Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

My apologies for not getting anything posted yesterday. I was going to do a comics post, but my local comic shop still didn’t have Glamourpuss, and also didn’t have Comic Book Comics, leaving me with no new comics worth writing a review of. I’ve started a long post on Promethea, which I’ll probably finish tomorrow, but that got put aside when I had multiple visitors (scarletdemon of livejournal fame and an ex-coworker wanting my advice on matters of the heart).

I’ve been thinking for a while about what I like and dislike about Doctor Who, and trying to decide exactly why I dislike the new series. I was going to do a big, long, ranting post about it, but decided that would probably be neither particularly interesting nor particularly productive. Instead, inspired by Bully, I’m going to do a Big Finish a week.

For those who don’t know, Big Finish are an audio drama production company who specialise in science fiction and comic related stories. In particular, they’ve done well over a hundred Doctor Who audio adventures, featuring four of the actors who played the Doctor in the classic series, as well as many of those who played companions and villains. I started listening to these when I realised (in 2006) that I didn’t like the new series at all. The things I did like about it were mostly ‘comfort food’ – things I remembered from being a child. TARDISes, Daleks, Cybermen, K-9 – these things give me a visceral thrill, because they’re so tied in with childhood memories of The Five Doctors or Revelation Of The Daleks. But if you strip that away from the new series, and look at both the style and the content, it’s quickly apparent that whoever it’s aimed at, it isn’t me.

The Big Finish stories are different. Created to appeal not to a mass audience, but to a hardcore following, and made at relatively little expense, they can be far more experimental and interesting than the TV show. ‘Can’ being the operative word. Some of the stories are absolutely wonderful – exciting, entertaining, witty and intelligent. Others are just bad fanfic, and the stories with Paul McGann quickly become incomprehensible – they attempt Babylon 5 style ‘story arcs’ and there’s an excess of continuity. But when they get it right, I can get both that visceral thrill *and* a story that doesn’t insult my intelligence.

So until I get bored I’m going to go through the Big Finish Doctor Who stories, one a week, and review them (for some sense of review – some of these might be more discursive rambling than intelligent analysis). I hope I’ll find some things of interest to say.

The Sirens Of Time is the first Big Finish adventure, and it’s a multi-Doctor adventure, featuring Peter Davison (the Fifth Doctor), Colin Baker (the sixth) and Sylvester McCoy (the seventh). The early Big Finish stories show a lot of the signs of their amateurish beginnings (the people making them started out making fanfic tapes before getting the official license and the original actors), and right from the start this episode shows who the producers are aiming at – a character (Vansell, who later becomes a recurring character), introduces himself within the first minute as being from the “Celestial Intervention Agency” (an organisation that had been mentioned in the TV show once, twenty-three years earlier) and babbles about ‘artron energy’. One of the things the new show has got right in comparison with the early Big Finishes is jettisoning this kind of continuity-referencing.

The story is divided into four parts, one for each Doctor with them meeting at the end. The first part is unfortunately tedious. Featuring Sylvester McCoy (the seventh Doctor and the last during the original run of the television series), it clearly shows the signs of writer Nicholas Briggs’ relative inexperience, with the Doctor talking to himself for large parts of the story. It’s not helped by Maggie Stables (who is wonderful in later stories as Dr Evelyn Smythe), giving a cackling over-the-top performance as an old crone. The Doctor saves the life of a woman named Elenya and then for no readily apparent reason ends up between a war criminal and the people who have come to kill him. There’s a ton of info-dumping and continuity references, and in general it is almost incomprehensible. This will sadly become an ongoing trend with the seventh Doctor stories. McCoy’s performance is OK, but it’s an inauspicious start, and I suspect that had Who fans not been as desperate as they were in 1999 for new material, no-one would ever have listened past the first part, let alone ever bought any future installments.

