Tony’s on his Walkman.
Delivering a first person
audio story about the audio medium has been done before, and with great effect
– if you’ve never heard the audiobook version of Dead Air, by James
Goss, go and hunt that down immediately.
There are similarities
between that Tenth Doctor story and this Twelfth Doctor Short Trip from John
Richards. During his time at St Luke’s university in Bristol in Series 10, but
seemingly before he meets wide-eyed inquisitive chip-doler Bill, the Twelfth
Doctor finds himself getting involved with the university’s Audio-Visual Club.
He goes to them in search of that once ubiquitous, now increasingly obsolete
device, a cassette player, having discovered a curious tape in the Tardis
during the rigorous alphabetization of his Jelly Babies, and having nothing of
his own on which to play it since that mad girl with the baseball bat blew it
up. Or was that the Cybermen…?
Anyhow, in search of a
tape deck, he meets Petra – quantum physics student by day, Audio-Visual Club
geek by any remaining time, and also, tech lead on the university’s podcast,
‘The People of St Luke’s.’
When they play the tape,
things get increasingly creepy and odd and nostalgic, but also – be warned –
increasingly complicated. When echoes are not exact echoes, what are they?
Big Finish is good at messing with your head through sound – you could say it’s
the company’s stock in trade – but here, the majority of the scares are
delivered both on the page and through Jacob Dudman’s performance.
And key to the emotional
and science fiction dramas here is one key question - if there’s something
trapped on a tape, is there a reason it’s trapped on there?
This is an interesting
story of the Twelfth Doctor’s particular fallibility, his judgment forever trapped
between trying to be a good man and actually being one, and how it can
sometimes lead him into trouble, and sometimes cost the lives of those who
stand close to him without his particular Time Lord advantages. He even
references a couple of prior instances here – it was he who brought the
Mandragora Helix to Earth in his fourth incarnation, and he who brought the
Family of Blood to Earth in that thing that we all thought was his tenth
incarnation but was technically his eleventh, which we still insist on calling
the Tenth Doctor because names and stuff. The one that looked a lot like David
Tennant. Alright, the first of the ones that looked a lot like David
Tennant *Shakes fist at sky, yells names of two former showrunners in head.*
The point stands though –
on the day the Doctor gets things wrong, he has a tendency to get them really
wrong, and people tend to die as a result. So, if you see something
trapped, and you let your own sense or memory of what being trapped was like
affect your judgment, you could well unleash the end of the world based on
little more than your need to see things free. While Dead Media came
first, a very recent example of this same syndrome in the Doctor’s psychology
of course was seen in Can You Hear Me? – egged on by Graham, the
Thirteenth Doctor freed a sadistic god from the prison in which it was
perfectly effectively trapped, and then had to undo her own rash action before
the universe could sleep at night.
Here, there’s a ‘monster’
that isn’t one, but whose existence in our universe is a danger to itself and
others, let loose in our dimension because the Doctor had memories of working
for UNIT and trying everything in his power to break free of his exile. There
are consequences here too, and if the Doctor succeeds in putting things right,
it’s important to note that there are some consequences you can’t undo with a
wave of your screwdriver and a heartfelt apology.
In terms of the delivery
of this story, Jacob Dudman’s some sort of joyous vocal freak of nature, adding
a third New Who Doctor to his repertoire, and for all it begins with a voice
that sounds more like an exhausted Tenth Doctor than a realistic Twelfth, the
longer you listen, the more Twelvish it becomes, so you’re completely along for
the ride long before the end. There are challenges to the delivery in the way
this story is structured too – rather than, as with the likes of Best Laid
Plans, allowing the narrator to be omniscient, and the Twelfth Doctor
merely a voice to be dropped into, here, the whole thing is in the first
person, so it’s the Twelfth Doctor from start to finish, doing impressions of
other voices along the way, like the Twelfth Doctor doing impressions of Petra
from Port Talbot in Wales. Oh, the fun of accents.
Nevertheless, Dudman
perseveres and delivers a strong vocal performance which, as mentioned,
convinces more often than it doesn’t.
There are moments as we
hurtle towards a solution to the problem – ideally one that doesn’t result in
reality being torn to accidental shreds – when a basic grounding in either
quantum physics, audio-visual engineering or ideally both would come in handy,
and the solution that’s found is decidedly heavy on the geek. Because the
Doctor’s relating these events in the form of a podcast, it’s probably also the
only Doctor Who adventure to be interrupted by adverts for Bristolian kebab
shops. Yes, really – one of the sheer delights of this story is the notion of
Captain Eyebrows being forced to read out soulless advertising copy as if it
has even the slightest tangential meaning or relevance to him. Bliss.
Dead Media is a story that delivers the complexity
of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor to a tea – it’s grumpy, and offhand, and almost
dismissive, but it’s all of those things in a way that makes you love it, and
him, and the way he misses the little things in life while focusing on the
bigger picture. It’s a story that’ll spark a desire in you to go back and watch
Capaldi at work, reminding you of just how staggeringly good he could be –
which is probably as much of a compliment as John Richards and Jacob Dudman are
looking for. Between them, they bring the Twelfth Doctor joyously, grumpily
back to life, and give us an adventure during his life at St Luke’s with a
poignant moment of self-realisation at its end. He might be there guarding
Missy in her prison, but perhaps, just perhaps, the period of enforced
stillness will have a positive impact on his own persona too.
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