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Doctor Who (and Class) audios
It's been a while sice I last had the chance to delve into Big Finish audios, but in recent weeks I did. Not least because Big Finish picked up Class, aka my much beloved, much mourned Whovian spin-off that only got one season, and I've been meaning to listen to the results for months. They're not the only audios I've been listening to, but I shall review them first.
Class Volume 1, and Class, Volume 2:
Three stories in each volume, all set during the show's first and only season, not afterwards. As a whole, they're entertaining, at times clever, and there's at least one story I adored and would call an instant audio classic, but in general they didn't feel as good or original as the tv s how to me, which is partly due to two premise problems. Since they are set in the first season, this means they can't do what the tv show already did, develop a narrative arc and relationships further. (More about this, and one exception, in the detailed reviews.) The other premise problem is that while Big Finish got the entire Class cast back, they always use just two or at maximum three of them per story. On the one hand, this allows focus on just these two (or three) characters. On the other, not only does it demand, and rarely gets, an explanation as why these characters don't the others for help with the problem du jour, and also, it means the sense of an ensemble gets lost. Meaning: if a tv episode was centred around, say, April and Ram, this still meant Tanya, Charlie, Matteusz and Miss Quill would get some brief but often significant character stuff to do as well. This isn't the case in the audio format, which pairs up the two or three Class characters with the guest characters. and thus feels more like a loosely connected anthology series of individual stories set in the same universe than a series about a specific group of people.
Bearing these drawbacks in mind, here are my reactions to the individual stories:
Volume I:
Gifted, by Roy Gill: Basically the story of Tam Lin with a Class spin; it's April versus Mab the Fairy Queen, with first an OC character and then Ram in the role of Tom the Rhymer. By itself, I liked it, but there's one big difference to the tv presentation of April and the April/Ram relationship which is to the tv version's credit. While April in Class gets introduced as the caring, determined-to-do-good type, her big story through the season has to do with her literally sharing a heart of the seasonal big bad and how she deals with that, her biggest emotional non-alien related issue has to do with what her father did to her mother and herself, and in her romance with Ram, he's the one more openly invested and she's the one who's holdling back. Meanwhile, both of the April-centric stories in the audios have her doing the comforting and holding on to Ram in a far more traditional gender role, and have this particular relationship at her emotional core.
Life Experience by Jenny T. Colgan: This one immediately won me over by resurrecting something the tv show did early on but then dropped, to wit, the odd friendship between Tanya and Ram, who due to a school project end up trapped in a building of your basic evil medical research facility. (This, btw, means this story has the best excuse as to why none of the other characters get involved - our two heroes literally can't contact the outside. It'a straightforward "locked up with monsters" tale where the literal monster (which is just reacting on instinct) isn't as evil as the rich industrialist sacrificing everyone for profit in order to exploit it, and the body count is very high before our heroes can save what's left of the day.
Tell me you love me by Scott Handcock: wins the award for "most disappointing use of a great premise". Charlie, Matteusz and Quill are the three characters who have to work together to save one of them from being utterly possessed by an alien entity that first makes the person it's possesssing just unable to keep themselves from stream-of-consciousness monologueing but eventually will wipe out all of the original personality and mind if not exorcised in time. The alien entity first hops between Matteusz and Charlie (who are keen on sacrifcing themselves for each other) and then Quill (who is not but has no choice when it comes to Charlie). This could and should have been an awesome story. I mean, the Quill and Charlie dynamic was one of the most interesting aspects of the tv s how to me, I love "enemies forced to work together" tales, and Class the tv show did one of its best episodes, Detention, using a similar MacGuffin (alien who makes characters reveal their innermost secrets, with the danger being that if they do this too long they'll die). But the comparison to that episode is crushing. In the audio story, Matteusz and Charlie reveal nothing but their love for each other, while Charlie and Quill reveal their antagonism. This.... is not news and does not need a Macguffin. (By contrast, when Matteusz gets the plot device in Detention he reveals that as much as he loves Charlie, he also is afraid "of who you are, what you're capable of, what you may do", while Charlie reveals that he does want to use the Cabinet to commit genocide on the Shadowkin. Both are devastating reveals with real consequences for the relationship afterwards.) The one thing that's not disappointing is how Quill eventually defeats the body hopping alien, which in its ruthlessness and logic is very her.
