Who Reviews The Crusade by Matt Rabjohns

If I were to ever be asked what for you is the most memorable thing you always recall about the First Doctor era? Then for me I would say straight off that the Historical adventures are what really stick in my mind. I never need an overburdening of aliens to have a great story. And throughout human history there have been plenty of human monsters to be afraid of. Back in the days when Doctor Who was meant to be semi educational, I would always proclaim that it’s the historicals that are the most diverting stories of William Hartnell’s amazing three years in the role of the Doctor.

The Crusade for me is the perfect case in point. David Whitaker was gifted with a golden pen when he scripted this story. For me as a schoolboy history as a lesson was never really brought alive as something I’d be interested in. But by viewing the two surviving instalments of The Crusade on the BBC’S Lost in Time DVD and listening to the complete audio soundtrack, I instantly came to the conclusion that history can be informative and extremely diverting indeed.

Perhaps The Crusade should own the crown of the finest William Hartnell historical adventure. The reasons for this thinking? Well, first there is the extra-ordinarily versatile and superb cast. Jean Marsh has long been a favourite actress of mine, and to see her here in her first Doctor Who role of many is a joy to behold. Princess Joanna comes over as a strong character, and her chemistry with both William Hartnell and the superb Julian Glover as King Richard is one of the finest aspects of this frankly perfect adventure. The acting of both Jean and Julian left me with no doubt that yes, these two could have been brother and sister. Bernard Kay also deserves a mention for his wonderfully restrained but believable Saladin. I really enjoyed how these characters were all represented. Not as just card board cut out villains and heroes. History is rife with shades of grey. People can both be right and wrong. And when writing, the skilled writer always has to give every character layers of character and humanity, whether they be the baddie or the goodie. But this story’s characters are all superbly drawn.

The chemistry between William Hartnell and Maureen O’Brien too is another factor that seriously contributes to my love for this story. I’m not too sure if it may even be the case that the Doctor and Vicki’s bond is even stronger than that between the Doctor and his granddaughter. The way the Doctor explains to Vicki the importance of not getting overtly involved in historical events is more Grandfatherly and closer to me than any of his previous scenes in stories with Susan. The smiles and looks on both their faces seem to scream that they are really enjoying the story they are acting out. This makes the Doctor/Vicki bond very endearing and touching. ​

The fact that in both Saladin’s and Richard’s Courts there is dissent and mistrust also adds layers to an already characterful and colourful script. The head-butting match between the Doctor and The Earl of Leicester still holds one of my all favourite insults from the Doctor ever on screen. “I admire loyalty and bravery Sir, and you have both of these. But unfortunately, you haven’t any brains at all! I hate fools!”

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And one cannot give an insight of 100% accuracy to the merits of the Crusade without bringing up Walter Randall. As El Akir, Walter is flawless as a villain. His nuanced performance makes him, at least to me, a singularly vulgar and easy to detest villainous snake. The way he whispers his intents to Barbara at the cliffhanger to part three showcases all the hallmarks of the best sort of Doctor Who villain. His vicious streak is delicious and appalling, and easily matches other superb later performances from other bests such as Roger Delgado and Kevin Stoney. He steals every scene he is present within.

Jacqueline Hill also yet again gets to shine as Barbara. She has forever been one of all-time favourite companions together with fellow school teacher and reluctant traveller Ian. What I love about her character is her massive and lovely compassionate streak. And she gets to display this core endearing attribute when Barbara tries to conceal Maimuna from El Akir and his lackies. And her grounding in historical know how means she knows how to play off against either kings or peasants. ​

And it’s not only the actors that appeal greatly in the Crusade. Douglas Camfield, truly one of Doctor Who’s finest ever directors, really does get the strawberries and cream from everyone on screen. In this story there is not one faceless entity, every character is rounded and beefy. And this is great and essential for all great drama. The way the thing is written and then directed has to meld together seamlessly, and for all the budgetary restrictions, the BBC team achieved this like this was as easy as pi. Even the background scenery looks highly authentic. The richness of the period costume is impressive. ​

Is there anything wrong or bad with The Crusade? I can’t really honestly say I can locate any serious faults. Not even the limiting of William Russell’s appearance as Ian to just one scene of him asleep in the desert really bothers me. If there ever was such a thing as a template for the perfect Historical story, then I would most assuredly put forward The Crusade as a definite contender for first place. ​

I am also greatly saddened that the sixties are so incredibly crippled by severe episode loss. Some of Doctor Who’s finest stories are either half lost or completely lost. And it’s a crying shame that a story of the quality of The Crusade is also affected by this sadness. I am always clinging to the hope that this story may one day be found completed! One must be eternally grateful for fans in the sixties who with their little primitive recorders ensured at least some element of the story lives on. But I am stoically focusing on hope, as there used to be only one episode of this story in the vaults, and now there are two. I can dare to dream that one day we may be treated to a completed Crusade.

