Sunday, 8 October 2017

Big Finish Reviews+ The Thief Who Stole Time by Tony J Fyler


When last we checked in on the Fourth Doctor and the Second Romana, they were in two very distinct kinds of trouble – the Doctor was prrrrrobably sacrificing himself to a tribe of semi-savages as a way of appeasing them for the crime of deicide, and Romana had been abandoned by her best old school chum on a planet of jellied eels, which swallows you down under its hungry surface if you dare to stop moving.

So…no pressure then.

Add in a book that writes the future of the world, a supercivilised TV crew come to study the natives, and one extra-special villain, and you’re in for a treat.

The Thief Who Stole Time, beyond its somewhat clunky title, is remarkable in another way too – Tom Baker, the actor who is by definition ‘most people’s’ Doctor, having played the role for seven years, rather than most actors’ three or four, is now in his eighties, but here he’s beyond a shadow of doubt the life and soul of the audio, sounding like a super-intelligent child, all energy and ideas. It’s evident that Baker’s having enormous fun with writer Marc Platt’s dialogue and narration, some of which is written in an approximation of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, all rolling, sea-like, overstretching lines and vivid, bone-deep, doubled-down images, which is meat and drink to actors like Baker, with his rumbling voice, and also Des McAleer, who gets his fair share of those lines as Blujaw, the village’s former ‘skald’ or seer. Not for nothing, these are techniques that make both the previous episode, The Skin of the Sleek, and this one, absolute joys to listen to for the sheer rolling poetry of the language. Imagine an hour of Richard Burton growling low space-time gobbledegook in your ears – that’s worth the admission price on its own.

Platt has created a highly unusual world, peopled it richly, and given it a central secret worth digging for – the extra-special villain has a plan to steal Something Powerful from this planet of jellied eels, and while in part 1 of the story, they busied themselves breaking into archives, killing eel-gods and double-crossing do-gooders, here they escalate their villainy to artefact-thievery, cold-blooded murder and turning themselves into a timeline-determining god. What’s fun on the one hand, and a little obvious on the other, is that the extra-special villain here has the ego and the emotional intelligence of a teenager, stamping their foot and stomping off to paint the universe black because they never asked to be born. That means on the one hand, much of the Doctor’s usual response, trying to talk sense to the villain, doesn’t work because it’s swamped by the raging ego of that self-revolution, and on the other hand, played wrong, it can sound a bit like Adrian Mole-meets-Hitler. What’s extra-specially pleasing here though is that Romana, played by Lalla Ward, has more emotional range to play with than she’s usually given, her cool superiority genuinely shaken in this episode, and Ward goes the extra mile to give her Romana an arc in this story that promises good things for future battles of wits against the extra-special villain here. The Doctor has had his humanoid arch-nemesis in the Master (now Missy) since the early 1970s, and this two-part story goes a long way towards giving Romana her own equal-and-opposite character, her own Moriarty to face and fight.

Taken as a whole, The Thief Who Stole Time is a deeply satisfying second part to the story of events on Fundarell, the planet of the jellied eels, and it rounds out the latest series of Fourth Doctor stories leaving the listener satisfied that they’ve been well-served – Baker and Ward sound on top form here, Platt’s world-building is suitably complex and realistic, and the dilemmas come naturally, one after the other as the arch-villain moves towards the culmination of their cunning plan, and then is (spoiler-alert) defeated. For listeners who demand texture, depth, engaging problems, and solid characters and societies in their audio Who, The Thief Who Stole Time is hard to beat. On top of which, the arch-villain is something new and delicious, the Under Milk Wood tones are gorgeous and rich like a chocolate fondant, and there’s a sense of immediate energy that powers the storytelling through from its unusual beginnings to its judicial end. The short way of saying all that, of course, is ‘Pick up The Thief Who Stole Time today – the title might be naff, but everything else is excellent.’

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