A Big Finish A Week 18: Omega
Well, it’s actually more than a fortnight since the last one, but given the circumstances, I hope you can forgive me.
(There are a *lot* of people searching for Doctor Who today, aren’t there? And I appear, when I look at the WordPress tag ‘doctor who’ to be the ‘featured blog’, whatever that means. So for those of you who are coming here for the first time, hello. My name’s Andrew Hickey, and I like the old series of Doctor Who very much, and don’t like the new series very much at all. I hope you won’t hold that against me…)
Omega is rather unusual among Big Finish audios, in that it directly follows, and is a sequel to, an episode of the TV series – but if you’ve seen the episode in question the big twist of the story is spoiled for you.
Nev Fountain’s story is part of a thematic trilogy, along with Master and Davros, that was leading up to Big Finish’s fiftieth story, Zagreus. Each of these featured the Doctor without a companion going up against a single ‘classic’ villain who hadn’t appeared much or at all in the Big Finish stories previously. Each revealed ‘new, shocking facts’ about the origin of that villain, and each in some way showed that the Doctor and the villain were two sides of the same coin. I’ve reviewed those two audios earlier, but suffice to say that Davros is one of the three or four best things Big Finish have ever done (and is among my top ten Doctor Who stories in any medium) while Master is three-quarters of a decent little horror/murder mystery topped with half an hour of the most egregious fanwank ever conceived.
Omega, as you might expect from one of Peter Davison’s audios, which are always solidly entertaining but rarely (with a few exceptions like The Kingmaker) groundbreaking and different, is somewhere in between, never reaching the highs of Davros, but never plumbing the depths of “The Master was created by Death in a deal with the Doctor when the Doctor was a kid because the Doctor was a murderer and gave up his best friend rather than face the guilt”.
We do, unfortunately, get the revelation that the Doctor has committed yet another genocide in the past, which must be at least the fifth and does tend to suggest that the Doctor is some kind of cosmic Hitler, even though most of these have been by accident, but taking this as a story on its own, rather than trying to make connections with all the other stories, it’s actually quite effective.
The story itself is quite simple – the Doctor turns up on a spaceship running a ‘jolly Chronolidays’ tour to the site of Omega’s experiments with time travel, where some of the actors who take part in the reconstructions are going mad and believing they are the real people who they are playing. Meanwhile, Omega is on the loose on the ship, and the Doctor has not got his TARDIS, and Omega is trying to get back to his own universe, even if this means taking the entire ship with him.
The problem is that understanding this means having seen two old Doctor Who stories. Omega isn’t as ‘iconic’ a villain as the Master or Davros, both of whom are names that would be recognised by, if not necessarily the non-fan public, at least the sort of casual fan who might be tempted to pick up a CD in the shops based on having liked the show as a kid. Omega, by contrast, is tied to two specific stories – The Three Doctors and Arc Of Infinity – both of which are themselves very much mired in Gallifreyan lore. This means that the only people who are ever going to listen to this story are those who have seen those two stories. And anyone who have seen those two stories will know that in Arc Of Infinity, which comes directly before this story, Omega had inhabited a body which was an exact replica of the Doctor’s.
Knowing this, the big twist in the middle of the story – that we haven’t in fact been following the story of the Doctor battling Omega, but instead a sort of sub-Fight Club story in which both minds are in one body, a copy of the Doctor’s – is entirely obvious to anyone who gives the story some thought, and without that much of the impact is lost.
The story has other flaws as well – the attempts at humour stick out like a sore thumb, with in-jokes aimed at particular groups of fans, and bathetic ‘humorous’ stings in the music whenever something ‘funny’ happens, and with a reference to Zagreus that includes a ‘hilarious’ Scouse accent (regional accents are obviously the funniest thing in the entire universe). Also, the big ‘revelation’ about Omega is so ridiculous one is almost tempted to regard it as a joke at the expense of the other two stories in the ‘trilogy’. Despite these flaws, the audio succeeds on its own terms, thanks to a particularly good central performance by Davison (and having watched a few of Davison’s TV shows recently, I’m even more impressed with his audio performances – when listening to the audios one feels the character is exactly the same one he played on TV, but when watching the TV show it is very obvious how much more subtle a performance he’s giving now. Which is not to disparage his performance in the 80s, but just to say how much better an actor he is twenty-plus years on). The plotting is also very tight – a necessity when every single character in the story, without exception, either gets possessed by another character, is pretending to be someone who they’re not, or in some other way has some very confused identity problems.
Omega is, despite my criticisms, definitely in the top 50% of Big Finish stories – the story itself is enjoyable enough to reward repeated listenings, it’s never dull, and the flaws, though real, never pull you out of the story the way they do in the worst of the audios. But this is one for the fans, rather than for the casual listener, in a way that the very best Big Finish stories aren’t.
