The fourth release in the eighth series of Companion Chronicles is “Ghost in the Machine” from Jonathan Morris. It’s another example of a “live” story, as it eschews the narration so common to the range. Instead, it’s similar to the BBC Audio story “Dead Air,” in that it depends heavily on recordings, but rather than relaying the story through recordings, those recordings are an integral part of the plot.
I generally enjoy Katy Manning’s work on audio, as she’s one of the best audio performers available to Big Finish. Though I did not enjoy “The Scorchies,” her ability to disappear into so many different voices was truly impressive. “Ghost in the Machine,” however, spends almost the entire first episode following Jo as she wanders around a deserted ship talking to herself. Manning really gives this her all, but it’s impossible to avoid the pitfalls of overly descriptive dialogue – and that’s even considering that Jo is one of the companions most likely to ramble on unnecessarily. Fortunately, as the episode wraps up and the villain is introduced, things pick up quickly.
There’s a being on the ship that inhabits audio recordings, and can pass itself from person to person after they record their own voices and after it recites the words to “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” This is because the creature was born on the first-ever audio recording made by Thomas Edison. No, it doesn’t make much sense when you think about it, but like all good Doctor Who, the story confidently embraces the nonsense at its heart. Morris uses a great conceit when characters are confined to recordings: they can only use the words they’ve recorded in the past. This provides retroactive benefit to Jo’s rambling in the first part: it gives her a greater vocabulary once she’s imprisoned on a tape. I admit I’m unsure if the story ever violates its own rules on this idea, but Morris seems to think it’s okay and I believe him.
Also trapped on the recording is the consciousness of scientist Benjamin Chikoto (Damian Lynch), as well as the Doctor himself. But the Doctor didn’t record his own voice, so he can only speak if he inhabits another body. This, of course, allows both Manning and Lynch to play the Doctor, and to have the third Doctor appear in a “full-cast” story without recasting the character. And I love Katy Manning’s impression of Jon Pertwee, so it’s a worthwhile exercise.
But while I like all of those elements, they’re generally superficial. The story itself is incredibly simple, and the Doctor’s solution is so obvious it’s almost shocking that it actually works. There’s not much here to get your teeth into, even if the narrative games the story plays are entertaining in their own right. Fortunately, things are helped along by Louise Jameson’s direction, and the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is effective if not particularly memorable. Overall, “Ghost in the Machine” is an entertaining Companion Chronicle that plays with narrative but is content to stop there. That it still entertains as much as it does is a testament to the strength of this range and Jonathan Morris’s writing in particular.
The third episode of the eighth series of Companion Chronicles is “Upstairs” by Mat Coward, and it presents a rather unusual scenario. It’s claustrophobic, very sci-fi in its presentation, and an entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking story as well.
It’s odd to consider that Maureen O’Brien starred in the first ever Companion Chronicle, but that “Upstairs,” in the eighth series, is only her third appearance in the range. Still, she’s the star here, and she handles the duties of the narrator with aplomb. Vicki gets some interesting lines here about how she perceives her time in the TARDIS: the grandfather and older brother relationships are obvious, but her fear of abandonment is much more subtle even as it underpins some of the story. O’Brien is quite good, as expected – she captures Vicki’s childlike outlook very well, and her Hartnell impression is completely unconvincing yet also hilarious. Peter Purves is also along for the ride, and it’s somewhat unusual to hear his voice in a Companion Chronicle but not his Hartnell. He completely vanishes into his supporting roles, though – he’s one of the best in the Big Finish stable at voices.
As for the actual story, I love the small scale: the TARDIS materializes in the attics above 10 Downing Street, and the Doctor, Vicki, and Steven explore to try to find out what year it is. But they discover that the various rooms exist at different moments in time simultaneously, setting up a potentially infinite series of rooms with very few escape routes. The first episode is purely about this mystery, featuring nothing more than the three characters wandering the attic and investigating their surroundings. We saw episodes like this in the 60s, usually when the budget ran out, and they often had a mysterious atmosphere. The same is true of “Upstairs,” which definitely piques the interest.
The second episode, which reveals that the time traveling attics are the result of the presence of a giant fungal growth whose tendrils extend into various time zones, is utterly bonkers. The servants of Number 10 are worshippers of the fungus, and aim to set it up as Prime Minister, so they must stop the TARDIS crew from interfering. But because they are servants, and because the Doctor and companions pretend to be nobles of various rank, they are forced to stop them politely. This leads to a number of mind-bending sequences involving the Doctor pretending to be an archbishop and the servants apologizing for being murderous. The solution also comes out of nowhere, and while I’m not normally a fan of the Doctor just having the solution laying around somewhere in the TARDIS, it works here because finding the TARDIS is such a focal point of the drama.
Lisa Bowerman directs, as usual, and the sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is suitably spooky. Overall, “Upstairs” is a success. It’s unashamedly weird, and for the most part, it works. As much as I appreciate the unlimited scale available on audio, sometimes it’s good to hear something in the minimalist 60s Doctor Who style.
The seventieth Companion Chronicle, and the second in the eighth series, is Ian Potter’s “The Alchemists,” a story set both in early 1930s Berlin and in the time before “An Unearthly Child.” While the story makes great use of the former setting, it does almost nothing with the latter – which isn’t necessarily a problem but it does make me question the intent.
“The Alchemists” actually has a framing device, something that has largely gone by the wayside in the later Companion Chronicles. Susan is leaving a letter for Barbara to be read in the event of her death or departure from the TARDIS. She uses the letter to illustrate two things: that it is possible to change history, just very dangerous, and that it’s important not to judge people by a limited range of actions. This of course addresses Barbara’s relationship with the Doctor, and is a neat way of using series continuity without it feeling intrusive. But there appears to be no reason for this story to be set prior to the TV series. There are a few features that set it apart – the TARDIS chameleon circuit is functional, for example – but both the Doctor and Susan seems basically the same as they do later on. Susan even remarks on this in her letter. Could it simply be a function of wanting fewer regular characters? In any case, it doesn’t detract from the story, fortunately.
The historical setting works very well, for the most part. Potter expertly captures the undercurrent of paranoia running through late-period Weimar Germany. Everyone has an agenda, everyone suspects someone else, and the anti-Semitic thoughts that parallel the rise of the Nazis are in full swing. I applaud Potter for not shying away from this: there are moments of stark hostility toward Jews that shock the conscience, giving the story an uneasy realism that most Doctor Who stories do not attempt. I also like Pollitt (Wayne Forrester) as a character: he’s rightfully appalled by the attitudes of Hitler and his followers, but he’s also an amoral secret agent who’s not above torture and murder.
And that’s the central theme of the story: people aren’t completely good or completely evil, and even the worst people have some redeeming qualities. This conflict is summed up in the most prominent historical figure in the story: Fritz Haber. Haber is known primarily for two things: the Haber-Bosch process that underpins the synthesis of modern fertilizers, and being the “father” of chemical warfare. His technology was used to save countless millions and also to murder countless millions. Unfortunately, I think the story makes a serious misstep by failing to emphasize his negatives. The Doctor is delighted to meet him, and eagerly discusses science with him, which seems more than a little out of character. Admittedly, the Doctor also claims a personal friendship with Chairman Mao, but Susan’s occasional mentions that Haber “made weapons” don’t accurately describe a man who personally stood on the battlefield of Ypres and directed the release of chlorine gas that killed thousands upon thousands of Allied soldiers. If you want to have a conversation about how his agricultural work mitigates against those actions, go right ahead, but misrepresenting his work with chemical weapons is not the right way to do so.
There’s not much to say about the actual plot, which is a very simple capture-and-escape historical. Carole Ann Ford gives one of her best Companion Chronicle performances: her hysteria under Pollitt’s interrogation is disturbingly convincing. Lisa Bowerman directs with her usual skill, and the sound design and score from Jim Hamilton and Toby Hrycek-Robinson are convincing. Overall, “The Alchemists” is a thought-provoking story with some odd decisions made around the margins. It’s worth hearing, even if it’s not the story you might expect.
The eighth and final series of Companion Chronicles begins with “Mastermind” from Jonathan Morris, a sequel to “Tales from the Vault” from back in the sixth series. Rather than returning to that story’s superficial, unrewarding anthology format, Morris instead decides to make this story all about the Master – and the result is still superficial and unrewarding.
So we’re back in the Vault with Ruth Matheson (Daphne Ashbrook) and Charlie Sato (Yee Jee Tso). We learn that the Master is being held prisoner in the Vault, and that he is in a state of suspended animation from which he only awakes for one hour every five years. And when he does wake up, the UNIT operatives on site must interrogate him. To do this, they must use a series of elaborate security procedures designed to prevent the Master from hypnotizing them; in the worst-case scenario, there is a failsafe that will lock down the prison and prevent any escape. So right off the bat you know that UNIT understands exactly how dangerous the Master is and how stupid it is to send a couple of ordinary human soldiers in to interrogate him. Clearly, the Master must have access to some incredibly important information in order for UNIT to take such a massive, stupid risk, right? Well, no – they just want to find out how he arrived on Earth and how he wound up in the prison in the first place. This is your motive for potentially endangering the entire planet?
I’ve seen this story compared to “The Silence of the Lambs” from multiple quarters, but the similarities end on the surface. Yes, the Master is locked in a cell, and yes, he plays mind games with his interrogators. But rather than focusing on these mind games, or on some sort of outside problem they need him to solve, the story focuses almost entirely on how the Master came to be there. First, there’s a belabored explanation (tied into mediocre short story anthology “Short Trips: The Centenarian” if you’re interested) of how the Master came to be the Deathworm Morphant and how he escaped the Eye of Harmony in the time following the TV movie. Evidently, as his captured bodies decay, they eventually turn back into the rotten Geoffrey Beevers Master. With this crucial continuity point addressed, the story turns to the Master’s time stranded on Earth after escaping. What follows is a catalogue of evil things the Master did to keep himself entertained until he could get his TARDIS back. First, he skulked around England for a while, murdering people as necessary. Then he booked a ticket on the Titanic, and when it sank he took a seat on a lifeboat intended for a woman or child! My, how evil! After that, he became a gang lord in New York, then moved to Las Vegas and took over the criminal enterprise behind the casinos. The problem here is that we don’t actually see any of these events. All we get is the Master recounting them in the broadest terms. We do see a few scenes of the Master passing himself down through a family from father to son, but even these aren’t nearly as interesting as they could be.
Geoffrey Beevers turns in one of his usual deliciously evil performances, but it feels like a missed opportunity for one big reason: the story doesn’t dive into the Master’s character to any significant extent. The best Companion Chronicles allow us access into the mind of the narrator – here, we get a list of horrible things the Master has done, but nothing more about his motivation other than the self-evident fact that he’s evil. And the supporting characters are utter non-entities. Matheson gets a hint of development when we learn about her time with the UN during the breakup of Yugoslavia, but Sato’s feelings over the death of his father are the most obvious of clichés. I loved the way the Master tempted them, but of course the story doesn’t actually do anything with that idea, allowing him instead to do the very thing the entire system is designed to prevent.
Most of the flashbacks take place in America, probably because 2/3 of the cast is American. This means that Beevers gets to play an American version of his Master, and his accent is somehow both completely convincing and completely ridiculous. Ashbrook is fine in her various roles, but Yee Jee Tso is terrible in all of his. The worst part of the experience is listening to Tso trying to hold his own against Beevers and failing, something that happens over and over again. I’m not normally one to pile on, but “he was in the TV movie” shouldn’t be a reason to cast someone with the range of a potted plant.
The general response to “Mastermind” has been overwhelmingly positive, and I don’t understand it. As a story, it wastes almost everything good about it in order to focus on the boring, unconvincing elements. Even the production suffers: while Ken Bentley directs well, the sound design from Neil Gardner and the score from Daniel Brett are way too obvious. The Master announces that he killed someone, and we hear the sounds of a chiming clock and the screams of a dying woman? Subtle this is not. Which is a nice description of “Mastermind” as a whole, come to think of it.
I’m not sure how much time passed between John Dorney writing “The Two Masters” for the main range and “The Trouble with Drax” for the Fourth Doctor Adventures, or in what order they were written, but one was clearly an influence on the other. The sixth release in the fifth series, “Drax” is a story that delights in being convoluted, and though it doesn’t amount to anything significant, it entertains throughout.
The entire story can be summed up in one simple sentence: Drax is running a con. The true extent of the con and the sheer audacity of his plan does not become apparent until the very end of the story, and Dorney keeps building and building, adding twists and turns at every point that otherwise seems like a natural conclusion. The most amusing part is how the stakes of the story grow progressively lower as the con grows increasingly complex, a development that is entirely in keeping with how Dorney characterizes Drax. I won’t go into elaborate detail about the plot, as it’s not really open to much analysis, except to say that every time you think they won’t pursue a certain twist, they go right for it.
Unfortunately, Barry Jackson, who played Drax on TV in “The Armageddon Factor,” passed away before “The Trouble with Drax” was recorded. So in this story, Ray Brooks takes over the role, and he sounds every bit the same crooked schemer as his predecessor. Drax is the central character of the story: even though Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are the stars, every scene follows Drax in one way or another. And he’s still the same one-note character he was on television, which makes Dorney’s script impressive in how it keeps the story interesting and the characters sympathetic without adding much detail to them. But it’s not until you find out that John Challis is also playing Drax, in yet another incarnation, that the story really gets compelling.
I like the idea of Drax as a recurring character, someone who’s constantly dragging the Doctor into mad schemes against the Doctor’s will. And the story likes the idea as well: after a while, Drax is given his own wildly bombastic, over the top theme, and it even plays at the end of the story as a sort of credit sequence. Whether that’s in the script or down to director Nicholas Briggs and/or sound designer Jamie Robertson is unclear, but it’s a great little touch. I love Baker and Ward in this, each competing with the other to see who can be more exasperated with Drax’s nonsense. And at the end, when the Doctor shrugs his shoulders in resigned acceptance, I defy you not to do the same – I know I did, and I was grinning the entire time.
There’s not a lot to write about “The Trouble with Drax.” It’s almost entirely plot-focused and the story doesn’t have much to follow outside of the series of improbable twists. It’s smart, and the plotting is structured convincingly, but we really don’t get much out of any of the characters that we don’t already know. Still, if you’re looking for a fun way to kill an hour, this story is a fine option. Just don’t let yourself get distracted, or you’ll lose the plot.
With all the various incarnations of the Master out there, I’m genuinely surprised it took Big Finish this long to do a “multi-Master” story – but here we are, with John Dorney’s “The Two Masters.” It pairs the Geoffrey Beevers and Alex Macqueen Masters in a twisted, time-bending story that I think holds together reasonably well and is delightfully entertaining throughout.
It’s quite clear that Dorney approached this story with the desire to explore the Master’s character, to see how his different incarnations are all manifestations of the same person by exploring their personality quirks. But right from the beginning, it seems as though he’s gotten it wrong: the Beevers Master is giggly and silly and the Macqueen Master is serious and cruel. When the Doctor notices something is up, though, it becomes apparent that Dorney is doing this on purpose, and it works quite well. Beevers in particular is having the time of his life impersonating Macqueen’s more ebullient personality – his episode 2 exclamation “That one nearly popped in to use the bathroom!” had me laughing out loud. There isn’t nearly as much time spent with Macqueen impersonating Beevers, and I think that’s to the story’s benefit, as it’s simply not as entertaining in reverse.
The plot is quite complex. The Macqueen Master meets with the Cult of the Heretic, a cult dedicated to worshipping a previously unknown Time Lord renegade, in an attempt to take control of their paradox technology. They try to convince him to create a paradox by killing his earlier self, the Beevers Master; he betrays them by electrocuting his earlier self near to death but not killing him. (Incidentally, here we learn just how the Pratt/Beevers Master got so horribly burned – evidently he started out as a healthy Geoffrey Beevers! No explanation why his voice changed in “The Deadly Assassin,” but I think that would be a bridge too far.) But then the Cult of the Heretic recaptures the Macqueen Master, switches his mind with that of the Beevers Master, and sets the two of them against each other, with Beevers-in-Macqueen trying to kill Macqueen-in-Beevers. Oh, and as part of this, they send mercenaries back through time to various points of history, explaining some of what’s going on in the previous two Master stories. Got all that? Good, because I’m not sure I do, but it seems like it all works.
All of this is leading up to the final episode, when the two Masters team up to achieve their ultimate goal: rewriting the universe to their own blueprint, then ruling it as the Masters of everything. There’s even a great episode 3 cliffhanger with both Masters launching into some fantastic evil cackling. And I love the joke of the Beevers Master killing Macqueen’s victims before he can punctuate his murders with terrible puns. It’s here that Dorney shows his understanding of the character, though, as the traditional bickering we know from the various multi-Doctor stories starts happening here as well. But this isn’t a sign of several well-meaning personalities clashing; it’s a sign of two megalomaniacs discovering they have no actual plan to work together. “Master” is a rather unitary role, after all – the clue, as both Masters and the Doctor repeat, is in the name. And it’s this incompatibility that ultimately allows the Doctor to outsmart them both and save the day. It’s smart, funny writing that reinforces what we already know: Dorney is one of the most valuable writers in the Big Finish stable.
The production is very good, with Jamie Anderson directing and Martin Montague handling the sound design. Jamie Robertson’s score is suitable if unmemorable. Overall, “The Two Masters” is a high quality release. It’s a bit too convoluted for its own good, but the main attractions are Beevers and Macqueen and, in that respect, the story gives you everything you want. Just try to listen to this without grinning.
The final story in the Tenth Doctor Adventures set – and potentially the final tenth Doctor story from Big Finish for quite a while, depending upon how quickly they can get David Tennant back in studio – is “Death and the Queen” from James Goss, a story openly modeled on the logic of fairy tales that works brilliantly. If this is the level of quality we can expect from these stories going forward, I want more as soon as possible.
