leave this story knowing exactly the same information about the organization that you knew going in. And to my knowledge it’s not intended to serve as a pilot, so we’re likely never going to see any of these characters again. So as a Torchwood story, it’s worthless. But even taken purely as a piece of drama, it fails on all but the most basic levels. Sure, it’s a pastiche, but it doesn’t have anything interesting to say about the source material. For that matter, it doesn’t have anything interesting to say about anything – there’s no attempt at deeper meaning here, nothing about Hollywood, nothing about the characters, nothing at all. The sound design isn’t even convincing in all cases. Heck, even the cover has a giant continuity error – the story takes pains to point out that Charley is blonde, but Kelly-Anne Lyons isn’t, and guess what we see on the cover?
“The Dollhouse” is a bad, boring story that serves no discernable purpose. Why anyone thought this was a good idea is beyond me, as it’s barely even fit for release. If there’s anything positive to be taken away from this story, it’s that the Torchwood series has absolutely nowhere to go from here but up.
The first Jago & Litefoot set comes to a close with Andy Lane’s “The Similarity Engine,” essentially a sequel to the Companion Chronicle (“The Mahogany Murderers”) that started the whole thing. The story feels a bit awkward in places because it suddenly feels the need after three stories to explain the backstory, so you have characters telling each other things they already know, but apart from that everything works well. I like how Dr. Tulp’s involvement in the other stories is explained here – it’s very much an RTD-style arc with small elements woven into a greater whole leading to an explosive season finale. Both leads are spectacular as usual – it’s continually impressive to see how steely Litefoot can be as well as to see the compassionate side of the blustery Jago. The ending is a bit weird, though – Jago saves the day by convincing Tulp’s henchmen that their boss is actually a jerk? And then Tulp turns into a giant tentacle monster? It feels odd, like there was a different, better ending we didn’t get to see. But it’s pulled off with such aplomb that it doesn’t ruin the story. Andy Lane knows the two leads like the back of his hand and his script reflects it. The sound design is effective, the direction skilled – this is a fine conclusion to a very strong set and it bodes well for the future. Knowing just how many of these there are to come, I worry about diminishing returns, but for now this series is a hit.
The tenth Jago & Litefoot story, “The Man at the End of the Garden,” features Matthew Sweet’s debut in the range, an author who produced two of my favorite monthly Doctor Who releases. And it’s every bit as good as you’d expect: it features parallel narratives, one “real” and one fictional, with elements of each bleeding over into the others. Events are rooted in a Rumpelstiltskin-like story, with a magical little man (Duncan Wisbey) making a deal with a little girl: promise him his freedom and win a reward, but fail to satisfy your end of the bargain and lose that which you love most in the world. If there’s a complaint about this story, it’s that the fairy tale is foregrounded to the point that it masks the roles of the lead characters. Both Jago and Litefoot are largely reactive characters in this story, playing the “ask lots of questions” part like everyone else. Still, their talents are put to use – witness Jago essentially saving the day due to his knowledge of stagecraft, for example. This also relates to Leela’s tears in the fabric of space-time, but even though she investigates the situation from a completely different angle, her role in the conclusion is reduced as well. Still, with the story written as well as it is, and with great performances from Joanna Bacon, Joanna Monro, and Eden Monteath, the story more than gets away with it. Narrative complexity is always welcome, especially when it comes from the pen of a talented writer. “The Man at the End of the Garden” is the most unusual Jago & Litefoot tale yet, but it’s also one of the best.
The second Jago & Litefoot set kicks off with Justin Richards’ “Litefoot and Sanders,” at heart an old-fashioned vampire story. Bodies are turning up in London completely drained of blood, and Professor Litefoot is on the case – but with a new partner, vampire hunter Gabriel Sanders. The story is as much about Jago and Litefoot’s relationship as it is about the vampire, and Richards plays it to the hilt. It’s fairly predictable that Litefoot is misleading Jago – it’s just too severe a change from their usual relationship in too short a time – but the way Jago vacillates between anger and understanding is quite entertaining. Special mention goes to David Collings, whose creepy, controlled performance as Sanders dominates the audio. He’s a fantastic villain due almost entirely to his voice and I’m curious to see where things go with him as the set continues. The twist at the end concerning Ellie’s apparent demise is appropriately shocking, but as it also comes virtually out of nowhere I’m expecting that, too, to be reversed. Still, “Litefoot and Sanders” is a fine intro to the box set that ably demonstrates how much life the series potentially has in it.
Series Two of Jago & Litefoot started with a vampire story and now it progresses into a zombie tale, Mark Morris’ “The Necropolis Express.” The start of the story is creepy enough, with the infernal investigators traveling on a secret train that transports coffins to the graveyard – the Express of the title. Jago refers to this offhandedly as the “midnight meat train” – was that an actual term or is Morris channeling Clive Barker? Litefoot needs to know if Ellie will rise from the dead as a vampire, and so they’re following her body to its final resting place. When they arrive, they find Reuben Mord (a very creepy Vernon Dobtcheff), a mysterious black-clad figure performing experiments in an attempt to resurrect the dead. It turns out this is an old nemesis of Litefoot in disguise, something I find rarely works dramatically when we as listeners have never encountered the character before. But his experiments are suitably horrifying, and there’s a solid tie to the work of Gabriel Sanders to keep the series arc going. And of course Ellie *does* come back as a vampire, which is going to make things very interesting when she starts eating rude customers. (I know, I know.) Not as much character work on display here, but as a creepy horror story it works very well.
One of the best elements of “The Mahogany Murderers” was the way it played with narrative, recognizing differences in the story when told by Jago as opposed to Litefoot. Jonathan Morris tries something along similar lines in “The Theatre of Dreams,” playing with the concept of diegesis. Our heroes spend most of the latter half of the story trapped within the Théâtre de Fantaisie, a supernatural theater that imprisons those within inside their own dreams. Jago thinks he’s rich, with the Queen set to attend a show at his theater, Litefoot thinks he’s found a cure to Ellie’s vampirism, and so forth. At this point, the story adopts a series of quick cuts: from Jago in the theater to Litefoot doing research to the two of them discussing their successes in the tavern. Initially, this seems like a stylistic device, a way to move the story along without wasting time. But the cuts themselves are diegetic: the characters are experiencing these scenes in real time because the Théâtre itself makes them experience their dreams at that rate and in that order. Morris pulls this off with an expert’s touch. The story around it isn’t bad either, letting us see deep into the souls of the regular characters. If I have one complaint, it’s that Jago’s greatest dream is apparently achieving fame and fortune – and while that’s obvious with how he behaves, it doesn’t reflect the quieter, gentler, and even heroic person we’ve already seen when he’s put to the test. “The Theatre of Dreams” is a very, very strong story, the best in the set so far.
The second series of Jago & Litefoot winds up with “The Ruthven Inheritance” from Andy Lane, who wrote the conclusion of the first series as well. While I think both stories worked well, Lane needs to come up with a new idea for a series finale – this one also ends with the principal villain mutating into a giant monster and rampaging around until Jago and Litefoot defeat it in a cacophony of sound effects. Up until that point, the story is quite interesting – we meet Lord Ruthven (Simon Williams), a wealthy man dedicated to ruining the careers of both Jago and Litefoot. He’s also the result of centuries of directed evolution that have given him a powerful body with built-in defense mechanisms. That evolution has been directed by Gabriel Sanders, who bred the Ruthvens to be useful instruments in his quest to bring the world under vampiric thrall. The extent of his plan seems unclear to me, especially given how easily everyone involved is defeated, but as usual the story really isn’t about that. It’s about breaking the leads down to their lowest points, about taking away the things they love and seeing how they respond. And it works, but the idea is gone too soon. This would be an interesting backdrop for an entire series, not half of one story. Oh, and Ellie is cured at the end, which is another rapid close to a largely unexplored plot. I don’t see the point of restoring the status quo so quickly, not when at this point they already knew they were doing two more series. But the final twist is welcome, and I’m very interested to hear the dynamic of Jago and Litefoot and Leela.
The third series of Jago & Litefoot begins with Justin Richards’ “Dead Men’s Tales,” a story that reintroduces Leela to Victorian London and the “infernal investigators.” Indeed, much of the story is spent examining Leela’s return to the time period – and while this is a “Gallifrey”-era Leela, she’s still surprisingly ignorant of custom and technology. The scenes where Ellie teaches Leela to work as a barmaid, and the ensuing hijinks, are entertaining enough, but they don’t really go anywhere. That’s the problem with the story as a whole: it’s incredibly slight, even for its running time. Leela has traveled to this period in order to find a rip in the fabric of time and repair it, all the while fighting off its unpredictable effects. The first effect, seen in this story, sees zombie sailors rising from the water and marching through London in search of something. And… that’s it! They don’t pose any particular threat, they don’t do much of anything apart from wander around… we don’t even have a sense of what they want until Litefoot throws up his hands and starts talking to them. There’s something there about a young man avoiding his responsibility to return to his rightful time and place, but it’s not discussed significantly until right at the end. “Dead Men’s Tales” is entertaining enough when it features the main characters interacting but there isn’t even a semblance of an interesting story here. The worst J&L story of the first nine.
There’s little more Victorian than a mysterious séance, and Jonathan Morris’s “The Spirit Trap” plunges Jago and Litefoot into a particularly interesting one. Mrs. Vanguard (Janet Henfrey) is a spiritualist: during her ceremonies, one can hear the movements of the dead and speak to them using her as a medium. But she’s also a fraud – the haunting noises are from percussion instruments tied to her finger and her words to the dead are based on cold reading. But she’s also not a fraud, as she can interact with “spirits” in the room – apparitions of people from the future! And how do these spirits know the secrets of the people at the séance? Simple – they Google them (or the equivalent thereof) and look up their family history. This is the trick Morris employs to great effect: using technology we understand and presenting it from a Victorian perspective, where it appears magical. It also wrong-foots Jago – as a showman he sees right through Mrs. Vanguard’s deceptions and is genuinely shocked when she turns out to be right. The friendship between the two leads is wonderfully evident – Litefoot’s determination to solve the case is intensified as soon as Jago is caught up in it. “The Spirit Trap” isn’t quite as good as its predecessor but it’s another highly entertaining story in what is becoming a magnificent set.
