Big Finish Reviews+ The Paternoster Gang: Heritage 3 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s declaring war – on the past!

The Paternoster Gang have been deserved their own spin-off since they first appeared on-screen. Understandably then, their first sequence of box sets on audio for Big Finish has become a firm fan favourite.

In Heritage 3, there’s more focus on where each of the Paternosters has come from, what they’ve had to overcome or escape from, and the courage it took to establish their family of successful outcasts.

In Family Matters by Lisa McMullin, we discover Jenny’s background and why it’s especially tricky for her relationship with Vastra. Without spoilering the plot details for you, this episode takes us from the respectable finery of Paternoster Row to the vivid, rapacious reality of Victorian freakshows, while using the Dickensian plot-twist of a long-lost relative coming back out of nowhere to good geeky science fiction effect.

While Madam Vastra (Eve McIntosh) very nearly loses her cool – a recurring theme in this set, as her time among humans becomes harder to bear – it’s Jenny (Catrin Stewart) who’s front and centre in this story. She’s always been a character about whom we could stand to know more – how, after all, does a young Victorian woman become the lover, wife, protector and maid of a lizard-woman from the dawn of history, when her society would bar her from getting above her station and transgressing its rules in almost all of those roles?

Jenny Flint has obviously not had an easy life. She arguably doesn’t have one now with Vastra and Strax, either, but she’s fought the expectations of her family, her peers, and her society to achieve what she has – the love of a good woman, the respect of a fellow warrior, and a place where, beyond the façade they raise to keep society from its own scandalised morality, she can call home and mean it. This story takes us in greater detail into the nature of that fight, that flight from everything that biology promised as the Victorian daughter of the parents she had, and shows us in particular Jenny’s quest to be better in her own mind than the prospects of her stars.

There are moments here where the dynamic between Vastra and Jenny feels like it might topple, like the truth about Ms Flint’s background, always hinted at, never illuminated till now, might in itself prove too different, too dark, too somehow shameful for Vastra, and you’ll hear Jenny’s sadness, her fear, her need to prove herself different from everyone around her in her youth. It’s a plea to disregard everything but her, and it’s not that uncommon in relationships that break moulds or dare to reshape the world in their own image. This one point we’ll spoiler for you – there’s a falling together, a clinging to what they have, at least for now, that will flood you with relief in this story, because Lisa McMullin’s not scared to take you to the brink, to show us the truth that knowing where people have come from is sometimes enough to bring out the worst in us, unless we, like Vastra here, can find the healthy tipping point and fall further into, rather than out of love, to grow more respectful of the fight to escape than resentful of the starting point of the people we love.

Whatever Remains, by Robert Valentine, smashes a couple of worlds together – Vastra and the gang are investigating a mythical beast-legend that may be keeping a will from being honoured, giving off strong Sherlock Holmes vibes. It’s a similarity that doesn’t go entirely unnoticed by the locals, one of whom has the hots for that manly Mr Strax (seriously, you’ve not lived properly or well until you’ve heard Annette Badland try to flirt with Dan Starkey in full-on Strax mode). And there is a Holmesian mystery here – who’s who and what they’re up to becomes a focus of the storytelling to some degree.

More than that surface storyline though (a mystery incidentally that Jenny solves more or less entirely on her own, and which Strax…erm…doesn’t), this is a story of the temptation of heritage. Because underneath all the beast-myths, something has been stirring. Something which calls to Vastra from her girlhood, and something guarded by a protector who must be either vanquished - or replaced.

Without spoiling the story for you, there’s a Silurian MacGuffin of awesome power in this story, which is actually the heart and the through-line of the action, and which will rear its techno-head later in the set. But the legal inconvenience and mythical beast story has a solid resolution, and Vastra’s striding off alone, breaking the unspoken rules of the Paternoster family, comes back to bite her when she and Jenny have a confrontation about the way they live their lives. If in Family Matters, Jenny’s afraid and defensive, waiting for Vastra to decide or prove how strong her love is, in Whatever Remains, it’s Jenny that lays down the law – she loves Vastra against all the world and its say-so, but while she plays the role of a maidservant to keep the world happy, Vastra should never, ever treat her as second class, never treat her as an ape, because in that gulf of status, if either of them believe it, love can die and self-esteem can grow to demand its dissolution.