The most important thing to remember while listening to “Death and the Queen” is that it embraces a particular storytelling style. Yes, Donna and Rudolph (Blake Ritson) fall in love and decide to get married in approximately five minutes. Yes, all of the supporting characters are ciphers, from the evil Queen Mother (-in-law) (Alice Krige) to the weak, effete prince, to the heroic, brilliant chambermaid (Beth Chalmers). And yes, the Doctor and Donna eventually save the day – but it’s all part of the style, and Goss puts it across with such verve that it just works.
The script is hilarious from start to finish. I enjoyed the structural experimentation at the beginning, jumping around from date to date as Donna grows closer to Rudolph while the Doctor continually sticks his nose in. I loved the relationship between the Doctor and Donna, which is as sparky and witty as their best television episodes. And I also loved the conclusion, as even with the seriousness of Death himself entering the story, the Doctor remains at his comic best. But there’s also a great deal of subtlety to the writing – while the Doctor’s speech about losing companions is often hilarious, it also gets right to the heart of the character, and has more than a hint of sadness about it. And the aforementioned relationship between the Doctor and Donna is put under the microscope, with her impending marriage to Rudolph held up like a funhouse mirroring of her time with the Doctor. There’s even a little foreshadowing of her departure at the end, which is the ideal way to tell these “missing” stories: since we know how Donna’s time in the TARDIS ends, allude to it!
David Tennant and Catherine Tate saved their best performances for last with this story. Tennant in particular dominates the story, and even though he’s a supporting character for most of the running time he takes over virtually every scene he appears in. Tate gets most of the story’s emotional material and handles it incredibly well. I particularly enjoyed the scene where she puts on a brave face while describing life in the castle to the Doctor: it’s overtly comic, but it shows Donna’s emotional growth through her willingness to follow through on a commitment even though that commitment was probably a mistake. And while the supporting cast is playing a bunch of clichés, they play their clichéd roles to the hilt, making the story all the more enjoyable.
The production is first-rate as well. Some of the brilliance from the leads must be down to director Nicholas Briggs, while the sound design from Howard Carter is effectively ambitious. There’s a lot of action communicated through sound but without dialogue and almost every instance is immediately understandable. And there are lots of hilarious touches – the sound effect immediately before the end credits had me bursting out laughing. Overall, “Death and the Queen” is brilliant. It’s funny, it’s heartfelt, it’s emotional, and it’s well made. I admit I was skeptical going into the Tenth Doctor Adventures set, expecting to get more monthly range drudgery starring David Tennant. Instead, I got two good-to-great stories and an instant classic. Wow.
Evidently the format of “Intervention Earth” was deemed a success, as the latest installation in the Gallifrey range, “Enemy Lines,” extends it, taking place over six half-hour episodes instead of four. It’s an attempt to unite the various eras of Gallifrey, combining the political intrigue of the early days with the paradoxes and multiple universes of the more recent ones, but unfortunately neither element is particularly rewarding.
I suppose I’m being unfair to the story by disliking the political elements, but those were my least favorite parts of the original Gallifrey stories and writer David Llewellyn hasn’t done much to improve upon those earlier days. Gallifrey is in difficult negotiations with another civilization over, among other things, quantum-mining rights, and relations have reached a breaking point. The problem with all of this, as it has always been, is that the story never really tells us the purpose of these alliances or indeed what the stakes are. Nor do we ever get a real sense of what Gallifrey’s power actually is – on the one hand, it’s the oldest civilization possessed of powers and technology beyond those of any other race; on the other hand, they apparently need to negotiate with nearby planets about mining rights. As a result, I don’t care about any of it. I also don’t like the domestic political intrigue: it’s not interesting when you can just make up whatever laws you want for the characters to obey or break as needed. Something like “House of Cards” has the advantage of taking place in the real world, so at least it can have verisimilitude – here, I don’t know what the rules of Gallifrey are, so how can I have any appreciation of what the characters are planning? Again, though, these are complaints I’ve had about the Gallifrey range as a whole – they just haven’t been relevant for a while.
More particular to “Enemy Lines” is how it revolves around paradoxes, and takes the dreary option of undoing anything interesting that happens. Remember how Omega finally escaped his antimatter prison in “Intervention Earth” and left Narvin and Ace stranded on the brink of death? “Enemy Lines” seems to pick up right from that point, with an execution squad sent by the High Council (presumably under Omega’s control) to eliminate them. But don’t worry about any of that, because it’s all erased when Braxiatel travels back in time and changes history. There’s actually some worthwhile political intrigue close to home, when a bomb strikes the Capitol during a presidential inauguration – but don’t worry about that either, as that’s all part of a corrupt timeline that’s erased by story’s end. An ancient Gallifreyan being called the Watchmaker (Eve Karpf) is wandering the galaxy, trying to undo Brax’s paradox by killing the people involved – a more cultured form of the Reapers from “Father’s Day,” really – and when the “correct” timeline is restored, all of the conflict we’ve been watching for six episodes is easily anticipated and dealt with. What’s the point of all this? By definition, none of the characters we follow are changed at all by these experiences, and we’ve known them all for so long that we don’t learn anything new about them in the process. If Leela left Gallifrey, she’d travel the universe righting wrongs and seeing the sights – well that’s a neat (if well-worn) idea. Too bad the story ends with Leela on Gallifrey not knowing any better. Brax is the only changed character by the end, and that’s only because of a final scene that depends on extensive references to the Bernice Summerfield range that I’ve never listened to.
Despite those extensive complaints, there are a number of redeeming elements. The story is exciting, for one thing – despite some of the dry subject matter, it never gets bogged down in it, a positive trend we’ve come to expect from director Scott Handcock. The script also does well to pair up familiar characters: Narvin and Ace make a surprisingly funny double act, and the relationship between Romana and Leela has been a highlight of the range from the start. The paradox material hangs together quite well, with no obvious plot holes and a fitting yet somewhat unpredictable ending. It’s also good to have Braxiatel back, as his presence always makes you question what you’re hearing and Miles Richardson is ever-fantastic on audio. Neil Gardner’s sound design is effective and I must once again commend the score from Ioan Morris and Rhys Downing that follows the excellent model they introduced in “Intervention Earth.” Overall, “Enemy Lines” is a mixed bag. It reintroduces some elements I dislike and depends on others that are dramatically unsatisfying, but it’s also an entertaining story populated with memorable and beloved characters played by talented actors. So it’s not an essential purchase but it’s a pleasant way to spend a few hours.
The tenth Torchwood release from Big Finish focuses on another minor character: Suzie Costello, the Torchwood member who betrayed the team and died by suicide in the series premiere. In “Moving Target,” by Guy Adams, we go back in time to a day when Earth is frozen in time and only Suzie and local woman Alex (Naomi McDonald) can move around. Alex is the target of an intergalactic hunting expedition, and Suzie must protect her from an endless series of alien hunters. “Moving Target” is a simple, yet effective, morality play. Adams spends the majority of the script setting up his two main characters and letting them interact, enabling the listener to get to know them and the ending to be much more impactful. The central conflict, though, is actually in Suzie’s head, and Adams underlines how Suzie isn’t cut out for Torchwood in the same way as her colleagues. One of the hallmarks of the Doctor Who universe is that heroes, when faced with an impossible choice, find a third way out. Here, it seems that Suzie and Alex have only two choices: keep fighting indefinitely or let Alex die and the world restart. But while Jack or Gwen wouldn’t accept this, and would try to find a way to stop the hunt, Suzie refuses to think outside the box. She keeps fighting to defend Alex because she knows it’s the heroic thing to do, but she can’t come up with any justification beyond that. And so, when she learns from the Referee (Nicholas Burns) that Alex is going to die in misery in a couple of weeks anyway, she takes the easy way out. The ending isn’t shocking at all – it’s the sort of thing that you know is coming, hope it won’t happen, and sigh in resignation as it happens anyway. Great drama, in other words, and made so much more effective by the time Adams spends developing his characters. Definitely a return to form for the range.
After six series following the traditional Big Finish spinoff model – four to six one-hour releases comprising a series – Gallifrey returns for its seventh with a brand new format. Much like a typical Doctor Who release, “Intervention Earth” consists of four half-hour episodes comprising a single story. But it’s also part of a larger story and ends on a cliffhanger. So even though the new format gives the series some much-needed energy, it’s still somewhat unrewarding.
Without any particular explanation, “Intervention Earth” introduces Ace into the Gallifrey cast as a human agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency. This has been hinted as a possibility as far back as the Cartmel era, and “UNIT Dominion” briefly mentioned her presence on Gallifrey, but as far as I know this is the first time the concept has really been explored. Writers Scott Handcock and David Llewellyn introduce mystery into her presence on Gallifrey: she can’t remember when or why the Doctor brought her there and she feels like a different person. But she’s taken to the CIA like a fish to water, and she travels in her own TARDIS on some of the Agency’s most difficult missions. All of this is interesting background, but none of it is explored in any depth. There are a few brief moments of friction between the human agent and her Time Lord colleagues, but apart from that she encounters very little in the way of character-based conflict.
The story is hyper-focused on its plot, in other words. A secretive cult on Gallifrey is dedicated to the resurrection of Omega and attempting to engineer events to enable his return. To do this, they have infiltrated the highest levels of Time Lord society. And when Ace is sent to investigate disturbances associated with the Hand of Omega, she disappears. So it’s up to Romana (the Juliet Landau incarnation) and Narvin to find out what happened. We follow their investigations from Gallifrey to Earth, and yes, eventually past the singularity and into the universe of antimatter. There, Stephen Thorne returns as the voice of Omega, and he wants… exactly the same thing he always wants: an escape from the antimatter universe back into the “real” one, consequences be damned.
All of that is relatively interesting, but the story trips up because it doesn’t give any stakes to the characters. Ace spends almost the entire thing under possession, and Romana and Narvin only have a brief moment of mistrust between them. The brief scenes between Lukas (Scott Arthur) and Vale Endrogan (Laura Doddington) could be interesting, but it’s so obvious something is up that the “revelation” that she’s an Adherent of Ohm is utterly predictable. And while Omega is a fascinating character, he has the same motivation here as in “The Three Doctors” and “Arc of Infinity.” That he actually escapes without destroying the universe is new, but we learn nothing new about Omega or about those that confront him.
I did like the straightforward plot, though. Part of the problem I’ve had with the Gallifrey range in general is its insistence on following arcane political debates or getting lost in endless side stories. “Intervention Earth” dispenses with most of that and just gets on with the story, which I appreciated. Not sure about the decision to end the story on a cliffhanger, though – and as for the little surprise at the end, you’d better hope you recognize the voice or you’ll have no idea what just happened.
The production is generally good. Handcock directs with his usual kinetic results, and Neil Gardner’s sound design never leaves the listener confused. The score from Ioan Morris and Rhys Downing is surprising: it employs a number of up-tempo synth pieces, which help give the story its energy. Overall, “Intervention Earth” is a solid continuation of the Gallifrey range. It’s nothing groundbreaking or even stimulating but it’s an entertaining way to pass a couple of hours, and it sets up something that might be even more interesting. That sets it apart from most of its predecessors.
I actually like this play for the sheer insanity of it. It’s trippy, it carries you along with it and I found it to be a lot of fun.
Nevertheless, Cuthbert did not feel right in this.
Playing games with The Doctor, yes, he does that to a point but Cuthbert is usually more direct and his plans less elaborate than the extravagant virtual reality trap he uses here.
Then I found out that the villain was originally going to be the Master and it all made sense. This is exactly the kind of thing that would appeal to him – overblown, egotistical and desperate to highlight The Doctor’s “weaknesses” while paradoxically seeking his approval.
While “Technophobia” hit all the marks of a tenth Doctor story, it sometimes failed to capture the feeling of one. That’s not a problem with Jenny T. Colgan’s “Time Reaver,” a fast-paced, enjoyable story based around another great concept and a great sense of humor. Hopefully this upward trend will continue!
I love the idea of the Time Reavers, weapons that, when fired, lock their victims into a state where the next few minutes of their lives seem to take hours, weeks, or even years. Naturally, these have all sorts of terrifying potential uses, whether in war or by common criminals, but what I love about the concept is that it’s not entirely terrible. We hear of people using the weapon to prolong moments of happiness – which is ultimately tragic in itself, given the condition those people end up in, but still gives nuance to the situation. And then there are the Vacintians, who want to use the Time Reavers to prolong the final moments of their civilization before it is consumed by solar expansion. Tragic, yes, but also heartbreaking, and made especially so by Cora’s (Sabrina Bartlett) naïve faith that people would only use the Time Reavers for similarly honorable purposes.
The setting is equally spectacular. The spaceport planet of Calibris is an alien world that would fit right into Tennant’s TV era – it’s the sort of Earth analogue that Russell T. Davies loved, rooted in his belief that even futuristic alien societies need to be relatable. And despite its massive scale, the soundscape makes it feel like a real place populated by real people. All credit to Howard Carter for his masterful sound design work on this story. Speaking of real people, Soren (Alex Lowe) makes perfect sense as a character: why wouldn’t the Doctor have a trusted mechanic for his TARDIS, especially in a post-Gallifrey universe? Makes it easier to replace a broken fluid link than the usual process of crash-landing somewhere and trying to find one.
Colgan absolutely nails the interactions between the Doctor and Donna in this story, as they’re constantly going back and forth in playful bickering. This isn’t surprising, as she’s been quite good at capturing the regulars in her prose work, but it’s delightful to hear Tennant and Tate reading the lines. But what really makes the script work is the dark undertone, the seedy underbelly of Calibris that is constantly threatening to break through to the surface. Yes, Gully (John Banks) is way over the top and the voice filter is a mistake, but in general the story’s humor is used to leaven the drama. The way the Doctor finally eliminates the Time Reavers is completely in keeping with his character but still quite difficult to hear, and it leads to a surprisingly downbeat final line. We also get to see Donna’s compassion come to the fore – and you couldn’t sum up Donna any better than when she channels the memory of her father to give Cora some final advice. Oh, and just for good measure, we get “There’s something on your back.”
The production is a huge improvement on “Technophobia.” Nicholas Briggs directs with his usual skill, of course, but Howard Carter is a star, as the score for this story is fantastic, perfectly matching the commotion of the sound design. “Time Reaver” is full of interesting scenes, memorable concepts, and an easygoing yet shadowy tone perfectly in keeping with Series 4. If this is how future Tenth Doctor Adventures are going to be, sign me up.
After acquiring the rights to tell Doctor Who stories using post-2005 material, Big Finish rolled out a ton of product, from the new UNIT to River Song to Winston Churchill. The jewel in their crown, however, is “The Tenth Doctor Adventures,” a box set that reunites David Tennant and Catherine Tate as the tenth Doctor and Donna. The first story in the set, Matt Fitton’s “Technophobia,” is a fun adventure that captures the spirit of the Tennant era but is unfortunately lacking in depth.
Both Tennant and Tate have narrated BBC Audio releases in the past, but this is the first time they’ve reunited for a full-cast story, and the results are, happily, everything you would expect. Tennant in particular sounds like he never left the role: he’s all manic energy and inspiration, flipping emotions from anger to enthusiasm at a moment’s notice, exactly as he was on television. You can easily picture him bounding around the set in your mind’s eye. About the only element of his Doctor we don’t get is the brooding side, and I’m sure there will be time for that in future releases. Tate, meanwhile, has scaled her performance back slightly – this is still recognizably Donna but she’s not quite as brash and intrusive as she was on TV. I think this works, though – it was easy to get away with two boisterous stars on TV, but on audio it would overwhelm the soundscape. And with performances like these it’s no surprise to see Nicholas Briggs in the director’s chair, as he’s always been particularly good at directing the series regulars.
As for the story, Fitton provides a brilliant hook: rather than a story about technology run amok, he tells a story about technology performing exactly as intended but humanity becoming increasingly terrified of it. There’s an alien influence reducing humans’ brains to primitive states, stripping people of their ability to understand or even recognize technology. This leads to fantastic scenes like a man screaming in horror from inside an elevator, and that elevator slowly descending and the doors opening to reveal… a perfectly ordinary, functional elevator. It’s also interesting to listen to tech CEO Jill Meadows (Rachael Stirling) slowly lose her understanding of and start to fear her own mobile operating system. And, of course, the best part is when the effect reaches the Doctor, and he not only loses the ability to (psychically) control the sonic screwdriver, he starts to fear the TARDIS itself!
The problem with “Technophobia” is that once you get past the return of Tennant and Tate, and the strong concept at its heart, there’s not much actual drama on display. The story is confined to a couple of locations, which wouldn’t be a problem if those locations were populated with strong characters. But the supporting cast is uniformly unmemorable. Fitton tries to flesh out the characters, showing Jill wanting to be taken seriously as CEO and innovator and Bex (Niky Wardley) worrying about her nan, but these details don’t feel organic and don’t lend the characters any sympathy. As for the male cast, I already can’t remember which one was Brian, which one was Kevin, and which one was Lukas – one was a train driver, one was a maintenance worker, and the other one was in the museum and got killed? It’s not unusual for Big Finish stories to have thinly-sketched supporting characters, but since these stories are set in an era which was known for its guest characters, this area needs to be improved in the future. And without strong supporting characters, it’s difficult to care about what happens to them, which is what robs the story of dramatic tension.
On the production front, I already mentioned Briggs’ strong turn as director, which can be seen in the quality of the performances. (Tate and Wardley have distractingly similar voices for audio, but that’s a minor complaint.) Howard Carter’s sound design is effective enough, but the music is completely unmemorable, which prevents the story from sounding like it belongs in the Tennant era. Overall, though, “Technophobia” is a solid start to the Tenth Doctor Adventures, and I’m curious to see where they go from here.
Almost every surviving Doctor Who regular from the classic series has appeared in a Big Finish story at one time or another, but it took until “Council of War,” the final episode in the seventh series of Companion Chronicles, for John Levene to finally return to the role of Sgt. Benton. And the story, from Simon Barnard and Paul Morris, is quite entertaining.
