Big Finish Reviews+ The Fifth Traveller by Tony J Fyler

Tony sneaks on board the Tardis. 

Hopes no-one will notice.

It takes real chutzpah to write a story like The Fifth Traveller.

It takes chutzpah (or cheek, for those who need the translation) because the central pivot-point of its premise is rrrrrrright there in the title. It takes the Tardis team of the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki, and adds an unknown quantity by the name of Jospa, from 30^th century Earth, into the mix with no prior backstory, no explanation – he’s just part of the team.

That immediately gets your ears pricking up, but it does lead to an immediate, obvious conclusion – that young Jospa’s a wrong ’un, otherwise we’d know about him already. When the team start reminiscing about how he helped them out on Vortis, and in Rome, you’re more or less confirmed in that conclusion, which means you spend the first three episodes essentially waiting for the other shoe of Jospa’s presence as part of the Tardis crew to drop.

It would be deeply unethical to tell you whether it actually does drop, or whether writer Philip Lawrence structures the whole thing to pull a fast one on you. What we can tell you with certainty is that by the time you get to the pivot-point on which the future of the crew depends, you won’t realise you’re almost at the end of Episode 3. It’s a fast-paced story this one, rich with the history of the crew’s immediately previous (and unseen) adventure, largely running away from the Verviddick – an aggressive species of warriors with a particular knack for creating living, jellyfish-like technology. But while there’s plenty of running to do in this story too, from plenty of different threats – acid rain, a species of four-armed, legless, yellow-furred, psychic apes (try doing that on a sixties budget, we dare you!), and a lone Verviddick spy tracking them through the jungle, there’s lots more to it than that too. There are great moments of character interaction between different sub-sections of the Tardis crew; Jemma Powell gets the chance she was denied in The Age of Endurance to stamp her portrayal of Barbara on our memory, thanks to some lovely, warm Barbara-writing from Lawrence, and there’s a chance for Maureen O’Brien to do some pre-Steven Vicki acting, alongside another young orphan, Jospa, played by James Joyce more as the bratty brother she spars with than Steven’s often over-serious protector would ever be to her. 

There’s a whole political sub-plot too: the Arunde - the yellow-furred psychic apes on this nameless planet - have their own issues, with a young, inexperienced hereditary ruler, or Matriar, who came to power before her mother could teach her all she would need to know. She holds the psychic ‘seeing-stones’ of all her tribe, and can see through their eyes and direct their actions if need-be. Which is all very well and suitably sixties – Matriar Sharna is more or less a guru in all but name. But whereas on sixties Earth, the gurus were a force of revolution against the staid traditionalism of mainstream society, here Sharna is the representation of mainstream society, and she has a revolution of her own to deal with – those who want their own seeing-stones, and the self-determination they will bring, are on the brink of overthrowing their Matriar, especially when strangers arrive on their world, strangers who walk on the ground which most of her tribe fear. She’s left to struggle with dissent in her own ranks, plus the central question of the strangers: whether the ground-walkers are their mortal enemies, or perhaps their salvation from the forces of darkness.

It's this richness of world-building, matched with the relatively deft swapping between Tardis sub-groups and peril-sources, that keeps you on your toes all the way through The Fifth Traveller, and adding that richness, the multiple peril-sources and the characterisation to some solidly written moments both for Powell and for James Joyce as Jospa gives you a story that you’ll devour in a single sitting, given a lack of distraction, and go back to again and again.

What’s more, the struggles of the Arunde are never tangential to the main Tardis crew plot. In fact, they end up being crucial to the resolution, as Lawrence draws his threads together well, and in a distinctly rounded, satisfying, sixties, fairy tale, happily ever after way.

Performance wise, there are a number of highlights here, with special honours going to James Joyce – when the whole crux of a story focuses on a single character and whether they’re good or evil, it’s a very delicate road to walk, a very nuanced performance you need to deliver if the chutzpah of the writing is not to come crashing down in flames of obviousness. Joyce walks that line with confidence, and a brio that helps give Jospa exactly the tone he needs to exist on that knife-edge where we hope for good, but suspect evil.

