Big Finish Reviews+ Missy, Series One by Tony J Fyler

Oh Missy you’re so fine,

You blow Tony’s little mind…

Michelle Gomez’s Missy was one of the brightest and best innovations in villainy of the first ten years of New Who. That she would eventually make her way to audio was a conclusion that for many fans was foregone.

But Missy is not in any sense an easy proposition when she steps out of the light of the Doctor’s opposition and takes centre stage. Like the War Master before her (and for all we know, other Masters after), the trick with Missy is to make her as successful as she deserves to be without making everything a cake walk. She has to have her dramatic arc, but yet she has to triumph in her villainy.

This first collection of Missy adventures gives her plenty of gracenotes by which to distinguish herself in audio both from any other incarnation of the Master, and from the white knight syndrome of the Doctor, while sneeeeeeaking a story arc up on you quietly, just in time to go ‘Boo!’ and make you jump out of your skin.

A Spoonful of Mayhem, the series-opener from Roy Gill is a thing which must have seemed absolutely irresistible, given Missy’s trademark outfit and brolly – it’s Missy as Mary Poppins, taking two bored brats on whizzo jolly adventures, all the while with a design of her own. It’s an interesting design, in that Missy is trapped in 19^th century Earth by temporal powers who take a dim view of anachronistic technology and killing people (honestly, what’s a girl to do for fun around such people?). She’s aiming to break free of their constraints, which involves breaking into the Crystal Palace, riddling a Sphinx, and Missy the steam engine driver, putting the Circle Line to possibly the best use it’s ever had. There’s a delicious denouement to the piece, and both Missy’s charges actually do learn positive life lessons on the road to mysteriously not being zapped or squished or generally thrown into pits for a thousand years. It’s a confident start to the set, with a good dose of energy and enthusiasm, for all it sometimes lags by being told for the most part through the narration of Master Oliver Davis – one of nature’s hellraisers and no mistake. And this is perhaps one of the most notable differences between, say, Missy and the other incarnation to have their own series, the War Master. Derek Jacobi’s incarnation is almost an evolution of Geoffrey Beevers’; he has a smiling face, a sweet nature when necessary, but he seems to seep corruption into everything and everyone who comes into his orbit. Missy on the other hand is actually capable of being a positive influence, more out of boredom than any particular altruism. A Spoonful of Mayhem might be a carousel of adventures and prison-breaking, but it feels as though Oliver and his sister Lucy will actually remember Missy with some fondness and take forward some of the lessons about self-determination and seizing the moment she instilled in them.

Maybe.

Or possibly they’ll be the sibling Bonnie and Clyde of the turn of the century. Might be rather good fun to pop back and find out in a future Missy set.

Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated, by John Dorney is…well, with the best will in the world and with appreciation to all the other writers in the set, it’s the best thing in the first series of Missy adventures by at least a couple of parsecs.

Why?

Because it’s hey nonny nonny Time Lord comedy with a Tudor twist, that’s why. Rufus Hound reprises his role as the Meddling Monk -or is he Henry VIII? – with a blistering, giggling energy that barely masks his meddling nature. And Missy stakes her claim to be the wife that wasn’t. There’s toing and froing and flirting and dungeons (which for both Henry and the Monk are pretty much the same thing), but there’s also, underneath all the rapid-fire banter, a coherent, somewhat subtle sub-plot which speaks impeccably to the different personalities of the Monk and Missy. How much meddling can you do before Anyone Important notices? Can Henry VIII have had seven wives? And when the weight of paradoxes is pressing on a critical point in history, who will blink first? Missy, or the Monk?

Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated is an action-packed hour of rollicking good fun, and there’s absolutely no doubt that a re-match between Michelle Gomez and Rufus Hound should be encouraged – they have a comic chemistry that’s like tennis with cannonballs, and they’re an absolute dream to listen to. More, more, more of the Missy-Monk axis, please, thank you and don’t kill me.

