Sunday 22 September 2013

The Cannibalists (8th Doctor & Lucie Miller)


I really enjoyed The Cannibalists, which managed to be what Orbis failed to be: a funny, off-beat story that didn't feel quite like anything else. It helps that it is written by Jonathan Morris, who can manage the balance of seriousness and humour pretty darn well and is becoming not just one of my favourite Big Finish writers but one of my favourite Doctor Who writers full stop.

The vibe of this story tome is less television Doctor Who and more the Doctor Who Weekly Comic Strip. You can imagine this sitting alongside The Iron Legion for example. Titus, for example, is a 'big' character in the best sense and comes bursting out of the speakers courtesy of a mighty performance from Phil Davis, who seems to be channelling Johnny Rotten in robot form.

Which brings me on to another point about this story. The Doctor and Lucie are the only organic characters in it. Everyone else is a robot. Sentient robots mind but robots. The story is set on Haven, where robots are preparing for the eventual return of human beings. Unfortunately something has gone awry and the robots have developed free will and divided into two (or three) classes: the Assemblers, the Cannibalists and...well...Drones. Unfortunately the Assemblers are old, battered and out-dated and the Drones are reduced to just one, last survivor: Servo. The Cannibalists, led by Titus, are about to win.

However there is a possible way out. A big bad re-set button. Find it and the City can be re-booted. But what if it is just a legend? What if I doesn't exist?

Servo is played by Phil Jupitus. Servo too has gone rogue, but in a different way to the Cannibalists. Instead of violence though Servo has taken up writing poetry. One of my favourite bits of the whole play is Servo's little cough before reading one of his poems. That and the joke about Lucie's unorthodox protrusions, which I found amusing.

I have a wee bit of a quibble about the ending, which seemed...well...without giving too much away a little convenient. But it fitted with what had gone before. Plus I guessed the twist well before being twisted, but that's not a massive problem. I could have been wrong. And that I would never have told you in the review so points to me for being a smart arse.

The key thing is it was fun. Fun and funny. With good - if 'big' - performances from the cast in an unusual environment for the Doctor and Lucie. A sort of Web Planet but with robots not insects. The sort of story that, even now, would be impossibly challenging and expensive for the television Doctor Who to attempt. Plus all sorts of people would get sniffy about the jokes.

Give it a listen. It's good fun.

Saturday 21 September 2013

The Scapegoat (8th Doctor + Lucie Miller)


I really enjoyed The Scapegoat even if it was a little...inconsequential. Or was it?

The TARDIS is pulled off-course by a McGuffin and instead of hitting fin-de-siècle Paris and the Moulin Rouge as Lucie expects (and is dressed for) they find themselves in Nazi occupied Paris and with the TARDIS stolen. Just another typical day in the office.

Lucie finds herself appearing onstage at the Theatre des Baroque alongside the 'most assassinated man in Paris' Max Paul (Paul Rhys). It's very funny, especially when Sheriden Smith does Lucie trying to do proper acting. But there's also something rather creepy going on. With the goat headed Doctor Baroque - a rather marvellous and mellifluous Christopher Fairbank - and Mother Baroque - Samantha Bond - clearly up to no goa..good.

Meanwhile The Doctor finds himself in the company of the Gestapo: Major Treptow (Clifford Rose, a man familiar with playing Nazi's) and a nameless Leutnant (Thorston Manderley, which is a wondrous name for an actor). And despite all the hints of menace these are Nazi's of the Indiana Jones school as opposed to the realistic type. They're all bombast, pomposity and stupidity. The Doctor runs rings around them.

In the end this is another story where the villains aren't really villains. The Nazis are, of course, Nazis but they're the side dressing to the Baroques. But the Baroques, with their unpleasant traditions, are less out and out villains and more trapped by ritual and tradition. Even if Mother Baroque turns out to be more zealous - and dogmatic - of the Baroques. If the Wirrn in Wirrn Dawn are creations of nature, then the Baroques and The Scapegoat perhaps stand as a representation of nurture.

Perhaps I'm over thinking the whole thing.

Basically it is a rather amusing, rather inconsequential story. Well acted by everyone concerned, especially Sheridan Smith who is on great form throughout. I also like McGann's casual, almost piss-takingly easy escapes from the Gestapo. It's almost as if The Doctor takes them far less seriously than they take themselves. There's a line about the Nazi's not being the worst thing in the universe and it is as if the Doctor is doing his best to prove the point here by turning them into laughing stock.

