Tony goes Marching.
If you think that women
shouldn’t be starship captains, superheroes or previously-male Time Lords, this
probably isn’t the set for you. On the other hand, if you’re one of those fans
who use the ‘Why not just create new female characters instead of changing
previously-male characters into women?’ argument – you’re on. Big Finish has
called your bluff to celebrate International Women’s Day, and it’s done it in
spectacular fashion.
The Eighth of March is a
collection of four stories, putting some of the women of the Who-universe front
and centre. Each story is written by a woman, the whole collection is directed
by a woman, and while it’s a technical stretch to say all the main heroes and
villains are women with the exception of Strax the Sontaran, certainly all the
underlying issues against which they fight and triumph have their analogues in
the real world fight for equality between the sexes – which still goes on in
2019.
The result is a breath of
bright, fresh air as sharp as Madame Vastra’s sword, as arch as a Bernice
Summerfield quip, as twinkly as a River-wink and as brilliant as Petronella Osgood.
Strap in, people, we’re about to have some fun.
Emancipation, by Lisa
McMullin is a gorgeously rich, layered face-slap of issue-flagging, woven into
a hell of a story. In the first place, it finally brings together two absolute
archetypes, Professor River Song and Leela of the Sevateem. Their different
approaches to dealing with the universe, and the fact that River knows of
Leela, but Leela only recognises a familiar spirit in the mad-haired,
motormouthed archaeologist, make for initial sparks, but then the two fall into
a productive sync, a way of working together that acknowledges their individual
strengths. The challenge they face is absolutely carved out of feminist issues
– while the villain of the piece is female, she’s as arch and evil as any
historical king or grand vizier, and the institutions she upholds have
distinctly male counterparts in our own world. The idea of two princesses (yes,
really, River and Leela are rescuing princesses from dungeons – take that,
patriarchal fairy tales!) being sacrificed for the good of the state and the
dictates of religion is disturbingly real in a world which still includes
honour killings. The idea that their bodies and lives are not their own to
control is potent in a world which is rolling back women’s healthcare and which
still includes female genital mutilation as a cultural practice. Lisa McMullin
even brings the issue of coerced consent into play, as the Princesses Myrahla
are coerced to vocally collude in their own destruction, while their minds
scream the absolute opposite.
The feminist underpinnings
are not as blatantly front and centre as I’ve made them sound – they’re there
if you want to pick up on them, but Lisa McMullin has actually written a
cracking, fast-paced fairytale princess-rescue with an evil queen, an innocent
victim, quite a bit of time-travel, and even, importantly, a bit of
post-Happily Ever After mopping up. You can listen to Emancipation perfectly
easily as a time-travel buddy movie with River and Leela, and there are proper
consequences to River’s mis-reading of a crucial situation here to give you
moments of in-story pause and weight. Or, if you have your checklist of ‘Stuff
That Still Needs Tackling In 2019’ to hand, you can also listen to the story as
a full-on feminist dialectic. The exquisite thing is not that it works either
way, but that it works both ways, and
leaves you with so many pinball-lights going off in your head, it sets you up
for the spirit of the set.
The Big Blue Book by Lizzie
Hopley takes us back into New Adventures territory, with Ace and Bernice
Summerfield battling the Librarian From Hell. While the Seventh Doctor has
swanned off on a train journey, Bennie and Ace go undercover at a Liverpool
university, Bennie doing her archaeology thang, and Ace acting as the world’s
most unlikely cleaner. What follows is a suitably esoteric, mindscape-heavy
tale which fits perfectly well with previous stories featuring this pairing,
while allowing Ace the bulk of the intellectual heavy lifting, showing us (but
more importantly showing herself) that she can deal with things that would
normally be out of her pay grade if there were a Bennie or a Doctor around to
do them for her. There are messages here too – again, Ace proves she’s more
capable than perhaps she believes, but there’s also an undercurrent of people
using other people’s intelligence and ideas for their own ends, and leaving
them burned out rather than rewarded, which may well chime with girls and women
in every kind of job there is.
Mostly though, this is first
and foremost a problem-solving drama, with the responsibility of life and death
and right and wrong on one young woman’s shoulders, showing how she copes with
the incredible sequence of annoyances, difficulties and threats that keep
coming her way. Basically, it’s The
Martian, but starring Ace. And a bit more off the wall and bookish. With
alien librarians and criminals, and set in Liverpool. Alright fine, it’s
actually quite different from The Martian,
but the point is this is Ace having to work a string of problems with science
and courage and a different type of bravery to the kind she knows she has.
Inside Every Warrior by
Gemma Langford is, apart from its rightful place in an International Women’s
Day release, the ‘pilot’ for the Paternoster Gang series. I’m not gonna lie – I
have an enormous soft spot for the Paternoster Gang, because, well, what’s not
to love about a ninja detective lizard, her wife-cum-maid and a comedy
Sontaran, running around Victorian England solving space-crime?
