Sunday, 8 October 2017

Big Finish Reviews+ Time Reef by Tony J Fyler


Doctor Who has an unfortunate track record when it comes to adapting Greek myths in either a historical or a science-fiction setting. The Myth Makers, Underworld and The Horns of Nimon spring to mind…and then limp off again to hide from the light of any serious consideration. The God Complex though was a storming stand-out of its season and its era, proving that when done diligently, the myths of gods and monsters, heroes and villains really can be used to create some top-class Doctor Who. It’s often the case though that they’re so complete as stories in their own right that any adaptation seems to lessen them.

Time Reef isn’t exactly based on a Greek myth, but writer Marc Platt does use the spirit of Greek myths as its tonal keynote to pose a highly sci-fi problem of time, perception and multiple dimensions. It also considers the question of how the Doctor does the things he does, and how, for instance, someone aiming to ‘be’ the Doctor could easily get it catastrophically wrong.

There’s a degree of backstory it helps to know when going in to Time Reef, as it’s a pivotal moment for companion Thomas Brewster. Brewster, a kind of grown-up Artful Dodger from Victorian London, had previously run off with the Tardis.

Time Reef gives us just one example of the kind of mischief he’s been getting up to in the five months (relative Doctor time) he’s had the Time Machine. Brewster has been selling off or donating bits of the Tardis’ critical circuitry, sometimes for a whacking great payday, sometimes showing his redeemable soft-touch nature. Now reunited with the angry Fifth Doctor and the always-rational, compassionate Nyssa, he’s quickly taken back to the Time Reef, where he offloaded some crucial and non-crucial bits of kit, and where people subsequently curse the name of the Doctor. When the Tardis more or less folds up in to a tiny ball of dimensions, the real Doctor is forced to step in and work his Time Lord mojo if any of them are going to survive.

By any of them, we mean rather more than usual. Platt expands the traditional ‘base under siege’ format here to include representatives of at least three species besides the three more who arrive in the Tardis. And this is more or less where it gets distinctly Greek and mythological. There’s a crew of space-aged questing heroes with very Grecian names, led by Commander Gammades (Nicholas Farrell), who’ve been stranded on the reef, and who spend a lot of their time waxing positively poetical. There’s the lady Vuyoki (marvellously played by the foot-stamping Beth Chalmers) from an entirely different species, who lives in an urn under the consistent conviction that she’s dead and waiting to be transported to her next life. And then there’s The Ruhk – a dark hellbird creature who stalks the reef, determined to stop Gammades and Co using the beacon that ‘the Doctor’ left with them as a way of maybe getting the hell off the region of eternal timelessness that is the time reef.
Gammades, by the way, has a major league drippy fascination with Vuyoki, who treats him in return with nothing but contempt. So it’s a happy little band and no mistake who welcome ‘the Doctor’ and his companion, ‘Blondie,’ to the reef.

The way events unfold is fairly classic and sticks to a Davison formula, though it does give the Fifth Doctor an opportunity to be really, properly cross and Davison seizes that opportunity with both hands. Platt though is never knowingly undersurreal, and the combination of oddities he throws together on the time reef, and indeed the way the time reef itself operates, is peculiar enough to make it memorable, almost an inversion of the typical base under siege format in that if things don’t go well, not only will the Tardis cease to exist, the reef and all its people will too. There’s some solid ‘nothing is what it seems’ work in this story too, with Gammades, Vuyoki and The Ruhk all effecting late-stage transformations, at least in our understanding of them and their motives as the clock ticks down towards the destruction of the reef. And there’s some suitably mythic ‘beauty is not necessarily what we think it is’ moralising too, as Brewster, who could be said to be responsible for the whole conundrum, is saved from a fate very much like death by an unusual intervention.

That the whole of this adventure is only three episodes long feels remarkable by the time you’re done with it, as a combination of Platt’s heavy space-time concepts, unusual characters and deeply literate language makes Time Reef feel very thickly layered and textured, but surprisingly easy to move through from complicated start to simpler finish. It’s a story that demands your attention in order to get your head around its central ideas, but then pulls you forward in a swirl of characterisation – not least from Davison, who in his best Frontios fury, pulls the story on by sheer dint of Time Lord self-righteousness.

The fact that it’s only three episodes long allows for a final one-part story with Thomas Brewster to be tacked on to the end. A Perfect World, by Jonathan Morris, continues some of the themes of Time Reef, inasmuch as it details another screw-up by that loveable rogue Thomas Brewster while he was off being clueless in control of a time machine. But it poses questions about life, the universe and personal choice, invents a couple of Brummie time-plumbers, and gives Brewster the chance to evolve beyond his origins and finally put down some roots somewhere. It’s a sweet, fun, philosophically interesting one-shot to cap both the occasionally challenging invention-load of Time Reef and the journey of Thomas Brewster as an antagonist/companion of the Doctor’s (at least for a while…).

If you’re looking for an overall vibe for Time Reef/A Perfect World, it’s very much like Mawdryn/Terminus/Enlightenment if, for the purposes of accuracy, neither Turlough nor Tegan existed to get stuck in ducting for half a story or have secret clandestine conversations with the space-devil and try to kill the Doctor. In other words, it’s a complex, lyrical, brave, mostly well-characterised mouthful of Eighties Who, with a Fifth Doctor developing his personality in a range of challenging scenarios. It’s an involving listen, so if you’ve never spent time on a time reef, you need to remedy that…while there’s still time.

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