Wednesday, 8 August 2018

Big Finish Reviews+ Jenny - The Doctor's Daughter by Tony J Fyler



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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