“The Bellova Devil” might be the best thing Alan Barnes has ever written for Big Finish. This is a story that absolutely delights in its characters and setting, with Victorian atmosphere (and, yes, pastiche) spilling out of the speakers. From the main characters, to the gentleman’s club, to the presence of lesser grotesques like the Manchester Mangler, “The Bellova Devil” is exactly what you’d imagine if you suggested Jago and Litefoot get their own series. I love the central plot: a “travelers’ club” is revealed to be a suicide club whose members travel to the afterlife. But it’s all a scam – really, they put you in deep sedation, dig you up later on, give you a new identity and some cash, and send you on your way. But *that* is also a scam, because in fact they take all your possessions and kill you with cyanide! This seems needlessly complex, but Barnes makes it work without detectable fault. I also like how everything points toward the presence of the supernatural but yet all events can be explained in real-world terms, despite the ongoing presence of Dr. Tulp (Toby Longworth). Christopher Benjamin again gets the heavy emotional lifting, as Jago comes quite close to death, but Trevor Baxter is just as delightful, particularly in Litefoot’s theatrical staging of his own death by poison. I’ve seen it said in a few places that the range never again reaches the heights of its first two stories; I hope that isn’t true, because this is excellent.
Henry Gordon Jago and Professor George Litefoot have always been among the most beloved guest characters in Doctor Who, and the stellar reception of the Companion Chronicle “The Mahogany Murderers” further proved it. It’s therefore not surprising that Big Finish would give the “investigators of infernal incidents” their own spinoff, and it all begins here, with Justin Richards’ “The Bloodless Soldier,” the first story in the first box set.
Oddly, “The Mahogany Murderers” is the actual pilot for this range, as it (re)introduces us to the principal characters and their roles. “The Bloodless Soldier” just assumes you know who everyone is, which strikes me as a mistake for the first story in a new range. Big Finish has a habit of assuming that their listeners buy everything they release, and that assumption has evidently been going on for a while. As far as the actual story goes, it’s pretty simple: it’s basically a werewolf story. A group of soldiers returning from overseas brings their convalescing captain to shore – a monster scratched him, and now he’s acting increasingly violent and animalistic. Yes, he’s turning into a monster himself, one that drains the blood of its victims – and soon he’s loose in London and it’s up to Jago and Litefoot to track him down. Everything rolls along predictably until the end, which is stunning – Ellie’s brother kills the monster and saves Jago and Litefoot, but is bitten in the process, and the only solution available to our heroes is to kill him before he fully transforms. This is the sort of situation in a Doctor Who story where the Doctor devises a new, unexpected solution – but here, Jago shoots the unfortunate soldier in the head, killing him. Christopher Benjamin is amazing in this moment – Jago sounds for all the world as though this moment will haunt him until his dying day. The scene also sets up potential future drama with Ellie, should she ever discover the true events of her brother’s demise. In sum, “The Bloodless Soldier” doesn’t play as a pilot, but assuming you know the main players, it’s a fine start to the range with an excellent ending.
“The Helm of Awe” is the fourth story that Philip Hinchcliffe has Presented to us through Big Finish, and this, like the others, is based on an idea for television adapted to audio by Marc Platt. While there are certainly some fine ideas on display, and a surprising turn by Tom Baker, the story is far too cluttered to be remotely coherent.
The Doctor and Leela land in the 1970s, on a small, remote Shetland Island where the people are very devoted to their Viking heritage. Naturally, strange things start happening almost immediately: the people seem strangely violent; Leela experiences visions of a Viking invasion; and a local professor, Angus Renwick (David Rintoul), is collecting strange, ancient artifacts. From here, the story follows fairly common Doctor Who beats: the first two episodes deepen the mystery, the real threat is introduced about halfway through, the third episode could basically be dropped without a problem, and the final episode sees the Doctor and Leela save the day. As plots go, it’s solid and entertaining. Here’s the problem: the story attempts to variously incorporate Viking traditions, World War II drama, cultish behavior, family relationship drama, an alien invasion, and drama on the high seas, and doesn’t do any of them justice. Furthermore, the alien threat at the root of all the problems is rather unclear about its motivations: it’s a couple of days since I listened to the story and I’m already losing track of the threat.
Fortunately, there’s some fine character work on display, starting with the Doctor himself. The Doctor was often very intense during the Hinchcliffe era – despite Tom Baker’s eccentricities, he didn’t turn into an overtly comedic figure until the Williams era – and that attitude is on full display in this story. He’s genuinely afraid of what might happen and infuriated about the damage to the timelines, and Tom Baker rises to the occasion, growling and barking out his lines in a head-turning performance. We’re used to Baker sounding variously drunk or delighted in his readings in the Fourth Doctor Adventures; here we get a sense of the capable actor lurking under the surface.
“The Helm of Awe” is also a fine story for Leela, representing her “savage” origins while respecting her intelligence. It’s easy to write Leela as an idiot; it’s difficult to write her as a smart, capable adult with a limited frame of reference, but Hinchcliffe and Platt are up to the task. I like the Sevateem war cry – yes, it sounds forced, but that’s a matter of perspective. If they’d thought of it in the 1970s we’d be used to it by now, after all, and it makes perfect sense for her tribe to have one.
In the end, though, I don’t think the story works. An episode-long excursion to World War II and an Allied ship pursued by a U-boat works as a set piece, but as a part of a greater whole it falls flat. It’s the sort of thing that could add needed texture and diversity to a six-part story, but when it’s 25% of the whole it needs to mean more. And that’s the story in general: it’s a great showcase for the Doctor and Leela, but apart from them it’s a confused, overcrowded mess. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll always prefer a confused story with too many ideas to a boring story with too few, but that doesn’t mean “The Helm of Awe” is particularly good. The quality of these stories needs to improve. It would be difficult to justify the cost if these were brilliant; it is impossible to do so in the face of mediocrity.
Gallifrey: Intervention Earth
Written by Scott Handcock & David Llewellyn
Intervention Earth is a fake political drama that’s more Star Wars than All the President’s Men.
The planet Gallifrey is ripe political drama. As established on televised stories from The Invasion of Time to Hell Bent, the Time Lords are 1% elitists who treat most of the planet like crap. It’s like Apartheid in Space.
This could have been a hard-hitting, insightful, and dangerous science fiction political drama. I imagined a Time Lord version of Wag the Dog, Three Days of the Condor, with hints of In the Loop. That potential is undermined by Big Finish space fantasy action cliches: lots of monologging, a loud theme song, and laser gun battles that sound like Galaxy Quest.
For a mostly female cast, the stories don’t treat women very well. Qualified women get berated by male subordinates. Ace is relegated to shutting up and getting kidnapped. Romana has to constantly remind her goons that she’s in charge.
Bottom line: Just like The Dark Eyed Coalition of Doom, Intervention Earth is a Big Finish Production of a Hollywood summer blockbuster. There’s no character growth, no drama.
It’s time for another Fourth Doctor Adventure, this one called “The Silent Scream” from James Goss. And since it’s set in season 18, one of Doctor Who’s most unique and experimental seasons, let’s go through the checklist and see what season 18 features are on display.
Somber atmosphere? Nope!
Powerful, atmospheric electronic score? Sort of!
A story dealing with entropy or decay? Only in the most technical sense!
So that’s 1-for-3 if you’re feeling generous, or 0-for-3 if you’re not, and I’m not.
The plot here is almost too simple for words: an intruder from the future is using advanced technology to steal the voices of Hollywood stars who were aged out of the business when talkies supplanted silent movies. The thief, Dr. Julius (Alec Newman), is doing this for profit, of course, and it’s up to the Doctor, Romana, and K9 to stop him. Since his strategy is to steal voices, it follows naturally that one of our heroes will lose their voice – and of course it’s Tom Baker, since it makes sense to have the biggest reason people buy these left mute for most of the second episode. But either way, it’s a simple scheme, so simple in fact that the Doctor essentially saves the day by waving his sonic screwdriver at the machinery. There are some mildly interesting ideas about the “shadows” that do Julius’ dirty work – I especially like how K9 can easily destroy them but they explode so violently that it becomes dangerous for him to shoot them.
I’m not opposed to simple or even perfunctory plot machinations if the story fills in the dramatic gaps in some other way, but “The Silent Scream” does not do this. The story largely involves the TARDIS crew following characters around, including Lorretta (Loretta?) Waldorf (Pamela Salem) and Lulu Hammerstein (Andrée Bernard), both of who have terrible American accents. (Is there a reason why all the American characters in Big Finish approximate some form of New York accent? It sounds like an audio production of Newsies every time they visit the US.) Lorretta loses her voice, Lulu is talked onto the Doctor’s side – it’s all very predictable. I’m disappointed by this, actually – Goss is usually a writer you can rely on for unusual ideas or presentations, but that is not the case here.
The production is fine. Nicholas Briggs directs well, Russell McGee’s sound design is convincing, and Jamie Robertson’s score is suitably electronic but we don’t hear nearly enough of it. But I don’t have much to say about “The Silent Scream” – it’s a bland, straightforward story that makes virtually no effort to sound like it takes place in its stated era. “Bland” is still a step up from many other Fourth Doctor Adventures, of course, but there’s no reason to recommend this.
I don’t often judge stories by their titles; nevertheless, a title can tell you a great deal about the story contained within. When it comes to Matthew J. Elliott’s “Zaltys,” the third release in the 2017 monthly range, the title is the name of the planet on which the story takes place. If you find that flat and uninspiring, fear not – the rest of the story is equally flat and equally uninspiring.
The problem with “Zaltys” can be summed up quite simply: it doesn’t know what it wants to do. The story’s main villain is a “necro-biological” named Clarimonde (Niamh Cusack) who has personal history with the Doctor – once upon a time, the third Doctor and Jo defeated her. She spends the story longing for revenge on the Doctor, glorying in abducting one of his companions, and instructing her lackey to keep the Doctor alive so she may personally drink his blood. Everything is setting up a confrontation between the two characters, and then she’s killed off before they meet and the story ends. And it’s not like this was an attempt to wrong-foot the audience; there’s no alternate threat introduced and no reason given to expect anything new. So why foreground their personal history to such an extent? Furthermore, the story takes pains in the first episode to remind the listener that Adric has experience fighting vampires – and he doesn’t encounter them either!