I often think Doctor Who without humour somewhere isn't quite Doctor Who. The ability to laugh seems to be key to the whole thing. Villains can't laugh at themselves. The crime of taking oneself too seriously is an oft committed one in the Doctor Who universe. And laughter also represents hope: if we're still laughing, we're still here. Victory through mockery. Less survival of the fittest, more survival of the wittiest.

I'm trying not to give too much away but the fate - or potential fate - of Max Paul is movingly outlined but fought against by Lucie, then the Doctor. In fact all waffle aside if this story has a theme it is that you don't have to keep playing the part fate appears to have allocated for you. Losers don't always have to be losers. Victims don't always have to be victims. We can change the universe by changing ourselves. As the Buddha once said, 'Do not ask the world to change. Change yourself.'

On that positive note I'm off to save the world.

Friday 20 September 2013

Wirrn Dawn (8th Doctor + Lucie Miller)


Wirrn Dawn is a game of two halves. The second episode is far stronger than the first.

The Wirrn, of course, made their first (and so far only*) appearance in Doctor Who in The Ark In Space and some of the themes of that story are reflected in Wirrn Dawn but it also adds elements of its own making the Wirrn much more 'sympathetic'. Their lifestyle might seem disgusting to us but  it's part of nature. The Wirrn are the Wirrn because the universe made them that way. They're driven by natural inclinations, not 'evil'.

That doesn't reduce the horror of what they do though and the human to Wirrn transformation process is not glossed over at all. There is pain here. Pain and fear.

In fact the one thing that comes through in this story is fear. Whether that's fear of the past, fear of death or change. The other thing, maybe the flipside of fear, is survival. The Wirrn survived, the 'Indig' survived sharing a planet with the Wirrn, the Doctor survives and wants to survive. Survival of the fittest.

It's a small cast story this. There's the Doctor and Lucie. I love Lucie Miller in this. She's pugnacious above and beyond the call of duty. Standing up to Salway (Colin Salmon) even as he's waving a massive gun at her. I love the way she recalls Rosto too as she's trying to convince the Wirrn not to kill her.

Salway and Delong (Daniel Anthony) are Galsec troopers. Farroll (Liz Sutherland) is a Galsec Admiral whose fleet takes a bit of a beating early in the story. Salway's a bully, (possibly) a coward and a racist. Delong is a kid. And an Indig kid at that, which means Salway feels he has a licence to bully him. Indig seems to be a slang word for the original human settlers of various planets. A snide, snarky unpleasant way to describe those people that Galsec is over-taking

Galsec (or should it be GalSec...anyway) are at war with the Wirrn but it doesn't look like a war either side is going to win without massive casualties and a lot of unpleasantness. It seems the first settlers on this planet - the name of which has escaped me - never fought the Wirrn.

This story it turns out is the story of how they survived, which the Doctor seems to have worked out for himself before the story ends. Paul McGann is apparently an incredibly laid back kind of chap and sometimes that spills through into his portrayal of the 8th Doctor. In this story he's so chilled out you could break him into little pieces and add them to your drink. So relaxed that he takes a rather large gamble based on an educated guess which will put everyone at risk. But that's a very Doctor-ish thing to do. He just does it in a superbly relaxed fashion hardly ever raising his voice, just adding a little urgency here and there. It's rather lovely.

So after all that rambling what do I think. I enjoyed it. It's nice when a story doesn't have an out and out bad guy, just a range of possible bad guys. It's nice to hear the Wirrn back with that distinct sort of squeaking creeping sound.

Oh and there's a little seed sown about Lucie's relationship with the Doctor when she's arguing with Solway about the dangers of putting the Doctor on a pedestal. I wonder whether that will pay off later?


*Not counting the Wirrn Corpse in Shada (?) , a novel and at one other Big Finish story, Wirrn Island

Friday 13 September 2013

The Beast of Orlok (8th + Lucie Miller)



The Beast of Orlok is fab. Yes, there's a few Gothic clichés and in-jokes there but it's rather all rather fun.

We're in the Black Forest. It's 1827. There's terrified villagers, a mysterious Baron and his castle and then...then there is the Monster. Or the alleged monster. The dreaded Beast of Orlok, which had terrorised the area twenty years previously but is now back.

