Big Finish Reviews+ The Fourth Doctor Adventures, Series 9, Vol 1 by Tony J Fyler

E-Space has never felt so real to Tony.

While it’s true that hour-for-hour, he probably hasn’t quite got there yet, the fact that Tom Baker is now on his ninth season of stories for Big Finish means it feels like he’s now been the Doctor on audio as long, if not longer, than he was on screen. Indeed, January 2020 saw him clock up eight years in the audio Tardis. And whereas by the time he travelled with the Second Romana, Adric and K9 on screen, he was increasingly irritable and keen to leave the role, on audio, he’s sounding fresher than ever, seeming to vocally jump through the challenges of leading the team, like the quixotic, grinning child-sage Time Lord he always seemed to be, over forty years ago.

Also, nine seasons in, it’s about time that he was reunited with the full Season 18 Tardis team, in the topsy-turvy universe of E-Space.

It’s more or less at this point that something clicks into place. Marc Platt has been writing inventive, demented, more or less what-the-hell Doctor Who stories for decades now. Lightbulb moment – Marc Platt comes from E-Space. If you think about it like that, his entire career makes a whole lot more sense. He’s brilliant in any universe, he’s just…not from round here.

If you need evidence of that, stick Purgatory 12 in your lugholes and give it a listen. There are lots of mad, brilliant elements in here – leaping from asteroid to asteroid, death being not so much inconvenient as irrelevant, living, learning rust, and a life-form whose idea of a good time is playing chess against Adric.

No, really. We don’t know what to tell you – E-Space is light on thrills, maybe.

Purgatory 12? Heavier on thrills – there are seemingly cannibalistic space raiders, more than happy to chow down on some juicy rump of Adric (You’re entirely welcome for that image). There’s a grumpy mega-organism driving a reincarnation cycle. There’s K9 making an actual, equal, friend. There’s a bold, brave, stupid, naïve hero, seeking a noble quest. There are…more things we’d love to tell you about, but you want to be surprised when you listen, right? You know there are mad things that end up making a deeply odd sense, it’s a Marc Platt script. Marc ‘Ghost Light, Lungbarrow, Spare Parts, Loup Garoux and more’ Platt. You can more or less take creepy, freaky, complex and at least a little bit bonkers as read.

And among the background of a desolation that never ends (you don’t get a name like Purgatory 12 without good reason), there’s an embedded emotional storyline of a crucial realignment of the relationships between the Doctor, Romana, Adric and even, to some extent, K9. It begins with Adric having a teen-strop and the Doctor abandoning him on a benighted chunk of space rock, seemingly forever.

Of course, the Doctor doesn’t really abandon him, but it’s an example of the Fourth Doctor’s sometimes cavalier approach to the people who travel with him that we initially believe he might have – he gets a message and Sarah-Jane’s out the door in less than five minutes. Leela leaves, he grins his face off and chuckles madly. Even, in due course, when Romana decides to stay in E-Space, he make only the most tokenistic of efforts to persuade her to come with him, then dumps K9 on her and naffs unceremoniously off. So, with Adric, the Fourth Doctor more or less kicks him out the Tardis door in the middle of space-nowhere, and leaves him to fend for himself, at least as far as Adric knows. That’s relatively key to the drama here – Adric’s fairly new on board the Tardis, and he and the Doctor are still working each other out. It’s arguable whether or not they ever actually managed it, especially when the Doctor regenerated and Adric’s awe of him notably diminished. But here, Adric is still a swirling mass of emotions after the death of his brother, Varsh, feeling like an eternal outsider, and bouncing off the many walls of the Tardis. Even the frequently frosty Second Romana extends an olive branch to him to stop him from leaving in this story, but the impetuous youth won’t be told or restrained, and neither will the Doctor – it’s a rather touching foreshadowing of the opening to Earthshock in that regard. It would be stretching the fact to say that by the end of this story he’s the Adric of The Keeper Of Traken, but there feels like definite development in his character over the course of Purgatory 12, not least because Adric himself is crucial to the solution of problems and the escape from a fate worse than at least a single death.

