Tony joins the gang.
Full disclosure – I’m a
Paternoster Gang fan through and through. This release, and the news that there
will be at least three more sets of adventures with the gang to come, was
always going to be like Christmas to me.
If you’re not
instinctively a Paternoster Gang fan, this first set has one real job – to
convince you that the Paternoster Gang on audio has more scope to give you
pleasure than they had on TV, playing second-fiddle to a wandering Time Lord.
Well, first of all of
course, this spin-off series puts Madame Vastra the Silurian, Jenny Flint, her
maid and wife (#ItsComplicated), and Strax, their Sontaran butler and
grenade-fetishist, front and centre. That means there’s less clutter here than
on-screen, because the gang are not fighting for breath around the margins of
stories focused on a Doctor and a companion, both of whom by the nature of the
show are designed to take the spotlight. Here, the spotlight has shifted to the
Paternosters, and their world can expand to fill that light. So for non-fans,
perhaps perversely, putting them front and centre can dilute some of the things
about the gang that don’t ‘click’ in mainstream TV Who.
Secondly, Big Finish has
form in delivering compelling, funny, tense, character-driven stories of odd
goings-on in Victorian London – in Jago & Litefoot, the company turned two
well-written subsidiary characters into thirteen hugely-loved box sets that
would have undoubtedly gone on had Trevor Baxter not sadly died. So arguably,
The Paternoster Gang #1 would be worth a punt in any case because without a
doubt, Big Finish knows its business, and it’s aiming both to satisfy existing
fans and win new ones with these Paternoster Gang stories.
But let’s get to the
specifics of this set.
The Cars That Ate
London! by Jonathan Morris
is a story that’s part social allegory, part historical extrapolation, part
bizarre sci-fi horror story, that allows the Paternoster Gang to ease into your
consciousness as a unit in their own right. Morris gives us a semi-traditional
pathway into the story – as Holmes and Watson had Inspector Lestrade to get
baffled and involve them in cases, the Paternoster Gang have Inspector Cotton
to fill that role and occasionally cast them into intrigue and adventure. The
Cars That Ate London! draws attention to several issues that were pertinent in
the Victorian era and are pertinent again now – electric cars and power
stations being the two most central. Electric cars in Victorian London?
Apparently so – never underestimate the openness of the Victorian mind. There
were trials of electric cars that long ago, it was just that petrol-driven
versions were more reliable, more economical and less altogether creepy than
their electric counterparts. Here, electric cars are a viable option being
pushed by a kind of Victorian Elon Musk (Alien Musk, maybe?), who has a vision
of a world free from the pollution and oil-dependence to which the development
of petrol cars will lead.
In a development that taps
into more current fears about self-driving cars, when your ecological
salvation starts driving into crowds and getting car-nivorous, things are
clearly out of hand. When it emerges that the vision of a polluted future it is
exactly that – a vision – we quickly shift gears from identifying an
oddness to dealing with some timey-wimey alien influence here, and the
Paternoster Gang are what you need if that’s what you’re facing. That’s a
fundamental of this series – where Jago & Litefoot had a strong tendency
towards the more human and supernatural sides of the Victorian nature, the
Paternoster Gang are more or less all about the alien. In The Cars That Ate
London!, the nature of the alien issue is on the small side, but the impact of
just a tiny bit of dickering about with time and established causality clearly
has the potential to spiral massively out of control, and so has to be stopped.
The story’s both
pertinent, vaguely prophetic and briskly told, while there’s plenty of time and
scope for character moments. If you’re not keen on Strax as a ‘comedy Sontaran’
in Doctor Who, it’s time to embrace the comedy that comes from his ‘potato out
of water’ situation and the fundamentals of his character. Here, for instance,
Jenny’s been trying to teach the solo Sontaran to speak ‘cocker-knee’ so as to
move with less stompy obviousness among the communities of the East End.
