Saturday, 5 May 2018

Big Finish Reviews+ Ravenous 1 by Tony J Fyler


Tony’s feeling peckish.

The Eighth Doctor’s straight, non-Time War chronology last saw him defeat the Doom Coalition by the smidgenest of smidgens, but there was a cost to be paid – Helen Sinclair, the Doctor’s friend from 1960s Earth (Hattie Morahan) was sent spinning off into almost certain oblivion with the Eleven, a Time Lord whose eleven incarnations are all accessible within his current body, and who frequently fight for dominance of his arms, legs, brain and mouth. It’s a great concept, brought to life with some degree of manic genius by Mark Bonnar.

Ravenous begins with the Eighth Doctor and his other friend, Liv Chenka from Kaldor City (home of the Robots of Death), hot on the trail of their friend, trying to rescue her from the machinations of the multi-faced, multi-minded monster.

Except much to Liv’s intense irritation, there’s a good deal of faffing about before they can actually get any credible rescuing done.

In defence of John Dorney though, who writes the first two episodes of this box set, it’s faffing of an exceptional class and quality. Faffing with a cherry on top, in fact. First up, Their Finest Hour brings Ian McNeice’s Winston Churchill crashing into Classic Who territory. It’s a wartime story that in particular pays tribute to the bravery and brilliance of the Polish airmen who played a vital role in the Battle of Britain. It’s also a relatively straightforward premise, almost worthy of Douglas Adams – in the skies above Britain, there’s a slab of…nothingness. A big oblong patch of nothing-there, which is heat-raying planes and pilots to incredibly thorough destruction. Needless to say, it’s not from around here, and the Doctor and Liv are called in to twiddle screwdrivers at it and make it go away.

McNeice’s Churchill and McGann’s Doctor have an easy, bouncy repartee in Dorney’s script, but the stand-out star of the story is Nicola Walker as Liv Chenka. Since she first appeared in Sylvester McCoy story Robophobia, Chenka’s been getting better and better, more comfortable with the business of bouncing around space and time saving people, and in Their Finest Hour and in fact throughout this box set, she rocks your world and pushes the stories on with a sense of indefatigable belief that, knowing Big Finish, probably means she’s set to meet a stick end pretty soon. She’s reached the level of mickey-taking, problem-solving, citizen of the universe competence familiar from New Who companions like late-stage Amy Pond or Clara Oswald, only with a joyfully dry undercutting wit and her own set of distinct skills.

There’s punch and poignancy in the story which you can hear coming if you’ve listened to enough Doctor Who from Big Finish, but Dorney pitches his punch just right to achieve a balanced result, and for all it’s a detour on the road to finding Helen, it feels like a worthwhile one, and a rich experience.

How To Make A Killing In Time Travel, Dorney’s second story in the set, is more outrageously comedic than Their Finest Hour. The action centres on a genius scientist who turns absolutely rubbish criminal. It’s a ‘desperation romp,’ the comedy coming from what people in horrifying situations do to try and push their luck to a satisfactory conclusion. There’s blackmail, chicanery, a robot with a funny translation circuit, a positively Trumpian financier…oh and a couple of royal warring scorpions. Because why wouldn’t there be a couple of royal warring scorpions?

Against that background, the Eighth Doctor and Liv wander round like Holmes and a highly savvy Watson, switching off machines here, investigating murders there, dealing with galaxy-imperilling temporal implosions and generally saving the day. It’s a rich, fun, runaround bit of business, and a complete, concise world that’s going terribly terribly wrong. Again, you’ll be listening to everything Nicola Walker says, because she’s an utter joy, but kudos too to Judith Roddy as Stralla Cushing, an unexpected driver of the drama here, along with the comedy-blackmail duo of Sarah Lambie and Jane Booker as Gorl and Dron respectively, of whom it would have been fun to hear more in future encounters with other Doctors.

The final two episodes of Ravenous 1 are a single connected story that get the Doctor to his object – in this case, a reunion with Helen. But Helen Sinclair is not quite the woman she was when she last saw the Doctor – she’s spent a lot of intervening time with The Eleven, in a penal colony-cum-asylum where the inmates are remarkably docile, as a result of a very special diet.

The Kandyman was an interesting concept when he was first devised, as an obsessive, flavour-demented chemist who made sweets so good they killed people. When he was eventually realised on-screen as Hell’s Licorice Allsort Assortment, yes, he looked absurd, but actually, if you stopped and thought about him for a moment and watched his mouth move, you could still get a shiver out of the will to survive beneath that absurdity.
Matt Fitton brings the calorie-compulsive chemist back to Doctor Who, and does it rather more as his creator, Graeme Curry, envisaged, a slick-faced, sugar-sheened humanoid with an android intelligence hidden in his sucrose-based body. He’s played by Nicholas Rowe as a brilliant, brittle figure – important, powerful but desperate to be recognised for his brilliance and the role he plays. In World of Damnation, the first part of the two, he’s responsible for pacifying the prisoners on the planetoid where The Eleven and Helen have been hanging out, working on The Eleven’s control issues and getting rather close.

Needless to say, by the time the Doctor and Liv get there, things are getting out of control, and here we learn not only how the Kandyman has been plying his trade, but also why it’s really not a good idea to cross him. It’s a joy to hear the Eighth Doctor and the Kandyman banter, both of them significantly older than they were in The Happiness Patrol. As disorder threatens to overwhelm the prison, we’re introduced to new important characters, including a crab in a robo-suit and a deeply sweet couple, comprised of a criminal and a nervous ultra-psychic – annnd why not? – and as the action moves into Episode 4, Sweet Salvation, there’s a satisfying underlying logic revealed to what the Kandyman’s actually up to, who his friends and allies are, and what, exactly, the ‘Ravenous’ might be. If life is all just chemistry, then sweets can kill, can pacify, can modify the mindset of anyone who eats them, and free will dies of disobedience or hunger.

Sweet Salvation is well plotted and better paced, so it ramps up the return of the Kandyman, the creepy hints at the Ravenous, and the battle of the egos as the Kandyman, The Eleven and the Doctor pit their wits against each other. Ravenous 1 overall is definitely two episodes of productive, enjoyable faffing and a two-parter of ramped-up, amped-up action, but it works for all that, the styles of the stories feeling right within the first stage of this new Eighth Doctor boxsetathon. Will you enjoy every episode of the four this time out? Absolutely – what you get are three interesting, character-rich, plot-driven stories that let Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor shine, bring Nicola Walker’s Liv Chenka screaming up the ranks of all-time best companions with a box set that shows her to the best advantage in her Who history so far, and gives the other characters, from Morahan’s Helen to the Eleven and the Kandyman, to Churchill and the smaller players with lives and stories and  agenda of their own, quite enough time and space to graft themselves onto your memory with meaning and impact. It’s a jewel, this box set, boding well for the beginnings of another long multi-set arc for the Eighth Doctor. Ravenous 1 will leave you (appalling reference alert!) thoroughly satisfied, but hungry for more.

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