Volume II:
Everybody Loves Regan by Tim Foley: basically, April gets single-white-femaled by an alien masquerading as a human school girl who ends up beloved by the entire school (which is the point; she lives from adoration, a la Jasmine in Angel, though minus the literal cannibalism). This one has Ram and Tanya co-starring and does its "April gets increasingly insulated and outcast via the Regan worship" plot well, April's immunity (due to good old Corakinus' heart-half) makes sci fi sense, and the way she gets through to Ram eventually (by reminding him of Rachel, his girl friend who was killed in the pilot, thereby proving he can't always have loved Regan and that she did alter his memories) makes for a moving scene. It makes zero sense that April doesn't ask Charlie and Quill for help, since the Regan effect likely would not work on them, either (not only are they aliens but Regan-the-schoolgirl-from-Manchester could not have inserted herself in their past memories, either), but other than that, no problem here, and it's worth noting that Regan turns out to me not deliberately malicious and teachable about the need of humans to keep their pain and their real memories, thanks.
Now you know... by Tim Leng: finally, the audio uses its chance to combine characters the tv show didn't already and gives this adventure to Tanya and Matteusz, who end up investigating a mystery dating back to the 1960s. (No, not the sudden disappearance of Susan, Barbara and Ian from Coal HIll, though Tanya comes across that as well in her research. ;) ). The plot here is pretty Buffy-esque - think Invisible Girl, from BTVS's first season -, with the key to the mystery being a bullied student who fell through a rift and returned with new powers to go after bullies -, but the charm lies in the Tanya & Matteusz interaction, precisely because the tv show never got around to it. At one point in order to draw the antagonist out Tanya decides they should pretend to bully another, and I was preparing to cringe, and also regretted it because I had loved their team-up, but no, it's actually a hilarious scene because they're far too decent, and Matteusz is also too nice, to come up with credible insults.
In Remembrance by Guy Adams: AAAAAAACCCEEE! Excuse me. Not solely but also because of the guest star, this is the jewel of the collection. The title alludes to the Seventh Doctor adventure Remembrance of the Daleks, in which he and Ace (re)visited Coal Hill back in the 1980s. This Big Finish story has Quill and Charlie come across a strange middle-aged woman in Coal Hill, who turns out to be present day Ace here to take care of unfinished business, and before you can say "Dalek", they're on the run from a loose pepper pott who via a rift escaped into the future during the 1980s occasion. The Quill-Ace dialogues throughout the story are absolutely golden, and Sophie Aldred does double duty because Charlie ends up in the 1980s via time rift where he meets teenage Ace; Aldred makes the age difference credible by voice alone. But this is really Quill's episode, whether she verbally spars with Ace (and Quill's issues and chip on the shoulder meet Ace's issues, beware) or outwits a Dalek. Katherine Kelley delivers both the sarcastic one liners and the weary bitter gut wrenching reflection superbly. (Also, it begs a fanfiction follow up in terms of Ace looking her up again. Incidentally, I think this is the first take on Ace in the present - semi canonical, outside of fanfiction, I mean - I've seen which takes into account what the "Death of the Doctor" episode in The Sarah Jane Adventures revealed about what she's doing these days while also using some of the Big Finish stuff about her immediate post-Doctor life, which for this Ace is also in the past.)
Since Volume 2 ends on such a high note, I really hope that Big Finish does more with Class, ups and downs in both volumes not withstanding, and moves on to tackling the aftermath of the s1 finale, and maybe rethink their "use only two or three regulars per story" policy.
On to stories from the Doctor Who main range:
The Peterloo Massacre by Paul Magrs: Content as advertised by the title: this is a straightforward historical with the (Fifth) Doctor the only alien in it. He, Nyssa and Tegan end up by TARDIS accident in the Manchester area, in the August of 1819, which means they inevitably get involved in the upcoming darkest hour of Manchester history, as the Doctor at one point calls it, when cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000–80,000 who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation, killed 15 and critically injured 400 to 700 of them (the numbers are vague because afterrwards a lot who could hid their injuries, fearing to be punished further). It's one of those fixed points in time events the Doctor can't change, but, in a rare event for the Fifth Doctor, he gets spectacularly angry, and the way Peter Davison plays that barely restrained rage is beautiful. (Especially in the scene with the reporter who prepares the whitewashing of the local industrialists who form and finance the yeoman doing the massacring already.) It's one of those stories where human greed and callousness towards the underprivileged are the villains, which, btw, why I'm glad there is no sci fi element other than the Doctor and friends. Well done, leaves you enraged, which is as intended by the story.