The actual plot doesn’t fare much better, not least because it takes until the end of episode three for the story to reveal the actual conflict. The people of Zaltys have been duped into putting their entire population into cryogenic storage, thinking a meteor is coming to wipe out their civilization. But the “meteor” is actually a ship carrying the necro-biologicals, who plan to land on the planet and feed upon the sleeping population. Adric figures out that the “meteor” isn’t real after looking at the data for about eight seconds. I understand that Adric is particularly gifted in mathematics, but this is a society that built an entire underground cryogenic complex capable of supporting its entire population in what sounds like a matter of months. Nobody looked at the data and raised an eyebrow? Zaltys is also a deeply insular society that forbids its people from interacting with alien life. Understandably, this upsets Perrault (Sean Barrett), so he… orchestrates the genocide of his people and plans to become a vampire? That seems excessive – and more importantly, it turns what could have been an interesting or even sympathetic character into a raving maniac.
Perhaps the only interesting character is Gevaudan (Philip Franks), a telepathic Vulpine who is the only alien living on Zaltys. He laments the loss of his mate and his pack, and he is keenly aware of his status on a planet that has little interest in making him feel welcome. His relationship with Nyssa is compelling as well, as it introduces the idea of Nyssa’s psychic abilities. Tegan is sidelined for the entire story – she spends the vast majority of it aboard the vampire ship hiding in the darkness and has no impact on the story’s outcome. Even the Doctor is oddly passive – after he figures out what’s happening, he can’t come up with a solution, and it falls to one of the guest characters to save the day.
It’s a shame about the script, because the production is first-rate. Barnaby Edwards is still one of Big Finish’s finest directors, and here he has assembled a particularly strong cast. The sound design and music from Steve Foxon are also of superior quality. Overall, though, “Zaltys” is a disappointment. For a story featuring planet-spanning, genocidal threats, it feels small and unimaginative. Not only is it not about anything in particular, it doesn’t even feel like it *wants* to be about anything – it’s just a loose assembly of set pieces around which some uneventful moments happen until it’s time for the credits to roll. I’ve often criticized Big Finish stories for feeling pointless, but “Zaltys” is a particular offender in this area.
It’s interesting to watch the evolution of Torchwood characters. When the series started, Gwen was the audience identification figure – an ordinary woman thrown into a world beyond anything she thought possible. But as the series progressed and Gwen became a fully-fledged Torchwood operative, characters like Rhys and Andy stepped into that role. Here, in David Llewellyn’s “Visiting Hours,” Kai Owen gets to take center stage in a story featuring none of the “lead” characters. It’s gutsy to lead off the third series of audios with a Rhys story, but Llewellyn’s script more than justifies the gamble. Rhys is visiting his mother Brenda (Nerys Hughes, reprising her role from TV) in the hospital as she awaits a hip replacement. Naturally, strange things start happening – in this case, time traveling organ harvesters appear in the hospital to take patients away under the cover of night. Much of the story involves Rhys and Brenda fleeing their pursuers through the rooms and corridors of the hospital, something that would probably be irritating if not for the amazing chemistry between Owen and Hughes. Brenda is the clichéd elderly mother to beat all clichéd elderly mothers, but the performance is so appealing it’s difficult to notice. It’s also interesting to see how Rhys behaves when he’s pushed to the limit – the decision whether to bash someone’s head in with a fire extinguisher isn’t the sort of test he faced on television. And even the bad guys have depth: Mr. Tate (Karl Theobald) and Mr. Nichols (Ryan Sampson) are doing this work to save their families, something that makes their eventual fate all the more uneasy. Scott Handcock directs along with sound design from Benji Clifford and a score from Blair Mowat, and the three combine to recreate the quiet claustrophobia of a hospital late at night. Overall, “Visiting Hours” is a success. It doesn’t push any boundaries, but it gives us a solid hour with an underappreciated character and doesn’t put a foot wrong.
And so we arrive at the final Doom Coalition story, John Dorney’s “Stop the Clock,” tasked with wrapping the extensive plot arc that has wound its way through sixteen stories. It certainly accomplishes that goal in a satisfactory manner, but there’s virtually nothing distinguishing about it apart from its competency.
I’ll start with the things I liked, because there’s certainly nothing overtly bad about “Stop the Clock.” Dorney weaves the various threads of the Doom Coalition sets together with consummate skill: River’s questioning of the Sonomancer’s relationship comes back to the fore, Padrac’s self-interest and manipulative behavior blows up in his face, and we even get an explanation for who the Red Lady from the second set actually was. The story neatly closes off the plot while leaving a few plot strands open, presumably for the upcoming The Eighth Doctor: The Time War set to explore. And the performances are excellent across the board, including what is easily Mark Bonnar’s best turn as the Eleven. Dorney even effectively mocks the “Silence, all of you!” line that undercut the character. In short, “Stop the Clock” is well written, entertaining, and a reasonable conclusion to the story.
The problem is that, as conclusions/”season finales” go, “Stop the Clock” doesn’t distinguish itself in any meaningful way. Two stories earlier, River started to question the Sonomancer’s love for Padrac, so in this story that becomes the fault line that fractures Padrac’s plan. There’s nothing surprising, nothing inventive, nothing we learn about either character that we didn’t already know: Dorney has simply taken Chekhov’s gun from the wall and fired it. The Doctor doesn’t have a great deal to do – after his attempt to impersonate the Eleven fails, he just stands there and tries to talk the Sonomancer onto his side. Liv is even more sidelined, as she accepts a dangerous mission to plant a bomb on Gallifrey, but then we spend about five minutes with her as she runs into practically no difficulty. Helen gets the most to do, as she is captured by the Eleven and then influenced by the Sonomancer, but even that seems perfunctory – as she attempts to sacrifice herself, she says something about wanting to matter, just to hammer home the character trait in case anyone was in danger of figuring it out on their own. Oh, and the story is called “Stop the Clock,” and it involves a one-hour time limit that lines up with the running time – and promptly underplays the time limit to the point that I wondered if it was still ticking down. If this is supposed to be a tense race against time, it doesn’t come across.
Name any modern Doctor Who season finale and it’s easy to think of memorable images or ideas. “Stop the Clock” doesn’t have anything like that – it’s like watching a chess computer play itself. All the pieces are there and used appropriately; all the resolutions flow organically from what came before. But there’s no excitement, no soul, both elements that should be present in a story that purports to conclude sixteen hours of audio drama. Perhaps the best scene involves the Eleven talking his captor into freeing him so she can kill him without getting caught – but that’s just good villainy targeted at an unimportant character. Something like that playing off Helen’s insecurities would be much better, though admittedly Doom Coalition has already paired Helen off with the Eleven.
Overall, I still enjoyed “Stop the Clock,” and most listeners should enjoy it as well. But as the last story in the Doom Coalition saga, it’s a bit of a nonentity – it’s basically just another Doctor Who story. Wouldn’t it be great if one of these box sets ended with something as good as “A Death in the Family?” Ah, well. One can dream.
The horrible American accents drove me away in 8 minutes (December 2016) and 11 minutes (March 2017). Learning nothing from The Gunfighters, this too is founded on caricatures from popular movies instead of actual history.
Given the quality of Mark’s other work, it seems like a good script got ruined by lazy supporting actors and tone-deaf direction. Simply removing the cultural insults would have made it better.
Big Finish not addressing this long standing problem is baffling. If Russell could find John Barrowman, then Nick Briggs should be able to find culturally appropriate actors.
Since I couldn’t get past 11 minutes of cultural insults, my ranking is 2/10.
The Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe get pulled in alternative timeline of London 2003. The English Empire became a global power from winning the Great Dalek War of 1903. The Doctor and Evelyn are worshipped as heroes, and the Doctor has splintered memories of fighting in that war. Meanwhile, the last surviving Dalek is tortured in prison. Jubilee is dark, violent, and highly recommended. Spoilers below.
Jubilee is one of Big Finish’s most ambitious audios to date. Robert Shearman’s sci-fi mystery explores theme and character. It has the usual rants against politics, consumerism, and “humans make great Daleks.” What’s unique is how Shearman uses time travel to explore long term destruction from short term solutions. The 1903 versions of the Doctor and Dalek both got it wrong.
“You humans are so fragile, your lives so brief, tiny splash of brilliant color against the time stream and then gone forever.”
The 1903 Doctor, from prison in 2003
Willful submission is expressed here with surprising subtlety. The Dalek, President Rochester, his wife Miriam, and his thug Lamb behave like actual BDSM submissives. They each need orders and discipline from someone they respect.
The Dalek sounds like a victim at first, then tricks Evelyn with her own compassion, then falls victim to his own compassion. Like the Doctor, he’s undermined by his earlier actions. “You should have given me better orders,” is one of the story’s best lines. His feelings about being the last of his kind foreshadow the new Who era. Kudos to Nick Briggs for bringing nuance to his Dalek voices. His range is on display in the all-Dalek dialogues, which normally bring the show to a grinding halt.
President Rochester, on the other hand, is a 2-dimensional tyrant at best. Whether he’s abusing Miriam, whining about redemption, or committing atrocity, he always sounds like a James Bond villain. His defining moment is claiming to be a victim while dismembering a dwarf in a Dalek suit.
Nigel’s wife Miriam is equally cliche. Her duality as masochist fembot and sadistic schemer never makes sense. Miriam’s obsession about getting hit hard enough “to break the skin” makes her more cartoonish than mad. Together, their marital insanity is adventure television cliche.
“Love you? But we’re married. That would feel weird.”
Miriam Rochester
Evelyn Smythe is a fantastic companion for Six. As a middle-aged woman who’s lead a full life, she’s gained more patience, maturity and intelligence than the Doctor…within a much shorter life span. Evelyn is a driving protagonist in Jubilee, paving the way for Rose Tyler in “Dalek.”
The fate of the 1903 Doctor is…wow. His utter defeat shatters the classic Doctor Who myth the hero can win just being clever. The Doctor’s final laugh is heartbreaking.
“There’s lots of clever dead people. I love killing clever clogs; they make the best faces.”
Missy in “The Witch’s Familiar”
For a hundred years since winning the Great Dalek War, the British trivialized the Daleks into a Hogan’s Heroes punchline. The contrast between the story’s actual history and its Dalekmania version is highlighted when Miriam says, “The Doctor from the movies was so much better.”