“Council of War” starts out as an unapologetic James Bond satire. The plot is quite simple at the outset: there have been mysterious happenings in Kettering, from ghost sightings to disappearances, so the Brigadier sends Benton undercover to investigate as a local councilor. While there, he meets Margery Phipps (Sinead Keenan), another councilor who is unknowingly embroiled in events on an alien world, and things progress from there. Benton looks dashing in a suit, and carries a Walther, and he has a love interest – so it’s all very traditional spy stuff, except that Barnard and Morris puncture it all with Benton’s awkwardness and old-fashioned beliefs.
I’m not sure what’s supposed to be satirical and what’s supposed to be taken at face value, but Margery is the perfect representation of how feminists were depicted in popular media at the time. She’s an independent, career-minded woman that is destined for great things, but at the same time she struggles to square her beliefs with her own femininity – she doesn’t even recognize herself in a dress and makeup, she’s irritated by her attraction to Benton despite his traditional mindset, and so forth. It’s a male-driven view of feminism, in other words, and it’s so reminiscent of things we saw even in Doctor Who of the time that it must be intentional, especially since it works with the story’s general winking tone.
I’m less sure about the story once it shifts to the alien world. It’s reminiscent of “The Daleks,” where Ian has to teach pacifists how to fight for their own survival, and it allows Benton some serious heroism, as he embarks on a solo mission onto an alien ship in an attempt to sabotage it and drive it away. But the planet of Kettering, with its ludicrously intense devotion to peace above all else, is straight out of a message-driven Star Trek episode – so is this also part of the pastiche of late-‘60s-early-‘70s drama? The ending is also more than a little unrewarding, as Benton gets all the way to the invaders’ bridge and confronts them… and is immediately captured, and has to wait for the Doctor to turn up out of nowhere and save the day. Granted, Benton got 90% of the way there, but it would have been nice to see him get over the finish line.
I know John Levene has a well-deserved reputation for being an odd guy, but you certainly can’t tell from his audio performance. He’s generally fantastic: he has a great voice for narration and he effortlessly steps back into Benton’s appealing combination of militaristic heroism and innocence. His impression of Jon Pertwee isn’t convincing at all, but at this point in the Companion Chronicles that hardly matters. Lisa Bowerman directs well as always, and the sound design from Simon Robinson ably supports the script. Overall, “Council of War” is a solid Companion Chronicle and a great opportunity to finally hear a beloved character return to the fold.
For the sixty-seventh regular release in the Companion Chronicles range, Big Finish turned to Eddie Robson for a season 6 story. While “The Apocalypse Mirror” has a very good conceptual hook, it doesn’t hold together nearly as well as it should, adding it to the list of curiously weak stories in the back half of the seventh series.
Robson is one of the most consistent writers in Big Finish’s regular stable, and he can normally be counted upon for thought-provoking material. “The Apocalypse Mirror” is another example of this: the idea of a ruined city mirrored in time by a beautiful version of itself, with people apparently passing between the cities for no discernable reason, is quite intriguing, and the way Robson introduces this in a mysterious first episode is skillful as well. I also like how the story overturns a very traditional Doctor Who trope: when the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe arrive, they meet oppressed people on the run from a tyrannical government – but it turns out that government is actually trying to help people! They help people by moving them to the better version of the city, but the people in the ruined city don’t know this – they just see people disappear, and dismiss the government’s explanations as propaganda. It’s a very believable way in which the social order could break down that doesn’t rely upon obvious clichés.
Unfortunately, the actual resolution is difficult to take seriously. The alternate, better world exists because scientists constructed a “sympathy engine” that actually created it out of the hopeful thoughts of the people in the ruined city. And that’s how you transport to the new city: by believing in hope, rejecting pessimism, and allowing these thoughts to carry you over. On the one hand, this is an uplifting message – but on the other, it’s nonsense like “The Secret” writ large. You can’t wish things into existence, or wish your way into a better life, but that’s exactly what happens in “The Apocalypse Mirror.” It’s like a child’s fable: if we just convince everyone to believe and hope as hard as they can, the world will be saved. And like a child’s fable, it’s utterly unrewarding in dramatic terms. We end up with Jamie making an appeal via hologram to the entire population, and while it’s implied that he is successful, the extent is unclear. “The Apocalypse Mirror” absolutely requires a strong, memorable guest character, through whose eyes we can see a shifting perspective – and no such character is present. It’s all abstract, in other words.
The casting for “The Apocalypse Mirror” is strange: it’s Frazer Hines and Wendy Padbury, but Padbury only plays Zoe and Zoe is hardly in the story. So it’s left to Hines to do every single voice, and this becomes obvious in places. His Troughton impression in particular seems to suffer, and as the story goes on the Doctor and Jamie start sounding more and more alike. There’s also no framing device, something that the range seems to have abandoned. Fortunately, the production is quite strong, as director Lisa Bowerman and sound designers Richard Fox and Lauren Yason combine to create a creepy, threatening atmosphere, especially in the first episode. Overall, “The Apocalypse Mirror” doesn’t quite work, but I admire its ambition.
After the Fourth Doctor Adventures finally hit a home run with the superlative “Paradox Planet” two-parter, we’re back to the standard format with Alan Barnes’ “Gallery of Ghouls.” And while it’s not a patch on its predecessor, it makes up for its lack of incident with some entertaining humor.
The biggest problem with “Gallery of Ghouls,” and the reason why this will once again be a shorter review, is that there isn’t a great deal that actually happens in the story. The Doctor and Romana take a vacation in Brighton in the early 1830s and eventually become embroiled in alien affairs involving waxworks. This Doctor, you see, is a big fan of wax museums – presumably this is a winking nod at “Tom Baker’s” publicity appearances for “The Five Doctors” – and so he attends Madame Tissot’s (Celia Imrie) display. But when the head of a rival gallery steals a wax head of Marie Antoinette, and that gallery owner melts into a storm drain, a mystery is afoot. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t really go anywhere from that point. Goole (Nickolas Grace) is part of an alien race that cannot experience physical sensations, so he craves emotions, and uses his wax gallery and his android Marie Antoinette to draw emotions from his customers. Some capture-and-escape drama happens for a while, until finally the Doctor lures Goole into the TARDIS and turns down the temperature, thus saving the day. Basically everything that happens with Tissot and her son Noni (Stephen Critchlow) is disposable, and unfortunately the characters aren’t interesting enough to make up for it. There’s a brief, intriguing glimpse at who Tissot actually is, but it goes nowhere.
Fortunately, Barnes has taken the season 17 briefing to heart, and packs the story with the silliness that era is known for. This is easily the most flippant Tom Baker has been for Big Finish, and it’s delightful. He knows the humor is over the top, and he goes right over with it – even simple lines like his incredulous “Romana! Have you been EAVESDROPPING?!” made me giggle. Lalla Ward embraces the tone as well, taking the straight role, exasperated with the Doctor’s unserious tone and actually trying to get things done. There are even lots of references to K-9 constantly being just “off camera” and unable to participate.
But that’s about it, really. Ken Bentley directs and Jamie Robertson handles the sound design, so no issues to be found there. “Gallery of Ghouls” is lightweight, disposable Doctor Who. It has a great sense of humor, so it’s fun to listen to, but I’m already struggling to find much more to say about it and I can’t imagine it’ll be much different for anyone else. Still, I had a smile on my face, and that hasn’t always been true of other stories in this range.
While I don’t think that “And You Will Obey Me” worked particularly well, I admired its ambition, at the very least, to tell a Master story that wasn’t like most of the other ones we’ve heard over the years. So I was curious to see what would happen in Justin Richards’ “Vampire of the Mind,” which pairs up Colin Baker with Alex Macqueen’s Master – and I was disappointed, because it’s little more than an elaborate exercise in box-ticking.
You really couldn’t design a more generic Doctor Who story than this if you tried. We’ve got an isolated community, a mysterious haunted castle, a generic female character paired up with the Doctor, the Master running around doing dastardly things and laughing, scientists conducting experiments, an alien threat – and absolutely none of it does anything interesting or unique. Every plot twist is predictable; every story beat is obviously signposted; every character is generic and unmemorable. It’s one of those stories that’s hard to write about because there’s nothing to say: if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you’ve heard this before, so what am I going to tell you about it?
Let’s start with Alex Macqueen’s Master, who has been wasted in a surprising number of Big Finish stories. For the most part, I enjoy his performance: I like his jovial, flippant attitude and I think he’s actually capable of conveying how threatening the Master can be at his worst. But he’s almost never used properly: “UNIT Dominion” was a dull, generic story, and “Dark Eyes” 2 and 3 were confusing at best and boring at worst. I commented before that there’s a scene in “Dark Eyes 3” where the eighth Doctor and the Master are imprisoned together, and the generic dialogue they’re given is a crushing letdown when they could be sparking off one another. Well, the same is true for “Vampire of the Mind.” Evidently the only point of this story was to pair up Colin Baker with this Master, so why on earth aren’t we given more scenes of the two of them together? And when they are together, why is the conversation limited to the Master’s evil plan and how the Doctor plans to stop it? You could put Pertwee and Delgado into this story and barely change a thing about it – and I’m sure to some fans that’s high praise but to me it just underscores how boring the whole thing is.
Some quick Google research shows Kate Kennedy to be funny and engaging, so why does she underplay the role of Heather Threadstone to the point of lethargy? I did enjoy some of her first episode banter with Colin Baker, but she rapidly falls in line as a generic stand-in companion despite her potentially interesting background and education. And then there’s John Standing as the elder Dr. Threadstone, who is so unmemorable I already can’t think of anything to say about him other than “he sounded gruff.” Colin Baker is reliable as ever, though the generic dialogue even makes him sound like he’s going through the motions.
A few other points – the Doctor goes out of his way to try to call in UNIT to save the day, which is one of those things that always makes me wonder why he doesn’t do that every time he’s faced with a difficult problem on present-day Earth. There are references to other Macqueen stories, and of course we had to have the scene at the end where the Doctor loses his memory so he won’t remember what this Master looks like when “UNIT Dominion” rolls around. (Though to be fair, it fits the plot surprisingly well.) We even get a flashback to the Master’s first moments in this body, but you weren’t expecting that to actually tell us anything about the character, were you? Maybe it’ll be picked up on next month in “The Two Masters” but that won’t make this story any better.
The production is fine, as one would expect, from director Jamie Anderson and sound designer Andy Hardwick. But ultimately “Vampire of the Mind” just isn’t engaging. There’s nothing intriguing about the plot, nothing imaginative about the characterization, and virtually nothing surprising happens throughout its two-hour length. The recent Peter Davison trilogy gave me some confidence about the monthly range; these two stories have forfeited it.
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
A Companion Chronicle starring William Russell and written by Simon Guerrier? Sign me up! Yes, it’s “The Library of Alexandria,” a very impressive story that begins with the trappings of a historical before going in an unexpected direction.
There’s no reason to expect this story to go in the direction it does, because it seems for all the world as though it’s going to be a traditional Hartnell historical. Much like “The Romans,” we have the TARDIS crew taking a well-deserved holiday in antiquity. Ian gets himself into trouble in his interactions with the locals. There’s a lesser-known historical figure in Hypatia (Susan Franklyn) and a historical event in the destruction of the Library of Alexandria that we know very little about. When Susan mentions that there are rumors that sea monsters destroyed the Library, it’s clearly meant to pique our interest – but this type of story conditions us to expect a believable explanation for why people think that. Perhaps there will be ships in the harbor decorated like sea monsters, or something along those lines – and then we’ll get a knowing chuckle from the Doctor as the crew escapes danger and takes off once more in the TARDIS.
But Guerrier doesn’t do that. It turns out the reason why it is said that sea monsters destroyed the Library is that it actually happened! The first episode cliffhanger is brilliant because it completely undercuts the listener’s assumptions about what’s coming. Most “pseudo-historicals” reveal their sci-fi credentials early on; this one reveals them with a flourish halfway through. (Assuming you don’t look at the cover, of course, which has tentacles all over it.) From there, it becomes a mad scramble to save whatever can be rescued from the Library while the Doctor defiantly turns aside the alien invasion. Guerrier uses the Mim as his invasion force, the same alien race he used in “Shadow of the Past” and several Bernice Summerfield stories. In a particularly sharp scene, after using focused light to burn one of their number, the Doctor basically talks the Mim right off the planet – and it’s very easy to picture William Hartnell with chin outthrust and lapels firmly in hand.
There’s also a bit of interesting character work, as Ian and Hypatia have a long conversation about science and philosophy and, when Ian returns to the TARDIS crew, everyone assumes he’s returned from a date! Doctor Who doesn’t feature many romantic entanglements with locals; there are a ton of instances where locals will fall for companions, but rarely is it reciprocated. And while there’s little romance in Ian’s interaction with Hypatia, they have an easy chemistry, and the mutual appeal is obvious – no wonder Barbara is so irritated! Ian insisting he and Barbara are just friends rings appropriately false – I like stories from this era that don’t shy away from their growing relationship.
William Russell is fantastic as always in this story, while Susan Franklyn turns in a fine supporting role. Guerrier even lets her have control of the narrative for a short while in a surprisingly effective scene. Everything else is as good as one would expect from director Lisa Bowerman and sound designer Toby Hrycek-Robinson. Overall, “The Library of Alexandria” is a very strong story that plays with the listener’s assumptions about Doctor Who in a rewarding manner.
Thus far, the Torchwood audio series has stayed away from serialization – we’ve had the linking elements of the Committee, but each story has stood largely on its own. That might be changing with James Goss’ “Ghost Mission,” the first Torchwood story to put Tom Price’s Sgt. Andy front and center. While the story continues the Committee plot, it’s also open-ended: we don’t get a resolution to Andy’s story, after all. Norton (Samuel Barnett) is also the sort of character you’d expect to see again in a recurring series, and the extras basically come right out and say that we’ll be seeing both characters again. For the most part I enjoyed “Ghost Mission,” largely because of Price’s performance – it’s great to have Andy at center stage and finally fleshed out as a main character. I love the little details about him, like the reasons why he doesn’t curse or the extensive experience he’s obviously had talking down drunk, hysterical club patrons. Norton is also great, even if his role is basically to stand around passing wry commentary, because he and Andy build a legitimate, appealing rapport. The problem with “Ghost Mission” is that we’ve basically seen it all before. First we had “More Than This,” where Gwen takes a local official on a wild tour of a day in the life of a Torchwood operative. Then we had “The Victorian Age,” where Jack takes Queen Victoria on a wild tour of a day in the life of a Torchwood operative. Now, in “Ghost Mission,” Norton takes Andy on… well, you get the idea. Heck, even “One Rule” had elements of this plot. Fortunately, the series has largely sidestepped this issue by making its characters so appealing, but we’re only halfway through the second series – this shouldn’t be feeling repetitive. Overall, though, I enjoyed “Ghost Mission.” It’s entertaining with appealing characters that I want to see again.
It’s difficult for me to write a proper review of James Goss’ “The Scorchies,” the ninth release in the seventh series of Companion Chronicles, because I’m incredibly conflicted by it. On the one hand, I can see what the story is trying to do and it appears to do that fairly well; on the other, I found it one of the most irritating experiences of my time listening to Big Finish.
Let’s get this out of the way up front: “The Scorchies” is not a bad story. It’s the same sort of satirical take on children’s light entertainment that we got way back in “The Ratings War” – though not as good – and it certainly embraces the style. Katy Manning’s acting is fantastic, not only as Jo and in her brief moments as the Doctor, but also in the way she disappears into the various Scorchies. Between Manning and costar Melvyn Hayes, this sounds like a full-cast drama, and that’s a testament to the two actors. And in many ways it is a full-cast drama: it’s not told in flashback, standing as one of the rare examples of an “as it happens” Companion Chronicle. The sound design from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is quite evocative of this style of television, and Ken Bentley knows exactly what to shoot for in his direction. Goss’ story is somewhat slight, but it even manages to be affecting by the conclusion as it tells the story of Professor Baffle and the history of the Scorchies. In short, I understand why a lot of people enjoy this story, and why a great many of them rate this story particularly highly.
Unfortunately, I am not one of those people. I don’t like light entertainment in this vein. I disliked this sort of show when I was a kid and I continue to dislike it now. Comparisons to the Muppets are incredibly wrong-footed. Everything about this story is loud – it’s like being shouted at for an hour – and the barrage of stimuli never stops. The scary parts aren’t scary and the dramatic parts are drowned by the surrounding cacophony of nonsense. And then there are the songs, which I suppose have witty lyrics but are also teeth-grindingly annoying. It was a struggle not to skip tracks to get ahead of them.
Viewed dispassionately, “The Scorchies” isn’t a bad story. It’s not a masterpiece – it’s the sort of thing I’d probably give a 6/10 – but it’s not a disaster. But everything about “The Scorchies” rubs me the wrong way. It’s a style of story I dislike in a genre I hate. I had to force myself through the entire unpleasant experience. I recognize that this is simply an issue of personal taste, and not a reflection on the quality of the story, but in the end this was one of the least enjoyable Doctor Who stories of my life, and I have to grade it as such.
After bingeing another season of House of Cards, the Netflix adaptation of the original Andrew Davies series, I popped in “House of Cards,” the Companion Chronicle from Steve Lyons. And while I knew I wasn’t going to get a story of political intrigue, I was hoping to get the kind of intricate storytelling that marks the best stories in the range. Instead, I got a standard runaround in a casino. Can’t win ‘em all, I suppose.
“House of Cards,” get it? Like playing cards? Yes, it’s a space casino, and the Doctor, Ben, Polly, and Jamie get to explore this temple dedicated to gambling. And that’s basically all that happens in the entire first episode: the characters wander around the casino and try their luck at different wagers. Yes, we meet some of the important supporting characters, and naturally there’s a run-in with security that leads up to the cliffhanger ending, but this is exactly the story you would expect from that concept – nothing more, nothing less. Fortunately, the second episode introduces some much-needed complexity by giving Polly a time travel device and allowing her to move back in the story and give events a nudge in the proper direction. And Lyons handles this with notable skill: Polly doesn’t actually change history but works herself into it in a way that doesn’t appear to have any flaws. It’s structured quite well, but it feels quite empty.
