Tony’s declaring war – on the past!
The Paternoster Gang have
been deserved their own spin-off since they first appeared on-screen.
Understandably then, their first sequence of box sets on audio for Big Finish
has become a firm fan favourite.
In Heritage 3,
there’s more focus on where each of the Paternosters has come from, what
they’ve had to overcome or escape from, and the courage it took to establish
their family of successful outcasts.
In Family Matters by
Lisa McMullin, we discover Jenny’s background and why it’s especially tricky
for her relationship with Vastra. Without spoilering the plot details for you,
this episode takes us from the respectable finery of Paternoster Row to the
vivid, rapacious reality of Victorian freakshows, while using the Dickensian
plot-twist of a long-lost relative coming back out of nowhere to good geeky science
fiction effect.
While Madam Vastra (Eve
McIntosh) very nearly loses her cool – a recurring theme in this set, as her
time among humans becomes harder to bear – it’s Jenny (Catrin Stewart) who’s
front and centre in this story. She’s always been a character about whom we
could stand to know more – how, after all, does a young Victorian woman become
the lover, wife, protector and maid of a lizard-woman from the dawn of history,
when her society would bar her from getting above her station and transgressing
its rules in almost all of those roles?
Jenny Flint has obviously
not had an easy life. She arguably doesn’t have one now with Vastra and Strax,
either, but she’s fought the expectations of her family, her peers, and her
society to achieve what she has – the love of a good woman, the respect of a
fellow warrior, and a place where, beyond the façade they raise to keep society
from its own scandalised morality, she can call home and mean it. This story
takes us in greater detail into the nature of that fight, that flight from
everything that biology promised as the Victorian daughter of the parents she
had, and shows us in particular Jenny’s quest to be better in her own mind than
the prospects of her stars.
There are moments here
where the dynamic between Vastra and Jenny feels like it might topple, like the
truth about Ms Flint’s background, always hinted at, never illuminated till
now, might in itself prove too different, too dark, too somehow shameful for
Vastra, and you’ll hear Jenny’s sadness, her fear, her need to prove herself
different from everyone around her in her youth. It’s a plea to disregard
everything but her, and it’s not that uncommon in relationships that break
moulds or dare to reshape the world in their own image. This one point we’ll
spoiler for you – there’s a falling together, a clinging to what they have, at
least for now, that will flood you with relief in this story, because Lisa
McMullin’s not scared to take you to the brink, to show us the truth that
knowing where people have come from is sometimes enough to bring out the worst
in us, unless we, like Vastra here, can find the healthy tipping point and fall
further into, rather than out of love, to grow more respectful of the fight to
escape than resentful of the starting point of the people we love.
Whatever Remains, by Robert Valentine, smashes a couple of
worlds together – Vastra and the gang are investigating a mythical beast-legend
that may be keeping a will from being honoured, giving off strong Sherlock
Holmes vibes. It’s a similarity that doesn’t go entirely unnoticed by the
locals, one of whom has the hots for that manly Mr Strax (seriously, you’ve not
lived properly or well until you’ve heard Annette Badland try to flirt with Dan
Starkey in full-on Strax mode). And there is a Holmesian mystery here – who’s
who and what they’re up to becomes a focus of the storytelling to some degree.
More than that surface
storyline though (a mystery incidentally that Jenny solves more or less
entirely on her own, and which Strax…erm…doesn’t), this is a story of the
temptation of heritage. Because underneath all the beast-myths, something has
been stirring. Something which calls to Vastra from her girlhood, and something
guarded by a protector who must be either vanquished - or replaced.
Without spoiling the story
for you, there’s a Silurian MacGuffin of awesome power in this story, which is
actually the heart and the through-line of the action, and which will rear its
techno-head later in the set. But the legal inconvenience and mythical beast
story has a solid resolution, and Vastra’s striding off alone, breaking the
unspoken rules of the Paternoster family, comes back to bite her when she and
Jenny have a confrontation about the way they live their lives. If in Family
Matters, Jenny’s afraid and defensive, waiting for Vastra to decide or
prove how strong her love is, in Whatever Remains, it’s Jenny that lays
down the law – she loves Vastra against all the world and its say-so, but while
she plays the role of a maidservant to keep the world happy, Vastra should
never, ever treat her as second class, never treat her as an ape, because in
that gulf of status, if either of them believe it, love can die and
self-esteem can grow to demand its dissolution.
It’s grown-up stuff, all
this, as the climax to a story that seems to start – and indeed goes some way
in – with larks and Sherlock Holmes gags. But it’s so right it’ll give you
moist-eye. So right it’ll remind you what love and self and shared existence
means.
So – that’s not too shabby
then, overall.
If it feels from this
review so far like it’s all been about the relationship between Vastra and
Jenny in Heritage 3, well…yes, their relationship is the focus of the
first two stories. Story 3 though, Truth And Bone by Roy Gill, brings us
to Strax, his past, his present, his self-definition and how the great Sontaran
war machine sees him. It also brings back another Sontaran who’s led a life
away from the Sontaran battle fleets, Stonn of the Bloomsbury Bunch, and
essentially, Gill’s story examines the difference between the here and now and
the there and then, how Strax and Stonn have evolved away from pure Sontaran
ideology – and whether in fact, if given the opportunity to leave the primitive
humans behind, they’d actually choose to go.
Strax, perhaps more than
either of the other two Paternosters, has always been a character about whose backstory
we’ve wondered. Here, the answers are played out to at least some degree, when
a Sontaran assessor comes to see whether Strax and Stonn can be productively
folded back into the ranks of the clone armies, or whether they’ve become too
different, whether they’ve become something other than Sontaran.
While the focus of Gill’s
story is firmly Sontaran-forward, part of the point of it is that Strax is not
just some random clone any more, that for all his stompy comedy
bonkersness, he’s one of the most advanced, one of the most evolved Sontarans
to have ever lived. So Jenny and Vastra, along with Stonn’s partner Tom, must
act to save him…assuming he wants to be saved.
There’s use for the
Silurian MacGuffin in this story, which gives Vastra more power than is
ultimately good for her, but the story, and indeed the whole set, takes us
deeper into the backgrounds and the foregrounds of our Paternoster heroes,
showing us very clearly the differences between where they’ve come from, where
they are, and where they hope to go in the future.
The Paternoster Gang –
Heritage 3 is a joy
from start to finish, but there are tears and gulping and snot along the way.
Embrace it all – more time spent with the Paternoster Gang will make your life
much better, because by their outsider status, their difference from the world
around them, and the strength they find in each other to bring their power to
the world, they’re about as epic a gang of heroes as you could wish to find.
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