If anyone were to ask me which classic William Hartnell tale stokes all the right fires, and gives one the prompting to actually take a keen respect in delving into history, then the Crusade is most certainly the story to go for. The glorious mix of Verity Lambert as producer, Dougie Camfield as Director and William Hartnell as Doctor always is a firm trio destined for success. ​

I wonder if I’ve made it clear just how much I love this story? The days of black and white monochrome adventure are still timeless and wonderful. The Crusade encapsulates all that’s great about the historicals. You want a superb lead actor, backed by a trio of superb companions, and a superbly dastardly villain? Check it out right this minute. Like me I know you won’t be disappointed in the least.

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…

Profiles Steven Taylor by Tony J Fyler

Tony Fyler charts the arc of one of the First Doctor’s more often-forgotten companions

Steven Taylor is very often dismissed as a relatively forgotten companion – he wasn’t there at the start of the First Doctor’s time on our screens, and he wasn’t there at the end either. What’s more, only three of his televised stories exist in their entirety, so like the female companions who shared his time, Vicki and Dodo, he tends to be one of those companions that people technically know was on the Tardis for a while, but don’t really remember.

That’s a crime, because Steven Taylor is essentially the ‘Second Chesterton.’ With Susan having left the Tardis, and Ian and Barbara following at the end of The Chase, the show was about to experience its first full rotation. The Doctor had picked up Vicki in the very next story following Susan’s departure, meaning her role as ‘curious young person’ was filled, but arguably the leaving of Ian and Barbara was far more significant. What would the Doctor be like without his two modern grown-ups to keep him in check and get him out of trouble?

Steven Taylor, the space pilot with a teddy bear, appeared in the final episode of The Chase, set on Mechanus, and escaped a long incarceration there with the Tardis travellers. The Doctor seems to accept his presence on the ship with far better, more grandfatherly grace than he initially showed to the Coal Hill teachers, and even a degree of humour. And with that, the new team took off, heading into the final story of the second season, The Time Meddler.

Steven was good at his job, but he was young, dashing but a little full of himself, and ready, like Vicki, with a mischievous grin or a sarcastic comment. And Steven changed the dynamic of the Tardis team utterly. While Ian and Barbara were still there, the dynamic was still essentially the same from Susan to Vicki – grandfather figure, two ‘parental’ figures, and a smart young girl.

Steven blew that out of the water – the dynamic became a grandfather figure with two rascally ‘perishing kids’ laughing and joking about, and as such, his own persona began to change to accommodate these strange young people in his life. The softening had been happening over time, and took a distinct turn when Vicki joined the Tardis crew, the Doctor realising perhaps what he had lost, and determining to be kinder to the next young person in his life. But the arrival of Steven made for fun, for laughter and banter (some of it notably arch), as well as Steven fitting strongly in the mould of Chesterton before him, and McCrimmon and Sullivan after him, the physically powerful man on board the Tardis. By the time of The Myth Makers, Steven is beginning to make his own mark, impersonating Greek heroes with a deadpan chutzpah that Ian would possibly have balked at, and crossing the plains of Asia Minor with good if exhausted humour. In the epic that is The Daleks’ Master Plan, he begins to stretch the role further, his futuristic origins meaning less of a need for “What’s that, Doctor?” acting, and more direct involvement in the plot, though to some extent, his role as the Second Chesterton is the sum of the characterisation he is really given to work with.

It is at the end of the Massacre that Steven gets perhaps his best character moment. As Ann Chaplet, the sweet girl with whom they had become friends, is revealed by the Doctor as very probably having been murdered in appalling circumstances, and the Doctor essentially shrugs, bringing his alien objectivity to bear on the experience, Steven loses all his considerable cool, accuses the Doctor of heartlessness, declares that if that’s the sort of man he is, he wants nothing to do with him and storms out of the Tardis, seemingly forever. It’s a scene that feels decades ahead of its time, and foreshadows the likes of Tegan’s “It’s stopped being fun,” and even Amy Pond’s more direct question when the Doctor says he doesn’t save everyone – “Then what is the point of you?”