My only major knock is that the physics of the 100-year time split are never fully explained. I had to play it a few times, then Google to understand. The story’s emphasis on drama makes us forget its lack of technical consistency. That absence is glaringly noticeable at the end, when the Doctor explains it all in a tsunami of Gallifreyan techno-babble. Colin Baker does what he can, but no living actor could make that sound natural. He’s being asked to compensate for the Robert Shearman’s laziness.
That said, I highly recommend Jubilee. It’s the most dramatic, mature, and politically interesting Six story I’ve heard so far.
Bottom Line: 10/10.
TARDIS Bits
The Doctor’s Jubilee speech is awful; blaming himself for our inhumanity is typical Time Lord arrogance.
The penultimate installment of Doom Coalition and the final installment from Matt Fitton is “The Side of the Angels,” an epic story that sets up what sounds like an even more epic conclusion. While I applaud the ambition on display here, the script simply includes too many elements to hang together properly over an hour.
As the title implies, “The Side of the Angels” features a new appearance by the Weeping Angels. It also features the Rufus Hound incarnation of the Meddling Monk, a previous incarnation of the War Doctor series’ Cardinal Ollistra, and of course all the surviving members of the Doom Coalition. This is way too much for a single hour of audio, and as a result the story comes across as disjointed and confused. The central concept is reasonable: a splinter group of Time Lords is setting up a hideout on Earth (in 1970s New York City for some reason) to protect themselves from Padrac’s destruction of the universe. But it goes off the rails with this detail: in order to get the energy they need to power their shield, they ally with the Weeping Angels, allowing them to feed on New Yorkers in anticipation of an energy release when the wave of destruction comes. And they retain the services of the Monk to organize everything, as though he’s the only one capable of such an act.
So you’ve got a few conflicts here: the Doctor and the Time Lords, the Doctor and the Monk, and the Weeping Angels and everyone else. The Doctor and the Monk is the most interesting, given the history between the two Time Lords in the latter days of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. But this isn’t the Graeme Garden incarnation, and irritatingly the story doesn’t establish whether Hound is an earlier or later Monk. While the Doctor is coldly furious with the Monk, the Monk is utterly enigmatic – and that’s poor writing. Both possibilities are interesting: either the Monk is equally furious with the Doctor over Tamsin’s fate or the Monk has no idea why the Doctor is so angry with him, but without picking a lane the story turns it into a continuity question and I have no time for those.
The other problem here is that the Weeping Angels are a dreadful choice for audio. This was a problem in “Fallen Angels” in the Classic Doctors, New Monsters set and it’s a problem here. Again: these are completely silent beings whose appeal is entirely visual. If you watched “Blink” with the picture off you’d have no idea what was happening. But we’re trying it again on audio, meaning that characters have to describe where the statues are and what they are doing – and it sounds exactly as clunky as you’d expect – and the only way to describe the sudden appearance of an Angel is to employ a musical sting, which gets hilarious after the 57th time. The story also conflicts with what we know about them – the Time Lords interacted with them and struck a deal? The Doctor even points this out, which is another device I hate: you can’t do ridiculous, unbelievable things and justify it by having the characters point out the silliness unless you’re writing something openly satirical. There is a great callback to the idea that the image of an Angel can become an Angel, though – Fitton does understand why the Angels work and has good ideas for them, but trying to present those ideas on audio is a non-starter.
I didn’t like the War Doctor series in general and so I don’t like Doom Coalition trying to tie itself forward into that season. Big Finish also presumes that their listeners buy and listen to everything: at the very end of the story, Ollistra regenerates into the Jacqueline Pearce incarnation, and her first words come just before the ending theme. That’s great if you both recognize Pearce’s voice and know she plays the character in the War Doctor series; if you don’t, you’ll have absolutely no idea why that scene is at all significant or necessary.
There’s some good stuff in here despite my complaints. Paul McGann is fantastic, especially in the scenes with Rufus Hound – he is furious with the Monk, and his refusal to intervene on the Monk’s behalf at the end is both chilling and utterly in character. The first Dark Eyes set started with the Doctor trying to recover from the trauma of Lucie’s death, which was promptly ignored from then on, so it’s nice to see the idea reappear here. It’s odd that any references to those stories are delivered in vague terms, though – so we’re assuming that everyone listening has listened to the War Doctor stories but making concessions for people that never listened to the Eighth Doctor Adventures? Nonetheless, McGann really nails these scenes and expertly communicates that the trauma of losing a friend has stayed with him all this time. Hound himself is great throughout, especially in that final scene – he genuinely seems in disbelief that the Doctor would abandon him and his anguish is painful. And while Liv and Helen are often on the periphery of the story, their relationship continues to grow and deepen. The sound design and music are effective as well, even with the repeated Angel sting. Overall, “The Side of the Angels” is a mess, but there’s enough here to make it something of a worthwhile listen. Hopefully the finale will pick up the slack.
“Songs of Love” from Matt Fitton is the second story in the fourth Doom Coalition set, and it also employs a surprising format: a “Doctor-lite” story largely featuring River Song. It’s good for what it is – a showpiece for River – but the more the Doom Coalition arc develops, the less inspiring it seems.
Set concurrently to “Ship in a Bottle,” “Songs of Love” features River on Gallifrey, trying not to arouse suspicion as she works to undermine Padrac’s schemes from behind the scenes. There’s always more for River to do when the Doctor isn’t around, and his absence here leads to a tour de force for Alex Kingston and her character. Simply put, she’s brilliant – she effortlessly manipulates those around her, she uses her knowledge and unique abilities to surprising effect, and she’s even allowed a couple of moments of failure to balance things out. (The vortex manipulator scene is quite good.) Her scene with the Sonomancer is great for River (though not for the Sonomancer, which I’ll get to in a moment) and her subsequent goodbye with Paul McGann is fantastic. If someone could just explain to me how she’s able to be here in the first place, I wouldn’t have a single complaint about her role in the story.
The problem with “Songs of Love” is that there isn’t much going on with the characters besides what River gets up to. Looking at the good guys, the Doctor is barely in it and Liv and Helen spend their small part of the story running almost constantly. The brief time we spend with the two companions does flesh out their relationship, though, which continues to be interesting. Liv does not like it when her friends keep secrets, while Helen has been torn about keeping River’s secret for precisely that reason. I also like the subtle hints we get about Helen’s romantic interests, though I hope we never get a grand, obvious revelation in that regard.
The villains struggle even more in this story. The problem with Padrac is simple: he’s utterly uninteresting. There’s no depth to his character, no shade – and he’s clearly intended to be a three-dimensional character given the amount of time we spend with him. I accept the first part of his development: he saw Gallifrey’s doomed future and it pushed him over the edge. But there’s nothing sympathetic about him, no way for the audience to think that maybe he has a point, because his solution – destroy all other life in the entire universe – is utterly insane. Next, he makes an impassioned plea to his fellow Time Lords to go along with his plan to save themselves. And what does he do with those who disagree with his idea? Why, he has them all murdered! I see that Fitton is trying to foreshadow how the Time Lords will one day become as bad as the Daleks, but that runs headlong into the fact that we’ve already seen this in “The End of Time.” In that story, Rassilon intends the Time Lords to ascend to a higher plane and leave everything else in the universe to destruction, which is basically Padrac’s “Harmony” scheme with different decoration. But Rassilon’s role in that story was to teach us more about the Doctor; here, Padrac has to carry an hour-long story and it doesn’t quite work.
The Sonomancer is another problem. Her characterization has been almost comically inconsistent throughout the series, and here we see her smitten with Padrac, calling him “my love” and doing whatever is necessary to protect him, because at this point, why not? Naturally, he takes advantage of her devotion, which leads to the aforementioned scene in the Matrix in which River essentially gives the Sonomancer a pep talk about asserting herself in her relationship. For River, it’s an effective bit of manipulation; for the Sonomancer, it makes her seem like a teenager.
The Eleven shows up at the end but doesn’t do too much – and thankfully we manage to get through an entire story with him without one “Silence, all of you!” And lastly, “Songs of Love” is starting to lay the groundwork to connect this story directly to the Time War, introducing Cardinal Ollistra from the War Doctor series and heavily implying that the oncoming catastrophe is the Time War itself. This is a nice bit of universe building; it’s unfortunate that it’s building toward Big Finish’s concept of the Time War, however, because that Time War is largely boring and unimaginative. Still, I suppose they get credit for trying, and it’s not Doom Coalition’s fault what comes next. Overall, “Songs of Love” isn’t all that bad. It’s a great River Song story that’s let down by almost everything else, but the River material is good enough that it remains enjoyable throughout.
The fourth and final Doom Coalition starts off with a surprisingly quiet story: “Ship in a Bottle” from John Dorney. As the title implies, this story features only the three regulars – and while there is definitely some good character work on display, the story is a bit too mechanical to be truly great.
The concept of the “bottle episode” has been around since the original Star Trek – a story with limited scope, usually featuring only the regular cast, and set entirely within one location. It’s normally employed as a budgetary tool – “bottle” episodes save money for larger-scale episodes later on in a season. Of course, that’s not as much of a concern on audio – and the title tells us that Dorney is doing this because he wants to. The story picks up with the Doctor, Liv, and Helen marooned on a time ship traveling uncontrollably into the future. That future, of course, is devoid of life due to the machinations of Padrac and the rest of the Doom Coalition – and there’s no apparent way for the TARDIS crew to get back to the unaltered timeline. So there’s not much of a plot, as they have to discover a way out of their situation and then put it to use. Naturally, they succeed.
But the lack of plot is acceptable in a story like this: the true interest comes from how these characters interact in an enclosed space when presented with an impossible situation. And this is where the mechanical feeling comes out: the characters take turns being fatalistic and talking each other out of their depressions. The Doctor always seems slightly out of character when he gets into moods like this: he discovers the time rudders aren’t there, so he gives up on trying and resigns himself to thousands of idle years reading and watching movies? I understand the aim here is to demonstrate Liv’s leadership and resourcefulness, but she discovers another escape route after examining the schematics for about 30 seconds. She also declares, quite seriously, that she’s a doctor and as a result she never gives up, thus inspiring the Doctor himself to keep going – and that’s thematically resonant, of course, but part of proper medical training is to learn when to give up!
