Big Finish Reviews+ The Movellan Manoeuvre by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s getting his Seventies on again.

The New Counter Measures team are back, seemingly as a surprise to everyone, after the somewhat abrupt ending to which they came just one story into their third series. And if you’re going to bring this team back, you could do worse than giving them a double-disc blow-out up against first the Movellans and then the Daleks, as episodes 3.2 and 3.3 do.

The Movellan Manoeuvre in particular is a pacy little number which dispenses with much of the mystery of previous stories with long build-ups. The Counter Measures team face the resurgence of what might be considered their Lex Luthor, their arch-rival, Lady Suzanne Clare (Carolyn Seymour) who appears to be…erm…manufacturing home-cleaning robots.

On investigation, there seems to be nothing nefarious or deadly about these robots, which is quite enough to drive group Captain Gilmore (Simon Williams) up the wall, so he goes to the expedient of kidnapping Lazy Clare and demanding answers.

It’s fair to say he gets them, but they’re by no means the answers either he or Lady Clare expect.

The Movellans are in and of themselves a great creation – for those not familiar with 1979’s Destiny of the Daleks, first of all, go back and get acquainted with Destiny of the Daleks immediately, and secondly, the Movellans are a force of disco-haired, gorgeously humanoid androids, ruled by pure logic and able to tell you calmy and in words of as many syllables as you like why they’re the superior form of life and why you should submit to their conquest.

There was a driving force in Destiny of the Daleks, a form of robo-life equal to the Daleks in ruthlessness and conquest, and whom the Daleks couldn’t defeat or exterminate in great enough numbers. They were later revealed to have won their war against the Daleks by attacking the part of the Dalek with which they themselves were unencumbered – the organic part - with a Dalek-eating virus. So firstly, you should never underestimate the Movellans. Yes, they might have dodgy disco-hair, but they defeated the Daleks. When was the last time you did that? And secondly, when they have a plan to take over a planet, more often than not, that planet gets taken well and truly over, thank you very much – and by ruthless android overlords with much more conversation than your average Dalek or Cybermen too.

The plot here, written by John Dorney, is effective and holds onto its mysteries as long as it possibly can – for a story where the Movellans are right there in the title, it’s an admirable exercise in delayed gratification that they don’t appear en masse for the longest time. When they do make their move though, it’s pitched at such a pace of ‘Ta-Dah!’ triumph as to make all the waiting and hoping worthwhile. The fact that it also takes the notional human villain by surprise is just an additional joy. While it would be a mistake to over-use them, this is a story that proves the viability on audio of the Movellans, and we could happily listen to more from these ultra-calm robotic overlords in future stories (We’ve never yet had a Movellan origin story, for instance, and that could be fascinating to listen to). Their viability is partly due to the way Dorney writes them here, and partly down to a joyfully understated performance from Cyril Nri as Movellan Commander Vallan, his rich, melodic tones perfectly showing the difference in approach between the Movellans and the Daleks.

The story, in which perfectly innocent cleaning robots are a front for something significantly more insidious, makes perfect sense when you’re dealing with the Movellans, and utilizes a modern technology that didn’t exist when they first appeared on-screen, but which has subsequently been used in a different way with a different robotic life-form, the separation of body and animating mindset and then at an appropriate moment, the downloading of the latter into the former. If anything it makes rather more sense here in The Movellan Manoeuvre than it did on-screen with the Cybermen, adding to the indefatigable potential menace of the Movellans and answering another of the questions we’ve always had about them – how do the Movellans get the armies they need to withstand the onslaught of a might like the Daleks’? Since Power of the Daleks, we’ve had the haunting image of conveyor belts full of Dalek shells being filled with mutant occupants. Here we don’t get quite the same scene for the Movellans, but we get at least one arresting mind-image of how they multiply and activate, and it’s at least very nearly as alarming.

The Movellan Manoeuvre has a lot to do with its hour of run-time – bring back the New Counter Measures team, advance their emotional story slightly (here with a sense that Rachel Jenson – played as ever by the unsurpassable Pamela Salem – might be getting sick and tired of the front-line danger of her role with the team, and that the affection between her and Gilmore might be coming to a point of decision), bring the Movellans back in a viable way, show them as potentially epic threats in their own right and set the scene for what could be the end of the Counter Measures stories in a re-match with the Daleks.

