Tony’s getting hot.
Scorched Earth, by Chris Chapman, takes the Sixth
Doctor, Chief WREN Constance Clarke and Flip Ramon (nee Jackson) to one of the
most dangerous places they could possibly go – France at the end of the Second
World War.
Wait, what? The end of
the war is dangerous?
Ohhh hell yeah.
Granted, you might well be
right to think that almost any point during the war might be dangerous,
but France at the end of the war is a special time and place. It’s a time when
the ‘all pull together’ spirit of fighting against a big enemy is like an
elastic band – touch it the wrong way and it can snap, and twang you into
unforeseen circumstances.
And the war of course is a
very different thing for Constance, who lived in it and helped to fight it,
than it is for Flip, who knows it as history, as taught to the sons and
daughters and grandchildren of the survivors, a thing remote, that needs a work
of creativity, a book or a film, to bring out the pure empathy you need to make
it real. That means they have very different takes on the emotional issues of
the day, and Chapman brings them into stark and agonising contrast in this
story.
But this time and place is
dangerous for this Tardis team on a whole lot of levels – it’s a positive lasagne
of dangers, Chapman layering his threats from the straightforward human to the
alien to the intensely personal – and by the time they leave France, this
Tardis team may never be quite the same again.
The set-up is pleasingly
straightforward. It’s July, 1944 in a small village outside Rouen.
The village is crammed to
bursting point with Resistance fighters, trying to re-learn and remember how to
be anything else. There are some British troops coming through, not so much on
a liberation tour as a Johnny-Come-Lately effort to catch the last of the
fighting and the hard work still to do. And, just so we can get the other major
power into the picture, there are a couple of captured Nazis.
Captured Nazis?
Ah, well, there’s a story
behind that – a story of strange, living fire that consumes material with
gusto, but with a very limited menu. It’s a living fire that seems to only
attacks Nazis.
Our time travellers come
into this environment with very different outlooks – Constance and Flip are
more or less in sync, determined to see France at the end of the war, to feel
the relief, the hope, the determination to rebuild and rid itself of the marks
of Nazi occupation. The Doctor is deeply worried about the effect of such close
future knowledge on Constance.
The human dilemma of Scorched
Earth though isn’t so much about any knowledge that Constance gains, but
about the shockingly different reactions of Constance and Flip to acts of revenge.
Because there’s a woman in
the village.
Clementine, played with
good emotional layering and backbone by Katarina Olsson. Clementine’s a
traitor. A collaborator. And the village is out for its own form of rough
justice.
That’s where Constance and
Flip start to really differ in their mindset, and the divide gets wider as the
story rolls along.
The alien story here is
fine as far as it goes, a handy monster-as-metaphor tale of a stranded life
form that feeds on something of which there’s a lot about in immediately
post-war France. The monster is mostly non-vocal, so it’s not by any means a
carrier of great dialogue, but needless to say the destruction it brings with
it is a stand-in for something rather more philosophical.
You can listen to Scorched
Earth as a straightforward historical story that poses interesting
intellectual and visceral questions about good, evil, shades of grey,
retribution, punishment and how you rebuild after a cataclysm. Or you can bring
it closer to home, in which case, the answers you think you know get less
certain. France after the war. Britain after Brexit. America after Trump.
America after George Floyd, even.
How do you rediscover the
way to bring communities, to bring nations back together in a way that works,
in the wake of an angry conflagration, where you know – you know – that
your neighbours backed the other side. The horse you know with everything in
your being was wrong. When they did things that hurt you, not so much
personally or physically, but emotionally, intellectually, even if you want to
get fanciful, spiritually, so the place you thought you lived can never
quite be the place it was for you again.
How do you do it?
There’s an answer here,
but it may be a sign of the times that it feels the stuff of pure science
fantasy, complete with a fairly shameless Peter Pan riff – which means
it works within the context of the story, but doesn’t give you a takeaway
solution to the problems of the present day. (To be absolutely fair to poor
Chris Chapman, if he could deliver an answer to healing or reuniting a country,
he should probably be in Downing Street).
But those questions linger
at the end, resonating through the relationship between Constance and Flip, and
while it doesn’t shatter that relationship utterly, the things that are
revealed along the way as they all find a solution to the hungry sentient Nazi-stalking
fire from outer space – complete with a Sixth Doctor variant of the on-the-fly
planning lately shown on screen in 13’s fight against the Cybermen – will make
the two women aware of differences they didn’t know were there. Differences
which might yet be irreconcilable. Differences which seem irreconcilable in our
here and now.
Scorched Earth is a solidly plotted, extremely well
layered Sixth Doctor story, with plenty of alien action, some dark
decision-making and at least one wartime plane ride, while chasing after a
hungry fireball searching for its next big meal. It’s also an immensely
effective, affecting study of two people, and the friendship they thought was
secure, possibly split by revelations, possibly on a road to being mended by
shared peril and hope. And it’s a manifesto for how a nation divided might
begin to rebuild its friendships and its lives. How much that manifesto depends
for its viability on the progressive side having won, it’s difficult to tell,
but it’s a story that ultimately offers hope in a world which both needs it,
and yet might not particularly recognise it any more.
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