A Big Finish A Week 17 – The Genocide Machine
Sorry for the lack of posts this week so far. Not only am I staying with my in-laws, with only dial-up internet access on Windows XP, but a combination of jetlag and a sinus infection has made me basically unable to think for a few days (an unfortunate thing about my wife working at a hospital is that even though I can get rid of most infections the same day I get them, there’s always another one coming along…)
We did, however, get to visit a few friends on Tuesday, and Prince Mu-Chao very kindly lent me several old Target novelisations, so I’ve spent the last few days journeying back to my childhood, counting the number of synonyms for ‘said’ that Ian Marter can use in a single page, and generally engaging in intellectual comfort-eating (as well as physical comfort-eating – I always put on weight in the US…)
More RIP/FC stuff tonight/tomorrow (I’m not entirely sure of what day it is any more…) but for now, I’ll be looking (briefly) at another example of intellectual comfort-eating, Mike Tucker’s The Genocide Machine.
Previously when looking at Big Finish audios I have mostly concentrated on those that contained some actual original ideas – one of the things I like most about Big Finish’s Doctor Who range is that at least a third of them or so have genuinely strong central ideas, and both plot and characterisation are arranged around these ideas – Rob Shearman’s better work, for example, is far better summed up by discussing its themes than by recounting its plot. The Holy Terror isn’t ‘about’ a castle created to torture an old man, but rather is about the obligations of a creator to the creation. Other times the idea is a scientific (or pseudo-scientific) one, or a counterfactual history, or just a neat way of structuring a plot. Even when these ideas aren’t fully integrated (as in The Council Of Nicea, which appears to be written by someone who can’t take the ideas under discussion terribly seriously) they’re there.
One gets the impression that the favourite Doctor Who era of the Big Finish producers was probably Christopher Bidmead’s short tenure as script editor – while Bidmead’s stories didn’t always make as much sense as they should (there is a gaping hole in Logopolis for example – why use the Earth technology?) they’re about ideas – recursion, entropy and so on – and when they work (they didn’t always) they’re remarkably successful at getting those ideas across.
However, it took time for Big Finish to really find a unique voice, which probably didn’t happen for the first year, and in those first dozen or so stories, while some new things were done (the introduction of Evelyn being the most important), they were essentially pastiching the old show, either in terms of genre (a historical, a multi-Doctor story and so on) or by bringing back old villains like the Ice Warriors and the Daleks.
The Genocide Machine is one of the latter, a straightforward ‘old-school’ Doctor Who story, with even a title that you can imagine the announcer in Toby Hadoke’s Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf reading out – “And now, The Genocide Machine. In which there is a machine. And some genocide.” – the only surprising thing is that, given that it features the Daleks, it’s not called Resolution Of The Daleks or something.
But even here, in one of the most generic Doctor Who stories Big Finish have ever done (The Daleks attack a gigantic repository of all knowledge, which hides a deadly secret… that’s it) you can still see the audios starting to diverge from the TV programme.
The Big Finish audios are unique in my experience of spin-off media in that they manage to straddle a number of lines. They retain the feel of the original show for the most part ( odd exceptions like Master and Flip Flop aside – and note here that I’m not talking about the McGann audios, which are a slightly different beast) but still have their own unique identity. They also are generally of a far higher quality than the TV series itself was during the time of the Big Finish Doctors (my opinion of the Nathan-Turner era is higher than many people’s, but even I would argue that there was never a Davison story as good as The Kingmaker or Spare Parts, and the Sixth Doctor was never as good on TV as in Jubilee or Davros). Here we see the very first stirrings of this, in the decision to do the first Dalek story without Davros in it for 25 years.
I remember as a kid being quite surprised when reading novelisations of old Doctor Who stories to find that Davros didn’t always appear with the Daleks – I thought the whole point of a Dalek story was for the bit where the Doctor confronts Davros – and so Big Finish’s decision to go back to the stories of the first three Doctors, and tell most of their Dalek stories without Davros, was quite a brave one. It’s both a strength and a weakness in this case – without their distinctive appearance the Daleks could be Anymonster, and they could easily be replaced in this story with, say, the Cybermen, without any major plot changes. But on the other hand, they don’t look anything like as clunky in the imagination as they did in some of the TV adventures…
Everything’s done competently enough here – the story is a fun romp, with nothing more to it than that – but it’s nowhere near as good as Big Finish later became capable of, and still shows a conservatism that is perhaps understandable in a company that was just starting out and had to persuade the fanbase of its legitimacy.
A Big Finish A Week 15: Spare Parts
One of the things nuWho has done repeatedly since its inception is to base many of its stronger episodes on material from spin-off and ancillary media – it’s no coincidence that Dalek, Human Nature/Family Of Blood and Blink (the three most highly-regarded stories from the new series, as far as I can tell, among fans generally) are based on, respectively, a Big Finish audio, a novel and a short story from an annual. The surprising thing, actually, is that they’ve not done this more – there are nearly twenty years worth of novels and audio adventures that could be mined for TV episodes, and even discounting all the ones that are more obsessed with the prehistory of Gallifrey and the origins of the rod of Rassilon and other such nonsense, one would think there was enough interesting story material floating around to give the TV show material for a couple of years at least.
What’s even more surprising, though, is when the TV series takes inspiration from the ancillary media and then proceeds to discard everything that makes the inspiration effective, as they did with the two-part Cybermen origin story in series two of nuWho, which claimed to take inspiration from Marc Platt’s Spare Parts.
