Tony’s
up among the gods.
The stakes for
fans in Daughter Of The Gods are ridiculously high. You’d have to be
incredibly brave or stone barking mad to go anywhere near the storytelling
territory it covers.
Naturally
enough, it’s a freakin’ triumph.
I mean, right
up there with all the high water-marks you think of as outstanding Big Finish
triumph.
Given the cover
art which you’d have to have seen to buy the story, it’s no spoiler to tell you
this is a multi-Doctor story, almost literally crashing the Second Doctor,
Jamie and Zoe into the lives of the First Doctor, Steven and Katarina.
Yes.
Katarina.
She who came
from Troy after Vicki stayed behind in the city.
She who
laboured under the moderately morbid assumption that the Doctor was a god, the
Tardis his temple and that, at least to some degree, for both of these things
to be true and for her to experience them, she herself was probably dead.
She who
shockingly died not long after she arrived on board the Tardis, during the
events of The Dalek Master Plan.
The thing about
Katarina of course is the lack of wiggle room to fit any additional stories
into her Tardis time. With Jean Marsh’s Sara Kingdom, another casualty of the Master
Plan, Big Finish found a way to give her some additional adventures with
Steven and the Doctor. With Katarina, it’s fairly cut and dried – she joined,
she had the on-screen adventure of the Master Plan, and she died during
its time. The end. It’s part of what makes her time on board the Tardis so
shocking, the fact that she had little time at all to see the wonders of the
universe before she was killed by it, the first person to travel with him that
the Doctor, in some sense, failed to save.
How to you
deliver a Katarina story while staying true to the power of all of that?
More or less,
you do it just like this. A time crash in the vortex, narrowly avoided, takes
the First Doctor and his crew to a world where they have to stay for some time
so that Steven can recover from some injuries, the Doctor can earn some money
and prestige as an academic, and the Tardis can repair itself after such a
close temporal shave. Katarina, too, has the chance to immerse herself in the
local culture and exercise the wits no-one in Troy ever gave her particular
credit for having.
But she has bad
dreams.
Bad dreams that
continually tell her she is dead, or should be dead, that none of this amazing
life so far beyond her birth and station was meant to be.
And then their
comfortable, productive break is interrupted by hostile aliens.
Aliens with a
weapon that ages whole populations to death in an instant. Aliens with whom it’s
useless to plead for your lives or your liberty.
Aliens the
Doctor and Steven have met before.
When the Second
Doctor, Jamie and Zoe turn up on the planet in the middle of a mass exodus,
there are too many Doctors for a single planet to cope with, and the story
zeroes down to one moment, one decisive moment that set this timeline going.
One moment that changed the future for the entire universe.
The question
is, when all is revealed, digested and understood, will Katarina have the
strength to do what is called on her to do? And perhaps more importantly, will
the First Doctor have that same moral fortitude?
It takes them
both, ultimately, to set the timeline straight, and it takes the multi-Doctor
nature of the story to teach them both what ‘straight’ looks like in this
circumstance. It’s huge and moral and tiny and personal and if you don’t end up
sniffling at the end of this story, you might need a Grinch procedure to grow
the size of your heart, because the balance is perfect – half of you will want
one thing to happen, half of you another. There’s no winning in this situation,
but losing either way will wet your eyes.
Ajjaz Awad
steps into Katarina’s sandals for this story, and while it’s not a straight
impersonation of Adrienne Hill, she delivers a highly accessible version for a
modern audience, without sacrificing any of the rigidity of belief in her gods
and her understanding of the universe that Hill established back in the
Sixties. Katarina comes across as a warm, likeable innocent, with much to learn
and a straightforward view of the world, but an increasing ability to
understand the places and the company in which she finds herself.
The story, by
David K Barnes, is importantly not that grandiose in nature. It’s almost Dennis
Spoonerish at the start – the First Doctor and friends hanging out somewhere
over an extended period for perfectly logical reasons. But the establishment of
that normality, where Steven gets an engineering job while the Doctor hob-nobs
with the highfalutin’ academics, allows for the building of strong character
relationships that kick in when the world goes to hell in a very rapid handcart,
and add to our emotional buy-in to the terror of the mass evacuation when death
drops out of the sky.
Meanwhile, the
Second Doctor’s strand of the story is for the most part significantly calmer,
not least because he and his friends don’t come into the panic until late in
the game.
Nevertheless, there’s plenty
going on with the Troughton Doctor and his friends, and once they turn up and
meet Katarina and Steven, it’s almost as though they bring a calming influence
with them.
They don’t,
though.
That’s not what
they bring at all.
What they bring
is the central moral dilemma of the piece. It’s a dilemma not dissimilar to
that in Nikos Kantzakis’ Last Temptation of Christ. Which life is
better? That where you live, maybe, and everyone else lives in fear? Or that
where you die, definitely, but are remembered forever as having done the right
thing?
What David K
Barnes has delivered with Daughter of the Gods is an absolute hymn to
Katarina’s worthiness for the wider universe, for her place on board the
Tardis, without making it a soppy, heavy-handed mourning. It’s an
action-packed, character-rich belting slice of Sixties Who with 21st
century complications and sensitivities, and the budget of your whole
imagination – which also happens to sing a hymn to Katarina, the
Daughter of the Gods. Finding the best of Big Finish in any given year is
tricky. This may not make it to your absolute top spot, but if it’s not in your
top five, we’d be very much surprised.
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