The very notion of a Time War is enough
to give you a blinding migraine the moment you cross its threshold, because not
only do all the laws of life as we understand it bugger off to the restaurant
at the end of the universe at that point, but
all the laws of conventional storytelling give a bit of a hopeless shrug
and trudge after them too. Cause and effect, life and death, past and future as
determined by memory – everything goes immediately into flux and what you could
very easily end up with is a long, loud, looping, endless scream as the walls
of causality stove your head in.
This – with additional notions about
budgets – is possibly why Russell T Davies, no stranger to ambition and himself
the inventor of the idea of the last great Time War, regarded its events as
‘unfilmable.’
We’re a long way on from that
declaration now – we’ve seen the last day of the Time War on TV, and in audio,
Big Finish has been giving us angles on the conflict for quite some time and in
plenty of ways – we’ve heard some of the adventures of the War Doctor, we’re
gloriously continuing to hear what the War Master was up to during the days of
the war, we’ve lived through some of the Time War from a Gallifreyan
perspective, and in particular, alongside his adventures with at least slightly
earlier companions, Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor – the last of the ‘pre-war’
Doctors, and as such the Doctor who brings the crusading moral certainties of
the Classic era to their point of universal crisis when faced with unparalleled
horror – is moving inexorably towards the point where his position of
neutrality or sheer, dogged cheerful helpfulness becomes untenable, and he
becomes the Doctor who could fight a war.
The third box set of Eighth Doctor Time
War stories deals with temporal flux, the mathematics of survival, moral
ambiguity, and the cost of a clear memory, while delivering some hardcore
storytelling and an arc that seems designed to push the Eighth Doctor nearer
and nearer to the edge of exhaustion, while giving him some solid, if slightly
desperate, speeches encapsulating those old and increasingly frayed moral
certainties.
No no, come back, it’s also got some
really fun bits, honest!
If there’s a story that comes closest to
proving why a Time War would be unfilmable, it’s Matt Fitton’s The
State Of Bliss, an opening story that will absolutely leave you needing
a long lie down in a dark room. Bliss, the Eighth Doctor’s companion played by
Rakhee Thakrar, has always had a whiff of temporal anomaly about her – her
origin story jumped about a bit at first, absolutely on purpose, and while her
role in the second Eighth Doctor Time War box set was more stable, she
became a person of interest for the Time Lords involved in fighting the war as
a result of being a temporal oddity. They love a temporal oddity, those
big-hatted devious Gallifreyan gits.
The State Of Bliss seems to explain why Bliss is such a
question-mark in the primordial soup of time and space. We get to see various
snippets from her life or lives, and the characters with whom she formed some
of the bonds that led her to where she is. The plot underneath all this is
screamingly devious and yet altogether logical and mundane, when eventually
explained in words of a lowish number of syllables. Without going into too much
spoilerific detail, a line from the story declares that ‘a fruit machine always
pays out.’ The reason Bliss is the way she is can be expressed by the fact that
it very rarely pays out the first time you pull the handle.
There’s a quite stunning naturalism to
the performances in this story from actors of great quality, including Nina
Wadia as Bliss’ tutor Professor Deepa, Anjli Mohindra as her mate and potential
partner Calla, and John Scougall as her other mate and probably more entirely
optimistic wannabe partner, Ryall. All these actors make for a scenario that
lives and breathes like a real memory, like peering into Bliss’ diary of her
student days. Most impressive of the lot though is Thakrar herself, who more
than in either of her previous box sets, really comes into her own as a
companion in this third outing, developing that comfort in quipping that is
sometimes necessary when running alongside the Doctor, and marking out Bliss’
character as determined, able, brilliant when necessary and possessed of a
strong moral sense which amplifies – and occasionally props up – the Doctor’s
own. Think somewhere between a Clara Oswald and a Jo Grant, with a little of
something that’s unique to Bliss herself, and you get an attractively natural,
real-seeming person. Which, let’s not forget, is no mean feat when playing
someone who’s less than usually sure of her own origins or nature.
The regularity with which we’re forced by
experience to say lovely things about Lisa McMullin’s stories is probably
sickening to some. But she will keep knocking things out of the park. In The
Famished Lands, she steers away from the esoteric timey-wimeyness of Matt
Fitton’s opener and demands we consider war as a real thing. The Vale of
Iptheus may be far from the chrono-quivering front lines of the Time War, but
the effects of the conflict are having real, horrifying consequences there. As
Britain hangs on a precipice of uncertainty over the effects on trade of a
no-deal Brexit, McMullin gives us a story that has the cutting off of trade
routes at its core. With those routes severed, imports dry up. When imports dry
up, the responsibility of feeding a mass populace falls solely of a domestic
planetary government. And when there’s not enough to eat, people will end up
simply starving to death.
