Big Finish Reviews+ Paper Cuts by Jeff Goddard

Ten years ago, this month saw the Draconians make their first appearance in the main range of Doctor Who audios from Big Finish, and with Marc Platt writing for them they did so with all the style and grace one associates with them. Paper Cuts places the Doctor firmly into the heart of the Draconian court, not once but twice, and answers the question first raised in Frontier in Space of how exactly an outsider became a noble of Draconia, a race absolutely steeped in tradition.

It is that deep culture and heritage that Platt brings to the fore here, and while it is reminiscent of Japanese culture it has its own uniqueness to make it truly alien. Draconia is a society that holds its traditions as sacrosanct, as it has always been, so shall it always be so. But when the Doctor, in an earlier (although unspecified) incarnation became an advisor to the XV Emperor, the Red Emperor, early in his reign he unwittingly drew the ire of those who held those traditions closest to their hearts when, for the sake of the entire species he suggested Draconia close itself off from the rest of the galaxy until a space-plague had passed, foreseeing the destruction and death that it would cause. In a move that would cause untold hardship for his peoples the Red Emperor took the Doctors advice, saving his peoples, but with its own price….

Now in his sixth incarnation the Doctor has been summonsed back to Draconia by the Red Emperor himself, some 60 years later and with ‘Charley’ in tow (more of this shortly). The Deathless Emperor is lying in state and his successor is to be named, but only after a three-day vigil of contemplation has been completed.

The four vigilantes (the highest, the lowest, the bravest and the wisest) in the Emperors tomb, in the Celestial Heaven above the planet soon learn that they are playing a deadly game, one that it seems none of them are expected to survive and that not all the participants are openly declared. As the Doctor, The Emperors Son, a lowly Fisher-Catcher and the Emperor’s former bodyguard gather together to become playing pieces on the board the stakes raise ever higher, especially with the High Priest playing their own game.

Paper Cuts never relents in its pace or imagery and has the feel and tone of a real whodunnit with just a twist of the mystical. It is a story of lyrical visuals, and the performances of all the cast bring it to vivid life, painting its pictures as the paper walls of the Emperor’s Tomb paint the pictures of people’s memories. With killer Origami Sazou (Draconian Chess) pieces, a space necropolis of the interred yet deathless Emperors of Draconia, and galaxy spanning Empires forced into seclusion this is a story of scale but told with a deceptively small cast of characters and with a delightfully light hand.

The sixth Doctor and Charley work beautifully as a pair, which is odd when you consider how well-known Charley is for her time with the eighth incarnation of our beloved Time Lord. But there is something about Colin Baker and India Fisher’s chemistry together that just works. Its not the same relationship, but its equally as engaging, even if Charley isn’t quite herself. Which brings me to the point I alluded to earlier. Paper Cuts could be listened to as a stand-alone story, but it is really part of a longer series of stories that sees an interloper, Mila, masquerading as Charlotte Pollard desperate to taste adventures with the Doctor for herself (and all to herself). As such there are out of character moments that throw you, especially if you listen to it as I did for this review for the first time in a long time and out of sequence.

But none of that detracts from the spectacle and grandeur of the story itself. Colin Baker is at his warm and charming best as the Doctor here, having finally reached that happy point for which he had always aimed when he started out all those years ago, thanks to his time with Big Finish. He and Fisher get a slightly easier job than the rest of the cast in this affair, as they play the only non-Draconians in the whole story. It is up to everyone else to bring the sibilant reptile species to life, and this they do with the same truth and poise as their television counterparts all those years ago.

Anthony Glennon’s arrogant and loathsome Prince has exactly the right tones of haughty entitlement one would expect from the first-hatched and heir apparent. Sara Crowe as the Queen Mother obsessed with the traditions of Draconia and driven by ambitions for her son gives an amazing performance. The lowly Fisher-Catcher played by Paul Thornley provides us with the most relatable character – just wanting to go home, even if it is full of hungry mouths to feed, and it’s a shame Mila would ensure we wouldn’t get to see a little more of the character. John Banks completes the main cast with his noble and earnest soldier, another solid performance that never fails to ring utterly true. We must also give special mention to Nicholas Briggs of course who along with directing, provides a chilling backdrop with his deathless Emperor – never failing to send the blood running just a little colder, probably aptly given this is a story about reptiles.

Ten years on Paper Cuts is just as sharp (pun possibly intended), just as vivid and vital as it was when it came it. If you haven’t listened to it for a while or have never listened to it than its ten-year anniversary may just be the time to do it! You certainly wont regret it.