The Defectors by Nicholas Briggs: both a standalone story and part of what I take it from the interviews at the end is a Big Finish event series, where later regenerations of the Doctor switch places with the first three (aka the ones whose actors are dead), for a mysterious reason to be explained at a later point. This allows later Doctors to interact with earlier Companions (provided the actors are still around), not decades (or centuries) later (except from their pov) but when their younger self actually was travelling with the people in question, and that's an interesting premise in itself. In this particular case, it's the Seventh Doctor finding himself in a Third Doctor adventure with Jo Grant, and as those eras are very different from each other, while I'm very fond of both, I pounced and aquired the audio. With one (and a half) caveats, I'd say the execution lives up to the promise.
The half caveat is that Katy Manning's voice, several decades, cigarettes and whiskeys later, inevitably has changed, but since she's playing young Jo (as opposed to old Jo as in her Sarah Jane Adventure episode), she tries to cover for it by attempting a more childlike, higher tone than her natural speaking voice, and I wish she wouldn't, because it just sounds weird. Other than that, though, her performance is fine, and it's really neat to see, well, listen to her interacting with Sylvester McCoy, whose performance makes it clear that physical appearances not withstanding, he really is a far older version of the Doctor than Three was. (And more prone to make people reveal themselves and their plans to him instead of taking the "now listen here!" approach.) Jo and the Doctor are whisked away to a mysterious island base where something very shady indeed is going on. Now this is post The Three Doctors for Jo, so she knows the Doctor has other faces, but she's not entirely sure at first whether or not this new arrival is one of them, which btw for any Companion who has to deal with the Master on a regular basis is just sensible distrust, I'd say. Anyway, it means she has to navigate finding out what the hell is going on with the supposed military based with figuring out how she feels about this new version of the Doctor and whether it is indeed the Doctor, whilch makes this at times almost feel like a post regeneration story (and a good one).
It's also, as advertised, a Pertwee story with a McCoy twist, and not just in the sense of the regenerations having changed place. To no one's big surprise there are aliens involved (who are controlling the military people on the island and need the Doctor to help finish repairing their crashed space ship), but whereas in the Third Doctor era this would have been a straightforward invasion story, in this case it turns out that the aliens themselves were originally captured by the British military (in 1951), some of them killed, some of them dissected and experimented on (i.e. tortured) before they figured out a way to turn the table on the humans and control them. They're also not interested in invading the planet, they just want to leave again. (But they did mind control the entire island population, military and civilians alike, and the nature of the control means halting the aging process, which means that once they withdraw, every one either ages up decades or just plain dies, depending on the original age in 1951.) Since Jo (before all this became clear) has managed to contact Mike Yates who intends to come in with guns blazing, the possible outcomes get increasingly darker. I feel the Doctor's choice of whom to support feels right especially for this incarnation, but alas then my second and full caveat happens, as Nicholas Briggs' script throws in yet another twist. On the one hand, I'm all for Companions getting to be active throughout, and this last twist ensures the final decision lies with Jo, and what she does is not out of character for her in this particular kind of situation, but on the other, the episode only runs on for two or so minutes after she does what she does, and what she does is enormous enough that I feel if that's where the episode wanted to go, it should have explored the effect on her instead of just handwaving. So all in all, I'd have preferred it if the last twist didn't happen. It would still have made for a morally ambigous ending.
Death and the Queen by James Goss: basically, a Ruritanian adventure for the Tenth Doctor and Donna. This one's plot and premise doesn't bear much examining and thinking about (what do the villains get out of their evil scheme that they wouldn't have gotten in far simpler ways? did we have to do a story where Donna gets conned by a bridegroom, again? etc.), but the charm is in the execution, no pun intended, and the Tate 'n Tennant rapport is as strong and sparkling as ever. Also, extra bonus for, after milking the "conned into marrying a prince with dreadful relations and hidden motives" fantasy for what it's worth, the story ends concluding that the most sensible thing to do is to abolish the monarchy entirely and make a republic out ofRuritania the fictionial European kingdom Donna spends some months as Queen (sort of) as instead. (This might not have struck me as so were it not for the fact that the latest season of Doctor Who included the Space-Amazon-is-okay-the-union-people-are-bad epsiode.) We meet the future leader of the revolution in this story, too, and she's female. In conclusion, not a classic, but I enjoyed it and listening to one of my favourite Doctor/Companion combinations again a lot.