We’ve asked uncomfortable questions about the Doctor’s character before, but not since the very early days, not since Ian and Barbara were new in the Doctor’s life and he essentially kidnapped them. Almost, it’s tempting to think, not since the pilot of An Unearthly Child, which was re-shot entirely because the Doctor was too unsympathetic and harsh. Since then, the Doctor has been getting progressively more cuddly to his Tardis companions, the relationship changing to a more familial dynamic. Steven’s hit of moral outrage at the alien’s objectivity about time and people makes us question the Doctor’s motives and personality for the first time in what feels like a long time. When Dodo Chaplet then wanders into the Tardis looking for a policeman, and Steven comes running back, it’s an uneasy moment that ultimately melts when he realises what the young girl’s massively convenient surname might just mean. But in that explosion, Steven Taylor’s character really comes to the fore.

Sometimes, you never quite know the value of what you have until it’s gone. That’s true of Steven Taylor, who had gamely tackled adventure after adventure, and who had made us remember that the Doctor was an alien to our understanding. His final story, The Savages, is actually far better constructed and plotted than much of the rest of season three, with its grim storyline of social and genetic experimentation, its unilateral enforcement of a class structure, its essentially chemical vampirism, and its crackingly-paced revolution story, in which, to be fair, Steven does his usual Steven thing – gets stuck in, fights the good fight, worries about the Doctor and Dodo and ultimately wins through. Sometimes too, in life, as in drama, we do not know what we are looking for until we find it. So it is with Steven, who has not seemed lost or in search of purpose, nor especially lacking in responsibility, until ‘the savages’ need a leader, and he – unwillingly at first, but quickly growing in his enthusiasm – decides to stay behind and make a more permanent kind of difference. Steven had always displayed a need for a kind of order, a need to know where his ducks were and a need for them to be in a row – one of his more regular, semi-despairing cries during his adventures was “Well now where’s he got to?!” It is pleasing to think of the space pilot putting both his own experience and character, and the pragmatism he learned during his time on the Tardis, to use as a leader, diplomat, warrior, architect and society-builder, uniting the Elders and the Savages and taking them forward to a new combined and equal future.

Big Finish of course has massively rounded out Steven’s character, both during his time with the Doctor, and after we leave him at the end of The Savages. The hope with which we leave him as he becomes leader is never entirely that easily realised. But certainly at Big Finish the character of Steven Taylor, lightly sketched on TV, is delivered fully, boldly and high definition, particularly in stories like The Perpetual Bond, The Cold Equations, The First Wave and The War To End All Wars. Steven Taylor may be an almost invisible companion on screen to us now, but he’s vital to the spirit of change, both in terms of the Doctor’s personality and the ability of the format to adapt. Without Steven, we might still be stuck with two parental figures and a young girl. Steven Taylor, space pilot, brought youth, fun, fire, strength and fundamental dynamic change to the Tardis, and for that, he should always be celebrated.

Big Finish Reviews+ The First Doctor Adventures, Volume 1 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s in an Unbound Dimension.

Here’s the thing.

People die.

Every day, they just keel over and stop being. As the Doctor would say, that’s fine – everything has its time, and everything dies. Even the people who, because they played a certain role, have become immortal in our imaginations. We’ll die too, one day, and they will go on being immortal in someone else’s imaginations, because – well, because that’s what immortality means.

In the world of audio drama though, you can be reborn as somebody else, and then, to some extent they’ll be immortal too, for playing you, playing someone that people have taken to their hearts. If you want to keep up your immortality, sooner or later that has to be true, and that has to be OK.

Big Finish has, for instance, recast Jon Pertwee as Tim Treloar, and now the Third Doctor, immortal as he is because of Pertwee, is having new ideas through the body and the voice of Treloar. And that’s fine. The company also frequently uses Frazer ‘Holy gods, that’s uncanny’ Hines to play the Second Doctor, rather than the annoyingly extinct Patrick Troughton, who made him famous. Elliot Chapman now plays Michael Craze playing Ben Jackson, and both William Russell and Peter Purves have got their different versions of William Hartnell’s First Doctor down beautifully.

And that’s fine too.

I mention all this by way of prelude to telling you I had no enthusiasm for this box set. None at all.

