Tony goes in search of
the real deal.
The Authentic Experience
kicks off Series 8 of the Short Trips range from Big Finish, with a Sixth
Doctor and Peri tale of alternative lives and experiences, written by TV and
audio Sontaran of choice, Dan Starkey.
Trickily, even to
summarise what’s going on in the story will ruin the first ten minutes or so of
your listening experience, because it goes in heavy on the befuddlement factor
– it depends on you not knowing what’s going on to sell both its concept and
its atmosphere.
What can be said is that those
first ten minutes are the start of a series of experiences, showing potential
lives led and embodied by everyone’s favourite Eighties botanist, Peri Brown.
It’s not a story that deals in alternative Peris though, so much as it is an
interesting science fiction thought experiment on ways to monetise time travel.
So far, so interesting. A script written by Starkey, an opportunity for Nicole
Bryant to stretch herself in audio beyond her usual Peri performance (and an
opportunity which it must be said she grasps with both hands, doing hard work
with her duties as narrator, Peri and all the other characters in this story),
and a Short Trip directed by regular Big Finish legend, Lisa Bowerman. Where’s
the bad?
Sadly, the story feels
like rather less than the sum of its parts. The Authentic Experience is not by
any means a bad story. It’s more that
it quickly becomes a guessable one, with science fiction concepts a touch too
familiar from other sources blended together in a way that allows the
imagination of listeners to spool ahead to the end faster than the run-time
does, creating an artificial sense that the story is slow and padded, a handful
of scenarios stitched together for the sake of showing Peri in different lives
and outfits and moods between Point A and Point B.
The central plot-device is
a time-honoured one, having more than a little in common with Carnival of
Monsters, and there are plots throughout the history of Doctor Who based on
machines going wrong or machines simply doing things the Doctor considers
monstrous, and him battling to shut them down. The machine which allows Peri to
experience the varieties of weirdness which make up the majority of the story,
to be fair to Dan Starkey, is an interesting take on those plots. That said,
there are elements studded throughout the storyline which make insufficient
sense, the most nitty-gritty of which is that the people who sign up for the
‘Authentic Experience’ can enter that experience individually, but the Doctor
determines they can only be brought out of
it en masse, and through the actions of Peri. The reason for that never feels
sufficiently explained, which adds to that sensation of things happening the
way they do simply so this particular story can be told, rather than because of
any consistent logic in the plot.
Bryant works gamely to
create an immersion in the atmosphere of several different environments in the
story, and she gives a performance that certainly carries the listener through
to the end. She’s helped along by Bowerman’s direction and the sound design,
but at the end of it all, you’re left with the sensation that you’ve heard the
story of an irritating Sunday afternoon in the Doctor and Peri’s
time-travelling life, rather than a story that demanded to be told.
That said, that’s almost
the remit of the Short Trips series – to give us additional slices of life on
board the Tardis, shorter stories that show us the Doctor and his friends
dealing with the adventures where alien Armageddon isn’t necessarily the order
of the day. The Authentic Experience certainly delivers on that level – its
flaw is that by allowing listeners to guess its twists ahead of time, it ends
up feeling like a Short Trip that’s nevertheless rather longer than it needs to
be.
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