I am Iron Man, says
Tony.
Iron Bright, by Chris
Chapman, promises what could be, and arguably should be, a definitive Sixth
Doctor story, as it brings the man with the peacock coat face to face with a
pair of Victorian geniuses – father and son team, Mark and Isambard Kingdom
Brunel. The Sixth Doctor has form meeting Victorian geniuses – one of his best
TV stories, Mark of the Rani, set him adventuring alongside George Stephenson –
so there’s a frisson of hope and expectation attached to any story that takes
him back into even faintly similar territory.
Chapman’s done his
research – Iron Bright (the meaning of which we’re almost desperate to tell
you, but won’t, so you have to listen to the story) takes us underground, into
the great Thames Tunnel, where things are going wrong for the Brunels and their
workers. There are cryptic ghosts that kill people, for one thing, which is
going to rain on any parade you plan, and Mark Brunel (played with a good deal
of bluster by Christopher Fairbank) is planning quite the subterranean shindig,
to attract wealthy investors to the project. Even in this simplicity of
conflicts, you’ve got a ton of story to be told, a clash of worlds to
investigate, as Victorian socialites meet homicidal ghosts from Somewhere Else
Entirely and try not to die underground. When the Doctor and Isambard discover
where the ghosts are coming from though, the conflict takes on a whole new
scale, as well as pushing us into new realms both of science fiction and of
social allegory – worlds are connected together, the story tells us, and what
might be seen as progress on the one could have terrible consequences on the
other. It’s a notion of some relevance as our modern Earth bakes, melts and
feels the fist of nature under the stress of climate change – the good times of
industrial progress, if uncurbed, can lead to the devastation of a world.
The escalation of the story
is logical, for all there feels like some degree of padding in the middle back
at the Brunel house, and the cliffhangers are above-average here, with the
shift in scale feeling like it needs you to take a bigger, deeper breath than
you thought you needed as it opens up the story from the small, fairly
claustrophobic world of Victorian tunnels under the Thames to much broader and
very different vistas, but there are parts of the mid-section that feel like a
history lesson of the world from which the ghosts are coming, and while the
escalation is impressive, the context-lessons continue into Episode 4 as you
find out the thing you thought was happening is actually an entirely different
thing that’s happening, because of the context the Doctor discovers. You could
certainly argue it’s valid to include, because the context explains the reality
of what’s been going on, and ultimately directs you as to how you should feel
about it, but being quite so heavily layered in context even as armies are
marching to an apparently unstoppable war does make for a thicker layering of
story than the pace seems to demand. There are also elements of Iron Bright
which strive for more than they achieve – there’s a lovely character called Tan
played by Catherine Bailey, and a maid with serious companion-potential, played
by Becky Wright, who, while adding some lightness to the mixture, don’t seem to
have a great deal to do except explaining some of the plot and then going back
and forth to tell people things. And there’s a degree here to which invention
and convolution risk losing some
listeners, especially in regard to whose fault the main threat actually is, and
why, so you end up having the Brunels in a story and feeling like they’re not
used as well as perhaps they could have been, as you dash back and forth from
one reality to another, trying to work out what’s going on, stop a war, deal
with the thorny issues of whose fault any of it is, absorb the environmental
message, pause for sombre reflection on what amount to gravestones with a
vengeance, climb a big tower, press a big button and play a game of chicken
with a leader who’s come down with a chronic case of manifest destiny.
It’s tightly packed, this
story, and no mistake. There’s just a risk of you losing the will to understand
it as it switchbacks and loops the loop in time, space and dimension-bridging,
while dragging along a lot of backstory and contextual information. It’s just
possible, when you’re done with the ride, that you’ll wonder whether it was all
actually worth it.
Iron Bright is densely
packed and frenetically paced, progressing from a classic Sixth Doctor oddity
to a panoramic science fiction dimensional war of conquest and survival, with
perhaps just a twist or two too many for some listeners to keep hold of as it
careers towards its ending. It’s worth a listen, because after all, it’s Old
Sixie meeting Isambard Kingdom Brunel and absolutely boggling his mind, but it’s
one to take an episode at a time, pausing every now and then to make sure you
understand where you are before you go on and risk getting lost in the twists.
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