David Bradley’s a fantastic actor, and playing William Hartnell in An Adventure In Time And Space, I thought he was entirely peerless. I wasn’t, however, in favour of his being written into the actual TV Doctor Who as the First Doctor, because, to my mind he neither looked nor sounded like the character when dressed in the get-up. Time however had passed between An Adventure and Twice Upon A Time, and Bradley did enormously good work on screen, winning me over to his interpretation of the First Doctor (despite the occasionally heavy-handed writing which made the First Doctor out to be more blatantly sexist than he ever was on screen).

And I still had absolutely no enthusiasm for this box set, because while the other members of this Tardis crew (Jamie Glover as Ian, Jemma Powell as Barbara, and Claudia Grant as Susan) are all fine actors in their own right, their roles in An Adventure had been minimal, and they felt cast more as lookalikes than especially as sound-alikes. So bringing them across to audio felt like a visual cash-in without, necessarily, the vocal skills to support it.

So – does it work? Could a box set like this convert me?

Well, mostly yes…and a little no.

There are two four-part adventures in the first volume of The First Doctor Adventures – The Destination Wars, which takes the crew to an alien world, and The Great White Hurricane, which is a pure historical that drops our heroes into 19^th century New York and entangles them in the lives of the local gangs in the shadow of a great big meteorological time bomb – a superstorm blizzard that is due to hit the whole east coast.

The first thing to say is that the writing is superb in both stories – Matt Fitton poses a great philosophical question about whether the ends justify the means in The Destination Wars, and Guy Adams gives us a pulse-pounder that works like a much better version of The Day After Tomorrow in The Great White Hurricane. As might be expected of these experienced hands, there’s barely a note wrong in either of the stories, either in terms of delivering adventures with solid hooks, engaging characters and proper dilemmas, or of evoking the period of the first two years of Doctor Who on screen.

In Fitton’s story particularly, the excitement is especially pulled along by the inclusion of what is now the earliest audio version of the Master, played by James Dreyfus. Yes, really, James Dreyfus, known to generations of Britcom-watchers as Constable Goody in The Thin Blue Line, or as Tom Farrell in Gimme Gimme Gimme. Known, possibly, to most Americans as the camp workmate of Hugh Grant in Notting Hill. That James Dreyfus…is the Master.

Nails it.

Totally, utterly, without a moment’s hesitation, nails it. Sounds like nothing for which he’s best known, but channels the darkness efficiently into a slightly pre-Delgado version still very much on the side of dark sanity, rather than the increasingly demented versions of Alex Macqueen or Michelle Gomez. James Dreyfus: you’ll believe a voice can sound elegantly malignant.

The dilemma of The Destination Wars taps into the sad historical reality that war is an accelerator pedal for technological advancement, and brings the Tardis crew into the lives of a family on a far-distant planet, as time passes and war is brought, intentionally, to them. There’s a neat touch of proto-Salamander underpinning the story, the Master as Enemy of An Entirely Different World, playing both sides against the middle to boost their advancement for his own unspeakable ends. Bradley and Dreyfus become a solidly antagonistic pair, more bluntly adversarial than Pertwee and Delgado, Davison and Ainley, Tennant and Simm or Capaldi and Gomez, and the dynamic of soured, embittered friendship helps power the drama along.

The Great White Hurricane fulfils its destiny as a pure historical by making the weather the big bad, and separating our heroes early. Much of the story is a quest by each of them to find the others and get back to the Tardis, which rings true to the period. The adventures they have along the way, including internecine teen gang wars, a mother in search of her stolen child, a frozen train full of stranded passengers and a frozen river leading to some Titanic action and an all-hands-on-deck effort to save lives are rich in characterization, meaning we enjoy the time we spend in New York, while still feeling the imperative pull of the weather that’s about to hit.

So – all good then?

Almost.

Bradley gets quite quickly into the swing of the audio adventures, and you begin believing that he’s just giving ‘another interpretation’ of the First Doctor you know and love. The rest of the Tardis crew though deliver their characters with varying degrees of success. Suffice it to say that in one case, the disparity between the performance of the original on screen and the performance here in audio goes beyond distracting and hits levels that disconnect the listener entirely from the character being played. It rather detracts from the drama when characters are put in peril if, whenever you hear them, you’re made to think ‘Who’s that again? No, really?’, and that’s what happens on this box set, though it’s more noticeable in The Great White Hurricane because in The Destination Wars, the Bradley-Dreyfus double act and the philosophical meat of the story does much to distract from that feeling of disconnection.