Purgatory 12 is a story that works absolutely perfectly with the Season 18 vibe, wild plot elements knotted together with odder, more tangential logic that would normally pass muster in N-Space stories. If you’re a fan of Season 18, you’ll listen to Purgatory 12 and sense a return to the odd, familiar, upside-down-with-knobs-on rules of E-Space. Tom Baker blows every door off the script, Lalla Ward brings a wonderful mix or archness and a character unbending under the power of travel, John Leeson’s K9 is particularly touching here, at first feeling inadequate and electronically anxious that he’s not performing to the Doctor’s expectations, and eventually finding a kind of computer communion with his first real friend. And Matthew Waterhouse, in the role around which Purgatory 12 revolves, delivers an Adric unfinished, an Adric young and pompous and vulnerable and independent and clever, and everything that ever made him appeal to young viewers. An Adric still as much fun as ever he was.

If the hallmark of a Marc Platt script is gloriously weird, frequently creepy, dementedly inventive elements, Jonathan Morris frequently matches pulsing forward motion and elements of humour that turn the brightness of his stories up, making them seem faster and more energetic than many others in the Big Finish library.

In Chase The Night he brings an absolute belter of an idea to the weird universe of E-Space and builds in a Full Circle-style riff on life cycles and the different ways to be alive.

The Doctor and his friends land in a rainforest at night and runs into the crew of a spaceship. A spaceship that goes around the world. On rails.

Mad enough for you yet?

The reason it makes this trip is because the sun is so powerful it will burn the crew to a crisp if they don’t. They’re literally dependent on perpetually outrunning the dawn until eventually they either die or get rescued.

Enter two Time Lords, a snotty Alzarian and a robot dog. Once revealed not to be the much yearned-for rescue team, there’s a good degree of standard-issue suspicion, irritation and downright what-the-hellery about their arrival, not least from the pilot, Dena, played with a kind of strung-out, sleepless edge of command desperation by the incomparable Jane Asher (Seriously, young people, if you’ve never seen her do drama, check out the internet, find her in something called Closing Numbers. It’ll kill you, but in a good way).  So what we have is a semi-enclosed environment with a creeping threat of sunshiney death, an old spaceship on rails, of which bits keep falling off, blowing up or going wrong (no pressure), with a pilot who’s strung out, blinkered and increasingly getting used to making stark, or even horrific decisions for the benefit of her dwindling crew.

Dwindling?

Oh, yes. Didn’t we mention that? Members of the crew keep falling sick, babbling some very specific words, and then dying. Y’know, just because life would be too dull and straightforward otherwise.

When one of the Tardis crew goes the same way, leading to a cliffhanger where they’re pronounced stone dead, things take a turn for the really desperate. But life is not only what it’s cracked up to be. Somewhere in the dark, there’s a force on which the whole future of the crew could depend. But is it a force for good or evil? Or something somewhere in between?

That’s quite a lot of trademark Morris forward motion. Oh, and the humour? It’s here in spades too, with a particular running gag just one early example, when Romana speaks as she would, being one of the cleverest life forms in the room, and everyone has to repeatedly ask for an explanation of her vocabulary, which K9, with increasing electronic embarrassment, supplies. There’s also a sweet joke with K9 mentioning that he can cross the rainforest terrain perfectly well, thank you very much, and then later having to ask in a subdued, sheepish voice for assistance with ambulation over the terrain at speed.

Chase The Night is a story that mixes quite a few elements of the televised E-Space stories together – an exhausted crew, and in particular a strung out, increasingly blinkered leader in conflict with their lieutenant from Warriors’ Gate, as here, Pilot Dena frequently crosses swords with her engineer, Terson (given that world-weary tone of steady competence under the thumb of an unstable commander by William Gaminara, himself no stranger to audio work), the inevitable decay of systems both mechanical and social from State Of Decay, and the ingenious use of unusual life cycles as both a fundamental underpinning and a major part of the solution from Full Circle. In essence, then, it couldn’t be more E-Space if it tried. But still it has an energy, a runaway train urgency that none of the televised stories managed, and of course it’s all leavened with touches of delicious tongue-in-cheek humour. And it has Jane Asher, so naturally it rules all.

As an opening act to a ninth season of Fourth Doctor stories, Part 1 is a triumph – both the scenarios, both the worlds we visit are odd in very E-Space ways, and the Season 18 team have an energy and a dynamic that’s friendly, certainly, but tinged with spikes of intellectual tension because as has been noted, in Season 18, every member of the Tardis team is a genius in their own right.

What you get here is an enthusiastic Fourth Doctor in a pair of E-Space adventures written by people who’ve thoroughly understood the dynamics of that environment and that sensibility. The Season 18 team is back, and they’re absolutely glorious.

Big Finish Reviews+ Survivors Series 9 by Tony J Fyler

Tony makes it through.

It’s the end, to coin a phrase, but the moment has been prepared for.

