Tony’s emerging from cryo-stasis.
Much of the time, the
point of Big Finish audio is that it can tell stories to fans who are hardwired
into the concepts of their favourite shows, fans who are older and more steeped
in the hows and whys of those shows, so the stories themselves can be more real
and less child-orientated than the TV version can be, aimed as it is in the
case of Doctor Who at a mixed family audience with at least one child in the
group.
Then just occasionally,
you come across stories like Cry Of The Vultriss, which have a feeling
to them that’s precisely like the TV version of the show from whichever era is
appropriate.
Early on, you can
absolutely imagine Cry Of The Vultriss as an 80s Sixth Doctor on-screen story.
All in all, that’s not
something that overly recommends it to the listener.
There are at least three
separate storylines at work in Cry Of The Vultriss, at least one of
which never gets the kind of satisfactory resolution you may be expecting from
Big Finish – but it does remind you of stories like The Mysterious Planet,
which had the Doctor and Peri walking off into the distance pondering the many
questions to which they still needed answers.
The Vultriss are
bird-people, and they’re bird-people in that distinctively Classic Who way in
which the Menoptera are butterfly-people, or Azmael’s followers in The Twin
Dilemma are a different kind of bird-people, rather than say, that New Who
way in which the Cat Nuns are cat-people, or the Shansheeth are…well,
bird-people. You can imagine the Vultriss mostly as actors in suits with layers
of make-up on, which subverts the power of audio to make them properly
bird-people.
In particular, that’s a
feeling underlined by the fact that the Vultriss are bird people…who cannot
fly.
There’s quite a bit of
Vultriss societal background delivered in Darren Jones’ story – they used to be
able to fly, there’s an equivalent to a witch-trial in which the victim either
flies and is innocent or doesn’t fly and is guilty, so their plunge to their
death is only right and proper, and we arrive in the midst of a Vultriss civil
war. The previously rightful queen, Jabule, has been ousted by the arrival of
an upstart mythical messiah, Queen Skye, who has the power of ‘The Cry’ –
essentially a squawk that kills. Silly in the abstract, it more or less works
in the context of Jones’ story. Ousted Vultriss queens though tend not to take
it lightly, and Jabule has become the leader of a group resisting the
leadership of Queen Skye, who are regarded as terrorists by that queen.
With us so far? Bird Wars
is Storyline 1.
Storyline 2 is that the
Doctor, Flip and Constance are on their way somewhere utterly else when, for
mysterious reasons, they fall out of the vortex and end up on Cygia-Rema, home
of the Vultriss. Why they fall out of the vortex, and the threat inherent in
that fall? Storyline 2.
Storyline 3 is, to put it
mildly, an homage to The Monster Of Peladon. The Vultriss, furiously
isolationist for most of their history, are about to welcome ambassadors from
space for the very first time, and initially, the Doctor, Constance and Flip
are mistaken for those ambassadors.
Nope. It’s the Ice
Warriors.
Gimme a break, they’re on
the cover, they can’t be that much of a spoiler.
The Ice Warriors here are
rather fabulous fun – there’s an Ice Queen, played by Adele Lynch, who played
the Ice Queen in Empress Of Mars on TV, there’s plenty of hissy,
stomping, growly fun from Nicholas Briggs as ‘the rest of the Ice Warriors,’
and one loyal underling in particular who’s a credit to the stompy, speedy
lizard-men from Mars we know and love. The homaging of The Monster Of
Peladon comes within an inch of its life, with questions over which Ice
Warriors are the Right Ice Warriors, and which, if any, are a bunch of Ice
Chancers. And there’s even a glorious handful of callbacks to stories like The
Ice Warriors and The Seeds Of Death when we first encountered the
Ice Warriors in all their conquering glory.
This is perhaps the point
– as an Ice Warrior story, Cry Of The Vultriss is top notch. As the
story of a narrative hacked, abused and brought to life for nefarious purposes,
it’s excellent. As the story of the Vultriss, the fundamentals are excellent,
there just seems little need for them to actually be bird-people, other
than that Classic Who reaching ambition that says ‘Sure, make them bird-people,
why not?’ As the story of rebellions, overthrows and clashes of power-groups it
works perfectly well, but the nature of the Vultriss as bird-people feels
overlaid mostly for 80s kitschy swank, and as such it rarely convinces.
But most of all, despite
developing into a threat which powers most of the latter half of the story, the
reason the Doctor and his friends are there is distinctly underexplored and
underexplained. If you recall the likes of Timelash, or again The
Mysterious Planet, and that sense of there being a whole other story that
was told before we got there, that’s the vibe of this storyline too – there are
things set in motion apparently by the wanton carelessness of another species,
and which feed into both the other storylines, but which are never resolved.
Why things are the way they are is left for an uncertain other adventure to
explain to us. While there’s a certain gambling value in doing things like
this, here the sensation is one of missing explanation rather than tantalizing
intrigue, and it rather lessens one’s ability to engage with the drama.
Essentially then, Cry
Of The Vultriss is a story with three strands, one of which, the Ice
Warrior strand, is clear and excellent, one of which, the Vultriss strand, is
complex and interesting, for all it feels unnecessary that they’re bird-people,
and the third of which, the why are we here and what must we do strand, feels
underbaked and pace-forced, leading to a degree of disengagement with the
whole.
Overall then, Cry Of
The Vultriss is a good-ish story, with plenty for people to do, especially
Flip and Constance, but falls short of being hugely memorable or demanding a
re-listen by giving only a limited explanation of why things are the way they
are.
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