Big Finish Reviews+ The War Master - Only the Good by Tony J Fyler

Derek Jacobi is the Master, and Tony will obey him.

Looking for the Big Finish release of 2017?

You can stop looking now – it’s The War Master – Only The Good.

The original return of the Master to New Who was very much a case of ‘Get a good actor, and let them fly.’ Sir Derek Jacobi, not by any means a Who-fan, had no real idea who the Master was when he stepped onto the set of Utopia. But when the moment of his revelations comes, the Utopia Master is fully formed in an instant, and the switch that’s flipped is astounding. Affable Professor Yana is gone in a handful of heartbeats, and the Master’s eyes are dark, so dark, his gaze malevolent, his rage explosive, his pleasure disturbing, seductive, sadistic –

And then he’s gone. Killed by an insect. Forced to regenerate, and forcing a generation of Who-fans to imagine what a cosmos with this Master in it would have been like.

We don’t have to imagine any more.

Big Finish has put together four stories in a box set that actually helps flesh out the Jacobi Master – his nature, his philosophy, his fundamental character, and then, in an initially controversial move, the company has put him back in the Time War.

Many fans, apparently including Russell T Davies, hadn’t really made the connection that the Jacobi Master was the Master that John Simm later talked about, the one who was ‘resurrected’ by the Time Lords to fight the Time War. They’re supported in not making that connection by a line of dialogue, which claims that Yana was found as a baby with a pocket watch, on the shores of the Silver Desolation.

Big Finish has found a way around that, and the Jacobi Master will now be known as the War Master forever.

The scope of the story arc is enormous but intimate, and it makes you trust in it early on, so as each of the four episodes goes along, there’s never a sense, as there’s sometimes allowed to be with Doctor stories, that the ending will be improvised out of string and exposition at the end. Ohhhh no – the Master is better than that. You sense a progression early, but it’s the progression of a predator. The War Master box set makes you empathise with malevolence, makes you thrill at patient, dripping, venom, and even lets you nod when characters are killed, because they were doomed from the moment they crossed the path of the War Master.

Nicholas Briggs kicks off proceedings with Beneath The Viscoid, which takes traditional Doctor Who tropes and examines their sometimes ridiculousness – the instant trust the Doctor often inspires, the authority he assumes, the brilliant man offering to help the oppressed, and the faith the oppressed have little option but to place in him. Imagine all that, with a scheming psychopath in the central role. It’s unnerving and gorgeous and it makes you want more.

The Gardezzans live beneath the surface of a stinking, viscous sea-world, a world which perversely slows down the firepower of the Daleks, and allows an otherwise hopelessly outclassed race of prey a chance to fight back.

Then ‘The Doctor’ arrives, all politeness and appreciation and offers of help in their fight against the Daleks. Jacobi’s Master is superbly suited to this kind of story, because of course what we the audience know of him going in is so little – we know he had a persona that was affable and helpful, and we know that turned on a dime to reveal the raging drumbeat-darkness at its core. There’s some of that in this first story, a little ranting about the pathetic insignificance of the Gardezzans in private, while appearing always helpful and flustered on the surface. It’s a story for anyone who likes that inevitable sense of eventual reveal, who likes stories of how far liars can go before their fictions collapse in on themselves. Jacobi’s Master is scarily perfect, playing the Daleks and the Gardezzans off against each other, while pursuing his own agenda. With support from the likes of Jacqueline King as Nius, leader of the Gardezzans, and Deirdre Mullins as Osen, their chief scientist, Jacobi flexes his muscles in a story that never lacks for pace, getting your heart racing, with the imminence of destruction by the Daleks powering you through this opening act.

Janine H Jones gives us a medical drama with some sci-fi clout in the provocatively-named The Good Master. The War Master, under an assumed name that will make long-term fans cheer, is working as an actual Doctor on the planet Arcking – a sanctuary for the sick and injured on the fringes of the Time War. He hasn’t been there long, but he’s made a big difference, diligently saving lives and patching up those scarred by the war.

Naturally, there’s more to it than that, and when pilot Cole Jarnish is brought in after his ship is almost destroyed by Dalek firepower, we begin to learn the secrets of this unusual planet. The Master is on the hunt for one of those secrets, but the Daleks have found him, and demand that the Master be handed over to them or the planet will be exterminated. A race against time, in the middle of a time war? Absolutely – can the Master find what he needs before the Daleks can hunt him down, and if he does, what hope does the universe have then? Jones gives us an unusual story, in which things are not what they first appear. Again, the cast is littered with solid support for Jacobi’s performance, in particular from Hannah Barker as Phila, his assistant, and Jonny Green as Cole, a character determined to put his own mark on the universe, and eager to take any opportunity to do so. Listen out especially for a chilling line of explanation of how the Master knows what’s going on on Arcking, and a glorious anti-Dalek rant worthy of David Tennant’s or Peter Capaldi’s Doctors. It’ll make you laugh, and cheer, and give you an appreciation of what the Master does when there’s no meddling Doctor around to cramp his style.