Survivors, like several other ideas in the mind of Terry Nation, has lived on far beyond its creator, and has taken directions that have made it chillingly relevant even in an age beyond that in which it’s set. The coming of ‘the Death,’ the plague that wiped out most of the world’s human beings, feels like a generation ago, a fact subtly underlined in Jane Slavin’s opening episode of this box set, The Farm, by the fact that young women of childbearing age can’t remember exactly how old they are, because their parents died when they were young and so precision about such things has been lost. The world our survivors used to know is gone, and even the world of the immediate aftermath, of paranoia, fear, and violation-danger, particularly for women, has curled around the edges into something more horribly productively-minded. In The Farm, Jenny (Lucy Fleming) is being kept, along with lots of other women, on the farm run by would-be British Supremo, Meg Pritchard (Richenda Carey). The conditions are primitive and unsanitary, the food rations small, and by the use of strict segregation of men and women that might not be quite as strict as it’s made out to be, there’s a degree of human-farming going on without anything so vulgar and authoritarian as a forced breeding program.

But ask yourself – in a human farm, what happens to women when they hit the menopause?

Strap in for this one, it’s funny and hopeful and dark and vicious and the silver thread of psychopathic human-using evil runs glistening through Richenda Carey’s Meg Pritchard, as she tries first to subvert Jenny to her cause, make her a trustee to be bought off with little luxuries that mean the world, and then, when that fails, to put her and her friends down as they make a break for it. Listen out for Issy Van Randwyck as Beryl and Lizzie Stables as Victoria, a pair of characters that show from different angles the commoditisation of women in this environment, each doing their bit to harden Jenny’s resolve to break Pritchard’s power. Above all, there’s a sense of realistic women together in captivity that’s too often missing from modern TV drama, and which would be enormously welcome there. It’s welcome here too, showing the strength, resilience and nous of women under pressure.

If you want a story with an interesting and intense single central set-up, you go to Christopher Hatherall, because he has some serious form in Survivors when it comes to delivering nitty-gritty stories about the actual, practical ‘hows’ of bad situations – in Series 6, he wrung every last drop of tension from a story mostly set in a great big hole in the ground (The Trapping Pit – worth a re-listen). Here, he takes us into a coal mine, because yay, more holes in the ground! More seriously, Hearts And Mines is more than just a play on words, it’s the beginnings of a real fracture between our chosen group of survivors, the group loosely identified as the Federation, with Craig (George Watkins) wanting to strike at the heart of the survivors-come-lately, the Protectorate, run by Captain Robert Malcolm (Hywel Morgan) on behalf of Meg Pritchard. Abby Grant though is torn between what she knows is the right thing, ethically speaking, and what her intuition tells her, which is that she has to rescue her son Peter (Joel James Davison) from the clutches of Malcolm and the brutal military lifestyle in which Peter’s been raised in her absence. The division comes to a head when the Federation gang try to seal off a coal mine to save the workers from Protectorate oppression. Tense, sweaty, and unexpected, the episode brings common sense and instinct into sharp conflict. Where will Abby’s true loyalties lie when every single chip is down? You’ll know by the end of this episode.

Fade Out, by Roland Moore, is a purposefully shocking episode of Survivors, reviving some of the initial series’ horror value, as some of our Federation friends hold out in an old cinema against the encroaching forces of Robert Malcolm and Peter Grant. It’s one of those crisis-point episodes of Survivors where allegiances crystallise, horror pushes people to extremes and souls are won and lost – not everybody makes it out of Fade Out alive, and the repercussions of the events here break friendships, force dark alliances and finally push one character over a line of definition from which there may be no return.

And finally, Andrew Smith, master of early Survivors and its philosophical questions of exactly how you re-establish a society you recognise or like in the aftermath of a cataclysm, returns to the series for the final episode of the full-cast audio Survivors. In Conflict, he forces events to what was probably always their inevitable conclusion in a post-Death world – when there are groups with differing ideologies competing for control of resources, you don’t get peace until you win a war, until your enemies are routed, defeated or killed. There are historical precedents for this idea going back at least as far as ancient Rome, and Andrew Smith delivers a final clash between the forces of the Protectorate and the Federation, between the brutal authoritarianism of Pritchard and Malcolm and the firm but fair comparative civilisation of Jenny and Ruth (Helen Goldwyn), that has that sort of epic scope, where instinct and rational decision-making are at odds, where choices are made, a watching populace pick a side and there are fatal consequences that decide what the future of Britain in the post-Survivors era is going to look like. It’s by no means all happiness and light – our survivors are irrevocably split, there will be trials and probably further executions, and at least a couple of banishments give a note of realistic sourness to the ending of a series as dark and bright and brilliant as Survivors on audio has been. The very last note of the series is a careless welcome given to a world-changing event – leaving us as listeners to imagine whether that welcome will herald a brave new era, or the beginning of a whole new level of conflict.

