Big Finish Reviews+ The Monsters of Gokroth by Tony J Fyler

Tony does the monster mash.

There are characters studded throughout Doctor Who history who spark the imagination, who make you think ‘Oh, they’d have been good in more adventures than they got.’ Mags, the werewolf brought to the Psychic Circus in The Greatest Show In The Galaxy is certainly one such character, mostly, if we’re honest, because of her sympathetic portrayal by Jessica Martin.

Big Finish exists for many reasons, but one of them is the opportunity to fill in gaps, to open cracks in the canon and hear what might happen if we fleshed out events we’ve only dared imagine before. So, welcome back Mags, for three adventures with the Seventh Doctor as he’s getting on, putting things right, tidying away loose ends, rather than bringing down staggeringly powerful Elder Gods. He feels he has unfinished business with Mags, and goes to seek her out.

Mags, again played by Martin, is on a mission of her own, tramping across the planet Gokroth in this, the first of her three return stories, written by Matt Fitton. Gokroth has… monsters. It has frightened villagers. And it has a mad scientist in a tower. Do you really need to know any more?

We’re off to the races with a sci-fi take on some classic horror movies. Where are the monsters coming from? Are they being engineered by the mad scientist? Will the crowd ever take the plunge and storm the castle, pitchforks a-go-go? And what’s in it for Mags either way?

There’s a sub-story here about narratives, what they need, how they change and, especially at the mid-point in the story, how they can sometimes get pulled right out from under you. When Mags goes in search of the woman who might be able to help her regain control of her Vulpanan instinct to change with the phases of the moon, she instead runs into the Doctor, who sets himself up as a better authority, more able to help her achieve her goals. The nature of reality and truth is the prize up for grabs on Gokroth – but whether the terrified natives have either the gumption to seize it, or the guts to deal with what they discover, are entirely different questions. Meanwhile, Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor has his work cut out trying to get reason to prevail in a climate of binary contempt and fear, of secrets, lies, fake news, questionable history and the seductive notion of blaming the ‘other.’

McCoy is on top form in this story, delivering a Doctor closer to the version from the TV movie than to his early, busy, chess-playing, god-bating days. It’s a brave way to take his character development (and of course, it doesn’t stop anyone delivering more stories with a ‘younger’ Seventh Doctor in the future), and it helps to see this Seventh Doctor, while not exactly mellowing as such – he’d still be standing in the way of tyrants whenever it was necessary – but focusing more on the small stuff, the missteps, the paths not taken and the setting right of things unfinished. It speaks of a Doctor settling down to his life, all the most important elements on his to-do List of universal housekeeping ticked off, a Time Lord free to do individual good deeds for good people, rather than battling behemoths from the dawn of time.

Jessica Martin too fits back into the voice of Mags as though no years had passed since The Greatest Show. She has an interesting journey in this story – deciding whether to continue as planned and seek out the help of Dr Maleeva (she of the tower, and sounding too much like ‘Malevolent’ for it to be a coincidence that she’s portrayed as evil), or to put her trust in the funny little man with the strange blue box. The years between the Psychic Circus and Gokroth have not, we feel, been particularly kind to Mags, haunted as she is by the unpredictability of her own nature and the colossal potential for murder and mayhem that comes with it. There may well be monsters on Gokroth, but when we meet her again after all these years, Mags isn’t sure that she’s not one of them.

What we get through the course of this story’s ups and downs is a through-line where the Doctor is able to face the truth, no matter what it is, and when he offers to help her overcome her problems and get on with her life, Mags joins the Tardis and becomes a fully-fledged (or indeed fully-furred) companion. It’s been a long time coming, and The Monsters of Gokroth is a busy tale of truths, half-truths and nothing-like-the-truths from which Mags and the Doctor emerge surer of each other, ready both to trust and to travel, to find the answers to the outstanding questions of her life.

Pop along to Gokroth, and find the monster inside yourself.

Reviews Torchwood One - Machines by Tony J Fyler

Ahhh, Torchwood One.

The version of Torchwood based in Canary Wharf, as seen on TV in Doctor Who and as run by the vaguely fascistic, or at least distinctly imperial Yvonne Hartman, played by Tracy-Ann Oberman.

Torchwood One always seemed like an organisation in transition – in its TV appearance, it seemed to translate a Victorian imperialism into the 21^st century, and as such combine the best in humanity’s scientific broad-mindedness with the worst in terms of its nationalistic ideology of dominance, Hartman going to her death ‘for Queen and Country,’ having outlined her remit as being to horde alien artefacts not for the world, but for Britain and its interests, wherever they would ultimately lie.

