Tony’s running out of
air.
The three Oliver Harper
stories by Simon Guerrier introduced and delivered the Tardis lifetime of a
brand new First Doctor companion on audio. Having established Oliver as a
sixties London commodities trader who needs to escape from the police in The
Perpetual Bond, second story The Cold Equations frequently has a claustrophobic
feeling to it.
That’s mostly down to the
nature of some of the story, which has Steven Taylor and Oliver Harper, the
First Doctor’s companions, drifting in a vacuum, protected from the
obliterating frozen airlessness of space only by space suits, their air running
out, every word of this mostly two-handed spoken-word play hastening their
death by suffocation. There’s lots of increasingly intense breathing, and if
you’re claustrophobic or asthmatic, go into this one preparing for the kind of
ride that breaks the sweat out on your forehead.
The Cold Equations of the
title refers to the staggering unlikelihood of their surviving this predicament.
As Steven says, when it comes to surviving in space, ‘They made us repeat it.
Space is a vacuum, it doesn’t think or feel. It doesn’t have it in for you.
There are simple, cold equations about what you can and can’t do.’
This is how this tense
hour-long Companion Chronicle begins. Two companions, no Doctor,
very little air left, and with Steven asking Oliver to tell him his secret,
because there won’t be another chance.
As with The Perpetual
Bond, the set-up of this story never tries to do too much. For his first trip
through time and space, Oliver gets a peak at the future, at a planet
surrounded by a massive debris field – a junk yard of discarded technology
thrown into orbit around the world – and a bunch of fiery-skinned aliens called
the Callians who are here to salvage it, to sell the scrap for whatever it may
be worth.
There’s much more
underneath the surface of The Cold Equations though than a kind of Steptoe And Son
In Space. There are people living on the planet, and events are spun out of
control when it turns out they’re humans, giving Oliver and Steven, under the
labyrinthine meanderings of galactic law, prior claim to the band of
space-junk.
And then bits of it start
colliding at incredibly dangerous speeds. The hows and the whys of Steven and
Oliver ending up marooned in space form much of the action of the story,
interspersed with those breathless sections of speech between the two of them,
wearing out the air against the hope of defeating the cold equations of life
and death.
We think of The Cold
Equations as the second Oliver Harper story, but really, for the most part this
is a cracking Steven Taylor story. On screen in the sixties, Steven’s role was
to be a younger Ian Chesterton – to fetch and carry and ask intelligent
questions and hit the right people with something hard when the Doctor couldn’t
or wouldn’t. In the world outside the storytelling, Purves’ role was also to
keep an increasingly distracted William Hartnell focused and on-track so that
recording could be completed within the punishing schedules of 1960s TV
production.
In the hands of Big
Finish, it would be difficult to find a companion who’s undergone such a
thoroughgoing deepening of their character as Purves’ Steven, and in stories
from Mother Russia and The Suffering all the way through to The War To End All
Wars (showing Steven years after the events of The Savages, a king deposed and
discredited, with a difficult relationship with his family), the audio medium
has sought at every turn to add some flesh onto Steven’s televisual bones.
The Cold Equations pushes
the envelope of Steven’s character development, reminding us very forcibly that
he’s a space pilot, well versed in moving objects through both the vast tracts
of empty space, and the debris fields than sometimes clutter them up.
This is Steven in full
space pilot mode, meaning the introduction of spatial geometry into the
adventure. Guerrier had to promise his tutor to take a class in astronomy in
order to get some of the explanations of rotating and moving bodies in space
laid down in this story, and how, for instance, sometimes to go faster in space,
it makes sense to slow down. The hard, factual, scientific rightness of all
this means you could be forgiven at one point for thinking you’re listening to
Purves read a transcript of an Open University programme from the seventies,
imagining cones, cutting the tops of them and working out angles of planetary
rotation and a host of other calculations for six separate ‘elements’ of
various objects moving at speed simultaneously. And let’s be absolutely clear –
you wouldn’t want Steven to be like this all the time. But once in a while, it
really enriches our appreciation of the character to hear him be able to do all
this in his head, when it really matters, when everyone’s lives are at stake.
It’s a sequence that reminds you ‘no really, he is a space pilot, which
is handy to have around.’ Steven also surprises everybody in this story by
refusing to think small, refusing to focus on just saving himself and Oliver,
but pitting his increasingly oxygen-starved wits against the cold equations of
the universe and taking a shot at a bigger victory. Whether such audacity is
simply a key part of his personality, or whether this largeness of scale is
something of the First Doctor rubbing off on the space pilot, we’re less sure,
but we like to think it’s a little of both.
Oliver too, despite lacking
Steven’s mathematical nous when it comes to drifting helplessly in space, has a
vital role to play in this audio, and Tom Allen gives the young trader the
bounce of a Labrador puppy, having escaped from the consequences of his actions
in London. He’s a Donna Noble companion here, eager to experience everything
there is out in the wider universe, to take his place alongside Steven and the
Doctor as a citizen of the universe of time and space. It’s an infectious
enthusiasm, tempered by the fact that we know from the beginning that their
adventure above the world ringed in garbage and metallic junk leads him to be
floating in space, at the mercy of Steven’s ‘cold equations’ – the realities
that space inflicts. The unemotional stacking of the odds in a battle they
mathematically, logically, can’t win.
But there’s always room
for a little Doctorish miracle within the framework of Doctor Who – if the
universe were ruled entirely by the cold equations, it would be run…well, by
the Time Lords, and the Doctor is the archetypal anti-Time Lord. He will always
put himself between his friends and the cold equations of certain doom in the
unfeeling universe, and here, powered by so many recent losses (this story’s
inserted in a run of three in the immediate aftermath of The Daleks’ Master
Plan, one of the most shockingly blood-soaked adventures in the Hartnell era),
and empowered by Steven’s bravery, sacrifice and mastery of his own equations,
the Doctor is able to pull a little something twinkly and mischievous out of
the bag. That, after all, is what he does – with a little help from his
friends.
This story is richly
textured, and you won’t believe how few voices are actually in it, Purves
conjuring a very twinkly, happier version of the First Doctor in this
environment than was called for in The Perpetual Bond. One thing that
distinctly survives from that story though is the idea that these adventures
could well have been a great addition to the on-screen show at the time. That’s
a fanciful notion – the on-screen Who of the sixties would never have allowed
Oliver, with his particular secret (which is revealed here) on a show aimed at
families and children, and the geometry that gives this story both its learning
and its sense of drama would have been considered too wordy for the show back
in its early years, too complex and taking too much time out of an adventure.
Be thankful then for the expansion of the First Doctor’s world at Big Finish,
and for both a tightly written but simply stated adventure from Simon Guerrier,
and top-notch performances from Peter Purves and Tom Allen to bring it to life
in all its joie de vivre, its gasping tension, its bleak scientific rigour and
its Doctorish wink at all that’s impossible in a sensible universe.
Pick up The Cold Equations
for a masterclass in companion-writing, and an object lesson in delivering an
uncluttered story that still has plenty of suspense, world-building and
personality.
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