In fact, other than merely having the idea of doing an ‘origin of the Cybermen’, the two stories have nothing in common. nuWho’s Cyber-origin (set in an alternate universe, so both that and Spare Parts can be ‘canonical’ if you’re the kind of person who cares about that, which I’m not) actually tries to do something reasonably intelligent, updating the fear of transplantation that was the basis of the original Cybermen ( who made their debut at the turning point between William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s eras as the Doctor, a point where the show had a rather small-c conservative attitude towards technology, reflecting in a way the back-to-nature ideas that were becoming more popular in the culture of the late 60s) and replacing it with a fear of consumer electronics that is more appropriate to the current culture.
However, this idea soon gets swamped in a banal story which is mostly a third-rate rehash of Genesis Of The Daleks, but with Roger Lloyd Pack as the wheelchair-bound megalomaniacal evil genius (Trigger from Only Fools And Horses just doesn’t have the same menace as Davros…).
Spare Parts, the alleged inspiration for that story, is infinitely better, and is right up in the first rank of Big Finish audios with Doctor Who And The Pirates, The Kingmaker and a handful of others. But while those stories are mostly lighter, often comedies, Spare Parts is unremittingly bleak and downbeat – it has the spirit of Genesis Of The Daleks rather than taking images from it and jamming them into an unrelated plot. It may even be (whisper it) better than that classic TV story, if only because its shorter length (it’s one of the shorter Big Finish stories, coming in at just a touch over two hours) makes for a tighter story.
Platt has worked out a relatively consistent portrait of a post-ecological-collapse world, one with a higher level of technology than our own, but with a society that’s something close to that of Britain in the 1950s – something that is much better fitted to the post-apocalypse genre than you might imagine. ’50′s Britain was the polar opposite of 50s America (at least as it’s portrayed in the media and in the popular imagination) a time and place of austerity, of coping with inevitable decline, of putting a brave face on the loss of Empire, of rationing and shortages, of a society trying desperately and over-harshly to reimpose order after the disaster that was the Second World War. As a template for the last surviving city on an otherwise dead planet, it works surprisingly well (though Platt overplays this a bit by explicitly stating in the story that Mondas is like the 1950s on more than one occasion). So we have a black market flourishing here too – but this black market is in organs for transplanting. We have police on horseback – but the ‘police’ are prototype Cybermen.
Spare Parts, unlike Genesis Of The Daleks or the televised Cybermen origin story, is a tragedy in the classical mould – as soon as the Doctor and Nyssa arrive, the end is absolutely pre-ordained, and every step they take to prevent it actually brings it closer, but they can’t not try to prevent the creation of the Cybermen, even though they know the effort is futile.
Unlike the Fourth Doctor’s dilemma in Genesis, the Doctor here is dealing with actual humans – ones whose entire civilisation will almost certainly die if they don’t become Cybermen. It’s also significant that it’s specifically the fifth Doctor and Nyssa who are in this position – having seen their companion Adric killed by the Cybermen (in Earthshock) they have a more personal incentive to stop the creation of the Cybermen. So the Doctor is genuinely torn between his compulsion to prevent damage to time, his need to help people, and his desire to prevent the horrors the Cybermen will cause, in a way we’ve rarely seen before or since. And the people of Mondas are mostly aware of precisely how horrible their situation is, and powerless to change it – their individual actions, well-intentioned in the main (or at worst motivated by human emotions like jealousy of a big sister, or desire for a quiet life, rather than grand universal-domination schemes), all lead to a result of unimaginable horror.
The choice to use the sing-song voice of the Cybermen’s earliest appearances is also inspired – it’s infinitely spookier than the gruff “Excellent!” voice of the 80s versions.
While the story has some of the usual Big Finish flaws (terrible ‘comedy’ regional accents – I can’t be the only Northerner who finds their treatment of us rather patronising and insulting at times – and a couple of duff lines like “I’m freezing your assets”), it succeeds in creating a bleak, kitchen-sink-Sophocles atmosphere that is quite unlike anything else I can think of. And some of the images (the young woman, drafted and partially converted into a Cyberman, not fully comprehending her situation and wanting her father to see her in her new ‘uniform’ in particular) are absolutely haunting.
It’s not exactly a laugh-riot, and it’s not much *fun* to listen to, but if you want a tightly-scripted, well-performed, powerful audio play, there’s very little out there with anything like the quality of Spare Parts.
A Big Finish A Week 14: Davros
Davros by Lance Parkin was the second Big Finish audio I listened to (after The Game) and the first one to really impress me.
I am, as I’ve said before, a huge fan of Terry Molloy’s Davros. In part this is just because Molloy played Davros when I was a child, and I have fond memories of having the shit scared out of me as a five-year-old. But it’s also because I think he gives a genuinely good performance.
Molloy is a ham – no question about it – but hammery is what was needed in the larger-than-life Doctor Who of the John Nathan-Turner years. If *you* had to compete with Colin Baker, Alexei Sayle and Eleanor Bron all in the same show, you’d turn the dial on your performance up a few notches too.
But he’s actually *relatively* restrained. Douglas Adams spoke about how the trick with Doctor Who during Adams’ brief tenure as script editor was to have villains who initially appeared ridiculous, but who turned out to be serious, thus making them much scarier when you realised they meant it. The problem during Adams’ time on the show – as Adams himself freely acknowledged – was that many of the actors would then say “This is a funny bit, let’s do it a bit tongue in cheek”, and then the suspension of disbelief would be totally gone.