There’s nothing about this
story that particularly screams ‘pilot’ either, which is a good decision. We’ve
seen them do their thing on screen, and here we’ve dropped in on them again,
but with the focus firmly on the gang themselves, in the absence of any moody
Time Lords. The story – essentially A Victorian Werewolf In London – is more
complex than it at first appears, and when we discover what makes the werewolf
go…erm…were, there’s a degree of ‘Huh…didn’t see that coming’ to it that takes
the tale to a different level. Mostly though, what we’re dealing with here is a
famous scientist treating his own maid like…well, like a terrorised partner,
and the various reactions of the gang to his behaviour as they investigate a
break-in at his lab and the theft of some all-important notes by…apparently…a
werewolf. There’s everything you want from a Paternoster Gang story here –
there’s Strax arguing with the horse and threatening to use some thoroughly
bonkers-sounding weaponry, there’s Jenny’s forthright adoration of her wife,
there’s Vastra standing up to sexist idiots, there’s some pretty cool
swordfighting, and there’s an ultimate re-statement of what links the team
together, which is love, respect, friendship and an additional almost parental
care of one another, the ‘oddities’ in a society that wouldn’t accept them
individually, but that can’t afford to dismiss them together. That ultimately
is the point of the title, and a crucial point of difference between the
Paternoster Gang and the villains of the piece. It’s worth keeping your ears
open as you go through Inside Every Warrior, because what was going on and what is
going on might well be different things, and if you’re not tracking, the
subtleties might slip by you among all the werewolves and aliens and
misogynists and the Truly Hideous Thing that happens to Strax. Ultimately
though, Inside Every Warrior announces the coming of a new Victorian series
that, on the evidence of this story, will come to stand alongside Jago &
Litefoot for fun, chills and affection from fans. Oh and incidentally, Joe
Kraemer, who composed the theme music for the Paternoster Gang episode, deserves
a raise – personally I want to be able to download that little beauty. (Hmm –
download album of Big Finish themes, anyone? Missy? Jenny? UNIT, Jago &
Litefoot, War Doctor, War Master…and so on?)
And to finish this set,
we’re with the new UNIT crowd, with three strong women front and centre – Kate
Stewart, Petronella Osgood and Jacqui McGee, journalist and increasingly strong
player in the UNIT-adjacent team, played by Tracy Wiles. Four strong and brilliant women actually, because we’re moving
forward into Capaldi-era UNIT with Zygon Osgood fully on board here. Narcissus,
by Sarah Grochala, is a story of insidious social standards of ‘beauty’ and how
they can be used to exclude people from love, sex, fun and potential futures.
There’s a newish dating app on the market which only allows the ‘beautiful
people’ to meet one another.
Just from the concept, you
know that’s gonna be run by all kinds of wrong-uns, don’t you?
And so it is, but for
reasons more subtle than the fury that’s raging in your brain right now. While
not strictly in any sense a female-specific targeted app – Captain Josh Carter,
for example, is the first of the UNIT crew to fall prey to it – the pressure on
women in society to look, dress, trim, pluck, prepare and perfect themselves to
some notional social standard of ‘beauty’ is exponentially higher and broader
throughout women’s lives than it is throughout men’s, and while absolutely
refusing to beat anyone over the head with that idea, Sarah Grochala’s script
allows you to understand it, as Jacqui, Kate and both the Osgoods all feel the
effects of the alien skulduggery that needs people to believe in their own
objective beauty, and mercilessly stokes their sense of self-pride in order to
trap them and use them for alien ends.
Petronella has a
particularly bad day at the office when she encounters the Narcissus app, which
takes some unravelling at the end. It’s highly important unravelling, speaking
to an even more insidious ‘need’ that’s very definitely targeted at women in
our society – the need to be ‘completed’ by someone else - so make sure you
don’t miss it, otherwise you’re just left with aliens being mean to our Osgood.
Narcissus is a neat, pacey
UNIT adventure that allows us to focus on the leading women of everyone’s
favourite United Nations military arm, in the absence of Sam Bishop and with
Josh Carter captured almost immediately by the app and its alien data-fiddlers.
Overall, this is an
enormously satisfying set of stories, each with their own individual tone,
paced for fun, meaning, and storytelling. They open up windows into the lives
of some of the best and most engaging characters in the Doctor Who universe,
give you plenty of adventure, from the physical to the intellectual to the
trans-temporal and back again, and for those who want the strong feminist
thread in their International Women’s Day stories, they deliver on that level
too. The temptation is not only to request more of the same next March, but
also to stud the year with other celebratory, groundbreaking, awareness-raising
sets in future years – 28th of June (date of Stonewall – come on,
you know the Doctor was there!) to
highlight the fight for equality of sexuality (Jack Harkness, River, Vastra,
Jenny etc), a set for Black History Month, etc.
Could such sets be
economically viable?
They could if, as with The
Eighth of March, they lead with story, and character, and stakes, and pacing,
while never shrinking from the issues underpinning the struggles. Above all,
The Eighth of March stands on the quality of its writing, the direction of
Helen Goldwyn, and knock-down drag-out heart-lifting performances all the way
down the cast sheet. More please!
