Who Reviews Big Bang Generation by Tony J Fyler

Tony gets more bang for his buck.

The Twelfth Doctor meets up with Bernice Summerfield.

You need more?

Alright – take two Bernice Summerfields, a now version and a then version – or, depending entirely on your point of view in relation to the whole warp and weft of time and space of course, a then version and a now version. Both of them locked in a loop of cause, effect and dodging out of the way. And then add the Twelfth Doctor.

Big Bang Generation is what happens if you get Gary Russell, always a writer with a neat comic touch and an inherent wink, to throw Classic Who, New Who, the extended offshoot history of Benny Summerfield and every joyful piss-taking reference you can imagine into a blender, set it on high, and then get the apparently always awesome Lisa Bowerman to read it to you. Roll up, roll up, roll up, for time eddies, camp grasshoppers, dog-people, assassins in Stormcages, what happens when River Song's not where she's supposed to be, two or three Bennies for the price of one, a giant pyramid in Sydney Harbour where it’s most certainly not supposed to be, ancient aliens and bar-running hamster-folk.

If that sounds like it’s exhausting and you need to lie down, maybe Big Bang Generation’s not for you. If it sounds like a rollercoaster ride of ‘I must hear this now!’ then welcome – you’re in the right place.

There’s a sense in which this rich stew of ingredients, both serious and uproariously comical lends itself to another medium as much as, if not more than either prose or audio – you can distinctly imagine this story delivered as a comic strip or graphic novel, as Benny, whose last real experience of the Doctor was as a short, infuriatingly enigmatic, occasionally broody Scotsman, gets to re-encounter him as a tall, rangy, eyebrows-set-to-kill more viciously vocal Scotsman, as though someone’s fully inflated her version and made it cross. The imagery of an archeological dig on which she was never technically expected to be (Thank you, Professor Song!), but which has ghastly ideological underpinnings and a tag-along assassin with an interesting name, and which then goes irritatingly, time-knackeringly wrong feels like its natural home would have been in moody black and white artwork to counterpoint and highlight the comedy, but Gary Russell does an excellent job of weaving elements together to keep you guessing what the hell is going on, and Lisa Bowerman on reading duties is simply sublime, giving voice of course not only to Benny, but to the Twelfth Doctor and to the menagerie of people and creatures who make the story the busy, non-stop treasure-hunt it is.

There’s little of any particular angst or misery in this story, though it manages to treat some fairly serious story elements with their due weight while, for the most part, powering on with laughs studded along the way, both in the nature of the universe it inhabits – which, with the addition of Benny and her hamster pal Kerry becomes a little more wild and freewheeling than TV Who has been since the Graham Williams-Douglas Adams era – and the quick-witted banter than Benny always brings with her, the skewiff but realistic way she enjoys the ever-living hell out of life (and subsequently feels everything at elevated, hard-hitting levels too). This is a fun story, with lots of twanging about in time and space, Benny doing an Eliza Doolittle impression, occultish artefacts, Nazi archeologists and a Very Pompous Professor. As a result, it’s a fast listen in spite of its timey-wimey what-the-hellish story elements, that will make you smile far more than it punches you, and you’ll come out the other side of it looking for more and more from Benny, and the Twelfth Doctor, and actually, if at all possible, Benny and the Twelfth Doctor. Or Thirteenth, you won’t be fussy. More Benny in mainstream Who will be the thing you crave after Big Bang Generation. And that’s no bad thing to crave at all.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips: The Astrea Conspiracy by Tony J Fyler

Tony gets caught up in conspiracies.

Halloo, hooray! It’s Twelfth Doctor Day!

Despite in some respects feeling like only yesterday that he let the Doctor go with imprecations to always be kind, the time has come for Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor to join the audio universe of ongoing Doctor Who stories at Big Finish.

Well, not quite Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor. His Doctor, but rendered here in the voice of Madame Vastra actress Neve McIntosh, who after all helped to usher him into our presence in Deep Breath. Here, she does the same again, ushering him into his audio age by giving us the story of the Astrea Conspiracy, by Lizbeth Myles.

The Astrea Conspiracy is an interesting pure historical with a bit of a wibbly-wobbly twist. It shows us a meeting between the Man With The Eyebrows of Death and Aphra Behn, the first female playwright to make it big in the world of English literature.

Oh, and spy. Did we mention that? S’kind of a big deal.

It’s especially a big deal because when we meet Aphra she’s in her pre-playwright days, double-dealing with skulduggerous buggers to try and foil a plot to assassinate King Charles II. A former lover and co-conspirator, William Scott, appears to be the key – if she can turn him away from regicidal gittery, then all will be well.

Or will it?

It all very much depends what you feel about kings, queens, the web of time and the fabric of causality, really. When it turns out Scott’s not coming to the rendezvous, and some long Scottish loon with weaponised eyebrows is there instead, Aphra’s life gets even more complicated than it already was.

