Thursday, 5 April 2018

Big Finish Reviews+ The Third Doctor Adventures, Volume 4 by Tony J Fyler



Tony goes retro.

The Third Doctor Adventures are, all things considered, one of the biggest risks Big Finish has taken in recent years. Recasting so huge a character as the Third Doctor, rather than having his words voiced by a contemporary castmember as they did throughout the Companion Chronicles, could have gone so, so, so wrong.

Fortunately, Big Finish is a company that lives and breathes in the audiosphere – they know voices. They know timbres. They know when they’ve found someone who can do something really quite extraordinary.

Step forward Tim Treloar, as the new, audio-specific Third Doctor.

Treloar, always conscious of the potential for things to go horribly wrong, began the Third Doctor Adventures with staggering diligence and a voice that was almost spookily Pertweean. Fans reacted well, and more and more Third Doctor Adventures were written. As a performance, Treloar’s gets better and better from a starting point of excellence, with the result that, while he started out with all-new adventures and monsters, as time has gone on, and with confidence growing all round, Big Finish has pitched him against some of Doctor Who’s finest – in the second box set, he faced off against an acolyte of the Master’s, and in the third, he took on the Daleks in an immediately post-Spiridon adventure that ticked all the Third Doctor boxes for longstanding fans.

It’s fair to say though that the Fourth set of Third Doctor Adventures is something extra special. Here he gets to take on the Meddling Monk (as most recently played on audio by Rufus Hound, clearly lapping up a role for which he was born, and (most thrillingly, because fans abhor a villain-vacuum and The Five Doctors was cheating) the Cybermen.
The Rise of the New Humans by Guy Adams, done slightly differently, could have been a cracking Cyberman story – but here, it’s delivered as Monk-fun all the way, with creepy hospitals, hyper-evolving humans developing metal prostheses and coming back at least a little way from the dead, ladling on the body-horror core of the story. But, and here’s the important bit, Adams does good service by the Monk’s core characteristics too, while raising an entirely reasonable ethical conundrum – if your partner, your parent, your friend was dying of a dread disease which is currently incurable, but which a hundred years from now is the work of a course of drugs to eliminate, could you see the bigger picture of the web of time, or would you want them cured? The Monk, supporting the work of genius Doctor Kurdi (played with fabulous grumpiness and then, as her character unfolds, with surprising tenderness by Mina Anwar), is offering tomorrow’s medicine, today. Who is the Doctor to stop him and tell him he’s wrong?

Katy Manning’s on sensational form, somehow squeezing her 2017 voice back a few decades into the throat of squeaky, breathy, top companion Jo.

What The Rise of the New Humans gives us is a couple of hours of peak performances from Hound, Treloar, Manning, Anwar and others, with some interesting philosophical questions thrown in to what becomes a kind of medical zombie movie with a wider scope. You’ll barely realise you’re zooming through the episodes, and Hound, who’s established himself as a Monk with whom to conjure, more than repays his star villain billing.

The Tyrants of Logic by Marc Platt does everything it can to be a kind of Ultimate Cyber-Story, touching on the past of the metal monsters from Mondas in the Classic TV show, the extended world of Big Finish and the New Who expansions of their abilities. Set on a planet named Burnt Salt, it includes a couple of semi-Cyber ragamuffins, a host of genetically engineered so-cute-you-could-die lemur-girl creatures who throw snowballs at Cybermen, a research project which may well have more to it than meets the cybernetic eye, the Cyber-wars equivalent of Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer, and, in a way that resonates with a Dalek Genesis Arc, a mysterious MacGuffin known as a Cyber-Leveller – we won’t spoilt the surprise of what that does for you, because…well, because it would spoil the surprise.
There are Cybermats here, there are glitterguns, and when things really get moving, there are what sound like an array of Cybermen from Nick Briggs – listen out and see if you can ‘place’ each type of Cyber-voice in their evolution, complete with different Cyber-gun sounds, but there’s also a New Who-style innovation which is absolutely spot-on for how the Cybermen should behave if we’re to take them seriously as a body-horror monster for the 21st century, and the threat at the heart of an all-out war with humanity. Again, Treloar and Manning are on the top of their game together, secure after three previous sets of adventures, and able to deliver some of Platt’s more emotional dialogue, Manning chiming perfectly with her on-screen portrayal of Jo, refusing to give up on the Doctor, talking him back from the brink of death at least once, and Treloar for his part giving the Third Doctor some lovely believable vocal beats of gratitude for all she’s done for him.

You might just possibly feel it’s a touch too busy and a little downbeat for much of its run-time, but everything and everyone in the story has a clear purpose, and were you to remove them, you’d diminish the journey on which Platt wants to take you. Do you feel like you’ve enjoyed a thoroughly satisfying Cyber-story by the end? Almost – but in terms of the balance, Platt, and Briggs on direction, skew towards giving you a story of the people, rather than a stereoscopic Cyber-story. Does it deliver that rarest of things – a Cyber-story that actually makes some sort of logical sense? Yes, on balance it does, certainly more than almost any Cyber-story in at least Classic Who. Perversely, but also joyfully, you’ll come out the other side of The Tyrants of Logic with your emotions having been put through the wringer, proving above all that you’re not yet ready to side with the Cybermen.

The Third Doctor Volume 4 is a fabulous investment in aural pleasure. All hail Tim Treloar and Katy Manning for bringing the Third Doctor and Jo fully back to the fans. And while we’re about it, all hail the writers and directors who, increasingly secure in their performances and their relationship, are giving them bigger and better and broader things to do.

The question now is how lucky Big Finish feels – in the fifth box set that must surely follow this tour de force, does it yet have the cojones to re-cast Roger Delgado’s Master?

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