James Goss hates nice people.

That’s the only conclusion one can safely draw from his contribution to this box set, The Sky Man.

If ‘pacey’ is the keyword of Beneath The Viscoid, and ‘deceptive’ is the keyword of The Good Master, ‘poisonous’ is probably the best available keyword for The Sky Man.

Be aware, this is absolutely a compliment. Goss’ story is the most jaw-dropping, the most patient, the most fundamentally eeeeevil story of the set, because it deals in hope. The Master is on holiday, deciding to learn the art and science of viticulture, or wine-making to you and me, on a planet he knows is doomed. Throughout the course of the story, he does very little but sit in a cottage and make wine. But he knows the world is doomed, and after his arrival, the people of the world know it’s doomed too. But who believes a world is doomed when the skies are blue and the harvest’s good? When babies are born and lovers bill and coo, who dares to believe it can end?

One man does. One man determined to change the fate of the world, while the Master makes his wine. The steady progression towards an inevitable yet utterly horrifying fate drags you with it, feet dawdling, and your pulse will thrum in this one – there are only a few moments of high tension, but the sustained tension is a killer. The Master’s presence is everywhere, his handprint of death on everyone. Goss’ script will delight anyone who loves The Daemons, because of that sense of the Master’s dark presence, simply waiting out the inevitable, and busying himself in the meantime. It’s that slowness of progression and the increasingly inescapable truth of the Master’s point of view, that makes Goss’ script the high-point on the release of the year.

And then there’s Guy Adams. Pleasingly, there’s increasingly Guy Adams at Big Finish, and here, with The Heavenly Paradigm, he shows this Master’s philosophy of self-interest and pragmatism while threading the previous stories together, and raising the stakes in a gambit to end the Time War, to write reality according to this Master’s will. Plus, there’s Nerys Hughes in suburbia to boot! The Heavenly Paradigm shows us, more than any other story in the set, what makes this Master tick. He’s not an agent of chaos, but of control, his control, and the way the stories all feed together into Adams’ idea here is – oh, damn the clichés! – masterful. And in case that wasn’t enough, Adams also delivers that solution to the Silver Devastation problem.

The way these four stories knit together, and the way Adams takes them to the dawn on the on-screen War Master, suggests that any more stories with this glorious incarnation will have to go backwards, rather than forwards in his timeline. Listen to this box set and you won’t care. You’ll be waving flags and placards demanding more from the War Master in 2018.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Wreck of the World by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s feeling wrecked.

The Early Adventures are intended to be stories that deepen our understanding of the First two Doctors and their friends, telling stories that feel right for the black and white period of the show’s history, but often taking the character development forward in a 21^st century style to bridge the gap between worlds. That makes them an inherently risky project. Go too far towards the sixties and you end up with stories that add in the results of TV budget restrictions of that era when they’re not needed. Stray too far into the 21^st century style of storytelling and you risk telling stories which don’t feel like they’re enough ‘of the period’ to sit alongside the actual sixties stories we know and for the most part love. Getting the balance right has resulted in some amazing additions to our library of early Doctor Who stories. Getting the balance wrong has occasionally led to stories we’d rather forget.

We mention all this because The Wreck of the World is a story that feels a little too sixties for its own good.

Writer Timothy X Atack sets his story after the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe have escaped the Land of Fiction. There’s repair work to do to the Tardis, and the three of them…erm…do it. For what probably isn’t, but which certainly feels like a solid fifteen minutes.

Then they get separated and face a whole new sequence of annoying engineering problems on ‘The World,’ a giant colony ship that seems (at least at first) remarkably lacking in colonists.

Zoe meets a solidly comical robot that goes by the enigmatic name of Gnostic and appears to have a loud, irritating nervous breakdown when asked particular questions, while the Doctor and Jamie join forces with a motley crew of treasure-hunters who’ve come to The World with a mission to loot the historical artefacts of many Earth ages and stock their museums to the gills.

There’s always something to do in The Wreck of the World, but there’s also the sense that the story is little more than ‘one damned thing after another’ in terms of the problems the crew face, which can test even an ardent fan’s patience – Zoe has to rebuild a whole roomful of technological equipment just to turn the lights on. Jamie has to run on a treadmill to deliver motive power to the ship. The Doctor spends quite some time in a tunnel with tools, doing some properly complicated jiggery-pokery. The crew spend more time wandering through an archive of Earth historical artefacts looking for a thing they’re fairly sure they won’t recognise when they see it…

These set pieces seem to exist to allow the crew to be Doing Something to burn minutes of run time, but for all that, The Wreck of  The World has more going on underneath its skin – and if you can tear yourself away from what amounts to Doctor Who Does Scrapheap Challenge, that’s an interesting dimension, which breaks it out of slavish adherence to the sixties vibe and puts it squarely in Fifth Doctor Series Three territory, with a dark secret behind the ‘wreck,’ a touch of arch social commentary, quite a bit of comedy (if you’ve ever wanted to hear Jamie punched clean across a corridor, you’re in luck here), a conceptually interesting alien threat, a very large number of zombies, and a body-count that would never have been allowed in 1968, when this story is theoretically supposed to have ‘aired.’

