Sunday, 8 October 2017

Big Finish Reviews+ The Burning Prince


Tony feels the burrrrrrrn.

The Burning Prince is, not to put too fine a point on it, a total cracker.

It takes the Fifth Doctor, who frequently suffered from having a full Tardis, and having to share the dialogue out amount two or more often three companions, into a universe of his own while Nyssa and Tegan muck about with tulips and pots in Amsterdam in the wake of their Omega experience. Set free from his full Tardis, John Dorney gives us the kind of Fifth Doctor that would have set the screen alight, Peter Davison ramping up his performance to beyond eleven. Even in the first few minutes, when faced with the usual inevitability of being in the wrong place and time, and being immediately captured and marched to a cell, he’s witty, sarcastic, and very much in control of his universe – he’s as much and definitively the Doctor as Tom Baker or Jon Pertwee ever were, and it’s electric to hear an ‘early’ version of the Fifth Doctor who would eventually dash about the place in his third season.

Instead of meeting up with Nyssa and Tegan, the Doctor finds himself on a spaceship of the Drashani empire – Game of Thrones In Space, where the young Prince Kylo is set to marry the Princess Aliona to unite the warring families of Sorsha and Gadarel, bringing peace back to a warring empire that spans a galaxy.

Kylo, it turns out, is a spoiled and gullible pyrokinetic, who, when he gets stressed or angry, sets fire to things. Rooms. People. Aliona, meanwhile, has been lost when her bridal ship went down on a hostile planet.

And then there’s the Igryss. The Igryss is an 8 feet tall natural killing-engine, brought on board the ship taking Kylo to search for his beloved for experimental purposes.

You’d be right in thinking that’s a fairly stupid thing to do, and if you’ve seen any sci-fi movie ever, you’ll know that before very long, the ship is being sabotaged, the Igryss is released and the crew of the ship are fighting a valiant rearguard action to try to stay alive.
Imagine the whole of the Alien movie, but with laser crossbows and the Fifth Doctor, compacted down to 25 breathless, arse-kicking minutes, and you’re more or less there on the first episode of this story.

Episode 2 largely focuses on lessons in How Not To Crash And Die In A Deeply Shonky Escape Craft, and the pace barely slackens at all. And Episodes 3 and 4 respectively cover How Not To Die On Planet Australia, and, as foreshadowed, Game of Thrones In Space. The body-count is insanely high, the treachery is varied and the tension twisted, the pace hits you like a pinball hammer within minutes of the opening credits, and only stops for a breather when you know you absolutely need one if you’re not to pass out. In other words, Dorney takes a lesson from some of the very best Fifth Doctor stories like The Caves of Androzani, gives the Davison Doctor fewer companions to worry about and sets him free to be active, and clever, and disapproving, and sarcastic, and what turns out to be an Androzani-style bad day for the Fifth Doctor results in one of the best-paced, most effectively characterized audio stories Peter Davison’s had in a long time. Perhaps perversely of course, that underlines a form of flaw in the Fifth Doctor – usually uncertain of his own abilities, frequently when he sheds those uncertainties and starts taking charge of situations, people die, as they did in great profusion in Earthshock, Warriors of the Deep, Resurrection of the Daleks and the aforementioned Caves of Androzani. The Burning Prince is another in those object lessons for the cricket-playing Doctor not to take his control of situations for granted, and it stands alongside any of them – yes, really, any of them – as a class act that repays relisten after relisten.

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