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…
A Big Finish A Week (And A Day) 5 – …Ish
Sorry this one’s a day late – it’s been a very busy week where every single plan I’ve made has gone slightly wrong.
“We never meet anyone who speaks anything else”
…Ish, the thirty-fifth Big Finish Doctor Who adventure, features the Sixth Doctor and Peri, a relatively rare pairing for this series, and is one of the most interesting of the Doctor’s adventures in any medium. Those of you who read this week’s Superman Beyond 3D might find some of the parallels interesting…
This is more a description of the plot than an actual review – normally I don’t do those and don’t like those who do, but with this one I don’t have much to say about the artistic quality, and my discussion of the ideas in it will be incorporated into some other posts I’m working on.
It starts out as an absolutely traditional Doctor Who story – the Doctor is visiting an academic conference on linguistics, on an unnamed planet, at which his old friend Professor Osefa is to give the keynote speech. However, when he turns up, she’s dead – an apparrent suicide. But while the handwriting on the note is hers, would someone so concerned with language and correct usage have written a suicide note that seems barely literate?
So far so normal, and the first episode of the story is fairly standard, with the best part being the interplay between the Doctor and Peri about the English language (the Doctor on Noah Webster – “That pestilential scribbler! The damage he wrought…” – the Doctor’s conversations with Peri here echo my conversations with my similarly-American wife), but it soon turns into far more interesting territory.
The conference, you see, has been regarding the creation of a new, ultimate, dictionary of the English language (which has become a Galactic lingua franca thanks to its ability to absorb useful features from any other languages with which it comes into contact) – one containing literally every word, with every meaning by which it had ever been used (those involved seem to be descriptivist rather than prescriptivist, which would appear to go against the Doctor’s stated views), cross-referenced to every other relevant word.
However, the conference has been infiltrated by a saboteur named Warren, who believes language ought to be free, and goes around trying to destroy projects that to his mind kill words by tying them down to specific meanings – at one point he ensured that the second volume of an encyclopedia (the one starting DAL) was too heavy to be lifted.
The dictionary itself is actually a person – or rather, a ‘hologlyph’. An artificial intelligence, Book has to read every piece of English-language writing in existence, and examine every recording of English speech, to get a full contextual understanding of every word. That contextual understanding is both the dictionary, and is Book’s personality – one of the important ideas of this story is that we are programmed by the words we know – language is the brain’s software.
However, at one point the Book has become infected – by contact with the Omniverbum.
The Omniverbum is ‘lexically transcendent’ – a word that transcends meaning – the ‘soul’ of language, it can only be defined by itself, and is, according to the lexicographers, worth preserving for that reason. But the Book has accidentally released a single syllable – pronounced in the audio as ‘ish’ although that’s presumably not what it ‘really’ is in-world – which once heard starts playing on your mind (like when you suddenly start thinking of a word you’ve known all your life, and wonder why *that* word for that thing, til eventually the sound itself seems meaningless). It actually eats meaning – it destroys your vocabulary, replacing it all with its own nonsense sound. (Very like the linguistic virus in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, actually). However, it’s also sentient, and merely wants to return to the Omniverbum from whence it came. On the other hand, Warren, the saboteur, actually wants to free the ‘ish’ and spread it as widely as possible, ‘freeing’ words by totally separating sound from meaning.
The story is actually quite a traditional Doctor Who story in structure, but makes use of the audio medium better than most – the conflict is all on the level of ideas, and is essentially one of juvenile pseudo-anarchism/libertarianism (let the words be ‘free’ even if it turns everyone in the universe into babbling imbeciles) versus moderation (it is good for language to change and evolve, but there needs to be a common standard so people can communicate at all).
It’s not quite as clever as it thinks it is – it’s all in text and nothing is in subtext, which is why it’s difficult for me to do anything more complex or interesting than a ‘this happened, then this, then this’ synopsis – but then again ‘all in text rather than subtext’ is appropriate for a play about words. And while the Sixth Doctor is my favourite audio Doctor, in this episode he’s given some very flowery language and bad puns – appropriate for the subject, but not *quite* done as well as it could be – leading him to come off as slightly more of a bumptious buffoon than he should (that should be an aspect of his character, but he should have slightly more self-awareness and actual intelligence than he displays here). Colin Baker does his usual marvellous job in the performance though.