John Dorney seems to do all this without batting an eye, and while giving every  member of the team something to do, and bringing back Carolyn Seymour’s arch villain Lady Clare with just the right amount of laughter and scorn for the do-gooders from the Post Office Tower. It’s a bit of a triumph, this story, and it’ll blast you through an hour of your life without you noticing it’s gone.

Check out The Movellan Manoeuvre and discover what the Discobots have been up to lately.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Burning Prince

Tony feels the burrrrrrrn.

The Burning Prince is, not to put too fine a point on it, a total cracker.

It takes the Fifth Doctor, who frequently suffered from having a full Tardis, and having to share the dialogue out amount two or more often three companions, into a universe of his own while Nyssa and Tegan muck about with tulips and pots in Amsterdam in the wake of their Omega experience. Set free from his full Tardis, John Dorney gives us the kind of Fifth Doctor that would have set the screen alight, Peter Davison ramping up his performance to beyond eleven. Even in the first few minutes, when faced with the usual inevitability of being in the wrong place and time, and being immediately captured and marched to a cell, he’s witty, sarcastic, and very much in control of his universe – he’s as much and definitively the Doctor as Tom Baker or Jon Pertwee ever were, and it’s electric to hear an ‘early’ version of the Fifth Doctor who would eventually dash about the place in his third season.

Instead of meeting up with Nyssa and Tegan, the Doctor finds himself on a spaceship of the Drashani empire – Game of Thrones In Space, where the young Prince Kylo is set to marry the Princess Aliona to unite the warring families of Sorsha and Gadarel, bringing peace back to a warring empire that spans a galaxy.

Kylo, it turns out, is a spoiled and gullible pyrokinetic, who, when he gets stressed or angry, sets fire to things. Rooms. People. Aliona, meanwhile, has been lost when her bridal ship went down on a hostile planet.

And then there’s the Igryss. The Igryss is an 8 feet tall natural killing-engine, brought on board the ship taking Kylo to search for his beloved for experimental purposes.

You’d be right in thinking that’s a fairly stupid thing to do, and if you’ve seen any sci-fi movie ever, you’ll know that before very long, the ship is being sabotaged, the Igryss is released and the crew of the ship are fighting a valiant rearguard action to try to stay alive.

Imagine the whole of the Alien movie, but with laser crossbows and the Fifth Doctor, compacted down to 25 breathless, arse-kicking minutes, and you’re more or less there on the first episode of this story.

Episode 2 largely focuses on lessons in How Not To Crash And Die In A Deeply Shonky Escape Craft, and the pace barely slackens at all. And Episodes 3 and 4 respectively cover How Not To Die On Planet Australia, and, as foreshadowed, Game of Thrones In Space. The body-count is insanely high, the treachery is varied and the tension twisted, the pace hits you like a pinball hammer within minutes of the opening credits, and only stops for a breather when you know you absolutely need one if you’re not to pass out. In other words, Dorney takes a lesson from some of the very best Fifth Doctor stories like The Caves of Androzani, gives the Davison Doctor fewer companions to worry about and sets him free to be active, and clever, and disapproving, and sarcastic, and what turns out to be an Androzani-style bad day for the Fifth Doctor results in one of the best-paced, most effectively characterized audio stories Peter Davison’s had in a long time. Perhaps perversely of course, that underlines a form of flaw in the Fifth Doctor – usually uncertain of his own abilities, frequently when he sheds those uncertainties and starts taking charge of situations, people die, as they did in great profusion in Earthshock, Warriors of the Deep, Resurrection of the Daleks and the aforementioned Caves of Androzani. The Burning Prince is another in those object lessons for the cricket-playing Doctor not to take his control of situations for granted, and it stands alongside any of them – yes, really, any of them – as a class act that repays relisten after relisten.

Big Finish Reviews+ 1963: The Assassination Games by Tony J Fyler

Tony Fyler dodges a bullet.