Class Volume 1, and Class, Volume 2:
Three stories in each volume, all set during the show's first and only season, not afterwards. As a whole, they're entertaining, at times clever, and there's at least one story I adored and would call an instant audio classic, but in general they didn't feel as good or original as the tv s how to me, which is partly due to two premise problems. Since they are set in the first season, this means they can't do what the tv show already did, develop a narrative arc and relationships further. (More about this, and one exception, in the detailed reviews.) The other premise problem is that while Big Finish got the entire Class cast back, they always use just two or at maximum three of them per story. On the one hand, this allows focus on just these two (or three) characters. On the other, not only does it demand, and rarely gets, an explanation as why these characters don't the others for help with the problem du jour, and also, it means the sense of an ensemble gets lost. Meaning: if a tv episode was centred around, say, April and Ram, this still meant Tanya, Charlie, Matteusz and Miss Quill would get some brief but often significant character stuff to do as well. This isn't the case in the audio format, which pairs up the two or three Class characters with the guest characters. and thus feels more like a loosely connected anthology series of individual stories set in the same universe than a series about a specific group of people.
Bearing these drawbacks in mind, here are my reactions to the individual stories:
Volume I:
Gifted, by Roy Gill: Basically the story of Tam Lin with a Class spin; it's April versus Mab the Fairy Queen, with first an OC character and then Ram in the role of Tom the Rhymer. By itself, I liked it, but there's one big difference to the tv presentation of April and the April/Ram relationship which is to the tv version's credit. While April in Class gets introduced as the caring, determined-to-do-good type, her big story through the season has to do with her literally sharing a heart of the seasonal big bad and how she deals with that, her biggest emotional non-alien related issue has to do with what her father did to her mother and herself, and in her romance with Ram, he's the one more openly invested and she's the one who's holdling back. Meanwhile, both of the April-centric stories in the audios have her doing the comforting and holding on to Ram in a far more traditional gender role, and have this particular relationship at her emotional core.
Life Experience by Jenny T. Colgan: This one immediately won me over by resurrecting something the tv show did early on but then dropped, to wit, the odd friendship between Tanya and Ram, who due to a school project end up trapped in a building of your basic evil medical research facility. (This, btw, means this story has the best excuse as to why none of the other characters get involved - our two heroes literally can't contact the outside. It'a straightforward "locked up with monsters" tale where the literal monster (which is just reacting on instinct) isn't as evil as the rich industrialist sacrificing everyone for profit in order to exploit it, and the body count is very high before our heroes can save what's left of the day.
Tell me you love me by Scott Handcock: wins the award for "most disappointing use of a great premise". Charlie, Matteusz and Quill are the three characters who have to work together to save one of them from being utterly possessed by an alien entity that first makes the person it's possesssing just unable to keep themselves from stream-of-consciousness monologueing but eventually will wipe out all of the original personality and mind if not exorcised in time. The alien entity first hops between Matteusz and Charlie (who are keen on sacrifcing themselves for each other) and then Quill (who is not but has no choice when it comes to Charlie). This could and should have been an awesome story. I mean, the Quill and Charlie dynamic was one of the most interesting aspects of the tv s how to me, I love "enemies forced to work together" tales, and Class the tv show did one of its best episodes, Detention, using a similar MacGuffin (alien who makes characters reveal their innermost secrets, with the danger being that if they do this too long they'll die). But the comparison to that episode is crushing. In the audio story, Matteusz and Charlie reveal nothing but their love for each other, while Charlie and Quill reveal their antagonism. This.... is not news and does not need a Macguffin. (By contrast, when Matteusz gets the plot device in Detention he reveals that as much as he loves Charlie, he also is afraid "of who you are, what you're capable of, what you may do", while Charlie reveals that he does want to use the Cabinet to commit genocide on the Shadowkin. Both are devastating reveals with real consequences for the relationship afterwards.) The one thing that's not disappointing is how Quill eventually defeats the body hopping alien, which in its ruthlessness and logic is very her.