The second part, featuring the Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, is much more like it. The plotline is an old staple (the TARDIS turns up in some kind of vessel during a time of war/international crisis, but then the Doctor loses it. The Doctor is under suspicion of spying, and teams up with a young woman to fight off a strange menace) which would actually be reused in its broad outlines for Storm Warning, the first Big Finish to feature Paul McGann, the eighth doctor. The young woman in this case is played by the same actress who played Elenya, and is called Helen, and so we presume they are the same character in some way.
Not only is this part of the story much better-written than the first part, but Davison’s performance is worlds better than McCoy’s. McCoy ties with Jon Pertwee as the worst actor to have played the part of the Doctor, and he’s particularly ill-suited to audio as a lot of his performance was based on physical mannerisms. By contrast Davison is an extremely competent, subtle performer, but was too young for the role when he originally took it on in his early thirties. Twenty years on, his performance has the maturity it needs to sell the character. On TV, he never really seemed like the Doctor in the same way that his predecessors did, but in the audios he is clearly the same character as played by Hartnell, Troughton and the Bakers, while still having his own interpretation. While this first story is very cheap-sounding, with some very poor voice acting, Davison sounds absolutely naturalistic, even when having to talk to himself to deliver necessary exposition.

Colin Baker’s episode, the third, is not quite as badly-written as the first, but is far from good. Centring on the creation of a spatial anomaly, it’s full of handwaved techno-babble that doesn’t really work, and like the first episode it requires entirely too much narration-as-monologue. The plot is also derivative, bearing more than a slight resemblance to the earlier story Terror Of The Vervoids. But where it shines is in Baker’s performance.

Colin Baker, the sixth Doctor, is the one whose reputation has improved most because of these audio adventures – and rightly so. While he’s not the best actor ever to have played the role, he seems to have had the most coherent idea of who the character is and what he wanted to do. Unfortunately, he took the role at a time when it had some of the worst scripts the series ever had, he was later saddled with the worst companion (Mel), and the series was shunted around, the format changed, and finally Baker was sacked from the role, essentially the scapegoat for problems in the production team.

Worse than that, Baker was intending to stay in the role for a long time, and had a character ‘arc’ (as the cool kids put it) planned out for the Doctor, starting as a fairly unpleasant character but changing as the series progressed. The combination of him being sacked before these ideas could be realised, and the terrible scripts he was sometimes handed, has meant that on TV his Doctor has moments of brilliance where you can see what he’s trying to do, and his performance is often the only thing holding together some extraordinarily bad programmes.

So in these stories, starting here, Baker is finally given the chance to complete what he started, and while his performances in the audios are often hammy, they’re the good kind of ham. Baker’s Doctor is arrogant, thoughtless, buffoonish, inconsiderate, pragmatic to the point of cruelty – but also deeply caring, intelligent and witty. He’s also rather more self-aware than he appears – “When it comes down to it I’m a bit of a know-it-all really” is a better line than it appears. His is both the most alien and the most human of the later Doctors, and it’s all in the performance rather than the script (though even the worst of his Big Finish scripts are infinitely better than godawful messes like the last episode of Trial Of A Timelord). Even Baker has difficulty making lines like “Yes of course! The only way you’re going to find Temperon particles is in… the Temperon!” sound like dialogue that could be spoken by a real person though.

The last part is a gigantic infodump, ‘explaining’ what has gone on in the first three episodes, with a reset switch pressed at the end meaning that nothing in the story really happened, but is mostly listenable just for the interaction between the three Doctors, all the actors obviously eager to be back in their most famous role.

The Sirens Of Time has all the faults of the early Big Finish audios, and very few of the strengths. Just about listenable because of Baker and Davison’s performances, it is still an uneasy mix of pastiche of the TV show and fanficcy continuity obsession. The audios wouldn’t start finding their own voice until the sixth story introduced the first original-to-Big-Finish companion, but the next few stories, while pure pastiche of the TV show, were more interesting.

(Comics post tomorrow. Promise.