For all that, it’s one of the better plays in the series – the combination of dealing with actual ideas (even if I’d have preferred it to be done a little more subtly) and some of the best performances in the series (Nicola Bryant is particularly good here – Peri is a much more realistic and appealing character in the audios than in the TV show, although she still can’t do the accent properly. Chris Eley on the other hand is not very good at all as Warren, but he’s the only one who lets the side down) make it head-and-shoulders above the average. It’s not a truly great story like Doctor Who And The Pirates, but it’s well worth a listen.
A Big Finish A Week 2 – Doctor Who And The Pirates
After no-one seemed to particularly mind which order I do these in, I asked my wife. She’s not a fan, and she would have to put up with me listening to the thing, so it was only fair to make her the final arbiter.
“So I could listen to one with Peter Davison and some ghosts, or maybe a Dalek one, or Doctor Who And The Pirates or”
“Yay, pirates! That’s the one with the singing in isn’t it? I like that one!”
So Doctor Who And The Pirates it is then.
One of the criticisms of the TV series is that most of the Doctor’s companions have been nonentities, and it’s a valid complaint. In the classic series, Romana was an actual character with a real personality, but pretty much all the rest of the companions were interchangeable figures whose only use was to be captured by monsters or to be exposited at. Ace was meant to be different, later on, but was let down by Sophie Aldred’s risible performance.
In the new series (and bear in mind I haven’t watched this year’s episodes) Rose seemed more promising, mostly due to Billie Piper’s performance, but had to bear the twin crosses of being a ‘normal person’ (which seems to translate in the minds of the makers of the show into having no interests outside of pop culture) and also the most specialest person in the whole of ever, which between them managed to crush the character.
So one of the things the audios did very early on is retcon in some better companions (I could, at this point, explain how they managed to do that, with reference to the problems with Trial Of A Time Lord, but either you already know or you really don’t care). In particular, there was Dr Evelyn Smythe, created in the sixth Big Finish audio The Marian Conspiracy, by Jacqueline Rayner, the writer of this story.
Evelyn is by far the best companion ever to have been created for Doctor Who, and the only one who’s a fully fleshed-out character. She’s an actual strong female character, and even more astonishingly for genre material (by which I mean the genres that are stocked in Forbidden Planet, not mystery or nurse novels, but I don’t know of a better catch-all term for SF, fantasy, superhero and horror) that doesn’t mean ‘kicking ass and taking names’ but rather drinking cocoa and taking heart pills. It’s certainly *possible* that she dresses up in a black leather bodice and high-heeled boots, but if she does, it’s strictly in private – the only clothing that’s ever mentioned in the audios is her collection of cardigans.
Evelyn is an academic, rather unworldly, highly intelligent (not at the Doctor’s level, but then who is?), deeply caring about others. Her first marriage split because she was more interested in her academic career (she’s an historian) and she seems to feel very disappointed that she never had children – her mothering instinct comes out in different ways in many of the stories (a bit of a stereotype, I know – but there *are* people like that). In particular, she seems to have turned her students into surrogate children, and only ever goes off with the Doctor because she’ll be forced to retire shortly.
She’s a woman of simple pleasures, who can make a cup of cocoa or a slice of cake sound like the most lascivious extreme of hedonism imaginable with her slightly throaty chuckle – which they may well be for her. She’s got a rather silly sense of humour, and can be quite witty, but is not very assured socially, often saying the wrong thing. It’s hinted at times that her relationship with the Doctor is more than just friendship – they cuddle in a couple of stories, and he gets incredibly jealous when she eventually leaves for another man, even as she continues to care for him. But this isn’t the moony teenage behaviour of Tennant’s Doctor about Rose, but a realistic relationship between two older people (Evelyn is close to retirement and refers to herself as an old woman, the Doctor is about 900).
The fact that I’ve found myself talking about her as a real person in the paragraphs above says something for the strength of the character. Normally in serial fiction written by multiple people, characterisation becomes at best a selection of tics and catchphrases, with the character’s behaviour and attitudes subject to the whim of the plotter. Here, though, thanks to the excellent performance by Maggie Stables as Evelyn (and her rapport with Colin Baker’s Doctor), as well as the scripts for this pairing being generally above average, it’s entirely possible to think of Evelyn as a real person. I don’t normally find myself feeling emotionally invested in fictional characters, but I’ve actually ended up quite fond of Evelyn. For all my criticism of Stables last week, I have to say her performance as Evelyn is one of the best I’ve ever heard.