Volume II:
Everybody Loves Regan by Tim Foley: basically, April gets single-white-femaled by an alien masquerading as a human school girl who ends up beloved by the entire school (which is the point; she lives from adoration, a la Jasmine in Angel, though minus the literal cannibalism). This one has Ram and Tanya co-starring and does its "April gets increasingly insulated and outcast via the Regan worship" plot well, April's immunity (due to good old Corakinus' heart-half) makes sci fi sense, and the way she gets through to Ram eventually (by reminding him of Rachel, his girl friend who was killed in the pilot, thereby proving he can't always have loved Regan and that she did alter his memories) makes for a moving scene. It makes zero sense that April doesn't ask Charlie and Quill for help, since the Regan effect likely would not work on them, either (not only are they aliens but Regan-the-schoolgirl-from-Manchester could not have inserted herself in their past memories, either), but other than that, no problem here, and it's worth noting that Regan turns out to me not deliberately malicious and teachable about the need of humans to keep their pain and their real memories, thanks.
Now you know... by Tim Leng: finally, the audio uses its chance to combine characters the tv show didn't already and gives this adventure to Tanya and Matteusz, who end up investigating a mystery dating back to the 1960s. (No, not the sudden disappearance of Susan, Barbara and Ian from Coal HIll, though Tanya comes across that as well in her research. ;) ). The plot here is pretty Buffy-esque - think Invisible Girl, from BTVS's first season -, with the key to the mystery being a bullied student who fell through a rift and returned with new powers to go after bullies -, but the charm lies in the Tanya & Matteusz interaction, precisely because the tv show never got around to it. At one point in order to draw the antagonist out Tanya decides they should pretend to bully another, and I was preparing to cringe, and also regretted it because I had loved their team-up, but no, it's actually a hilarious scene because they're far too decent, and Matteusz is also too nice, to come up with credible insults.
In Remembrance by Guy Adams: AAAAAAACCCEEE! Excuse me. Not solely but also because of the guest star, this is the jewel of the collection. The title alludes to the Seventh Doctor adventure Remembrance of the Daleks, in which he and Ace (re)visited Coal Hill back in the 1980s. This Big Finish story has Quill and Charlie come across a strange middle-aged woman in Coal Hill, who turns out to be present day Ace here to take care of unfinished business, and before you can say "Dalek", they're on the run from a loose pepper pott who via a rift escaped into the future during the 1980s occasion. The Quill-Ace dialogues throughout the story are absolutely golden, and Sophie Aldred does double duty because Charlie ends up in the 1980s via time rift where he meets teenage Ace; Aldred makes the age difference credible by voice alone. But this is really Quill's episode, whether she verbally spars with Ace (and Quill's issues and chip on the shoulder meet Ace's issues, beware) or outwits a Dalek. Katherine Kelley delivers both the sarcastic one liners and the weary bitter gut wrenching reflection superbly. (Also, it begs a fanfiction follow up in terms of Ace looking her up again. Incidentally, I think this is the first take on Ace in the present - semi canonical, outside of fanfiction, I mean - I've seen which takes into account what the "Death of the Doctor" episode in The Sarah Jane Adventures revealed about what she's doing these days while also using some of the Big Finish stuff about her immediate post-Doctor life, which for this Ace is also in the past.)
Since Volume 2 ends on such a high note, I really hope that Big Finish does more with Class, ups and downs in both volumes not withstanding, and moves on to tackling the aftermath of the s1 finale, and maybe rethink their "use only two or three regulars per story" policy.
On to stories from the Doctor Who main range:
The Peterloo Massacre by Paul Magrs: Content as advertised by the title: this is a straightforward historical with the (Fifth) Doctor the only alien in it. He, Nyssa and Tegan end up by TARDIS accident in the Manchester area, in the August of 1819, which means they inevitably get involved in the upcoming darkest hour of Manchester history, as the Doctor at one point calls it, when cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000–80,000 who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation, killed 15 and critically injured 400 to 700 of them (the numbers are vague because afterrwards a lot who could hid their injuries, fearing to be punished further). It's one of those fixed points in time events the Doctor can't change, but, in a rare event for the Fifth Doctor, he gets spectacularly angry, and the way Peter Davison plays that barely restrained rage is beautiful. (Especially in the scene with the reporter who prepares the whitewashing of the local industrialists who form and finance the yeoman doing the massacring already.) It's one of those stories where human greed and callousness towards the underprivileged are the villains, which, btw, why I'm glad there is no sci fi element other than the Doctor and friends. Well done, leaves you enraged, which is as intended by the story.
