War! Good God, y’all,
this is what it’s good
for, says Tony.
The Time War series from
Big Finish is a brave attempt to do what was once thought impossible – to give
colour to, and to at least a little personalise the Time War, a sequence of
events and causes that it should be impossible to follow, a war between the
universe’s two greatest, most dogmatic time travelling species, the Time Lords
and the Daleks. More than that though, the Eighth Doctor Time War series exists
to bridge the gap between the Eighth Doctor we have known since his TV Movie
appearance – a Doctor full of bounce and fizz and Tiggerish excitement – and
the Eighth Doctor we now know finally makes the choice we never imagined the
Doctor could make, to become a warrior, and fight the Time War with the
warrior’s conviction brought to the screen, and later to a series of audio box
sets, by the wonder that was John Hurt. The box set arcs of recent years for
the Eighth Doctor have seen him pushed further and further into dark places,
from Dark Eyes, through The Doom Coalition and now into Ravenous, but there
still feels like a distinct divide between the Doctor we know from those box
sets and the Doctor who finally makes that warrior’s choice.
The Eighth Doctor Time War
1 box set felt, if anything, oddly slight and a little unprepared for the task
ahead – particularly in the episode which showed us Time Lord troopers drilling
like ordinary Earth-warriors. Immediately though, the second box set takes us away
from any sense of flatness or ordinary chronology – in the opening story, The
Lords of Terror by Jonathan Morris, we join Eight and his newish companion,
Bliss, as he takes her home to her world, just to tell her parents she’s OK
before they go hurtling off again.
But Bliss’ home world
is…not the place it was. It’s been ravaged by the Daleks, till only one city
remains. One city with a plan to retaliate.
The sheer culture shock on
Bliss of this revelation would be enough to explore in a full story, but Morris
by no means leaves a promising situation unpoked with sticks. Sure enough, as
the title suggests, there’s more to this retaliation than meets the eye, and
there are both layers of storytelling that confront the Doctor with what the
war is doing to his own people’s psychology, and a handful of callbacks to Tom
Baker’s early days – big rockets, cities with domes that must be climbed, and
explicit references to the mission on which he was sent in Genesis of the
Daleks. It’s a neat, throbbing undertone of guilt and association, but as with
Bliss’ anguish, it’s not really given the time it needs to breathe and sink
into us because there’s always something frantic happening – people are killed,
people are revealed as traitors, people’s backstories of pain are unfurled, and
reality shifts from minute to minute, culminating in a countdown clock that, in
another Genesis callback, brings the Doctor face to face with the
responsibilities of the actions he might take.
In essence, The Lords of
Terror is an expression of the Orwellian idea that if you have an enemy, and
you use the same tactics as that enemy, you become almost indistinguishable
from them, especially in the impacts you have on others. That’s an idea which
had its full TV flowering in the era of the Tenth Doctor, when the Time Lords
themselves, hardened, blinded and ravaged by war, become a bigger danger to the
universe than the Daleks themselves – this story is not by any means that
wholesale fall of a society’s standards, but it is a gracenote on how such
things can happen, one life at a time.
Planet of the Ogrons, by
Guy Adams is somewhat lighter fare, as long-term fans will expect. The Ogrons,
bless them, are burly ape-like creatures of very little brain but plenty of
brawn, who worship carnivorous rocks and hire themselves out as muscle to any
galactic bullies who can pay.
They’re not by any means
the universe’s most interesting creatures, and there’s a sense in which the
story they’re used to tell here feels like oddness for the sake of it – we meet
a new non-Dalek Dalek who likes to tinker, and we meet one very particular
Ogron that really feels like its story needs a resolution which fails to come
within the scope of this box set. But put all that behind you, because this
story also introduces us to the Twelve.
The Twelve is a ‘future’
incarnation of the main villain of The Doom Coalition and Ravenous, known with
a certain numerical inevitability as the Eleven. A Time Lord whose
regenerations are all permanently with him, the Eleven is a tortured creature,
trying to drive the vehicle of his body with ten backseat drivers at any time
trying to wrest the wheel from him.
The Twelve is Julia
McKenzie.
For people who don’t know,
Julia McKenzie’s a phenomenal actress, now of an age to dominate the ‘little
old lady in whose mouth butter wouldn’t melt’ category of roles. She also has
an absolutely audible eye-twinkle, and, when necessary, can deploy a voice like
a stiletto. She plays the Twelve as an incarnation who finally has her other
selves under control (at least to begin with), and working on the side of what
can still loosely be thought of as good – the Time Lords. Casting McKenzie is
one of those scarily frequent strokes of genius from Big Finish, and the
combination of her and Paul McGann, buffered by the mellifluent peacekeeping
presence of Rakhee Thakrar as Bliss, is a stand-out reason to buy The Time War
2, irrespective of your ability to commit to the storytelling journey of the
set. You simply need to have heard some things in your life, and this is one of
them. Jon Culshaw as the Very Special Ogron doesn’t hurt matters in the
slightest, either.
