Tony’s gone black and white.
The First Doctor Adventures were at
first a somewhat questionable enterprise, taking the Tardis cast from An
Adventure In Space And Time – who it’s probably fair to say were cast
mostly as lookalikes rather than soundalikes - and putting them in a set of
audio adventures.
That all seems quite a while ago now.
While it seems oddly the case that
Claudia Grant sounds more like TV-Susan when she’s just being interviewed as
Claudia Grant than when she’s aiming for the higher pitched RP of her
audio-Susan, the four stars of the First Doctor Adventures have really gelled
into an entirely coherent original Tardis team. David Bradley’s First Doctor is
a believable version of the character and Jamie Glover and Jemma Powell as Ian
and Barbara have eased into their roles over the course of the first three box
sets, which is just as well, because in terms of scripts, the two stories in
this fourth volume are biggies. There are no training wheels attached any more
– the cast have to nail their parts to the wall, or the nature of the scripts
will show the cracks, the joins and any hasty paste-overs in the performances.
Because quite apart from anything else,
we’re about to go back…to Skaro! (annnd cue end credits. No, really, there
should be end credits there. Oh fine, see how you are, no sense of drama…)
Return To Skaro by Andrew Smith really is a big deal. It’s a
retrospective second shot at a Skaro-based Dalek story, set before the Tardis
team deal with The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, at the end of which, as we
know, Susan leaves the ship.
The script itself has some gorgeously
period moments – the Dalek city they visited previously is there, but ruined,
and with new additions. A couple of seeming lightning conductor towers are
actually emitting a form of lightning into the sky, for complex reasons
that take a while to fully uncover.
The adventurers meet a happy band of
Thals, who explain that their chief scientist (and that’s where you get your
first shudder) has been working to make use of Dalek technology for Thal
purposes. There are tours taken, questions asked, and the Doctor gets to be
both open-mindedly curious and later, deeply finger-on-chin sceptical. I so
badly want to tell you about the Episode 1 cliffhanger it’s burning a hole in
my brain, but suffice it to say it’s word perfect for early Who cliffhangers,
and would absolutely have been how any return to Skaro ended its first episode,
so as to ensure kids remembered the art of playing at being Daleks all week
long and then tuned in ravenously the following Saturday.
There’s deception, deceit, fun with
tunnels, and as would have been absolutely demanded back in the day, there’s a
Dalek massacre of the Thals. This time, as the first time, it’s a stark warning
against taking people with bad intent at their word, only this time, there is
perhaps the first inkling that the Thals play a part in their own
extermination, trusting in the words of a traitor and believing, as humans
would do later in Power Of The Daleks and Victory of the Daleks that
a Dalek that doesn’t or cannot kill you immediately will not or cannot kill you
when it decides it needs to.
Besides all of which, Smith does the
thing any writer tasked with writing a First Doctor return to Skaro story would
be honour-bound by their young fan’s heart to do. He adds previously unknown
detail to the Daleks we met in The Dead Planet, and he takes them
forward to a new, momentous evolution which we in 2020 understand, but which in
1963-4 would have blown our little Dalek-loving minds.
Alongside all the treats of this story –
tunnel-fun, earnest Thals revering the Doctor and friends as legends, Thal
scientists trying to make head, tail or bumps out of Dalek technology, Andrew
Smith captures the sense of sheer scale of those early First Doctor stories
here – which is tricky to keep natural when all the scenery’s in your head and
has to be pointed out by one character or another. It feels like a true nod of
acknowledgement to Terry Nation, without necessarily subscribing to his ‘fill
an episode with a quest’ scriptwriting philosophy. There is some
questing in this story, but it feels natural and to a point, and Smith repays
the listener’s patience later with a really fast-paced ‘Get the hell out of
here now or the Daleks will kill you’ chase.
All in all, it takes some world-class
chutzpah to even imagine telling this story.
It takes some serious class to write it,
to make it real, and to perform it so it sounds like an entirely believable
sequel to The Dead Planet. That it works at all is testament to everyone
involved. That it works this well shows some god-level skills. Big Finish is
already having a big year. This story’s right up there among the crown jewels
of 2020 so far.
Follow that, Jonathan Barnes!
To be fair, asking that of Barnes is
absurd. His story, Last of the Romanovs is as different in tone
as could be imagined from Return To Skaro. Much more in line with The
Aztecs or The Reign Of Terror, this is a story over which
uncertainty and death hang from the very first moments, when the Tardis arrives
in Ekaterinburg, Russia, observed by only one man through a window across the
street.
Tsar Nicholas II. Last of the Romanovs –
at least, as far as we know for sure.
The premise of this story is dark, and
grey, and cold and all-round horrifying. There’s a ticking clock in our head,
because Tsar Nicholas is still alive in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and
we know, from our vantage point in history, that he doesn’t stay alive much
longer. At some point soon, soldiers will come into the room where Nicholas,
his wife Alexandria, and all their children are staying. And they will be shot
until they are dead.
History says so. And as the First Doctor
was fond of saying, we cannot re-write history. No, not one line.
Before that though, there’s plenty of
time for some hapless time travellers to get involved in plots, counter-plots,
disguises, mistakes and everything in between. The Doctor gets brought in to
see to the health of Nicholas’ young haemophiliac son. Barbara and Susan are
dressed as nuns to make contact with Alexandria and Anastasia, her daughter.
And there’s a case of an identity if not mistaken then at least misunderstood
as events move ever more implacably to the conclusion, we know they must reach.
Of special note in this story is Dan
‘Dan, Dan, the Sontaran’ Starkey, gloriously far from his usual stomping ground
as an officious and yet philosophically engaged Russian officer, Yakov
Yurovsky. In one particularly chilling sequence he takes the Doctor to the pit
where, in due course, the bodies of the final Romanovs will be dumped and
buried, and offers him one chance. A game of ‘Change My Mind,’ probably the
ultimate temptation for an interfering time traveller. It’s a cleft stick
situation for the First Doctor, who as yet is not experienced enough in time
and space to determine fixed points and flexible ones, and so has to stick to
the rules of not changing anything – at least not intentionally. He knows that
the rule of the Soviets will be brutal, will be massively homicidal, will be
horrible. But there’s little if anything he can say to change the mind of one
man who might yet change the course of history.
While the pure historicals often had
elements of romp about them, while educating the viewer and delivering on the
potential of getting caught up in history, this nevertheless feels like a
historical they could have and would have commissioned back in the day – its
history was still only half a century
behind the viewers in 1963-4, and the lesson of the rigidity of thinking and
how it leads only ever to death would have been one worth instilling in the
nation’s children. Whether it would have been quite this bleak on broadcast is
a different matter, but then the inevitability of death is leavened here at
least briefly by the likes of Barbara and Susan dressed as nuns, and there’s
compassion here too, as they pray with the Tsar’s family, not out of any specific religious
observance, but because it brings them comfort in their troubles. There’s also
a very neat moment between Susan and Anastasia which allows for a little
up-tick of hope just at the end, just a maybe, just a thread out of the ghastly
cloud of death that stains that day.
It’s a thread to which we cling as
listeners, needing it to be able to wipe the screen of our brains and head off
to the next adventure with this increasingly seasoned Tardis crew.
At the beginning of this review, I said
there were no training wheels any more for this team.
Backed with writing and sound design and
supporting actors like this, they don’t need them. They just need the team, and
the writing, and the powerful dream that was early Doctor Who.
Long may they sail.
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