My life at your command.

Big Finish Reviews+ Time Reef by Tony J Fyler

Doctor Who has an unfortunate track record when it comes to adapting Greek myths in either a historical or a science-fiction setting. The Myth Makers, Underworld and The Horns of Nimon spring to mind…and then limp off again to hide from the light of any serious consideration. The God Complex though was a storming stand-out of its season and its era, proving that when done diligently, the myths of gods and monsters, heroes and villains really can be used to create some top-class Doctor Who. It’s often the case though that they’re so complete as stories in their own right that any adaptation seems to lessen them.

Time Reef isn’t exactly based on a Greek myth, but writer Marc Platt does use the spirit of Greek myths as its tonal keynote to pose a highly sci-fi problem of time, perception and multiple dimensions. It also considers the question of how the Doctor does the things he does, and how, for instance, someone aiming to ‘be’ the Doctor could easily get it catastrophically wrong.

There’s a degree of backstory it helps to know when going in to Time Reef, as it’s a pivotal moment for companion Thomas Brewster. Brewster, a kind of grown-up Artful Dodger from Victorian London, had previously run off with the Tardis.

Time Reef gives us just one example of the kind of mischief he’s been getting up to in the five months (relative Doctor time) he’s had the Time Machine. Brewster has been selling off or donating bits of the Tardis’ critical circuitry, sometimes for a whacking great payday, sometimes showing his redeemable soft-touch nature. Now reunited with the angry Fifth Doctor and the always-rational, compassionate Nyssa, he’s quickly taken back to the Time Reef, where he offloaded some crucial and non-crucial bits of kit, and where people subsequently curse the name of the Doctor. When the Tardis more or less folds up in to a tiny ball of dimensions, the real Doctor is forced to step in and work his Time Lord mojo if any of them are going to survive.

By any of them, we mean rather more than usual. Platt expands the traditional ‘base under siege’ format here to include representatives of at least three species besides the three more who arrive in the Tardis. And this is more or less where it gets distinctly Greek and mythological. There’s a crew of space-aged questing heroes with very Grecian names, led by Commander Gammades (Nicholas Farrell), who’ve been stranded on the reef, and who spend a lot of their time waxing positively poetical. There’s the lady Vuyoki (marvellously played by the foot-stamping Beth Chalmers) from an entirely different species, who lives in an urn under the consistent conviction that she’s dead and waiting to be transported to her next life. And then there’s The Ruhk – a dark hellbird creature who stalks the reef, determined to stop Gammades and Co using the beacon that ‘the Doctor’ left with them as a way of maybe getting the hell off the region of eternal timelessness that is the time reef.

Gammades, by the way, has a major league drippy fascination with Vuyoki, who treats him in return with nothing but contempt. So it’s a happy little band and no mistake who welcome ‘the Doctor’ and his companion, ‘Blondie,’ to the reef.

The way events unfold is fairly classic and sticks to a Davison formula, though it does give the Fifth Doctor an opportunity to be really, properly cross and Davison seizes that opportunity with both hands. Platt though is never knowingly undersurreal, and the combination of oddities he throws together on the time reef, and indeed the way the time reef itself operates, is peculiar enough to make it memorable, almost an inversion of the typical base under siege format in that if things don’t go well, not only will the Tardis cease to exist, the reef and all its people will too. There’s some solid ‘nothing is what it seems’ work in this story too, with Gammades, Vuyoki and The Ruhk all effecting late-stage transformations, at least in our understanding of them and their motives as the clock ticks down towards the destruction of the reef. And there’s some suitably mythic ‘beauty is not necessarily what we think it is’ moralising too, as Brewster, who could be said to be responsible for the whole conundrum, is saved from a fate very much like death by an unusual intervention.

That the whole of this adventure is only three episodes long feels remarkable by the time you’re done with it, as a combination of Platt’s heavy space-time concepts, unusual characters and deeply literate language makes Time Reef feel very thickly layered and textured, but surprisingly easy to move through from complicated start to simpler finish. It’s a story that demands your attention in order to get your head around its central ideas, but then pulls you forward in a swirl of characterisation – not least from Davison, who in his best Frontios fury, pulls the story on by sheer dint of Time Lord self-righteousness.

