Big Finish Reviews+ The Silurian Candidate

Tony’s getting political.

The Silurian Candidate is the latest Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama to feature Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor. The fact that it’s written by Matthew J Elliott will probably make anyone familiar with the range prick up their ears, as Elliott, while still fairly new to the company, has delivered a couple of outright crackers prior to this release, both featuring the same Tardis team – McCoy, Bonnie Langford as chirpy eighties computer programmer Mel Bush, and Sophie Aldred as her TV successor in the Tardis, Ace. So we’re pre-disposed to like this one, because Elliott has form.

It's also worth giving at least half a cheer when you realise this story is more or less a direct sequel to Peter Davison’s TV Silurianfest, Warriors of the Deep (which – in the writing at least – had some excellent potential).

The Silurians of course are famous in Who history for having been the first intelligent life-form to have evolved on planet Earth, but then disappeared into cryo-sleep when they thought the planet was about to be devastated by an interplanetary impact…which never came. They slept on, and in the meantime, the furry ape-things they’d treated as animals evolved into Mankind. That’s about as much as you need to know in order to really get the most out of The Silurian Candidate – and to be fair, you don’t really need to know even that in advance, as the pocket guide to Silurian history is helpfully given to us throughout the course of the story. But while the Silurian story is more or less the same each time they’re used – Silurians wake up, get cross, try to wipe us out, fail – there are interesting elements to their use too, and those have made for the drama of their stories before. Firstly of course, you can’t treat the Silurians as ‘alien invaders’ because their point of view is that we’re the invaders of their planet, and it’s a point of view with which it’s hard to argue. And secondly, like probably only the Ice Warriors in Who history, the Silurians were never depicted as being monolithically-minded, all-out invaders. They were a civilisation equal and opposite to our own, so they had leaders, disagreements, strong and divergent opinions, just as we do.

In their original appearance on-screen, that complexity of character was crucial to the solution of their story, and Elliott runs the same sort of game here too, with the ruling Silurian triad having significant differences of opinion on what to do with a planet of the apes.

It’s worth keeping all this in mind throughout the Silurian Candidate, because as the title suggests, it’s a pretty devious affair – the Doctor, Ace and Mel get tangled up with an expedition actively looking for the Silurian cryo-chambers, and uncover a plot to use some very specific humans as plots to push the world towards a nuclear Armageddon. There’s a degree to which that sounds positively satirical as two political madmen in our own world push each other’s buttons and drive us towards a nuclear extinction. Here, for instance, just seventy years on from our ‘present day,’ the world is once more divided into two paranoid power blocs, east and west, and the leader of the Western block is a brash, self-revolving egotist with a toupe, barking out incendiary remarks about his opposite number in the east, who is the archetypal courteous bureaucrat. For those who’ve watched the relative stability of the Obama years torn up and a new nuclear brinksmanship replace genuine diplomacy over the course of 2017, it teases the classic science-fiction question: Are they trying to get us all killed, or are they just that incompetent that the deaths of millions will be the result? And if they are trying to kill us all, are they acting alone? There’s a delicious tie-in there with some of the less intellectually rigorous conspiracy theories in the world, which claim that leading humans in the world of politics are actually lizards in human-suits, because here a lot of the drama is derived from the question of who actually is the Silurian Candidate? One of the two bloc leaders? The fair-minded but emotionally distant Ruth Drexler, who goes looking for the Silurians? The mild-mannered flunky, seemingly moving events to a peaceful resolution? The Doctor himself? It’s a high-stakes chess game of the kind at which the Seventh Doctor so excelled, except here he’s not out-thinking Elder Gods on a trans-temporal chessboard, he’s bargaining at baccarat with the lives of everyone on the planet Earth, human and lizard alike.

Elliott gives us a third power-punching Seventh Doctor story here, bringing back an old favourite ‘monster’ and giving them enough of their old oomph to satisfy long-term fans, while adding something fresh to their legend and their tactics, and delivering a richly satirical storytelling thread to give us a knowing wink. McCoy and his companions feel energised and help push the story along at pace, and the SIlurians sound ‘right’ in a way they haven’t since the seventies – complex and emotionally rich, yes, but nevertheless, properly different to the human voices around them as they plan to drive us beyond the point of nuclear no-return.

The Silurian Candidate’s worth several re-listens and while there’s plenty going on, it doesn’t demand your intense attention, so you can enjoy it while getting on with your life. After all, with politicians like these, you never know how long you’ve got…

Big Finish Reviews+ Zaltys by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s seeing monsters.

There are many different ways of writing successful Doctor Who. You can fling your imagination wildly out to the far edges of possibility, you can turn ordinary things into dark-tinged terrors, you can extrapolate a satirical idea into sci-fi, or you can go mining.

Mining into familiar ideas or territory, to uncover new angles to those familiarities and fit them together in a way that makes for new storytelling takes.

Matthew J Elliott, writer of Zaltys, is a great miner.

Here, we’re in space-gothic/monster-movie territory, creatures the like of which we’ve seen before in Who given a new twist or two and crammed together to create a story that manages to hit all the landmarks we expect and still be brand spanking slightly barking new.

