Doctor Who Audios
Apr. 12th, 2008 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakHaving finished the day's work and while waiting for certain tv episode, it's as good a time as any to get some more reviews written down. I've enjoyed most of the audio plays Big Finish produces for Doctor Who (all eras), and the three I recently acquired were no exception. They were all different from each other, featuring different incarnations of the Doctor, and all in their way used the audio format for doing things the tv show couldn't or wouldn't.
After hearing praise for audio Companion Evelyn Smythe in general and this introduction adventure of her in particular, I finally managed get my hands on The Marian Conspiracy, and found the praise fully justified. Rather boringly, I also find myself agreeing with the idea that the Sixth Doctor comes off far better on audio with an excellent script and the right Companion. Pairing him with a 55-years-old opinionated historian who treats him like an uppity student if he blusters makes all the difference between coming across as a bully and coming across as a cranky yet deeply humane man fond of verbal sparring. Also, as someone who knows the Tudor period fairly well, it was a great delight to see a script that gets it right, and doesn't take the easy way out into clichés. And uses a historical figure for some neat character exploration of the Doctor. Setting the adventure during the reign of Mary, it could have simply been an evil Catholics/brave Protestants cliché. Instead, the key scene has the Doctor ponder the paradox of Mary - a woman who is kind in personal interaction, was willing to die for her beliefs in the previous reign, and seriously, honestly believes she needs to save her subjects' souls. And is willing to kill them for that belief. And then he makes the unexpected yet illuminating comparison to himself, asking how much of a difference good intention and the belief you're acting for the greater good make if you for that belief have led people to their deaths, got peaceful people to take up arms, destroyed invidual lives. And the script is good enough not to give a pat answer to that question, either via another character or via the Doctor himself, but to let it stand.
Colin Baker is in fine form, Maggie Stables who plays Evelyn is superb, and as I said, the script has a great sense of period. Tv being what it is, we'll never see a 55-years old woman in a cardigan and with a fondness for chocolate as a companion on the screen (at least not for longer than an episode), and that's shame, because the dynamic with the Doctor that develops here is truly wonderful.
Sympathy for the Devil is one of the "What If?" audio adventures that present AUs developing from one particular change in canon; in other words, just the concept fanfiction adores. In this case, the change is the Third Doctor not arriving at an unspecified point in the early 70s after being exiled and forced to regenerate from the Second, but, by accident, in 1997. (Sidenote: I wasn't entirely clear whether the Doctor as presented here was meant to be genuine Three, just with David Warner replacing the late Jon Pertwee, or another version. The script gives him some Pertwee-isms, like "...now listen to me!", "now look here" or the habit of attaching "...,you know" at the end of a sentence, but since this is an AU anyway, it could also be a different regeneration.) This makes for a slightly different world he arrives in, and here I have to congratulate the choices Jonathan Clements' script makes. Because if the world had been entirely lost, then you'd say humans really aren't capable of saving themselves without the Doctor, which is too hero-worshipping and too much the Great Man view of history, but if there would be no difference at all, then your main character and his efforts look somewhat superfluous. As it is, Sympathy for the Devil postulates that the Brigadier and UNIT have managed to deal with the Autons and the various other threats without the Doctor, but at a much, much higher body count (in one case, they had no choice but to use a nuke in the London area), and one of the fallouts is that the Brigadier is currently a bitter and retired man living in Hongkong.
