Tony’s feeling the
lure.
Doctor Who, as Steven
Moffat has repeatedly said, is a programme that eats ideas.
That’s especially true if
you’re looking to create a multi-layered, believably odd take on the worlds of
outer space. Fortunately, there’s Matthew J Elliott, who’s a stage magician of
ideas. Give him a chance, he’ll pull a string of terribly apologetic killer
service robots out of his sleeve. With a tap of his wand, he’ll pull a gaseous
interior designer out of his hat, complete with a space suit to protect them
from a fate worse than death – dispersal. With a quick ‘Alakazam!’ he’ll give
you a Big Bad which has a touch of Elder God about it, but really rather
regards the existence of the universe as the tedious trailer before the main
event.
There’s more than that
involved in The Lure of the Nomad, we’re just making the point that if you’re
looking for a density of ideas, Matthew J Elliott’s your go-to guy.
In this story, he
unapologetically introduces us to a brand new companion for the Sixth Doctor,
not with a slow, considered, emotionally-driven ‘Here’s how this happened’
origin-story, but with a bang, when their adventures together are more or less
over, though he does have Sixie seeming quite keen to send new boy Matthew home
in a hurry, after the latter fails to see the humour in the Dead Parrot sketch,
and is less than thrilled by the prospect of an education in The Goon Show (and
quite right too, frankly. Humourless oik!). What seems like a simple, if
unscheduled, landing though turns into something rather immensely clever – it
would be quite good fun to hear the Seventh Doctor come up against the villains
of this particular piece, as they have the sort of
thinking-round-eighteen-dimensions mindset that would really give him something
to get his brooding, monosyllabic teeth into. With Sixie, it’s a whole
different process – the Sixth Doctor has a tendency to solve the problem that’s
actually in front of him at any given time, which here leads us through a
sequence of mini-adventures (you read the part with the terribly polite killer
service robots, yes?), and running up against a truly loathesome personality in
the process, Eric Drazen, played by Matthew Holness. The conceptual elegance of
creatures like designer Willoway (by the way, who doesn’t love a gaseous
life-form named Willoway? Good day’s work there) is striking, and adds a richness
to a story that could otherwise be a fairly straightforward case of ‘What’s
going on here then?’ But really it’s new companion Matthew Sharpe
(Sharpe-with-an-e as he insists on telling everybody, to the point where you
want to spell it wrong just to spite him), played by George Sear, and the
equally gloriously-named archaeologist Juniper Hartigan, played by Anna Barry,
(Anat from Day of the Daleks, if you’re trying to place the voice) who really
steal this story with a couple of rock solid performances.
Perversely, trying to
actually nail the story down in a handful of sentences is – in common with some
other Elliott stories – particularly tricky, especially without giving the
whole game away. Think ‘vaguely Vervoids inasmuch as people keep dying on a
spaceship, with twinges of Fenric running through it in terms of What’s
Actually Going On.’ You won’t be entirely there
if you think that way, but you’ll be close enough that when you listen to it,
you’ll nod occasionally and go ‘Ahhh.’
The shifting ground
underneath your feet as you try to actually work
out What’s Actually Going On can make The Lure Of The Nomad feel a touch
exhausting round about the halfway point of Episode 3, and there’s an ending
here that’s really quite emotionally cruel. The Sixth Doctor has a really hard
day at the office waiting for him in trying to avoid the Lure of the Nomad, but
that’s good – every now and again, we like the Doctor to have those days,
they’re what set the real hardcore villains apart from villains of the week.
The force we’re dealing with here could well warrant a return engagement,
because they have that kind of spark – they’ve villains in emotional Doc
Martens, ready to stick the boot in.
The Lure of The Nomad is a
story you have to cling onto by whatever means you can – teeth, fingernails
(your own for preference, but anything that works in emergencies), as it swings
from whodunit to base-under-siege to whhhat-the-hell’s going on? to gigantic
villainous space opera. But there are some solid, real-feeling characters along
the journey, and a proper kick-in-the-face final act that more than makes the
trip worthwhile.
No comments:
Post a Comment