It’s grown-up stuff, all this, as the climax to a story that seems to start – and indeed goes some way in – with larks and Sherlock Holmes gags. But it’s so right it’ll give you moist-eye. So right it’ll remind you what love and self and shared existence means.

So – that’s not too shabby then, overall.

If it feels from this review so far like it’s all been about the relationship between Vastra and Jenny in Heritage 3, well…yes, their relationship is the focus of the first two stories. Story 3 though, Truth And Bone by Roy Gill, brings us to Strax, his past, his present, his self-definition and how the great Sontaran war machine sees him. It also brings back another Sontaran who’s led a life away from the Sontaran battle fleets, Stonn of the Bloomsbury Bunch, and essentially, Gill’s story examines the difference between the here and now and the there and then, how Strax and Stonn have evolved away from pure Sontaran ideology – and whether in fact, if given the opportunity to leave the primitive humans behind, they’d actually choose to go.

Strax, perhaps more than either of the other two Paternosters, has always been a character about whose backstory we’ve wondered. Here, the answers are played out to at least some degree, when a Sontaran assessor comes to see whether Strax and Stonn can be productively folded back into the ranks of the clone armies, or whether they’ve become too different, whether they’ve become something other than Sontaran.

While the focus of Gill’s story is firmly Sontaran-forward, part of the point of it is that Strax is not just some random clone any more, that for all his stompy comedy bonkersness, he’s one of the most advanced, one of the most evolved Sontarans to have ever lived. So Jenny and Vastra, along with Stonn’s partner Tom, must act to save him…assuming he wants to be saved.

There’s use for the Silurian MacGuffin in this story, which gives Vastra more power than is ultimately good for her, but the story, and indeed the whole set, takes us deeper into the backgrounds and the foregrounds of our Paternoster heroes, showing us very clearly the differences between where they’ve come from, where they are, and where they hope to go in the future.

The Paternoster Gang – Heritage 3 is a joy from start to finish, but there are tears and gulping and snot along the way. Embrace it all – more time spent with the Paternoster Gang will make your life much better, because by their outsider status, their difference from the world around them, and the strength they find in each other to bring their power to the world, they’re about as epic a gang of heroes as you could wish to find.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Paternoster Gang Heritage 2 by Tony J Fyler

Dinner is served, human scum, mutters Tony.

All of what you’re about to read should be understood through a very clear and singular prism: I love the Paternoster Gang. Always have, always will, and on audio at Big Finish, both the characters and their adventures have a chance to grow by virtue of the characters being, like most of us, the focal point in the stories of their own lives.

So: Tony loves Paternosters. Clear?

Now, read on.

Heritage 1 did everything it needed to do with the Paternoster Gang’s first solo outing on audio – it established them front and centre of their own narrative, gave them a focus, in terms of alien doohickery and gittery in Victorian London (as opposed to the frequently macabre and unexplained shenanigans of Messrs Jago and Litefoot). Heritage 2 massively expands their reach, both in terms of geography and in terms of the challenges they’re called upon to tackle. The world of Paternoster Row is getting bigger and more complex.

Dining With Death, by Dan ‘Dan, Dan the Sontaran, if he can’t blast it, no-one can’ Starkey, sees the Gang tackle the impromptu hosting of an interplanetary peace conference between a species habituated to lying and killing even their own kind, more or less out of occasional existential boredom, and a race who’d make you measure the circumference of the dots on your ‘i’s to ensure they conformed to protocol before they signed anything. The previous peace conference between the two races in a discrete London restaurant was atomised by person or persons unknown, there are factions on both sides that don’t want the peace to go ahead, the races are only coming together to fight a third invasive species who neither of them have actually set eyes on, and Madame Vastra is determined that the tensions surrounding the conference will not spread out onto the streets of London, and into the wider world. It is her duty, she feels, to protect the Earth from the cosmic idiocy and bloodshed of any failure to communicate between these races, and so she offers the house on Paternoster Row as the location for the negotiations, with herself as chair and Strax as butler, taking care of all the delegates’ many pernickety needs, while Jenny is despatched to find out who blew the first peace conference to its component atoms – and whether they might try again.