Apart from that, there are some great moments in here, particularly near the start when Liv rightly berates the Doctor for abandoning them. Helen shies away when the Doctor snaps at her, and Liv even goes out of her way to defend Helen and build her back up again. I also enjoyed the Doctor rightly taking offense at the suggestion that one of the Eleven could be mistaken for him. There’s an interesting dynamic among the TARDIS crew, and it’s easy to forget they haven’t been traveling together for very long given the comfort and chemistry between the performers. When the Doctor finally devises a madcap scheme to escape their imprisonment, he starts to explain why it’s their only choice – but Helen and Liv are already on board. Despite the friction, there’s a lot of trust in this group. I hope this set doesn’t split them up for too long.
Ken Bentley directs, while Benji Clifford provides the sound design and Jamie Robertson the score. The atmosphere is claustrophobic despite the comfortable-sounding ship interior, and the sequence of the Doctor clambering across the outside of the ship is very well presented. Overall, “Ship in a Bottle” is a very good start to the final Doom Coalition set. It’s not an all-time great or anything like that, but it’s good to hear a small-scale, personal story before we get into what will probably feature a lot of yelling and things exploding.
Right off the bat, I have to say I’m surprised. It’s the final War Doctor story from Big Finish and it’s by Nicholas Briggs, so I was expecting his usual hard-bitten Dalek Empire reprisal and anticipating some appeals to nostalgia. I was shocked to discover none of those things – instead, it’s an attempt to do something different. It’s clunky, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
The biggest problem with the story is that the Enigma are basically nothing more than a plot device. The Daleks are desperate to find a way to win the Time War, so they leave this dimension entirely and journey to a different one in search of an advantage. Once there, they find a race to whom time has no meaning, and who have the ability to rewrite history at will. So the Daleks order them to rewrite history such that Gallifrey becomes a Dalek planet, and the Enigma start to do so because the Daleks take hostages. It makes sense when written down, but it’s not very dramatic: the Daleks found a race of beings that can rewrite all of history on a whim? Well that’s convenient! The moral dilemma that it sets up also isn’t very relatable, as it depends on the decision-making of those very same aliens that we know nothing about. Yes, they’re troubled by the Doctor’s sadness, but without a good sense of their needs or desires it’s impossible to expect anything. And while that does introduce an element of surprise, good drama should arise naturally from the characters’ decision-making.
Fortunately, Briggs does a much better job with the regular characters. The War Doctor in particular has the opportunity to affect the outcome of the war, and his decision is unsurprising yet very dramatically effective: he wants to wipe out both the Daleks and the Time Lords. This of course ties together with “The Day of the Doctor,” but it also feels like a natural progression for this character based on what we’ve seen over the four box sets. It also undercuts his relationship with Ollistra: they’ve become steadily closer as this set has unfolded, but this decision demonstrates that their closeness has been artificial and born of necessity. And I like what he does with Ollistra – she’s softening and starting to see things from the Doctor’s perspective, so for the Doctor to essentially dismiss her is powerful.
Leela, however, is still a problem. After spending most of the last story with her mind addled by a time weapon, she spends most of this one as the vessel through which the Enigma communicates. As a result, we spend two hours with the character and barely get to see her as herself. Leela’s part of the story is also thematically troublesome: at best, it’s patronizing; at worst, it’s colonialist. While it’s true that the fourth Doctor would playfully refer to Leela as “savage,” here Briggs embraces some sort of ridiculous notion that Leela’s savage brain is unsullied by negative emotions and immoral thoughts and thus ideal to support the Enigma. Leaving aside the fact that this blatantly contradicts what we saw of the Sevateem in “The Face of Evil,” it also ignores the fact that Leela has spent countless years living on Gallifrey along with even more years among a myriad of alien civilizations. So the only possible explanation is that her “savage” origin means her brain is physically different – and that’s the thought process that has been used to justify all sorts of horrifically racist behavior through history. I’m not saying that Briggs thinks that way, of course, but this “noble savage” stuff crops up in Big Finish from time to time even though it’s been decades since most writers retired that way of thinking.
Perhaps I’m grading on a curve, but overall, “The Enigma Dimension” is pretty good. It shows ambition beyond simple nostalgia and showcases some imaginative concepts while developing the principal character in interesting ways. The obvious flaws in its thinking keep it from reaching any great heights, but given what I was expecting, I was pleasantly surprised. I should also point out that the technical aspects of the entire box set have been first rate, with Briggs himself directing all three stories and Howard Carter providing the music and sound design. It’s a shame that “not bad” is such a high standard for this series, but it’s too late to change that now.
7/10
It’s amazing as Doctor Who fans that we got to experience John Hurt playing a previously unknown incarnation of our favorite character. And while it was even more amazing that he was willing to reprise the role on audio, it was sadly unfortunate that his failing health was the impetus for his participation. So we’re left with twelve War Doctor stories beyond what we saw on television, and it pains me to describe the range as a massive missed opportunity. While Hurt himself was excellent throughout – as one would expect from one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation – the stories too often resorted to obvious, boring war movie clichés, often taking the most unimaginative options available and never truly exploring what a Time War could be. There were a couple of enjoyable exceptions, but the lesson learned should be that of Russell T. Davies, who never dramatized the Time War because he knew there would be no way to do it justice on screen. So while it was great that Big Finish secured the participation of one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation, perhaps they should have heeded the advice of one of the most acclaimed dramatists of his generation instead. Is it better to have any new Doctor Who starring John Hurt instead of none at all? I suppose so, but in the end, this was a chance to tell new, exciting stories that broke through the boundaries – and instead they’re just average Doctor Who stories with a slightly different design. This isn’t what I want out of drama, in other words, and to say that about something with such potential is a crushing disappointment – which is an apt description for the range as a whole.
Okay, let’s start here: “The Lady of Obsidian” is an awkward title and “The Obsidian Lady” works much better. With that out of the way, we can discuss Andrew Smith’s story, the penultimate adventure featuring John Hurt as the War Doctor, and one that ties the series back to the past for the first time. It’s another solid entry in the range, though it mostly ignores its own potential and doesn’t accomplish anywhere near what it should.
It makes sense for Leela to be the first classic series character to appear in the War Doctor range: she has a long history on Gallifrey, especially if you’ve listened to the Gallifrey audio range, and her timeline is confused just enough to make her an ideal participant in a time war. She’s also the most openly violent companion: she’s more than willing to kill to gain an advantage, an instinct the Doctor tries to restrain throughout their travels. So how would this most warlike of companions react to meeting the War Doctor, the man who has so betrayed his morality that he won’t even call himself the Doctor? I don’t know either, because the story doesn’t explore the idea. Instead, we learn that a time weapon wounded Leela in a battle with the Daleks. Rather than removing her from history as intended, the weapon scrambled her mind, rendering her capable of seeing not only her true memories but also every possible memory arising from every single choice. She can remember staying on Gallifrey to marry Andred, but she can also remember remaining with the Sevateem and eventually becoming a mother. She remembers surviving countless battles and being killed in every single one. And so on – this is actually a very interesting idea, but unfortunately all Smith does with it is have Leela occasionally hold her head and moan about how confusing it all is. With the way she’s written and performed, it makes zero sense that she could lead an effective resistance group against the Daleks.
Of course, the other problem is that the story spends so much time with Leela under the influence of this injury that we barely get to see her actual personality. So while the Doctor recognizes her and wants to help her, she has no idea if he’s trustworthy or indeed even real. Instead of using her as a counterpoint to the War Doctor, instead of exploring (for example) how the war has changed her relative to how it has changed the Doctor, Smith presents Leela as a puzzle to be solved. As a result, we learn nothing about either character and instead spend more time with the action sequences. At the end of the story, Leela declares that she knows the Doctor is the same man, because he has the same eyes and the same soul. But this comes out of nowhere – before that, she’s barely coherent! Of course she thinks he’s a good guy, he just cured her!
Oh, there’s another monster introduced in this story – some sort of revenants from another, potential universe who are bleeding into our reality through a crack in time. They are feral, bestial distortions of humanity, consumed by a desire to rip apart everything they see. Also, they can capture and skillfully fly a Dalek scout ship. We eventually learn that they’re just trying to defend their own existence, which shouldn’t even be real – but again, rather than exploring this in any depth, the story just blows them up when they’re no longer convenient. Honestly, they’re an obvious plot device from the start: we need a good excuse for why the Daleks don’t just pursue the Doctor straight into the nebula, so here’s a random alien menace that will do it for them.
It’s a shame, because John Hurt and Louise Jameson play well off one another. We also get to see Ollistra evolving as a character, becoming more heroic in spite of herself due to her time with the Doctor. But if that’s going to go anywhere interesting, there’s only one more story left to do it. Overall, “The Lady of Obsidian” is good enough at what it does, but disappointing in what it doesn’t even try.
It’s the final War Doctor set – and with the unfortunate passing of John Hurt, we can be sure there won’t be any more. It’s always a little unusual to experience a performance knowing the performer has since passed away, but one can at least hope that the material does him justice. The first story in the set, “Pretty Lies” by Guy Adams, is largely quite strong, though it takes a rather unfortunate thematic approach.
I understand what Adams is going for, to begin with. Schandel (Joseph Kloska) is a well-known archetype: the overeager reporter willing to bend the truth for the purposes of either entertainment or propaganda. He’s from some nebulous point in the future, and he knows the Doctor’s reputation: the great, heroic warrior who defeated the Daleks. (This raises an interesting question: when is Schandel from? Generally speaking, those we’ve seen on TV who knew about the Time War, the Time Lords, or the Doctor were terrified, disgusted, or occasionally sympathetic – but nobody ever hailed him as a hero.) The Doctor, of course, knows the truth about himself: he’s little more than a particularly effective soldier, doing un-heroic things in the name of the greater good. (Again, the Doctor’s words jar with what we know about him. He laments that he has become an amoral killer when he clearly hasn’t – and I know the ultimate point of the War Doctor is that he’s still the same man underneath it all, but we’re not supposed to know that yet!) So after initially dismissing Schandel as an ignorant propagandist, the Doctor realizes he can use Schandel’s reporting to his advantage and enlists him to craft a fake broadcast to deceive the Dalek invaders. This is a solid exploration of the nature of truth in reporting, especially in wartime. My problem comes with the current political climate: as of this writing, the legitimacy and honesty of the media is being directly challenged, with truth being viewed as the enemy of politicians who lie and conspire as easily as they breathe. I’m not particularly interested right now in a story about the dishonest media being used to deceive the enemy, not when real journalists are being threatened for nothing more than doing their jobs. Not that this is Adams’ fault, and I do think it’s a legitimate topic to explore – but for those reasons it does not appeal to me.