There are points throughout Doctor Who’s history where spin-offs become possible. Some have been realized, others not yet. 1985’s Remembrance of the Daleks screamed ‘spin-off’ right from broadcast, its team of three humans fighting the combined Dalek threat alongside the Doctor and Ace having the distinct air of a ‘Web of Fear proto-UNIT’ about them – Group Captain Ian ‘Chunky’ Gilmore, Professor Rachel Jensen and Dr Alison Williams were well-characterised, rounded, real people, and when the Doctor and Ace left them behind, there was always the sense of them having lives beyond their involvement in the Doctor’s life. That’s how you can tell a natural spin off point – if you can imagine the characters going off to have adventures of their own, that’s a spin-off point.

But still, before you commit resources to writing and recording stories for them, any group of spin-off characters needs a try-out, and that will usually be a story which allows them to show off their potential, but which probably still includes the Doctor in some way, to carry the weight of ‘omnipotent alien with a plan’ plotting, in case such a thing is necessary.

The Intrusion Countermeasures Group – Gilmore, Williams, ministry man Sir Toby Kinsella and maybe, at some point, Jensen – were given their try-out in The Assassination Games, the third Big Finish story celebrating fifty years of Doctor Who, the so-called “1963” stories. In terms of personal reaction, I was looking forward to the Peter Davison and Colin Baker outings in the trio, but not particularly the McCoy entry, not being the biggest of his fans. Both the first two though disappointed by padding and a moderate insanity of plot. McCoy’s The Assassination Games managed to keep the story reasonably tight all the way along, and I was forced to concede it had ‘won’ the trio.

Because it’s both a Counter-Measures origin story and a Seventh Doctor story, the trick is in giving everyone enough to do, without spinning the story out for hours and hours and making the listener lose the will to listen. That’s why you give such a story to a writer like John Dorney. He establishes the tone, the period and the nature of the action rapidly – a new kind of nuclear missile, the Starfire, can cause solid amounts of devastation, but leave relatively little fall-out and minimize the shockwave effect. And Britain has it. The chance to break the nation out of its post-war post-imperialistic doldrums and set it on the path to world power status beckons, and then people start getting shot – assassinated in ways that elevate the tensions around an already highly-strung nuclear chessboard.

There are nuclear agendas, nuclear protestors, political sex scandals (this being 1963, the year of the Profumo scandal is shamelessly, even joyfully worked in, with a ‘good-time girl’ sleeping with both a Minister for Defence and a Russian spy), some fantastic undercover work from both Ace and the Doctor (the Doctor’s reveal in particular is delicious). There are basements full of alien tech, there are hyno-zombies, and there are creepy alien illuminati who combine elements of The Faceless Ones, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Bodysnatchers and the Darwinian nightmare of parasitoid wasps – so, pretty grim, all in all. But more than all of this, there’s a solid sense of period here, and of the potential of what Counter-Measures could be: perennial Big Finisher Hugh Ross adds to the Counter-Measures team we know with a smooth, polished performance as Sir Toby, the ultimate Westminster mandarin, while there’s something entirely logical for everyone to do within the storyline – Alison the duffle-coated idealist going undercover with Disarmament Now, Jensen giving the semi-official once-over to the armament stores of the arms manufacturer du jour, Sir Gideon Vale, Gilmore chasing down assassins and saying ‘What the devil-?’ a lot – it sets out a manifesto that says ‘This bunch could sustain an adventure series on their own, once the Doctor bogs off in his blue box again.’

While Dorney and veteran Big Finish director Ken Bentley keep the plot cracking along and reasonably tight, there’s also enough about the plot that’s absolutely barking mad, in the style of the great ITC adventure serials of the 60s and 70s – Danger Man, Department S and yes, The Avengers – and adds that element of demented invention to the stall that The Assassination Games sets out for a potential Counter-Measures series. Without being too spoilerific, threads of conspiracy and the potential replacement of key personnel lead to doppelgangers, double lives and a potential third world war between America and Russia – nothing like upping the stakes! It plays in to the paranoia of the age, but also delivers enough realism in the characters’ lives and dialogue to make you buy into the potential of the story and the show.

In some ways, The Assassination Games is the inversion of Remembrance of the Daleks, in which the Counter-Measures team (in embryo) were strong enough, but played second fiddle to the Doctor and Ace’s battle with the Daleks. In The Assassination Games, the Doctor and Ace are strong enough, and crucial enough, while playing second fiddle to the Counter-Measures team, meaning that once it’s over, you don’t immediately think ‘I could listen to more Seventh Doctor right now,” but rather “I could listen to more with that Counter-Measures team right now.’