While Molloy’s Davros has a dark sense of humour that is not there in Michael Wisher’s performance in Genesis Of The Daleks, he is always deadly serious – while he’s a ranting megalomaniacal villain, the performance is consistent, and at times quite subtle. He can convince you that this apparently-ridiculous man is very, very scary and dangerous.
So the pairing of Molloy’s Davros and Colin Baker’s Doctor in what was essentially a two-hander (part of the trilogy Big Finish did pairing a companionless Doctor with a classic individual villain, leading up to the release of Zagreus) is a perfect one – both actors share many of the same qualities in their performances. Indeed, both were generally hated during their time on TV – blamed for faults in the production and the scripts – but have been reappraised by fans due to these audios.
The story itself is quite minimal – the Doctor and Davros end up working together for TIA, the biggest corporation in the galaxy, mostly because the Doctor wants to keep an eye on Davros, who claims to be working for the good of lifekind. Of course, he turns out not to be…
The story is mostly a comedy, but a black comedy with hints of melodrama rather than a broad farce like Doctor Who And The Pirates or The Kingmaker. There’s some attempt at political satire, but this is mostly of quite a juvenile nature – dialogues between a reporter and the CEO of TIA, essentially consisting of “Corporations are bad and evil, man” “No, actually, they’re good, you scruffy anarchist oik”. A rather better idea, and one that I was surprised hadn’t been done before, was the CEO’s wife (played by Wendy Padbury, a former TV companion) being an ‘historian’ of the David Irving type, peddling a revisionist history where Davros had nothing to do with the Daleks’ occasional mild excesses, and was a truly great man.
Davros’ actual plot this time is an economic one – he’s discovered a formula for predicting the stock market with absolute accuracy, and he plans to use this to put the Galactic economy on a permanent war footing, thus solving the problems of famine and poverty. He genuinely seems not to understand that this might not be a particularly good thing to do.
Of course, these days we know that it doesn’t take a one-armed, deformed ranting supervillain to do that – just put a moron in the White House and wait a few years and it’ll happen naturally…
But equally important are the series of flashbacks to Davros’ past, which set up how he came to be who he is. Particularly effective is a subplot involving a female Kaled scientist called Shan, with whom he is portrayed as having a very friendly relationship. The story is clearly set up to make you think that her death turned him bad. In fact, he causes her death deliberately, because the two of them were ‘in the same ecological niche’ – the same argument he earlier uses for why the Thals had to be destroyed.
This is, of course, the logic of most ultra-free-market capitalism, and it’s a shame that the parallels between Davros’ behaviour and the (presumed) behaviour of the company for which he works aren’t drawn slightly more explicitly. But then , there’s not really room for that – this story is nearly two and a half hours long, and there’s barely a wasted minute in it. It’s a dialogue-heavy, character-driven piece, and one of the best things Big Finish have done.
What’s marvellous about it is that it embraces its more ridiculous side (Davros’ much-mocked speech which ends “and that was just the first second” is actually perfectly in character, and the cliffhanger at the end of the first CD is the Doctor jumping down a mineshaft carrying a nuclear bomb which is going to go off in ten seconds. He survives, of course) while still never feeling like the *characters* aren’t taking it seriously. These people are all having bizarre experiences, but they’re bizarre experiences which have very real consequences for them and for everyone else in the universe. An experience not that dissimilar to reading the news, to be honest…
This mixture of the surreal, the terrifying and the hilarious is perfect for Colin Baker and Molloy, and both ham it up with evident glee, but stay always on the right side of the line, giving perfectly-pitched performances.
Davros is available on CD or as an MP3 from Big Finish, but the best way to experience it is as part of the Davros DVD box set. For £35 you get this and all the other Big Finish audios featuring Davros, all the classic TV adventures with the character, and some special extras. I’d link to the page but Big Finish’s website appears to be down at the moment, but you can buy it at http://doctorwho.co.uk when the site is back up.
A Big Finish A… More Than A Week 13: Zagreus
Sorry this one is ‘slightly’ more than a week after my last BFAW – to make up for it I’m going to review the longest of all the Big Finish stories: Zagreus.
In 1973, when Doctor Who was ten years old, an anniversary story was shown which, for the first time, brought multiple incarnations of the Doctor together. It was called The Three Doctors but really should have been called The Two Doctors as it only featured William Hartnell in a cameo – he was very ill and didn’t have long to live. It was a rather risible story, with a terrible script only enlivened by the interaction between Pertwee and Troughton. It had a Time Lord as the villain, and featured Shocking Revelations about Time Lord history.
In 1983, there was a twentieth anniversary story. It was called The Five Doctors but really should have been called The Three Doctors as it only featured William Hartnell in a brief clip from an old episode – he was replaced by actor Richard Hurndall for the show – and Tom Baker refused to take part and was again only represented by a clip (from the then-unaired Douglas Adams scripted Shada). It was a rather risible story, with a terrible script only enlivened by the interaction between Pertwee and Troughton. It had a Time Lord as the villain, and featured Shocking Revelations about Time Lord history. (It’s actually rather fun, if you just like seeing Cybermen and Daleks and Yetis and the Master appear at random and be dispatched for no plot-relevant reason…)
In 1993 the show had been off the air for four years. Nonetheless, it was decided to do a multi-Doctor anniversary show. This one featured all the then-living Doctors (Hartnell and Troughton were represented by rather unconvincing busts) in a plot that featured a Time Lord as a villain. In a shocking twist, it had no Shocking Revelations – instead it was two ten-minute episodes that were done in 3D and were a crossover with Eastenders (a popular soap opera).
