Tony’s seeing monsters.
There are many different
ways of writing successful Doctor Who. You can fling your imagination wildly
out to the far edges of possibility, you can turn ordinary things into
dark-tinged terrors, you can extrapolate a satirical idea into sci-fi, or you
can go mining.
Mining into familiar ideas
or territory, to uncover new angles to those familiarities and fit them
together in a way that makes for new storytelling takes.
Matthew J Elliott, writer
of Zaltys, is a great miner.
Here, we’re in
space-gothic/monster-movie territory, creatures the like of which we’ve seen
before in Who given a new twist or two and crammed together to create a story
that manages to hit all the landmarks we expect and still be brand spanking
slightly barking new.
Elliott wastes no time in
doing the thing you need to do with the Fifth Doctor’s full Tardis if you’re
not to have a story with at least one companion standing about saying nothing
while the others sing a couple of quick choruses of ‘What’s that Doctor?’ He
gives us a bit of a twist on Tegan’s endless quest to get home to Heathrow,
with the Aussie tempting the Alzarian brat-boy to try and get her home instead.
When Adric fizzes and disappears from the Tardis, and Nyssa starts talking to
someone who isn’t there, we’re off to the weirdness races. When Tegan
disappears too, things start to get really interesting.
The Alzarian and the
Aussie each take control of their own story-threads, with Adric zapping to the
underground catacombs of the Zaltys (melodramatically known by some as the
Planet of the Dead), where the locals are getting their Silurian on, sleeping
in the deep freeze because there’s a big chunk of space-rock heading their way
in just a handful of heartbeats. So…no urgency there then…
There are only a few of
Zaltys’ natives left awake to monitor things, and when the time comes for the
space-rock to hit the planet, they’re more than likely to go foom and be
vapourised.
Oh, and there’s a psychic
wolfman. Did we mention the psychic wolfman? Yep, there’s a psychic wolfman.
See? Elliott’s a really good miner – taking the stuff of monster movies and
re…erm…vamping it in a new way with half a twist that gives you something
interesting to listen to.
Anywayyyy…
Tegan meanwhile is
Somewhere Else Entirely, being teased by a sadistic woman who wants her to run
away, like a mouse from a cat, just for the fun of the chase. Or just possibly,
as an amuse bouche. When she meets a deeply dried-out fish-woman, the vibe of
Tegan’s story changes substantially, becoming rather more Die
Hard-meets-Terminus as Tegan and Lusca the fish-woman start crawling through
the ducting and waiting for a single very specific opportunity to escape from
the taunting woman and her many many acolytes. Clarimonde the taunter, played
with a delicious purr by Niamh Cusack, will bring memories of a late Tom Baker
story to the fore, and indeed the strand of Zaltys’ story she embodies is another
that takes us back to classic monster movies, and to gothic novels too, but evolved
through Elliott’s imagination into a new science-fiction setting.
If that doesn’t make the
story busy enough for you, the Doctor and Nyssa, searching for their
disappeared comrades, are on the surface of Zaltys, meeting pink-haired,
gun-toting grave-robbers and profiteers. As you do.
With so many threads in a
single story, the real, palpable danger is that all you end up with is three
independent stories running parallel. But this is where Elliott comes into his own
– while initially the strands seem to be entirely separate, over the course of
the four episodes of Zaltys, he weaves them into a triple-helix single story
that works better than you initially imagine it ever could. At least the middle
two episodes speed by from cliff-hanger to cliff-hanger while you juggle the
elements and listen as they evolve and begin to circle each other, captured
like asteroids in a planetary orbit.
Elliott’s big on
references in this story too – and that’s another dangerous thing to do. The
occasional reference to the Doctor’s past, anyone can get away with. The number
of references that come to the fore here, there’s no actual need to throw in,
and you run the risk of hitting the listener with the sense of ‘Look, look, I
know my Who history’ – which has a high likelihood of feeling like protesting
too much. Here, we get references to
Mindwarp, Castrovalva, the Silurians, and more within the first episode,
without even getting into the late Tom Baker story it would be spoilerific to
name, or the fact that there’s a distinct whiff of Timelash in the DNA of this
story too – it’s a later-Doctor sequel to an unseen story featuring the Third
Doctor and Jo Grant.
But rather than beating us
over the head with his Who-knowledge, Elliott works his references through the
story simply, like things the Doctor or his friends would know, so it
challenges you to ask why they wouldn’t mention them. It’s the
sort of thing they’d have done in the on-screen show in the Eighties if they’d
had more consistent confidence in their script editing, and because of that, it
works.
As for the other story
elements, Elliott works his psychic wolfman, Clarimonde and her army of
minions, the fish-woman who’s a long way from her black lagoon, the Zaltysians (who
also give an additional dimension, because they’re the ultimate isolationists,
meaning they speak to the world in which we increasingly live, where we build
walls and sever ties) and their impending asteroid tragedy like a symphony,
pulling them together to deliver a story which makes a hell of a lot more sense
than you ever imagine it will, and which also gives you satisfaction as a story
of many mysteries intertwined. It’s true that when it starts, you won’t imagine
for a second it’ll do anything like that, because there’s a genuine sense of
not knowing what on Zaltys is going on. But to some extent, that’s the point –
we discover elements as we go along with the Doctor and his companions, each
taking a strand of the story and revealing those details piece by piece,
meaning Zaltys, perversely for a story with so many elements and intertwined
strands, feels less written than experienced in real time, the way the Doctor
and friends experience it.
Elliott’s a relatively new
voice at Big Finish, and Zaltys, like his earlier title Maker of Demons, is
rooted in some core ideas, richly mined, and highly plotted while feeling very
natural. There’s a point in each of his stories to date at which he brings you
to a listener-crisis, a point where you think ‘This absolutely can’t work, the
longer it spins the more it’s bound to fall apart!’
Neither of them do – they
push on and on and on, making more sense as they go, and rewarding you more as
you progress through them too.
There is a point, just at
the very end of Zaltys, which feels like one twist too many, one arc completed
in a way it doesn’t need to be, but Zaltys overall is a surprising, engaging
affair that challenges the listener with its number of threads and elements and
characters, and then blows your hair back by not only making them work, but
pulling them tight into a single coherent story that punches above its two-hour
running time with satisfaction and impact.
We said this after Maker
of Demons, but more Elliott at Big Finish would be very pleasing, because he
brings a tone, and an ability to keep a story spinning, that earns him a place
that, if continued, will put him on a par with some of the best in the game.
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