Or is it.

Well something odd is occurring and into this oddity step the Doctor and Lucie.

Of course it turns out that there's a lot more to the Beast of Orlok than meets the eye.

It's quite nicely done. There's some fine performances all around. Headed by the magnificent Miriam Margoyles as Frau Tod. Frau Tod is mother to Hans (Samuel Barnet) and Greta (Alison Thea-Skot) and something of an unusual woman. Particularly when it comes to her firm lack of belief in the Beast. I love Miriam Margoyles so it is nice to hear her on here. Frau Tod is really the hero of this story, which is lovely.

Frau Tod does not like the Baron Teuful (Peter Guinness). There's a reason for this, which becomes clear but the Baron is not a likeable chap. He isn't the most original character in the world being basically Frankenstein in all but name but he's satisfactory enough particularly as...well...not every cliché is what it might appear to be.

There's an officious burgomeister, Otto Pausbacken (Nick Wilton), who is one of those Doctor Who characters who officiousness and determination to misunderstand a situation in the name of a bit of petty politics is probably going to doom them to an unpleasant death.

Plus there's Judah (Trevor Cooper) hovering on the sidelines in a sinister manner but whose side is he on? Why is he so interested in Hans and Greta? All these questions will be answered. As will the biggest question of them all: who or what is The Beast of  Orlok?

You'll have fun finding out.

McGann and Smith continue their excellent work as The Eighth Doctor and Lucie Miller who are rapidly becoming one of my favourite Doctor and Companion pairings. I think if Lucie were a television companion you might have to tone her down a tad but on audio she's fantastically belligerent, loud and driven.

But I think the best thing about this story is that it is just plain fun: action, adventure and cake. What more do you want?



Tuesday 10 September 2013

Hothouse (8th + Lucie Miller)


Hothouse is rather entertaining. Written by Jonathan Morris, who is one of my favourite Big Finish writers, it sees a return of the Krynoids via the classic Doctor Who trope: the person who does terrible things in the name of saving the world. The murderer with the best intentions. The person who believes the end justifies the means.

In this case it's ex-rock star Alex Marlowe (Nigel Planer) who has become a environmentalist and determined to save the world from itself. Accordingly he's been fiddling with Krynoids. Actually let me rephrase that. Alex has taken upon himself to experiment with the cuttings taken from the dead Krynoid from The Seeds of Doom by command of the then Head of the World Ecology Bureaux, Sir Colin Thackeray.

In fact the Doctor has been dragged into investigating Marlowe via the World Ecology Bureaux's Hazel Bright (Lysette Anthony). Lucie Miller (Sheridan Smith) has gone undercover. A quick scoot around on an official visit is followed by Lucie's sneaky investigation and it's when she stumbles upon...well...let's just say from that moment onwards it all starts to go horribly wrong.

And now I've stumbled across the 'spoilers' problem. I know this was released back in 2009 but I'm trying to avoid too many obvious spoilers because it - er - spoils the fun: that little twist, that horrible moment, that sudden unexplained frisson of terror. All popped by a throw away line in a review. I've already given away the Krynoids, although I must confess the cover gives it away so I'm feeling a little less than guilty about that.

Suffice it to say things look bad, then they look worse and then the story ends. Some people live. Some people die. Some people are heroic. Some people are stupid to the point of insanity.

The thing about the Krynoids - and what makes them truly horrifying in my opinion - is the body horror. The change from human to Krynoid. That loss of ones identity and humanity. It is a death as well as a transmogrification. If our consciousness is eliminated and replaced by that of another being the receptacle we're walking around in is just that:  a receptacle. A fate too horrifying to contemplate.

It's also quite a visual thing so Jonathan Morris does a fine job of making that horror visible through audio with a couple of key scenes, which I won't spoil. In truth as well as being a sequel to The Seeds of Doom, it also reminded me a little of The Ark in Space for reasons that...well...for reasons.

There's some lovely performances here. Nigel Planer gives Marlowe just the right level of pop star self-indulgence manifest as a desire to save the world through what can only be described as 'tough love'. Lysette Anthony does a fine job with Hazel Bright plus there's some nice support - in small-ish parts - from Stuart Crossman as Stefan Radek and Adna Sablyich as Christina Ondrak.