Yet for some reason, people were expecting Zagreus, which featured all four of the Doctors who take part in Big Finish’s range, was Big Finish’s fiftieth Doctor Who audio, and came out in 2003, to be good…
Zagreus is really difficult to review, because it’s so long (4 hours), and so convoluted, and based on the assumption that the listener remembers every detail of Big Finish’s previous Paul McGann audios, that it’s almost literally incomprehensible. On top of that it throws in in-jokes about how it’s not in the same continuity as the novels, and fanwanky references to earlier stories, especially The Five Doctors. I’ve listened to it five times , and I’m still not sure what’s actually meant to be happening. ( If you don’t believe me, take a look at the Wikipedia entry and see if the synopsis makes the slightest sense – it’s considerably more comprehensible than the actual audio is). Not only this, but large parts of the story merely rework bits of Alice In Wonderland (a wonderful book, but there should be a law against ever referencing it in anything ever again, it’s so over-quoted).
So we have a story in which almost everything that happens is an illusion created by the TARDIS, which has gone bad under the influence of Rassilon, and so Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy don’t play the Doctor at all, but rather holographic projections of historical characters from the Who universe that the TARDIS merely makes look and act like older incarnations of the Doctor. Meanwhile, Paul McGann plays the Doctor as possessed by Zagreus (a spirit of ‘anti-time’), so possibly this should be called ‘the no Doctors’ (although the late Jon Pertwee does cameo with bits of audio from a fan video flown in).
I don’t like to criticise anything as obviously ambitious as this, but it does show the problem with the McGann audios very strongly. McGann is excellent as the Doctor, and many of the stories have potential, but they’re all built on the modern (post-Babylon 5/Buffy ) model of science fiction as soap opera, structured much like the X-Men comics of the 70s and 80s where it’s expected you’re familiar with everything the character has ever previously been in. The McGann stories have several long ‘story arcs’, and unless you listen to every one in sequence you’re going to be totally lost.
To its credit, that is one of the few things that nuWho has actually got right – while there are nods to longer ‘arcs’ (the Time War, Bad Wolf, etc) they’re mostly thrown in as little extra bits for people to find. Each story is relatively self-contained, and while part of a larger series can stand alone (to the extent that any nuWho stories stand up at all, which is minimal).
It’s a shame, because so much of this *could* be good. Two of the three smaller stories (about a rip in reality in the 1950s, and about a race of vampires who existed at the dawn of Time Lord history) have the potential to be quite good if they were turned into longer, fuller stories (the third, about a war between animatronic robots in a theme park at the end of time, is not only bad in itself, but rips off a not-very-good episode of Red Dwarf which was in its turn heavily ‘inspired’ by Michael Crichton’s Westworld). Don Warrington gives a marvellous performance as Rassilon (an inspired choice for the part – for those who don’t know him, Warrington is roughly a British James Earl Jones, someone whose voice just oozes gravitas and importance, as well as being one of our greatest actors), and we have dozens of people who’ve appeared in Doctor Who in the past – but almost none of them are playing their usual roles, and the characters they’re given aren’t especially interesting ones.
It’s an ambitious failure, but it definitely *is* a failure, and I wish I could say more positive things about it.
A Big Finish A Week 12 – Medicinal Purposes
Robert Ross’ Medicinal Purposes is a story about which I am definitely in two minds. On the one hand, it’s definitely an above-average story for Big Finish; on the other it has many of the worst features of the new series.
Just to clarify, I’m not talking there about David Tennant, who appears in this story but not as the Doctor, but about the plot and moral tone. The plot is quite simple really – the Doctor and Evelyn arrive in Edinburgh at the time of the Burke and Hare murders. There they discover that Dr Robert Knox, the anatomist who bought the bodies from the two, is actually a time traveller who has put Edinburgh into a time loop, replaying the murders over and over for an audience of interstellar voyeurs.
This is pretty much the template for all the nuWho time-travel episodes – the Doctor and companion go back to meet Famous Historical Personages, and discover a Sinister SciFi Plot – as it appears the producers of the current show do not trust the audiences to have even a 1066 And All That level knowledge of history (The Girl In The Fireplace was a particular low in this regard, not only having TennantDoctor fall in love with the execrable Mme de Pompadour , but then having Rose ‘explain’ her to Mickey as being ‘like Camilla’, which is equally insulting to the late French parasite, the current wife of the Prince of Wales, and the entire audience).
It’s done better here though – partly because the plot is tighter than the average nuWho story and actually makes sense as a plot (with one big exception I’ll come to shortly) but also because of an exceptionally strong set of performances by the main cast (the bit parts are, of course, all hammed-up ‘och aye the noo’ bad accents). Colin Baker and Maggie Stables give their usual superb performances as the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn. By this point Evelyn’s character had been thoroughly thought-out, and Stables’ performance as the character throughout this series is as naturalistic a performance as I’ve ever heard, complementing Colin Baker’s hamminess perfectly, and creating a character for whom I actually feel rather more affection than many real people I know. I’m quite amazed Stables isn’t a much better-known actor than she is.