Survivors on audio has been one of the most traumatic, philosophically fascinating, realistically human, hopeful, dark, gritty and horrifying series in Big Finish history. It has never been anything less than breathtaking in its writing and its performance. It has expanded massively on the legend established by Terry Nation and the TV writers, and it ends with a set of stories as emotionally exhausting, as pulse-racing and as inventive as any in the series. If you’ve come this far with the audio version of Survivors, it’s a massive pay-off of all your investment and a suitably bittersweet resolution of the long story-arcs that have seen characters pushed to their limits and beyond by the challenge of surviving the end of the world as we know it.

Listen to Survivors 9 – then take a long breath, have a cup of tea, look at the world around us… and go back to the beginning for one more apocalypse.

Who Reviews Hell Bent by Jeffrey Zyra

By Steven Moffat

“You said memories become stories when we forget them. Maybe some of them become songs.”

The Clara Who series finale er, wait a minute, The Doctor Who series finale Hell Bent has to go down as one of the better Moffat finales, but far from great, since the show came back onto our TV screens back in 2005.  One of the faults and there are many of Steven Moffat is his inability to give us a properly written series finale without going for the big production of bringing back tons of characters including the kitchen sink.   This time he bridges the series finale along through three stories to give us a story that wraps up the Clara era pretty well which we all thought was done two weeks ago in Face the Raven.

The thing about the new series is that a companion just cannot leave the show.  They either leave and come back or get killed and get resurrected and fly around time and space with an immortal in a TARDIS in the shape of an American Diner.  This is also a trend in most Sci-Fi shows and done all the time in comic books.  When a character dies just wait a moment they will come back alive.  At some point no one will believe them anymore and it will just be looked at as a ratings grab as it will be a massive publicity event to get people to watch.  Now with Clara I thought she should have stayed dead.  Her death in Face the Raven was heart-breaking and a shocking end.  Now we have a story where she comes back and apparently cannot die somewhat like Owen Harper from Torchwood which is too bad as I preferred that send off and I just wish companions could just leave and not come back or stay dead.  At least Adric stayed dead.

I found it hard that the all-powerful Rassilon just got up and left Gallifrey without giving up much of a fight.  Really the guy with a power glove that kills Time Lords just leaves with his tail between his legs.  Really found this hard to take that he would leave because The Doctor says too.  This is minor and not that big of a deal but it wasn't really needed in this episode.   It seemed more like pandering and a filler as this first part of the story wasn’t needed as the story ended up being about saving Clara and not about stopping the Time Lords at all for what they did to him and Clara.  In my mind Gallifrey was wasted.  Here was a golden chance to have a story set on Gallifrey having Rassilon as the main baddie and then bringing Gallifrey back.  You still could have the Hybrid in it as The Doctor was protecting ME since he made her The Hybrid. 

With the revelation that this three-part arc was about saving Clara really cheapened Heaven Sent as we saw The Doctor being tortured about who or what the Hybrid was when in fact it turned out to be The Doctor and Clara or was it, we never really did get that answer even when The Doctor confessed to being it but then why would he run away from himself.  To me it felt like we did not need the events in Heaven Sent because if he wanted to save Clara he would have just said some fake lie about the Hybrid and ended up on Gallifrey instead of being in there for 4 and a half Billion years.  That’s a long time to wait to save someone and just doesn’t make much sense to me why The Doctor would torture himself like that when he could have just lied to get out of the Confessional Dial.

This story was a quandary for me as I did not overly enjoy it but nor did I hate it.  There were bits that I did like for example The Doctor staring down the Time Lords outside the cottage and the final farewell between The Doctor and Clara.  I thought most of the story from where The Doctor meets up with ME again was pretty good and it gave you a good sense of what was going to happen and if you didn’t guess from the beginning of Hell Bent that The Doctor would be the one losing his memory of Clara well then it would be even sadder moment for you.  

I also really liked the old school TARDIS console room.  I really liked that they recreated the old Hartnell era design and it looked really good.  I would actually welcome seeing that one used again and since they have a set for it maybe they will.

