Big Finish Reviews+ Counter Measures: Dalek Gambit by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s caught in the crossfire.

  

The Movellan Manoeuvre was Act 1 of what probably shouldn’t feel like a two-part finale, but absolutely does. Creepy factories, double crosses, business geniuses taken by surprise, and the nerves of the Counter Measures team strung tight as the Movellans didn’t appear for the longest time despite being in the title of the episode, and then brilliantly did, revealed an audacious, emotionless plan and took on the forces of the Earth for a kind of supremacy they saw as utterly logical.

One line from that first act sets the tone and pace for The Dalek Gambit – ‘We are better than the alternative.’

It’s time to meet the alternative.

Doctor Who fans of course know of the war between the Daleks and the Movellans, but it’s rather gorgeous that in what might yet be the final episode of The New Counter Measures (spoilers!), our team of heroes are back on turf that’s familiar to them. Certainly, far more familiar than was the mystery of the Movellan Manoeuvre.

Daleks are what got them into the lives they’ve now led for over a decade. Might it be Daleks who bring those lives to an end?

Certainly, it sounds like it might be a very close thing, and it’s a flash of brilliance that makes Roland Moore, writing this story, validate and prove the line about the Movellans being the better option. This is not a story of deep Dalek cunning and round-the-houses prevarication. This takes its pace and tone from those second parts of Russell T Davies Dalek stories – everything’s built up and up and up like the charge in a laser gun. This episode fires the gun, and things never really stop from that moment on.

In terms of the pacing, there’s a flip here, from the creeping, building mystery of The Movellan Manoeuvre to all-out high-pitched dramafest of this episode, with the war, and the battles, and the yelling, and the running, and the planet-killing bomb as the Daleks refuse to mess about, and the giant ticking clock that’s counting down.

That’s all really rather the point of The Dalek Gambit – non-stop action and pace and breathlessness when the Daleks, rather than being engaged in an internecine war with their own kind, as when the Counter Measures team first encountered them, are engaged in a full-on war with the Movellans, and are prepared to blast the planet to dust just so it will take the remaining Movellans with it.

Along the way, Moore manages to delineate the difference between the Movellans and the Daleks, and its no small irony that the Daleks, with their organic component, are less rational and more overwhelmed by fury and devastating destructive power. In a way, the no-questions-asked, no-compromise Daleks here make The Dalek Gambit one of the best Dalek stories you’ll ever have encountered, because they’re not hampered by the need to explain their plans, or engage in some extermination-stopping buzzkill game with the Doctor. These are Daleks as primal and straightforwardly lethal as you’ve ever seen or heard them, and they fairly blow your hair back in this story. That brings us round in a rather joyful, if nail-chewing, full circle to Remembrance of the Daleks – while Gilmore, Jensen and Williams had their hands full with a few scattered Daleks more intent on killing each other than noticing the human flotsam, here we get a sense of that ship that lurked in orbit with its colossal firepower, able in a heartbeat to wipe humanity off the face of the earth.

Here, it might very well happen for real, and the New Counter Measures team are mostly caught up in mini-quests, dealing with landing parties, chasing a surviving Movellan, trying to work out a way to broker a survival for humanity that neither the Daleks nor the Movellans ever really see as an option, and all the while, the clock ticks down, malevolently, your chest getting tighter as the stakes get higher, the team fighting Daleks, the team trying to imagine a way round the inevitable destruction of the earth…

It seems as yet uncertain whether any more New Counter Measures stories will be made.

We’d rather like them, if they were. But if not, then let it be said that the New Counter Measures team went out on a screaming high, fighting the alien monster than first got them into the business. It’s punchy and powerful and you’ll pretty much forget to breathe as the run-time runs on, and the ending will affect you. Maybe not in the way you think it will, but it will.

