Tony’s feeling peckish.
The Eighth Doctor’s straight,
non-Time War chronology last saw him defeat the Doom Coalition by the
smidgenest of smidgens, but there was a cost to be paid – Helen Sinclair, the
Doctor’s friend from 1960s Earth (Hattie Morahan) was sent spinning off into
almost certain oblivion with the Eleven, a Time Lord whose eleven incarnations
are all accessible within his current body, and who frequently fight for
dominance of his arms, legs, brain and mouth. It’s a great concept, brought to
life with some degree of manic genius by Mark Bonnar.
Ravenous begins with the Eighth
Doctor and his other friend, Liv Chenka from Kaldor City (home of the Robots of
Death), hot on the trail of their friend, trying to rescue her from the machinations
of the multi-faced, multi-minded monster.
Except much to Liv’s intense
irritation, there’s a good deal of faffing about before they can actually get
any credible rescuing done.
In defence of John Dorney though,
who writes the first two episodes of this box set, it’s faffing of an
exceptional class and quality. Faffing with a cherry on top, in fact. First up,
Their Finest Hour brings Ian McNeice’s Winston Churchill crashing into Classic
Who territory. It’s a wartime story that in particular pays tribute to the
bravery and brilliance of the Polish airmen who played a vital role in the
Battle of Britain. It’s also a relatively straightforward premise, almost
worthy of Douglas Adams – in the skies above Britain, there’s a slab
of…nothingness. A big oblong patch of nothing-there, which is heat-raying
planes and pilots to incredibly thorough destruction. Needless to say, it’s not
from around here, and the Doctor and Liv are called in to twiddle screwdrivers
at it and make it go away.
McNeice’s Churchill and McGann’s
Doctor have an easy, bouncy repartee in Dorney’s script, but the stand-out star
of the story is Nicola Walker as Liv Chenka. Since she first appeared in
Sylvester McCoy story Robophobia, Chenka’s been getting better and better, more
comfortable with the business of bouncing around space and time saving people,
and in Their Finest Hour and in fact throughout this box set, she rocks your
world and pushes the stories on with a sense of indefatigable belief that,
knowing Big Finish, probably means she’s set to meet a stick end pretty soon.
She’s reached the level of mickey-taking, problem-solving, citizen of the
universe competence familiar from New Who companions like late-stage Amy Pond
or Clara Oswald, only with a joyfully dry undercutting wit and her own set of
distinct skills.
There’s punch and poignancy in
the story which you can hear coming if you’ve listened to enough Doctor Who
from Big Finish, but Dorney pitches his punch just right to achieve a balanced
result, and for all it’s a detour on the road to finding Helen, it feels like a
worthwhile one, and a rich experience.
How To Make A Killing In Time
Travel, Dorney’s second story in the set, is more outrageously comedic than
Their Finest Hour. The action centres on a genius scientist who turns absolutely
rubbish criminal. It’s a ‘desperation romp,’ the comedy coming from what people
in horrifying situations do to try and push their luck to a satisfactory
conclusion. There’s blackmail, chicanery, a robot with a funny translation
circuit, a positively Trumpian financier…oh and a couple of royal warring
scorpions. Because why wouldn’t there
be a couple of royal warring scorpions?
Against that background, the
Eighth Doctor and Liv wander round like Holmes and a highly savvy Watson,
switching off machines here, investigating murders there, dealing with
galaxy-imperilling temporal implosions and generally saving the day. It’s a
rich, fun, runaround bit of business, and a complete, concise world that’s
going terribly terribly wrong. Again, you’ll be listening to everything Nicola
Walker says, because she’s an utter joy, but kudos too to Judith Roddy as
Stralla Cushing, an unexpected driver of the drama here, along with the
comedy-blackmail duo of Sarah Lambie and Jane Booker as Gorl and Dron
respectively, of whom it would have been fun to hear more in future encounters
with other Doctors.
The final two episodes of
Ravenous 1 are a single connected story that get the Doctor to his object – in
this case, a reunion with Helen. But Helen Sinclair is not quite the woman she
was when she last saw the Doctor – she’s spent a lot of intervening time with
The Eleven, in a penal colony-cum-asylum where the inmates are remarkably
docile, as a result of a very special diet.
The Kandyman was an interesting
concept when he was first devised, as an obsessive, flavour-demented chemist
who made sweets so good they killed people. When he was eventually realised
on-screen as Hell’s Licorice Allsort Assortment, yes, he looked absurd, but
actually, if you stopped and thought about him for a moment and watched his
mouth move, you could still get a shiver out of the will to survive beneath
that absurdity.
Matt Fitton brings the
calorie-compulsive chemist back to Doctor Who, and does it rather more as his
creator, Graeme Curry, envisaged, a slick-faced, sugar-sheened humanoid with an
android intelligence hidden in his sucrose-based body. He’s played by Nicholas
Rowe as a brilliant, brittle figure – important, powerful but desperate to be
recognised for his brilliance and the role he plays. In World of Damnation, the
first part of the two, he’s responsible for pacifying the prisoners on the
planetoid where The Eleven and Helen have been hanging out, working on The
Eleven’s control issues and getting rather close.
Needless to say, by the time the
Doctor and Liv get there, things are getting out of control, and here we learn
not only how the Kandyman has been plying his trade, but also why it’s really
not a good idea to cross him. It’s a joy to hear the Eighth Doctor and the
Kandyman banter, both of them significantly older than they were in The
Happiness Patrol. As disorder threatens to overwhelm the prison, we’re introduced
to new important characters, including a crab in a robo-suit and a deeply sweet
couple, comprised of a criminal and a nervous ultra-psychic – annnd why not? –
and as the action moves into Episode 4, Sweet Salvation, there’s a satisfying
underlying logic revealed to what the Kandyman’s actually up to, who his
friends and allies are, and what, exactly, the ‘Ravenous’ might be. If life is
all just chemistry, then sweets can kill, can pacify, can modify the mindset of
anyone who eats them, and free will dies of disobedience or hunger.
Sweet Salvation is well plotted
and better paced, so it ramps up the return of the Kandyman, the creepy hints
at the Ravenous, and the battle of the egos as the Kandyman, The Eleven and the
Doctor pit their wits against each other. Ravenous 1 overall is definitely two
episodes of productive, enjoyable faffing and a two-parter of ramped-up,
amped-up action, but it works for all that, the styles of the stories feeling
right within the first stage of this new Eighth Doctor boxsetathon. Will you
enjoy every episode of the four this time out? Absolutely – what you get are
three interesting, character-rich, plot-driven stories that let Paul McGann’s
Eighth Doctor shine, bring Nicola Walker’s Liv Chenka screaming up the ranks of
all-time best companions with a box set that shows her to the best advantage in
her Who history so far, and gives the other characters, from Morahan’s Helen to
the Eleven and the Kandyman, to Churchill and the smaller players with lives
and stories and agenda of their own,
quite enough time and space to graft themselves onto your memory with meaning
and impact. It’s a jewel, this box set, boding well for the beginnings of
another long multi-set arc for the Eighth Doctor. Ravenous 1 will leave you
(appalling reference alert!) thoroughly satisfied, but hungry for more.
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