Fabulously of course, you can – the original Counter-Measures team went on to have four whole series of adventures. 2016 has seen the special bridging story, Who Killed Toby Kinsella?, which will kick off The new Counter-Measures, a reinvention of the concept for the villains of the 1970s. Time Will tell whether the Counter-Measures team can stand up to the that multi-coloured decade.

But back in 1963, The Assassination Games works well – barking and realistic, finely balanced yet crackingly paced, bridging the gap between the extraordinary Remembrance of the Daleks and the spin-off it deserved. 

Big Finish Reviews+ The Assassination Games by Tony J Fyler

Tony Fyler dodges a bullet

There are points throughout Doctor Who’s history where spin-offs become possible. Some have been realized, others not yet. 1985’s Remembrance of the Daleks screamed ‘spin-off’ right from broadcast, its team of three humans fighting the combined Dalek threat alongside the Doctor and Ace having the distinct air of a ‘Web of Fear proto-UNIT’ about them – Group Captain Ian ‘Chunky’ Gilmore, Professor Rachel Jensen and Dr Alison Williams were well-characterised, rounded, real people, and when the Doctor and Ace left them behind, there was always the sense of them having lives beyond their involvement in the Doctor’s life. That’s how you can tell a natural spin off point – if you can imagine the characters going off to have adventures of their own, that’s a spin-off point.

But still, before you commit resources to writing and recording stories for them, any group of spin-off characters needs a try-out, and that will usually be a story which allows them to show off their potential, but which probably still includes the Doctor in some way, to carry the weight of ‘omnipotent alien with a plan’ plotting, in case such a thing is necessary.

The Intrusion Countermeasures Group – Gilmore, Williams, ministry man Sir Toby Kinsella and maybe, at some point, Jensen – were given their try-out in The Assassination Games, the third Big Finish story celebrating fifty years of Doctor Who, the so-called '1963' stories. In terms of personal reaction, I was looking forward to the Peter Davison and Colin Baker outings in the trio, but not particularly the McCoy entry, not being the biggest of his fans. Both the first two though disappointed by padding and a moderate insanity of plot. McCoy’s The Assassination Games managed to keep the story reasonably tight all the way along, and I was forced to concede it had ‘won’ the trio.

Because it’s both a Counter-Measures origin story and a Seventh Doctor story, the trick is in giving everyone enough to do, without spinning the story out for hours and hours and making the listener lose the will to listen. That’s why you give such a story to a writer like John Dorney. He establishes the tone, the period and the nature of the action rapidly – a new kind of nuclear missile, the Starfire, can cause solid amounts of devastation, but leave relatively little fall-out and minimize the shockwave effect. And Britain has it. The chance to break the nation out of its post-war post-imperialistic doldrums and set it on the path to world power status beckons, and then people start getting shot – assassinated in ways that elevate the tensions around an already highly-strung nuclear chessboard.

There are nuclear agendas, nuclear protestors, political sex scandals (this being 1963, the year of the Profumo scandal is shamelessly, even joyfully worked in, with a ‘good-time girl’ sleeping with both a Minister for Defence and a Russian spy), some fantastic undercover work from both Ace and the Doctor (the Doctor’s reveal in particular is delicious). There are basements full of alien tech, there are hyno-zombies, and there are creepy alien illuminati who combine elements of The Faceless Ones, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Bodysnatchers and the Darwinian nightmare of parasitoid wasps – so, pretty grim, all in all. But more than all of this, there’s a solid sense of period here, and of the potential of what Counter-Measures could be: perennial Big Finisher Hugh Ross adds to the Counter-Measures team we know with a smooth, polished performance as Sir Toby, the ultimate Westminster mandarin, while there’s something entirely logical for everyone to do within the storyline – Alison the duffle-coated idealist going undercover with Disarmament Now, Jensen giving the semi-official once-over to the armament stores of the arms manufacturer du jour, Sir Gideon Vale, Gilmore chasing down assassins and saying ‘What the devil-?’ a lot – it sets out a manifesto that says ‘This bunch could sustain an adventure series on their own, once the Doctor bogs off in his blue box again.’