Very enjoyable and the perfect length to get me from home to office.

Which is nice.

Paul McGann is doing an excellent job with the Eighth Doctor (still) as he plays a slightly dazed version of himself. Still recovering from the events on Orbis (aren't we all) and still not quite sure about Lucie Miller. I do like the Eighth Doctor on audio. He's rapidly becoming my favourite Doctor.

Sheridan Smith also continues to do a fine job with Lucie Miller. There's so much energy there, even if her Northern bolshiness sometimes skirts the edge of cliché.

A nice bounce after the disappointment of Orbis.

Monday 2 September 2013

Orbis (8th + Lucie Miller)


So, let's cut to the chase. I didn't like Orbis much.

Now I've got to work out why. A contributory factor might be that I listened to this on my way home from a long day in the office, on a over-crowded and over-heated tube train. That never improves one's mood but I know from previous experience that a good Big Finish story over-rides that. It draws you in.

Orbis didn't do that.

Was it the setting? A water world occupied by intelligent jellyfish - The Keltans - and menaced by a race of belligerent giant clams - the Molluscari? I don't think so. After all I'm a big fan of The Web Planet, which makes this look positively unambitious, partly because it was on the television.

Was it the performances? No. Not really. The acting was pretty good. I particularly liked Laura Solon's Selta, the jellyfish with a thing for the Doctor. Andrew Sachs did a fine job of Crassostrea, the leader of the Molluscari on the verge of giving birth. Although what a hermaphrodite, giant clam psychopath would actually sound like is a moot point.

But I think talking about the performances sets a little alarm bell ringing about this story: the tone. It's like The Gunfighters. Pretty light-hearted and comedic until Johnny Ringo turns up. Or in the case of this story until the Molluscari land. When it all takes a turn for the unpleasant.

The ending in particular, which is in its way bloody horrible, doesn't feel right. It feels tacked on as if the writer's realised they needed to get the Doctor off of the planet and the only way to do it was to...well force the issue in as unpleasant a way as possible.

It doesn't feel very Doctor Who-ish.

And neither does the Doctor's own behaviour. Even allowing for the ending of Vengeance of Morbius would the Doctor really just settle down in such a way that with his TARDIS back, Lucie back and his memory back (which he seems to have lost in dribs and drabs over time) he wouldn't try to do something more than stay and die with the Keltans?

This is the Doctor we're talking about. A man who jibbed at being stuck on Earth for two years but is apparently happy to sit on Orbis for a lot longer than that as happy as a sand boy? That he wouldn't strain every sinew to escape. To get back to his TARDIS. Back to Lucie? Nah, it just doesn't ring true.

And then there's the bloody Headhunter. Back again. Up to her old tricks. I don't know why but I'm beginning to find the Headhunter a little tiresome. Nothing to do with Katarina Olsson's performance, which is perfect. More to do with the character. Here she is inside the Doctor's TARDIS. No, flying the Doctor's TARDIS. Armed with a gun that fires 'time bullets'. Time bullets. Even the Doctor scoffs at that.

I think it is the Headhunter's abilities to do anything and have everything that annoys me. Nobody likes a smart arse and the Headhunter is becoming the ultimate in smartarses. She's going to be back though, that much is obvious but should she be. There's only so many times she can pop up with a lovely plan and the special equipment, fail and then flee without a scratch before there's something irritating about her.

I don't know perhaps that response was conditioned by the long day and the tube.

Perhaps it is because I don't like stories which revel in carnage and then expect us to forget it all with a smile and pick up again next week as if nothing much has happened. Even though I know Doctor Who couldn't possibly be as 'real' as that because everyone in it would either be suffering from survivor guilt, PTSD or be a sociopath. Death is everywhere and nowhere in Doctor Who. It can be the most moving moment in a Doctor Who episode or throwaway death of another minor cast member no one really noticed or cared about. It can be the focus of an episode - as it is in a way in both Resurrection and Revelation of the Daleks - or it can happen over and over again without much proper comment.

So I didn't enjoy Orbis and perhaps having thought about all of that the reason I didn't like it was I don't like it when the Doctor gives up. There's enough acceptance in the world as it is. I like my Doctor to rage, rage against the dying of the light. Not go gently (or McGuffiny) into that good night.

Or maybe I was just tired and grumpy.

You decide.