Tony’s feeling peckish.
You’re going to need a
nice lie down in a dark room after Ravenous #3.
And possibly even before
it. It’s that kind of timey-wimey effecty-causey rollercoaster ride.
There are three things to
keep in mind about the Ravenous, which we’ve heard before, but which come into much
clearer audio focus in this box set.
1.
They’re
the Time Lords’ natural super-predator, and therefore Time Lords, used to
swanning about the fiefdom of time and space like they own the place, are
actually, intrinsically scared enough of these things to make impetuous
mistakes.
2. For reasons more or less of ‘Well, why
wouldn’t they?’, they naturally look kiiiiind of like Pennywise the Clown.
Creepy clowns, certainly, is their go-to physicality and style. So, yeah, good
luck with the sleeping.
3.
And
of course, they earn their name by being permanently starving, with Time Lord
the absolute ribeye steak of their menu.
So, let’s play our game.
We kick off this time out
with a Time Lord research station, mining dark chronons (time particles) as a
theoretically limitless power source in the event of anything beggaring about
with the Eye of Harmony. Because why the hell not? When a Ravenous nabs Time
Lord researcher Brallix and frightens him into regeneration, an altercation
means the station has a dead Ravenous to autopsy and a regenerated Brallix on
hand to continue mining operations.
If only things were that
simple in the Eighth Doctor’s universe.
Rule 1: things are never that simple in the Eighth Doctor’s
universe. Without spoilering you, the encounter on Deeptime Frontier
opens up the door for the Alien-style
‘one creepy thing following us round a dead Tardis’ scenario of Seizure, the
final story of Ravenous #2, to become a full-on Aliens-style Ravenousfest in box set 3, and others to come. What’s
perhaps most striking about Deeptime Frontier is that it hammers home the
notion of the Ravenous as Time Lord predators – creatures that especially love
to hunt the time-travelling folk in the stiff collars. And that one of the ways
they do that is to literally make Time Lords frightened to distraction. The
Doctor’s been frightened before, his exposure to the universe has arguably
prepared him rather better than most Time Lords to deal with bladder-weakening
terror, but here, he’s seen making irrational decisions and mistakes – rather
more than his human companions do, because the humans aren’t part of this
particular evolutionary battle of predator and prey. It’s taken a while to
really get a handle on why we as an audience should care about the Ravenous
(almost £60sworth of time at even the download prices by the time we get to
Ravenous #3), so Deeptime Frontier is a big step forward in helping us
appreciate why we need all the box sets, and what particularly is the USP of this
Big Bad.
Having said all which, Companion
Piece by John Dorney ignores the Ravenous – and the Doctor, come to that –
more or less entirely. It’s largely a fun, fan-serving piece, which has the
Nine (Yes, the villain we’ve come to know as the Eleven, or the Twelve, just
earlier in his lifetime) happily capturing friends of the Doctor, like he’s
some demented action-figure fan, who has to get the whole set. No-one really
seems adequately able to explain why
precisely he’s collecting the set, though it seems to be an idea seeded by
River Song. Yep, she’s here, furiously not meeting the Doctor but throwing a
spanner in the works of the Nine’s plans more or less on principle. What this
allows for is a handful of one or two-line vocal cameos from a host of
companions, plus the return of Charley Pollard into an Eighth Doctor timeline –
albeit, as with River, one from which he’s conspicuous by his absence – and the
arrival of a companion who isn’t, at this point in the timeline, a companion.
We mentioned the part
where it’s probably a good idea to have a nice lie down in a dark room, right?
If dark chronons didn’t
get you, you should probably start at about this point.
Anyone who read the IDW
comic Prisoners of Time might have a
touch of déjà vu about this story, but the chance to get some of the Doctor’s
friends together is never a particularly bad thing, and getting them to both
realise what he sees in and gets from each of them, and then work together to
defeat the frankly rather low-powered villain, is fun in and of itself. It
ultimately feels like a bit of a Doctor Who pantomime where the Doctor only
arrives in the final moments, and it seems to have very little, if anything, to
do with the ongoing storyline of the Ravenous, but is it a fun listen?