Which is where the action of the story takes place, during the last day before the Chinese take-over. The script uses various tropes from Third Doctor adventures - notably Mind of Evil, but also Claws of Axos and gives them a new twist. It isn't hard to guess that the Master will be around (especially if you've heard a scientist named Keller became Ke Le when defecting to the Chinese with his mind-controlling tech); turns out Alt!Master (played by Sam Kisgart) got stuck on Earth due to TARDIS loss in the early 70s and has been waiting for the Doctor to show up ever since, using his time for evil, of course. The script has a great time playing with expectations - and genuinely thinking through its "what ifs", because the Brigadier, who only met the Second Doctor two times, does of course not yet have the intimate friendship with him the Third Doctor years in "our" universe produced and tries to stay out of hero-ing anyway. (Naturally, this does not stick.) He gets his own foil and nemesis in the form of his successor at UNIT, Colonel Brimmincombe-Wood (played by a certain David Tennant), who is not evil, just obnoxious, and then turns out to be far more competent than we first thought, just different from the Brig. There is a great sequence where we cut between Time Lord bickering and UNIT (ex-)leaders bickering. There is Buddhism as a key to world-saving as in the 70s, a new explanation for nuclear tests, and a dig of sorts at something that I mentioned in my review of Mind of Evil (where we got a favourable Mao reference, thus proving the scriptwriter, like many a contemporary, had a rosy-eyed view of the Chairman in 1972); during said Time Lord bickering, the Master gets in a true burn when he, in reply to the Doctor's claim of being anti-tyrants, says "well, Mao was really complimentary about you", leaving the Doctor to say defensively "when I knew him he was a librarian!".
One can quibble about individual details, but all in all it's a very well plotted AU, and how can one not love a story where the Brig ends up as the Doctor's Companion?
Master was written by Joseph Lidster, who has since gone on to write for tv and this season contributed what was one of my favourite Torchwood episodes, A Day in the Death. It was meant as an exploration of one of DW's iconic villains, similarly to another Big Finish production, Davros, and the result fascinatingly manages to simultanously fail and succeed. And, since this was produced in 2003, to pre-empt several ideas that since have shown up on New Who.
What I regard as failure: as an offered explanation of why the Master is how he is, and an exploration of what makes him tick, it doesn't really convince. Which is partly due to the chosen format. On the other hand, as an exploration of the whys and wherefores of the Doctor's behaviour vis a vis the Master, it offers some fascinating stuff.
It makes for an interesting compare/contrast to the New Who episode Utopia, because here, too, the Master spends the majority of the story in a state of amnesia, being a kindly old man, intent on saving lives and having dedicated his past remembered existence (in this case, only ten years) to the public welfare. But the reason for it is quite different, and so is the fallout once the amnesia stops. This being a Seventh Doctor story, we're in allegorical territory, complete with mythic figures and anthromorphic personifications. It's also an exercise in layered storytelling, as we start with the Doctor telling this story to someone else and warning, repeatedly, not to take everything he says for granted. (And within the story, the Doctor at a crucial point also tells a story.) Framing narration aside, we open with Dr. John Smith, dedicated surgeon living in a city that has modelled itself on Edwardian society (but is on another planet), greeting his dear friends, the Schaefers, as they come to dinner. Among other things, this is a haunted house story, a murder mystery (which isn't that hard to figure out if you know your murder mysteries and thus know the obvious red herring can't be the killer), and a morality play. Complete with mysterious stranger showing up at the end of the first act. (And here the audio is teasing us by drawing out the point where the man utters his first clear words and thus we know that it's Sylvester McCoy, though really, it had to be the Doctor - who else?) What happened, apparantly is that the Doctor made a deal with Death herself. (Yes, Death shows up in - female - person. Also in disguise at first. Going by the debates a recent Death appearance has caused, I imagine this alone made it a love it or hate it case for DW fans, with the whole sci fi versus fantasy thing.) The Master would get ten years living without the burden of his past, a new chance at life, and in return, the Doctor had to promise to kill the Master. Which of course he refuses to do now. Lots of mind games by Death ensue.
