The Fearmonger [Seventh Doctor + Ace]

The Fearmonger, which was released in February 2000, is the Seventh Doctor and Ace's first entry in the world of Big Finish. Sylvester McCoy had already appeared in Sirens of Time but without a proper companion. Now one of my favourite Doctor - Companion teams is back, which is nice.

Written by Jonathan Blum, The Fearmonger is set in a near-contemporary Britain where the right-wing New Britannia party, led by Sherilyn Harper  (Jacqueline Pearce), is on the rise. Praying on the fear and hostility of the British to immigrants she's looking forward to a successful election campaign. If she survives the assassination attempts of course.

Her attempted assassins include Walter Jacobs (Mark McDonnell). It's Walter who will be in and out of the story all the way through. Edgy, frightened and hysterical Walter Jacobs isn't the easiest of people to hang out with.

Later we get to meet another gang of would be assassins headed up by the Antipodean sounding Alexsandr Karadjic (Jack Gallagher). Another spanner in the works as the Doctor attempts to prevent full-scale riots. And worse.

Being Doctor Who, of course, there has to be an additional complication. The Fearmonger itself. A creature of vaguely unknown origins - although the Doctor speculates a little as to where it popped up from - it breeds on strong emotions and helps encourages them. And it appears to have occupied Sherilyn Harper.

A Big Finish story with a nice contemporary resonance.

It isn't bad. It's not great, but it's not bad.

The politicians and their aids are, of course, cynics to a woman and there is a part of me that would like to see a politician - especially the right-wing ones I don't like much - less cynically. However the presence in this story of Roderick Allingham, who is Harper's aid, makes that virtually impossible. Partly because he's written up as the arch-political fixer, a Peter Mandelson manque, but also because he's played by the magnificently oleaginous Hugh Walters.

Hugh Walters has appeared in three Classic Doctor Who stories and each appearance was bigger and better than the first. His best being Vogal in Resurrection of the Daleks. There he is assistant to businesswoman and (sort of) unwilling Davros accomplice Kara (Eleanor Bron). In The Fearmonger he is a less camp version of Vogal: dry, cynical and Machiavellian and it is perfect casting. He could almost be an escapee from the Pertwee era of difficult civil servants and politicians.

In fact there's something a little Pertwee about the whole story now I come to think about it. Allingham and Harper constantly refer to the Doctor's 'United Nations connections'.

Overall then it is the performances that make this story. Jacqueline Pearce - whose voice I could listen to for ever - is great and I've already talked about Hugh Walters. Mark McDonnell makes Walter Jacobs sound so fragile that you'd want to make him a cup of tea and give him a hug in real life. Plus there's Vince Henderson's 'shock jock' Mick Thompson, who has the right level of annoying 'I call a spade a spade' smart arsed hostility to actually make you think you've heard him presenting a genuine radio programme.

But best of all are Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy as Ace and the Seventh Doctor. Sophie's great in this and there's a brilliant scene where she has a go at replicating the Doctor's speech to the snipers in The Happiness Patrol with what can only be described as less than successful results. Lovely.

Then there's Sylvester. He's simply magnificent. The darker and more devious Doctor of the Cartmel 'Master Plan'. He's got a habit of just appearing in scenes to the discomfort of those involved and in this story - naturally - people are afraid of him and his reputation. His best moments though are at the end. His quiet discussion with Harper and then the final tense scenes with Ace. McCoy's always best in those quiet moments - like Matt Smith. Then you get an insight into how scary the Doctor might actually be.

So to get this blog finished so I can start doing some actual work I would say The Fearmonger is definitely worth a listen but it's not a Big Finish Classic. However if you like the Seventh Doctor and Ace you will almost certainly enjoy this.

The Land of the Dead [5th Doctor & Nyssa]

One quibble excepted I really enjoyed The Land of the Dead. I particularly enjoyed the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa partnership. One of the problems with the televised Fifth Doctor is that he is occasionally overloaded with companions and as a result none of them get to 'breath' much. Sarah Sutton's Nyssa in particular gets swamped by the more belligerent Tegan and the needier Adric. So on occasions, such as Kinda, she gets stuck in the TARDIS with a glorified headache.

Which is a shame as I always liked Nyssa and not just for her skirt dropping Terminus but because I always felt there was an interesting story to be told and that she and Davison had a really good chemistry.

So one of the strengths of this is that it is just the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa.

Also Nyssa's back story informs her responses to what's going on and in particular her scenes with Tulung (Neil Roberts) are made all the stronger for that and there's a rather moving moment - which I'm going to remember inaccurately - when they are talking about tradition and science and looking up at the sky and seeing the whole universe and death. Sarah Sutton plays it beautifully too.