And that’s why I don’t have much to say about “House of Cards,” because there’s really nothing to talk about. This is another Companion Chronicle starring two companion actors, but despite matching narratives, it doesn’t even begin to try to get into Jamie’s or Polly’s heads. We don’t learn anything about Ben – apart from apparently being stupid enough to take out a line of credit from a casino – and the Doctor just flits around in his usual display of chaotic influence. There’s a race of snakelike alien gangsters, there’s an attack by some robot dogs, and there’s an American cowboy stereotype who’s convinced he’s just one game away from his lucky break. I suppose there’s some interest in hearing these disparate elements tied together, but ultimately there’s nothing here you haven’t heard before.
If not for the time-travel plotting, “House of Cards” would feel like it was thrown together at the last minute. The Doctor saves the day by winning a random game of what sounds similar to Go Fish? Why not? I do like the sound design from Matthew Cochrane and the score by Daniel Brett, which actually capture the feeling of being in a casino, but apart from that, I really don’t have much to say. It’s very rare for the Companion Chronicles, but I was bored throughout.
For the seventh series of Companion Chronicles, the four-episode double-disc release is Marc Platt’s “The Flames of Cadiz,” a historical story set constructed around the Spanish Inquisition and Drake’s battles with the Spanish Armada. While the story certainly captures many of the finest elements of the Hartnell-era historicals, it was a mistake to make this the double-length story, as the second half is much more tedious and uninteresting than the first.
But let’s start with the first half of the story, which is generally excellent. Many of the classic historicals involve the TARDIS crew becoming embroiled in historical events and simply trying to flee back to the Ship to escape – and that’s exactly what happens in “The Flames of Cadiz,” as Ian’s trademark heroism lands him before the Inquisition in Seville. From there it’s a mad scramble by the Doctor and his companions to rescue Ian before he’s burned at the stake – and there’s some fantastic material in here, including the Doctor dressing up in the robes of a cardinal and bluffing his way into a face-to-face meeting with the King of Spain. As each successive plan fails, the panicked feeling builds – there’s a ton of drama here, both in the plot itself and in the characters’ reactions. Even the guest characters are sketched well, from the maniacal head of the Inquisition to the ineffectual, dithering king. And finally, just when things seem hopeless, the TARDIS crew escapes, and, with the Inquisition close on their heels, retreat back to the Ship, where they escape to their next adventure, right?
Well, no. They escape the Inquisition and flee back to the Ship, but instead of leaving Seville, Ian decides this is the perfect time to get on a wagon bound for Cadiz – several days away – and meet his personal hero, Francis Drake! He makes this decision less than an hour after literally being tied to a stake with flames licking his feet, and with the Inquisition searching the city block-by-block and door-by-door to find him. Ian Chesterton has many characteristics – heroism, impulsiveness, and self-righteousness among them – but I’ve never known him to be a complete idiot, and yet that’s exactly what he is here. And of course Barbara doesn’t tell anyone until Ian is long gone, which just complicates matters further and launches the story into a travelogue of their overland journey in pursuit.
The lead plot in the second half, with Ian meeting Drake, is incredibly clichéd. It turns out that Drake isn’t the swashbuckling hero that Ian imagined as a child – he’s a boorish, arrogant lout that also happens to be a skilled pirate and brilliant tactician. That’s about as far as that part of the story goes – though Ian saves Drake from being killed, because that’s what Ian does. The subplot of the second half is Barbara’s apparent desire to change history to favor England even more than it already does, and the Doctor’s righteous anger and attempts to stop her. The resolution here is quite smart: the Doctor has completely misread Barbara and the situation because he doesn’t actually know what year it is! This is very much in keeping with the impulsive, mercurial Doctor of season 1, and adds more depth to his complex relationship with Barbara.
Instead of a guest actor, “The Flames of Cadiz” features both William Russell and Carole Ann Ford, and they alternate narrative duties based upon where their characters are in the story. Platt handles this quite well, as things never get confusing, and I hardly need to point out what a pleasure it is to listen to William Russell perform. Lisa Bowerman is always reliable as director, and the sound design from Toby Hrycek-Robinson is solid as well. Overall, “The Flames of Cadiz” probably would have been better served as a two-part story, as the second half is a step down from the first, but there’s enough good here to keep it solidly above average.
I said after “The Paradox Planet” that this two-part story would be the best Fourth Doctor Adventure by far if Jonathan Morris could stick the landing in “Legacy of Death.” To my immense relief, he did exactly that: “Legacy” is every bit as good as its first installment, capturing humor and drama in equal measure and delivering a fine, enjoyable experience.
The story reveals the ontological paradox that seemed evident in the first part: the people of Aoris need xenox crystals in order to build technology to repair their shattered planet, shattered because of the negligence of their predecessors. So they go back in time to steal the crystals from those same predecessors – but now, without any xenox crystals, the people of the past have no way to construct clean sources of energy, and the planet falls into ruin. There’s a bit of “Day of the Daleks” in here, with the Doctor thundering at both Drang (Simon Rouse) and Embery (Tom Chadbon) that they caused their own destruction – but this situation is more complex, as both men are simultaneously responsible and not responsible – they couldn’t help but act, but they were compelled to act by their own actions. The resolution is excellent: Morris smartly refuses to resolve the paradox but still manages to give each civilization an acceptable ending. I was afraid this would end with the future Aoris wiped out of existence or something, but the story is better than that.
Equally impressive is Morris’ use of time travel, reminiscent of Steven Moffat at his finest. Actions in the past impact the future with immediate effect for people traveling between the two, and yet Morris never loses track of who is located where and when and in what order. It’s an incredibly complex plot but it feels easy, even obvious, a testament to Morris’ skill. And the environmental themes are carried on from the first part, with a strong message about climate change awareness. I also like some of the concepts that dance on the margins, like K-9 adding 2000 years to his life or the way he founds a religion that, as its adherents point out, isn’t a cult because all its predictions come true!
As “Legacy of Death” is basically just episodes 3 and 4 of “The Paradox Planet,” there’s not much more to say about it. Ken Bentley directs well, Jamie Robertson’s sound design is first-rate, and I like the score which is very reminiscent of season 17. Overall, “The Paradox Planet” and “Legacy of Death” combine to produce easily the best Fourth Doctor Adventure thus far. If the range had been doing stuff like this from the beginning, imagine what might have been?
Following the example of 2015, Big Finish released another trilogy in 2016 featuring three different Doctors in a linked set of three stories. This year, the stories all feature the Master, and the first of these is “And You Will Obey Me,” from Alan Barnes. While it certainly does some great work with the Master, it’s also a disjointed, overstuffed release that fails to live up to its potential.
I think Geoffrey Beevers’ Master has been one of the most wasted recurring elements in the entire Big Finish stable. Instead of using him as the menacing, desperate character we saw on television, we’ve often seen him as a figure of fun or a generic ranting villain. Here, though, Barnes absolutely nails the character. He’s desperate to survive above all other priorities, and the way he corrupts a group of teenagers to serve as his eyes and ears while he recovers from an accident is both frightening and utterly in keeping with his character. The Master in this story takes a sadistic relish in acting like the world’s worst father, taunting his “children” in one breath and ordering them around in the next, and Beevers eagerly sinks his teeth into the role in one of his best performances. But then that points to the biggest problem with the story: the Master is hardly in it! He doesn’t appear at all in the first two parts save for a couple of background noises, appears almost entirely in flashback in the third episode, and finally steps onto center stage in the final episode. This would be okay if the story was interesting when he wasn’t around, but it wasn’t.
While the Master is hiding on Earth trying to recover, a number of different forces are trying to find him. There are two sets of alien assassins on the prowl: one is a rogue AI that wants to kill the Master to balance its moral ledger against previous crimes, the other is a pair of giant dragonfly assassins that only live for 30 days. There’s interesting material in both races, but the story does absolutely nothing with it. The dragonflies in particular are thoroughly unimpressive; the Doctor dispenses with them with very little effort and later a random character with a gun unceremoniously kills them off. How on earth were they expecting to kill the Master? And they’re not played for humor, so I assume we’re expected to take them seriously. I like the androids better, especially the revelation that they’re making all this effort to improve their morals by slightly over 1%, but even their role in the story is too cluttered.
The story is also about the Master’s effect on the children he controlled. There’s some nonsense about the Master’s symbiotic nuclei bleeding out into the surrounding atmosphere – seriously, what ARE symbiotic nuclei? – and rendering the children ageless. So in the story’s present, they’re all in their 40s, but they still look like 16 year olds. Does the story spend much time exploring how it feels to be a mature adult with the appearance of a teenager? How teenage hormones battle against a lifetime of experience? Since I’m asking the question you know the answer is “not really” but it’s still disappointing considering the potential. It doesn’t help that three of the four children are utterly free of personality; the fourth, Mikey (Russ Bain), has a personality but he’s arbitrarily removed from the script in an unrewarding way.
Oh, and there are some Russians in the story, and one character makes a point of saying how unmemorable they are. This is an unintentional microcosm for all the characterization in the story. I haven’t even mentioned the fifth Doctor, who is traveling alone in this story, but he’s barely involved in the plot until the final episode. For a story that’s so overstuffed with underdeveloped characters, there isn’t a strong plot tying everything together. I did like Jamie Anderson’s direction, and Richard Fox and Lauren Yason always provide fine sound design. But in the end, “And You Will Obey Me” is a mess that wastes a great portrayal of the Master and a disappointing start to an ambitious trilogy.
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: RETURN OF THE ROCKET MEN
Sequels in the Companion Chronicles have generally been reserved to single authors, like the various Simon Guerrier arcs. But in “Return of the Rocket Men,” sequel to one of the best stories in the entire range, Big Finish gave the nod to Matt Fitton to pick up where John Dorney left off. And while the end result isn’t quite as spectacular, it’s still very much worth hearing.
To be fair, “Return of the Rocket Men” is only a sequel insofar as the titular Rocket Men make another appearance. There aren’t recurring characters (apart from the Doctor) or anything like that. But thematically and structurally the stories are quite similar: both involve companions coming to a realization about their time in the TARDIS and both include a twist revelation involving rocket packs. I think both of these are examples of why “Return” is inferior to its predecessor. “Return” revolves around Steven and the mindset that will eventually drive him to leave the TARDIS in “The Savages.” He spends the story contemplating when you know it’s time to stop doing something you once loved, and he reflects upon all the death and loss he has experienced during his time with the Doctor. (Looking back, has any companion seen as much horror?) Unfortunately, the death Steven witnesses in this story isn’t as meaningful to the listener as so many others were – and as such the story isn’t very convincing as the “last straw” that it intends to be.
The twist in “The Rocket Men” was remarkably elegant: Ian had been wearing a rocket pack for quite some time, but had never mentioned it – and since there weren’t any visuals, there wasn’t any way for the listener to know. “Return of the Rocket Men,” however, attempts a time travel-themed twist: we flash back to Steven’s days as a pilot when a rogue Rocket Man saved his life, and later we learn that Rocket Man was Steven himself in disguise! It’s a neat idea, but it’s incredibly predictable – I think the decision to make the Doctor audible in Steven’s headset during the flashback was a mistake, as it spells out what’s going on in gigantic flaming letters. I’m also not sure that Steven intending to make the ultimate sacrifice to save his younger self is as impactful as it could otherwise have been. It doesn’t feel like the culmination of his time in the TARDIS it should be; rather, it feels self-directed and a bit aimless.
I admit it’s a bit unfair to compare “Return of the Rocket Men” to its predecessor, if only because that story was on a short list of Big Finish’s greatest material. And indeed “Return” is a strong story: Peter Purves gives a fantastic, emotional performance that has the listener in his corner from the first moments and never lets go. Despite the predictability of the story, it’s still effective in large part because of Purves and the emotional journey Steven is on. Tim Treloar is very good as the Rocket Men leader Van Cleef – including his brief moments of narration – and the sound design from Howard Carter and Lisa Bowerman’s direction are both top notch. In short, you should definitely pick up “Return of the Rocket Men” – just don’t expect it to reach the stratospheric heights of the original.
The sixtieth release in the regular Companion Chronicles series, James Goss’ “The Last Post,” gained an uncomfortable significance before its release with the unfortunate passing of Caroline John. As such, the story stands as her final performance, and while it wasn’t intended to act as such, it works surprisingly well as a tribute to Doctor Who’s landmark seventh season.
James Goss seems to have been on a nostalgia kick when he wrote his Companion Chronicles. First, we had “The Time Museum,” which featured a journey through Ian’s memories of his travels in the TARDIS. Now, with “The Last Post,” we follow a story that takes place parallel to the events of season 7. The script is told in epistolary fashion, largely through letters written between Liz and her mother, Dame Emily Shaw (Rowena Cooper). Between Liz’s work at UNIT, and Emily’s work on a secret government council, the letters describe everything from the Auton invasion to the Stahlman project. I like these references because they’re not intrusive: they make “The Last Post” sound like it takes place in a connected fictional universe without ever sounding forced.
Importantly, in spite of these references, “The Last Post” is not nostalgic in its storytelling. The format of the story alone is unlike anything we saw on television, and the idea of telling a story that takes place in parallel to multiple TV adventures is something we haven’t seen too often. It makes UNIT feel more real: the Brigadier isn’t addressing one crisis at a time; he’s juggling multiple crises at once. The Doctor doesn’t blow people off simply because he’s petulant and frustrated; he genuinely does have other important things to work on. And it makes Liz’s frustration seem honest – it’s coming from professional conflicts, not clichéd behavior. Emily runs into similar difficulties on her council, but even that comes from a believable place: she’s a humanities PhD and the more “qualified” people don’t take her entirely seriously.
As for the plot, it’s a good one – a doomsday clock that issues specific predictions about individual deaths. Perhaps it was a bit too much in the reference department to reveal that the clock was built from parts from WOTAN, but the “Doctor Who is required” reference was amusing so I’ll forgive it. The story has an oppressive sense of inevitability about it, something communicated very well in the interactions between John and Cooper. As for the performances, they’re as good as you’d expect. Rowena Cooper creates an intelligent, appealing character in Dame Emily – it’s very apparent that this is Liz’s mother, and affection shines through their interactions. Caroline John gets a wide range of emotions to address and demonstrates excellent capability as a narrator. Her impression of the Brigadier is particularly entertaining as well. It’s just a shame that this is her final performance, as it’s clear that, had health allowed, she had many more great ones to give.
Overall, “The Last Post” is a very good release. It’s an entertaining story, it features two appealing characters, and it stands as a fine tribute both to its era and to its star. It’s produced well, and it’s an easy listen. It is yet another strong entry in a very strong series.
The second release in the second series of Torchwood audios is “Zone 10” from David Llewellyn, and most significantly it features the return of Naoko Mori to the role of Toshiko Sato, the crew’s oft-overlooked tech expert. It’s a fairly straightforward plot – she travels to Russia to investigate a mysterious signal from outer space – but the story is perhaps most significant in how it advances the ongoing Committee plot, with some interesting revelations about Torchwood’s involvement in the Committee’s arrival. Most disappointing, though, is that the story doesn’t spend enough time focusing on its characters. Toshiko and Maxim (Krystian Godlewski) spend nearly half the running time engaging in small talk and yet we hardly learn anything about either character. There’s a brief focus on how Toshiko feels like the forgotten member of the Torchwood team, how the other agents would steal this mission from her if they knew about it, and there are some parallels drawn between her and forgotten Russian cosmonaut Anna (Ella Garland). The conclusion therefore doesn’t earn the poignancy it’s trying for. There’s also a surprising amount of action here, and while it’s difficult to communicate a gun battle in a snow-covered Siberian wasteland on audio, Steve Foxon’s sound design does an admirable job. But even the action feels off: one scene features three characters moving through deep snow without any cover and taking fire from multiple snipers. By the time the snipers fire off 20 rounds without hitting anything, the scene has gone from exciting to laughable. All of this isn’t to say I disliked “Zone 10,” of course. The story moves at an entertaining clip, the ongoing plot threads are interesting, and Mori herself is an absolute delight in the lead role. So it’s still a decent listen, but I’m a bit concerned. Thus far, the second Torchwood audio series is significantly worse than the first, and that’s a disturbing trend.
On rare occasions, the Companion Chronicles serve as companion pieces to the monthly range. We saw that with “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” and “Night’s Black Agents,” and now we have the final story in that vein: “Project: Nirvana” from Forge creators Cavan Scott and Mark Wright. And though it’s set in the middle of one of Big Finish’s worst ongoing plots, this story is surprisingly excellent.
Set during the “Black and White” arc, “Project: Nirvana” follows a mission by the Black TARDIS crew as part of the Doctor’s attempt to defeat the Elder Gods. In this case, it’s Derleth, god of jealously, whose spirit is stored in an artifact being transported aboard a secure Forge train. And so it’s up to Lysandra Aristedes and Sally Morgan to infiltrate the train and carry out whatever secret, manipulative plan the Doctor has in mind. Fortunately, Scott and Wright make this into a character piece: they don’t focus unnecessarily on the Elder Gods arc and instead focus on how Lysandra has changed over the years. What the Doctor hasn’t told them is that Lysandra’s younger self is aboard the train – but she doesn’t remember because of some traumatic event, and the Doctor wants to find out what that was. So we end up with some fantastic scenes of a younger Lysandra interrogating Sally, with Sally seeing the humanity lurking beneath Lysandra’s impassive surface but unable to get through completely to her. This does more to flesh out Lysandra as a compelling, sympathetic character than all of the monthly releases in this arc put together – and that’s a credit to the authors and their understanding of their character.
Derleth himself is also a harrowing, threatening character. With almost unlimited power to control the emotions of those around him, he can create an army of devoted followers just by walking into a crowded room. Only Lysandra shows the ability, drawn from her Forge training, to resist him – even the Doctor’s resistance crumbles over time. He’s on the train in the first place because of some insane plan by Nimrod to clone the Elder God and deploy those clones into battlefields, leading the enemy to turn on itself in fits of rage and jealousy – the “nirvana” of the title. It’s scary to hear how easily people fall under Derleth’s thrall, especially someone like Sally that we’ve come to like. There is genuine tension in this story, something that doesn’t happen as often as I’d like in Big Finish – but then Scott and Wright have always proven themselves the best in Big Finish’s stable at writing action epics that are legitimately tense and thrilling.