Torchwood One on audio has given us the opportunity to see a little more humanity in Hartman, and a little more of that transitional phase for Torchwood One as a whole – while absolutely staying true to the post-dated yuppie culture and adding in the 21^st century elements of ‘caring commercial culture,’ especially in Yvonne herself, who knows everybody’s name because it makes for good office politics, we’ve seen Hartman as the indefatigable wrangler, the diplomat, the finder of ways to ultimately achieve her aims – even when the organisation is stolen out from under her in Torchwood One: Before The Fall. Torchwood One itself has been revealed to us as an aspirational organisation, drawing talent from all over the country, and matching the Generation Y professionalism of the likes of Ianto Jones with the unreconstructed and entirely casual sexism of Tommy the technical genius, played by Tim Bentinck. It’s an organisation that has yet to reach the pinnacle of ‘Queen and Country’ English imperialism of its TV appearance and demise.

This three-story set pitches Torchwood One against an enemy from the black and white era of Doctor Who, WOTAN (a clever computer with a superiority complex), and it does it in a way that develops and gets more interesting as the set progresses.

The Law Machines by Matt Fitton, apart from being a glorious play on words (WOTAN, when it first appeared, set about creating itself a bunch of ‘War Machines’ and linking computers together to eradicate a humanity it judged flawed by both flesh and individuality), is a modern take on the likes of Robocop – the original War Machines have been updated, given a new look and sent out into the world as a robotic police force, able to judge wrongdoing and deliver summary punishment (Yes, there was always a touch of Judge Dredd about the idea too). The ‘Law Machines’ have of course been entirely purged of any control by WOTAN, which was deleted way back in the Sixties.

Right?

Well, of course it wasn’t. Something survived on a spool, on a drive, on a data stick, something of the WOTAN machine consciousness, which is now using a new human stooge to infect an increasing number of laptops, systems and eventually of course, the Law Machines for its own purpose.

There’s a glorious moment in The Law Machines when WOTAN, which sees connectivity between machines as the key to growing its power, demands to be connected. Its stooge simply plugs it into the internet, like a baby being given a dummy. And of course, that’s part of the genius and the challenge about resurrecting this particular villain – back in the Sixties, the idea of interconnected computers that developed Artificial Intelligence was a thing to be feared. Now, it’s the most staggering of commonplaces. We’ve moved on, so making WOTAN threatening again is something of a creative challenge – but it’s one to which Fitton rises rather well, as Yvonne Hartman and the team take on the relic of Sixties computer megalomania as it learns its way around the early 21^st century.

There’s a good story here, particularly in terms of a thread beneath the surface of the Law Machines and the WOTAN awakening, with Hartman’s Torchwood advocating for something called the Vision Protocols, a kind of permanent surveillance of the civilian population. When Hartman tells you if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear, there are chilling back-references to the reality of political chicanery at the turn of the century, and there’s also a speech from Yvonne that shows her motivations and her plans – she despises the ordinary people of the UK, and yet she protects them, waiting for the day when, with her help and guidance, they can become something great, they can fulfil a big idea of a Greater Britain, setting itself apart and over the rest of the world. Until that day, she vows, the world can rely on Torchwood to preserve it in all its petty obsessions. Torchwood may not yet be quite ‘ready’ for the 21^st century, but it’s ready enough to do what’s necessary.

Blind Summit by Gareth David-Lloyd is a story you don’t want to miss if you’re a fan of Ianto Jones. It gives you Ianto’s first encounters with Torchwood One – his life in London before the organisation poked its nose into his affairs, and his first active mission for Torchwood, investigating a drug trial that seems to be creating supermen – or lunatics. Or indeed both simultaneously. There’s a lot of texture to Ianto’s life and personality here, as he makes the uneasy transition from ‘ordinary’ citizen to ‘Torchwood-aware’ operative. What’s neat is that the drug being trialled involves data from the same archive as the Law Machines, so the theme of WOTAN’s presence is maintained, but more than that, this story really focuses on the hard human choices of the life of a Torchwood operative, and particularly, Torchwood’s leader, Yvonne. David-Lloyd’s writing of Torchwood stories, while never slouchy, takes a big leap forward here and he comes closer to an urban version of the bleakness of Countrycide than the buddy movie of his last story for Ianto, The Last Beacon. Seriously, even if the return of WOTAN means nothing to you, don’t miss out on Blind Summit, it’ll help put a lot of what you think you know about Ianto into a better, darker context than you ever imagined.

9 to 5 by Tim Foley is a corollary to The Law Machines, without for the most part giving its games away. An odd temp agency sends out temps of an unparalleled perkiness, efficiency and sunny disposition. They’re not creepy-perky, just instilled with a corporate ethos of doing the best job they can do, as efficiently as possible. What could be wrong there…right?

Yvonne and Ianto couldn’t tell you – at least not at first. But when they befriend a temp named Stacey, played by Niky Wardley, things begin to unravel as more and more questions emerge without satisfactory answers.