I really like Peter Davison's 'new' take on the Fifth Doctor too. It's interesting that Peter Davison's stint with Big Finish is less often praised than both Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker's. I think that's done to how the Sixth and Seventh Doctor's eras on television are perceived and that their Big Finish careers have taken on an almost a redemptive quality. So that anyone who thinks Colin Baker is a bad Doctor just needs to take a corrective course of Big Finish adventures to recover their senses. Ditto with McCoy. However Davison's take on the Doctor is generally well-received, perhaps with the exception of its own stars*, and as a result Big Finish is seen more as a continuation than a redemption but I think there's more going on here.

I've gone over some of this ground in the review of Phantasmagoria but I think that the Big Finish Fifth Doctor is the Fifth Doctor Peter Davison wishes he could have given us on television. It's pretty well-known that he thought he was too young for the part when he was cast originally and now he's the right age. Perhaps I'm reading too much into all of this but that's my right as a citizen of a post-modern universe.

To sum up all of that: Davison's brilliant.

The Land of the Dead is set in Alaska and would be as bleak as the environment if it wasn't for the dry humour of architect Monica Lewis (played with panache by Lucy Campbell) whose main reaction in a crisis is to abandon her internal monologue in favour of an avalanche of sarcastic verbiage. She and the Doctor spend quite a lot of time together and it's a finely played relationship. In fact Monica makes you think about Tegan and how much better Tegan would have been if she'd been written more like Monica.

There's not really a villain in this story. There's a slightly mad millionaire called Shaun Brett (Christopher Scott) who is really in need of some help to get over his father's death more than anything else and there's an out and out monster (which had this been a Davison television adventure would have been a sorely disappointing man in a terrible costume : see The Arc of Infinity and The Caves of Androzani for examples) which is limited in intelligence but dangerously hungry.

In fact you might argue that a theme in this story is about leaving the past alone. Digging up the rocks brings back a rather unpleasant monster from the past, digging up the past drives Shaun Brett and Tulang almost insane.

Whilst another theme is the clash between tradition (of family, tribe or society) and science. The clash is most obvious in Tulang and Gaborik (Andrew Fettes) who are Native Americans, of the Kuyokon Tribe. The use of Native Americans as a kind representation of lost traditions, a lost connection to the land and a lost wisdom is a bit of a cliché, which is my minor quibble with the story. Perhaps recent discussions with friends about the use of Nazi's in Doctor Who have made me more focused on this line of thinking but there's something a little off with it. If Doctor Who's Nazis come out of the Indiana Jones tradition, then their Native Americans come out of the X-Files.**

But perhaps I'm being overly harsh. In fact I definitely am but I think one needs to be careful to avoid turning a whole complex group of people into a short-cut for an idea. Or just a plain cliché.

That really was my only quibble.

Listen and enjoy.



*There's nothing more depressing than listening to some of the Davison era DVD commentaries as the cast slag off their own work.

**For an interesting introduction to the perceptions of Native American culture I recommend Rich Hall's TV documentary 'Inventing the Indian'

Light At The End (Big Finish's 50th Anniversary Story)

I'll make an initial admission. I've been looking forward to this more than I have The Moff's TV 50th. Why? Because much as I enjoy New Doctor Who, I'm a Classic Who boy* and I'm a fan of Big Finish's work in general so I was convinced it would be good.

And it is.

Fanbloodytastic in fact.

There.

Review done. No spoilers.

In fact I'd say if you were thinking of testing the Big Finish waters this would be the perfect story to begin with. You get all the first Eight Doctors**. Yes, all of them. No, I'm not going to tell you how you can work it out for yourself. Like I did. That's part of the fun.

You also get a lot of familiar companions to join the fun. In fact the only oddity would be the presence of Charlotte Pollard with the Eighth Doctor as she is - so far - a non-television companion but that just provides you with an excuse to go back and listen to Storm Warning and begin the Eight Doctor's adventures with Big Finish.

Seemless.

That's not to say this is uninfluenced by New Doctor Who. I'd suggest that the story might have had a far different ending if the New series hadn't already led the way with...ah...spoilers.

I think the reason this works so well is that there is only one villain. There's no attempt to crowbar in the usual suspects and over-stuff the villainous pudding. We mainly deal with one main villain here and it is The Master, played with oleaginous malevolence by Geoffrey Beevers. (That's not a spoiler btw. He's in the trailer and on the cover of the CD for heaven's sake.) And it allows the Doctor's to shine. It's a lesson in how to do a multi-Doctor story without losing the stories shape.

And this really is all about the Doctor's.

Each gets some time to do his thing. Each gets some juicy lines, although Colin Baker gets the best big speech and Peter Davison gets the spookiest and darkest moments.

In fact at points towards the end of Part One when the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa are investigating an 'incident' it is genuinely creepy as hell. There's a dawning realisation about what is to come - or at least I had one - and that just adds to the darkness. It's incredibly powerful and possibly the highlight of the whole thing for me.

