Big Finish Reviews+ Serpent in the Silver Mask by Tony J Fyler

Tony kills everyone.

Any Ealing comedy fans in the Hub?

Doctor Who has proven over time (and particularly on Big Finish audio, where it speaks more to hardcore fans than to a TV audience of families) that there’s almost no genre, no style that can’t be adopted and adapted to become a cracking Doctor Who story.

The Serpent In The Silver Mask, by David Llewellyn, is Kind Hearts and Coronets in a time-locked, paradox-proofed space station.

Except, actually it’s better than that makes it sound. First of all, take a moment to appreciate how hard it actually is to write a Kind Hearts and Coronets-style story in Doctor Who. For those new to the idea, Kind Hearts and Coronets is a gorgeous, classic black and white British comedy where Alec Guinness plays every member of an unspeakable family, including the outsider, the interloper, who, in order to receive an enormous inheritance, kills them off one by one in a series of delicious, dark, funny ways. The point about Kind Hearts is that you know in advance who the murderer is.

Now, the point of a Doctor Who story of course is that there be mystery – something for the Doctor and his companions to unravel, puzzles to solve, clues to interpret. So Llewellyn gives us Kind Hearts meets Agatha Christie, on a base if not exactly under siege, then at least under lockdown.

Add to that a local law enforcement officer who’s at least as suspicious of the Doctor and friends as he is of any of the obnoxious family members, and then remember that this is the early Davison Tardis, with no fewer than three companions to find something to do, and you begin to see the scale of Llewellyn’s challenge in The Serpent And The Silver Mask.

The fact that he utterly knocks it out of the park is almost miraculous. Nine out of ten writers would get it horribly wrong. This is time ten. It’s a joy, this story. It’s the kind of story you want to finish, and then loop straight back to the beginning to listen to again.

There are very few, if any, undotted i’s and uncrossed t’s here – why are the Fifth Doctor and his Tardisfull of friends on Argentia, a giant space station out of sync with the rest of time? Because where locked-off time and real time meet, you get a kind of crystalline growth, that’s why – time fungus, if you like. And what are those crystals useful for? Well, one thing they’re useful for is building new sonic screwdrivers. Everything about that makes perfect sense within the Fifth Doctor’s universe.

From there on in, the Doctor and Co are almost co-opted into the funeral of Carlo Mazzini, the head of a most unusual family. For reasons that also make perfect sense within the script, every single member of the Mazzini family is played by Samuel West, and once the will is read, the hunt is on to unmask a killer before they plough their way through the entire family.

There are sympathetic robots, unsympathetic robots, a detective who’s out of his usual league, red herrings galore, a wonderful variety of murders, lashings of brisk and deliciously dark comedy, a flirty Tegan, a chatty Doctor and Things For All The Companions To Actually Do. The result is a glorious romp with grisly murders, with all the high-profile guest cast adding layers of texture to the fun. Samuel West is staggeringly good throughout, Peter Davison’s on form, Phil Cornwell adds some gruff gravitas as Superintendent Galgo and a supremely punchable robot as Zaleb 5, and Sophie Winkleman as Sophia, secretary to Carlo Mazzini, brings a breezy and increasingly infuriated voice of authority to bear as the Doctor and his friends try to track down the killer.

While Tegan’s getting soft and somewhat sweet with a member of the Mazzini tribe, and Adric is disappearing up ventilation shafts, finding bodies and being attacked by severely creepy dolls, Sarah Sutton’s Nyssa, going gloriously against her usual serene stereotype, is getting stroppy and irritable – ‘It’s horrible,’ is her summary judgment on the Argentia station, and she dislikes almost everything and everyone she meets from there on in. She’s the paranoid android on this trip, finding pretty much everything absolutely hateful. To be fair to her, most everyone she meets is a member of the Mazzini family, and a bigger collection of screaming grotesques it would be hard to imagine. West, as the whole horrible lot of them (with, possibly, one exception – spoilers!) is magnificent, and the rest of the cast turn up their game to 11 to play along with him. As in Kind Hearts, the gender of the family-member is no bar to him, and neither is age or accent – there are a pair of thoroughly revolting yuppie twins, all ‘Yah, totally,’ and ‘I know, right?’, there’s a grand dame with access to perfume and poisons, there’s a kind of ‘bluff Northern businessman’ uncle, and the time-travelling son of Carlo Mazzini, the initially-deceased, who feels almost born for Alan Bennett to inhabit. All of them are conjured into life by West, and you believe utterly in the reasons why such a thing would be possible and necessary, allowing you to sink into the adventure and enjoy every mad, funny, dark, grotesque, wonderful minute of its madness.

The Serpent In the Silver Mask is almost two hours that pass like one, so engaging is the writing, so en pointe the performances. It’s one that, once you’ve heard it, will always float up in your mind when you contemplate re-listening to something.  It’s a stylistic experiment that could have gone so very very wrong, but in the hands of Llewelyn, Barnaby Edwards on crisp directorial duty, and a cast that feels like it’s having enormous fun, The Serpent In The Silver Mask proves that such stories can be utterly triumphant.