Big Finish Reviews+ Peace in Our Time by Tony J Fyler

Tony asks the ultimate question.

War! Good God, y’all! What is it good for?

Errrrrrrm…

Well, that rather depends on your point of view. If you’re one of the bodies doing the actual fighting of it, up to your neck in mud, blood, bullets and dysentery, then probably absolutely nothing, as advertised.

If you’re safe at home, guiding the destiny of a nation from a reinforced bunker or a safe stronghold, it could be argued that war is good for all sorts of things – standing up to offensive ideologies, grabbing land and resources previously belonging to the Not-We, removing infrastructure and human obstacles from a pathway to what you yourself consider a superior outcome… So long as you regard the people who fight the wars as a resource worth spending, and their deaths as the operational cost of victory, war can be highly useful in a whole multitude of ways. Quite apart from which, war is like adrenaline to human cleverness. Absolutely, people will invent clever things, discover new breakthroughs in peace time. But nothing gives an appetite to research and technological development like the thought that someone else is being cleverer than you, and they’re your enemy. And of course, nothing opens up the floodgates of imagination and crucially funding for research, development and technological advancement like that paranoia being played out on a governmental level.

All of which is fairly horrible, but has the depressing advantage of also probably being true.

Now here’s the thing.

If you’re safe at home, you have the luxury of viewing a far-away war as advantageous in all of these ways.

If you’re divorced from the action by time, instead of space, the effect is the same. The soldiers who died in the First World War, the Second World War – to us, their deaths are historical fact, and so are the technological developments that were created to help them. The world we know has been revolutionised in very many ways by the wars they fought, and we are the products of the people who either went to fight but reproduced, or who didn’t go to fight, and passed on their genes. If peace, instead of war, had happened, things would be different, in some ways subtly, but in other ways hugely.

That sort of philosophical argument is at the heart of Peace In Our Time, by Una McCormack.

The First Doctor and Steven arrive in London in time to investigate the seeming theft of the plans for the Dreadnought – for the non-history-fans, a class of ironclad ship that fuelled an arms race which was to ultimately erupt in the First World War. Are the plans set to be sent to Germany, or is there something darker and more twisted afoot?

Ruby Watkins, maid to the Gledhill family, doesn’t know the answer to that, but she does know something’s not right with her family upstairs. They don’t have the right number of servants for the house they live in, for one thing, putting extra pressure on Ruby to fulfil the duties of any number of servants. Then there are the silences, and the odd stops that shouldn’t be there, when they go still as statues without, it seems to Ruby, any business to do so.

When the Tardis team’s mission to investigate the theft of the Dreadnought plans and Ruby Watkins’ mission to find out about the oddness of her employers collide, a deeper truth is revealed. Yes, the plans have been stolen, but it’s not the Germans who are due to get their hands on them. Someone somewhere has found out quite how useful war can be, and intends to put a stop to it for their own nefarious purposes.

As a premise for a Doctor Who story, there’s something intrinsically modern about Una McCormack’s idea here – it resonates somewhat with the likes of Rosa, where the Doctor and their companions are out to stop history from being radically perverted from the course they know, but where time at the point when they interfere or don’t is still in flux, happening in its moment. If the Dreadnought arms race doesn’t happen, the major elastic-twist of history that leads to the explosion of the First World War probably won’t happen. Possibly, just possibly, peace will prevail. The difference here of course is that the Doctor and Steven are acting as agents for the war that will come in their version of accepted history. Arguably, by thwarting the plans of the temporal profiteers in the early 20^th century, they’re the ones at least tangentially condemning all the soldiers to die in the trenches of France in World War I. The settlement at the end of World War I was such that it stoked resentment and anti-European feeling in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, allowing the Nazis a populist cause to ride into power. Without World War I, it’s questionable – and historians love questioning this kind of temporal tipping-point – whether there would have been the thing we know as World War II. So the Doctor and Steven and the clever and brave Ruby Watkins (with a little help from her feminist friends), by aiming to ensure the Dreadnought plans are retained in England and returned to the proper authorities, are at least arguably making themselves responsible for all of the carnage that resulted.

No pressure.