The fact that it’s only three episodes long allows for a final one-part story with Thomas Brewster to be tacked on to the end. A Perfect World, by Jonathan Morris, continues some of the themes of Time Reef, inasmuch as it details another screw-up by that loveable rogue Thomas Brewster while he was off being clueless in control of a time machine. But it poses questions about life, the universe and personal choice, invents a couple of Brummie time-plumbers, and gives Brewster the chance to evolve beyond his origins and finally put down some roots somewhere. It’s a sweet, fun, philosophically interesting one-shot to cap both the occasionally challenging invention-load of Time Reef and the journey of Thomas Brewster as an antagonist/companion of the Doctor’s (at least for a while…).

If you’re looking for an overall vibe for Time Reef/A Perfect World, it’s very much like Mawdryn/Terminus/Enlightenment if, for the purposes of accuracy, neither Turlough nor Tegan existed to get stuck in ducting for half a story or have secret clandestine conversations with the space-devil and try to kill the Doctor. In other words, it’s a complex, lyrical, brave, mostly well-characterised mouthful of Eighties Who, with a Fifth Doctor developing his personality in a range of challenging scenarios. It’s an involving listen, so if you’ve never spent time on a time reef, you need to remedy that…while there’s still time.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Thief Who Stole Time by Tony J Fyler

When last we checked in on the Fourth Doctor and the Second Romana, they were in two very distinct kinds of trouble – the Doctor was prrrrrobably sacrificing himself to a tribe of semi-savages as a way of appeasing them for the crime of deicide, and Romana had been abandoned by her best old school chum on a planet of jellied eels, which swallows you down under its hungry surface if you dare to stop moving.

So…no pressure then.

Add in a book that writes the future of the world, a supercivilised TV crew come to study the natives, and one extra-special villain, and you’re in for a treat.

The Thief Who Stole Time, beyond its somewhat clunky title, is remarkable in another way too – Tom Baker, the actor who is by definition ‘most people’s’ Doctor, having played the role for seven years, rather than most actors’ three or four, is now in his eighties, but here he’s beyond a shadow of doubt the life and soul of the audio, sounding like a super-intelligent child, all energy and ideas. It’s evident that Baker’s having enormous fun with writer Marc Platt’s dialogue and narration, some of which is written in an approximation of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, all rolling, sea-like, overstretching lines and vivid, bone-deep, doubled-down images, which is meat and drink to actors like Baker, with his rumbling voice, and also Des McAleer, who gets his fair share of those lines as Blujaw, the village’s former ‘skald’ or seer. Not for nothing, these are techniques that make both the previous episode, The Skin of the Sleek, and this one, absolute joys to listen to for the sheer rolling poetry of the language. Imagine an hour of Richard Burton growling low space-time gobbledegook in your ears – that’s worth the admission price on its own.

Platt has created a highly unusual world, peopled it richly, and given it a central secret worth digging for – the extra-special villain has a plan to steal Something Powerful from this planet of jellied eels, and while in part 1 of the story, they busied themselves breaking into archives, killing eel-gods and double-crossing do-gooders, here they escalate their villainy to artefact-thievery, cold-blooded murder and turning themselves into a timeline-determining god. What’s fun on the one hand, and a little obvious on the other, is that the extra-special villain here has the ego and the emotional intelligence of a teenager, stamping their foot and stomping off to paint the universe black because they never asked to be born. That means on the one hand, much of the Doctor’s usual response, trying to talk sense to the villain, doesn’t work because it’s swamped by the raging ego of that self-revolution, and on the other hand, played wrong, it can sound a bit like Adrian Mole-meets-Hitler. What’s extra-specially pleasing here though is that Romana, played by Lalla Ward, has more emotional range to play with than she’s usually given, her cool superiority genuinely shaken in this episode, and Ward goes the extra mile to give her Romana an arc in this story that promises good things for future battles of wits against the extra-special villain here. The Doctor has had his humanoid arch-nemesis in the Master (now Missy) since the early 1970s, and this two-part story goes a long way towards giving Romana her own equal-and-opposite character, her own Moriarty to face and fight.