If this is the end, it’s the best of endings. If it’s not the end, there are ways to write around the end of this story, and let the adventures continue. But if it is the end, it’s an end that’s true to the evolution of the characters, in a full-circle full-on fight for survival, and for the earth itself. It’s a tale of noise and fury, with aggressive Daleks, desperate flailing hopes against hope, and at least a little Something Very Clever from one of the team. It’s an ending that says thank you to everything that’s come before, everyone who’s had the privilege of writing for the team, everyone who’s made their world come alive, going all the way back to Coal Hill School and the mind of Ben Aaronovitch. It’s a thank you to the actors who play the roles that they get to save the world again in such spectacular style, while also being a truly exceptional, if uncomplicated, Dalek story.

Thank you, New Counter Measures team. We’d love to hear you again some day, but if this is the end, you went out playing an absolute blinder.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips: Dead Woman Walking by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s got worms.

Dead Woman Walking, by Roland Moore, is in many ways a thought experiment through the medium of Doctor Who. It embraces the struggle of macro-creatures like humans against micro-organisms, like viruses or worms, and asks us to examine which version of us is the ‘best self’ we could be. It encompasses responsibility, recklessness, power, manipulation and consequences, all within little more than half an hour of prime Doctor Who.

Now, if that makes it all sound a bit heavy, don’t worry – Moore’s a storyteller first and foremost, and he does due diligence by his responsibility to the listener, so what you get here is a story of Ace in a biological dilemma, being kept alive by  a biological entity which exists in symbiosis with a kind of living bomb which could blow apart the planet on which she’s standing, while a vicious civil war goes on around her. What you get here is the Doctor seemingly baffled as to how to give both her and the planet a future in which they’re not inextricably bound together, and Ace, being Ace, showing the true quality of her character. It would absolutely spoiler you to explain how that quality of character resolves itself into a solution, but in a time when fandom has been reflecting on the power and the admirable nature of the likes of Sarah-Jane Smith, this story does good service to Ace’s character, and to the way in which her journey made her better, able to affect situations merely by the content of her character.

While it has something of The Invisible Enemy about it, this story deals cleverly with the question of how far out of your comfort zone you’d go to get a good result. While Ace on-screen was very much the gung-ho teenager, reader to shout at things and blow them up to get them out of her angry way, this is an Ace that feels more mature than that, an Ace who, while by no means comfortable with it, is prepared to go the long way round a problem if it’s clear that that’s the way of least danger. An Ace prepared to suffer, to grow older, even if need-be to die to solve the problem, but in the meantime to be the best version of herself she can be, and hope it rubs off on people.

While the Doctor is forced to leave her behind on the world with the living bomb at its core, Ace’s job is to stay alive, locked into a symbiosis with that bomb, being, while still entirely Ace, a kind of still point to whom others can look, a beacon and a source of peace, and an example of the way they too could live their lives, bigger than any petty conflict to which they may be dedicated.

In many ways, the sub-structure of this story is a thank you to those who’ve written Ace over the decades, and to Sophie Aldred for giving such vivacious life to her. Hardly a farewell, it’s a story that nevertheless could stand as one of the character’s many best days, the kind of days we remember when all other days are gone – perhaps fittingly so, given both the story’s title and its central dilemma, in which Ace’s life depends on her not putting a foot wrong over an extended period. As such, there’s the fuzzy warmth of the best of funerals about it, which is somewhat thankfully undercut at the end by the relationship between Ace and the Doctor in one of its more spiky moments, one of his teachable moments putting her well and truly through the wringer.

Is Dead Woman Walking perfect then?

Not quite – in fact, the more grammatically minded among you will take a layer of enamel off your teeth early on, as the storytelling starts off in a lazy way with shifted perspectives, like ‘If Ace had been conscious, she’d have heard the tone in his voice…’

Maybe you have to be a pedant for this sort of thing to get to you. I’m led to believe there are at least one or two in the fandom, so if this sort of thing drives you screaming to your computer to write emails of complaint, take a breath. Push on through. The story itself is worth the occasional moment of grammatical seething. Especially if you’re an Ace fan, it’s a slightly more mature take on her character, where there’s more depth to her than the child who hit Daleks with baseball bats (much as we love that version). It’s an Ace who might be mad as hell at the Doctor’s hard schooling, but who knows enough to stand still and let the world, just occasionally, change around her, because of her. And because of who she is, to change for the better.