The difference is, when dealing with the First Doctor, there’s much less trepidation, much less web of time carefulness to contend with – certainly, he’s the Doctor who said that not one line of history must be re-written, which gives him a gung-ho sense of action here, but he’s also the Doctor who didn’t hesitate that long before designing the Trojan Horse, and who accidentally set Nero’s Rome on fire, the Doctor prepared to impersonate a leading figure in revolutionary France and who ultimately nailed the defeat of Mondas by Earth into the web of time personally by bringing his Tardis crew to the Snowcap Base. He’s altogether more certain of the rightness of his actions than any 21^st century Doctor would be, so there’s little time spent weighing the moral rights and wrongs of the situation – a person or persons unknown wants to meddle with established history as the Doctor knows it. They must be stopped. As such, Una McCormack welds a story together with the philosophical core of 21^st century Who, and the charge-ahead storytelling focus of the early days. The result is pacy, punchy, and makes a lot of Classsic Who sense, spending little time examining its philosophical navel, but cracking on to try and defeat the twisters of history. Without spoiling too much of the story for you, there’s something deliciously Upstairs, Downstairs about the story too, and the conclusion is wrought not so much by the amazing time traveller and his space pilot friend, but by Ruby bloomin’ Watkins, than you very much, and others like her who want to make their own fundamental change to history and society.

All in all, Peace In Our Time is a fabulously conceived little gem of a story, polished by the gumption of its telling, and the race towards its conclusion. It’ll feel shorter than it is, because Peter Purves understands the pacing of the storytelling and pushes right ahead with it, garnering the energy it needs to make it feel like a real race to retrieve the plans and defeat the forces who want to use them for their own ends. Ultimately, you’ll enjoy it for the pacing, the world-building and the characters, with Ruby Watkins coming across as absolutely a proto-companion who never was. It’s only really afterward, as you sit reminiscing about how much of an adventure you’ve just had, that the philosophical implications of a timeline without the First World War really hit you. Fortunately, the story makes clear that while the specific people who suffer and die will be different, doing nothing and letting the time meddling go unchecked will ultimately result in a bigger, darker destiny for the whole of humankind. It’s by no means a competition, but it does weigh the wars we know in the balance and compare them with the whole of humanity for generations, which is a slick way to exonerate the Doctor and Steven from any of the actual consequences of keeping time on track here. They ultimately act for the greater good, and by the time the story ends, they more or less understand as much, rather than simply doing what they do and stopping people messing about with time. They’re explicitly saving the Earth by forcing it to stay on course and fight the wars it needs to fight to deliver for instance the world that we know.

Check out Peace In Our Time now – and prepare for war…

Who Reviews The Ark by Tony J Fyler

Tony mucks out the Monoids.

Doctor Who has always been a show driven by imagination and stories, rather than practical deliverables and budgets. That means there have always been stories that, while working brilliantly as stories, have been let down by wobbly sets and naff monsters.

The Ark, from First Doctor William Hartnell’s third season, is one of those stories. At its core, The Ark is a brilliant tale - humans fleeing the destruction of the Earth by the Sun, taking all the animals with them, along with micro-dotted human beings and a friendly bunch of mute creatures called the Monoids. It takes in themes of privilege and revolution and also, deals with the consequences of the Doctor’s interference in time and space as the Doctor’s companion Dodo bring a cold on board the spaceship. Having no resistance, the super-evolved crew start dropping like flies. There’s a trial, there’s the Doctor in scientific mode trying to find an antidote, and then, job done, the Tardis crew bog off into time and space – only to return immediately to the Ark 700 years later, to find the Monoids no longer mute, no longer docile and frankly ruling the roost. It’s not quite Planet of the Apes, but it is rather Spaceship of the Monoids.

Sadly, the Monoids on-screen reduced The Ark to ‘that one with the stupid one-eyed Beatle-haired things.’ They were badly realised on what felt like an aggressive level, and they robbed the story of any real ability to shock or provoke.

Good news! The audiobook version means you can invent your own Monoids, albeit they’re described in the text. Your mind has a bigger budget than the BBC in the Sixties, and so the Monoids, while still being front and centre of the action here, stop being so much of a focus-drag.