Taken as a whole, The Thief Who Stole Time is a deeply satisfying second part to the story of events on Fundarell, the planet of the jellied eels, and it rounds out the latest series of Fourth Doctor stories leaving the listener satisfied that they’ve been well-served – Baker and Ward sound on top form here, Platt’s world-building is suitably complex and realistic, and the dilemmas come naturally, one after the other as the arch-villain moves towards the culmination of their cunning plan, and then is (spoiler-alert) defeated. For listeners who demand texture, depth, engaging problems, and solid characters and societies in their audio Who, The Thief Who Stole Time is hard to beat. On top of which, the arch-villain is something new and delicious, the Under Milk Wood tones are gorgeous and rich like a chocolate fondant, and there’s a sense of immediate energy that powers the storytelling through from its unusual beginnings to its judicial end. The short way of saying all that, of course, is ‘Pick up The Thief Who Stole Time today – the title might be naff, but everything else is excellent.’

Who Reviews Ghost Light by Jeffrey Zyra

Written by Marc Platt

“Confusion, wastage, tyranny, burnt toast, till all the atlas is pink.”

Most houses are friendly.  But one house in particular is evil.  A house that the residents of Perivale will not go to at night and that house is Gabriel Chase.   Because you see Gabriel Chase is haunted or at least that is the story Ace tells The Doctor.  Ace burned down Gabriel Chase as a child and unbeknownst to Ace The Doctor brought her there to see why she was getting weird vibes that the house was haunted.

While at the house The Doctor and Ace run across some strange characters.  For instance, the butler is a Neanderthal named Nimrod, a lost explorer who seems to have lost his mind named Redvers Fenn-Cooper, very creepy Lady Pritchard and her daughter Gwendoline and the proprietor of the house Josiah Samuel Smith who wants to assassinate Queen Victoria.  The Doctor and Ace seem to have happened upon a strange cast of residents of Gabriel Chase and there appears to be something lurking in the cellar as Ace soon discovers.

It appears that certain members of the household only come out at night and they show fear at the very mention of Light.  Ace tells The Doctor about the cellar and that it is quite alien.  The Doctor releases the tortured creature named Control who in turns releases the one they work for Light.  It appears that Light was sent to Earth to survey the planet but unfortunately for him while he was imprisoned the planet kept evolving.  The Doctor must stop Josiah Samuel Smith and his mad cap scheme and to also save the Earth from Lights firestorm scenario that would kill all life on Earth.

Ghost Light is a weird story.  It has to do, for the most part, with evolution and the progress of the earth.  You see Light was there before to take a survey and then seemed to get caught napping.  So when he wakes up he is none too happy about the changes that have taken place.   So he has taken things into his own hands to stop the changing and end everything.   It is really pretty easy to follow if you pay attention to the story that is unfolding.

Ghost Light was definitely one of the strangest stories in Doctor Who’s history and at times had you scratching your head.   But I enjoyed this mad cap adventure.  I like how the 7^th Doctor was jerking around Ace and making her face her fear and in essence make her stop running away from it.   Ghost Light was another of the stories that defines Ace as a companion. It is another of those Doctor teaching moments that eventually culminates in The Curse of Fenric. I enjoyed when they did this as it was different and it gave you a different aspect to The Doctor and companion relationship.  I would have enjoyed seeing more of this during the 7^th Doctor’s era and expanded upon more in depth but unfortunately with the amount of stories they did have they just didn’t have enough time to do it.  For fans of NuWho this scenario with Ace is quite evident in the new series as we have seen similar with the Doctor and companion relationship in the new series but maybe not as manipulative.

I really liked the sets they used in Ghost Light.  If anything the BBC can really recreate the past better than they can with spaceships and alien planets in the Classic series.  I just loved the set of the Victorian Gothic house that the story was centered on.  It looked pretty old and creepy and it gave you that haunted house feel and look especially with those stairs in the main entrance.  

Ghost Light is another story where The Doctor is darker and manipulative.  He is also playing games and more or less is using the occupants of the house for his own game.  He is cunning and calculating and is in a mental showdown with Light and Josiah Smith.  It would have been good to see more of this Doctor but unfortunately fates were not with us.  But this Doctor was the template that was used during the Virgin Publishing series of Doctor Who novels called the New Adventures.  The authors expanded on this dark and manipulative Doctor in ways that could only happen in the books or as Big Finish has done on occasion also.

Ghost Light while probably not the best of stories in Doctor Who’s history but it is one that can be deemed a guilty pleasure.   There is so much going on that you can find something to like or laugh at.  But just remember to not eat the soup.