Big Finish Reviews+ Memories of a Tyrant by Tony J Fyler

Directed by John Ainsworth.

Tony’s getting forgetful.

At its best, science fiction makes us ask questions about the world in which we live. Memories of a Tyrant, by Roland Moore, asks us to consider the time limit we place on vengeance and justice, by using an old man with dementia as the lynch pin in a moral maze, with occasional divergences into an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery.

Garius Moro may or may not be a tyrant from decades ago, who used an apocalyptic weapon and killed billions. He’s aged since then, whoever he is, and dementia has crept over his mind, so he has no hard memory of those days. And there’s only one surviving image of the tyrant – a blurry snap of a man on a balcony. Is it him? Who can tell? And, more to the point, if he can no longer remember it, does it matter? What would punishing a frail, decrepit old man, lost in the fog of his own forgetfulness, achieve?

But then, if he is the fabled tyrant and mass murderer, should age and feebleness let him escape a retribution that would bring closure to the descendants of his victims?

Told you it was a moral maze.

This is all given a healthy coat of sci-fi imagination when the Sixth Doctor and Peri are called in by an old friend of the Doctor’s to a space station colloquially called The Memory Farm – a place where even long dormant or forgotten memories can be resurrected in perfect clarity, and in Moro’s case, possibly used against him in a court of law. There are forces that want him convicted and killed, forces that want him exonerated and set free, and forces that just want to see justice done. And into this powder keg strides the man in the multicoloured coat and his American friend.

There are, it’s fair to say, plot holes here big enough to drive a Tardis through – there seems little reason the Doctor couldn’t pop back with a camera, get them a better image of the tyrant and help clarify matters. Come to that, he could pop back and observe Moro as a younger man, to trace the truth of his story. Less forgivable than this, a well-liked character in this story gets killed more or less because the Doctor doesn’t feel like nipping back to the Tardis for a piece of kit.

But the story endears itself to listeners on many levels – it’s got the moral maze at its heart, but it also has Peri wanting to use the facility to recapture fading memories of her dad from when she was a little girl, which makes you want to give the grown-up Peri a hug. And it also has a much more warm and friendly relationship between the Sixth Doctor and Peri than was frequently seen on screen – as Peri says here, ‘Oh, we had our ups and downs, but now… yes, we’re friends,’ which makes them a much more attractive listen than they were in the spiky years.

There’s also an appreciable amount of solid technological imagination in this story – the idea of memory as both the thing that defines our personality, and as a potential commercial resource, has resonances of Philip K Dick’s We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which is as much of a recommendation as any modern writer could need. The plot of the second half of the story delivers some hefty consequences to the commoditisation of memory, which imperil the Doctor’s life, limb and reputation, and give Peri a really strong arc as an avatar of truth and justice, while also involving a couple of more common-or-garden murders to solve along the way. It’s really Peri who’s the Miss Marple of the piece, fighting against a reality that seems entirely changed, in order to get to the truth in which she believes – and any story that gives Nicola Bryant something strong to do with Peri gets our vote any day of the week.

Memories of a Tyrant does all the things you want good, exciting science fiction to do, and it does them with a Tardis Team that’s been redeemed on audio from the skew-whiff destiny of its TV days. Have a listen, and let them play with your mind.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Night Witches

Tony flies with the Witches.

The Early Adventures range of Doctor Who stories reaches right back to the show’s earliest years to create some stories in ways that perhaps have fallen out of favour in subsequent decades, but give them enough of a modern spin to let them intrigue 21^st century listeners.

The fourth series of these Early Adventures kicks off with a new story for Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor and his earliest Tardis crew, Polly, Ben and Jamie.