This is the final Companion Chronicle set in the Sylvester McCoy era, and it features McCoy himself in a rather significant supporting role. Indeed, while most of the story is delivered through narration from Lysandra or Sally, the final confrontation between the Doctor, his companions, and Derleth is presented as a full-cast scene. It provides an interesting look into the dynamic of the Black TARDIS: the Doctor is the same manipulative bastard we know and love from his travels with Ace and Hex, but here he treats his companions like the soldiers they are. The seventh Doctor is often found playing the game from the sidelines, but to hear him giving out orders like a superior officer is still a bit disconcerting.
The production from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason is suitably epic, backed by Ken Bentley’s able direction. The performances are great across the board. Overall, “Project: Nirvana” is an unqualified success. It’s an atypical Doctor Who story featuring unusual characters taking place within a misguided story arc – and it works in spite of all those things. This is a further reminder that Scott and Wright are two of Big Finish’s best writers.
THE COMPANION CHRONICLES: THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
I’ve always appreciated the ability of the Companion Chronicles to tell different types of stories, including long plots that extend over multiple releases over multiple years. “The Uncertainty Principle” from Simon Guerrier continues the arc surrounding Zoe’s memory previously seen in “Shades of Grey” and “The Memory Cheats.” And while it does a fair job of extending the plot arc, it falls down when it tries to tell an interesting story of its own.
The mysterious Company knows that Zoe was a time traveler, and knows that she has useful knowledge as a result of her time in the TARDIS. But they also know there’s something wrong with her memory, and so they’ve set Charlie Hayes’ Jen on the case. No difference here than the prior stories, except each time Jen is able to dig a little deeper and discover a little more. I like learning more about this time, because it’s interesting to play with: how does the Time Lords’ memory block work, and how does it affect someone with a photographic memory? The problem is that we’re not getting enough advancement in the story: they’re threatening to execute Zoe but it doesn’t feel like she’s making much of a breakthrough. The interaction between mother-daughter team Wendy Padbury and Charlie Hayes is always entertaining, of course, but I hope this goes somewhere productive before the range concludes.
The story that is drawn from Zoe’s memories in “The Uncertainty Principle” isn’t particularly gripping or even interesting. I do like how it opens, with the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe infiltrating a funeral to learn more about the deceased, but after that it devolves into a typical mystery plot. There are aliens made of electricity that hurt people, but it turns out they’re actually quite nice and don’t want to cause any harm. The dead woman from the funeral actually exists in a state of quantum uncertainty, and she’s returned to life from that. It all seems incredibly devoid of consequence: everyone is well meaning and everyone gets what they want. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this type of story, but it needs to do something more interesting at some point to hold the attention.
Oh, and speaking of quantum uncertainty, Guerrier goes off on a protracted lecture about the titular Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger’s Cat. There’s a fine attempt in here to tie the story back to Zoe’s memories, to show that their unpredictability means that their truth is a relative state, but it’s far too didactic to be dramatic. This was done to much better effect in the Oliver Harper stories, where Steven gave a detailed description of the physics involved in piloting a spacecraft. That had immediacy; this does not.
This isn’t to say that “The Uncertainty Principle” is a bad story – it’s just not a very exciting one. It almost seems like it’s here to fill space, which is odd considering it’s intended to develop an ongoing plot. Still, a fine performance from the two actors as well as able direction from Lisa Bowerman means you can find many worse ways to spend an hour. I suppose I’ve just come to expect more.
The seventh series of Companion Chronicles kicks off with “The Time Museum” from James Goss, his first script for the range. It’s an interesting examination of memory and character, and thankfully evolves beyond a nigh-incomprehensible first episode to deliver a brilliant ending.
“The Time Museum” is a tale of two halves. An elderly Ian Chesterton wakes up in a museum of time travellers within an exhibit dedicated to his life and travels in the TARDIS. As he struggles to piece together his memories with the help of “curator” Pendolin (Philip Pope), he discovers that mysterious creatures roaming the museum are taking his memories and leaving him confused. The first episode is dedicated to discovering just what is happening, and it features Ian and Pendolin running through exhibit after exhibit of Ian’s time in the TARDIS, from the Dalek city on Skaro to the battlefields of the Crusades. But Ian’s memories are confused, and so he describes things like the “Cave of Five Hundred Skulls,” conflating “An Unearthly Child” and “Marco Polo.” This is conceptually interesting, but its execution is wanting: there’s little more to the first episode than Ian rambling incorrectly about his travels with the Doctor. It’s like listening to an ill-informed fan trying to sound like an expert. William Russell’s performance is nonetheless great, as he really sells the anguish and confusion of an older man struggling to retain his memories, but nonetheless the episode is confusingly presented.
Fortunately, the second episode is much, much better. Ian deduces that the “curator” is actually the creature stealing his memories, and much of the episode is spent listening to each man trying to verbally outwit the other. Ian masterfully manipulates Pendolin into engineering his own destruction, meditating all the while on his lost memories and his absent home. And the end, when Ian returns home via stolen time technology, a likely homage to his initial return home in “The Chase,” is hopeful and triumphant, a true monument to a beloved character. There’s also an eerie post-credits scene that makes you wonder if the entire thing might start over again with a different star.
There is no narrative in this story; it’s a full-cast two-hander. There are moments when Ian starts into narration of past adventures, but they are quickly interrupted, emblematic of his damaged memory. William Russell is absolutely brilliant: he’s always been in the first rank of companion actors, but this is one of his best-ever performances in his greatest role. Pope is an able supporting actor, adding a fine combination of officiousness and threat. And the sound design, from Richard Fox and Lauren Yason, plus the direction, from Lisa Bowerman, help create the sense of confusion that drives the story. Overall, “The Time Museum” is quite good, in spite of its first episode, and it’s great to hear the experimental tradition of the Companion Chronicles extending into their seventh series.
The final entry in this year’s Peter Davison trilogy is “The Peterloo Massacre” from Paul Magrs, and it stands as one of the most interesting and yet most frustrating Big Finish releases in recent memory. As a piece of drama it is quite often brilliantly gripping, yet it’s also as subtle as being smacked upside the head with a boat oar and features a nearly pointless final episode.
“The Peterloo Massacre” is about the historical event of the same name, when a large, peaceful assembly of working class protestors from in and around Manchester was attacked by the military, resulting in multiple deaths and hundreds of casualties. It’s considered one of the most brutal, repressive moments of that century in England, and Magrs does not shy away from that idea. This is presented in the grand tradition of the Hartnell historicals: there’s no celebrity, no alien influence, just the TARDIS crew thrown into a horrible situation and trying to survive until they can get back to the TARDIS and leave. By the time the Doctor realizes when and where they’ve landed, Tegan and Nyssa have become involved in local events, and much of the story is spent with the Doctor desperately trying to find his friends before they’re caught in the carnage. There is a building, pervasive sense of dread throughout the first three episodes of “The Peterloo Massacre” – you can hear each step down the road to the massacre, and you can hear each moment at which it could have been averted but wasn’t. When the massacre finally happens, as the climax to the third episode, the presentation is truly horrifying – Nigel Fairs deserves all the credit in the world for some particularly disturbing sound design. In many ways, this buildup and explosion resembles the TV story “The Massacre,” a story that is rightly perceived as a classic to this day.
Unfortunately, for everything that “Peterloo” does right, it also takes a number of drastic missteps. Chief among them is an utter lack of anything resembling subtlety: virtually every guest character in the story is lovingly drawn from the finest stock clichés. Hurley (Robbie Stevens) is everything you’d expect from a villainous industrialist: he cares for nothing but profit, he holds the lives of his workers in disregard, he’s a “self-made man” who holds the working class in contempt because they didn’t better themselves like he did, and so forth. His wife (Liz Morgan) is even more over the top, irrationally dismissing Cathy (Hayley Jayne Standing) from her service and ordering Nyssa out of the house. The soldiers are cackling drunks to a man. And the working class characters are no better – Cathy is the noble, heroic maid who wants to better herself, while her father (Wayne Forester) is representative of the old order, exhorting his daughter to know her place and never question her betters. Even Tegan is relentlessly one-note, unable to keep her mouth shut for even a moment about inequality and workers’ rights. About the only character with any depth outside of the Doctor and Nyssa is William (Gerard Kearns), but even he’s just hopelessly naïve.
And then there’s the final episode, which I’m still struggling to understand. The massacre happens at the end of episode three – this is both the historical and dramatic climax of the story, meaning that Magrs leaves a full quarter of the running time for denouement. Some of this is put to good use: seeing what happens to Cathy and her son, for example, and giving us some of the most intense acting we’ve ever heard from Sarah Sutton. But for most of the episode we follow Hurley as he has a crisis of conscience, suddenly wondering if slaughtering unarmed innocents was a good idea or not. I’m not sure if I was supposed to feel any sympathy for him, but trying to add depth to a character that just spent three episodes as a screamingly unsubtle villain strikes me as a misstep. There’s also the question of the parentage of the baby: it’s plain from the start that the baby is Cathy’s son, not her little brother, but I don’t think that was supposed to be a big surprise. But who’s the father? All the evidence points to William, and right at the end Nyssa dramatically reveals this to his parents. Shock! Horror! The wealthy industrialist’s son has been dallying with the maid! The family is disgraced! But no – actually, Nyssa was wrong, and William is not the father. So who was? We never find out, because immediately after that “revelation,” the crew leaves in the TARDIS! What on earth was the point of any of that?
I mentioned before that Sarah Sutton turns in a powerful performance in this story, one that’s quite unexpected given her usual reserved performance. But Peter Davison steals the show: his Doctor is absolutely infuriated by the massacre and its surrounding events, and utterly frustrated at his inability to intervene. It’s so rare to hear the fifth Doctor genuinely angry, and his righteous fury is therefore shocking and powerful listening. I’m very pleased to hear one of the lead actors being challenged by a Big Finish script, and even more pleased to hear an actor of his considerable talent rising to the occasion.
Overall, then, “The Peterloo Massacre” is a mixed bag. At its best, it’s comparable to the very best Big Finish releases. At its worst, it’s crushingly unsubtle and seems to waste its final episode. So it’s tough to give a score – but I enjoyed listening despite the flaws.
It only took five years but I think the Fourth Doctor Adventures finally found the perfect marriage of author and concept. “The Paradox Planet” is from Jonathan Morris, he who burst onto the scene with his novel “Festival of Death” – and sure enough, giving him a season 17 story with the Doctor, Romana, and K9 results in an excellent story.
It’s unfortunate, in a way, that “The Paradox Planet” is only the first installment of a two-part story, because this is almost certainly the best story in the entire range thus far. The central concept is mind-blowing: a race of people forced to live underground by the effects of climate change discovers time travel, and determines the best way to improve their lives is to go back in time and bring extinct species forward to repopulate the planet and make it inhabitable once again. But the people in the past fight back, not wanting the future inhabitants to rebuild society off the backs of their labor. Though Morris hasn’t come to it yet, it seems obvious that the story is heading toward a revelation that the future people doom themselves by taking away the very things the past people need to avert catastrophe – but I’m perfectly okay with this revelation because it’s fantastic. The story is full of journeys backward and forward in time, and to this point Morris seems to have plotted everything out without fail. The resolution to the first episode cliffhanger is a particular delight – it’s set up so you expect something in the past to affect the future, but the specific solution Morris devises is hilariously satisfying.
This is the first story in this series that actually feels like it belongs in season 17. Douglas Adams’ influence is all over the TV episodes, not just in terms of the comedy but also in terms of the concepts. Here, Morris combines a complex time travel plot with another huge Adams concern: the environment. Romana takes everything seriously, acting as a pseudo-Doctor, while the actual Doctor wanders around enjoying himself with K9 cleaning up behind him. Ideas like K9 spending a thousand years in “sleep mode” are thrown around almost for fun. If there’s one difference it’s the absence of any theatrical, over-the-top villains for the Doctor and Romana to tear down – in fact, Morris goes in the other direction, presenting people who are so wrapped up in their conflict they can no longer examine it from an outside perspective. Romana does at least have some fun at the expense of a couple of scientists in another memorable scene.
The casting is fantastic as well, especially Doctor Who veterans Simon Rouse and “City of Death” alum Tom Chadbon. (Incidentally, doesn’t Chadbon sound a lot like Geoffrey Beevers?) The production is generally great, from director Ken Bentley to Jamie Robertson’s sound design. Overall, “The Paradox Planet” is a great opening half, and for maybe the first time in five years I genuinely can’t wait to see what happens next.
So here we are, eight hours and two box sets into the Doom Coalition series, and we still haven’t heard the words “Doom Coalition” or indeed much of any hint about what this Coalition might be or what its goals are. As good as some of the individual stories have been, if someone asked me right now what the Doom Coalition series is about, I wouldn’t have any idea. The fourth and final story in this set, Matt Fitton’s “The Sonomancer,” provides a couple of hints in that direction, but unfortunately those hints don’t bode well for an impressive revelation.
I mentioned this briefly in my review of “The Gift,” but this is the second story in a row where they’ve reduced Caleera to a generic villain obsessed with destroying everything. We receive confirmation in this story that she’s working with the Eleven, but their plan doesn’t seem to amount to anything more than “blow a bunch of stuff up.” Is this what the Doom Coalition is going to be? A collection of original villains teaming up to accomplish something doom-related? If so, I hope it goes somewhere more interesting. Right now you’ve got the Eleven, a character with an interesting backstory reduced to a cackling megalomaniac, and Caleera – sorry, the “Sonomancer” – a character with an interesting backstory reduced to a cackling megalomaniac. Their relationship is exactly what you’d expect from two supervillains thrown together: disagreeable and combative. We sure forgot about all that “my love” stuff from “Scenes from Her Life” in a hurry, didn’t we?
River Song is also in this story for some reason. This isn’t a complaint, really – I like the character and I like Alex Kingston – but it feels like they’ve thrown her in because they have the license instead of anything story-related. Between this and “The Diary of River Song,” we’re rapidly learning something frustrating about her involvement in these stories: she can’t actually meet the Doctor, so each story has to invent an excuse for them not to meet. In the final part of “Diary,” they communicated solely via communicator; here, River only meets Helen and stays out of the Doctor’s view. While I’m certainly not arguing that River should be defined by her relationship with the Doctor – in fact, I like seeing stories where she isn’t – that relationship is still an appealing part of the character and I’d like to see more of it. I suppose we’re just waiting for the inevitable moment where she drugs Colin Baker and gives him amnesia, right?
(Also, as an aside, how does River even get to interact with pre-War Doctors? It’s quite clearly established in the TV series that the Time Lords are inaccessible, but River can just drop in on previous Doctors or other Time Lords with impunity? Can, say, Peter Capaldi fly back and visit Romana? If so, why hasn’t he? If not, why can River do it?)
The biggest problem with “The Sonomancer” is that it’s so empty. Nothing much happens – yes, it’s an action epic, with lots of running around and things exploding, but we don’t learn anything about the characters or what they want. Liv gets some great scenes fighting the Eleven – I enjoyed the protracted robot suit battle – but all we get out of the Eleven is more insanity and “Silence, all of you!” That doesn’t bode well, since Fitton wrote his introductory story – even his creator can’t figure out anything interesting to do with him? Uh oh. Helen spends most of the story as River’s companion, but all we get from that is Helen promising never to tell the Doctor who “Melody Malone” really was. Is this going to pay off in the future or is Helen actually going to take this secret to her grave? In addition to the Eleven and the Sonomancer, there’s also an evil capitalist giant bear (Derek Ezenagu) who adds nothing to the story apart from sloppy political commentary. Nothing more to say about that.
“The Sonomancer” is a letdown. “Scenes from Her Life” and “The Gift” had their problems but they seemed to be building toward something interesting. “The Sonomancer” is not that. It’s an action epic that doesn’t make a lot of sense populated by ill-defined characters and crowbars River Song into the plot for no apparent reason. Where are these stories going and why? Shouldn’t we have some sort of answer to that question after eight hours?
Marc Platt is quite well-known among Doctor Who authors for his high-concept stories, and “The Gift” is the most high-concept he’s been in quite some time. The TARDIS crew pursues Caleera to the eve of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, where a cunning trap awaits the Doctor: a telepathic “gift” passed from person to person with the power to amplify the earthquake and destroy the entire city, if not the Earth itself.
I’m not a fan of “crazy” acting in general, especially on audio, so “The Gift” was fighting an uphill battle with me from the start. Much of this comes from local eccentric Sam (Cory English), someone who has been irreversibly affected by the “Gift” and whose insanity affects his ability to help. I did enjoy how the Doctor turned to Sam for a haircut to clear his mind, and more so how that actually worked – the idea of this Doctor showing different haircuts at different points of the story is a good one, and easy to communicate on audio. But then you’ve got Charles Virgil McLean (James Jordan), who is basically a less interesting, American Henry Gordon Jago, and whose arrogance and incompetence make him rather unsympathetic. He’s fine in the beginning, but his performance after obtaining the “Gift” grated on me.
So we follow the “Gift” as it moves from person to person, from Sam to Mexican gambler Pepé Gonzalez (Paul Marc Davis… by the way, was “Pepé Gonzalez a tribute to the Vampirella artist or just the best Mexican name they could come up with?) to McLean to the Doctor himself. And we learn that Caleera is behind the whole thing, and that the Doctor possessing the “Gift” is the final step of her plan to destroy the Earth. Of course the Doctor saves the day, but let’s talk about Caleera – in “Scenes from Her Life,” she was introduced as a character with some considerable depth, one who was rejected by her fellow Time Lords as too different. But here, she’s a generic, cackling megalomaniac. Why does she want to destroy the Earth? I’m not entirely sure, other than it’s something a crazy person would want to do. Why take a character with such potential and reduce her to this?
