Tuesday, 5 December 2017

Big Finish Reviews+ Doctor Who: The Early Adventures: The Morton Legacy


Tony’s trying on jewellery.

The Early Adventures are a way to tell new stories with the first two incarnations of the Doctor.

The Morton Legacy is more or less Doctor Who meets Dickens, without doing anything as straightforward as actually introducing the author into the story. It’s Bleak House with bling, as Josiah Morton, gentleman collector, helps himself to a strange blue box he finds on a street corner, and hides it away in his secret warehouse of curios. When a strange little scruffy man and his two companions come asking questions about the box, he’s happy enough to accommodate them, but won’t show them the box or his warehouse, meaning they have no choice but to help him to make sense of some peculiar recent events.
Morton’s life and fortune is bound up with a case in chancery, a common enough story. But then, out of nowhere, people on the other side of the case of his questionable inheritance start to die, struck down it seems by an invisible monster.

Is the Morton legacy a blessing, or a curse? Or is Josiah Morton as innocent and honourable a gentleman as he seems after all? Writer Justin Richards – very familiar with the period from his work with Big Finish and elsewhere - draws his story strands together, seeming to lead us in a very particular direction and channelling Dickens every step of the way. As well as Morton, there’s his daughter Jemma, who seems well-brought-up if rather clueless, but who also has a particular fascination of late for a rather unusual necklace her Papa obtained from an intrepid explorer. Is she all she seems, or more?

Richards gives us plenty to be thinking about – how do our heroes get back to the Tardis? What’s killing the enemies of the house of Morton? Is someone controlling the invisible beast? What’s the role of the necklace? – and then adds elements from up and down the social scale to push the story along. There are criminal thugs who want Josiah Morton’s loot, inscrutable servants who know more than they’re saying, explorers needing funds to finance their next expedition, and policemen with very little imagination but a good grasp of Being Suspicious, all of which combine to give The Morton Legacy action, a rich cast of suspects and more atmosphere than you could poke a stick at.

In fact, Richards leans heavily on period atmosphere and Dickensian storytelling traditions, but he and experienced audio director Lisa Bowerman also move the tale along at a pace, so you’re rarely given time to stop and ponder the mechanisms of what’s going on. 
The Morton Legacy has something of a switchback ending, which may lead some more curmudgeonly fans to feel like they’ve been cheated of the satisfying solution they were anticipating, but Richards’ solution has something of an Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes feel to it – at all times, go with the simplest explanation of all the available facts first. It’s the kind of ending that on TV would have relegated all the good work of The Morton Legacy to an ‘also-ran’ story, but in audio, the work of Frazer Hines in particular sells the piece, the Doctor both explaining the true nature of the villainy, and refusing to bend his moral judgments in response to it, giving him the adamantine, alien feel of a later Doctor like Tom Baker’s.  

The Tardis crew are on great form in terms of their performances here, with Hines  making you forget you’re not actually listening to Patrick Troughton much of the time, and Anneke Wills doubling down too, giving us both a strong-willed Polly and an even-toned narrator to push the story along and deliver much of the atmosphere.

The Morton Legacy is a story of domestic 19th century terror, murder, mystery, legal battles and necklaces of doom. Despite that left-turn ending, and an occasional preponderance of the narration which makes it feel rather more like ‘narrated scenes’ or a ‘missing story’ than  the Early Adventures usually do, it’s a story you’ll enjoy for its atmosphere and its new take on the Troughton Doctor among the eminent Victorians. 

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