Leslie Philips is also excellent as Dr Knox, who is portrayed in a way that appears quite consistent with the real man. And while I’ve never liked David Tennant’s performance in nuWho, he’s very good in the role of Daft Jamie, one of Burke & Hare’s victims and one of the main characters in this story – possibly he’s better because he’s using an accent closer to his real one. One small criticism though – his performance is *very* reminiscent of Mickey from The League Of Gentlemen, possibly as a nod to Mark Gattis, the actor who played that role, who has also written and performed in several Big Finish audios.
However, the characterisation of The Doctor is hopelessly inconsistent in this story. To start with, he’s completely amoral, justifying the murders because the ends justify the means (there’s some waffle about how that’s not what he’s really saying, followed by him saying exactly that) and actually wanting to shake hands with Burke & Hare and congratulate them. He then *teams up with someone he knows to be a future victim*, without telling her this, to set time right, before then trying to save people anyway. While individual lines and scenes work – you can imagine the Doctor behaving very callously if necessary, just as you can of course imagine him showing compassion and trying to save people – as a whole, it’s an inconsistent view of the character, one in which he has no real moral centre and no underlying guiding set of principles, just a set of whims and justifications for moving from one plot point to another.
In this, the character is like the Doctor of nuWho, who is completely devoid of personality, just a set of tics and ‘quirks’ that can be moved from plot point to plot point (or, increasingly, special effect to plotless special effect) without regard to consistency or characterisation.
At the end, of course, all the characters who we know are going to be murdered are – the Doctor tries to save Daft Jamie, but a rather-clumsy subplot involving an alien virus means that he would die anyway, so he’s sent back to his place in history.
And the sentence above points to my other real problem with this story – I used the word ‘characters’, but of course these were not characters invented for a science fiction story, but real, living human beings. While I understand there’s a long tradition of using true historical crimes as the basis for grand guignol or gothic melodrama, I find it more than a little distasteful to use the actual deaths of actual people as a source of cheap entertainment. I suspect the writer is aware of this – hence the alien voyeurs – but it isn’t really dealt with properly. And while I know the events were a long, long time ago, it still feels slightly unpleasant to me.
Of course, I think that’s probably just me. No doubt if the human race and civilisation survive that long, in a hundred years the equivalent of Doctor Who will involve an investigation into why both the Moors Murderers and Harold Shipman lived in Hyde, with it being the result of some diabolical alien force or other. There’ll probably be a joke about “…and the greatest monster of all – Timmy Mallet!” which will get a laugh out of two people in the audience obsessed with late-20th-century trivia.
I’ve been rather too hard on this story here, probably because the faults are more interesting to talk about than the good points. It’s actually a pretty good, spooky little story with some very effective moments. But it does leave a little bit of a nasty aftertaste.
A Big Finish A Week 11 – The Church And The Crown
One style of story that I am very glad Big Finish have revived is the ‘historical’. In the early days of Doctor Who the show was meant, at least in part, to be educational (or so the received wisdom about the show goes), alternating between ‘science-based’ stories and historical ones.
In truth, there was very little educational about the historicals, which owed more to 1066 And All That and Boys-Own adventures than to actual history, but they were fun, and an obvious thing for Doctor Who to do really – after all, the show is about someone who can travel anywhere in time and space.
However, it was perceived that the historicals were unpopular, so they were phased out relatively early on, and never reappeared in the series. Instead, pseudo-historicals took their place, starting from the last Pertwee series, with stories set in the past but the addition of some form of bug-eyed monster (the first of these was The Invasion Of Time which I watched recently after getting the Sontaran box set for my birthday – incidentally, Jennie, you were right, Pertwee *could* be a good Doctor when he was given a good script).
To my mind this was a great loss, as my interest in Doctor Who is not primarily in the genre trappings (although I do like those) but in the character of the Doctor himself. Doctor Who is a uniquely flexible concept for a show and I think it’s a shame that for much of its history there have been a very limited number of plotlines (alien invasion, base under siege, evil mastermind has built a sinister macguffin) recycled over and over.
Thankfully, the people at Big Finish have as good as stated that one of their intentions is to give the later Doctors the scripts they *should* have had (many of the scripts in the last few years of the show were very poor), and so all the audio Doctors, but especially the Fifth, have been given ‘proper’ historicals, usually with specially-created companions. The Sixth Doctor’s companion Evelyn seems to have been created for this purpose, but she’s since become a much more general-purpose companion, but Erimem, the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh played by Caroline Morris who journeys with the Fifth Doctor and Peri, has been used almost exclusively for historical stories.
The Church And The Crown by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright is the first of those (other than Erimem’s introduction in The Eye Of The Scorpion, set in Pharaonic Egypt) and sets up the pattern for most of the other stories featuring her, in that it’s essentially a story of conspiracy, with a few Boys’ Own style rescues thrown in.
The interesting thing about these stories is that while they’re all runaround pulp adventures, with our heroes getting split up and ending up working for different factions, and usually with some evil conspirator planning the whole thing, they’re not afraid to have the characters be motivated by differing ideas along with their desires for personal ambition or revenge on their enemies. This shows most obviously in The Council Of Nicea, which is a rip-roaring theological adventure, but is also apparent here.