Like I said above I wasn’t all that crazy about Clara more or less becoming a time traveler and hybrid immortal or Doctor like which was the complaint a lot of fans had about her character.  Sometimes it felt like the Clara show with her companion The Doctor.  It did feel like that and Steven Moffat most likely gave those fans a slap with her and ME going off in their own TARDIS.  Whatever that was for one thing that’s for certain Clara will be gone now and the show looks to be rebooting with a new companion and let’s hope the show becomes more Doctor centric in Series 10.  Hell Bent closes a really great Series 9 as every story was pretty strong with a few exceptions and they tried different things some good and some bad but that is to be expected but at least they tried going in a different direction as we saw with the finale. 

Grade B

 

Who Reviews Before the Flood by Jeffrey Zyra

Written by Toby Whithouse

“Clara, I want to talk to my ghost self.”

The problem with two part stories in the new version of Doctor Who is that the second part for the most part has been disappointing or at the very least pretty mediocre and has not delivered on the excitement from the first part that got you all jazzed up for the conclusion.  So far in the Capaldi era the two parters have been mixed with the mediocre Dark Water/ Death in Heaven to the very well done The Magician’s Apprentice/ The Witch’s Familiar.  Before the Flood has the hard task of following the really good Under the Lake and despite not being quite as good as its lead up episode it wasn’t bad at all and was pretty entertaining.

Before the Flood starts off with one of the more confusing segments to start an episode.  At first I was ‘what the hell does this have to do with anything and who cares about Beethoven and that stupid guitar’.  I just did not care and wanted to know more about the ghost Doctor and what would happen to Clara and the others in the seas base.  Well that scene in a clever but annoying and confusing way explained how The Doctor escaped from the Fisher King and well did we really need that explanation at the beginning?   Maybe, but the explanation went by so fast that I had to watch it again.  It made sense the second time around but at first watch it was confusing.

I really enjoyed Before the Flood but did not think it was as good as Under the Lake.  While Under the Lake was scary and had a lot of tension that was missing from Before the Flood.   Before the Flood was not all that scary and was turned into a time travel story.  Yes, the scene with Cass walking in the corridors was a tad scary but you had a feeling that she would figure out that a ghost was behind her.  That scene reminded me a bit of Daredevil when he used his powers to sense that someone was there.  The scenes with the Fisher King screaming and chasing The Doctor, O’Donnel and Bennett were pretty good also and had a touch of Hinchcliffe to them.

Clara is starting to act too much like The Doctor and it is getting annoying.  I mean when she forced Moran out to get the cell phone back from the ghosts because he wasn’t infected was a good idea but who is she to order him to get it.  Yes, he went because he knew it was the right thing but I did love how Cass called Clara out on that.  Something she needed and it almost ended up getting them all killed.  Also she came across very selfish telling The Doctor to die with the next companion after her.  That’s pretty cold and selfish especially when The Doctor finds out about his upcoming demise.   That did not paint Clara in a good light with me and thankfully she will be leaving soon.

One of the things that bug me is the new sonic sunglasses.  The plus thing is that The Doctor doesn’t wave it around like a magic wand to save the day but it is starting to become a safe way out.  I get how he used it to make the hologram ghost of himself and all that but what bugged me is if he could use the glasses to erase the imprint from everyone’s eyes why didn’t he do that earlier?  Wouldn’t have made things simpler when he figured out what the words in the ship did to you.  It would have made you immune from the ghosts and you wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore.

I did like the way The Doctor saved the day even if it became predictable.   I had an inkling that The Doctor would be in the statis chamber as the clues were there especially with the TARDIS being freaked out about being at the sea base.  It became even more apparent when The Doctor confronted the Fisher King.  It was a pretty good solution and even though you didn’t see The Doctor set the charge for the dam or set up the TARDIS emergency takeoff  it made sense as we knew only one power cell made it to the future and the dam does break.  The way The Doctor tricks the Fisher King is right out of Classic Who as The Doctor used his intelligence and his words against the enemy and not weapons.  

Before the Flood had a classic feel to it but just wasn’t as scary or clever as Under the Lake.  It was pretty entertaining and I really did enjoy it even though I had some problems with it.  It had a classic Doctor Who feel to it and even though they tried to be way to clever with the explanation of how The Doctor cheated death it wasn’t really needed as The Doctor could have explained all that to Clara at the end.  But still Toby Whithouse gave us a two part story that was really good and very entertaining and it did escape the New Who two part story curse.

Grade B+