The Broken Clock, by Nev Fountain, is a story that plays with storytelling and delivery, in the style of a cheesy American crime re-enactment show, complete with actors playing people who are actually there, and an initially irritating but also subtly creepy Voiceover Guy who narrates, for instance, the approach of someone’s death, fully aware that the victim can hear them. There’s quite a bit of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey in this one, and Missy Masters, a Scotland Yard Inspector, is on the case to find out who killed whom and why – and what it all has to do with a broken grandfather clock (Yes, that would be your Who-fan reference detector pinging into life). The truth is actually rather gorgeous and demented, but whether you think it gets revealed just in the nick of time or just after the point where all the crime show meta-structure gets a little ponderous (people breaking character to ask questions and direct the action, for instance) will depend on your tolerance for the kind of layer-folded storytelling the plot demands. For my money, I was jusssst getting to the point of demanding ‘No seriously, what the hell is going on?!’ when, mercifully, the plot unfolded. Stick with it though – when you find out what actually is going on, you’ll go ‘Ohhhh…’ and realise quite how elegant the story is.

Jonathan Morris’ The Belly Of The Beast continues the style to some extent – there are reset points and restart points and loop points in this tale too, dealing with the lives of a slave mining workforce which Missy has excavating a planet that may just possibly not be a planet, for a treasure that is most certainly a treasure – and one that makes audio Missy, when she gets it (Oops – spoiler – she gets the treasure. Sorry, but this is Missy – of course she gets it) more impressive and deadly than ever she was on TV, and bodes well for upcoming box sets. You get to very near the end of The Belly Of The Beast without realising the nature of the story arc you’ve been following arguably from the beginning, but certainly since Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated, and then everything clicks into place and sets Missy free from many of her past constraints, ready to terrorise the universe on a whole new scale in future sets. That’s the point about a Missy audio set – where on screen against the Doctor she has to ultimately lose, here, she gets to stand, and plot, and kill, and win.

The Diary of River Song Series 5, which was released first and so gets the credit of introducing Missy to the world of Big Finish, was a strong early contender for Release of the Year.

Missy Series 1 at least equals it.

Very Missy, if you think about it – fighting herself for the top spot on your Must-Get lists of Big Finish audio releases of 2019. Get ‘em both, you’re going to absolutely love them. This set though is Missy in full flow, beholden to no-one for her place in the spotlight, doing what’s necessary without sacrificing her fundamental mad-as-a-fruitbat personality. Missy was always one to blow your tiny little ape-mind. She’s found a new lease of life on audio – prepare to have your mind blown again.

Who Reviews Extremis by Jeffrey Zyra

“Doctor, will you read the Veritas?”

Written by Steven Moffat

Extremis is the first part of a three part story that is penned by Steven Moffat while the next two episodes will have different writers along with Steven Moffat.  I have to admit that I had to watch Extremis a couple of times to figure out what was going on as it was a typical Steven Moffat story with a lot of stuff going on.  In fact that is one of the reasons to watch it again as there was a lot going on that you definitely didn’t pick everything up on first viewing.  You might not get everything on the second viewing either but anyway Extremis was a better story than anything that Steven Moffat wrote for last season.

With Extremis I don’t really hate it nor do I really like it as it is the first part of three but if this was a standalone story that was leading into a story that came later on in the series then yes this was a really good story.  But I cannot really rate it until I see all three parts but from what I saw with Extremis I liked for the most part.  It was pretty entertaining and did open up possible scenarios that haven’t been done in Who before. For example the whole world inside a computer program with the simulants start killing each other when they figure out that they are just a simulation.  It has been done before in science fiction shows but not so sure it has been done in Doctor Who before.

I really liked the Missy storyline.  In that storyline we finally get to see who is in the vault.  For once it was not an over dramatic reveal or saved for the end of the series.  I really liked how we found out with The Doctor having to make a promise to watch over Missy’s body for 1000 years.  Plus, it was also clever if pretty predictable of a way for him to save Missy from death also.  Rewiring the machine of execution was predictable but really that was probably the right choice Steven Moffat could make in that scenario.  It also raises some questions too. Will the Doctor in the next two parts of this story free Missy from the vault to help with the impending invasion from The Monks?  Or will she just be in there giving him advice and not have much of a presence?  I’m sure we will find out in time but I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends escaping at some point. 

