Tony’s in Eleventh Heaven.
Full disclosure – it took me until A Christmas
Carol to see Matt Smith as the Doctor. There are Reasons, and you don’t need to
know what they are, but the point is, it took a while for his Doctor to
convince me it was anything more than a collection of tics in ghastly tweed
suit.
But when you watch the Eleventh Doctor now, at some distance from the weekly
over-dissection of being the newest episodes, he’s a stone cold masterclass.
In which spirit, woohoo, and wahay! The
Eleventh Doctor has arrived at Big Finish!
With…out Matt Smith in it…Oh.
There’s a sense about the whole ‘Chronicles’
idea at Big Finish of ‘Why would you do that?’ – they’re stories featuring New
Who Doctors, without any of the actors who played
the New Who Doctors in, and it’s worth bearing in mind, there are fans who are
annoyed that William Hartnell and Jon Pertwee have been recast, despite the
significant inconvenience of their being dead, so the idea of recasting lead
actors who are still alive is enough
to make them heap their Big Finish CDs together in a pile and set light to
them.
Well, perhaps not quite, but almost.
For those who have less of a problem with there
being more Doctor Who in the world, the Chronicles are a chance to tell full
New Who stories while getting around the real-life issues of actors having post-Who
careers. While both David Tennant and Matt Smith have been agreeable to the
idea of returning to their Doctors at Big Finish, and Tennant has so far done
so twice (or twice and a bit if you’re in the know), getting recording windows
with New Who Doctors post-Who is agonisingly difficult. Step forward, Jacob
Dudman, who voiced Tennant’s Doctor in the Tenth Doctor Chronicles, and here
elbows out all contenders to also play the Eleventh Doctor.
Let’s get this out of the way before we go any
further. The Eleventh Doctor is a role Dudman appears to have been born to play. His Eleventh Doctor goes
beyond uncanny, and he could quite easily play the role for decades to come,
because while he’s technically not
Matt Smith, if, say, Matt Smith lost all scrap of his voice, he could hire
Dudman as a replacement voicebox, to go everywhere with him and say the things
he needed to say.
It would be weird, certainly, but he could do
it, and apart from the whole ‘two bodies’ thing, nobody’d much notice the
difference.
So with that firmly understood, welcome back to
the world of the Eleventh Doctor. This first Eleventh Doctor Chronicles set
takes us through the Eleventh Doctor’s life and friendships on a buffet principle
– a little of this, a little of that, giving an overall picture of the Time
Lord’s essential self.
The Calendar Man by AK Benedict is a classic
Eleven and Amy story, with that kind of mythic fairy tale sense of their early
adventures. They follow a distress signal to a colony world with a problem it
doesn’t remember it has, where people go missing in the mist, and then
disappear from the memories of the world, including their families. The
Calendar Man is coming for them, and only one young woman seems immune.
Benedict makes the Calendar Man something
rather interesting - a villain that can even scare the Doctor, in a story that captures
that sense of early Eleven whimsy and darkness. The solution relies on the
Doctor’s personal bravery, but equally on the actions and characters of his friends,
and there’s a solid heart-punch in the forgetful people’s forgetfulness too. A
classic switcheroo with a twist at the end gives you plenty to grab hold of, and
also some pretty heavyweight dramatic consequences. The Calendar Man kicks the
set off with a cracking mystery and some honest personality-beats, and Dudman,
as mentioned, is so good as the Eleventh Doctor, it’s practically identity
theft.
The Top Of The Tree, by Simon Guerrier is an exhausting,
relentless, ravening beast of a story.