While it’s absolutely the case that all three of the Gang have their own storylines here, and that all three get plenty of chances to shine, Starkey’s closeness to the way Strax speaks and thinks makes this an extra-special treat for Strax-fans, from Strax’s decidedly…erm…RentoKillWithMaximumPrejudice approach to plumbing, to an insistence on the surrender of even ceremonial stabby things while the conference is in session, to fixing atmospheric conditions for the different aliens and, when necessary, wrestling the cheese into submission. Because, y’know…Strax gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘lactose intolerant.’

Of the three stories in the set, Dining With Death is probably the most overtly comic, and as such, it reminds you of some of the things unique to the Paternoster Gang and gets you into their particular three-way chemistry, before things take a darker, screamier tone with the two remaining stories. Maybe it’s a mark of personal shallowness, but the outright comedy means it’s my strong nomination for easiest and most regular re-listen on this set.

Guy Adams takes the writing reins for the second story, The Screaming Ceiling, which pairs the Gang with young, gadget-addicted ghost-enthusiast, Thomas Carnacki to investigate…well, a screaming…erm…ceiling, really. The joy about this story is that it’s told as if related by Carnacki himself (for those not in the know, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder was a fictional paranormal investigator created by William Hope Hodgson in the early 20^th century). The two investigating teams are employed independently by the husband and wife owners of Castle Kraighten in the Highlands of Scotland – cue mists, rain, horrible weather and the desperate isolation of an old, old castle for atmosphere. Castle Kraighten has…well, there really is no other way to say this, it has a ceiling with a mouth, and a mouth that screams. 

But other things are weird in the castle too – people have a history of wandering off down its corridors and never being seen again.

Bring it on, Stephen King!

The chemistry between various members of the Paternoster Gang and the young, self-important Ghost-Finder propels this story along to good effect, certainly, but there’s a real sense of creepy gothic ghost stories about the tone of the piece, especially when it becomes clear that Carnacki himself may not be quite the reliable narrator he thinks he is. Will they all get out alive? Especially after the ceiling eats Strax? While Madame Vastra, Jenny and the aggrieved Sontaran have all the nous and the aptitude to work out the mystery of Castle Kraighten, it’s just possible that the lives of our heroes – and after them, the world – might depend on the self-aggrandizing chatterbox before the affair of The Screaming Ceiling is drawn to a close, because of the crucial difference between knowing what is happening and being able to stop it. Joe Jameson as Carnacki is a particular delight in this story, giving him quite the peacock touch while retaining an essentially good heart, so that, while we sympathise with Strax’s position, we can’t ultimately agree with him when he pleads that he should be allowed to kill the arrogant young rodent who attaches himself to the Madam Vastra…

…At least, not this time…

And as if meeting Carnacki the Ghost-Finder wasn’t a big enough humblebrag, the final story in the set has the Gang engage the infamous Spring-Heeled Jack of old London town.

The story, by Gemma Arrowsmith, starts with a giant premise – Spring-Heeled Jack is an actual London legend, being able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, with burning eyes and fiery breath – and as it develops, becomes something rather more emotionally complex. When the sweetheart of one of Jack’s victims turns to the Gang for help, Madam Vastra takes some convincing to debase herself by investigating folklore tales. But when the sweetheart starts forgetting her beloved, his name, his face and the details of his life, it’s clear something sinister’s going on. It might not be legendary jumping demons, but neither is it exactly another ordinary day at Paternoster Row. Before you can blink twice, Strax is jumping into the Thames to follow an aquatic lead, while Madam Vastra takes to the rooftops to follow a trail, leaving Jenny to investigate drier sources of information alongside Gwendoline Platt, an over-hungry journalist with an exploitative turn of mind. When they eventually find the infamous Spring-Heeled Jack, it would be spoilerific to tell you the ways in which things get more complicated than anyone imagines, but suffice it to say there’s unlikely to be a dry eye in the house by the time you’re done.

