Big Finish Reviews+ The Dispossessed by Tony J Fyler

Tony is possessed of an urge to run away.

There are some stories which, whenever you watch them, make you ache with sadness for what could have been, had the tone been different, had the budgets been higher, had the overall intention been clearer and bolder.

We all have our own list of those stories, and many of the names on those lists will be different from fan to fan.

Mark Morris’ story The Dispossessed isn’t, in any fundamental way, the darker, more horrific, more effective evil elder brother of Paradise Towers. But you’d be forgiven for drawing comparisons between the two, as even Mel almost does here.

A vertical living environment, with lifts that sometimes go nowhere, and other times go somewhere you’d rather they didn’t. A wandering gang of husk-like former residence, drained by some unknown force and set to wander the halls and walkways, looking for others to turn. Two young people hiding out in this madhouse world, trying to survive. A brusque efficient stranger with a winning manner and a job to do. And lurking somewhere, the force behind the world-within-a-world, responsible for everything, but subtle. Winning. Persuasive. A kind vampirically plausible mind with a need that can only be fulfilled by more, and more, and more –

Erm…it’s a bit dark, this one.

And yet for all that, it’s only really dark when you sit back and look at what you’ve heard. As a listen, The Dispossessed doesn’t really wear its themes too heavily, so you don’t plod through it. Rather you spin, in something like a waltz, from character-group to character-group, getting piece after piece after piece of the picture and crucially, not being conspicuously clear in your mind till pretty late in the game who’s behind the set up in which we find ourselves, or whether there’s actually an objective wrongdoer here. Morris balances our expectations and the delivery of crucial information well, to build a kind of dystopia which could all be a misunderstanding…but is it?

Ace and Mel find themselves separated from the Doctor after a smack-in-the-face, did-not-see-that-coming cliffhanger, and we build up contradictory pictures of what’s going on depending on whether we follow the Doctor’s storyline or that of his friends. While the Doctor gets involved in the fight for survival and the mission of an unusual visitor, Ace and Mel get an altogether different perspective on events and realities, and Morris plays with our minds right into episode 4, while nevertheless delivering some solid eighties scares and drama and a pulse of something altogether more 21^st century in terms of its unnerving allegory of fake news.

The case is surprisingly small for a story that delivers quite complex and multi-layered thrills of unease. Morgan Watkins and Anna Mitcham as Ruck and Jan play it straight, likeable but never too sickly-sweet, whereas Stirling Gallacher’s Isobel comes across as bluff and focused all at once – but is there more to her mission? Meanwhile, Nick Ellsworth brings a real ‘Count Dracula welcoming you to his home’ vibe to Arkallax, supposed at least by Isobel to be a monster, when he encounters Ace and Mel, and happily, expansively – but truthfully? – tells them the story of his flight from a past that went wrong. Who can be trusted in this spiderweb of storytelling? The Doctor eventually presents himself as part-saviour, part-sacrifice to try and break his friends free of the rules which govern the absurdist dark world in which they find themselves, and Morris actually makes you wonder, in a series where the hero always has to win eventually, whether in fact that’ll happen this time, and whether the Doctor may finally have over-extended himself in his self-belief.

The story ends with another of those ‘didn’t-see-that-coming’ punches in the face, this time from a totally unsuspected direction. We’d love to spoiler it for you, but we can’t, because a) friends don’t spoiler endings for friends, and b) it leads directly in to the thoroughly bizarre premise of the next story in the Seventh Doctor’s adventures.

The Dispossessed is not, as we’ve said, the evil elder brother of Paradise Towers. But if a vacancy opened up for that role, Mark Morris would be more than staking his claim on it with this story – it’s eighties tower block terror synthesised through a modern psychological horror mindset and sprinkled with just a touch of Seventh Doctor magic.