Guerrier brings the Eleventh Doctor and Kazran
Sardick (Danny Horn reprising his TV role) into a tree-world, where there’s a
strong potential for ghastliness and danger almost everywhere you look. It’s a
whole ‘Ecosystem Of Death’ deal, with bravery, sacrifice, more than a touch of
horror and the kind of antithetical environment that frankly only Mother Nature
(and now Simon Guerrier) would create, to put living creatures through the mill
in order to sharpen their instincts and force them to adapt. When Kazran and
the Doctor get separated from the Tardis, run into a species of evolving
humanoids and discover that almost everything they touch is either horribly dangerous
or downright lethal, they’re going to have to climb for their lives. The
relentlessly dangerous environment of The Top Of The Tree, and the
psychological trauma of some of the things we find out on our way through the
story, makes it an exhausting listen, because by the end of it, you feel like
you too have been through the evolutionary mill, but Guerrier, like Benedict,
gives great Eleventh Doctor – particularly in terms of having conversations in
which he assumes the most likely
response of the other party, based on his own somewhat skewed but endearingly barking
mad outlook on life. Horn’s return is always going to be fun, because the
Kazran Diaries will always fill in the gaps in our head-canon of A Christmas
Carol. The Top Of The Tree is one that you’ll take a deep breath before
re-listening to, but one that you’ll want to revisit for the character-work,
despite the exhaustingly vertical storytelling and the sadness along the way.
Ohh, Dorium Maldovar. Who doesn’t love Dorium
Maldovar? He’s clever and waspish and blue, for goodness’ sake, not loving
Dorium Maldovar should probably be illegal.
Hardly surprising then that bringing Simon
Fisher-Becker, the man beneath the Maldovar, into official Big Finish stories
is one of the better decisions the company’s made this year. He’s absolutely
one of the best things in The Light Keepers, by Roy Gill.
There are some pretty interesting issues
tackled in the story – you could argue there are comments on fracking in there,
as well as the rights of indigenous people. Mostly though, if we’re honest,
it’s Fisher-Becker’s Dorium and the chance to learn more about him, while
having him be spectacularly cross with the Eleventh Doctor, that will nail The
Light Keepers to your ears and make you want to come back to it. Dudman and
Fisher-Becker together are superb, a galactic odd couple whose dialogue is both
beautiful and hilarious.
The actual Big Bad in The Light Keepers is a
returning enemy, and it’s learned a new trick since the last time we heard it.
Whether it works or not partly depends on a) whether you heard the stories in
which it appeared previously, and b) whether you thought it worked originally,
but Gill certainly gives the new twist enough vigour that it feels like it has
a reason to be at the heart of things here either way, giving the villain
probably its strongest showing to date.
‘Jane Austen.
Amazing writer, a brilliant comic observer, and—strictly amongst ourselves—a
phenomenal kisser.’
So said the ever-incorrigible Clara Oswald.
If you ever wanted to hear the story in which
Clara kissed Jane (at least for what seems the like the first time)…buckle up,
space-babies, because Alice Cavender has you covered in False Coronets.
This is not, however, some internet fan-fiction
where Jane and Clara get their smooch on for the sake of it. It’s a kickass
‘time’s gone wrong’ story of Regency alien nastiness, and what might have
happened if England had followed France’s lead and lopped off the heads of its
aristocrats in a big revolution.
Anti-revolutionary propogandist-in-chief? Your
own, your very own Jane Austen, locked in a cell and awaiting execution, before
she had a chance to write all the books that Clara loves so much. And so, as
much to put right this affront to literature as to do the history-saving thing,
the Eleventh Doctor and Clara skip back to try and find out what’s gone wrong,
collapse the living botheration out of the revolutionary timeline and get home
in time for tea and Persuasion.
It’s a complicated one, this, but that’s what
you get with alternative timeline stories. Nevertheless, the combination of
Cavendar’s relentless commitment to never be boring, Dudman’s continuing quest
to put the actual Matt Smith out of a job, and the bright, engaging voice-work
of Nathalie Buscombe as Miss Austen
means you feel like you’re in a sparkling quadrille – there may be twirls and
partner-swapping and bowing galore, but it’s always bright, and controlled, and
going somewhere interesting. In a more run-of-the-mill collection, False
Coronets would be an eeeeasy stand-out. Here though, with more than something
to recommend every story, it punches at least at the weight of the other three.
And then, y’know, it has Clara kissing Jane Austen. So…there’s that too.
The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles is, for our
money, the brightest, most energetic, and most fun of the Chronicles sets so
far, and while Dudman is a scarily convincing Tenth Doctor in the absence of
David Tennant, his Eleventh Doctor takes personification to almost absurd new
levels. More Eleventh Doctor Chronicles might conceivably hurt somebody’s
feelings, somewhere.
They wouldn’t hurt ours in the slightest.
*Cough, cough* Eleventh Doctor and Strax,
anyone?
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