The stories are still compelling, and Bradley leads a bold effort to reimagine the First Doctor and his friends for the 21^st century, allowing them to have new adventures. I would like to have been entirely wrong about the ‘lookalike, not sound-alike’ thing, and in forthcoming volumes, they may well square the circle and bring the one particularly distracting performance at least within a distance where with a hearty jump, the imagination of the listener can convince itself the character at least is the same, even if the person playing them is entirely different. In Volume 1, though, I’m only mostly wrong.

Mostly wrong is absolutely good enough to give this box set a whirl, incidentally. You can safely spend your money on the basis of my being mostly wrong.

But here’s to a future in which I’m increasingly, decidedly and thoroughly wrong.

Who Reviews Twice Upon a Time by Jeffrey Zyra

Written by Steven Moffat

“Doctor, I let you go.”

The 2017 Christmas Special is here and it is a historical one that will be remembered more for the debut of Jodie Whittaker than for Peter Capaldi leaving Doctor Who along with Steven Moffat.  This year’s special is also a little bit more special as it also stars David Bradley as the First Doctor, taking the reins from the late William Hartnell, to join forces in a rare multi Doctor story.  Needless to say, this story has a full complement of characters.  Oh, did I mention that Bill returns in this story too?  Yes, she pops back also as Peter Capaldi is joined once again by Pearl Mackie. 

The story takes place right after the closing moments of “The Doctor Falls” when the two Time Lords meet up at the closing moments of “The Tenth Planet”. So that is two stories closing moments that have a part in “Twice Upon a Time” and one is the story of the first regeneration as we see the First Doctor doubting if he wants to regenerate. Sort of what the current Doctor is going through except he is thinking of ending the cycle and just die and end the line of The Doctor. 

So that is where the story starts to take place when we see the two Doctors talking together and all of a sudden time stops.  Nothing is moving at the Antarctic at all well except for a British Captain from 1914 during the First World War.  It is during this exchange with The Captain that the story starts to pick up as the three men who are now inside the TARDIS are captured by the glass looking aliens called The Testimony.  The Testimony are from the future and come and collect a vital part of the human when they die and now they want The Captain to be brought back to when he dies to ensure the timeline to be where it should be.  As you can imagine this doesn’t set well with The Doctors and of course the plan to stop it along with Bill who just happened to appear from nowhere on the Testimonies ship.   As we soon discover once The Doctor arrives on an unnamed planet to ask for the help of Rusty Dalek the Testimonies have not committed anything evil in fact from the invention of Dr. Helen Cray of New Earth they take the memories from those who have passed away and put them in an avatar to speak with their loved ones in which we find out that Bill is one of those avatars. 

Which takes us to the conclusion in which The Doctor changes the rules again and The Captain is saved.  It turns out The Doctor lands the TARDIS a few hours after The Captain left and returns him right at the moment of the 1914 Christmas Truce where both sides stopped fighting on Christmas Day - something that has never happened again in any war and is one of the true miracles of Christmas.  This actually happened and there are many books on the subject and also a movie so if you have the time you should check out and learn about what happened on December 25th 1914. 

“Twice Upon a Time” wasn’t all that bad of a story.  I had my reservations about it as the current string of regeneration stories in the newer Doctor Who have had a bad track record. Stories like “The Time of the Doctor” and “The End of Time” were cluttered with lots of characters and stories that didn’t make all that much sense at all.  Though the farewell in “The End of Time” is one of my favorites I can’t say all that much for the actual story. But thankfully with Peter Capaldi’s last story we are given a story that is very enjoyable and makes sense. What we have are two characters at a crossroads on whether they want to go on.  Both Doctors are questioning the regeneration process and it takes one last adventure and to help a soldier, who happens to be Brigadier Lethbridge - Stewart’s relative to shake them from their doubt. Everything else in the story was frosting on the cake as it was mainly a story about their own mortality.

I really liked the pairing of the First and Twelve Doctors but Steven Moffat didn’t really capture the essence of the First Doctor.  He didn’t write him all that well and at times I was shaking my head at what he was saying.  I know the 1960’s was a different time but the First Doctor wasn’t as sexist as he was portrayed in “Twice Upon a Time”.  In fact he never mentions to his female companions to clean the ship and stuff like that but instead he is seen as a grandfather type to Susan and Vicki.  If there was a low point of “Twice Upon a Time” it had to be the way Steven Moffat characterized the First Doctor. 