The Doctor and Bliss arrive on Iptheus
to discover happy starving people, but there’s much more to the story than that.
Dealing with governmental paternalism up to and beyond the point of the death
of swathes of its own citizens, there’s some solid sci-fi in the story too,
with food that fills you up but gives you no nutritional benefit, and a
somewhat Harryhausen twist that’s both horrifying and a geeky delight to hear.
Make no mistake though, this is a hard-hitting story of the state, the
individual, the mathematics of who gets to survive in times of crisis and why –
and it will probably shock you. Science fiction at it’s best is supposed
to shock you and make you think about your own world. Lisa McMullin’s story in
this box set will do just that. It’ll also give you possibly the most memorable
McGann Doctoring in the set, in his response to questions about why he’s doing
a particular thing. Just listen – you won’t miss the moment.
Roland Moore’s Fugitive In Time has a somewhat Pertweean feel – the Doctor on a mission for
the Time Lords, and accompanied by a Time Lord, Adele Anderson’s superb
new take on Tamasan, a more scorched-earth strategist who’s followed the Doctor
through the Time War arc. A planet locked off by virtue of an unfriendly
atmosphere, the Daleks in orbit waiting to come and seize a particularly juicy
piece of techno-kit, and the Doctor and his friends going undercover in a
semi-feudal land to find a special visitor from the stars. Any story which can
feature the legend that is Wendy Craig as a genetic scientist from a species so
morally dodgy as to be faced with eradication from the timeline by the Time
Lords has got to be worth a listen, and here, we see very clearly the
difference between Tamasan’s straight down the line Gallifreyan dedication and
the more freewheeling, open-minded, open-hearted approach of the Doctor to
people and species the ‘official’ history would cast as villains.
And then there’s the Valeyard.
Michael Jayston. As the Valeyard. During
the Time War.
I know – shut up and take alllll the
money, right?
The War Valeyard, by John Dorney, is more or less everything you think
you want in a Valeyard story, with a dollop of something extra-interesting on
top.
The delicacy with which you need to
write a Time War Valeyard story should not at any point be underestimated,
especially when aiming at an audience which has already experienced the more
morally ambiguous War Doctor, and the War Master, somewhat driven by the war
towards the dark side of the status quo. What space, in all that moral
tapestry, exists in which to write a particular Time War Valeyard story? How
can he be different, if at all, from the Trial of a Time Lord Valeyard?
How can he even be there during the Time War?
John Dorney gives Jayston room to play,
both in terms of the sharp, verbose Trial Valeyard, and the new and noticeably
different Time War Valeyard, in a story that conflates issues of memory and
identity. ‘A man is the sum of his memories, you know; a Time Lord even more so,’
said the Fifth Doctor in The Five Doctors. And in a space and time in
which even the Doctor will later repudiate his own claim to the name of the
Doctor, putting heroism behind him, Dorney creates an identity issue that might
help the Valeyard find a different way to be.
You can, if you’re a fan of transposing
personal issues into your science-fiction, see The War Valeyard as an
examination of memory in the face of something like dementia – if you’re not
who you think you are, but you act as you believe you would, what is the
‘reality’ of your life and circumstance? And is it kinder to snap you out of a
comfortable, pleasurable fiction or to leave you in a state of confusion and
medication if it makes you happier than any colder, darker reality would be?
If you don’t want to do any of that of
course, you can enjoy The War Valeyard as a cracking meet-up between the
Eighth Doctor, the Daleks, and the Valeyard in a time and space that allows him
a freedom he’s never previously had. Oh and you’re going to want to listen to
the ending. Many, many times. The ending is guaranteed squee-fodder, and will get
you writing pleading tweets to Big Finish to beg for some kind of sequel. (Note
to self – would that make it a squeequel?)
(Second note to self – never, ever say
that again…)
All told, there’s a balance across the
four stories here that gives the set a distinctly Time War feel – mind-melting
alternate timeline-bleed in The State Of Bliss, socially conscious
sci-fi with some really hard hits in The Famished Lands, a daring quest
into unknown territory with dubious allies, implacable enemies and a hearty
line in double-crossing and chicanery in Fugitive In Time, and a joyful
dissertation on memory and character in The War Valeyard. Along the way,
a cast of impeccable quality – Jayston, Wadia, Mohindra, Craig help
the regulars to achieve a level of naturalism which anchors their adventures in
human, understandable emotions and reactions, even as increasingly the universe
is falling to pieces round their ears. You might have to push harder than
you’re used to just to get through The State Of Bliss because of its
reality-shredding premise, but it pays you off for your effort, and acts as the
gateway to what is probably the best set in the Eighth Doctor Time War
series so far.
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