Is this death, asks
Tony Fyler. Feels different this time…
Death, in Classic Doctor
Who, was everywhere. It was often random and frequently vicious and very often,
it was the backdrop against which the Doctor felt himself forced to take action.
But the death of a companion was a very different prospect, a thing rarely done
or gambled with, for fear of losing ‘the point’ of the Doctor as the man who
saved people, for fear of making it too clear that if you stood next to him,
you ran a very big risk of some of the worst things in all of time and space
wanting to kill you.
Death, in Classic Doctor
Who, almost always meant death as we understood it – that was one of the things
that made the Doctor so special; he was less breakable than the rest of us,
freer to take the insane kind of risks he needed to take to keep the rest of us
safe.
Afterlife is a story which
does death in a way that’s pretty much unique to Classic Who.
First of all, it deals
with the death of a companion.
Thomas Hector Schofield,
or Hex to his friends, the nurse who tagged along with the Seventh Doctor and
Ace after Cybermen destroyed his workplace, had become a real, fleshed-out
person, at first a potential romantic interest for Ace, and later, just a
bezzie mate, his Liverpudlian charm and his practically Hippocratic dedication
to helping people making him both likeable and the kind of character that we
the audience could admire.
And then he died, caught
in the middle between the Doctor and one of the infernal Elder Gods he made it
his business to fight. And whereas in previous on-screen Who, when companions
died, they generally had no family left but the Tardis crew, and there was a
general, mourning consensus that the Doctor had done all he could to prevent
their deaths. This time – notsomuch. Hex had been talking about his nan since
he first wandered into the lives of Ace and the Doctor, and we’d learned even
more of his family history since then. But the Doctor has rarely seemed more
alien than in Afterlife, almost shrugging Hex’s death away and trying to make
Ace feel better about it in a range of absurd and vaguely appalling ways –
offering to take her back to a time when Hex was alive, and more dramatically,
to wipe her memory of Hex altogether if it would make her feel better. She
demands more of him – that he go and explain Hex’s death to the nan who raised
him after his mother disappeared. This is the Doctor entirely wrong-footed,
entirely vulnerable, and more to the point entirely culpable for the
consequences of the life he leads, unable to simply pull an enigmatic frown and
say time will tell.
It's potent, powerful
stuff from writer Matt Fitton, and the cast is sublime – Jean Boht, famous in
the UK as Liverpool matriarch Nelly Boswell from Eighties sit-com Bread, brings
a perfect combination of world-weariness and roaring fire to the role of Hex’s
nan, and while for the most part she lets the Doctor explain, when he tries to
evade a question or when his answers don’t convince, she lets him have the full
force of her grief.
There’s much more to the
story of Afterlife though – not only is erstwhile Private Sally Morgan,
one-time companion of the Seventh Doctor and once quite sweet on Hex, already
in Liverpool, helping Hilda Schofield come to terms with life alone, the area
is caught in the middle of a gang fight between the Finnegan family, who seem
to have some massively unusual abilities, and a new name on the block, one Mr
Hector Thomas, who sounds very very familiar, but has none of the memories Ace
expects him to have.
Needless to say, in this
study of life and death and afterlife, there’s more than meets the eye in the
case of quite a few characters, and the Doctor’s battle against the Elder Gods
continues. After all the angst and remonstrations of Ace and Hilda Schofield,
we hear the Seventh Doctor give a speech to the Big Bad that’s better than
anything ever written for Matt Smith, and on at least a par with the Twelfth
Doctor’s Zygon Inversion speech. Suffice it to say it will send shivers of
wonder down your spine, and if you listen to it in public, you’ll have to watch
out that you don’t punch the air and shout “Yeah!” by the end of it. Even
without the rest of the story, that speech alone makes Afterlife something
pretty special.
But then Afterlife is
special for all kinds of reasons – Ace’s fury, unleashed on the Doctor for both
Hex’s death and the fact that he seems not to care about it, making her almost
scream at him about how he’ll behave when she dies. The Doctor’s desperate
attempts to make things better, to make it all go away for her, and how
profoundly wrong they sound. Hilda’s scalding grief, and Sally’s gentle,
constant, practical help. It’s here that the real heart and soul of the story
are, and when it was released, there’d never been a Big Finish story quite so
brimful of heart and soul (the Eighth Doctor has subsequently got there with
Absent Friends, an episode of Doom Coalition 3, by John Dorney). But as ever in
the Doctor’s life, the concerns of the universe and its myriad power-crazed
psychopaths intrude on the simple business of being alive or dead, and force
him to the powerful confrontation that gives the story its standout speech from
McCoy. And what, then, of Hector Thomas, who looks and sounds exactly like a
man who should be dead, but knows nothing of him? That mystery is unravelled
here, and the Doctor determines to leave it be without further examination, to
let life and death be simple and digital, the way most life and death in
Classic Who always was. It’s Ace who can’t or won’t accept that, Ace who
demands that Hector, the would-be gangland boss, has more to him than she is
willing to let lie.
Matt Fitton is always more
than a safe pair of hands – he’s been responsible for some of the more complex,
emotional and rewarding stories across not just a range of Doctors but the
Counter-Measures series too. Here he allows emotion to leak or pour or
positively flume out of the characters as feels natural in the wake of a death,
allowing the ‘weird alien threat’ story strand to catch up in its own time, and
make a kind of sense of everything, then lead on to a whole new range of
questions, to be answered in future adventures. Afterlife is a great way to
spend a couple of hours, especially if you’ve listened to any of the Hex adventures
along the way – I’d particularly recommend The Harvest, Protect And Survive,
Black And White, The Angel of Scutari and Gods And Monsters. Get Afterlife for
all the power of its genuine emotions, plus a way to make death not exactly
mean death that even Steven Moffat would be proud of.