It will be interesting to see what happens from Extremis and how the next two stories will tie into it.  I really liked The Monks and how they are planning on taking over the Earth from the simulations but did they have to run it for over 2000 years?  I’m hopeful that we can get a new reoccurring villain from this story as that is something that the show needs.  So far, this story has started off pretty well and Extremis was one of the better Moffat stories and let’s just hope that the next two stories will be just as good. 

The Mothership Master Class Part 4 - The Queen of Evil by Tony J Fyler

We've looked at the evolution of the Master in three previous features, charting the change from the Anti-Pertwee of Roger Delgado's incarnation, through the Naked Evil years of Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers, to the Playful Obsessive of Anthony Ainley, through the brief and blood-curdling Derek Jacobi awakening and John Simm's rebirth of the character as the Anti-Tennant. The Master in all his incarnations has always been uniquely written. Being a fellow rebel Time Lord, he above all others is able to challenge the Doctor on a philosophical level, to say "Blah blah universal peace and wonder. You're so wrong it's infuriating, and I'm going to conquer this world or destroy this galaxy, just to watch your face fall when you realise I'm right.' He is and always has been obsessed with proving the Doctor's worldview to be utterly childish and naive, his plans a punch in the face to the Doctor's wide-eyed wonder at the universe.

So then what are we to make of the latest on screen Master to blaze a trail of destruction across the Doctor's life? What of Michelle Gomez's Mistress? What does she add to the mythos and the legend of this unique character in Doctor Who history?

Firstly of course, and let’s get this out of the way, she’s a female incarnation, so she proves on screen the idea that Time Lords can change their sex when they regenerate. There has been much outrage in pockets of fandom at this idea – some claiming she’s just a ‘stolen’ body, others that this regenerative sex-change capacity is unique to the Master (though The Doctor’s Wife made it clear this was not the case). But no – as far as we know, it was a perfectly normal regeneration that turned the Master into the Mistress (and NB – even if it was a body-theft, that’s still a valid incarnation of the Master, otherwise, Anthony Ainley’s whole career in the role is null and void, and so is the Eric Roberts version).

Does her new femininity bring anything unique with it though? It’s important to remember that this is Steven Moffat’s Master, and while he’s eager to fill the show with strong female characters, they’re not – to put it kindly – a particular speciality of his, so it’s easy perhaps to dismiss the new elements of the Mistress’s personality as underwritten, or explained as ‘the bananas incarnation.’ But look a little closer and there is method in the madness. 

The Master has always been obsessed with the Doctor, his plans have always been ‘devious and over-complicated’ (to quote the Rani), and he’s always been a master of disguise. All of this is very much to the fore in Missy – the plan seems more over-complicated than ever, and the obsession with the Doctor very much the driving force for the whole Nethersphere operation. And what better disguise could there be than a physical transformation into something the Doctor’s not expecting – a female form? So there are definitely touchstones of Masters past and venerable in Missy. John Simm introduced a ‘barking mad’ element to the character to deliver some unpredictability, some turn-on-a-dime frailty that could see him smile one minute, and order the decimation of the Earth the next. Gomez, if anything, takes that element and runs right off the screen with it, while adding a particularly personal cruelty to her make-up. Where Simm deliciously killed off the British Cabinet and sat drumming his fingers, and decimated the Earth, Gomez is up close and personal, obliterating people because she can, and demanding they ‘say something nice’ so she can have a happy memory of them.

The Master often works best when he’s very specifically the antithesis of a particular Doctor – Delgado was the Anti-Pertwee, Simm, the Anti-Tennant, and both were perhaps the most successful, the most shocking incarnations of the role, because they matched and bounced the personality of their particular Doctor back at him. So is Gomez the Anti-Capaldi? Yes, beyond a shadow of doubt – he’s against bantering, she’d banter with a brick wall if it stood still long enough; he’s full of self-doubt, she’s the spirit of blissful self-possession; he seems uncomfortable with his physical body, so what better way to accentuate that than to kiss him, to make him confront it, and his naivety or hypocrisy about it? Plus of course, he barely registers that Clara’s a female – or indeed that there are such things as females – throughout his first series. She’s undeniably a female incarnation, reveling in the newness of it, even camping it up to oversell the point, and heighten his confusion, his wrong-footing at the world as she has remade it.