I did like having Bill being an avatar of her memories. It made the farewell scenes all that much better as we didn’t have The Doctor traveling back to see his former companions or hallucinate seeing Amy or anything like that.  It made perfect sense and was the right thing to do seeing his old companions as memory avatars.  It was also good to see Jenna Coleman return as Clara and have him get his memories of her back. With her and Nardole return was a nice touch and very a touching farewell as they help persuade The Doctor to keep on living. 

I really enjoyed Peter Capaldi as The Doctor.  Like most I was sad to see him go and was glad he got a good send off.  I really liked the speech he gave before he regenerated.  It was like a lecture for the next incarnation on how to act as The Doctor and what it means to be The Doctor.  It also wasn’t mushy and sappy and you didn’t have crying Doctor saying goodbye.  His last words were like he was letting the part he enjoyed and handing it off to Jodie Whittaker.  It just seemed to me like a passing of the torch type of moment and a pretty simple goodbye.

We also get our first glimpse of Jodie Whittaker and it appears we are recycling another cliffhanger as we have seen something similar before when Matt Smith took over from David Tennant.  It would have been better if they came up with something else but I’m guessing we’ll find out in time when the show returns in the Fall.  So in the words of the new Doctor this story was brilliant and a very good send off for Peter Capaldi and one of the better Christmas Specials and Regeneration stories in the new series.

Grade B+

Big Finish Reviews+ The First Wave by Tony J Fyler

Tony waves goodbye to Oliver Harper.

The Oliver Harper trilogy of stories is a remarkable insertion into the First Doctor’s history – adding a whole ‘previously unseen’ companion to the roster and hugely building up what we know about one of the TV show’s least developed companions, Steven Taylor, in the process. Oliver transforms, over the course of three audio stories by Simon Guerrier, from a nervous man haunted by the legal realities of his time and place (1960s London and the cut and thrust of the city’s commodities market) in The Perpetual Bond to an enthusiastic puppy-dog citizen of the universe when freed from its restrictions in The Cold Equations. The combination of Steven and Oliver becomes fascinating in The Cold Equations, because Steven, wounded by the deaths of The Daleks’ Master Plan, feels almost defeated by the inevitable crushing eventuality of death in the universe, while Oliver, fresh and deathless in his adventures, is full of bouncy positivity and a refusal to give in to Steven’s inevitable logic.

In The First Wave, his third and final story, the difference between Oliver and Steven is sharply delineated all the way down the line, from the fact that the Doctor only takes them to the planetoid Grace Alone because in The Cold Equations, the Tardis crew learned they would go there and commit a crime – historical inevitability coming to kick them in the destinies – to Steven’s increasing exhaustion, when pursued by an alien aggressor. He’s convinced it’s simply his ‘time’ to die, and so is prone to giving up to that inevitable fate. He feels, in a theme that runs throughout The First Wave, that they’re all on ‘borrowed time.’ Oliver though has no concept of that borrowed time, and so saves Steven’s life in this story when the space pilot wants to literally just lie down and die.

In terms of the actual alien threat on Grace Alone, it’s something that terrifies at one remove for most of the story – Steven and Oliver spend the first half of the story running away from an implacable and unnamed menace they believe is following them, and has already killed the Doctor.  

It’s only when we go back into their memories that we discover exactly what that pursuer is, and how it ‘killed’ the Time Lord – and when we do that, you’ll be go from fascinated to punching the air, because the villain of this piece is one that features in much later Who than Hartnell’s, and is dreadfully realised on screen. That means there’s a double thrill here, hearing this particular villain encounter the Hartnell Doctor, and finally fulfilling the potential of their nature and psychology on audio, getting a breath of fresh air in a story that doesn’t especially reboot them, but simply does them right.

Guerrier delivers a story that comes down to the difference between Oliver’s and Steven’s point of view.  When the Doctor, with his somewhat hardline ‘We can’t rewrite history, not one line’ stance, comes down on Steven’s side, preferring to take the consequences than allow them to go untaken, Oliver shows him, for the first real time in the Doctor’s life, that there is another way – a more actively meddlesome way, a way that involves telling the universe that while you’re there, you have as much right to a say in what happens as anyone else. You could make a fairly bold case for this story to fit perfectly into the Hartnell Doctor’s history as the point at which his meddling with the web of time became rather looser and more free, inspired by the actions of the young puppy dog from London who decided the future could go hang because he was there, and could rewrite what happened simply by his actions.