The central conflict in The Church And The Crown is that of secular and religious authority, in this case personified by Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu – the story is loosely patterned after The Three Musketeers, but with the added complication of Peri resembling the Queen and being kidnapped in her place by the Queen’s lover, the Duke of Buckingham.
Of course, the ideological conflict isn’t particularly well integrated into the pulp plot – the Duke of Buckingham is plotting a secret invasion of France, which is foiled by the Doctor with the help of Erimem, who persuades the king and the Cardinal’s warring forces to work together. Which would tend to suggest that the authors are advocates of theocracy, if you think about it too much…
But the conflict between Richelieu and Louis is very well-drawn, and we actually have characters whose motives are based on ideological differences rather than personal antipathy – a relatively rare thing in popular fiction of any type.
The performances are less good – this sounds like the actors weren’t given quite enough time to prepare. I usually expect a few dodgy performances from minor characters in Big Finish audio, but even Peter Davison, who usually gives absolutely perfect performances, lets through a couple of line reads that are slightly off (the stresses on the line “I sometimes think that at my age there’s nothing left to discover” don’t quite work in context – I only noticed though because he’s usually so good) in an otherwise good performance. Nicola Bryant is more impressive than normal here, though – playing two roles, she can drop the fake American accent that mars her otherwise good performances as Peri for the role of Queen Anne, and so her actual ability isn’t let down by the accent she’s forced to put on.
The Church And The Crown offers fewer opportunities for discussion than many of the other stories I’ve talked about here, but it’s a very good start to a whole series of historical adventures that are all worth a listen.
A Big Finish A Week 10 – Flip-Flop
I’m going to keep this one very brief – sometimes when I review one of these I’ll have more to say than other times. This time, I’m looking at a story I actually refuse to listen to a second time, so I won’t be able to go anything like as in-depth as I otherwise would.
Flip-Flop by Jonathan Morris is one of the nastiest things I’ve ever heard, yet somehow is actually considered in some way ‘good’ by many Doctor Who fans. Its high reputation comes entirely from the way it’s structured. It consists of two discs, a white and a black, which can be listened to in either order. Either way, the story is the same – the Doctor arrives on a planet, discovers that the horrible fate that has occured to it is the result of meddling in time, and goes back in time to fix it. Meanwhile, in a parallel timeline, the Doctor arrives on the same planet with a different horrible fate and goes back in time to fix *that*, and they end up in each other’s timestream, with nothing going right either way.
So far so dull – it’s adequately constructed as far as that goes, but it’s hardly the great innovation that some of the online reviews of this story make it out to be. For all that everyone talking about this says it’s incredibly tightly-plotted and cleverly done, the multiple plot-lines would have required no more work to create than the average Choose Your Own Adventure book – and even so the story can only work at all because of the massive cop-out of having both parallel Doctors decide to leave the planet and let the other Doctor sort it out, which is about as far out of character as you could get.
But leaden plotting and bad characterisation are not the world’s worst sins – I could forgive them, for the sake of the story being one that was trying to do something different, but failing. I could also forgive the heavy-handed references to It’s A Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day, Sylvester McCoy’s much-worse-than-usual performance, and even the fact that once again Big Finish have a female leader who is an obvious Thatcher stand-in (I hate Thatcher as much as the next man – if the next man is Arthur Scargill – but even I’m sick of seeing these stereotypes with their whiff of misogyny). These are all faults of 99% of genre fiction, and would merely put Flip-Flop into the category of tired filler.
What makes me actively loathe this story though – to the point where I find it slightly puts me off Big Finish’s other work – is the fact that one of the discs is essentially propaganda for the BNP (or at the very worst, ripped straight from their fellow-travellers at the Daily Express).
The story, which I presume is meant to be ‘satire’ (though I always understood the purpose of good satire to be telling truth to power, rather than exerting power over the powerless) is – and this is not an exaggeration – that blind slug-like aliens have come to a planet and claimed minority status, overwhelmed the ‘native population’, insisted on special laws for themselves because they ‘feel threatened’ and made all the white people humans their slaves. They’ve also banned Christmas, because it’s offensive to their religion. Saying anything bad about them is a hate crime.
In short, it’s merely a recitation of Express-leader lies about asylum seekers and Muslims, placed in a science-fictional setting. It’s absolutely revolting, and every single person involved should be ashamed of themselves.
A Big Finish A Week 9 : Jubilee
Sorry for the lower-than-normal number of posts recently – I’ve had writers’ block for a few days. Plenty of ideas, but when I come to write them out I’m completely lost for words. You can probably expect an absolute glut at the end of the week, when I suddenly get my flow back and can churn out the posts I’ve got planned (a look at the comic The Kingdom, a discussion of why I’m a Liberal Democrat, a review of the album & by Kristian Hoffmann and some more on All-Star Superman). But I always do my Big Finish A Week, so here goes…
Jubilee is probably best known among casual fans as the loose inspiration behind writer Rob Shearman’s Dalek, the best episode of the 2005 series of nuWho. However, the differences are so great that had we not been told of the connection I doubt many people would have noticed it. Both feature a Dalek locked up on its own and a companion who shows it a small amount of sympathy, and both end with the Dalek choosing to die rather than continue killing, but where the TV show is essentially just another base-under-siege story (except with a Doctor who is violent, rude and dismisses the idea of learning… ) Jubilee is actually rather special.