The audiobook by Paul Erickson manages to take a four-part story that always on screen felt like two two-parters knitted together (two episodes with the humans in charge, followed by two on a Monoid-run Ark), and expand it to feel like a valuable six-parter, with a long trial as the Doctor and Co are sentenced to death for bringing a fatal disease on board the Ark, and some exploring in different environments and biospheres to find vaccine ingredients. There’s more texture to the novelization than ever made it on screen too – we learn how Monoid One came to power, which gives a rewarding reality to the revolution of the Monoids, and we also get a bit of backstory for Jackie Lane’s Dodo.

The Ark then feels like a more substantial story in the novelization than it did on screen, and its themes are given more time to expand and bed in.

Peter Purves, on reading duties, is perfect here. His Steven, the companion he played in the story, is of course perfect, but he also delivers a Dodo that makes you want to dig out more Dodo stories and watch them, and over the last decade, at Big Finish and BBC Audio, he’s been honing his version of the First Doctor to the point where it’s utterly believable and consistent, meaning he strongly anchors Doctor Who stories that need a nuanced characterisation of the First Doctor to hold them together. Even his Monoids sounds less distracting than the on-screen versions, helping you to get away from the visual of them, and making the run-time of this audio novelization fly by.

Pick up The Ark on audiobook today – it’s probably the best version of this story you’ll ever own.  

Big Finish Reviews+ The Perpetual Bond by Tony J Fyler

Tony trades up.

Big Finish is a company that has evolved its storytelling in an unusual way. Beginning with the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors, it took the idea from the Virgin New Adventures novels that the Doctor had other companions after Ace, and it normalised the idea of fitting brand new companions, who could bring brand new challenges and characteristics to each Doctor’s life, into the timeline at various points – the Fifth Doctor gained Erimem, the Sixth Doctor gained an ever-growing host of additional friends, from Dr Evelyn Smythe to  Constance Clarke, via Frobisher the Whifferdill, and the Seventh Doctor gained the Nazi and the Nurse, Klein and Hex, among others.

When the Eighth Doctor series began, it was absolutely a necessity to invent him some new companions, and so Charlotte Pollard, C’rizz, Lucie Bleedin’ Miller, Tamsin Drew, Molly O’Sullivan and Liv Chenka joined the audio world, expanding the Doctor’s horizons, and everyone took it as read that of course the Doctor probably had companions that we’ve never seen on-screen. They have the adventures we haven’t seen, the adventures in our head that come out in other ways, on other media.

So it’s peculiar that the first four Doctors are relatively sacrosanct in terms of their companions, especially since with the best will in the world, the companions of the first four Doctors are advancing in years – a point tragically proven in a recent handful of years by the loss of Caroline John, Elisabeth Sladen, and Mary Tamm.

Then, as if out of nowhere, along came the Oliver Harper Trilogy. Three stories featuring the First Doctor, Steven Taylor…and a brand new audio-only companion.

How the hell did that happen?

More particularly to the point, having listened to the three audio stories in the trilogy, the question should be asked: why hasn’t it happened again?

Oliver Harper, introduced in The Perpetual Bond and played by Tom Allen, looks to all the world like a typical sixties city type, working on the trading floor in London.

But Harper has secrets. Harper is scared. Harper is moments away from fleeing the forces of justice, for a crime he’s committed, but for which he cannot face the music.

Which may be why he thinks his boss has suddenly turned into a giant mushroom.

The First Doctor and Steven, in Simon Guerrier’s ground-breaking Companion Chronicle, finally find their way back to 1960s London, and even to the junk yard of IM Foreman in Totter’s Lane, but while looking for a phone box that isn’t a bigger-on-the-inside time machine, so as to try and re-unite with Ian and Barbara, they see an alien catch a bus, and take off in hot pursuit.

Events take them to the trading house where Oliver works, and a moment’s unwise honesty binds them in an understanding that none of them are going mad, and that yes, there appear to be mushrooms walking around in bowler hats, carrying rolled umbrellas, just as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

It emerges that there are others trading commodities at the Flowers Trade And Investment. They’re doing it better than anyone else, and they’re doing it with a cynicism about what constitutes a commodity that one would probably optimistically hope was the province of the alien.