Ultimately though, it’s Vastra who’s most cogently able to deal with the threat
here, as it’s her, of the three, who’s able to be most ‘Doctorish’ when such a
thing is needed. Nevertheless, there’s room for all three of the gang to have
their moment in this introductory story, and it leaves you not only feeling
like you’ve had a rollicking Victorian adventure with a relatively new bunch of
audio friends, but pondering what we in the 21st century are
actually going to do about the balance between our need for technology and our
need to protect the planet for generations to come.
A Photograph To
Remember, by Roy Gill, is
the most poignant of the three stories in this set, taking us into the world of
memorial photography – photos of dead people, posed as though they’re alive, to
give a kind of ‘life-memory’ of their subject. At first, that feels a little
macabre to 21st century mindsets, but to the Victorians, it made a
particular kind of sense. You wouldn’t want to remember someone looking dead,
would you? That would be simply ghoulish!
That conceit leads us into
the meat of this episode, which involves a hefty chunk of Paternoster
world-building. If Holmes had his Moriarty, then it turns out our Paternoster
Gang have their own equal-and-opposite power stalking the streets of London – the
Bloomsbury Bunch. One Silurian, one human, one Sontaran. Their dynamics are
radically different, and so are their aims, but whether they can actually be
defined as evil in this adventure is up for debate. They have plans,
absolutely, but the plans they have spiral wildly out of control, leading from
what is basically an inept filing system to a fairly full-on zombie apocalypse,
with additional bodyswapping fun!
Unravelling the threads of
their plans from the consequences that are their first visible results, through
the zombie – or more accurately, revenant – apocalypse, to the again-tiny bit
of alien gubbins responsible for the whole thing is a process that takes up most
of the episode, giving it the feel of a rational investigation against a
ticking clock. Adding in the Anti-Paternosters’ personalities, relationships
and power structures is a glorious complication that ultimately pushes
everything to a knife-edge. If part of the first box set’s job is to broaden
the Paternosters’ world into something on which they can more comfortably (and,
for those who weren’t fans of theirs on TV, less irritatingly) stamp their
personalities, and where they can be the enjoyable focus of their own
adventures, then the delivery in Roy Gill’s story of an equal-and-opposite
group with a different dynamic is a key part of that broadened canvas.
Also, purely in terms of
casting, bringing back Christopher Ryan as the Anti-Strax who’s in charge of
the Bloomsbury Bunch is a stroke of right-feeling genius. It will be
interesting, based on this first story, to see how their relationship to one
another develops in future.
And finally, when is a
ghost not a ghost?
Well, practically always,
admittedly, but particularly when they’re drifting about the place looking all
ethereal before they’ve technically shuffled off this mortal coil.
In The Ghosts Of
Greenwich by Paul Morris,
there’s an enormous scope to the storytelling, taking us from disreputable
drinking dens and human pals of Strax (the invention of a character called ‘Old
Smallpiece,’ played by Trevor Cooper, who can serve as another story-conduit
for the future is another stroke of genius here), to the Royal Observatory, a
potential time-thief, and the glorious contradiction that is the line of
meridian – a seemingly arbitrary line drawn on the ground that can determine
what the time is for the rest of the world. It’s highly-structured drama, with
a solidly spooky starting premise that builds to proper alien creepiness and
power, for a standoff finale that proves the Paternoster Gang can handle the
big angry alien threats as well as the smaller misused technology episodes.
Bottom line, if you liked
the Paternoster Gang as sidekicks to the Doctor on TV, you’re going to love
them here as their world is expanded and they’re allowed to live lives more
centred in their own day-to-day adventures. If you didn’t, and even if you
hated comedy Sontarans and lesbian lizards, you’re going to need to check this
box set out – Big Finish, as we may have mentioned, knows its stuff. It’s
worked hard to place the gang very firmly in their own world, and in that
world, they’re shiny and funny and clever and kickass and tender and caring and
funny some more. There are challenges to their set-up, there are Sapphire and
Steely elements of creepiness and there’s even a degree of steampunk
sensibility that makes this first box set feel like the start of something really
rather special.
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