As I said, this is among other things an exercise in storytelling, and one of the stories we get from the Doctor addresses a favourite subject of fannish speculation - what happened between the Doctor and the Master back on Gallifrey, and by the way, Sylvester McCoy does a great job with that little monologue about two boys living in "a land far, far away" who dream of leaving their society full of rules and confinement and explore the universe, and are best friends until one day, another boy who always bullies them does that once too often, holding one them under the water, and rage rises in the other to the point where he kills the bully with a stone. They could have claimed self defense, but they were convinced that if the death came to light, they would never be allowed to leave the planet, and so they burned the body, holding hands as they watched the pyre they made. And that changed everything. The second version of the story doesn't come until the climactic scene, which, in short form, goes something like this, after a traumatic event has happened that causes the old Master-personality to break through the John Smith one:
Master: I don't believe it. Ten years as a goodie two shoes. This is just typical for you, Doctor.
Death: My servant is back!
Master: Think again. I'm not after death, I'm after power and knowledge. I just don't care who dies so I get it.
Doctor: But I do, so could you please stick with the career change?
Master: No. By the way, why did you never kill me no matter how often you had the chance?
Doctor: ...because I feel guilty for deserting you?
Death: Ah, but this where we get the big surprise, boys. Doctor, I shall now give you back the memory you've always surpressed. You were the one who killed the bully, not the Master. And after that, I came to you in your dreams and showed you just how ghastly your future life as my Champion would be, and you went Winston Smith and said do it to him instead. Your entire life-saving career is based on that act of betrayal of your best friend!
Doctor: *has breakdown as he realizes this is indeed the true memory*
Master:...
Doctor: ...
and the next bit I must quote verbatim as I remember it because I can't do it flippantly. It's played out so movingly that just for this scene, I can lay my principle "this whole "Death's champion" talk does not explain a supervillain career, Lidster!" objection aside. The Master asks whether if Death hadn't come between them, they'd still be friends.
Doctor *in maximum self-loathing mode*: I can't think why you would want to be my friend.
Master: We were children. It was one act.
Doctor: There is no one I would rather be friends with.
At which point Death had enough of Time Lord reunions and breaks them up again by separating them, and the whole story wraps up with her getting John Smith in a situation where he is willing to commit a murder, thus forfeiting his protection against her and becoming entirely consumed again by the Master persona, and the Doctor vowing that one day, "I'll save you, old friend."
Now obviously, the audios are only canon if you want them to be. And as I said, despite some debates of what makes people commit evil acts between the various dramatis personae (especially the Doctor and "John Smith" pre-amnesia breakthrough, but at a point where John Smith fears he might be the killer in the local murder mystery because he can't remember his past and thus doesn't know whether or not he'd be capable of it), settling it with "he became Death's champion after one transferred memory" is somewhat lame if you think about it. But as a drama, as long as you listen, it really works. The guest characters, especially Philip Madoc as Victor Schaeffer, are good; Geoffrey Beevers - who did play the Master on screen, between Delgado and Ainley - is good though not as good as Derek Jacobi in pulling off a complete transformation in a single scene, and Sylvester McCoy is outstanding, whether he bonds with Smith (having to choose another pseudonym for himself this time), smoothly evades questions with the guest characters, fences with Death or guilts, which he does throughout the story in subtle ways and then of course has the big breakdown scene. This being a very meta kind of play, we also get Death taunting him about no longer playing the spoons and mangling his metaphors because he's too busy "destroying planets and cleaning up the mess you made by not being able to go through with it the first time around", which sums up the Seventh Doctor's transformation during his run, from the start in a clown persona to the dark state that allowed him to cooly trick Davros and the Daleks into blowing up Skaro. And of course her gloating that she always knew he wouldn't be able to kill the Master and that she'll make him pay for the rest of his existence for this works ever so well with New Who canon, as does the saving-the-Master-idea (which Three arguably expresses at the end of The Daemons but no later incarnation until Ten).