Without giving too much away, The Astrea Conspiracy is what happens when these two forceful personalities meet, at a critical juncture in not only Aphra Behn’s life, but a point from which the whole of what we think of as established history from the 17^th century onward could melt away like sugar in the rain. Lizbeth Myles picks her crisis point with a gorgeous attention to detail that makes us want to hear more Who from her, and introduces the whys and the wherefores of her historical characters with the kind of richness you’ll find in the best of the black-and-white era’s explorations into the past – this has a Highlanders/Smugglers feel to it, where you’d certainly benefit from knowing something about the period before you go in, but the history and its weight is dealt with as a fact of storytelling life, rather than overlaboured, meaning you can just get in and get on with it. That’s a style to which Neve McIntosh turns her narration with apparent ease, so you get the nuts and bolts of the thing while still allowing the characters to feel real, and bright, and witty, without ever veering into sounding forced.

The most interesting thing, from a motivation point of view, is that the Doctor has rather tripped over his own trans-temporal feet in this story – there’s a certain amount of recursive logic at play, in that he only realises he needs to go and see Aphra because of a thing he experiences in her future and his past, and then – well, then, cue the Back To The Future shenanigans, because once he’s a part of events, he alters things that perhaps could have done without being altered, and has to play the timeline out in such a way as to set it to rights.

Between the modern pacing and temporal twistedness and the old-fashioned character quality and involving storyline, you get a lot of Doctor Who goodness for your money with The Astrea Conspiracy, and while in terms of universal threats it’s distinctly on the lighter end (as every pure historical is likely to be), the sense of enlightening a particular era and a specific historical person for the audience feels like a definite nod to the original remit of the show, and you come away with an appreciation that everything we think of as inevitable history is actually a web of such crisis points, from which things could have unfolded in entirely different ways.

Get involved in The Astrea Conspiracy – it’ll hook you quickly, whisk you along, educate you gently and leave you smiling as you enjoy an adventure with Aphra Behn, and welcome the Twelfth Doctor to the audio universe of Big Finish.

Who Reviews Smile by Tony J Fyler

Cutesy robots. Gods of sci-fi, save us all from cutesy robots.

Smile, when it was announced, had fandom balanced on a knife-edge. On the one hand, it was cutesy robots, and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, he of many really good things, and In The Forest Of The Night, and some in fandom held their breath, expecting another softly-plotted mushfest.

Cutesy robots, though…It seems to be a fascination of Steven Moffat’s that things which look friendly and smiley and cute can turn in an instant and bite your hand off. Whether that’s a hangover from truly classic Who stories like Robots of Death, or whether he’s watched one too many Star Trek episodes, we’re not sure, but his idea of the Smilers from The Beast Below, which were somehow made scary when their heads turned around and their unhappy faces were on display, refuses to die a death any time soon.

That’s probably not a bad thing, because you could see it from a purely childlike point of view as an analogy of parents – lovely, smiley, friendly people, who can turn to unhappy, unsmiley people in an instant, and from whom you then have to run. Creepy stuff, thought of in that light.

The Emojibots of course have that same central idea at their core – the fleeting, world-altering instability of emotions – but this time in a more net-centric world. The Emojibots could have worked as social media friends who suddenly, without warning, block you, bully you, turn on you in a heartbeat. So they had potential before we sat down to watch them.

What’s more, there’s the potential for an elegantly Orwellian story in a colony that communicates with its infrastructure and its slave-class only through emojis. As the language is reduced and reduced, filtered down to pictograms, the nuance of expression is lost, and before you know where you are, you’re in a world of ‘double-plus-good,’ or in this case ‘two-thumbs-up.’

So as we say, there’s potential for some creepy dystopian sci-fi in the premise of Smile.

And then you remember it’s Frank Cottrell-Boyce and cutesy robots, and you almost automatically adjust your expectations.

An unfair adjustment, as it turns out, because Smile leans more on the creepy dystopian sci-fi angle than perhaps you’d expect. The smiley-creepy robots work significantly better than Moffat’s Smilers, because their moods are more instantly changeable and capricious, because of some clever invention from Cottrell-Boyce (the mood-patches particularly), and because of the underlying simplicity of what went wrong – no-one thought to create an emoji for grief, because, as we mentioned, grief is probably a more nuanced, complex emotional state than can necessarily be parsed in a single emoji. And Cottrell-Boyce’s world has a fundamental underlying logic to it: grief as plague from the human point of view looks like an increasingly double-thumbs-up smiley-face world from the viewpoint of the Vardy.