There’s still more originality in the Gomez mistress though. The ‘playing to the gallery’ tactic is something Simm’s Master was able to do in The End of Time, but for the essence of Gomez’s Mistress, look at the Osgood scene. Every Master would have escaped from the handcuffs, absolutely, but Delgado’s Master would have hypnotized Osgood into becoming his slave. Ainley’s would have bargained for his life. Simm’s would have offered the way into the Doctor’s affections, and then, when free, would have become a tower of male rage. Missy’s use of Osgood’s psychology – the oh-so-desperate desire to be thought useful, to be thought worthy, by the Doctor, even the insecurity over how she smells – is dark, and cruel beyond the point of need. The use of the ‘sisterly confidence’ trick shows the Mistress has an implacable disregard for the humans she uses, and the chatty, terrifying countdown she employs to intimidate Osgood even further is monstrous to a degree that no plan to take over the world, no plan to build an army of Cybermen, could ever be, because she takes the time to do it, like a cat playing with her food. The killing of Osgood is the scene that stamps Gomez’s Mistress very firmly on the Master blueprint – that additional, personal cruelty is breathtaking and a fresh dimension of unpredictability to the character, and, even when Osgood pleads that she’s more useful alive, Missy can’t resist the opportunity for one more twist of the hope-knife, agreeing with her, recognizing a good point, well made – and then blasting her in the head anyway. It’s awful and wonderful in the same instant, this blowing away of the cobwebs of understanding we think we have about the Master. Followed immediately by the scene where she blows the side of the plane out to fling Kate Lethbridge-Stewart out into what we think is oblivion, it announces a tearing up of the rule book. The Mistress is unknowable and unreasonable, and two of the Doctor’s friends pay the real price of her unpredictability. We’re not in safe ‘Battle of the Time Lords’ territory any more, boys and girls.

If the terrifying unpredictability is a new character dimension for the Master, then the ending of Death In Heaven proves why only a female Master could do the things she does. The ending is oddly weak, looked at one way – she builds the army of Cybermen, they can weaponise the dead. She’s won. The universe will not be likely to be able to stand against her.

Then she hands the army over to the Doctor. The audience blinks, and asks ‘What just happened?’ Missy doesn’t want to conquer the universe – Missy wants her friend back, but she wants him back on the strict understanding that she shows him what he really is; manipulative, and determined to make the universe in the image of his idealism, just as she has always been determined to make the universe in the image of her power. She has looked at his doe-eyed optimism about the universe and said ‘Oh alright then, if you must, go and make it that way – but don’t pretend you don’t want it all to look the way you look, to believe the things you believe. Accept what you are, and who you are, and then, let’s be friends again.’

From the Gentleman Psychopath of Delgado, through the Naked Evil and the Playful Obsessive, Missy stamps her incarnation on the world of Doctor Who right there. She is the Psychological Adept, and she’s also the Ultimate Realist, the Master who can admit the things no other Master could – that she’d remake the universe in the Doctor’s image if it would get him to realize they’re the same, if it would get her her friend back.

And of course, she saves the best for last. Telling the Doctor where Gallifrey is, priming him to go and look for it, she gives him hope again, knowing perfectly well how he’ll react to finding it isn’t there. It’s one last psychological suckerpunch, and she knows – just as she knew Osgood would fall for it – she knows the Doctor will go, and find the empty space in the cosmos where Gallifrey once was, and will rage and roar and tear his hearts in two that he believed her.

This is the Master no previous incarnation has had the strength to be. It’s no longer about conquering the universe, though she’ll still do it to get the Doctor’s attention. In Missy, Moffat and Gomez delivered a Master more complex, more personally cruel, and more psychologically honest than any before.