Monday, 22 January 2018

Big Finish Reviews+ Landbound by Tony J Fyler


The second Paul Spragg Short Trips Memorial Opportunity winner is Landbound, a Third Doctor story which is subtly constructed, showing the Doctor’s handful of meetings with a former sailing captain at various stages of his time of exile on Earth. The storytelling, by Selim Ulug, is neat enough to draw parallels between sailor Ronald Henderson, who had a disturbing experience out at sea and has been landbound ever since, and the Doctor’s enforced period of being planetbound on Earth, and we see a new sliver of adventure in the Third Doctor’s life – at momentous points in his Earthbound timeline, he runs into, or seeks out, Ronald for a chat or a mini-adventure, doing what he can to help the sailor, learning something himself in return.

As stories go, it’s neat, contained, logical, and charming.

Where all that goes awry, sadly, is having it narrated by Nicholas Briggs in a northern accent, in the same year as he narrated the Ninth Doctor adventures. If you’ve heard those, and then you listen to this, you’ll ache with the wanting for this to be more than it is, because Briggs gives Henderson something close to his Ninth Doctor voice. It doesn’t help dissuade you from the hope of a weird multi-Doctor potential to the story that Henderson has an ornate pocketwatch, a friend named Jack, and another, female friend who looks after him and his shoreside pub.

If you start thinking on those lines, you’ll wait the whole length of Landbound waiting for the other Gallifreyan shoe to drop. And no, of course we’re not about to tell you if it does or not. Whether it does or not is almost irrelevant, because you’re primed for it early on, which has the oddest tendency to make you enjoy the story in your head rather more than the story that unfolds in front of you. The story that does unfold in front of you has occasional vibrations reminiscent of a David Tennant special, at least in terms of the ‘monster,’ which has a life cycle simply inimical to our own, rather than any great or grand invasion or colonisation plan. But Briggs’ northern narration means you’re always wondering who’s zooming who in the conversations between the Third Doctor and Ronald Henderson, and while the story itself is good enough to be a Short Trip any day of the week, the story that the combination of the writing and Briggs’ narration plants in your head is a kind of Eighth Doctor-style, oh-crap-I’m-gonna-need-a-second-mortgage run of four box-set arc.

Bottom line, Landbound is a perfectly acceptable Short Trip, made better by the fact that it’s by one of us, and better still by the fact that it’s free as a bird to download. In its simplest incarnation, it’s a story of debts, and sadness, and kinship and kindness and healing and the wonderful joy of eventual freedom after incarceration, whether physical or psychological.

Yes, really, that’s in its simplest incarnation.

The more complex incarnation brought about by that handful of either entirely inconsequential or deeply deliberate additions to the plot and by Nick Briggs with a northern accent is bigger and bolder and even more fun, and you get that for free too, so what is there to complain about? Only really the uncertainty as to which incarnation Landbound is ever actually aiming to be. Perhaps it’s aiming to be both. Perhaps that’s why it won the Paul Spragg prize. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…


Download it, listen to it, see which version of the story you hear.

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