Grade B -

Big Finish Reviews+ Cradle of the Snake by Tony J Fyler

Each of the three Doctors who piloted the Tardis during the 80s had adventures with longstanding foes like the Daleks and Cybermen, but each of them also had era-specific enemies or monsters that had the potential for further use, but which never made it across into another Doctor’s time. The Sixth Doctor had Sil, the particularly unpleasant slug-like Mentor. The Seventh Doctor tangled with Fenric, the Elder God. The Fifth Doctor’s private property was, if we’re honest, a cut above both of them. The Mara was based in religious symbolism – in Buddhism, Mara is a demon of seduction. Marrying that idea to the Judaeo-Christian idea of a serpent who tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, Doctor Who’s Mara is all things to all people – a creature of the mind, that feeds your desires and grows stronger, until, when released, it takes the form of a giant snake and is free to obey its own whims, bring chaos and destruction everywhere it sinks its fangs.

It could be said that this is not normal Doctor Who fare, but on the other hand, the show has a long history of explaining the way in which rationally explicable things have become part of some belief system or other. But especially in its manifestations in the TV stories Kinda and Snakedance, the Mara really was something particularly disturbing, Janet Fielding doing exceptional work to bring the definitively adult concept into the family show, and push the boundaries between ‘hiding behind the sofa’ scary and ‘actually potentially traumatizing’ scary.

Big Finish audio has many opportunities the TV show never had, and one of those opportunities is to revisit monsters or villains that had potential, but which perhaps suffered from TV budgets. While the human and mental incarnations of the Mara were deeply disturbing on screen, its ultimate serpent form had an inevitable tendency to be a let-down. And while Kinda stuck reasonably close to the mythological origins of the Mara, with a tribe of mostly-mute aborigines falling under the spell of the first male among them to speak (with the Mara putting words in his mouth, based on his desire to rid his world of a scientific expedition), Snakedance, the second Mara story, gave a fascinating investigation of precisely the reverse – how spiritual or objectively-experienced things can come to be viewed as ‘mumbo-jumbo’ over time, and how we as a species de-fang the snakes of our collective consciousness. If that strikes you as a trite point, bear in mind that this Easter there were Dalek Easter eggs on sale in stores: the symbol of science-fiction racial purity, used to sell chocolate to children.

So, given the opportunity to add a third chapter to the Mara story, what does Big Finish offer in The Cradle of the Snake?

Well, sadly, slightly less than the sum of its predecessors. After a strong ‘next time on Big Finish’ moment at the end of The Whispering Forest, the action at the start of The Cradle of the Snake feels rather clunky – there’s a lot of Turlough asking ‘What?’, and Nyssa or the Doctor filling in the exposition of their previous tangles with the snake of seduction. Intending to pop back to Manussa and have a word with Dojjen, the mystic so instrumental in the Mara’s defeat in Snakedance, the Doctor overshoots, and lands them in the Manussan past – a hundred years before the rise of the Mara on that planet. He also links minds with Tegan in an attempt to drive the Mara out of her once and for all. Janet Fielding as ever does superb work bringing the self-assured tones of the Mara to her performance by degrees, to disturb the listener, but the snake makes a point – if it leaves Tegan, it must find somewhere else to go. Yanked prematurely from Tegan’s mindscape by Nyssa’s concern, the Doctor heads off into Manussan society, to find Tegan a medic who can cure her once and for all.

It’s not long before there’s a sense of ouroboros at work – the snake that eats its own tail – as the Mara comes out to play on Manussa significantly before it’s ‘supposed’ to, through the engine of a machine that translates thought energy into physical realities (hence the cradle of the snake, as the Mara has always been about the translation of thought into action, thought into reality), and one by one, those who appear to be ranged against its rise simply fall to the power of its seductive voice. Oddly enough, given her experience with the character and its very vocal performance, Janet Fielding only gets an initial shot at being the Mara in this story, though everyone else, at some point or other, has a turn. Without overspoiling you, listen out for the Nyssa Mara, it’s a treat for anyone who thinks she’s always been a bit too Goody Two-Shoes.

While the story of the Mara’s premature rise to power, feeding itself on the minds and desires of many Manussans is straightforward enough, there’s something of a headache in store for listeners trying to keep the timeline straight in their head, as to whether the Mara was genuinely ‘born’ on Manussa as a result of the thought-into-matter machine tapping into the darker desires of some Manussans, or whether it’s only there at all because the Doctor and his crew brought it there. The solution to the problem of premature Mara-rule is also more than a little convenient, stretching the idea of balance to very near its breaking point – only when balance is restored to the universe can the Mara be defeated. Handily, here’s an avatar of perfect contentment to balance against the Mara’s serpentine itch of endless desires – so that’s alright then, boys and girls.

