Tony rejoices in the
lack of angst.
People either love or hate
the Tenth Doctor. Played by David Tennant, he was bouncy, gobby, loud and
energetic, and he ran around the universe, fixing things with a twinkle in his
eye and a wave of his screwdriver, only occasionally dropping down the
emotional register for a bit of a growl or a mope.
Jenny – The Doctor’s
Daughter is the Tenth Doctor without the growl or the mope.
Georgia Tennant (yes, a
relation – having played his daughter on screen for one episode, the actress
married David Tennant) is Jenny, a newborn semi-clone of the Tenth Doctor, with
all of his instincts, none of his knowledge or baggage, and a skillset all her
own. When, at the end of her TV episode, she jetted off in a stolen ship, the
inference of her own adventures was left hanging, and Big Finish has picked it
up and run with it.
What that means is you get
four stories with very little by way of sturm, drang or emotional angst. Jenny
is one of the more upbeat releases you’ll hear this year, by virtue of that
lack of baggage. She’s just rocketing around the cosmos, stealing one ship
after another, dropping in to places, seeing what’s up, fixing it by the simple
expedient of Being Brilliant, and then zapping off again.
Stolen Goods, by Matt
Fitton, pits Jenny against Garundel, a camp whiny space-frog swindle-merchant (just
think Michael Gove painted green), who’s crossed paths and swords with the
Doctor before. What starts out as a routine space traffic accident unfolds into
corruption, deceit and scammery, and Fitton gives Jenny a classic Tenth Doctor
sense of playing happily along with the nonsense being told to her, and then
cheerfully revealing why she understands it’s a complete con, pinning her
instinctual brilliance to your ears. This story also sees Jenny acquire her very
own ‘companion’ in Sean Biggerstaff’s ‘Noah’, a neophyte who, necessarily if
he’s to be her companion, is even newer in the universe than she is, with no
idea how or why he exists and occasional strange bursts of arcane knowledge
that add an air of mystery to his existence. Adding a ticking clock to the
whole thing is a somewhat miscast Sian Philips as a cyborg bounty hunter who
wants to use Jenny for her own nefarious purposes. If you get Sian Philips in
front of a mic, normally, you use her for rich, layered characters, and the
Colt 5000 isn’t that by any means – it’s more or less a Terminator with a plan,
but nevertheless, Philips is an actress to whom giving less than her all is
anathema, so what you get here is a very effective
Terminator with a plan, to say the very least.
Prisoner of the Ood, by
John Dorney, brings back another great Tenth Doctor creation, the
tentacle-faced Ood. Their chief characteristic is an extreme vulnerability to
psychic influences, so they’re a kind of ready-made ‘army for the conquering’.
Here, they’re conquered by Someone Interesting, but the scenario in which Jenny
finds herself, running and hiding on a suburban estate alongside new resident
Angie Glazebrook (Arabella Weir), is gorgeously absurd. The image of the creepily
alien Ood stalking along a suburban estate, killing people while hunting for
one particular prisoner is lovely and silly, and Jenny works well here,
bringing her alien, ahead of her time sensibilities to the otherwise very
familiar setting.
Neon Reign, by Christian
Brassington, is the hardest going of the set, though it works hard early on to
set up its premise – the industrialised, seemingly orientally-influenced world
of Kamshassa is under the thrall of its Dragon Emperor and his Dragon Guards.
The men of the planet are addicted to a drug that keeps them indolent, while
the women and girls are forced to go out and work, to keep their fathers and
brothers and sons in the manner to which they are instructed by their overlord
to become accustomed.
It feels a touch
overburdened with Men’s Rights Activist nonsense spouted by His Almighty
Draggonness towards the end, but in a fairly classic Who ‘dress up as a guard,
defeat the emperor, free the planet’ story, Brassington and Tennant work well
together to keep Jenny quite bouncy and brave and brilliant, and clearly having
none of this sort of nonsense.
And finally, in Zero Space
by Adrian Poynton, Jenny and Noah find themselves in a pocket universe where
nothing can exist, only to find a whacking great scientific space station, full
of clones. Because…naturally. There are good reasons why they should be there
though, and a solid ‘Things aren’t what they seem, go off and live your own
lives’ story emerges, with the help of Adele Anderson and Anthony Calf as the
clones from zero space.
Jenny – The Doctor’s
Daughter sets up a world in which Jenny’s energy can burn bright and smiley and
funny and brilliant, and pits her against four distinctly Doctor Whoish
story-types, with which she deals in her own new, funny way at one remove from
her parent. If the world is getting you down in this hot, chaotic summer, grab
the first box set of Jenny – The Doctor’s Daughter. It’ll make you bouncy and
happy again and reset your optimism for the world.
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