Speaking of wasted characters, Helen doesn’t really get to do much in this story after her turn on center stage in the last one. There’s an entire subplot about a mobster, Aldo Deluca (Enzo Squillino, Jr.), who takes Helen prisoner at some point, but it goes nowhere and adds nothing to the story. Do we really need padding like this in stories that run less than an hour?
When the earthquake comes, the realization is excellent. The sound design from Benji Clifford deserves special mention as it communicates the scale and horror of the disaster without ever resorting to incomprehensible loud noises. There’s not much else to the scene, sadly – Liv gets trapped in a collapsed building, the Doctor saves her with the “Gift” – but the design work is an example of Big Finish at its best.
Overall, “The Gift” is a solid entry in the Doom Coalition series. A large number of minor annoyances keep it from anything more than an above average rating, but there’s enough intrigue to hold the attention and it’s nice to see Marc Platt telling an off-kilter story once again.
John Dorney, one of the most reliable of Big Finish’s newer crop of writers, delivers “Scenes from Her Life” as the second installment of Doom Coalition 2. Tasked primarily with introducing a new recurring villain, it accomplishes this goal by telling a story with a strong emotional foundation and some fantastic imagery.
Dorney is usually good for at least one great image or revelation per script, and here he wonders what a TARDIS would look like without its outer shell in place. The answer is a Gothic castle lookalike hanging in the time vortex – it’s a fairy-tale image but one that works rather well with what we know about TARDIS interiors. And so the inhabitants of this “naked” TARDIS think they’re living in a castle and adapt themselves correspondingly. There are a few parallels here to “The Doctor’s Wife,” including the bizarre, dreamlike setting and the grotesques populating the supporting cast. And while it’s unfair to compare Dorney to Neil Gaiman, one of the masters of this genre, “Scenes from Her Life” comes off rather well by comparison. My only complaint is that Stormblood (Vincent Franklin) and Sepulchra (Jacqueline King) were too over the top, though admittedly that’s an issue I have with most stories like this.
On the other hand, Caleera (Emma Cunniffe) gets a fantastic amount of development. Interspersed through the story are, well, scenes from her life, showing her journey through the Time Lord Academy, how she developed advanced telepathic abilities, and how the Time Lords acted to suppress these abilities. Dorney smartly frames this within the Time Lords’ desire not to interfere: by extension, “you’re just like everyone else” is an ideal description to them. So why would she even want to keep her abilities? But we know that she longs to be different, to stand out – it’s a similar thought process to the one that drove the Doctor from Gallifrey but with a much different conclusion. After she escapes, her vengeance is sadly predictable – but as she flees into the vortex, it’s hard to say where she’ll wind up. The eventual destination is disappointing, but that’s not part of Dorney’s script.
“Scenes from Her Life” also provides some much-needed development to Helen, a character who has otherwise felt pretty generic to this point. “Compassionate” is hardly the most intriguing character trait, but at least it’s distinguishable. Caleera plays Helen’s insecurities like a musical instrument, correctly reading her desire to be special and her frustration at being held back by the male-dominated museum community. Her desire to free Caleera is naïve, yes, but it’s totally understandable given her past. And the Doctor thoroughly understands, maintaining throughout that it was ultimately his decision to push the button. Neither Liv nor the Doctor get much to do in this story – mostly they wander around the “castle” until Caleera’s imprisonment is discovered. But it works because it puts Helen front and center, planting some seeds that future writers will hopefully encourage into growth.
Overall, “Scenes from Her Life” is a strong story that lays the groundwork for interesting future material. We’ll see what happens in that future material, but this bodes well.
The first Doom Coalition set from Big Finish was refreshing: while it attempted to establish another plot arc for Paul McGann’s eighth Doctor, it was free of many of the more tedious elements of the Dark Eyes series. If anything, it was a bit too light on arc – after four hours of audio drama, there’s absolutely nothing to indicate why the range is called Doom Coalition! Still, I was optimistic for the second set, and then I saw the first story credited to Nicholas Briggs, which dampened my enthusiasm somewhat.
That story, “Beachhead,” seems to be almost entirely standalone, and involves an interesting buildup followed by an utterly disappointing resolution. We’re definitely in Briggs territory – a remote village populated by regional accents – but the first half of the story builds a genuinely effective sense of unease. Mysterious floods are destroying the community, and the Doctor, Liv, and Helen end up in the middle of it. But the Doctor is haunted by decisions made several lifetimes ago, as well as the apparent history he has with local innkeeper Phillipa Gregson (Julia Hills). And when Liv and local girl Matilda (Rebecca Night) find an unconscious alien, things get increasingly uneasy. At this point I was excited to learn what would happen next. So what went wrong?
To start with, Briggs decides to use the Voord as the villains of the piece. I have no idea why: there is absolutely nothing distinguishing about the Voord in this story, as they are presented as one-dimensional villainous caricatures. Why not take some continuity from “Domain of the Voord” and work it into the script? Andrew Smith had some interesting ideas there, if nothing else. And there’s no subtlety here, either; their world was destroyed and now they want to conquer Earth. None of the Voord we meet have any desires other than to kill everyone and take over – they’re basically a plot device, which is both poor writing and a waste of a continuity reference. The resolution is unintentionally hilarious, though – the police strike team rolls up and kills the Voord! Is this the first time in Doctor Who history that humanity has defended itself without the Doctor later decrying the violence? Probably not, but I still laughed.
The other major plot element is similar to “Timelash” – talk about a story you want to emulate, right? – in how we learn that the Doctor has been here before. Briggs sets up an interesting conflict: what must have seemed like an insignificant UNIT mission ended up changing the face of a community for a generation, and now the Doctor must deal with the fallout. And it seems as though this fallout is quite serious, to the point that Phillipa holds the Doctor at gunpoint, furious over the fate of her late husband. But then the Voord attack, and all is forgotten, nicely papered over by the conclusion. This should have been the focal point of the entire story: we should have followed the Doctor as he first realized and then atoned for his past mistakes, instead of putting small parts of that idea into a generic action epic with faceless bad guys. I understand this is a Briggs story, and that nowadays he prioritizes nostalgia above everything else, including good storytelling, but “Beachhead” could easily have been so much better. The design is convincing, the direction is capable, and, as usual with Briggs scripts, there’s nothing especially bad about it… but there’s nothing making me want to tune in “next week,” either. What happened to the planet of the Voord? Who cares?
After a tremendously successful first series of Torchwood audios, Big Finish embarked upon a well-deserved second. The first story in the second series, “The Victorian Age” by AK Benedict, features one of Jack’s adventures as the head of Torchwood Cardiff near the time Queen Victoria founded the agency. Unlike its predecessors, “The Victorian Age” doesn’t take itself seriously at all, and as a result it feels like a bit of a step down. The Queen (Rowena Cooper) herself shows up at Torchwood London one day while Jack is there and announces a surprise inspection. And so, for the next hour, we listen to Jack and Queen Victoria chase a dangerous alien through the streets and tunnels of London. Jack is his usual mix of flirty and serious, but the Queen is presented as some sort of modern deity. She has a perfect, witty response to any challenge, she takes the bizarre completely in her stride, and she can win anyone over in a matter of minutes. She’s never been in a public house before? Within five minutes, she’s got the entire dining room eating out of her hand. Never visited the Underground tunnels? Here she is, rallying citizens to her banner and comforting those who have lost loved ones. It helps that Rowena Cooper gives a first-rate performance throughout, sharing great chemistry with John Barrowman, but it starts to feel one-note after a while. Still, not every Torchwood story needs to be emotionally harrowing, and there’s nothing wrong with starting a series off with something a bit more lighthearted. “The Victorian Age” made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion, and I’m not going to complain about that.
My biggest complaint about the first War Doctor set was its lack of imagination: stories set in the Time War should be mind-bending experiences featuring a new, unpredictable Doctor pushed to his limits, and “Only the Monstrous” was none of those things. The new set, “Infernal Devices,” is much better in this regard, though it still has a ways to go to reach masterpiece level.
The first story, “Legion of the Lost” from John Dorney, puts its imagination on display right off the bat. The Time Lords travel back in time to the early days of the universe to employ the services of the Technomancers, a race whose technology is supplemented by what can only be described as magic. And the Technomancers use this technology – supported by the power of an Old Time race known as the Horned Ones – to do everything from powering communicators to resurrecting the dead. So what better way to bring back Time Lord battalions that have been killed in battle with the Daleks? It’s into this situation that the Doctor arrives, and of course he needs to learn more about the resurrection process.
That the Technomancers are sacrificing lives in order to resurrect Time Lords is obvious: it’s the standard revelation in stories like this. I like the moral twist that Dorney puts on it: if the lives being sacrificed are those of people who were erased from history, is anything actually being lost? It’s a good question, so good that the Doctor can’t offer a counter-argument other than “it’s wrong because I say so.” But Dorney simplifies matters by revealing that the process also implants a small part of the Horned Ones in the resurrected, and that they are using this process to re-enter the corporeal universe. This makes the process dangerous, and justifies the Doctor shutting it down – but it also removes the better moral dilemma from the equation. Why not make the Doctor make that choice? Make him decide between weakening his people’s fighting ability or allowing the sacrifice of innocents to continue – by making only one choice correct, the drama is lessened.
The fact that I can debate the ending already renders “Legion of the Lost” better than anything in “Only the Monstrous.” And the production is great besides, with David Warner brought in as guest star to play against John Hurt. Who wouldn’t want to listen to a confrontation between those two? Overall, this is a solid start to the box set, and it bodes well for the future.
7/10
A THING OF GUILE
This, on the other hand, does not. The second story in the set is “A Thing of Guile” from Phil Mulryne, a tale that sets up a number of promising ideas and promptly does nothing interesting with any of them. Coming off the cliffhanger that the Doctor is being charged as a war criminal – and he’s never been tried by the Time Lords before, so who knows where this’ll go, right??? – we see virtually no impact to this sentence apart from the Doctor wearing an “artron leash” that keeps him attached to Ollistra. Sure, a few characters refer to him as a war criminal, but by story’s end he’s won them all over as usual. It doesn’t even tell us much more about Ollistra than we already know: yep, she’s devious, brutally pragmatic, and largely unsympathetic.
But then there’s not much of a plot here. The Daleks are doing something secret on an asteroid and the Time Lords want to find out what it is. So they send the Doctor with some other Time Lords to investigate under a Trojan horse strategy. Upon landing on the planet, we spend half the running time of the story watching the characters run in circles trying to not be eaten by a giant worm. And finally we learn that a group of renegade Daleks is trying to reverse engineer Daleks back into Kaleds for… some reason. I’m not sure if this is intended to prefigure “Evolution of the Daleks” or if it’s just inspired by it, but there’s very little being done here that’s new. Perhaps this’ll be picked up in later box sets, because almost nothing is done with the idea here. Dalek High Command finds out, destroys the installation, and kills everything. Oh, and the Doctor escapes. The end.
The problem here is that we really don’t learn much of anything. The characters aren’t developed in any significant fashion, there are no revelations about the Time War, and we don’t even get a look at some apocalyptic technology. Yes, it’s more action-oriented than your average Doctor Who story, and yes, the Doctor is more pragmatic than many of his other selves, but we really need more ambition behind these stories. There are only so many times the Doctor can uncover a scheme by either the Daleks or the Time Lords, indignantly declare it even worse than the Time War itself, and defeat it. And if the stories insist upon going down that road time and again, the least they can do is offer something else along with the routine. “A Thing of Guile” does not. It’s boring. The fifth episode of a limited-run series starring John Hurt should not be boring.
5/10
THE NEVERWHEN
It took six stories, but finally, with Matt Fitton’s “The Neverwhen,” the War Doctor series starts to embrace its potential. My usual complaints – the war is conventional and unimaginative, the Doctor’s portrayal is routine, etc. – are answered here to great effect in a story that takes its high concept and runs with it all the way to a logical conclusion.
This is the sort of thing we should be seeing in a series about a Time War: a battlefield where time itself is in flux, and where a soldier can be carrying a plasma rifle in one moment and a spear in the next. But Fitton goes beyond even technology in having the shifting timelines affect the biology of the soldiers themselves. Unless I missed it, though, one obvious effect of this isn’t used: we don’t see the Gallifreyan characters regressing through previous regenerations. That’s a minor complaint in light of what happens to the Daleks, though, something that sets up the story’s major twist. While the twist was screamingly obvious by the time it was revealed, it was still elegantly constructed and executed and didn’t rely entirely upon its own existence for self-justification. My only complaint about it is that the Doctor’s supposed allies don’t show significant nuance, which is what makes the twist so obvious in the first place.
We also finally get a glimpse into the mentality driving the War Doctor. Rather than relying upon the “Don’t call me that!” repetition that has substituted for character development thus far, Fitton actually digs into his thought processes. He’s still the Doctor, he’s still trying to find Doctor-ish solutions to problems, but he’s stuck in a war that doesn’t always allow it. The new series portrayal of the Doctor as “the man who never would” often presents him with impossible binary choices but allows him to avoid them by finding a third way. Here, the Doctor seems to come up with a brilliant solution to the Neverwhen problem – and it fails because it can’t actually work. Faced with this failure, he actually then picks one of the bad solutions, and the resolution is disturbing as a result.
This is the best War Doctor story thus far and it’s not particularly close. There’s actually something going on beneath the surface, and even the surface is skillfully constructed. “The Neverwhen” is the sort of story I was hoping for, ever since these War Doctor sets were announced. Let’s hope we get more of this in the future.
Does anyone else remember season 17 of Doctor Who on television? I do – I remember a playful tone, ambitious storytelling, witty scripts, and all the rest. But I’m not sure Big Finish does, as we’re now two stories into their season 17 recreation and the second, Eddie Robson’s “The Labyrinth of Buda Castle,” is as dull and uninteresting as the first.
Are we absolutely sure that Eddie Robson wrote this? He’s not only one of Big Finish’s most reliable writers, he’s one of their punchiest: almost everything he writes has a compelling hook or interesting central concept to capture the interest. But “Labyrinth” has neither of those things; instead, it’s a by-the-numbers vampire-but-not-really story that involves a lot of running from place to place. It almost seems to be a better fit with the Hinchcliffe-era audios, with its gothic horror iconography and revelation that the villain is actually an alien and not a mythological horror. It has a few of the trappings of “City of Death,” primarily the Doctor and Romana vacationing in a European capital, but it doesn’t otherwise feel like a season 17 tale.
Mark Bonnar plays the villainous Zoltán Frid, and director Nicholas Briggs must have told him to go as far over the top as possible. If this was filmed there would be bite marks on the scenery – he growls and wheezes his way through each line in what sounds like a mixture of murderous rage and sexual arousal. This sort of performance is well in line with Graham Crowden in “The Horns of Nimon,” but that story was self-consciously comedic. “Buda Castle,” on the other hand, sounds like it wants to be scary, and so Bonnar’s performance is jarring instead of amusing. Even at the beginning when he approaches Romana in the café – I’m not sure if this was supposed to be unnerving but it was really just uncomfortable. There’s also Kate Bracken as vampire hunter Celia, who’s hunting Dracula – but of course she has other motives as well. She comes across better than other attempts BF has made at characters like this, but she’s still largely unmemorable.
There’s a great scene at the start of the second episode where Tom Baker confronts the villain and they argue their philosophies. Baker is always larger than life, so this is the one moment where Bonnar’s performance actually works – and I always love a good confrontation scene between the Doctor and the villain. This is the benefit of unsubtle bad guys, as it happens. But it’s fleeting, as most confrontations are, and what happens next is by-the-book Doctor Who storytelling right up to the ruthless solution employed by the fourth Doctor. As I’ve said so many times about this range, “The Labyrinth of Buda Castle” isn’t poorly written or poorly made by any definition. It’s professional, it’s entertaining in spots, and it’s well produced. But it’s also utterly rote storytelling. I’m not sure if it’s the two-episode format or an editorial decision or something else, but this is yet another example of an uninspiring Fourth Doctor Adventure, and this time it’s from a writer with a justifiably great reputation. Is this the fate of all 4DAs? To be drowned in a vast, grey ocean of blah?
The second of three Peter Davison releases to start the 2016 monthly range, “Aquitaine,” from Simon Barnard and Paul Morris, is a light, intriguing story that holds the interest and entertains throughout. It’s not as deep as its predecessor but it’s a pleasant way to pass a couple of hours, which is certainly a plus for the monthly range.
Hargreaves (Matthew Cottle), the on-board AI that controls the spaceship Aquitaine, is arguably the main character of this story. He’s omnipresent, either through communication via loudspeaker or through the many avatars that roam the ship doing chores. He’s unfailingly open and friendly, enabling the TARDIS crew to get involved without all the tedious capture-and-escape that often entangles lesser stories. He’s surprisingly witty, which adds humor, and his periodic memory resets allow the characters to recapture the story without sounding forced. There’s also a quixotic sort of melancholy about him, how he sets the tables and cooks three meals a day that are never consumed, how he trims the plants that always seem to grow larger. He’s a great character, in other words, something that’s rather impressive for an AI that isn’t supposed to develop significantly.
The biggest issue with the story, on the other hand, is its failure to develop a consistent tone. It veers from point to point, starting off like it’s going to follow Hargreaves around in a chamber drama then jumping from body horror to ghost story to quiet reflection to action and back. The “ghosts” heard throughout the ship, for example: are they supposed to be scary? They’re certainly designed like typical horror movie sounds, and the characters are unnerved by their presence, but the thread doesn’t go anywhere until the scientific explanation is given later on. The scheme by Akunin (Harry Myers) to create a new hybrid species, meanwhile, comes almost out of nowhere and sits uneasily with the ghost/time travel plot. An appropriate structure almost seems too obvious: with the characters moving back in time, why not find out what happened to the ship in a defined reverse order? As written, it feels haphazard, not planned.