There’s some solid British acting talent trying to make sense of Marc Platt’s script, including Dan ‘Dead Bloke From Downton’ Stevens as Rick ausGarten, Vernon Dobtcheff as the pre-Dojjen Dojjen, Dadda Desaka, and increasingly ubiquitous Big Finisher Hugh Fraser as Dr Hanri Kerrem, the doctor who gives Tegan a clean bill of health, but as with many Platt scripts, there’s an overriding sense that the ideas are more important than the demands of drama, so the wheels come off the storytelling in episode three, and the solution rather bumps along the ground for the majority of episode four without any actual ‘Ta-Dah’ moment or the accompanying sense of having ultimately won anything. Oh and the big snake? Yep, turns out it’s just as underwhelming as a sound effect as it was as an early-80s puppet.

Perhaps the real issue in The Cradle of the Snake though is not the lack of a coherent storytelling structure for the last episode, but the lack of the sense of menace that was unique to the Mara on screen. Both in Janet Fielding’s performance as the embodied Mara, and Jeff Stewart’s as Dukkha, the main trickster in her mind, there was a cold, delicious power that made the Mara feel like a real, exciting force to watch. The truth is that no-one in The Cradle of the Snake except Fielding can quite capture that slow, seductive malice – there’s too much focus and drive in the Mara having a plan beyond existence, and everyone seems committed to playing it as just a possessive force. As such, the Mara, which feels inherently like it could be a villain custom-made to work brilliantly in the audio format, falls depressingly flat in The Cradle of the Snake as it busily sets about conquering its world.

One to buy, then?

The voice of the Mara inside you will probably tempt you to it, because to anyone who enjoys the Mara and understands the appeal of it as a creation, the idea of not knowing what it does after Snakedance is going to be intolerable. But it’s very possible you’ll then spend quite some time trying to convince yourself you like it rather more than you actually do.

Big Finish Reviews+ Spare Parts by Christopher Fain

Spare Parts

By Christopher Fain

Audio Drama by Big Finish Productions

Written by Marc Platt

Release date July 2002

Length 2 hrs 1 min

We all want immortality, says Thomas Dodd; he's cynical but not wrong.

It's Doctor Who at its science fiction best, the disparity of technology capable of cybernetic augmentation set in a 1950s Londonesque city locked down with rationing and curfews and cyber-Police on cyber-horses. Spare Parts is, to a newbie, a good place to start with Big Finish's Doctor Who audio drama line. The Cyberman voices are a throw-back to the television serial "The Tenth Planet" and that is continuity at a grand, scary level.

Intending to take Nyssa to the picture show in London, the Doctor has accidentally brought her to the wrong place. Not an unusual occurrence, but this time it could have larger repercussions than those usually faced by the time traveler and his companions. They have arrived in an underground city on Mondas, the lost twin of Earth, where the Cybermen were first created.  They're just in time to witness the last gasps of humanity on a planet where the surface is lethal and its people are being used up as a form of cannon fodder.

Here we find one of Big Finish Productions' most thought-provoking audio dramas, penned by Marc Platt. Spare Parts is a terrifying and darkly gritty tale set on Mondas, where the computerized committee government now enforces totalitarianism in the interest of survival.

Once he suspects the truth of where they are, the Doctor is sure he doesn't want to be involved.  Getting involved means changing the course of Cyberman history. To do so does not mean preventing their creation, but any alteration could result in a far worse trajectory than the one which both the Time Lord and his companion have been witness to. There are consequences to interfering with known events.

As the Doctor explains at a later point in the story, arguing with Nyssa about why they should stay disinterested: 'Sometimes you play. Sometimes you sit on the sideline. Sometimes you run afterwards with a stretcher.'

Unable to turn away immediately, they separate to explore on the cusp of the city's curfew and are caught up in the gears of Mondas' last days as a human world.  The population is doomed with disease, slow starvation, and the threat of a nebula which hangs ready to devour the frozen planet.

There is a black market for flesh body parts and the Police have been secretly ordered to dig up the cemetery, to provide the city with nutrients. Few of the processed Cybermen are surviving more than a week as their bodies reject the cybernetic augmentation. The propulsion system used to give the planet some means of directed travel is located on the frozen surface, needing crewmen for repairs and operation. Workers who go to the surface don't survive very long; even when protected by heavy gear, their minds cannot endure the terrible blackness which is their open sky.

