Thursday, 4 June 2020

Big Finish Reviews+ Scorched Earth by Tony J Fyler



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. 

No comments:

Post a Comment