Fortunately, the story maintains a light touch that helps it to overcome its inconsistent tone. Some of this is driven by Peter Davison’s performance and his entertaining double-act with Hargreaves, but “Aquitaine” is generally a breezy, enjoyable affair. While Tegan and Nyssa are threatened on multiple occasions, the experiences aren’t as harrowing as they perhaps could be. Janet Fielding spends much of the story interacting with Davison – which is exactly the sparky, argumentative relationship you’d expect – while Sarah Sutton spends much of it with different members of the guest cast. Additionally, Fielding is paired off with Gerald Kyd’s Lt. Savinio, though that plot thread doesn’t pay off especially well. Myers is probably the strongest member of the guest cast outside of Cottle – Akunin’s interactions with both the Doctor and Nyssa are compelling in part because they all share a scientific background but differ in moral composition.
The sound design from Andy Hardwick is excellent, and Ken Bentley’s direction is assured as ever. A strong production can often offset issues with an inconsistent script, and that’s certainly the case here – “Aquitaine” is very easy on the ears. There’s definitely a lot to recommend “Aquitaine,” and it’s certainly an enjoyable way to pass the time. No, it won’t stick around in the memory for very long, but it’s an entertaining release that avoids dredging up any tired old clichés. In the end, what’s not to like?
The first series of Torchwood audios from Big Finish comes to a close with Guy Adams’ “More Than This,” a Gwen Cooper story that continues the high level of quality seen throughout the range and provides great incentive to continue with the series into its second year. Set after Miracle Day, it features Gwen’s efforts to restart Torchwood in Cardiff – specifically her efforts to get a building permit from a local bureaucrat, Roger Pugh (Richard Nichols) for a new Hub! When he doesn’t believe her when she explains what Torchwood does, Gwen takes him on a whirlwind tour of a typical day in the life of a Torchwood operative. The story could easily serve as a pilot for a new Torchwood series, as it walks the audience through the essential elements. It’s also an elegant bookend to the series premiere “Everything Changes,” as now Gwen is the experienced operative taking the potential new recruit through his paces. Roger is an appealing character, whose resistance to the idea that there’s more to the universe than humanity comes not from skepticism but from pure emotion: grief over his wife’s death in a car accident. Ultimately, there’s a bit too much going on here – the story doesn’t need every incident Gwen and Roger confront – and the plot itself is a bit predictable, but the heart of the story is excellent. There’s nothing particularly new or innovative going on in “More Than This,” but character pieces don’t have to innovate – they just have to remind us of honest emotions. All in all, “More Than This” is an excellent conclusion to one of the best series of audios ever released by Big Finish. Here’s hoping the second series is just as good.
Maybe it’s because it doesn’t say “Doctor Who” on the cover, but the best use of Big Finish’s new series license by far has been the new Torchwood series. “Uncanny Valley” from David Llewellyn is yet another strong entry in the range. The story is simple: billionaire Neil Redmond (Steven Cree) is in a horrific car accident, and during his recovery, representatives of the mysterious Committee offer him a lifelike android duplicate (Cree again, as “N.J.”) that will take his place in the world at large. Jack Harkness figures out what’s going on and comes to stop the duplicate before it’s too late. But if the story is simple, the details are quite complex. This is almost entirely Neil’s story, with Jack not doing much of anything until halfway through the story and continuing to take a back seat until the final quarter. And the emotional gauntlet we see Neil run is heart wrenching: ashamed of his disability, and unable to emerge because of the duplicate, Neil lives in seclusion, with only N.J. for company. At first, he teaches N.J. to interact with other people and live in the real world; as his loneliness deepens, he falls in love with what is, essentially, himself, and watches with awe as N.J. travels the world, making lucrative business deals and seducing beautiful men and women. But awe gives way to jealousy and anger, and the attractive, sexual Jack introducing himself into the equation provides the tipping point.
It’s odd to hear a Big Finish story dealing so forthrightly with sexuality, something that would be unheard of in a Doctor Who story, but Llewellyn’s script is mature and appropriately restrained, while Barrowman and Cree both give nuanced, emotional performances. The production is great, too, with Neil Gardner doubling as director and sound designer and Blair Mowat providing the score. “Uncanny Valley” is a fine example of character- and emotion-driven storytelling, and it’s another strong addition to this increasingly impressive Torchwood range.
Big Finish certainly hasn’t been shy about exploiting their new series license – we’ve had the War Doctor, UNIT, River Song, Strax, and an upcoming David Tennant set. The oddest of these early releases, though, is “The Churchill Years,” a box set of adventures Winston Churchill had with the Doctor. They’re told in the style of the Early Adventures: Ian McNeice narrates in character as Churchill, and the stories are full-cast apart from the Doctor himself.
The first story, Phil Mulryne’s “The Oncoming Storm,” features a rare appearance by the ninth Doctor. It’s difficult to appreciate the Doctor’s appearances in any of these stories because everything about the Doctor is told secondhand and McNeice doesn’t do impressions, which is probably for the best. So while this story certainly captures this Doctor’s reluctance to get involved and desperate need to prevent bloodshed, it obviously doesn’t incorporate any of Christopher Eccleston’s performance. But with such a small number of Eccleston stories available, anything is welcome. “The Oncoming Storm” addresses the aftermath of the Time War, with the Doctor trying to shut down a Time Lord weapon before an alien race can get their hands on it. As Doctor Who plots go, it’s fairly straightforward, complete with the threat being defeated through its own hubris. There’s a pseudo-companion, Hetty Warner (Emily Atack), who’s the usual unexpectedly-heroic-1940s-woman you get in stories like this.
Fortunately, McNeice ties the whole thing together with a great central performance every bit as good as his turns on TV. “The Oncoming Storm” is a solid opening story: it’s entertaining and it’s a rare opportunity to hear a new ninth Doctor adventure.
6/10
THE CHURCHILL YEARS: HOUNDED
The second story in the Churchill Years box set is “Hounded,” from long-time BF writer and editor Alan Barnes. The real Winston Churchill dealt with periods of depression he referred to as his “Black Dog,” and this story attempts to put a Doctor Who twist on the idea.
I was terrified that this story was going to minimize Churchill’s actual struggles with depression by revealing his depression to be the manifestation of some sort of alien. Fortunately, Barnes has more sense than that, instead opting to have an alien being take advantage of Churchill’s existing depression for its own ends. But while the story takes a solid approach to history, it rather fails in terms of its own structure. The first half of the story is consumed with an utterly pointless runaround that serves only to pad out the running time, and that leaves the second half to feel rushed and unsatisfying. This is a tenth Doctor story, and again McNeice plays the Doctor’s part – it definitely fits the tone of the era and really increases my anticipation for the David Tennant box set coming later this year. And pseudo-companion Hetty Warner is back, involved in a temporal paradox plot that’s fun in theory but, again, takes far too long to resolve. This isn’t quite as good as the opening story, but again, it’s a pleasant way to pass an hour.
5/10
THE CHURCHILL YEARS: LIVING HISTORY
The third story in the set is “Living History” from Justin Richards, and it’s the most divorced from the central concept. Instead of the Doctor dropping in on a period of Churchill’s life, here he takes Churchill on an adventure in time and space. The destination: ancient Britain in the midst of Julius Caesar’s campaign, meaning that two of the more celebrated military leaders in history get to meet.
Unfortunately, Richards doesn’t do much of anything with this idea. We meet both Caesar (Alistair Petrie) and Briton queen Tristahna (Laura Rogers), and both are the most predictable sorts of stock character. The TV series has made a living out of these celebrity historicals, but it has done so by making the celebrity the most compelling character on screen – look at Churchill himself for an example. Here, there’s nothing compelling about either leader, neither in personality nor in action. I admit it’s hard to expect more than that from a Justin Richards story, but in direct comparison to the TV show this doesn’t hold up very well.
Also along for the ride is Kazran Sardick (Danny Horn), on his travels with the Doctor in the midst of “A Christmas Carol.” If this sounds like a bit of a stretch, you’re right, but at least it makes sense in the context of the episode. It’s also in the grand Big Finish tradition of “Let’s bring back as many old characters as possible!” even if it’s rather obscure for an early attempt. Still, Horn is fine, and with the eleventh Doctor largely off-screen he adequately fills the man-from-the-future role. Oh, and there’s a Bronze God (Nicholas Briggs… you can guess what this really is) that does exactly the sorts of things you would expect a Bronze God to do.
It’s reassuring, I suppose, to see that Justin Richards is exactly the same writer of new series material that he is of everything else. “Living History” is comfortable, exciting Doctor Who storytelling with a couple of solid ideas but absolutely nothing imaginative or boundary pushing. For the third time in three tries in this set, it’s a pleasant way to pass an hour.
6/10
THE CHURCHILL YEARS: THE CHARTWELL METAMORPHOSIS
The final entry in the Churchill Years box set comes from regular Doctor Who audio director Ken Bentley, sitting in the writer’s chair for “The Chartwell Metamorphosis.” Unlike the other stories in the set, this one actually adds some shade to Churchill’s character, but it’s still rather clunky and uneventful.
The central idea here is fantastic, and insane in the best Doctor Who traditions. Churchill can see the end of his life approaching, can see his abilities fading, and wants to do whatever he can to prolong his time. So he works with the staff in his retirement home to consume mysterious larvae so he can metamorphose into a butterfly and live eternally! As one does. What I love about this is how it’s rooted in Churchill’s own insecurity, and how his desperation to survive hurts the people around him without turning him into a cartoon villain. This sort of plot is also well matched to the eleventh Doctor, who actually plays a fairly significant role in this one.
The problem, again, is that the story isn’t structured particularly well. Much like “Hounded,” it takes forever to get going and then crams most of the story into the second half. It also features a recurring character – which I didn’t even notice until the Doctor commented on her presence, and then I had to pause the story and look the character up. Turns out it’s one of the kids from “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe,” also known as the worst TV story since the revival. Fortunately, it’s okay not to get the reference, as she could just as easily have been Hetty Warner for all the difference it made.
Overall, The Churchill Years is a confusing release, in that I’m not entirely sure why they decided to make it. Yes, Ian McNeice is consistently great as Churchill throughout the four stories, but none of these stories are particularly adventurous and none of them shed light on any of the recurring characters. And unlike the War Doctor set, or even the UNIT set, was anyone clamoring to see the further adventures of Winston Churchill? Certainly there’s nothing bad in here, and each story is pleasant enough, but you’d think an investment into four hours of material would yield something other than some random Doctor Who stories. But that seems to be the raison d’être of Big Finish’s new series material thus far: hit the obvious crowd-pleasing marks and quit while you’re ahead. Hey, I’m sure it’s profitable.
Louise Jameson, despite her apparent ubiquity at Big Finish, only appeared in four Companion Chronicles: a linked trilogy that concluded with “The Time Vampire” and “The Child,” another story from Nigel Fairs that was intended to be the first installment in a new trilogy. Unfortunately, those other two installments were never produced, and so we’re left with a stylistic curio that works in some ways and struggles in others.
From what I gathered from the extras, the intention was to tell three stories in three different styles reflecting three different ages. As the title implies, “The Child” is from the perspective of childhood and is thus told in the style of a classic fairy tale. We follow on from “The Time Vampire,” in which Leela died, and in which we learned that the Sevateem believe that babies are born with all the knowledge of their past lives already in place. In this story, Leela has been reborn as Emily (Anna Hawkes), a young girl who experiences these memories by perceiving a ghostly Leela as an imaginary friend. And so, the two characters share narrative duties. When Leela narrates, she describes the story in a manner very familiar to the Companion Chronicles range. When Emily narrates, on the other hand, she relates the story as a child would relate a fairy tale: the Doctor becomes a powerful Wizard and the other characters are described as archetypes.
For the most part I liked this narrative style, because I could hear Emily describe things in fantastic terms and then Leela would interject and ground the story in more realistic language. And in the great Doctor Who tradition, the acts of magic on display are given scientific explanations at the conclusion. But I don’t think these elements hang together very well: the story sits uneasily in the real world, with many overtly fantastic elements. When the Doctor conjures avatars from his subconscious to guide Leela through her trials, it’s obvious they’re intended as analogues for his previous incarnations – but since we hear almost everything with these characters in the fairy tale narration, it’s difficult to understand exactly what’s happening. There’s also the question of Emily’s real world situation, with her references to her upper-class lifestyle and the expectations of young girls in her time – I’m sure this would have been explored in the other installments of the trilogy, but as a standalone these elements feel incomplete and unrewarding.
As with almost all of his stories, Nigel Fairs handles every element of the production: writing, directing, and sound designing. And as with his other stories, this helps create a consistent atmosphere that envelops the listener in the story. But ultimately the story isn’t as rewarding as it could be, both because of the unusual style and because we never get to hear the themes carried forward into future installments. I enjoyed “The Child,” but it left me scratching my head, and not in a good way.
When “Nightshade” was released as part of the New Adventures back in 1992, it was acclaimed for two reasons: for “trad” fans it was an island in an ocean of experimental early novels, and author Mark Gatiss expertly captured his characters’ emotions, tying them skillfully to the themes of the book. 24 years later, the Big Finish audio adaptation by Kyle C. Szikora doesn’t exist in the same context, and the necessities of adaptation to a two-hour script mean that the story loses much of its depth.
It’s generally unfair to compare adaptations to the source material unless there’s a stated desire to capture the source as closely as possible. Audio drama has many advantages over and limitations compared to prose and vice versa. Adaptations should also be able to blaze their own trails, as “Nightshade” does when Szikora’s ending differs completely from the Gatiss original. Throughout the book and the audio, the Doctor contemplates retirement and Ace contemplates leaving the Doctor to stay behind in Crook Marsham. But unlike the book, here Ace is decidedly unsure about what she wants to do. Her resolve to leave fades in the face of the implications of staying in one place and one time, and she never actually makes the decision – the credits roll as she stands outside the TARDIS, torn about her future. I like this ending, as it’s a smart way to let us inside Ace’s head – and it also allows Sophie Aldred to turn in some surprisingly convincing emotional acting, probably some of the best she’s done for Big Finish. But it’s also a plot thread that should be explored in the subsequent story – which we’ve already heard, called “Love and War.” In that context, the original ending matches up much better with “Love and War” – but I’m not sure if we’re even supposed to consider these Novel Adaptations in those terms, so I’m not going to complain.
The problem with “Nightshade” on audio is that it feels disjointed, as though it’s not sure what direction it wants to go. There’s not much of a plot – an ancient alien is feeding on memories and must be stopped – and so the story spends a great deal of time with its characters. Normally I’d salute this decision, but the characters aren’t fleshed out to any particular degree. And when the villain is feeding on the characters’ memories, you need knowledge of their pasts to appreciate what’s going on. This was the best part of the novel, and it’s almost completely absent here. When Lawrence (Jonny Magnanti) is visited by his dead brother, it’s presented as heartbreaking – but we barely know him. Two of the best-developed characters, Robin (Samuel Barnett) and Hawthorne (Edward Harrison), aren’t even given this chance at further development. And then there’s Edmund Trevithick (John Castle), star of the Doctor Who analogue Professor Nightshade, who’s actually given a bit of a character arc. But when his end comes, and he declares that he’s always been a coward but now he will finally stand up and fight, we haven’t actually seen much evidence of this cowardice. Yes, he berates the staff at his retirement home and yes, he’s isolated from any family he might have, but from what is he being redeemed?
Ultimately, I enjoyed “Nightshade.” The production is excellent, which is par for the course for this range, from Scott Handcock’s direction and Iain Meadows’ sound design. Particular credit to Blair Mowat for a score that sounds just like the sort of thing Mark Ayres might have given us had “Nightshade” been on television. The script also gives us some of the best Doctor/Ace material we’ve had, with great performances from the two leads. But the story needed either more length or more discipline, and neither is present.
What is it? It has the feel of an old radio serial with a brilliant soundscape to match. It’s very much in the spirit of Dick Barton and Flash Gordon, all frenetic dialogue and rushing around with a constant sense of tension and urgency that carries you along with it. It achieves all of this without being just another runaround.
It’s a gangster romp set in 1938, with the broadcast of War of the Worlds by Orson Welles as the backdrop, the imminent threat of WW2 on the horizon and aliens selling advanced weapons.
In essence this play is all about scams, deceptions and rackets so the post Capone gangster setting is a perfect fit. The gangsters are scamming each other for the alien weapons on offer, either for themselves or for Uncle Sam. A female Russian agent also wants them and poses as an American damsel in distress to scam everybody, including the Doctor, although how he doesn’t notice this is a brainfade moment for him. Miss Glory Bee? Really?
Cosmo “Scum” Devine, dilettante and socialite, has an altogether more serious agenda while he scams high society and gangs alike for power and status. He wants to give the alien weapons to the Third Reich. The mob might be violent, venal and self destructive idiots but at least they are not traitors.
The War of the Worlds, due to be broadcast on the radio, is arguably a scam as well. It’s a commonly told tale, especially in the papers at the time who were not above exaggeration in the same way that the sea is not above the clouds, that when it was first broadcast it caused mass panic amongst people who thought it was real, but I have heard the original broadcast and it specifically says at the start that it is a dramatisation and it seems the urban myth created around it is just that. Even if you missed the start it’s actually quite dull to listen to. The potential alien threat is certainly scary but the matter of fact way it is played makes the rest of it a chore to get through. The thought of anyone really being fooled by it is a bit ludicrous in hindsight.
The weapon selling aliens are also running a scam. There are only two of them, masquerading as the spearhead of an invasion force, when actually they are criminals on the run from their own people.
So, a big theme of the play is that everybody is conning everybody else. Even the solution the Doctor comes up with is a con, fooling the aliens into thinking an even more powerful alien is about to invade by broadcasting War of the Worlds at them. A nice touch.
As well as telling its own story this is part of the arc that started when the Doctor rescued Charley from the R101, and so there are also hints throughout the play about how time has been changed, the main ones being (as noted by Wikipedia);
– Welles does not recognise a Shakespeare quote. This is explained in Time of the Daleks, which I did not pick up on until I had heard both a couple of times. Nicely subtle but not so obscure you couldn’t spot it.
– The CIA did not exist until after WW2. Then again, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, they would say that wouldn’t they? 🙂
– Chaney says he has a 1929 Lamborghini that used to belong to Capone. Lamborghini didn’t exist till the 60s.