The plotline of Jubilee is relatively straightforward – the Doctor and Evelyn, through what appears at first to be a TARDIS glitch, arrive in 2003, but a 2003 where the ‘English Empire’ is in control of much of the world, where contracting words is banned, and where a Dalek is locked up in the Tower of London being tortured. It’s revealed that in 1903 the Doctor and Evelyn saved the Earth from a Dalek invasion (something that had not yet happened in their timeline) and this had caused these changes. There’s also a second prisoner in the Tower, who is very strongly hinted to be Davros (who hadn’t at the time yet appeared in a Big Finish adventure) but who turns out to be the Doctor, his legs removed to prevent his escape.
The TARDIS has glitched and created two parallel timelines and the Doctor and Evelyn must try to put things right, which is accomplished by handwave. (It’s actually a very tightly-plotted story with several plots and counterplots, but a day after relistening to it the resolution of the actual plot is only ‘handwave’ in my head).
Jubilee starts out by presenting itself as a comedy – it starts with an in-world trailer for a film called “Daleks: The Ultimate Adventure” with the Doctor saying ‘Daleks? I hate those guys” and Daleks shouting “Scar-per! Scar-per!” – but while it retains the humorous touches throughout, they quickly turn blacker, and the story itself becomes something very dark.
Unlike the previous stories I’ve reviewed here, which have not really been about anything much other than themselves – they’ve all been either adventure stories or comedies, purely for entertainment value, although the better ones also contained actual ideas – Jubilee is actually about things – about power, and responsibility, and about choice.
The writer Robert Anton Wilson coined the terms ‘burden of omniscience’ and ‘burden of nescience’, to describe why it is that absolute power does corrupt absolutely:
” But a man with a gun (the power to punish) is told only what his target thinks will not cause him to pull the trigger. The elite, with their burden of omniscience, face the underlings, with their burden of nescience, and receive only the feedback consistent with their own preconceived notions. The burden of omniscience becomes, in short, another and more complex burden of nescience. Nobody really knows anything anymore, or if they do, they are careful to hide the fact. “
In Jubilee the TARDIS, early on, gets scared (the TARDIS has a personality and intelligence of its own in some stories) and refuses to make a choice – refusing to take full responsibility. In doing this, it causes everyone in the story to have to make choices that they don’t want to make – in the altered timeline, nobody is in a role they want to be in. The President is someone who is deeply, deeply disturbed, and convinced that the entire population is under the control of the one surviving Dalek (in the end it’s proved that he is, sort of, right). Because of this, he’s convinced he has to act like a sadistic tyrant even though he claims not to want to be one, ordering people to be tortured to death because he thinks it’s the kind of thing he should do.
Every character in the story – with the exception of the Doctor – is looking for someone to take orders from, and because the President is not the strong leader they want (desperately wanting orders himself), even though he acts in a fascist enough manner, there’s a void at the centre of all the interactions (the President’s wife is attempting to arrange a coup because he hits her, as he should, but not hard enough to break the flesh). The Dalek personifies this – a soldier with no orders, he goes mad with indecision until Evelyn presents him with the option of true freedom.
The health of a nation being tied to the mind of its leader is a very Shakespearean notion, and while there were no direct references, the torture of the Dalek (and in particular the ‘injury to the eye motif’), and the ramblings of the maddened alternate Doctor, called King Lear to my mind, while the relationship between the President and his wife was strikingly similar to that of Terry Pratchett’s Macbeth and Lady Macbeth parodies in Wyrd Sisters. There’s a real sense of darkness and oppression throughout the story.
Jubilee definitely rewards repeated listenings – my first impression of it wasn’t particularly favourable, as I concentrated too much on the dark humour and not enough on the meatier stuff within – and luckily the performances (with the exception of Kai Simmons’ stilted performance as the soldier Lamb) are excellent. Colin Baker does his usual superlative job as the Sixth Doctor, Maggie Stables shows once again why Evelyn is by far the best companion the Doctor ever had (though here she was still a new enough character that she’s not quite as fully-rounded as she would be a year later), and real-life couple Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres, who have had a long working relationship with Rob Shearman, are as excellent as ever (for those who don’t know, Jarvis is widely-regarded as the British voice actor) as the President and his wife.
If anything, Jubilee has gained relevance over the last few years, with its portrayal of the torture of an ‘enemy combatant’ (and some of the torture scenes are genuinely disturbing), and it contains many more ideas than I’ve been able to discuss here, about choice, about the rather disturbing bloodlust in British popular culture, about morality, and about the way historical tragedy is sanitised and turned into tourist fodder. Sometimes the more over-the-top humorous elements clash a little with the more serious-minded work (Shearman is clearly trying to do what Douglas Adams tried, but usually failed, to do with his tenure as script editor on the TV series, and bring in ridiculous elements to make the scary stuff scarier when you realise they mean it. It works better here than it did then, but it still makes it harder to suspend disbelief).
It’s easily one of the best Doctor Who stories in any medium, and it’s a shame that nuWho managed only to take the least interesting parts of it; and it’s a greater shame that even the watered-down TV bowdlerisation was still better than anything else in the new TV show…
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