Big Finish Reviews+ Daughter of the Gods by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s up among the gods.

The stakes for fans in Daughter Of The Gods are ridiculously high. You’d have to be incredibly brave or stone barking mad to go anywhere near the storytelling territory it covers.

Naturally enough, it’s a freakin’ triumph.

I mean, right up there with all the high water-marks you think of as outstanding Big Finish triumph.

Given the cover art which you’d have to have seen to buy the story, it’s no spoiler to tell you this is a multi-Doctor story, almost literally crashing the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe into the lives of the First Doctor, Steven and Katarina.

Yes.

Katarina.

She who came from Troy after Vicki stayed behind in the city.

She who laboured under the moderately morbid assumption that the Doctor was a god, the Tardis his temple and that, at least to some degree, for both of these things to be true and for her to experience them, she herself was probably dead.

She who shockingly died not long after she arrived on board the Tardis, during the events of The Dalek Master Plan.

The thing about Katarina of course is the lack of wiggle room to fit any additional stories into her Tardis time. With Jean Marsh’s Sara Kingdom, another casualty of the Master Plan, Big Finish found a way to give her some additional adventures with Steven and the Doctor. With Katarina, it’s fairly cut and dried – she joined, she had the on-screen adventure of the Master Plan, and she died during its time. The end. It’s part of what makes her time on board the Tardis so shocking, the fact that she had little time at all to see the wonders of the universe before she was killed by it, the first person to travel with him that the Doctor, in some sense, failed to save.

How to you deliver a Katarina story while staying true to the power of all of that?

More or less, you do it just like this. A time crash in the vortex, narrowly avoided, takes the First Doctor and his crew to a world where they have to stay for some time so that Steven can recover from some injuries, the Doctor can earn some money and prestige as an academic, and the Tardis can repair itself after such a close temporal shave. Katarina, too, has the chance to immerse herself in the local culture and exercise the wits no-one in Troy ever gave her particular credit for having.

But she has bad dreams.

Bad dreams that continually tell her she is dead, or should be dead, that none of this amazing life so far beyond her birth and station was meant to be.

And then their comfortable, productive break is interrupted by hostile aliens.

Aliens with a weapon that ages whole populations to death in an instant. Aliens with whom it’s useless to plead for your lives or your liberty.

Aliens the Doctor and Steven have met before.

When the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe turn up on the planet in the middle of a mass exodus, there are too many Doctors for a single planet to cope with, and the story zeroes down to one moment, one decisive moment that set this timeline going. One moment that changed the future for the entire universe.

The question is, when all is revealed, digested and understood, will Katarina have the strength to do what is called on her to do? And perhaps more importantly, will the First Doctor have that same moral fortitude?

It takes them both, ultimately, to set the timeline straight, and it takes the multi-Doctor nature of the story to teach them both what ‘straight’ looks like in this circumstance. It’s huge and moral and tiny and personal and if you don’t end up sniffling at the end of this story, you might need a Grinch procedure to grow the size of your heart, because the balance is perfect – half of you will want one thing to happen, half of you another. There’s no winning in this situation, but losing either way will wet your eyes.

Ajjaz Awad steps into Katarina’s sandals for this story, and while it’s not a straight impersonation of Adrienne Hill, she delivers a highly accessible version for a modern audience, without sacrificing any of the rigidity of belief in her gods and her understanding of the universe that Hill established back in the Sixties. Katarina comes across as a warm, likeable innocent, with much to learn and a straightforward view of the world, but an increasing ability to understand the places and the company in which she finds herself.

The story, by David K Barnes, is importantly not that grandiose in nature. It’s almost Dennis Spoonerish at the start – the First Doctor and friends hanging out somewhere over an extended period for perfectly logical reasons. But the establishment of that normality, where Steven gets an engineering job while the Doctor hob-nobs with the highfalutin’ academics, allows for the building of strong character relationships that kick in when the world goes to hell in a very rapid handcart, and add to our emotional buy-in to the terror of the mass evacuation when death drops out of the sky.

Meanwhile, the Second Doctor’s strand of the story is for the most part significantly calmer, not least because he and his friends don’t come into the panic until late in the game.  

Nevertheless, there’s plenty going on with the Troughton Doctor and his friends, and once they turn up and meet Katarina and Steven, it’s almost as though they bring a calming influence with them.

They don’t, though.

That’s not what they bring at all.

What they bring is the central moral dilemma of the piece. It’s a dilemma not dissimilar to that in Nikos Kantzakis’ Last Temptation of Christ. Which life is better? That where you live, maybe, and everyone else lives in fear? Or that where you die, definitely, but are remembered forever as having done the right thing?

What David K Barnes has delivered with Daughter of the Gods is an absolute hymn to Katarina’s worthiness for the wider universe, for her place on board the Tardis, without making it a soppy, heavy-handed mourning. It’s an action-packed, character-rich belting slice of Sixties Who with 21^st century complications and sensitivities, and the budget of your whole imagination – which also happens to sing a hymn to Katarina, the Daughter of the Gods. Finding the best of Big Finish in any given year is tricky. This may not make it to your absolute top spot, but if it’s not in your top five, we’d be very much surprised.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Dalek Occupation of Winter by Tony J Fyler

Tony feels a shiver down his spine.