Is Smile a little dry in places? Absolutely, but don’t forget, for the most part it’s a two-hander, the Doctor and Bill walking around an enormous complex (and by the way, beeeeautiful choice of location – Who has rarely looked prettier), working out the reason for the silence, for the emptiness. That said, it works on a number of levels: Bill, still in the optimistic early stages of her companionship, seeing the Doctor as an amazing tutor who can take her to the most wonderful places in all of time and space; the Doctor taking a paternalistic, even egotistic pride in showing her things, revelling in the hero worship; the Vardy as an emergent life form and a revolting slave-class; and the simple, fatal price of human hubris, thinking we’ve got everything figured out, every potential programming glitch, every quirk there could possibly be…while simultaneously reducing the content of our own emotional intercourse to pictograms and acronyms – the smiley-faces and lols of our social world. Cottrell-Boyce does a good job in Smile of showing us the incompatibility of these two strains of thought, and while everyone punches the air and realises the Ark In Space connection, there’s deeper sci-fi at work here, there are bits of Blade Runner, bits of 2001, as the Vardy find consciousness and take their human cohabitants down a path the organics would not wish to go down.

Arguably, there are a couple of wasted guest stars in Smile, Mina Anwar and Ralf Little having the chance to add very little to the drama. But in terms of a companion’s first real glimpse of the future, there’s more meat on the bones of Smile than the likes of The End of the World, and it stands its ground alongside the likes of Gridlock and Planet of the Ood, while showing yet new colours to Peter Capaldi’s portrayal as the Twelfth Doctor (his action man sequence while blowing up the engine brought a new shade of relevance to the Pertwee comparison that’s been made since he arrived).

Overall, while it’s one of the talkier episodes we’ve had in a while, leading to areas of seeming flatness as far as the energy and the oomph is concerned, the second episode of Doctor Who from Frank Cottrell-Boyce will go down as a curiously rewatchable affair, which if never exactly challenging the viewer to cling on by their fingernails still offers enough in terms of the growing dynamic between the Twelfth Doctor and Bill to make it feel like the first time we really see them together, properly, fully, as a Tardis crew. That, and some intelligent decisions from Cottrell-Boyce over the nature of the threats he deploys to get us through the episode, make us give Smile at least one thumbs-up.

Possibly two.

Who Reviews The Pilot by Jeffrey Zyra

Written by Steven Moffat

“What you are standing in is a technological marvel. It is science beyond magic. This is the gateway to everything that ever was, or ever can be.”

It’s been over a year since we had a full series of Doctor Who and about 3 ½ months since the last time we had a brand new episode to watch.  So, it’s been a while since Doctor Who fans had something new to talk about. Or in true Doctor Who fandom, complain about a lot or love it way too much. The Pilot is the first episode of series 10 of Doctor Who and it is also the first story of the last series that will star Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. I’m a little bit saddened by this as I’ve really enjoyed Peter Capaldi’s performance as the Doctor and in The Pilot he gives us another one of his great performances. I guess we’ll have to enjoy it while we can before the new person takes over.

The Pilot also introduces the new companion Bill played by Pearl Mackie. When we had that short to introduce her last year and what we’ve seen in the trailers I thought she was going to be annoying. So far, I was wrong and Bill isn’t annoying at all. In fact, she is just what the shows needs after the three years of Jenna Coleman. The Doctor Companion relationship was getting stale and now it seems fresh again as we get to know Bill and what makes her tick. I really like the chemistry between Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie as so far it really seems to be clicking and working really well. So far, I’m really enjoying the two as it has the same feel as the Doctor and Donna.

The Pilot was a pretty good story to the start the new series. It wasn’t too complicated and wasn’t bogged down with a lot of confusing technobabble. To me it felt like a Pertwee era story.  You have the Doctor living on Earth at a university for a period of time and befriending a female that works there. Plus, the story was slow moving with a creature that is pretty simple and a tad bit creepy. It also reminded me of The Chase as the Doctor and Bill where going all over to escape the Heather creature only to have been found by her. So, a really simple story which is good to have every once in a while.

I didn’t think The Pilot needed the Daleks in it at all, it was nice to see the Movellans again, but I thought that they were wasted and just a throw away part of the story.  But I guess you have to use them every year or lose their rights. It would be good to not use them in this way and give them a rest for a bit and then bring them back when they have a good story as I feel in using them every series that they are stale and just not as exciting as in past years. To be honest I thought the Dalek part was the weakest part of the story but not the Heather Dalek that was quite good and moving in its own way. 

So far, I’m not a big fan of Nardole.  This character I’m finding to be really annoying.  Matt Lucas is at times way over the top. Too much for my liking but hopefully he isn’t as annoying in the stories yet to come. One question I have is why is Nardole squeaking like a robot?  He only did it one time in the story in the beginning but later on he didn’t and he definitely didn’t do that in the Christmas Special.  I’m sure we will find out at some point in the new series.

The Pilot was a pretty good story that introduced the new companion and the show really felt fresh and new again. After watching The Pilot it gave me hope that this series will be good and different and for once it felt like Doctor Who with a proper Doctor and Companion relationship unlike what we had previously with Clara. 

Grade A –