Apart from that, this is a strong, entertaining action epic. We get to see the Doctor and Ollistra working together – their relationship is a little too chummy from what we’ve seen before, but it’s good to see Ollistra in action as an effective military leader in order to give the Doctor time to think. The Daleks are also impressively scary without resorting too much to Dalek clichés. The cast is good and the production is strong. It’s nothing revolutionary, in other words, but if the range had been up to this standard all along I’d have been happy.
I spent most of my review of “The Beast of Kravenos” lamenting how Big Finish’s institutional nostalgia for the Fourth Doctor Adventures evidently doesn’t extend to season 18. The second entry in this year’s series, “The Eternal Battle” from Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, doesn’t really do it either, but at least it’s a more entertaining story than its predecessor.
Scott and Wright are among my favorite Big Finish writers – they’re very good at adapting an action esthetic to audio, and “The Eternal Battle” puts that skill on full display. There’s a war raging on an unknown planet between Sontarans and humans, with one horrible twist: something is causing the dead to rise, turning them into zombies who indiscriminately attack both sides. The Doctor and Romana find themselves with the Sontarans, whose position is slowly eroding as the zombies kill and convert more and more of their soldiers. The story doesn’t spell it out, but this ties into the central season 18 theme of entropy increasing: both sides of the conflict are slowly being converted into the same mindless final outcome and cannot be converted back. However, if the story is trying to come across as a zombie movie, it fails to do so – the “zombies” seem to exist on the periphery for most of the story, there’s very little body horror, and any thematic significance went unnoticed, at least by me.
This is a very good Sontaran story, featuring yet another great performance from Dan Starkey. It’s always interesting to take defined recurring villains and put them in unusual situations, and a Sontaran army on the brink of exhaustion and defeat is highly unusual. It’s most effective because their usual desire to die gloriously in battle is completely undercut by their situation: any glorious death will lead to their resurrection as a member of the opposition. It’s through this conflict that Scott and Wright get around the question of why the Sontarans don’t just shoot the Doctor on sight – Field Major Lenk knows that their old enemy may be able to find a way out, and his loyalty to his men overrides any desire for revenge. Lenk is my favorite part of the story, actually – he’s a genuinely good leader, above and beyond tactical skill, and he’s not played for laughs.
Is something going on with Lalla Ward? This is the second story in a row where she’s played Romana as particularly sarcastic and irritable – I know that her relationship with Tom Baker had frayed by season 18, but this is taking nostalgia a step too far. In all seriousness, it’s a jarring portrayal, and I’m curious about the reasons behind it. Tom Baker is his usual incorrigible self, and he and Starkey play quite well off one another.
The major drawback here is that the resolution isn’t particularly interesting. The story takes a major shift away from action movie to a much more typical Doctor Who ending: there’s an alien computer carrying out orders from a dead world that are no longer applicable, and the Doctor has to figure out how to stop it. It’s executed well, of course – I would expect nothing less from Scott and Wright – but it seems inconsistent with the rest of the story and a little predictable to boot.
Credit is due to Jamie Robertson, whose score takes the season 18 electronic approach but pitches it to a more fast-paced story. Overall, “The Eternal Battle” is a solid, entertaining story that does some interesting work with the Sontarans. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely above average, especially for a Fourth Doctor Adventure.
The second entry in the 2017-opening Peter Davison trilogy is “The Contingency Club” by Phil Mulryne, another trip back into the history of London. While there isn’t much to the story, it’s still entertaining enough to pass the time, and the characters once again make it worthwhile.
It’s 1864 in London, and as the blurb says, anyone calling himself a gentleman is a member of a gentlemen’s club. They’ve all got admission requirements – wealth, countries visited, and so forth – but the most desirable one is the Contingency Club, whose membership is nearly impossible to acquire. Naturally, the TARDIS lands inside the Contingency Club, and the TARDIS crew is thrown into a web of intrigue.
The script does a good job of building suspense – the Doctor and his companions slowly encounter stranger and stranger things inside the club before things get even more complicated – but there’s virtually no payoff. The entire first half of the story is consumed by the Doctor and his companions wandering from place to place and meeting vaguely threatening people without anything eventful happening. And when we finally learn what’s going on, it doesn’t feel rewarding. I understand that it’s trying to take the usual Doctor Who plot in an interesting new direction. There’s a scene where the Doctor confronts the villain, dismisses her as just another power-made megalomaniac, but she corrects him – she’s not like that at all, she’s just playing a game! But of course she is like that, because Lorelei King plays her like a megalomaniac when a much more dispassionate performance may have been more interesting.
Fortunately, the main cast is once again on top form. Mulryne uses the time-tested device of splitting the crew up and pairing them off with guest characters, and it works quite well. Tegan, in particular, is a great match for this time period – although I was surprised she didn’t get more irate. Adric and Nyssa also make a surprisingly good team. I like how the script distinguishes between their areas of expertise, with Adric handling the more abstract mathematical problems and Nyssa using her scientific knowledge to deal with the others. And much like in the previous story, Mulryne presents Adric as a likable, understandable character. He can be an obnoxious teenager, yes, but he’s also a rational, relatable look into the story that provides a counterpoint to Tegan and Nyssa.
Still, I don’t have much to say about the story itself. It doesn’t aspire to be anything greater than a pleasant runaround, and while it’s pleasant enough, and there’s certainly a lot of running around, it’s rather forgettable.
After the success of “One Rule,” the monthly Torchwood release that featured the return of Tracy-Ann Oberman as Yvonne Hartman, it made sense for Big Finish to return to that period of Torchwood history. That return comes in “Torchwood One: Before the Fall,” a three-story miniseries showing just how things worked for Yvonne, Ianto, and their coworkers at Canary Wharf. Despite the relatively obscure subject matter, the set works well – it’s easily the best of the three Torchwood box sets thus far released by Big Finish.
The set consists of three separate discs: “New Girl,” by Joseph Lidster; “Through the Ruins,” by Jenny T. Colgan; and “Uprising,” by Matt Fitton. This is misleading, though: despite the three titles and three authors, “Before the Fall” is very much one story, with each part taking place at a different time in the overall plot. It tells the story, start to finish, of Rachel Allan (Sophie Winkleman), a new Torchwood recruit who rises rapidly through the ranks until she supplants Yvonne as the director of Torchwood One. Lidster’s story – the best of the three – starts with her first day, and walks us through employee orientation at Torchwood. While it was obvious on TV simply from the scale that Torchwood One was much different from Torchwood Three, here we see the daily activities of the massive corporation dominating Canary Wharf. Rather than a few people scrambling to protect Wales, this is a gigantic organization that looks from the outside just like any other large office. In fact, some of the characters comment on this – much of the clerical staff works there for the salary and benefits rather than out of any strong desire to protect Britain from extraterrestrial threats. It’s fascinating to watch Rachel go through this – there’s a very clichéd moment where Rachel talks to Yvonne without knowing who she is that is undercut later on when Yvonne darkly mentions how they torture spies and infiltrators.
But, of course (spoilers), Rachel is an infiltrator, and she’s actually there to gain control of the organization. The plot has to take a major leap to make this happen, and sadly it doesn’t work. While it’s very convincing in showing Rachel gaining the trust of her coworkers and casually manipulating people into doing her dirty work, it has her do this under the appearance of a clumsy, nervous new employee. This explains why people trust her, but it doesn’t explain why she’s suddenly put in charge of the entire organization when a disaster threatens Yvonne’s control. The story also takes pains to show that she’s relatively ordinary, and that her vendetta against Torchwood is based around her father’s accidental death, “collateral damage” from an alien invasion. You might recognize this as the plot of “Captain America: Civil War,” but here the story considers that someone like Rachel wouldn’t actually know what she was doing. Thus, as soon as things go awry, she has absolutely no idea how to solve the problem, and her regime collapses, allowing Yvonne to take over once again. It all makes sense, but it results in Rachel looking stupid and making me wonder how Torchwood fell for her ruse in the first place.
Of course, I understand that the authors are also telling a story about Yvonne, about how she is a genuinely good leader, one who understands her employees inside and out and one who has gained their respect, even if her methods are sometimes questionable. Rachel is a good point of comparison – she sees her staff as interchangeable means to her ends rather than as individuals with wants and desires. It’s no surprise that Ianto never stops trusting Yvonne – he’s got the best sense for that sort of thing – and it’s also good to have him around as a grounded counterpoint to the ambition on display. But I keep coming back to the point that playing up Yvonne’s ability minimizes the threat posed by Rachel, and that’s not good if you’re expecting drama to take up three hours of running time. Scenes like the “away day” are gripping enough in the moment, but the idea that Rachel would be so incompetent as to get her own people killed and that there wouldn’t immediately be an uprising – when they threw Yvonne out for something very similar – just defies belief and takes me out of the story.
Overall, though, this is a successful release. Apart from the one massive leap of logic, there’s nothing flagrantly wrong with the plot, and the character work on display allows us to get to know several new, interesting personalities. I came away from “Torchwood One: Before the Fall” thinking that I wanted to hear more from this group, and in the end that’s what you’re looking for in an ongoing range.
Another new year is upon us, and with it has arrived a new series of Fourth Doctor Adventures. Every year, I go into these with a renewed sense of hope that this will be the year Big Finish stops wasting the contributions of the most beloved of all Doctors, and every year I wind up disappointed. Now, as the sixth year begins with Justin Richards’ “The Beast of Kravenos,” I am once again hopeful – and already I’ve been handed a disappointment.
It’s a Justin Richards story, so you know what you’re getting: a competent plot, characters that don’t stray too far from their archetypes, and a sense that everything involved knows its limitations. Frankly, I’m not that interested in discussing “Kravenos” as a story, because it’s nothing we haven’t heard ten thousand times before. Much more interesting is its relationship to Big Finish, and the company’s attitude toward nostalgia.