Elliott wastes no time in doing the thing you need to do with the Fifth Doctor’s full Tardis if you’re not to have a story with at least one companion standing about saying nothing while the others sing a couple of quick choruses of ‘What’s that Doctor?’ He gives us a bit of a twist on Tegan’s endless quest to get home to Heathrow, with the Aussie tempting the Alzarian brat-boy to try and get her home instead. When Adric fizzes and disappears from the Tardis, and Nyssa starts talking to someone who isn’t there, we’re off to the weirdness races. When Tegan disappears too, things start to get really interesting.

The Alzarian and the Aussie each take control of their own story-threads, with Adric zapping to the underground catacombs of the Zaltys (melodramatically known by some as the Planet of the Dead), where the locals are getting their Silurian on, sleeping in the deep freeze because there’s a big chunk of space-rock heading their way in just a handful of heartbeats. So…no urgency there then…

There are only a few of Zaltys’ natives left awake to monitor things, and when the time comes for the space-rock to hit the planet, they’re more than likely to go foom and be vapourised.

Oh, and there’s a psychic wolfman. Did we mention the psychic wolfman? Yep, there’s a psychic wolfman. See? Elliott’s a really good miner – taking the stuff of monster movies and re…erm…vamping it in a new way with half a twist that gives you something interesting to listen to.

Anywayyyy…

Tegan meanwhile is Somewhere Else Entirely, being teased by a sadistic woman who wants her to run away, like a mouse from a cat, just for the fun of the chase. Or just possibly, as an amuse bouche. When she meets a deeply dried-out fish-woman, the vibe of Tegan’s story changes substantially, becoming rather more Die Hard-meets-Terminus as Tegan and Lusca the fish-woman start crawling through the ducting and waiting for a single very specific opportunity to escape from the taunting woman and her many many acolytes. Clarimonde the taunter, played with a delicious purr by Niamh Cusack, will bring memories of a late Tom Baker story to the fore, and indeed the strand of Zaltys’ story she embodies is another that takes us back to classic monster movies, and to gothic novels too, but evolved through Elliott’s imagination into a new science-fiction setting.

If that doesn’t make the story busy enough for you, the Doctor and Nyssa, searching for their disappeared comrades, are on the surface of Zaltys, meeting pink-haired, gun-toting grave-robbers and profiteers. As you do.

With so many threads in a single story, the real, palpable danger is that all you end up with is three independent stories running parallel. But this is where Elliott comes into his own – while initially the strands seem to be entirely separate, over the course of the four episodes of Zaltys, he weaves them into a triple-helix single story that works better than you initially imagine it ever could. At least the middle two episodes speed by from cliff-hanger to cliff-hanger while you juggle the elements and listen as they evolve and begin to circle each other, captured like asteroids in a planetary orbit.

Elliott’s big on references in this story too – and that’s another dangerous thing to do. The occasional reference to the Doctor’s past, anyone can get away with. The number of references that come to the fore here, there’s no actual need to throw in, and you run the risk of hitting the listener with the sense of ‘Look, look, I know my Who history’ – which has a high likelihood of feeling like protesting too much.  Here, we get references to Mindwarp, Castrovalva, the Silurians, and more within the first episode, without even getting into the late Tom Baker story it would be spoilerific to name, or the fact that there’s a distinct whiff of Timelash in the DNA of this story too – it’s a later-Doctor sequel to an unseen story featuring the Third Doctor and Jo Grant.

But rather than beating us over the head with his Who-knowledge, Elliott works his references through the story simply, like things the Doctor or his friends would know, so it challenges you to ask why they wouldn’t mention them. It’s the sort of thing they’d have done in the on-screen show in the Eighties if they’d had more consistent confidence in their script editing, and because of that, it works.

As for the other story elements, Elliott works his psychic wolfman, Clarimonde and her army of minions, the fish-woman who’s a long way from her black lagoon, the Zaltysians (who also give an additional dimension, because they’re the ultimate isolationists, meaning they speak to the world in which we increasingly live, where we build walls and sever ties) and their impending asteroid tragedy like a symphony, pulling them together to deliver a story which makes a hell of a lot more sense than you ever imagine it will, and which also gives you satisfaction as a story of many mysteries intertwined. It’s true that when it starts, you won’t imagine for a second it’ll do anything like that, because there’s a genuine sense of not knowing what on Zaltys is going on. But to some extent, that’s the point – we discover elements as we go along with the Doctor and his companions, each taking a strand of the story and revealing those details piece by piece, meaning Zaltys, perversely for a story with so many elements and intertwined strands, feels less written than experienced in real time, the way the Doctor and friends experience it.

Elliott’s a relatively new voice at Big Finish, and Zaltys, like his earlier title Maker of Demons, is rooted in some core ideas, richly mined, and highly plotted while feeling very natural. There’s a point in each of his stories to date at which he brings you to a listener-crisis, a point where you think ‘This absolutely can’t work, the longer it spins the more it’s bound to fall apart!’

Neither of them do – they push on and on and on, making more sense as they go, and rewarding you more as you progress through them too.

There is a point, just at the very end of Zaltys, which feels like one twist too many, one arc completed in a way it doesn’t need to be, but Zaltys overall is a surprising, engaging affair that challenges the listener with its number of threads and elements and characters, and then blows your hair back by not only making them work, but pulling them tight into a single coherent story that punches above its two-hour running time with satisfaction and impact.

We said this after Maker of Demons, but more Elliott at Big Finish would be very pleasing, because he brings a tone, and an ability to keep a story spinning, that earns him a place that, if continued, will put him on a par with some of the best in the game.