The Paternoster Gang: Heritage 2 eases you in with a gag-packed tale of intrigue and diplomacy, takes you into gothic ghost stories and very nearly traps you there forever, and hits you with an emotionally rich line on a longstanding London mystery, to make you hug your loved ones tighter and more often, while imagining the indignities of losing the memories you swear you’ll never lose and would never willingly surrender. It’ll make you laugh, and thrill, and cry, all within the setting of a super intelligent lizard-woman, her wife-cum-maid, and their butler-of-war in the Victorian world. It’s heartwarming, gorgeous, emotional, fun, and you’d be ill-advised human scum to miss it.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Paternoster Gang - Heritage 1 by Tony J Fyler

Tony joins the gang.

Full disclosure – I’m a Paternoster Gang fan through and through. This release, and the news that there will be at least three more sets of adventures with the gang to come, was always going to be like Christmas to me.

If you’re not instinctively a Paternoster Gang fan, this first set has one real job – to convince you that the Paternoster Gang on audio has more scope to give you pleasure than they had on TV, playing second-fiddle to a wandering Time Lord.

Well, first of all of course, this spin-off series puts Madame Vastra the Silurian, Jenny Flint, her maid and wife (#ItsComplicated), and Strax, their Sontaran butler and grenade-fetishist, front and centre. That means there’s less clutter here than on-screen, because the gang are not fighting for breath around the margins of stories focused on a Doctor and a companion, both of whom by the nature of the show are designed to take the spotlight. Here, the spotlight has shifted to the Paternosters, and their world can expand to fill that light. So for non-fans, perhaps perversely, putting them front and centre can dilute some of the things about the gang that don’t ‘click’ in mainstream TV Who.

Secondly, Big Finish has form in delivering compelling, funny, tense, character-driven stories of odd goings-on in Victorian London – in Jago & Litefoot, the company turned two well-written subsidiary characters into thirteen hugely-loved box sets that would have undoubtedly gone on had Trevor Baxter not sadly died. So arguably, The Paternoster Gang #1 would be worth a punt in any case because without a doubt, Big Finish knows its business, and it’s aiming both to satisfy existing fans and win new ones with these Paternoster Gang stories.

But let’s get to the specifics of this set.

The Cars That Ate London! by Jonathan Morris is a story that’s part social allegory, part historical extrapolation, part bizarre sci-fi horror story, that allows the Paternoster Gang to ease into your consciousness as a unit in their own right. Morris gives us a semi-traditional pathway into the story – as Holmes and Watson had Inspector Lestrade to get baffled and involve them in cases, the Paternoster Gang have Inspector Cotton to fill that role and occasionally cast them into intrigue and adventure. The Cars That Ate London! draws attention to several issues that were pertinent in the Victorian era and are pertinent again now – electric cars and power stations being the two most central. Electric cars in Victorian London? Apparently so – never underestimate the openness of the Victorian mind. There were trials of electric cars that long ago, it was just that petrol-driven versions were more reliable, more economical and less altogether creepy than their electric counterparts. Here, electric cars are a viable option being pushed by a kind of Victorian Elon Musk (Alien Musk, maybe?), who has a vision of a world free from the pollution and oil-dependence to which the development of petrol cars will lead.

In a development that taps into more current fears about self-driving cars, when your ecological salvation starts driving into crowds and getting car-nivorous, things are clearly out of hand. When it emerges that the vision of a polluted future it is exactly that – a vision­ – we quickly shift gears from identifying an oddness to dealing with some timey-wimey alien influence here, and the Paternoster Gang are what you need if that’s what you’re facing. That’s a fundamental of this series – where Jago & Litefoot had a strong tendency towards the more human and supernatural sides of the Victorian nature, the Paternoster Gang are more or less all about the alien. In The Cars That Ate London!, the nature of the alien issue is on the small side, but the impact of just a tiny bit of dickering about with time and established causality clearly has the potential to spiral massively out of control, and so has to be stopped.