In other words, The Wreck of The World is a good story, overly consumed with annoying physical problems. There’s an entirely decent alien story in here, explaining the wreck and delivering quite a solid and troubling lesson for our society. But it’s all rather buried beneath the mechanical and engineering challenges that Atack throws in the way so we don’t guess the solution ahead of time, leaving The Wreck of The World much harder work to listen to than it should have been. By the end of it, you’ll feel like a member of the Tardis crew, having had to mine for the nuggets of gold that are certainly there, through miles and miles of steel, encountering mechanical problems every inch of the way.

Big Finish Reviews+ Static by Tony J Fyler

We all love a good scary story – the notion of being scared just enough, and then having the scary-thing defeated or explained away is fundamental to childhood, and fundamental to Doctor Who. Without it, there’d be no Daleks, no Cybermen, no Weeping Angels, and no need for a Doctor to make it all alright again.

Static, the new Sixth Doctor audio adventure from Big Finish, is properly creepy, scary stuff, using plenty of horror movie tropes, and giving them a British twist of dripping, chilly dismalness.

Writer Jonathan Morris creates the caravan park of the damned, with a creepy caretaker, a seemingly programmable mist that stops people leaving the park, and a couple whose relationship has never recovered from a death in their past.

But at this particular caravan park, when the mist comes down, the dead come back to life.

See? Properly creepy.

Of course, it’s difficult to sustain that intense creepiness over two hours, and Static is a story of two halves, with the first two episodes intensifying the shivers – dead relatives, skeletons found in trees, mystical stone circles, phones that ring when they’re disconnected, the voices of the dead coming through the static on a portable TV and so on. The second half does the classic Doctor Who thing – adding facts, science and alien technology to explain the mysteries of the set-up, and letting the Doctor save us all from a fate worse – or at least more certain – than death.

On the way to a conclusion that has its fair share of punch, the story brings in a secret RAF project from World War II, a body-farming project, and an alien species with a particular methodology that makes sense of all the creepy-seeming elements. There’s a degree of timey-wiminess to the plot, as the Doctor and his wartime companion, Leading WREN Constance Clarke, flit from the present day back to the war to uncover what’s really going on, leaving modern teen Flip in the caravan park of unparalleled creepiness with the troubled couple, the axe-wielding caretaker and the waves of dead people walking out of the mist.

In terms of the punch, one of the companions faces the reality of her death in this story, and we’re not about to tell you if death is a permanent condition for the Sixth Doctor’s crew. Certainly, the reactions of her fellow time travellers are played real and raw, meaning there are emotionally harrowing moments in Static, as well as creepy horror and body horror threads.

If there’s a stand-out performance in this story, it undoubtedly comes from David Graham as Percy Till, the caravan caretaker. Graham’s in his nineties now, and has a strong geeky pedigree, having worked as a Dalek voice on the very first story in which they appeared, and also being the voice behind both Brains and Parker in the classic Thunderbirds. Here, he adds a kind of weary certainty to his performance as Till, which gives the caravan park a sense of ancient, bristling threat that carries the creep-factor for at least the first two episodes.

Underneath it all, Static is a workaday alien invasion story, and all the things you’d expect of such a Doctor Who story are here – alien tech disguised as something else, the Doctor being noble, twists, turns, possession, time travel, you name it, it’s here. But it’s in the initial set-up of its atmosphere that Static stands out from the crowd of similar invasion stories. Let yourself sink into the chilly mist of Static’s premise and it’ll give you more than a few shudders en route to the logical conclusion.

Big Finish Reviews+ O Tannenbaum by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s singing carols.

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree, how lovely are your branches.

Wellll…

The loveliness of tree branches of course depends on your relationship to the trees. O Tannenbaum, the Christmassy short trip from Big Finish plays with some tropes we’ve seen in New Who Christmas Specials – in particular, Christmas trees that are possibly more than they seem to be.

The story by Anthony Keetch balances on a knife-edge of sweet and twinkly, threatening now and again to tip over into properly dark and scary. But this is a First Doctor story, and more than that, it’s a later First Doctor story, with Steven Taylor in it, and that gives a certain reassurance that the old man with the magical blue box is in control of events, at least enough to wring a happy ending from the scenario of an isolated cabin in the woods, with a lonely little girl whose father went out hunting on Christmas Eve, and who hasn’t come back.