If Planet of the Ogrons
deals with personality in terms of the Very Special Ogron and the Twelve, In
The Garden Of Evil, Adams’ second contribution to this set, is a very different
philosophical exploration of similar ideas. A garden filled with lethal
creatures that kill if prisoners stray off the paths is filled with people who
have no memory of their identities. They remember things, words, skills they have, but not who they are. And every
now and then, they get teleported for interrogation by…whoever it is that’s
keeping them there. When they arrive for questioning, they remember, but when
they get sent back to the Garden, their memories are wiped of their personality
again. And then there’s Prisoner Alpha, separated from the rest in a
prison-dome all of his own. Is he, as he surmises, the most evil man in the
universe? Or is there more to the Garden than meets the mind?
Adams’ tale is highly engaging,
because it makes you wonder how you would cope in a similar situation – would
you simply accept your imprisonment? Try to make friends? Try to test the
boundaries of your confinement? What would your fundamental personality reveal
if you didn’t have the understanding of yourself that you carry around with
you? It’s a mystery, and Bliss shows a very rational side to her nature in
working through the issues, while ‘Alpha’, despite his brilliance, wonders
about his guilt, his culpability for crimes resulting in this incarceration.
The Twelve though steals this story too, showing an inquisitive intellect, and
a ghastly ruthless streak which frankly Julia McKenzie was born to express.
There’s extra help in this story too in the presence of Victor McGuire (as he
describes himself, ‘Jack in Bread, Ron in Goodnight Sweetheart, surprise star
of West End musicals at the age of 44’) as Borton, another prisoner in the
Garden whose reasons for being there are surprisingly never discovered, but
whose personality reveals itself as amiable and curious, the very kind of
person who might help solve the mystery of the Garden of Evil.
Episode 3 cracks along at
a pace that feels punchy but not overcrowded, with its single key objective for
our team of getting out of the Garden and regaining their memories. And while
most of the episodes of this set are standalone but close in time, there’s a
connection here that leads us relatively smoothly into the fourth episode, Jonah,
by Timothy X Atack. Episode 4 is an unusual one, bearing some resemblance to
the Beneath the Viscoid episode of the first War Master set – it’s all
submarines chasing beneath the surface of a sea that negates the operation of
time travel capsules. The story welcomes back the imperious Cardinal Ollistra,
played by Jacqueline Pearce, and here there’s a definite sense of racing to
find a prize that could turn the tide of the Time War, and there are three very
strong female characters in the hierarchy of the Doctor’s sub-crew - Chief Panath,
played by Tania Rodrigues, Executive Officer Omor, played by Surinder Duhra,
and Ensign Murti, played by Anya
Chalotra. Between them, these three women drive a lot of the story, and
give the planet its personality, its culture, its character and values – and
you end up with a world that you’re genuinely sorry the Daleks have ravaged.
Plotwise, it’s high-stakes adventure on a race between the Time Lords and the
Daleks for The Thing that can change the fate of the war, but there’s
ultimately more to it than reaching the objective first. Atack crafts a story
that has satisfaction bells strewn throughout it, and rings every one along the
way. Meanwhile, there’s not a single dud note from the cast in Episode 4 – the
three locals act their socks off to build the world, McGann, Pearce, Thakrar
and McKenzie add streaks of personality and character-colour throughout, and
the whole thing hums with a quality you can only let engulf you.
The Eighth Doctor Time War
2 is four individual episodes with some connection, rather than a heavily
linking arc of darkness, but there’s good stuff to be gotten out of each and
every one, and there’s more of a feel of the war becoming an inevitable reality
for the Eighth Doctor in this set than the last. There’s also, thanks to events
in Episode 1, a new, vaguely Charlotte Pollardy conundrum with which to contend
going forward – people who exist when they shouldn’t, the laws of time having
been put into abeyance.
There are some clever
ideas here, around which are woven some staggering performances – McGann on
form as ever, Thakrar really getting to show us more about the character of
Bliss, and McKenzie stealing every scene in which the writers dare to put the
Twelve. Like all the best of treats, we’d really like to keep her for a while
before there’s any hint of the Thirteen stealing her thunder.
Grab The Eighth Doctor
Time War 2 – it’s a solid progression for the Eighth Doctor as he inches ever
closer to the war, a richly character-driven set of stories, and quite apart
from all of that, you absolutely need the Twelve in your life, as soon as you
possibly can manage.