Jemma Powell has much more meat to work with here than in her debut, and gives us a living Barbara more nuanced, almost by necessity, than any previous attempt by other actors to fill in her lines. And Kate Byers as Matriar Sharna brings a fragility and a hope to the character that carries the idea of a young ruler struggling to find her strength as her world begins to slip out of her control.

The Fifth Traveller is agreeably rich without being dense, and it moves everything along with a sunlit pace that involves you and pulls you with it, without you ever feeling the need to stand more still than you do. Lawrence delivers a story that can hold its head up among the best of the Early Adventures, and which feels like both a quick listen and a deep one – by no means an easy combination to master. Give it a spin today – it’s well worth the price and will give you plenty of repeat-listening value for money.

Big Finish Reviews+ The First Doctor Adventures Vol. 4 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s gone black and white.

The First Doctor Adventures were at first a somewhat questionable enterprise, taking the Tardis cast from An Adventure In Space And Time – who it’s probably fair to say were cast mostly as lookalikes rather than soundalikes - and putting them in a set of audio adventures.

That all seems quite a while ago now.

While it seems oddly the case that Claudia Grant sounds more like TV-Susan when she’s just being interviewed as Claudia Grant than when she’s aiming for the higher pitched RP of her audio-Susan, the four stars of the First Doctor Adventures have really gelled into an entirely coherent original Tardis team. David Bradley’s First Doctor is a believable version of the character and Jamie Glover and Jemma Powell as Ian and Barbara have eased into their roles over the course of the first three box sets, which is just as well, because in terms of scripts, the two stories in this fourth volume are biggies. There are no training wheels attached any more – the cast have to nail their parts to the wall, or the nature of the scripts will show the cracks, the joins and any hasty paste-overs in the performances.

Because quite apart from anything else, we’re about to go back…to Skaro! (annnd cue end credits. No, really, there should be end credits there. Oh fine, see how you are, no sense of drama…)

Return To Skaro by Andrew Smith really is a big deal. It’s a retrospective second shot at a Skaro-based Dalek story, set before the Tardis team deal with The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, at the end of which, as we know, Susan leaves the ship.

The script itself has some gorgeously period moments – the Dalek city they visited previously is there, but ruined, and with new additions. A couple of seeming lightning conductor towers are actually emitting a form of lightning into the sky, for complex reasons that take a while to fully uncover.

The adventurers meet a happy band of Thals, who explain that their chief scientist (and that’s where you get your first shudder) has been working to make use of Dalek technology for Thal purposes. There are tours taken, questions asked, and the Doctor gets to be both open-mindedly curious and later, deeply finger-on-chin sceptical. I so badly want to tell you about the Episode 1 cliffhanger it’s burning a hole in my brain, but suffice it to say it’s word perfect for early Who cliffhangers, and would absolutely have been how any return to Skaro ended its first episode, so as to ensure kids remembered the art of playing at being Daleks all week long and then tuned in ravenously the following Saturday.

There’s deception, deceit, fun with tunnels, and as would have been absolutely demanded back in the day, there’s a Dalek massacre of the Thals. This time, as the first time, it’s a stark warning against taking people with bad intent at their word, only this time, there is perhaps the first inkling that the Thals play a part in their own extermination, trusting in the words of a traitor and believing, as humans would do later in Power Of The Daleks and Victory of the Daleks that a Dalek that doesn’t or cannot kill you immediately will not or cannot kill you when it decides it needs to.

Besides all of which, Smith does the thing any writer tasked with writing a First Doctor return to Skaro story would be honour-bound by their young fan’s heart to do. He adds previously unknown detail to the Daleks we met in The Dead Planet, and he takes them forward to a new, momentous evolution which we in 2020 understand, but which in 1963-4 would have blown our little Dalek-loving minds.