The story’s both pertinent, vaguely prophetic and briskly told, while there’s plenty of time and scope for character moments. If you’re not keen on Strax as a ‘comedy Sontaran’ in Doctor Who, it’s time to embrace the comedy that comes from his ‘potato out of water’ situation and the fundamentals of his character. Here, for instance, Jenny’s been trying to teach the solo Sontaran to speak ‘cocker-knee’ so as to move with less stompy obviousness among the communities of the East End. Ultimately though, it’s Vastra who’s most cogently able to deal with the threat here, as it’s her, of the three, who’s able to be most ‘Doctorish’ when such a thing is needed. Nevertheless, there’s room for all three of the gang to have their moment in this introductory story, and it leaves you not only feeling like you’ve had a rollicking Victorian adventure with a relatively new bunch of audio friends, but pondering what we in the 21^st century are actually going to do about the balance between our need for technology and our need to protect the planet for generations to come.

A Photograph To Remember, by Roy Gill, is the most poignant of the three stories in this set, taking us into the world of memorial photography – photos of dead people, posed as though they’re alive, to give a kind of ‘life-memory’ of their subject. At first, that feels a little macabre to 21^st century mindsets, but to the Victorians, it made a particular kind of sense. You wouldn’t want to remember someone looking dead, would you? That would be simply ghoulish!

That conceit leads us into the meat of this episode, which involves a hefty chunk of Paternoster world-building. If Holmes had his Moriarty, then it turns out our Paternoster Gang have their own equal-and-opposite power stalking the streets of London – the Bloomsbury Bunch. One Silurian, one human, one Sontaran. Their dynamics are radically different, and so are their aims, but whether they can actually be defined as evil in this adventure is up for debate. They have plans, absolutely, but the plans they have spiral wildly out of control, leading from what is basically an inept filing system to a fairly full-on zombie apocalypse, with additional bodyswapping fun!

Unravelling the threads of their plans from the consequences that are their first visible results, through the zombie – or more accurately, revenant – apocalypse, to the again-tiny bit of alien gubbins responsible for the whole thing is a process that takes up most of the episode, giving it the feel of a rational investigation against a ticking clock. Adding in the Anti-Paternosters’ personalities, relationships and power structures is a glorious complication that ultimately pushes everything to a knife-edge. If part of the first box set’s job is to broaden the Paternosters’ world into something on which they can more comfortably (and, for those who weren’t fans of theirs on TV, less irritatingly) stamp their personalities, and where they can be the enjoyable focus of their own adventures, then the delivery in Roy Gill’s story of an equal-and-opposite group with a different dynamic is a key part of that broadened canvas.

Also, purely in terms of casting, bringing back Christopher Ryan as the Anti-Strax who’s in charge of the Bloomsbury Bunch is a stroke of right-feeling genius. It will be interesting, based on this first story, to see how their relationship to one another develops in future.

And finally, when is a ghost not a ghost?

Well, practically always, admittedly, but particularly when they’re drifting about the place looking all ethereal before they’ve technically shuffled off this mortal coil.

In The Ghosts Of Greenwich by Paul Morris, there’s an enormous scope to the storytelling, taking us from disreputable drinking dens and human pals of Strax (the invention of a character called ‘Old Smallpiece,’ played by Trevor Cooper, who can serve as another story-conduit for the future is another stroke of genius here), to the Royal Observatory, a potential time-thief, and the glorious contradiction that is the line of meridian – a seemingly arbitrary line drawn on the ground that can determine what the time is for the rest of the world. It’s highly-structured drama, with a solidly spooky starting premise that builds to proper alien creepiness and power, for a standoff finale that proves the Paternoster Gang can handle the big angry alien threats as well as the smaller misused technology episodes.

Bottom line, if you liked the Paternoster Gang as sidekicks to the Doctor on TV, you’re going to love them here as their world is expanded and they’re allowed to live lives more centred in their own day-to-day adventures. If you didn’t, and even if you hated comedy Sontarans and lesbian lizards, you’re going to need to check this box set out – Big Finish, as we may have mentioned, knows its stuff. It’s worked hard to place the gang very firmly in their own world, and in that world, they’re shiny and funny and clever and kickass and tender and caring and funny some more. There are challenges to their set-up, there are Sapphire and Steely elements of creepiness and there’s even a degree of steampunk sensibility that makes this first box set feel like the start of something really rather special.