I’m frequently on record saying that nostalgia does little for me and that I find continuity largely uninteresting. Many fans love debating the correct chronological placement of each Big Finish story; more power to them, but I couldn’t care less. Similarly, while I think it’s important for Doctor Who to stay attuned to its past, outright nostalgia doesn’t earn any bonus points with me. Just because a story is a perfect recreation of its era doesn’t mean it’s good: season 19 may have had Castrovalva and Kinda, but it also had Four to Doomsday and Time-Flight, and a slavish recreation of season 19 can just as easily produce the latter as the former. Big Finish, at least under Nicholas Briggs’ stewardship of the Doctor Who range, has wholly embraced nostalgia as a defining characteristic of their work, and nowhere is this better represented than in the Fourth Doctor Adventures. Briggs has described the range as an attempt to recapture how he felt watching Doctor Who as a teenager in the 1970s, and you can see that throughout the five series. There’s a strong embrace of the Hinchcliffe-era gothic horror motif, but it’s leavened by a lot of Williams-era humor. This is how the same series can, for example, involve both mysterious goings-on in a quaint English village as well as the Master teaming up with the Kraals. If you’ve followed my reviews, you’ll know that I do not find this to be advantageous; instead, I think this obsessive focus on nostalgia hurts the company’s ability to tell new and interesting stories involving Tom Baker.
So now we come to “Kravenos” and we notice something interesting: it’s set during season 18. We’ve got the Peter Howell theme, the Doctor on the cover in the red coat – there’s no question about it, this is season 18. And unlike any other season in the classic series, season 18 features very strong thematic consistency as well as a consistent visual and aural aesthetic. Even a story like “State of Decay,” which was explicitly repurposed from an earlier era, is produced in a manner utterly unique to this single year of Doctor Who. So while I don’t clamor for nostalgia, if you’re going to produce a story set in season 18 as part of a range whose very existence is predicated on nostalgia, I think at a bare minimum you should try to recapture the style of that season. Naturally, “Kravenos” doesn’t bother. It’s exactly the same Hinchcliffe/Williams amalgamation that we’ve been listening to for five years before this. And Briggs’ explanations for this insult the intelligence. Imagine, he replies when asked about the period-inappropriate music, if Dudley Simpson had been asked to stay on for one more story. The problem with this idea is that it presumes that it would ever have been a possibility. John Nathan-Turner didn’t change Doctor Who’s entire aesthetic by accident; he wanted to give the series a kick up the ass and restart it in a bold, new direction. If you watch the Tom Baker era in sequence, the Howell theme alone at the start of The Leisure Hive is a complete shock to the system. Simpson would never have been kept on for season 18. To imagine that he would have is to imagine the history of the series is false. I do believe, therefore, that if you are going to explicitly set a story in season 18, you have an obligation to embrace its aesthetic, just like you wouldn’t populate a season 17 story with dour, humorless characters.
But that’s the point. The “nostalgia” that dominates the Fourth Doctor Adventures isn’t a steadfast determination to recreate a particular era or season of the show – if it were, “Kravenos” would not have been produced for this series. Instead, it’s a long-running attempt to recreate how Nick Briggs felt when he watched it at 16. And Briggs doesn’t like season 18, so here we are. Ultimately, “Kravenos” is just another in a long line of generic Tom Baker Doctor Who stories, but with season 18 décor cynically slapped on it in an attempt to get fans of that season to buy it. Yes, at least it’s a Justin Richards generic runaround, and there’s lots of fun scenes with Jago and Litefoot, and the cast is well-represented (except for Lalla Ward, whose Romana sounds bitter, miserable, and mean), and K9 gets some good lines – but if you’re tired of every damn one of these being yet another recreation of tea time 1977, you won’t find any solace here, no matter what pretty star field they plaster across the cover.
The 2017 monthly range kicks off with “The Star Men” from Andrew Smith, a story that marks the monthly range debut of Matthew Waterhouse in the role of Adric. It’s driven by some fine ideas, it’s suitably atmospheric, and since it’s written by Adric’s creator he gets a lot of good material – but it’s also overwritten, obvious, and largely unsurprising.
We’ve only seen Waterhouse in a few Big Finish stories to date, starting with his test run in the Fifth Doctor Box Set from a while back. But “The Star Men” sounds like he’s been working with his former colleagues for ages – there’s no awkwardness, no sense that Adric is out of place. (Well, no sense greater than the usual.) Smith also gives him some great material: we see his obsession with solving problems, his childish insistence upon being right, and we even get a budding romance with Autumn (Sophie Wu), a fellow prodigy who finds Adric appealing. Some of this is too obvious, particularly Adric’s habit of standing at computer banks trying to solve difficult problems while a deadline approaches. I wonder what that’s foreshadowing! But for the most part this is a great opportunity for Adric to take center stage, and Waterhouse takes full advantage with a surprisingly nuanced performance.
Let’s also mention the first episode, which is brilliant – it’s basically just the TARDIS crew discovering a mystery and going to investigate it, along with a nicely casual way to skirt around the “who are you and what are you doing here” problem. The cliffhanger is great – no forced, immediate danger, just a group setting off on a journey into another galaxy. It’s a great setup for what sounds like an intelligent, high-concept sci-fi story, combined with some great sound design and atmosphere.
Unfortunately, the other episodes don’t live up to the promise of the first. The basic idea here is that aliens (the Star Men of the title) from another universe are using portals to travel into ours, and aim to use their “supernatural” abilities to conquer all inhabited space. It’s standard megalomania, in other words, and unfortunately Smith doesn’t do anything to deepen this characterization: the physics of the other universe are largely ignored and the aliens are entirely one-note. There’s a bit where Nyssa and Tegan travel into the other universe and it’s basically just like ours, except with lizard men running around and rebels vs. evil overlords. I understand that it’s hard, if not impossible, to present a universe on audio with different laws of physics – we learned this back with the Divergent Universe, after all – but why build your story around a concept like that if you’re not going to use it?
Fortunately, Smith has a good handle on the characterization of the regulars, which lends both competence and confidence to the production. The actors respond well, especially Peter Davison, who doesn’t get to play the “why don’t they listen to me” version of his Doctor all that often. The production is great – I still think Barnaby Edwards is Big Finish’s best Doctor Who director, and the sound design from Steve Foxon is excellent. In sum, there’s not much going on here, but “The Star Men” does what it does skillfully enough. If you want a well-made, well-acted story that puts Adric at center stage and actually makes you sympathize with him, this is your story. If you want something daring and boundary pushing, what are you doing in the monthly range to begin with?
This second Diary of River Song set has attempted to thread an arc through its four stories, and unfortunately it has failed in this attempt. When “World Enough and Time” ended, countless alternate Earths were spilling through into our reality; when “The Eye of the Storm” picks up, all but one of those Earths has been sent back. Eh? How did that work? This is the problem with “Eye” as a whole: it doesn’t make much sense. The Speravore plan seems both overly simplistic – they just want to feed – and yet overly complex, and it doesn’t help that writer Matt Fitton tries to boil the whole thing down into one moral choice. The alternate Earths split off from one point in history, see, and we spend the first part of the story getting to know the (irritatingly overwritten) young couple at the heart of the split. So with two Doctors involved, they approach the problem from different angles: the sixth Doctor throws himself into danger, thinking of sacrificing himself to save the couple, while the seventh Doctor stays behind, orchestrating a means to save the universe by deleting them from the timelines. This is the dichotomy Fitton illustrates between the Doctors: the sixth doesn’t think of the consequences while the seventh thinks of nothing else. And River is in the middle, imploring them to act more like their future selves and find the third way out – but since she’s the only representative of the modern TV series, she has to do it herself. This would all be fantastic but for one problem: her brilliant third solution is to convince the young couple to voluntarily commit suicide rather than let the seventh Doctor take them unawares. Really? We’re back to innocent people sacrificing themselves so the Doctor doesn’t have to kill them or die himself? That’s the better way? It’s a shame, because I like some of the character stuff, like how River has a romantic thing going on with the sixth Doctor, or how her charms are completely ineffective when turned on the seventh. The final conversation over tea is an entertaining cap to an otherwise weak story which serves as the finale to a weak, disappointing set. I can’t help but notice that, with one or two rare exceptions, Steven Moffat wrote every single line of River’s TV appearances. Perhaps that was for the best.
I have no idea if this is true, but “World Enough and Time” from James Goss seems as though it started from two particular images and built a story around them. The first image is the Doctor working as the managing director of a modern corporation, which is interesting; the second is the Doctor and River on a date quoting Andrew Marvell at each other, which is not. The biggest problem with the story, by far, is that the sixth Doctor is wildly out of character throughout. There’s a constant implication that something is keeping him from acting like his usual self – perhaps something is done during his regular trips into the dream machines – but it’s never spelled out and, more importantly, we never see him go back to normal. It’s an interesting idea for an episode in a continuing serial – think “Mindwarp” – but for his first appearance in the River Song series, it’s a horrible misstep. But that might be tolerable if River wasn’t also out of character: she spends the majority of the story believing the Doctor is in on the conspiracy underlying Golden Futures and thinking he’s betrayed her. Why? It’s never clear, which is a mistake for a character defined in part by her trust in the Doctor. Add to this the pretentious, unnecessary Marvell quotes – “To His Coy Mistress” indeed – and you have a recipe for a surprisingly poor story from a typically strong writer. Hopefully this set will rebound in the final story, because this has been very disappointing thus far.
I love your reviews, and cite them often. I finally started listening to Big Finish last year…already bought about 70 of them! The best material of Colin, Sylvester, and Paul make Tom’s run unlistenable. Even the fanboy-friendly Doc Oho rated this story 5/10. Thanks for the great reviews!