While The First Wave impresses throughout, as all the Oliver Harper stories do, it’s actually not until what is essentially its epilogue that it reaches the same emotional ‘No no, I’ve just got something in my eye’ pitch as The Cold Equations. Without spoilering the ending for you, it’s a sequence that extends beyond the end of the story, and forward throughout a handful of Hartnell’s, to almost the closing moments of The Tenth Planet.

Peter Purves, throughout the three Oliver Harper stories, delivers us Steven Taylor in spades, according to Guerrier’s playbook. It’s a Steven who is all the things he should have been on-screen, but rarely got a chance to be. The traveller ready for anything, the trained space pilot, the man haunted by recent deaths, and keenly aware of his own inevitable mortality alongside the Doctor (a sense which, to give the sixties writers their due, they did deliver in a blistering scene at the end of The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve). In The First Wave, he continues his unbroken streak of fine work at Big Finish, adding real human flesh to Steven’s bones.

Tom Allen as Oliver gives us a great, believable new companion for the First Doctor, who in The First Wave completes an evolution from being too scared to say boo to a goose to being the teacher, the one among the all-male Tardis crew to grasp the nettle of the future with both hands and declare his own importance, saving the Doctor and Steven’s lives in the process.

The Oliver Harper trilogy is a run of three stories you’ll listen to again and again, as each has its own joys – The Perpetual Bond has a return to sixties London, a monster that’s not a little mad but still creepy, and a plot that makes us ask uncomfortable questions about the business ethics of banks, traders and the like. The Cold Equations is an absolute love letter to Steven, his training, his actual skills, and the difference that both the Doctor and Oliver Harper have made to his outlook on the inevitabilities of the universe. And The First Wave gives us a thrilling, saddening, epic conclusion, and the first encounter between the Doctor and a villain that has gone on to be rather better served on audio than it ever was on screen. It gives us a lesson in the importance of standing up for what you believe is right, whatever even your clever friends think. And it gives us the sense of being a previously unseen turning point in the Doctor’s life, as he learns from the example of the city trader-cum-citizen of the universe that is Oliver Harper.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Cold Equations by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s running out of air.

The three Oliver Harper stories by Simon Guerrier introduced and delivered the Tardis lifetime of a brand new First Doctor companion on audio. Having established Oliver as a sixties London commodities trader who needs to escape from the police in The Perpetual Bond, second story The Cold Equations frequently has a claustrophobic feeling to it.

That’s mostly down to the nature of some of the story, which has Steven Taylor and Oliver Harper, the First Doctor’s companions, drifting in a vacuum, protected from the obliterating frozen airlessness of space only by space suits, their air running out, every word of this mostly two-handed spoken-word play hastening their death by suffocation. There’s lots of increasingly intense breathing, and if you’re claustrophobic or asthmatic, go into this one preparing for the kind of ride that breaks the sweat out on your forehead.

The Cold Equations of the title refers to the staggering unlikelihood of their surviving this predicament. As Steven says, when it comes to surviving in space, ‘They made us repeat it. Space is a vacuum, it doesn’t think or feel. It doesn’t have it in for you. There are simple, cold equations about what you can and can’t do.’

This is how this tense hour-long Companion Chronicle begins. Two companions, no Doctor, very little air left, and with Steven asking Oliver to tell him his secret, because there won’t be another chance.

As with The Perpetual Bond, the set-up of this story never tries to do too much. For his first trip through time and space, Oliver gets a peak at the future, at a planet surrounded by a massive debris field – a junk yard of discarded technology thrown into orbit around the world – and a bunch of fiery-skinned aliens called the Callians who are here to salvage it, to sell the scrap for whatever it may be worth.

There’s much more underneath the surface of The Cold Equations though than a kind of Steptoe And Son In Space. There are people living on the planet, and events are spun out of control when it turns out they’re humans, giving Oliver and Steven, under the labyrinthine meanderings of galactic law, prior claim to the band of space-junk.

And then bits of it start colliding at incredibly dangerous speeds. The hows and the whys of Steven and Oliver ending up marooned in space form much of the action of the story, interspersed with those breathless sections of speech between the two of them, wearing out the air against the hope of defeating the cold equations of life and death.

We think of The Cold Equations as the second Oliver Harper story, but really, for the most part this is a cracking Steven Taylor story. On screen in the sixties, Steven’s role was to be a younger Ian Chesterton – to fetch and carry and ask intelligent questions and hit the right people with something hard when the Doctor couldn’t or wouldn’t. In the world outside the storytelling, Purves’ role was also to keep an increasingly distracted William Hartnell focused and on-track so that recording could be completed within the punishing schedules of 1960s TV production.