Absolutely, if you’re happy weaving timelines and listening to River be witty
in the face of torture.
And be honest – who isn’t?
Episode 3,
L.E.G.E.N.D., is the
now semi-traditional ‘fairytale episode.’ Last time, the idea of the Krampus in
Salzburg took us through the mid-section of the set, but here, we’re hanging
out with the Brothers Grimm, at least one of whom manages to remain mostly
conscious through most of the story. Again, there’s a fairly tangential connection
to the overall Ravenous story-arc, in that it centres on the actions, and
indeed the ego, of an alien professor who specialises in myths and folklore –
the Ravenous are the folklore of Gallifrey, and she knows a lot about them, but
that never really comes to the fore, because she’s decided to go and hang out
with the Grimms, who of course are experts in the folklore of their own little corner of space-time. Unfortunately,
she comes along with an intelligent and oddly aspirational AI, which has the power
to make the world in its own image. Before you know where you are or largely
why, Helen Sinclair’s turned into a fish, spell-rhymes change reality, and the
Doctor and a new travelling companion are having to gnaw their way through a
whole lot of gingerbread to make sense of a world gone mad. It’s a nice touch
of satire from Matt Fitton that the havoc of this episode is unleashed by an AI
earnestly trying to make the world ‘better’ – a touch of manifest destiny which
of course, like all such destinies depends for its usefulness on how one
determines what is ‘better.’ If you determine that ‘better’ means ‘more like a
Grimm fairy tale,’ you’re in a world of really pretty dark, unDisneyfied
folklore, from which escape is often deeply at odds with how we understand the actual world to work. As such,
L.E.G.E.N.D. is rather a fun detour from the main thread in and of itself – it
only becomes problematic when you’re paying for the Ravenous and the two mid-section
stories have only a tangential connection to them.
Finally this time, John
Dorney’s The Odds Against is…well more or less the Eighth Doctor meets the
Riddler from Batman, but with a deeply interesting twist. Near the portal where
the Ravenous were first imprisoned, there’s a gang of very understanding but
mostly silent monks, and a dead body. The monks, naturally enough, being monks,
have secrets, the Doctor extends his trust, Liv patently doesn’t, and an enemy
does that so very Doctor Who thing of having everything in their sights, and
then arguing themselves out of a small revenge, in order to play the longer
game and necessitate a fourth box set. Oh and there are clues. Listen out and
you can pick them up, thought to be fair, you could probably just leap to one
big conclusion and be just as right. Along the way, there’s a very particular
revelation which takes us all the way back to the events of Deeptime Frontier,
and how exactly the Ravenous eat their Time Lords. Trust us – that’s gonna be
important going forward.
Overall, Ravenous #3
delivers a lot of information pay-off for fans who’ve come three box sets in
without any particularly clear idea what these uber-predators actually are, or why they should care.
Absolutely, it delivers that in two of the four episodes, leaving the
mid-section as entertaining sub-stories in their own right, or diversionary
padding, depending on how kind you feel. There’s certainly enough in the middle two episodes to let you enjoy
them. You just have to get over the slight sense of dislocation from a plot-arc
to a couple of distracting adventures and back again. This time out though,
there’s certainly more meat on the bones of the Ravenous to help you through,
plus a companionfest, River Song being monstrously confusing with time and
smart-alecry (smart-Alexry, even?) and fun with gingerbread cottages. There’s
also significant evolution for one major character, along lines that could,
just possibly, help explain a thing or two in the Eighth Doctor Time War range.
Have a dark room and
perhaps a cup or two of soothing herbal tea on standby, because your brain may
rather hate you once you’ve made it through the mayhem of Ravenous #3 – it’s as
confusing as a River Song timeline, only with a couple of Time Lords, each of
whom have a number of voices at various stages of their lives. But crack on
with it – there’s enough here to make it worth the trip on its own merit, and
without it, anything that follows is likely to make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
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