Without giving the game away, WOTAN’s the program that just won’t die, and the story brings a cold logic to the idea of artificial intelligence – it adapts, it learns, it flows around problems and it finds resource-appropriate solutions. If The Law Machines was a gentle poke of the stick at the fact that we’ve gone beyond the Sixties paranoia of interconnected computer systems and artificial intelligence, 9 to 5 uses the idea of artificial intelligence adaptation to make WOTAN a credible, 21^st century threat (while also carrying the bonus of a villain played by the joy that is Jane Asher).

Torchwood One – Machines is an unusual, inventive set, pitting a version of Torchwood seen on TV in just two episodes against a Sixties enemy who’s at least initially lost much of their sting. What it brings though is a premise established, and then updated, with a cracking Ianto-at-Torchwood origin story to join the two together. For Torchwood fans, it also shows Torchwood One at a stage in its evolution where it’s not perhaps as nakedly invasive and paternalistic as it would eventually become, but where some seeds are sewn for its development in that direction.

Big Finish Reviews+ Equilibrium by Tony J Fyler

Isenfell be constant, says Tony.

E-Space is weird.

The original trilogy of E-Space stories was a dense block of mostly unfathomable malarkey in the run-up to Tom Baker’s farewell from the role of the Doctor.

For reasons mostly of its own devising, Big Finish has now returned to the pocket-universe of E-space for three Fifth Doctor stories. Whether you enjoy the new E-Space adventures really rather depends on whether you enjoyed the original E-Space trilogy with Tom Baker, Lalla Ward and Matthew Waterhouse.

What I mean by that is that there’s a very particular ‘vibe’ to E-Space. We’re not in N-Space any more, Toto. E-Space is…well…weird.

E-Space is all about entropy, energy, collapse, decay, cyclic systems, closed systems and what can conceivably be done about the whole wretched ‘rapid collapse of control and matter’ palaver. If you’re not up for that, you should probably skip the new E-Space trilogy altogether. These will not be the stories you’re looking for.

Andrew Smith’s return to Alzarius in Mistfall set the tone by giving us a deeper insight into the world of the Marshmen and its cyclic system. For the second story in the trilogy we’re in closed system territory on the world of Isenfell. If that sounds a little Nordic and Viking, it’s probably deliberate, as Isenfell’s a bit of a snowglobe world – from mists we shift to frozen tundra under a feudal regime that works on the principle that for every addition there must be a subtraction, to ensure that Isenfell remains essentially constant. All sounds very logical, doesn’t it?

Try having children in a place like that.

Or indeed, if you happen to arrive in a big blue box from outer space, try being a visitor to a place like that. There’s a ghastly, proper E-Space barmy horror to the mathematics of survival on Isenfell, and the corollary is that if the inhabitants don’t balance the energies of their world, the world has a way of doing it for itself – the fabulously in-period idea of ‘black snow’ which falls like death until one way or another, Isenfell is damn well constant. Equilibrium will be maintained.

As an idea, the central philosophy of Equilibrium is pretty strong, and while in all fairness it takes significantly less than a genius to work out what’s going on, the episode endings also work well in terms of the Eighties cliff-hanger – the first episode in particular is quite shocking because while you may have guessed the way the world works, to see it played out is still a punch in the face. Episode three has a great cliff-hanger too, because it shifts the blame for the escalation of events on Isenfell from some long-gone civilization squarely onto the Doctor’s shoulders, in a way you’d think he’d be too experienced in the ways of entropy to fall for. For the uninitiated, the more energy you pour into a closed system, the more entropy you create – it’s like running faster to go backwards.

The eventual solution to the issues of Isenfell is provided not by the Doctor, but by a character who doesn’t, at the start, know what they’re capable of, but has it revealed to them by the Fifth Doctor in a moment of what passes, for him, as high dudgeon. It’s a telling metaphor for the tearing down of tradition and getting to the fundamental truths underneath, especially because, as Janet Fielding mentions in the extras, there’s a direct and clever sci-fi parallel between Isenfell in E-Space and the Earth and its real-world ecological strain today. Both are to all intents and purposes closed systems at the mercy of potentially deadly climates. The sobering thought of course is that there’s unlikely to be a one-act-saves-all MacGuffin when it comes to the Earth, but the tearing down of systems that are unsustainable before the tipping point of destruction is reached has a real lesson to teach on a planet where the response to the melting of the ice caps has been to rush through legislation allowing more shipping to go via the Poles.

