Tony needs a lie down.
Ohhh boy.
Let’s say one thing right
up front: if you come to this story randomly, without having listened to much
of the few years before it, you’re going to be utterly baffled by Gods And
Monsters. This story’s a culmination, a drawing together of threads and a sprouting
of seeds that have been embedded in a long arc of Sylvester McCoy stories at
Big Finish, beginning with The Harvest, when the Doctor took on new companion
Hex (the always-excellent Philip Olivier), going through a whole black
Tardis/White Tardis time-space dichotomy… sequence, which brought military
companions, Captain Lysandra Aristedes and Private Sally Morgan to the party
alongside – and sometimes parallel to – Ace and Hex, and through a sequence
involving techno-vampires and a thing called The Forge, all drawing towards a
climax that can be summed up in six words: The Curse Of Fenric, Part 2.
Yep – that really
shouldn’t be a spoiler to you, the cover art for this story’s crawling with
Haemovores. What we’re dealing with here is the even-more-ultimate-than-last-time
battle between Time’s Champion and Fenric, the Shatterer of Worlds. If the
first round somehow made sense to you, you stand at least a fighting chance of
making it out of this sequel alive.
Which is more than can be
said for all of the Tardis crew.
On a world where physics
appears to be on a lunch break, there are gods, there are monsters, and there
are the two ancient players, the chess-game of the universe played for enormous
stakes – if Fenric wins, its chains will shatter and it will final be able to
fully manifest itself in our puny little universe of flesh. The Doctor pits his
wits and the lives of his companions against the Elder God of chaos and death,
but there are forces here that neither he nor Fenric have counted on – or have
they?
Gods And Monsters is a
full-on, high-octane, screamingly emotional ride into the scale of battle the
Doctor’s been playing with Fenric since long before The Curse of Fenric popped
up on screen. This is Doctor Who for people who liked the more convoluted New
Adventure novel arcs, the Faction Paradox adventures, the Eighth Doctor’s audio
sojourn into a parallel universe of far-out weirdness, or come to that, those
who can follow the Time War box sets without coming over with a fit of the
timey-wimey vapours. It’s by no means a story for the faint-hearted, the
newbie, the wanderer-in. You need to put the work in to conquering the stories
of a peculiar past before you’re ready to make sense of Gods and Monsters, by
Mike Maddox and Alan Barnes.
If you’re ready for it though
– if you’ve followed the threads and senses the impending climax – then Gods
and Monsters delivers shocks, thrills, twists, blood, death and more besides,
in a conclusion that, certainly more than The Curse Of Fenric, gives you the
scale of the Elder Gods and the epic battle Fenric and the Doctor have been
embroiled in. If anything, one of the problems with it is that it elevates the
Doctor to Super-Godhood, more or less because anyone or anything less should
absolutely fail. That’s the consequence of course of making your villain the
ultimate ultimate ultimate evil. To beat it, you have to have a hero
who’s bigger and better than anything you can currently imagine, and it rather
runs the risk of pushing the doctor too far in that direction. That said, it
does also punch him back down to being a David standing against his personal
Goliath when people, when pawns and knights and players start to fall around
him. There’s outstanding work by the companions in this story too, everything
elevated, everything tense as a bowstring, with Ace, Hex, Lysandra and Sally
all reaching points of destiny which define who they are and where they go from
here. Certainly, after Gods and Monsters, nothing will be the same again for
any of them, and arguably not for the Seventh Doctor either. It is, in a sense,
the big battle that his life on audio has been building up to, the battle the
Seventh Doctor’s life has been building to ever since the events of The Curse
Of Fenric, and certainly the battle to which small events and large ones have
been leading him in the audio stories leading up to this event.
The point of all of which
rhetoric is that you really need to hear Gods And Monsters. Most Seventh
Doctor fans are Curse of Fenric fans in any case, so the idea of an audio rematch
with the Elder God is enough to make it irresistible to many. The fact that you
need to put the work in and get through a whole slew of other audios to get the
full effect of Gods And Monsters is somewhat unavoidable, and the journey is
not particularly easy at many points – you’re going to need to keep a hold of
your sanity as some of the stories that lead to this finale are bizarre in the
extreme (The Magic Mousetrap, I’m especially looking at you…). But in a world
where people watch eight seasons of Game Of Thrones just to find out what the
hell eventually happens, Gods and Monsters is a story whose time has probably,
finally, come.
Strap yourself in, go back
to The Harvest, listen to a shedload of other stories first, and then prepare
yourself for the epic screaming weirdness that is Gods and Monsters.
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