But fundamentally it's a wonderful tribute to my favourite television series. There's call backs to old stories with some lines - even Battlefield! There's Tom Baker's voice. There's Sylvester McCoy's rolling rrrrrrrrrrrr's. There's whispers of voices fondly remembered. There's Colin Baker's sparkling indignation and Peter Davison's soft power.***

It's a fine celebration made by people that obviously care. The Moff will have to work bloody hard to make me feel as happy after I've watched The Day of the Doctor and I hope he does.







*42 year old boy but when it comes to Doctor Who still that fascinated, geeky and mildly terrified 7 or 8 year old boy
**Or whatever number they're going to be once The Moff's taken his pet theory out for a run in The Day of the Doctor
***I know what I mean by this even if you don't. If you buy me a pint, I'll explain.

The Eight Truths - World Wide Web

The Eight Truths and Worldwide Web (8TWW) bring the third season of Eighth Doctor to an end. They also mark the end of The Headhunter's (Katarina Olsson) story arc. I have raved about Katarina Olsson's performances before. She's fantastic and The Headhunter is an interesting character, although I found her a little annoying in Orbis but I wonder if that is the story more than the character.

8TWW in fact brings a close to one outstanding thread from Orbis so hopefully I shall never have to mention that story again.

The Doctor and Lucie are on Earth. The Doctor has gone off to help with a dodgy Mercury probe and Lucie is going shopping. It's whilst she's shopping that she bumps into a familiar old face, Karen (Kerry Godliman) associate of the Headhunter or former associate. She's now involved with a organisation helping people to find their true potential. Lucie is entrapped and made to cut herself off from the Doctor.

The scenes around the Eightfold Truth are great. The understanding tone of voice adopted by the people involved, the treacle language of self-help gurus regurgitated and the dash of spiritual frippery all make it rather convincing. I like the fact that the Eightfold Truth is headed by Stephen Moore's Clark Goodman.

Stephen Moore is, of course, best known for being Marvin (The Paranoid Android) in the original Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy Radio Series and there's something about his voice that's both mildly melancholic and mildly comforting. To me at least. And he's a very British choice of Cult leader. No Showbiz Messiah complex here. Just a plain old-fashioned conman.

He's being professionally scoffed at by journalist Kelly Westwood (Sophie Winkleman) who is out to debunk the whole Eightfold Truth Cult. Kelly and the Doctor link up.

However Goodman is being manipulated by someone...and that someone is The Headhunter who is in possession of the Stellar Manipulator she palmed all the way back in Orbis and working for some familiar - well, familiar-ish - Doctor Who foes.

All of this is gradually revealed. The Doctor's story gradually pulls itself towards Lucie's. The Mercury probe, looked after by Dr Avishka Sangakkara (Sanjeev Bashkar), has ceased working and the Doctor's help makes him realise that there's Gallifreyan technology at work here. Then there's the crystals...

The cliffhanger is an excellent on with both Lucie and the Doctor facing dangers of their own. How will our heroes escape?

 

When we start Worldwide Web the Doctor's been in a coma for 28 days. Things have moved on. Plans are afoot. Or afeet one should say. On Eight Legs.

 

The villains are the Spiders of Metabelis 3 headed up by their Queen (Beth Chalmers). Applause here for Big Finish getting the Spider voices to sound just right. Sorry, the Eight Legs. They so hate being called Spiders.

 

Lucie has been taken over by the Queen. But lucky for us the baddies think the Doctor is dead, which is rather foolish of them and the strain of the operation - and keeping her minions happy - has allowed Lucie to get out of her own mind. A bit.

 

The scenes between Lucie Lucie and Queen Lucie are great and Sheriden Smith does a wonderful job of make Queen Lucie perceptibly different to Lucie Lucie by flattening her voice and taking all the warmth out of it. It's rather lovely.

 

I also like the fact that the Spiders have their arguments too. They're broken into factions and the Queen can't entirely trust everyone. Then there's Goodman, who has realised what he's let loose, and finally Karen who having been 'spidered up' against her will has something of a grudge against the Headhunter.

 

It's all leading to a rather interesting climax. The Doctor does his thing, Lucie does hers and the Headhunter suprises everyone in a rather brilliant little sequence. The Eighth Doctor's 'I never really understood her' almost being an echo of The Fifth Doctor's 'There should have been another way.' There's some weird stuff inside and around the Stellar Manipulator and some philosophising on what it means to be alive.

 

This is a fun end to the third season of Lucie Miller and Eighth Doctor adventures. The two leads get to have a lot of fun, various story arcs come to their end and they're off to Blackpool for Christmas. What could possibly go wrong?

 

 



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.

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.

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