So what happened to all life on Earth? After “Five Twenty-Nine,” a concept piece by John Dorney, we don’t exactly know – but we do know that whatever happened most likely killed everyone on the planet. The effect is circling Earth, killing everyone in each time zone in sequence. While this is a good twist on an “encroaching doom” scenario, I am forced to wonder if this effect basically just hits 1/24 of Earth at a time, or if it actually respects the utterly arbitrary, human-created time zone borders. It must, because doomsday strikes at 5:29 in each time zone, right? That’s not that important, though. Dorney tells the story by matching River up with a small family living on an island, making the script a race against time: she can’t save everyone, but can she at least save these people? As it turns out, she can’t – and she’s most frustrated by their willingness to give up and surrender to their fates. I was, too, but it makes sense, as long as you don’t wonder why they wouldn’t want to keep fighting for their child – but that’s why the script contrives to make their daughter an android, so they can rest assured that she’d survive the purge. (A married couple tries desperately to have a child, but for whatever reason, they are unable to. Naturally, the next step is to… sell all their possessions and use the proceeds to buy an android child? Eh? Is adoption not a thing in the future?) Still, Dorney makes it work – he’s very good at these small, personal stories – but the side is let down significantly by Salome Haertel, whose performance as the android Rachel is more wooden than the desk I’m sitting at. Some will argue, I’m sure, that this is deliberate, that this is an attempt to sound “robotic” – but if it is, it doesn’t work. Frankly, it sounds like she’s just reading off the page. I know she’s Alex Kingston’s daughter, and I know she doesn’t have many acting credits, but this was bad enough that it basically ruined the story for me. Aside from that, though, this is an effectively emotional, character-driven story that works as intended and features a great ending. It’s not Dorney’s best, but it’s a step up from the first story.
The second River Song box set from Big Finish wastes no time: the first story, “The Unknown” by Guy Adams, throws us right into an adventure. River is accompanying an experimental Earth ship as it investigates a strange phenomenon and in the process it collides with something in the time vortex. That something turns out to be the seventh Doctor’s TARDIS, and so the two must work together with the ship’s crew to solve the problem. “The Unknown” is basically “Nightmare of Eden” without any of the interesting subplots – it’s only worthwhile because it puts Alex Kingston and Sylvester McCoy together and lets their characters interact. And even this isn’t that interesting: he’s not a big fan of her methods, which provides some sparks, but the story doesn’t draw much of a contrast between this Doctor and his other incarnations. It also plays around with memory, naturally, which means that by the end nobody remembers anything about what happened. I know, I know, they have to keep continuity consistent with the TV show, but what’s the point of the story if you’re going to delete everyone’s memory? Nobody can learn anything from or be changed in any way by their experiences. In short, a mediocre runaround.
Unfortunately, Big Finish’s superlative Doctor Who Novel Adaptations range is ending, ostensibly due to poor sales. While some may argue that audio adaptations of novels we already have is needlessly reductive, it is difficult to deny that the results have been some of the best releases in the recent history of the company. And so we come to “Cold Fusion,” adapted by Lance Parkin from his original novel – it’s possibly the most celebrated Missing Adventure, and it brings the range to a very strong close.
Thank heavens they made this a six-parter. There is so much going on in “Cold Fusion” that any attempt to do it justice in two hours would have failed. As it stands, it still feels a bit overcrowded: you’ve got an ice world run by the scientific elite who criminalize any unscientific thought, an underground terrorist group looking to strike a critical blow against the elite, an ancient TARDIS entombed in a mountain, an alternate universe version of Time Lords bleeding through the cracks in reality and appearing as ghosts, a female Time Lord who may have been the Doctor’s wife in a past life, and a whole lot of continuity references besides, not to mention two Doctors and five companions. Parkin somehow makes it all hold together, though the story feels like an adventure romp as a result, rushing from scene to scene and location to location.
The characters are the best part of the story. In keeping with its Missing Adventure roots, this is a fifth Doctor story, set soon after his regeneration with Nyssa, Tegan, and Adric. The seventh Doctor, Chris, and Roz are guest stars, though each gets to take center stage as the story progresses. The conceit is very smart: the fifth Doctor is investigating a mystery for which the seventh Doctor is at least partially responsible, and keeps stumbling into his successor’s plans as things continue. I love scenes like the fifth Doctor accidentally finding a secret escape hatch with convenient rope ladder and welding the door shut behind him, only for Roz to later enter the same room and be unable to find the same secret escape hatch despite looking for it. We also get characters interchanged: Adric and Roz, or Nyssa and Chris, provide new and entertaining dynamics separate from what we normally got on television.
The adaptation makes a mistake by not drawing as much of a line between the two Doctors as the book. In the novel, the fifth Doctor is reactive and often ineffectual, something tied both to his personality and his recent regeneration. Here, apart from an early scene in the TARDIS cloisters, there’s no evidence of any of that. Similarly, in the novel, the seventh Doctor is at his darkest and most manipulative; here, he comes across as flying much more by the seat of his pants. There’s a point at the end where the fifth Doctor realizes that, unlike previous encounters with his other selves, his future incarnation remembers exactly what happened the first time around. But this isn’t borne out by the story in any significant way, which robs that scene of much of its meaning. That being said, the final scene between Davison and McCoy is a lot of fun – and at this point I’d like to know why we couldn’t have more of this. Why not a main range trilogy of multi-Doctor stories?
My other issue with the adaptation lies with Patience (Christine Kavanagh) and how she is described. At the time the novel was published, her character was part of the groundwork for a new direction for the series that ended up curtailed when Virgin lost the license. She was always intended to be a mystery, in other words – but in this adaptation her character is so vague as to be utterly pointless. Unless you’re versed in the Virgin mythology, you’re not going to have any idea that the Doctor’s tale of an ancient, lost Time Lord is referring to “the Other” and not, say, Omega. As it stands, all we learn from the audio is that Patience is herself an ancient Time Lord and that she might know the Doctor or it might just be a function of a faulty telepathic link. It didn’t even leave me wanting to know more, honestly – just confused about what I’d just heard.
Overall, though, “Cold Fusion” holds together quite well. All seven regular characters are given a lot to do, and all seven actors turn in fine performances. Matthew Waterhouse in particular shines as Adric, who is unexpectedly and genuinely funny on more than one occasion. Director Jamie Anderson does an admirable job keeping everything under control, and the sound design from Fool Circle Productions sounds great, like it came straight out of the Radiophonic Workshop in 1982. There are some struggles with condensing an overstuffed novel into the audio format, but Parkin is skilled enough to make it work – and I like the feeling that there are too many ideas here to completely flesh them all out. “Cold Fusion,” and indeed all of the novel adaptations, brings to audio an era when Doctor Who novels were genuinely ambitious, when writers of spinoff media weren’t always content merely to slavishly recreate a particular television season. Even the Missing Adventures pushed boundaries, and “Cold Fusion” was one of the best in that regard. The range will be missed – I hope the rest of Big Finish’s output picks up the slack.
The tenth Big Finish novel adaptation is once again taken from the ranks of the New Adventures: Andy Lane’s “Original Sin,” adapted by John Dorney. It’s probably the least accessible release in this range to people who weren’t into the books – it’s not written by a famous TV author, it doesn’t feature any TV companions, etc. – but Dorney does his best to make it work in this format. Unfortunately, one problem is too big to overcome.
Original Sin is one of the longest New Adventures, clocking in at over 300 pages, and not with the print in the new series novels you can see from outer space, either. It’s absolutely stuffed with continuity references and world building, as it simultaneously tries to tell the story of the end of the Earth Empire, introduce two new companions, and bring back a 1960s villain. It’s one of the better books in the range, but even so it feels overcrowded. John Dorney is tasked with taking this expansive work and condensing it into two one-hour episodes – and while he does a surprisingly effective job, the story still winds up feeling seriously disjointed. Details from the book seem to arise at random times: in the novel, for example, Roz is constantly irritated with new partner Chris, as he’s relentlessly optimistic and cheerful while she’s miserable and cynical. In the audio, this doesn’t come across at all: Roz is certainly troubled and working to overcome the death of her partner, and Chris plays the part of the inexperienced junior officer, but you don’t hear the cheerful/cynical divide. Yet, late in the story, when Chris says something cheerful, Roz incredulously replies with something like “Don’t you ever stop?” It jars; it sounds like a line from the book that was inserted into the script without considering if it actually worked.
The other issue is that the audio script never has enough time to spend on any one event. The Doctor’s discussion of morality with Pryce is a centerpiece of the novel; here, it’s over in a few minutes, though at least Dorney keeps most of the key dialogue intact. The novel uses its length to carefully build the future Earth; here, you don’t get much of a sense of the city except from what is delivered in info-dumps and news reports. The villain is the preserved consciousness of Tobias Vaughn (Philip Voss, excellent) from “The Invasion,” but presumably due to rights issues the adaptation never names him. In this version, Roz and Chris meet the Doctor for about thirty seconds total, enough for him to invite them aboard at the end. To keep the cast size reasonable, Jot Davies plays about 75 different roles, and one of the consequences is that his portrayal of Pryce isn’t nearly frightening enough. In fact, the story seems oddly neutered – I understand they need to keep the gruesome stuff to a minimum, but why take out the part where the Doctor decapitates Vaughn’s robot body? It’s tied directly back to the earlier discussion of morality, and without it things feel curiously unfinished.
Fortunately, Dorney does an excellent job presenting the characters. Much of the story is from the perspective of the two Adjudicators, and he effortlessly introduces us to them and their backstories without making any of it seem gimmicky. In the monthly range, we’d have to wait for a year or two and sit through a bunch of unrelated stories to find out what happened to Roz’s partner; here, we find out by the end of the story and it’s wrapped into the themes to boot. The Doctor is fantastic – he’s improvising, not scheming, but he develops and executes plans with shocking effectiveness. And I love how much he trusts Bernice: she investigates and resolves fully half of the plot without the Doctor around because he knows she’ll get it right.
Despite this being their introductory story, we’ve already heard Yasmin Bannerman and Travis Oliver in the “Damaged Goods” adaptation. Unlike that story, Chris and Roz take center stage here, and prove the casting decisions were good ones. Sylvester McCoy is on top form as well, something that has been consistent throughout his novel adaptations. The production is great, too: Ken Bentley directs, the sound design from Russell McGee is convincing, and the score from Crispin Merrell and Gordon Young is satisfyingly different from Big Finish’s usual Doctor Who fare. Overall, “Original Sin” is a mixed bag. When it works, it works incredibly well, but it can’t overcome the problem that a novel of that size simply can’t be effectively condensed into a two-hour audio drama. Still, the surplus of ideas, the great characterization, and the thematic aspirations all add up to something worth hearing – it’s just not a patch on the original.
But at least they got rid of the endless continuity references.
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From Styre on 11 - Cold Fusion
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