Doctor Who and the Pirates (or The Lass That Lost a Sailor), the 43rd Big Finish Doctor Who audio, was the first one written by Jacqueline Rayner since she introduced Evelyn Smythe, and it’s one of my very favourites. Its synopsis – the Doctor and Evelyn on a pirate ship after hidden treasure, with the third episode being a musical – sounds like a deliberate attempt to ‘homage’ Pirates of the Carribean and the Buffy episode Once More With Feeling, but in fact this is one of the cleverest, funniest, and *best* uses of these characters in this format I can imagine.
Evelyn and the Doctor turn up at the flat of one of Evelyn’s students, who seems in a bad mood, and force her to listen to a story about an adventure they’ve recently had with some pirates. The story is quite funny and light-hearted for the most part, but it turns darker by the end – Evelyn was unable to prevent the death of Jem, the cabin-boy she’d taken under her wing. And it turns out in the end that the reason they’re telling the student this story at all is that that night she’d posted a suicide note to Evelyn, which Evelyn had received the next day. They’d come back in time a day to play Scheharezade and convince Sally the student to stay alive.
Now this makes for an interesting framing story, but what’s really fun is the story they tell. I love unreliable narrators, and the Doctor and Evelyn are unreliable in very different ways. Evelyn keeps forgetting details, making things up to cover herself, getting flustered and backtracking, and simply doesn’t want to talk about the cabin-boy’s death at all, often missing out pertinent details because they get too close to that central fact of the story. The Doctor by contrast just pushes ahead, occasionally saying the wrong thing. Their versions of Red Jasper the pirate’s description of the Doctor sum it up pretty well:
“You lily-livered foul-coated spicy-smelling scoundrel” versus
“You fine, distinguished-looking sailor wearing a stylish outfit”
The format also allows the producers to make a virtue of the cheap production. Big Finish audios often use the same repertory cast, with the same actor playing two or three bit parts. In this case, one actor plays pretty much all the sailors and pirates (named by Evelyn as “John Johnson, Tom Thompson, Nicholas Nickelby… son.. Nicholas Nicolson”) but this is because Evelyn isn’t very good at doing voices.
And Bill Oddie (the second Goodie to make an appearance in the series) turns in an excellent performance as Red Jasper – all over-the-top yo-ho-ho pirate cliche and exaggeration at the start of the story (which as you can imagine he does very well) but as the story progresses he becomes clearly psychopathic and very scary – following Douglas Adams’ rule that Doctor Who becomes a lot scarier if the bizarre is played absolutely straight.
But as if the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn, unreliable narration and the presence of one of the Goodies weren’t pushing enough of my buttons, the most famous feature of this adventure is the third episode – a musical, featuring rewrites of Gilbert & Sullivan songs (mostly from Pirates Of Penzance, logically enough, but also HMS Pinafore, and the Mikado for good and adequate reasons).
Again, this can be justified in-story as the Doctor and Evelyn making up silly songs to cheer up Sally (though even this doesn’t really justify the Doctor pausing mid-song to debate with himself the canonicity of the K-9 And Company TV special). But really, like the rest of the story it doesn’t need any justification – hearing “A pirate’s life is not a happy one” and especially “I Am The Very Model Of A Gallifreyan Buccaneer” is its own justification. While they’re imperfect – Gilbert would rather have shot himself than rhyme Rassilon with ‘hassle from’, and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s orchestrations are not improved by being played on what sounds like a multi-tracked Casio keyboard (sadly they probably spent more money on the music than any other aspect of this episode, but there’s still no substitute for a real orchestra) – they’re still clever, and funny, and you can tell the cast loved every moment.
Doctor Who and the Pirates is funny, clever, well-acted, touching and manages to have the characters be consistent with their previous appearances while also having them grow and change. It really is as close to a perfect Doctor Who story as I can imagine. Highly recommended.
A Big Finish A Week Part 1 – The Sirens Of Time
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.
5 comments