Once again, the Doctor gets involved in saving the Cybermen, this time very much against his will. His physiology is mapped as the template for a new and improved cyborg, one that can survive the rigors of the surface. 

Mondas was perhaps doomed from its start. The people have lived in underground cities for a very long time, the planet's surface a mystery. Life on the surface is now memorialized in the ceremonies and trimmings of a holiday which seems to be similar to Earth-based Christmas but with symbolism that accents the differences between Earth and Mondas. For the Mondasian, the decorated fir tree is a reminder of an unremembered time when they lived on the surface, where the trees grew; the fairy lights are stars and the star at the top of the tree stands in for a long-lost sun, the star Sol.

They have reached an untenable position in their society. The people are dying out, fighting mortality with life-saving augmentations such as replacement hearts. Drifting in space, away from the light and heat of a star, the surface of Mondas is physically lethal and psychologically devastating. 

In this story, there is no central enemy to fight. These are organic beings with emotions and frailties. This is a war for survival in the hands of those who no longer have human feelings. With the Cybermen, the desire to survive subsumes personality and all other flesh needs into programmed responses. In the push for the survival of Mondasian humanity, they kill what it means to be human.

Spare Parts is full of easily understood characters both rich and colorful who turn the story into historical science fiction, ghastly and heart-wrenching by turns. The average citizens are like frightened rats, scurrying to be safely indoors by tea, when the curfew starts.  They are so like Earth humans that the listener cannot stay detached. The city might look like 1950s London, but it has social tones of an earlier era, with wartime rationing, curfews, and call-ups for recruits who are waved off with cheers and pride to their new job on the surface work crews. Many suspect what is really happening to those who go off for processing, but it is easier to pretend ignorance and accept the dictates of a secret government.

The Hartley family, who represent the average citizens of Mondas, clings to life on short rations and little hope, turning the telly up when a neighbor begs for help as she is collected by the Police. They sound like they're from the north of England, as dirt-common as Yorkshire. They decorate for the holiday, worry over a sluggish pet cyber-bird, fret over what to have for tea, and live in an interconnected unit which relies heavily on each beating heart---even when one of those hearts is an augmentation complete with turning paddles. 

Dad Hartley is a mat-catcher who has, at some point in the past, lost his wife. He apparently sold her body to a black marketeer; this doesn't make him a bad man, only one desperate to take care of his children. He's a brilliant, world-weary character who has become fatalistic in the face of encroaching doom.

Yvonne Hartley's a sweet and innocent teenage girl who works in the hydroponic factories, where the food is grown. She has breathing problems and a young man whom she fancies; she's as normal as any woman of her age can be and it's easy to admire her pluck and generosity of spirit, which makes her fate particularly touching. The one character who does not anticipate or deserve such a frightening end is the one character with whom you walk the queue for processing. Stripped of clothes and confused among other recruits, Yvonne only comes to the realization of what processing truly means as the knives and laser saws begin to flash.

Frank Hartley wants to be recruited for service but is also ignorant of what it means. He thinks there's honor and a steady pay packet to be made by joining the surface work crews. Frank's frustratingly jealous of his sister, Yvonne, for being given her call-up papers, and it's the listener who knows what Frank does not yet understand. This is no honorable service but a death sentence given for no other reason than Yvonne's suffering from consumption.

The true horror of this audio play comes from within their home, in one of the most heartbreaking scenes ever written for a Cyberman story. If your loved one was turned into a Cyberman, would you want to see them again? Would you want to know? What if they turned up at your door only half-processed and schizophrenic with the mental torment of an incomplete conversion, incapable of remembering their humanity but childlike in their need for you?

Other secondary characters who flesh out this tale include Thomas Dodd, a wide-boy who runs a body parts shop, trading in misery and spare transplant materials. He's an opportunist, but he isn't alone; Mondas has only one underground city left and its population has shrunk to a few thousand. Dodd won't be the only one capable of seeing the truth and working to make a profit while a profit is possible.

The city is run by a Central Committee, twelve of Mondas' finest minds hooked into a computer.  They are aided, primarily, by those who still possess the physical bodies necessary to carry out the gruesome task of conversion. 

Doctorman Allan is an alcoholic scientist who is responsible for the creation of the Cybermen race, but she is no John Lumic or Davros; she is human and hates herself for what she's done to her people. She has stripped the humanity from living Mondasians and her conscience is pricked by this; she spends much of the story drinking and it is, in fact, her wine which offers the Doctor a chance at stopping this metal march to doom. Allan is every bit the cynic that Thomas Dodd, the black marketeer, is. But while Dodd is working to supply body parts to the little man for a profit, Doctorman Allan has a grander goal of saving the world. 