Alongside all the treats of this story – tunnel-fun, earnest Thals revering the Doctor and friends as legends, Thal scientists trying to make head, tail or bumps out of Dalek technology, Andrew Smith captures the sense of sheer scale of those early First Doctor stories here – which is tricky to keep natural when all the scenery’s in your head and has to be pointed out by one character or another. It feels like a true nod of acknowledgement to Terry Nation, without necessarily subscribing to his ‘fill an episode with a quest’ scriptwriting philosophy. There is some questing in this story, but it feels natural and to a point, and Smith repays the listener’s patience later with a really fast-paced ‘Get the hell out of here now or the Daleks will kill you’ chase.

All in all, it takes some world-class chutzpah to even imagine telling this story.

It takes some serious class to write it, to make it real, and to perform it so it sounds like an entirely believable sequel to The Dead Planet. That it works at all is testament to everyone involved. That it works this well shows some god-level skills. Big Finish is already having a big year. This story’s right up there among the crown jewels of 2020 so far.

Follow that, Jonathan Barnes!

To be fair, asking that of Barnes is absurd. His story, Last of the Romanovs is as different in tone as could be imagined from Return To Skaro. Much more in line with The Aztecs or The Reign Of Terror, this is a story over which uncertainty and death hang from the very first moments, when the Tardis arrives in Ekaterinburg, Russia, observed by only one man through a window across the street.

Tsar Nicholas II. Last of the Romanovs – at least, as far as we know for sure.

The premise of this story is dark, and grey, and cold and all-round horrifying. There’s a ticking clock in our head, because Tsar Nicholas is still alive in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and we know, from our vantage point in history, that he doesn’t stay alive much longer. At some point soon, soldiers will come into the room where Nicholas, his wife Alexandria, and all their children are staying. And they will be shot until they are dead.

History says so. And as the First Doctor was fond of saying, we cannot re-write history. No, not one line.

Before that though, there’s plenty of time for some hapless time travellers to get involved in plots, counter-plots, disguises, mistakes and everything in between. The Doctor gets brought in to see to the health of Nicholas’ young haemophiliac son. Barbara and Susan are dressed as nuns to make contact with Alexandria and Anastasia, her daughter. And there’s a case of an identity if not mistaken then at least misunderstood as events move ever more implacably to the conclusion, we know they must reach.

Of special note in this story is Dan ‘Dan, Dan, the Sontaran’ Starkey, gloriously far from his usual stomping ground as an officious and yet philosophically engaged Russian officer, Yakov Yurovsky. In one particularly chilling sequence he takes the Doctor to the pit where, in due course, the bodies of the final Romanovs will be dumped and buried, and offers him one chance. A game of ‘Change My Mind,’ probably the ultimate temptation for an interfering time traveller. It’s a cleft stick situation for the First Doctor, who as yet is not experienced enough in time and space to determine fixed points and flexible ones, and so has to stick to the rules of not changing anything – at least not intentionally. He knows that the rule of the Soviets will be brutal, will be massively homicidal, will be horrible. But there’s little if anything he can say to change the mind of one man who might yet change the course of history.

While the pure historicals often had elements of romp about them, while educating the viewer and delivering on the potential of getting caught up in history, this nevertheless feels like a historical they could have and would have commissioned back in the day – its history was still  only half a century behind the viewers in 1963-4, and the lesson of the rigidity of thinking and how it leads only ever to death would have been one worth instilling in the nation’s children. Whether it would have been quite this bleak on broadcast is a different matter, but then the inevitability of death is leavened here at least briefly by the likes of Barbara and Susan dressed as nuns, and there’s compassion here too, as they pray with the Tsar’s  family, not out of any specific religious observance, but because it brings them comfort in their troubles. There’s also a very neat moment between Susan and Anastasia which allows for a little up-tick of hope just at the end, just a maybe, just a thread out of the ghastly cloud of death that stains that day.

It’s a thread to which we cling as listeners, needing it to be able to wipe the screen of our brains and head off to the next adventure with this increasingly seasoned Tardis crew.

At the beginning of this review, I said there were no training wheels any more for this team.

Backed with writing and sound design and supporting actors like this, they don’t need them. They just need the team, and the writing, and the powerful dream that was early Doctor Who.

Long may they sail.