We’re not in supernatural territory here though – this is not Who Does Harry Potter or Rivers of London. The Night Witches, written by Roland Moore, is a pure historical story, with no aliens, no plots to take over the world – at least none from green, tentacled monsters from the planet Zog – just the genuine push and pull of human history, and the realisation that that’s plenty complicated enough, plenty dangerous enough, and very often plenty fatal enough a thing to go messing about with. The pure historical was baked into the DNA of Doctor Who right from the very beginning, as part of the show’s mission to educate its mainly young audience about historical subjects in an involving way. But kids are kids, and the pure historicals were less popular than the ‘Pow!-zap!-Exterminate!’ playground potential of the science fiction storylines, so they died out after Troughton’s first season in the Tardis.

Big Finish has revived them, and let the later Doctors get in on the purely historical action, but there’s something about the ‘black and white’ Doctors of the Early Adventures range that instinctively fits more with this kind of storytelling – not least because they’d died out before those later Doctors got their Tardis keys, so we’re not pre-trained to hear later Doctors in those stories.

The Night Witches lands the Tardis crew in wartime Russia, with Nazi tanks on the advance, and introduces us to the all-female bomber crew that earned themselves the Night Witch title for their slow, relatively silent bombing raids. To make up for its lack of alien threat, it does pull a sci-fi trope out of its bag though – Polly has an exact doppelganger in the poster-girl for the Witches, adding agreeably to the complications that abound and the potential plot-threads that are spun.

It’s fair to say that angle of the ‘two Pollys’ is needed in this story, which suffers from the precision with which it recreates some of the pure historical stories – by which we mean it spends a lot of time moving people from A-B and then a lot of time trying to move them back from B-A, only to run into complications. What this does is minimise the action elements in favour of allowing us to get to know and care about the period and its people – and in particular in this case, the group of exhausted, starving, intensely brave women who did what they could do to fight the threat of the Nazi war machine. But still, in The Night Witches, there are moments when perhaps a touch more plot wouldn’t go amiss. Moore’s script discovers the plotting button more distinctly towards the end, but even then – and rightly so – the plots that are hatched feel like desperation measures, of the kind you’d expect from a group of young, starving, exhausted, frayed-nerved people increasingly likely to never see another dawn. There’s that feeling of World War I, Somme-like desperation to do anything to avoid going over the top in some strands, and the blank-eyed slablike desperation to do anything that can help them win in some others. It’s all very evocative, and certainly it does the job of putting us in the mindset of the time and place and people we get to drop in on through the magic of the Tardis, but the lack of a particular in-story Big Bad means it can sometimes feel unfocused and scrappy and, to coin a phrase, ‘just one damned thing after another.’

That said, the performances throughout are very good. In particular, the Tardis team are on spectacular form, Anneke Wills rising to the occasion of having a distinctly Polly-centred story with a performance that prints the heart of her companion right on the memory of the listener. Elliot Chapman gets better every time he plays Ben, and here he’s more or less indistinguishable from the original article. And Frazer Hines…there are really too few words for the wonder of Frazer Hines, who not only continues to give us a Jamie as bright and bold and resourceful as ever he was, but also continues to send shivers down listeners’ spines with his intensely evocative take on the Patrick Troughton Doctor. It’s genuinely uncanny, and Moore in this story gives Hines a demented amount to do, not least having heated arguments with himself as the two characters he plays. The three main Night Witches we meet are agreeably distinct - Anjella Mackintosh gives Polly-double Tatiana Kregki a pragmatism that feels real, Wanda Opalinska makes commander Nadia Vasney a classic case of someone who’s been at war too long on too few rations and too little sleep, and Kristina Buikaite gives Lilya Grankin a sweet gaucheness that makes her the most appealing of the three.

The Night Witches is worth checking out, both as a tribute to the real women on whom the story is loosely based, and as a more interesting, richly characterised and female-driven story than many in the history of Doctor Who. If it doesn’t blast the fourth series of Early Adventures off into the stratosphere with a story that demands immediate and repeat re-listening, it does bring it down to Earth and give us an unblinking look at female bravery under extreme duress against the forces of Nazism. Given the world in which we find ourselves, that means The Night Witches is a story that feels unexpectedly appropriate in 2017.