While Dorney and veteran Big Finish director Ken Bentley keep the plot cracking along and reasonably tight, there’s also enough about the plot that’s absolutely barking mad, in the style of the great ITC adventure serials of the 60s and 70s – Danger Man, Department S and yes, The Avengers – and adds that element of demented invention to the stall that The Assassination Games sets out for a potential Counter-Measures series. Without being too spoilerific, threads of conspiracy and the potential replacement of key personnel lead to doppelgangers, double lives and a potential third world war between America and Russia – nothing like upping the stakes! It plays in to the paranoia of the age, but also delivers enough realism in the characters’ lives and dialogue to make you buy into the potential of the story and the show.

In some ways, The Assassination Games is the inversion of Remembrance of the Daleks, in which the Counter-Measures team (in embryo) were strong enough, but played second fiddle to the Doctor and Ace’s battle with the Daleks. In The Assassination Games, the Doctor and Ace are strong enough, and crucial enough, while playing second fiddle to the Counter-Measures team, meaning that once it’s over, you don’t immediately think ‘I could listen to more Seventh Doctor right now,” but rather “I could listen to more with that Counter-Measures team right now.’

Fabulously of course, you can – the original Counter-Measures team went on to have four whole series of adventures. The latest news from Big Finish is that in 2016, there will even be a reboot – The New Counter-Measures. That will be a very big gamble, because Counter-Measures was spun off from a core group of characters created for the screen by Ben Aaronovitch. But before we even have to confront the question of how The New Counter-Measures will work, there are sixteen hours with the original team to enjoy.

The Assassination Games works well – barking and realistic, finely balanced and yet crackingly paced. If this story sets out the stall for the Counter-Measures series, then bring it on!

Big Finish Reviews+ 5th Box Set - Iterations of I by Jeff Zyra

Written by John Dorney

The Doctor walks into the consul room and finds Adric and Nyssa trying to fly the TARDIS and land them at Heathrow airport in 1981 hours before Tegan has to catch her flight.  As with all things concerning the TARDIS flying her is harder than it looks as the TARDIS does not materialize at Heathrow but instead on a cliff edge on Fleming Island.  There is something odd going on at the island as it appears to be haunted and someone has gone to a lot of lengths to keep whatever it is on the island.  That is until The Doctor and his traveling companions Adric, Nyssa and Tegan stumble upon it and unwittingly set it free.  Now it’s up to them to prevent it from leaving the island and wreaking havoc on the main land.

The second story from the 5th Doctor Box Set is Iterations of I.  It takes place further along in the era where Tegan is ok with traveling with The Doctor for a bit and the companions seem to be used to each other unlike the first story Psychodrome.  This story also is a lot scarier than the previous story as it is a pretty good horror story to go along with the science fiction.  It was also a pretty clever story also using numbers or a new type of number to be the main catalyst for this story. 

Since this was taking place in 1981 the new type of number was trapped in a computer.  Now remember there wasn’t any internet yet and networking computers wasn’t done all that much if at all at the time so the ‘I’ number did not have anywhere to go.  So now that it is out The Doctor has to come up with a way of getting it back into the computer program that it was trapped in.

The resolution of the story was not what I was expecting as it involved someone making a sacrifice. I shouldn’t divulge who does make it but you pretty much can guess when listening to this story.  Iterations of I should also be credited for giving Adric a backbone and some guts to fighting back when he was about to be kidnapped and used as a hostage by Robert DeValley.   It was a good twist to have Robert’s ulterior motives to be about using the ‘I’ to get rich as it was the greedy 80’s after all. But it did throw me for a loop with that revelation as I was not expecting it. 

I did like the horror aspect of this story. It was pretty creepy during the first two parts of this story with Nyssa having a psychic attack and having her susceptible to the ‘I’ was pretty creepy.  Especially when she was just repeating ‘I’ over and over and no one was picking up on it.  The creep factor was pretty high in this story.

I really liked Iterations of I as it was a really good story that mixed in horror with science fiction.  It also pushed The Doctor to the limits as he tried to find a way to stop the ‘I’.  It was filled with lots of good performances by the 1981/1982 TARDIS crew and even though they are older they still have the magic to bring their characters to life and that was a key factor into making this box set a must buy for fans of the 5th Doctor and for Doctor Who fans in general.

Grade A