The Doctor, Steven and Oliver unite to try and put a stop to a giant operation that has something uncomfortably historical about its resonances, but the three could well be up against more than they can handle.

Guerrier’s story is written with a pulsing intelligence – he places the story firmly in the timeline of Steven and the Doctor, just after The Daleks’ Master Plan, with Steven still mourning for friends so recently made and lost – Katarina, Brett Vyon, Sara Kingdom (this last becoming a particularly poignant loss following stories released later in which Steven and Sara are trapped, again in sixties London, for some time – see An Ordinary Life). Guerrier writes great Steven, translating the space pilot’s view of the world into his experiences in what he thinks of as ‘ancient London,’ and also filling in those experiences with details picked up from previous London-based Steven stories like The Suffering. And Peter Purves relishes the chance to put some extra solid companioning into the character, beyond his often-limited on-screen role of ‘fighter of bad guys and schlepper from here to there.’ As the story is half narrated from his point of view, it allows Steven to give us genuine new insights into the Doctor, his own life, his past and experiences, and the ways in which this travel to historical worlds can be tiresome for a space pilot used to an entirely different life.

But it’s Tom Allen who most captures our attention here as Oliver Harper, the young man with a secret, happy in the anonymity of the trading floor, where everyone is judged not by who they are or where they’ve come from, but by the measure of their success at their job. While this is still very much a Doctor Who story, and it’s the Time Lord who eventually comes up with a solution to the nasty business being done at Flowers’, it’s a Companion Chronicle too, and both of them are written and delivered exceptionally well. Allen slips into the story with a seemingly effortless ease, and does what no-one’s done since the sixties – added a whole new ripple into the First Doctor’s life.

Oliver Harper is that most interesting combination of things – a character on the run from the law for reasons we don’t find out until his second story, The Cold Equations, but who the Doctor takes on trust. We hear enough of him in The Perpetual Bond to put our trust in him too, for all it’s as yet a somewhat guarded trust.

In terms of the First Doctor’s timeline of course, a character like Oliver Harper is an irresistible new creation. The grumpy, rash old man who kidnapped two school teachers has been heartbroken by the necessity of letting his granddaughter go, has picked up a surrogate grandchild to help him ease the pain, and recently had to let her go too. The teachers left him at the first opportunity they really got, despite growing as fond of him as he was of them, and he’s picked up a young space pilot because the alternative was to leave him to rot in a battle between the Daleks and the Mechanoids. Those choices, those losses, added to the sudden, shocking deaths of people around him in the immediate past, the losses of Katarina, Brett and Sara, have hit the old Time Lord hard, and his response here is to trust. It’s possibly a degree of retroactive character rewriting to see him as having mellowed into that trust, there’s also something inherently logical about the Doctor’s decision even as he was written in the sixties. Oliver Harper is a member of a privileged elite, who needs to flee the  judgment of his own people. There’s something distinctly Doctorish in his story, so the Doctor’s decision to offer him an escape route makes sense as a kind of Pay It Forward move, the Doctor who found his escape in the Tardis, pays that fortune forward to Oliver and takes him into time and space.

While we’re not far enough removed from the sixties yet to view them as Steven does, as ‘ancient history,’ we’re at least far enough removed to share the Doctor’s perspective that the law and justice are not necessarily the same thing in that period (or in any period, come to that). So the Doctor takes a chance and trusts Oliver Harper, making a new friend rather than leaving him to his fate. In all three of Guerrier’s scripts featuring the London trader, there’s a richness of character-development that was never given the chance to appear on-screen in the genuine Hartnell era. Thankfully then, Big Finish makes the character of the audio First Doctor broader and better than he ever had time to be on TV, and both Steven and Oliver are far richer in terms of their backstory than the lens would ever have allowed.

Pick up The Perpetual Bond without even a moment’s hesitation. But be warned – get The Perpetual Bond and you’re in for all three Oliver Harper stories. The young trader won’t let you go until his tale is well and truly done.