Tony’s counting minutes.
Eleven.
Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten
– Eleven.
That’s how many listens it
took to get all the way through The Age of Endurance – an audio story
named with a staggering aptness. It took that many listens because every single
time I tried to get through it, The Age of Endurance defeated me.
Defeated consciousness at any rate – ten whole times it sent me to sleep.
This does not bode well.
Let’s get down to brass
tacks here. The Age of Endurance has been called a true Hartnell story,
not least in Doctor Who Magazine, because, as in some other Early
Adventures like The Bounty of Ceres, writer Nick Wallace takes up a good
twenty minutes with Simply Faffing About before the Tardis crew actually meet
anyone.
Then they meet some
people, and in fairly short order, you start to long for those early minutes
when they were Simply Faffing About.
The Lastborn are the
people they encounter, and they almost immediately set about making you wish
they were the Unborn – stomping about, issuing orders and splitting up the
Tardis crew, more or less because they read it in the script and Wallace needs
to divide the crew to give us an equality of peril on the two main ‘sets’
across which The Age of Endurance plays out – two ships, the Endurance
and the Vanguard. There’s a third ship which is crucial to the plot, but
there’s actually so little differentiation between any of them, what you end up
with is a game of Find The Peril, with our viewpoint shifting from one ship to
the other and back again more or less as necessary to tell the story, trying in
vain to sustain your interest enough to remember which ship is which.
The ship on which the
Tardis originally materialises is the Vanguard, and there’s a decent
enough mystery on board – it’s drifting in space, the crew have vanished, and
there’s a dead man behind a locked door. The mystery rather evaporates though
as soon as we meet The Shifts, a race of shapeshifting vampire alien lizard (yes,
really), who apparently have enslaved the Lastborn for a millennium. These
Lastborn, far from being the stompy angry humanoids they at first appear are
actually stompy angry victims, with character backgrounds and everything.
Except for the most part,
they’re interchangeable, as though Wallace watched The Dead Planet, with
its similarly named, similar looking Thal contingent, borrowed the idea, and
then vampire-sucked anything interesting out of them that might either let
us tell them apart, or, really, have any interest in doing so. They do start
getting vaguely interesting when we meet their Mother, if that’s any
consolation, and Rachel Atkins as Myla does inject some character into
proceedings. Beyond her though, The Age of Endurance is supposed to be a tense,
Das Boot affair that really has all the tension of the Battleship movie. There
are two factions, the Lastborn and the Shifts, there’s an impenetrable spatial
barrier which, naturally enough, one faction has managed to penetrate and the
other faction wants to. There’s a vampire theme and there are badly hidden and
regularly alluded-to secrets on which the destiny of everyone in the story will
of course ultimately hinge. There’s some running around, some coming back from
the dead, and an awful lot of exposition to try and add flesh and colour to the
bones of the story, but really, without that most crucial of things – a
storytelling hook – it feels distinctly flat on the ear.
And this is where the
issue with The Age of Endurance really lies – yes, plenty of genuine,
on-screen Hartnell stories were as predictable as this, as genuinely,
unfortunately dull as this, but you can take slavish replication too far when
you’re fifty years down the line and working without the same constraints of
budget and lead actor. Yes, these are meant to be the Early Stories, but if
you’re going to try and summon the spirit of Das Boot in space, you need
to engage us in the characters and the drama – and sadly, The Age of
Endurance does neither. It took eleven attempts to get through this story
simply because every time I tried, it sent me to actual, literal sleep. You
shouldn’t be able to sleep through a tense space stand-off – you simply
shouldn’t, and indeed, you probably wouldn’t if that’s what The Age of
Endurance offered. It conclusively misses the mark in terms of tension and
prefers vague nostalgia to audience engagement – for instance, this is the
story in which we welcome Jemma Powell as the new incarnation of Barbara
Wright. But if you’re going to go to the trouble of recasting so iconic a
companion, it would really do her a service to forego the honest reflection of
the Hartnell era that sees her carted off to a cryo-chamber halfway through and
playing no more than a silent role as ‘bargaining chip’ for much of the second
half. It’s unusual of Big Finish to bungle something like this – Elliot
Chapman’s introduction as the new Ben Jackson in The Yes Men was a
triumph, as was Tim Treloar’s (real) introduction as the new Third Doctor. So
it does a disservice to Powell to have her disappear from this story so
ignominiously halfway through her first chance to convince us that the new
Barbara is worth casting. Would the original Barbara have been cryo-chambered
halfway through? Yes, probably – but again, even when creating the Early
Adventures, you can take nostalgic accuracy too far for your own good. The
Age of Endurance serves as only a lukewarm launch story for Powell as the
Big Finish Barbara because it sticks too strictly to what the original
Hartnell-era writers would have done with her. Given the great strides Big
Finish has made in enriching and developing some less well-served Hartnell
companions, like Ian and Steven, The Age of Endurance feels like a
missed opportunity to serve up a story that allows the new Barbara to take much
more of a centre stage position, and begin developing her too.
All in all, The Age of
Endurance is a disengaging start to the third series of the Early Adventures,
aiming for gradually building tension, and missing spectacularly by not really
giving the listener anything on which to hang their interest. It misses the
chance to make the arrival of the new Barbara a celebration of character, and
it slavishly sticks to sixties precepts, designed to evoke nostalgia for the
cheapness of the early show, to the detriment of the listening experience.
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