She is assisted by Sisterman Constant, a selector. The selectors move among the remaining population, choosing the sick and damaged for processing. She takes pride in her position and is aware of its implications. Sisterman Constant believes she is doing good and is sanctimonious about her duty. Her blindness to the inevitable outcome is painful; she can only see the present need and not how this situation must eventually play out. In this way, she can be likened to the kapos of WWII concentration camps, a judas goat.

Commander Zheng, a processed Cyberman in charge of the surface work crews, answers directly to the Central Committee; without emotion or human thought, he acts as he is ordered to and begins the job of processing the full population with an intent of shutting down the city; there is no more choice, because the roof of the underground cavern is opened, letting in the frozen atmosphere from above. He is the instrument by which Mondas' destiny is fulfilled and his last line is just as chilling as the Central Committee/Cyberplanner's repeated cries of 'We must survive'. Zheng, despite being an emotionless Cyberman, lingers in the mind as strongly as any of the unprocessed human characters and reveals to the listener that, in the end, the Doctor's involvement has changed little.

Even if the sight of this legendary Doctor Who alien doesn't frighten you, the idea behind their existence should. The mesh of a human desire for survival with the cold logic of the machine should be enough to scare any living soul. A species of cyborgs whose most basic ambition comes from within its human origins: the drive for survival, at any cost, even the loss of humanity.  How far are we from a similar fate? A breast implant today, a hip replacement tomorrow, a new nose in a few years, cyberthetic limbs for the wounded soldier returning from war, cyberthetic eyes which contain a camera and a connection to the visual center of the brain...what's next? A neural augmentation for wifi? 

The push for physical, emotional, and social perfection can be a killer.

This audio drama has been influential in the Doctor Who television show, beginning with the parallel world episodes "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel", which see the Doctor witnessing the birth of Cybermen on Earth in another universe. But, this is not where the influence ends. In the episodes "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday", the director of Torchwood One at Canary Wharf, is named Yvonne Hartman (close enough!) and she retains some of her humanity after conversion, enough so for us to draw a correlation to Spare Parts' Yvonne Hartley's uncompleted processing and the human behaviors which both Yvonnes show from under the Cyberman mask.

Many fans comment on how difficult it is to understand the Central Committee's voice, claiming it to be garbled and distorted. It is true that this particular voice is hard to follow at times, but given that the character is, story-wise, meant to be a composite of twelve brains joined together through a computer, the Central Committee's voice(s) is just about what a listener should expect. 

Spare Parts is a masterpiece of storytelling, a captivating dystopic history for one of the Doctor's greatest foes.

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Art used here comes from:

http://alphabetswhop.blogspot.com/2013/05/c-is-for-cybermen.html

http://janjygiggins.deviantart.com/art/Mondas-93373741

You can find this audio drama at:

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/spare-parts-200

Marc Platt is a British writer well known for his contributions to Doctor Who. He has written twenty-one Doctor Who audio plays for Big Finish Audio. He wrote the 7th Doctor television serial "Ghost Light" and five Doctor Who novels, including the much-acclaimed Lungbarrow.  Spare Parts was the inspiration for the 2006 Doctor Who episodes "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel".

Directed by: Gary Russell

Sound Design: Alistair Lock

Music: Alistair Lock

Cover Art: Clayton Hickman

Number of Discs: 2

Duration: Disc 1 (59:08) Disc 2 (73:50)

ISBN: 1-903654-72-6

Recorded: 26 & 27 March 2002

Recorded At: The Moat Studios

Chronology: This story takes place between the 5th Doctor's television adventures Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity.

Cast:

The Doctor --Peter Davison

Nyssa --Sarah Sutton

Doctorman Allan --Sally Knyvette

Sisterman Constant --Pamela Binns

Thomas Dodd --Derren Nesbitt

Mister Hartley --Paul Copley

Yvonne Hartley --Kathryn Guck

Frank Hartley --Jim Hartley

Mrs. Ginsberg --Ann Jenkins

Gary Russell --Philpott/Nurse

Alistair Lock --Minister/TV Commentator

Nicholas Briggs --Zheng/Cyber Voices/Radio Announcer/Citizen/Nurse

(Paul Copley also appeared as Clem McDonald in Children of Earth)