The Defectors by Nicholas Briggs: both a standalone story and part of what I take it from the interviews at the end is a Big Finish event series, where later regenerations of the Doctor switch places with the first three (aka the ones whose actors are dead), for a mysterious reason to be explained at a later point. This allows later Doctors to interact with earlier Companions (provided the actors are still around), not decades (or centuries) later (except from their pov) but when their younger self actually was travelling with the people in question, and that's an interesting premise in itself. In this particular case, it's the Seventh Doctor finding himself in a Third Doctor adventure with Jo Grant, and as those eras are very different from each other, while I'm very fond of both, I pounced and aquired the audio. With one (and a half) caveats, I'd say the execution lives up to the promise.
The half caveat is that Katy Manning's voice, several decades, cigarettes and whiskeys later, inevitably has changed, but since she's playing young Jo (as opposed to old Jo as in her Sarah Jane Adventure episode), she tries to cover for it by attempting a more childlike, higher tone than her natural speaking voice, and I wish she wouldn't, because it just sounds weird. Other than that, though, her performance is fine, and it's really neat to see, well, listen to her interacting with Sylvester McCoy, whose performance makes it clear that physical appearances not withstanding, he really is a far older version of the Doctor than Three was. (And more prone to make people reveal themselves and their plans to him instead of taking the "now listen here!" approach.) Jo and the Doctor are whisked away to a mysterious island base where something very shady indeed is going on. Now this is post The Three Doctors for Jo, so she knows the Doctor has other faces, but she's not entirely sure at first whether or not this new arrival is one of them, which btw for any Companion who has to deal with the Master on a regular basis is just sensible distrust, I'd say. Anyway, it means she has to navigate finding out what the hell is going on with the supposed military based with figuring out how she feels about this new version of the Doctor and whether it is indeed the Doctor, whilch makes this at times almost feel like a post regeneration story (and a good one).
It's also, as advertised, a Pertwee story with a McCoy twist, and not just in the sense of the regenerations having changed place. To no one's big surprise there are aliens involved (who are controlling the military people on the island and need the Doctor to help finish repairing their crashed space ship), but whereas in the Third Doctor era this would have been a straightforward invasion story, in this case it turns out that the aliens themselves were originally captured by the British military (in 1951), some of them killed, some of them dissected and experimented on (i.e. tortured) before they figured out a way to turn the table on the humans and control them. They're also not interested in invading the planet, they just want to leave again. (But they did mind control the entire island population, military and civilians alike, and the nature of the control means halting the aging process, which means that once they withdraw, every one either ages up decades or just plain dies, depending on the original age in 1951.) Since Jo (before all this became clear) has managed to contact Mike Yates who intends to come in with guns blazing, the possible outcomes get increasingly darker. I feel the Doctor's choice of whom to support feels right especially for this incarnation, but alas then my second and full caveat happens, as Nicholas Briggs' script throws in yet another twist. On the one hand, I'm all for Companions getting to be active throughout, and this last twist ensures the final decision lies with Jo, and what she does is not out of character for her in this particular kind of situation, but on the other, the episode only runs on for two or so minutes after she does what she does, and what she does is enormous enough that I feel if that's where the episode wanted to go, it should have explored the effect on her instead of just handwaving. So all in all, I'd have preferred it if the last twist didn't happen. It would still have made for a morally ambigous ending.
Death and the Queen by James Goss: basically, a Ruritanian adventure for the Tenth Doctor and Donna. This one's plot and premise doesn't bear much examining and thinking about (what do the villains get out of their evil scheme that they wouldn't have gotten in far simpler ways? did we have to do a story where Donna gets conned by a bridegroom, again? etc.), but the charm is in the execution, no pun intended, and the Tate 'n Tennant rapport is as strong and sparkling as ever. Also, extra bonus for, after milking the "conned into marrying a prince with dreadful relations and hidden motives" fantasy for what it's worth, the story ends concluding that the most sensible thing to do is to abolish the monarchy entirely and make a republic out of