Let’s put this on record. The continued existence and excellence of Peter Purves makes an audio recast of the First Doctor entirely redundant. Purves has been excellent for years now when it comes to evoking the twinkly-but-still-potentially-cross later First Doctor, as well as Steven, and he brings both performances beautifully to bear in this Short Trip too, making for a wonderful short listen.

If there’s an issue with O Tannenbaum, it’s in storytelling that telegraphs its surprises a little too hard to early, and a sense of a very guessable punchline looming up ahead of you at least as early as halfway through.

But it’s Christmas, at least in this story, so don’t be a grouch, just embrace the joy of Purves telling a wintry, piney, deep snow story of the old man with a box, his space pilot sidekick and putting right the things that have gone unfortunately awry in the universe. For those listeners who felt David Bradley’s First Doctor had a little too little of the limelight in Twice Upon A Time, this is a perfect antidote, the original Doctor here unleashing some of his schoolmasterly severity to extremely effective advantage – there are moments in every Doctor’s era where they stand there and suddenly you feel that fundamental character coming through – Paul McGann’s shoes fitting perfectly, Tom Baker dressing down the Cybermen, Christopher Eccleston feeling the Earth turning, David Tennant giving no second chances because he’s that sort of a man, Peter Capaldi’s war speech…

This story gives us is a solidly 21^st century First Doctor proving moment, a moment when the white-haired old Time Lord stands up, lays down the law and brings back Christmas for a scared little girl and her daddy. For that, it’s a glorious way to spend a very small amount of your money, and despite its sugary Christmas notes, it’s one you’ll return to year-round for that moment of the First Doctor doing things as they should be done.

Big Finish Reviews+ Landbound by Tony J Fyler

The second Paul Spragg Short Trips Memorial Opportunity winner is Landbound, a Third Doctor story which is subtly constructed, showing the Doctor’s handful of meetings with a former sailing captain at various stages of his time of exile on Earth. The storytelling, by Selim Ulug, is neat enough to draw parallels between sailor Ronald Henderson, who had a disturbing experience out at sea and has been landbound ever since, and the Doctor’s enforced period of being planetbound on Earth, and we see a new sliver of adventure in the Third Doctor’s life – at momentous points in his Earthbound timeline, he runs into, or seeks out, Ronald for a chat or a mini-adventure, doing what he can to help the sailor, learning something himself in return.

As stories go, it’s neat, contained, logical, and charming.

Where all that goes awry, sadly, is having it narrated by Nicholas Briggs in a northern accent, in the same year as he narrated the Ninth Doctor adventures. If you’ve heard those, and then you listen to this, you’ll ache with the wanting for this to be more than it is, because Briggs gives Henderson something close to his Ninth Doctor voice. It doesn’t help dissuade you from the hope of a weird multi-Doctor potential to the story that Henderson has an ornate pocketwatch, a friend named Jack, and another, female friend who looks after him and his shoreside pub.

If you start thinking on those lines, you’ll wait the whole length of Landbound waiting for the other Gallifreyan shoe to drop. And no, of course we’re not about to tell you if it does or not. Whether it does or not is almost irrelevant, because you’re primed for it early on, which has the oddest tendency to make you enjoy the story in your head rather more than the story that unfolds in front of you. The story that does unfold in front of you has occasional vibrations reminiscent of a David Tennant special, at least in terms of the ‘monster,’ which has a life cycle simply inimical to our own, rather than any great or grand invasion or colonisation plan. But Briggs’ northern narration means you’re always wondering who’s zooming who in the conversations between the Third Doctor and Ronald Henderson, and while the story itself is good enough to be a Short Trip any day of the week, the story that the combination of the writing and Briggs’ narration plants in your head is a kind of Eighth Doctor-style, oh-crap-I’m-gonna-need-a-second-mortgage run of four box-set arc.

Bottom line, Landbound is a perfectly acceptable Short Trip, made better by the fact that it’s by one of us, and better still by the fact that it’s free as a bird to download. In its simplest incarnation, it’s a story of debts, and sadness, and kinship and kindness and healing and the wonderful joy of eventual freedom after incarceration, whether physical or psychological.

Yes, really, that’s in its simplest incarnation.

The more complex incarnation brought about by that handful of either entirely inconsequential or deeply deliberate additions to the plot and by Nick Briggs with a northern accent is bigger and bolder and even more fun, and you get that for free too, so what is there to complain about? Only really the uncertainty as to which incarnation Landbound is ever actually aiming to be. Perhaps it’s aiming to be both. Perhaps that’s why it won the Paul Spragg prize. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

Download it, listen to it, see which version of the story you hear.