Sometimes in a tried and tested format, you need new people to bring new angles on familiar things. You need new brains through which to filter old ideas to make them truly fresh again. Truly bright again.

Truly terrifying again.

Step forward, David K Barnes, we think we love you.

The Early Adventures series of stories from Big Finish was launched with the aim of rounding out the kind of stories which had been told in the Companion Chronicles line, but with a broader scope and more voices, while still holding to the ‘narrated scenes’ style of storytelling, rather than the full cast, no-narration option of the Main Range.

That said, we open the fifth series of the Early Adventures with a story that’s at least mostly told through cast voices, and where the narration has a distinctly natural flow, mostly used simply to condense chunks of scene that could otherwise feel tedious. Five series in, Big Finish knows what it’s doing, and having found writer David K Barnes, has reached a place where the narrated scene format flows seamlessly over the length of a full four-part story.

As to the story…ooh, it’s a dark one. We love a dark one.

There’s a Dalek on the cover art, and Dalek in the title, so there’s a good chance you think you know what you’re in for – shouty shooty extermination-fests ahoy, right?

Well…

Certainly not at first.

Think more Power of the Daleks than Resurrection of the Daleks. Think more political commentary than festival of firepower. Think about how, for instance, there was a time when we didn’t check our Twitter feeds every morning to see what 3AM absurdity had come out of the White House. Think about how normal it is to do that now. Normality is just the name for what happens every day. People can be conditioned by repetition to think the most absurd and gruesome things are normal.

Welcome to Winter.

Winter is the only real spot of warmth and brightness on a cold, ice-wasted planet. Winter is a city, with a leader (the superbly slippery Robert Daws as Gaius Majorian) conditioned to a pampered life ruling over the unwashed frozen plebs. It’s a city with a great manufacturing industry, geared to the production of one particular item, apparently in great demand in an eager cosmos, and a city which has a regular, Tripod-style selection of the best and brightest to join the research division that helps make the economy work. The research division that consumes their every waking hour for the rest of their lives, so they kiss their family and friends goodbye and go to serve a higher purpose.

It’s a society with Daleks. Non-exterminating, non-devastating Daleks.

A society where Daleks are normal. A society where Daleks are good.

That’s really the point of the title – this is not The Dalek Invasion of Winter. No no, this is an occupation, insidious, inch by inch, changing what the ‘normal’ is for a whole society, then establishing a husk around that normal, so no-one questions it. It’s not that they don’t dare, just that there’s no reason to. A society working in harmony with the Daleks is just…normal.

And then out of thin air come the First Doctor, Steven and Vicki.

Dissenting voices, shouting that the (ahem) Dalek ‘Emperor’ has no clothes on. Dissenting voices, bringing a different way of looking at everything that’s normal – the manufacturing industry, the selection, the way the whole society of Winter is structured and run.

Steven finds himself working on a production line alongside Amala Vost (Shvorne Marks), whose brother Kenrik has proved himself the cleverclogs of the family and gone to the research division. Steven tries to overcome one of the central fallacies on which Winter survives, while Amala tells him that he’s utterly wrong, but even if he were right, she and many like her would still need a job in the morning or they’d starve to death – the norm is frozen into her bones and accepted there.

Vicki finds a friend in Gaius Majorian, tells him the truth she knows about the Daleks, which troubles him greatly…or does it?

And the Doctor, while feted by the city’s rulers, discovers someone perhaps as dangerous as the Daleks themselves, a person who can watch the norms of their reality break down, and take dispassionate control of a crowd for their own bored and morally exhausted purposes.

Definitely a dark one.

For all that though, the darkness is like a slow, slow poison, and Barnes’ script, under the direction of Lisa Bowerman, takes us through the everyday highs and lows and freezing cold of Winter, giving us our lovely moments of character interaction, of friend-building, of shock and triumph and tragedy as we uncover the truth of what Winter is, layer by increasingly cold, dark layer.

There’s not a performance here that wavers from ideal – Peter Purves continues his unbroken run as the most evocative post-Hartnell voice of the First Doctor, while getting the chance to give us some Steven-as-would-be-revolutionary into the bargain. Maureen O’Brien conjures up the young, loquacious innocence of Vicki in a way that makes us feel for her heart when her confidence is misplaced. Robert Daws gives us a masterclass in political chicanery, Matthew Jacobs-Morgan as Kenrik conjures the vulnerability of a young soldier about to go into battle as he prepares to spend the rest of his life in the research centre. Shvorne Marks shows us the ‘ordinary people of Winter’ in Amala, their loves, lives, needs and concerns encapsulated in a performance that makes you smile. Sara Powell – oof, you want to pin back your ears to listen to Sara Powell as Jacklyn Karna, and Nick Briggs gets if not exactly to relive his Victory of the Daleks performance of a Dalek biting its theoretical tongue, then to come somewhat closer in this more rational script to the sustained, restrained Dalek malevolence of Power of the Daleks.

In short, The Dalek Occupation Of Winter is an absolute belter with which to launch the fifth series of Early Adventures, its energy strained like a high violin note, its life vivid in its ‘normality,’ and the performances slick and sharp and hopeful by turns as the arrival of the newcomers and the questions they ask brings the reality of Winter to the unwilling light of day.

Feed it into your ears today and prepare to shiver.