Characterisation in Equilibrium is pleasingly strong – there’s a limited cast, but each of the characters stands out well. Annette ‘Margaret Slitheen’ Badland delivers a radically different and eventually a deeply effecting vocal performance for Queen Karlina, while Big Finish stalwart Nickolas ‘Straxus’ Grace is more recognizable, but still gives a layered performance as Balancer Skaarsgard. The most fun in the story though is given by Joanna Kirkland as Princess Inger, who appears to be the love-child of Brian Blessed and Rik Mayall, and who looks at the ‘ember-haired’ Turlough and decides she wants him. Sadly for the prospect of lots of little flame-haired Isenfellows, Turlough thinks she’s ‘absolutely barking mad’. To be fair to the moany redheaded git of time travel – ‘Snow, more snow, and oh look over there – mountains of snow!’ he declares on their landing on Isenfell – he has a point about Inger, but her barking mad demeanour does power the story to several of its turning points, and she’s relentlessly invigorating along the way.  There’s also especially good work from Sarah Sutton and writer Matt Fitton in developing ‘older Nyssa’ in this story, her strengths as a mother, her balanced admiration for the Doctor and her apparent willingness to give up her life of travel with him coming to the fore at different points in the story to help smooth its flow.

In terms of its place as part two of a trilogy, Equilibrium works well – the thread that leads the Tardis crew to the icy planet is quickly dispensed with, and the thread that takes them through to the next story, The Entropy Plague, is subtly slipped in at the end as a proper companion-kidnap.

As I say, you have to be in a properly E-Space state of mind to really get the most from Equilibrium, so would it be one to buy?

Yes, I’d say so – it does little enough wrong to make a couple of hours slip by reasonably quickly, and the characters are believable enough to make you happy to spend that time with them. The plot circles a fundamentally simple idea with complex consequences, and the amount that each of the companions gets to do is sufficient to keep you interested in each of their threads. If you enjoyed Mistfall, you’ll probably enjoy this one too. Besides, as is the way with trilogies, it’s tricky to listen to any of the parts without listening to all of them, and Fitton’s script meets the quality requirement set by Smith’s re-entry to the E-Space universe, so give it a go – the ball has yet to be dropped so far in the new E-Space arc.

Big Finish Reviews+ An Ordinary Life by Jeffrey Zyra

Starring Peter Purves and

Jean Marsh

Written by Matt Fitton

While escaping from the Daleks the TARDIS makes an emergency landing in London in the 1950’s. Steven and Sarah rush over to The Doctor who has collapsed.  They go outside as the TARDIS more or less has pushed them out to save them from what is caused it to make the emergency landing.  Out in the cold and snowy streets of London Steven and Sarah find help and shelter from Joe and Audrey. Joe and Audrey are immigrants from the Caribbean and struggling to make a living with a new born and the constant racist harassments.  But despite all that they take the three travelers in and help them out.

Steven and Sarah end up renting the room above Joe and Audrey because it doesn’t seem like The Doctor will be recovering soon and with the sudden disappearance of the TARDIS it appears they may be living in 1950’s London for a while.  So they end up settling in getting jobs and enjoying the trials of everyday life and enjoying the break from being hunted by Daleks.  But soon things seem to change as the people in the neighborhood seem to change as their personality is way different than what it is before and Steven ends up finding out that something alien is roaming around and an invasion is taking place right in front of them.

I really liked An Ordinary Life.  It gave us a different take on two of the first Doctor’s companions.  More so for Sarah Kingdom as most of her stories in The Dalek Masterplan are missing so we do not really know much about her.  What was really good about this story is that we were able to see Steven and Sarah live a normal life while waiting for The Doctor to recover.  We see Sarah and Steven having to cope with cooking and buying groceries in the 20th Century.  It was funny seeing the two companions from Earths far future trying to cope with something that is primitive to them but normal for us.  It was strange seeing Steven getting a job but he had no choice as they needed money to pay the rent and to buy food.  What was funny was that Sarah tried to get a job with the police department.  Remember this is the 1950’s and women were not working in the police department. So when she showed the men her credentials it didn’t work out all that well with the guys in blue all unconscious.

What also made this story intriguing is the way they handled the racism of the time.  Steven and Sarah befriended a family from Jamaica and were branded as sympathizers and were thus included into the harassment of the others.  It went as far for Steven to lose his job over it.  This story gives us a reminder that our past was not all rosy as the history books make out.  This would be a good story for people to listen too to get a feel of how it was for foreigners back then and unfortunately is now being repeated.

An Ordinary Life does have a science fiction aspect to it.  It happens towards part three and is cleverly added to the story.  There is an alien race that relies on cloning its victims and like the Zygons it needs the host alive to keep the print.   It is a pretty clever way that The Doctor stops them and I was pretty entertained with the outcome.  I’m not going to give much away as you need to listen for yourself.

An Ordinary Life was a great story that shows us a different side of two companions from the First Doctor era and I would welcome a few more stories like this from Big Finish.

Grade A