In the hands of Big Finish, it would be difficult to find a companion who’s undergone such a thoroughgoing deepening of their character as Purves’ Steven, and in stories from Mother Russia and The Suffering all the way through to The War To End All Wars (showing Steven years after the events of The Savages, a king deposed and discredited, with a difficult relationship with his family), the audio medium has sought at every turn to add some flesh onto Steven’s televisual bones.

The Cold Equations pushes the envelope of Steven’s character development, reminding us very forcibly that he’s a space pilot, well versed in moving objects through both the vast tracts of empty space, and the debris fields than sometimes clutter them up.

This is Steven in full space pilot mode, meaning the introduction of spatial geometry into the adventure. Guerrier had to promise his tutor to take a class in astronomy in order to get some of the explanations of rotating and moving bodies in space laid down in this story, and how, for instance, sometimes to go faster in space, it makes sense to slow down. The hard, factual, scientific rightness of all this means you could be forgiven at one point for thinking you’re listening to Purves read a transcript of an Open University programme from the seventies, imagining cones, cutting the tops of them and working out angles of planetary rotation and a host of other calculations for six separate ‘elements’ of various objects moving at speed simultaneously. And let’s be absolutely clear – you wouldn’t want Steven to be like this all the time. But once in a while, it really enriches our appreciation of the character to hear him be able to do all this in his head, when it really matters, when everyone’s lives are at stake. It’s a sequence that reminds you ‘no really, he is a space pilot, which is handy to have around.’ Steven also surprises everybody in this story by refusing to think small, refusing to focus on just saving himself and Oliver, but pitting his increasingly oxygen-starved wits against the cold equations of the universe and taking a shot at a bigger victory. Whether such audacity is simply a key part of his personality, or whether this largeness of scale is something of the First Doctor rubbing off on the space pilot, we’re less sure, but we like to think it’s a little of both.

Oliver too, despite lacking Steven’s mathematical nous when it comes to drifting helplessly in space, has a vital role to play in this audio, and Tom Allen gives the young trader the bounce of a Labrador puppy, having escaped from the consequences of his actions in London. He’s a Donna Noble companion here, eager to experience everything there is out in the wider universe, to take his place alongside Steven and the Doctor as a citizen of the universe of time and space. It’s an infectious enthusiasm, tempered by the fact that we know from the beginning that their adventure above the world ringed in garbage and metallic junk leads him to be floating in space, at the mercy of Steven’s ‘cold equations’ – the realities that space inflicts. The unemotional stacking of the odds in a battle they mathematically, logically, can’t win.

But there’s always room for a little Doctorish miracle within the framework of Doctor Who – if the universe were ruled entirely by the cold equations, it would be run…well, by the Time Lords, and the Doctor is the archetypal anti-Time Lord. He will always put himself between his friends and the cold equations of certain doom in the unfeeling universe, and here, powered by so many recent losses (this story’s inserted in a run of three in the immediate aftermath of The Daleks’ Master Plan, one of the most shockingly blood-soaked adventures in the Hartnell era), and empowered by Steven’s bravery, sacrifice and mastery of his own equations, the Doctor is able to pull a little something twinkly and mischievous out of the bag. That, after all, is what he does – with a little help from his friends.

This story is richly textured, and you won’t believe how few voices are actually in it, Purves conjuring a very twinkly, happier version of the First Doctor in this environment than was called for in The Perpetual Bond. One thing that distinctly survives from that story though is the idea that these adventures could well have been a great addition to the on-screen show at the time. That’s a fanciful notion – the on-screen Who of the sixties would never have allowed Oliver, with his particular secret (which is revealed here) on a show aimed at families and children, and the geometry that gives this story both its learning and its sense of drama would have been considered too wordy for the show back in its early years, too complex and taking too much time out of an adventure. Be thankful then for the expansion of the First Doctor’s world at Big Finish, and for both a tightly written but simply stated adventure from Simon Guerrier, and top-notch performances from Peter Purves and Tom Allen to bring it to life in all its joie de vivre, its gasping tension, its bleak scientific rigour and its Doctorish wink at all that’s impossible in a sensible universe.

Pick up The Cold Equations for a masterclass in companion-writing, and an object lesson in delivering an uncluttered story that still has plenty of suspense, world-building and personality.

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.