– Chaney says there are 49 states but in 1938 there were 48. He can’t be including the fictional state of Malabolgia from Minuet in Hell either, since that seceded from the Union as part of its creation.
Apparently all but the Lamborghini one were deliberate mistakes which explains why, as a motor racing fan, the Lamborghini one stuck out like a sore thumb for me. History would certainly have been significantly changed had they been making high performance cars in 1929. The whole history of motor racing, for a start.
In any case, little bits like this serve to place Invaders from Mars firmly in the Charley arc without getting in the way of the story it is currently telling. A good choice because you don’t want anything else holding up this story. It’s too much fun.
There isn’t a weak performance anywhere. Charley gets the annoying precocious brat thing under control for a change, The Doctor is on top form, Cosmo Devine I could listen to all day and the rest of cast are great too. My favourite plays are always the ones where you can clearly tell those involved were having a ball, and all involved give it full commitment so I’m happy to give Invaders from Mars
The second series of Early Adventures wraps up with “The Isos Network” from Nicholas Briggs, a direct sequel to “The Invasion” that captures absolutely none of what made the TV story so good. As with so many other stories of similar vintage, there isn’t anything particularly terrible about “The Isos Network,” but “boring and uninspiring” sums it up quite well.
I’m still unsure of the purpose of the Early Adventures. Cynically, I understand that they serve as an excuse to slap the faces of Hartnell and Troughton on CD covers to sell more copies, but creatively I’m not sure. The Companion Chronicles were also an excuse to tell stories featuring unavailable Doctors, but those rapidly became a strong creative exercise, with many releases taking full advantage of the narrative format to tell imaginative, ambitious stories. With the Early Adventures returning to a conventional narrative style, the ambition seems to be absent as well (unless they’re written by Simon Guerrier). I’m not sure how sales are going, but I’m shocked that they haven’t yet announced a year-round monthly release schedule for these; why grind out four stories a year when you could be grinding out twelve?
I suppose I should discuss the story, but you know what I’m going to say. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe travel to a planet that served as the staging area for the Invasion from the season 6 story. Thousands of Cyber-conversion chambers standing empty, their occupants long since destroyed in the failed Earth campaign. This is a cool image, but what opportunities does it afford for storytelling? Perhaps a character piece, with the Doctor and his companions dealing with the fallout from their recent adventure? How about an exploration of a society rebuilding its tattered remains after the Cybermen departed? But no, Briggs takes the most obvious route: there are still some Cybermen left over that must be defeated. There’s a hard-bitten group of soldiers, there’s a doomsday device that threatens to destroy everything, and the Doctor and companions run around for 2 hours foiling the evil Cyber-plot. Oh, and they ride on giant slugs for a while. And there’s a partially converted person struggling to maintain his identity in the face of Cyber-control.
Wait a minute, doesn’t this sound familiar? Didn’t we just do this in Briggs’ “Return to Telos?” (Or Alan Barnes’ “Last of the Cybermen?”) Well, yes. It’s bad enough that Big Finish is turning into a generic Doctor Who assembly line, but releasing the same story from the same author twice in under a year is really pushing things beyond the bounds of reason. Oh, but that was in the Fourth Doctor Adventures and this is in the Early Adventures, so that makes everything okay, or something. At least in that story you had Tom Baker in the lead role; here you’ve got Frazer Hines and his one-note Troughton impression leading yet again to long scenes of Hines talking to himself. It’s the same complaint as usual: the impression, while very effective with limited deployment in the Companion Chronicles, isn’t convincing enough to support a central character over a two-hour story, and it distracts from the story rather than enhancing it.
The narrative, incidentally, is clunky and obvious, but then that’s no surprise because Briggs is not a capable prose author (see also “The Dalek Generation”). Briggs directs, and it’s fine, though it doesn’t help the snail’s (slug’s?) pace of the story. The sound design from Toby Hrycek-Robinson is good, if unremarkable. But I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to take away from this. If I’m supposed to be inspired, the story failed. If I’m supposed to enjoy myself, the story failed. If I’m supposed to think “Yep, that was certainly a four-part Doctor Who story!” then I guess the story succeeded, but that’s not exactly an inspiring goal.
The fourth series of Fourth Doctor Adventures was a bit better than its predecessors, but for the most part the range continues to plod along, uninterested in anything but the most basic appeals to fan nostalgia. For the fifth series, we head into season 17, famous for being script-edited by Douglas Adams, and we get Tom Baker and Lalla Ward paired up. It opens with “Wave of Destruction” by Justin Richards, and it’s… a plodding, uninteresting story. Imagine that.
It seems like a lot of Doctor Who fans think that the defining characteristic of season 17 was silliness, with Tom Baker wandering around mocking everything in front of him. While that certainly happened, the storytelling was quite ambitious, even if (in usual Doctor Who fashion) the production couldn’t carry it off. “Wave of Destruction” is not ambitious at all. It’s a very basic “return of the Vardans” story that does absolutely nothing new or inventive with anything. The Vardans plan to hijack a radio transmission to gain access to Earth; the Doctor and Romana execute a fairly straightforward plan and stop them. But this is set in the 1960s, so it’s a pirate radio station located offshore! Is anything interesting done with that idea? You know the answer. The Vardans want to conquer the Earth and enslave its people, ha-ha-ha, and Richards doesn’t even try to do something original with them. This would be, by far, the worst episode in season 17. Hell, even “The Horns of Nimon” had more going on than this, and nobody took that even a little bit seriously.
At least it’s funny. There’s a fun scene of Romana going shopping, and Lalla Ward’s exasperation is almost worth the price of admission, despite the predictable humor. There’s another good scene with Romana and K9 running the pirate radio station. Tom Baker clearly enjoys getting an endless supply of witty comebacks, and it’s great in general to hear him “together” with Ward. I don’t know if they ever shared a studio, but that’s the magic of audio if they didn’t. But even the humor lacks the breezy elegance of Adams’ scripts, and often comes across as a pale imitation. It’s admittedly unfair to hold these stories up to the standards of one of the best writers of his generation, but if that’s the feeling they’re trying to recapture, what else am I supposed to do?
Look, you know what this is: it’s a Fourth Doctor Adventure, so it’s a plodding, rote imitation of the Tom Baker era. It’s disappointing to hear something like this from Justin Richards, who’s usually good for some inspiring ideas, but here we are. Baker is good, Ward is good, John Leeson is there for a bit and he’s good as K9, and everyone else is entirely forgettable. It’s funny, so I suppose it’s recognizable as season 17, but that’s about as far as it goes.
With a new year comes a new trilogy, and with the protracted “older Nyssa” arc finally over, the monthly range moves to a different point in the fifth Doctor’s life. Jonathan Morris’s “The Waters of Amsterdam” picks up right where “Arc of Infinity” leaves off, with Tegan rejoining the TARDIS crew after helping defeat Omega. Surprisingly, it’s not a continuity-packed “extravaganza” but rather a smart, low-key character piece, and it’s all the better for it.
It’s annoyingly rare these days to say a monthly range release is actually about something, but “The Waters of Amsterdam” is very much a story about loss. Almost every major character in the story is dealing with a loss of some kind, and the different ways in which they cope drive the plot along. This is textbook character-driven storytelling: let the story develop according to the characters, not the other way around. So we start with Tegan and what she was doing during the time between “Time-Flight” and “Arc of Infinity,” and we discover that she lived a relatively normal life, jumping between jobs, dating, and all the rest. It’s mundane, but because we know Tegan so well, Morris makes it easy to relate to and sympathize with her struggles and successes. Her relationship with Kyle (Tim Delap) ends for very simple reasons: she needs someone to challenge her and he doesn’t do that. There’s no dramatic revelation of infidelity or anything like that, just – from Tegan’s perspective – an ordinary relationship ending for ordinary reasons. And so, when he turns back up, she has to struggle with the fact that she likes him but knows that they’re ultimately incompatible.
Of course, being that this is a Doctor Who story, Kyle conceals a great secret, one that explains his struggles in the relationship. And as he gains greater self-awareness and independence, he has to learn how to lose someone he cares about while still retaining the ability to find someone new. Again, there’s nothing earth-shattering here, but Morris writes with a very human, believable touch, something that is quite effective considering Kyle’s true identity. And then there’s Teldak (Elizabeth Morton), dealing with the loss of her entire planet. She’s willing to sacrifice herself for the opportunity to see her home one final time. Rembrandt (Richard James) is the historical celebrity for this story, and he, too, is dealing with the loss of his wife – and Nyssa knows all too well the struggle of losing loved ones, leading to a great moment between the two characters.
All of this makes “The Waters of Amsterdam” sound downbeat or even bleak, but it is none of those things. It’s a very easygoing story, with a refreshingly light sense of humor. Morris’s scripts often have a quick wit, and this one is no exception. The plot is strong, and never convoluted, and only seems to put a foot wrong near the end. It’s also a story that actually makes use of time travel as more than a plot device, with a similar exploration of the “alternate future” concept to that seen in “Pyramids of Mars.”
My biggest issue with the story is the decision to make Teldak a villainous character. This wasn’t necessary: she could have taken many of the same actions out of pure desperation to survive rather than a megalomaniacal desire to destroy her enemies, and in that scenario the Nix (Robbie Stevens) could have remained the sort-of-allies they became. But no, it’s more “I killed them all! Ha ha ha!” dialogue that cheapens an otherwise intelligent, delicate story.
The production is excellent. Jamie Anderson directs, helping to lend the story its unusual feel relative to much of the rest of the range. Martin Montague’s sound design is quite good, and I very much enjoyed Jamie Robertson’s score. Overall, “The Waters of Amsterdam” is a very strong story, one that isn’t afraid to let its characters drive events without relying upon hoary old science fiction clichés. If the monthly range would produce more stories like this, I’d be much more satisfied.
Big Finish, never known for half measures, is jumping into the New Series pool with both feet. We’ve had UNIT, the War Doctor, Torchwood – and now “The Diary of River Song,” a four story set featuring the time-traveling archaeologist and spouse to everyone’s favorite Time Lord. The first story in the set, “The Boundless Sea” from Jenny T. Colgan, is an odd decision: it’s about the safest, most generic story imaginable and it almost completely fails to inspire.
River is weary of… something and so she decides to take some time off by working as a university archaeologist in early 20th century England. I like that the story doesn’t shy away from the institutional sexism that she would have confronted in this job in the real world, but it’s so caricatured that it’s sometimes difficult to take seriously. I’m also unsure about the idea to have her so reluctant to get involved, as it doesn’t make the character sympathetic and requires a great deal of trust from the listener. Additionally, the story takes forever and a day to get going: the opening scenes in the university followed by the travel to the dig site are interminable, with very little of interest happening at any point.
And once she does arrive, she spends the majority of the remainder of the play locked in a room with two other characters. As the pilot episode for a series about a time-traveling adventuress with the universe at her fingertips, the scope is shockingly limited, presenting itself as little more than an utterly clichéd cursed-tomb story. There are some interesting character beats – the villain is a woman who was defined entirely by her marriage, and River can sympathize with that for obvious reasons. But the resolution is far too Doctor Who, in that River solves the problem exactly as you’d expect the Doctor to solve it – and in a story that makes the point that River is sometimes defined too much by her relationship with the Doctor, it’s an uneasy resolution.
While the script might be uneven, it’s at least thoughtful. The production, on the other hand, is uncharacteristically weak. Alex Kingston is largely excellent, but the other performances are overly mannered and affected for a story that otherwise isn’t attempting a pastiche. The conclusion is far too action-oriented for audio and features an unfortunate amount of characters yelling descriptive passages at each other. Ken Bentley-directed stories are usually much stronger than this. And while the sound design from Steve Foxon is quite solid, the theme music is not – it’s too long, it’s way over the top, and it doesn’t even sound convincingly orchestral. Overall, “The Boundless Sea” is a bizarrely weak way to launch a box set, with questionable decisions showing throughout the production. I said this about UNIT and I said it about the War Doctor and now I’ll say it again: if I had never heard of Doctor Who or River Song, I wouldn’t bother moving on to the second episode.
3/10
I WENT TO A MARVELLOUS PARTY
I know it’s a Noël Coward song, but there’s a party supply store where I live called “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party” and so that’s all I think about when I see the title of Justin Richards’ “I Went to a Marvellous Party,” the second story in the Diary of River Song box set. This has absolutely nothing to do with the story, but as an anecdote it’s about as interesting – which is to say that there’s very little that stands out in yet another space murder mystery.
Look, I know what you get with Justin Richards scripts. They’re usually entertaining, with solid characterization and enough conceptual sci-fi to keep you reading or listening. He’s not one to push boundaries – and despite his extensive experience writing new series spinoffs, this is the second story in this set to feel more than a little like a classic Doctor Who story. It’s “The Robots of Death” or “Terror of the Vervoids,” basically, and though there’s a good twist in the murder plot, there’s very little here to surprise or capture your interest.
What I do like is River’s role in the resolution, specifically how she manipulates the various players, switching sides until she can engineer an ideal outcome. The character on television is devious as well as charming, always hiding a secondary motive underneath a disguised exterior, and that element of her character is on full display in this story. It’s just a shame that the plot to which she turns this devious nature is so simplistic – it doesn’t feel like a challenge, nor does it bear any significant weight. As I mentioned before, this is a great example of what Doctor Who would be like with a female Doctor – but this isn’t Doctor Who, this is River Song, and it should be more lively than this. I’m struggling to find more to say about this story; it’s thoroughly competent but utterly uninspired. Still, there’s improvement here from the first story in the set.
5/10
SIGNS
Now this is more like it. “Signs,” from James Goss, is the third story of the Diary of River Song set, and it finally tries to depart from the Doctor Who norm and tell a more unique story. It’s still flawed, but there’s actual interesting material here, leading to a much more successful outing.
So at the end of the previous story, someone (Samuel West) claiming to be the Doctor turns up, and he convinces River that he’s an incarnation she hasn’t yet encountered. Of course, the audience knows this isn’t true, because Big Finish isn’t going to start creating new Doctors, but River doesn’t, and the story is therefore about observing her reactions and how she figures out who he really is. Goss elects to do this in two-handed fashion: the story features only Alex Kingston and Samuel West and a lot of dialogue between the two. West’s “Doctor” is very convincing, and as such his interactions with River are largely delightful, as we see the deep affection she has for him. The two actors have great chemistry together as well.
The problem is that the story isn’t particularly gripping. There are great images, like the “Doctor” traveling in a large, empty spaceship, and the idea of the Spore Ships in general. But the “Doctor’s” scheme is vaguely presented, and the true villainy of his behavior – repeatedly cloning and killing River until he learns what he needs – is saved for a climactic plot twist instead of being worked into the story. I appreciated the twist, and I didn’t see it coming, but I wish we could have spent more time knowing so we could learn more about River through her reactions. I did like the death bed scenes, which let us see just how desperately River wants to survive. I also appreciated River’s actions at the very end – finally, something different from what the Doctor would do – but it felt like there could have been more to it than an action movie line.
I also wasn’t a fan of the two-hand structure. For the most part it works, but there are moments where Goss has River and her “husband” pleading with planetary governments – without hearing anything on the other side, it comes across as the sort of “Listen, all of you!” crowd scene that Big Finish has always been terrible at. On balance, though, I enjoyed “Signs” – it’s a flawed story but it has a great deal of ambition and makes me feel better about the set as a whole.
6/10
THE RULERS OF THE UNIVERSE
They definitely saved the best for last. “The Rulers of the Universe,” from Matt Fitton, closes the Diary of River Song set, and it’s easily the strongest story of the four – though I suspect that’s only because the Doctor is in it.
So you’ve got an entire box set of stories about River Song, and the two best stories by far involve first a fake Doctor and then an appearance by the real thing. As an attempt to feature a supporting character and define her as a person in her own right that doesn’t rely on the Doctor, this doesn’t really work. Suddenly much of the drama is about River trying to figure out a way to help the Doctor while he saves the day without revealing her identity – and yeah, Fitton writes it well, but we’re back to defining River in terms of the Doctor.
This does mean, though, that the Doctor (Paul McGann, in this case) gets some excellent material. The story is set in the early days of the Time War, presumably near the end of the eighth Doctor’s life, and the Doctor is dancing around the edges of the war and cleaning up collateral damage while refusing to get directly involved. The brief mentions here are much more effective than anything in the first War Doctor set – Fitton actually communicates the idea of a war with its tendrils in unexpected places and causing a number of unexpected consequences. And McGann plays the Doctor with more of an edge than usual – this is a man clearly losing patience with the war and his role in it.
To dodge any possible continuity problems, the Doctor and River only interact via communicator – but since this is an audio story, it’s basically like hearing them meet. Kingston and McGann have fun with the interaction, showing the Doctor’s puzzlement running headlong into River’s desire to look after him. It’s a shame they couldn’t do more with this, though I understand the difficulties in staying consistent with the TV series. I’m also pleased that Fitton doesn’t reduce River purely to a support role: before taking over communication with the Doctor, she puts an elaborate, time-travel-driven revenge scheme into action, thoroughly defeating the titular Rulers of the Universe. This was the first and only time in the entire set that I felt I was seeing the same River I’ve seen on television: intelligent, resourceful, and completely audacious. But even so, this is a relatively brief moment that feels as though it’s clearing the decks so the Doctor can solve the problem of the Spore Ships.
The whole set should have employed some of that bravado. River Song was a bomb dropped into the middle of Doctor Who; she shook up the status quo more than any one character in the series since its revival. But here we have, for the most part, straightforward science fiction tales. River doesn’t feel like the influential, magnetic character that changed Doctor Who. Instead, she feels like another random guest star – an interesting one played by a talented actor, of course, but little more than that. There has been a serious lack of ambition from Big Finish in all of their new series releases thus far; I’m starting to wonder if we’re ever going to see any.
From Styre on 8.04 – Ghost in the Machine
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From Styre on 8.03 – Upstairs
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From Styre on 07 - The Victorian Age
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From Styre on The Diary of River Song Vol. 1
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