After hearing praise for audio Companion Evelyn Smythe in general and this introduction adventure of her in particular, I finally managed get my hands on The Marian Conspiracy, and found the praise fully justified. Rather boringly, I also find myself agreeing with the idea that the Sixth Doctor comes off far better on audio with an excellent script and the right Companion. Pairing him with a 55-years-old opinionated historian who treats him like an uppity student if he blusters makes all the difference between coming across as a bully and coming across as a cranky yet deeply humane man fond of verbal sparring. Also, as someone who knows the Tudor period fairly well, it was a great delight to see a script that gets it right, and doesn't take the easy way out into clichés. And uses a historical figure for some neat character exploration of the Doctor. Setting the adventure during the reign of Mary, it could have simply been an evil Catholics/brave Protestants cliché. Instead, the key scene has the Doctor ponder the paradox of Mary - a woman who is kind in personal interaction, was willing to die for her beliefs in the previous reign, and seriously, honestly believes she needs to save her subjects' souls. And is willing to kill them for that belief. And then he makes the unexpected yet illuminating comparison to himself, asking how much of a difference good intention and the belief you're acting for the greater good make if you for that belief have led people to their deaths, got peaceful people to take up arms, destroyed invidual lives. And the script is good enough not to give a pat answer to that question, either via another character or via the Doctor himself, but to let it stand.
Colin Baker is in fine form, Maggie Stables who plays Evelyn is superb, and as I said, the script has a great sense of period. Tv being what it is, we'll never see a 55-years old woman in a cardigan and with a fondness for chocolate as a companion on the screen (at least not for longer than an episode), and that's shame, because the dynamic with the Doctor that develops here is truly wonderful.
Sympathy for the Devil is one of the "What If?" audio adventures that present AUs developing from one particular change in canon; in other words, just the concept fanfiction adores. In this case, the change is the Third Doctor not arriving at an unspecified point in the early 70s after being exiled and forced to regenerate from the Second, but, by accident, in 1997. (Sidenote: I wasn't entirely clear whether the Doctor as presented here was meant to be genuine Three, just with David Warner replacing the late Jon Pertwee, or another version. The script gives him some Pertwee-isms, like "...now listen to me!", "now look here" or the habit of attaching "...,you know" at the end of a sentence, but since this is an AU anyway, it could also be a different regeneration.) This makes for a slightly different world he arrives in, and here I have to congratulate the choices Jonathan Clements' script makes. Because if the world had been entirely lost, then you'd say humans really aren't capable of saving themselves without the Doctor, which is too hero-worshipping and too much the Great Man view of history, but if there would be no difference at all, then your main character and his efforts look somewhat superfluous. As it is, Sympathy for the Devil postulates that the Brigadier and UNIT have managed to deal with the Autons and the various other threats without the Doctor, but at a much, much higher body count (in one case, they had no choice but to use a nuke in the London area), and one of the fallouts is that the Brigadier is currently a bitter and retired man living in Hongkong.
Which is where the action of the story takes place, during the last day before the Chinese take-over. The script uses various tropes from Third Doctor adventures - notably Mind of Evil, but also Claws of Axos and gives them a new twist. It isn't hard to guess that the Master will be around (especially if you've heard a scientist named Keller became Ke Le when defecting to the Chinese with his mind-controlling tech); turns out Alt!Master (played by Sam Kisgart) got stuck on Earth due to TARDIS loss in the early 70s and has been waiting for the Doctor to show up ever since, using his time for evil, of course. The script has a great time playing with expectations - and genuinely thinking through its "what ifs", because the Brigadier, who only met the Second Doctor two times, does of course not yet have the intimate friendship with him the Third Doctor years in "our" universe produced and tries to stay out of hero-ing anyway. (Naturally, this does not stick.) He gets his own foil and nemesis in the form of his successor at UNIT, Colonel Brimmincombe-Wood (played by a certain David Tennant), who is not evil, just obnoxious, and then turns out to be far more competent than we first thought, just different from the Brig. There is a great sequence where we cut between Time Lord bickering and UNIT (ex-)leaders bickering. There is Buddhism as a key to world-saving as in the 70s, a new explanation for nuclear tests, and a dig of sorts at something that I mentioned in my review of Mind of Evil (where we got a favourable Mao reference, thus proving the scriptwriter, like many a contemporary, had a rosy-eyed view of the Chairman in 1972); during said Time Lord bickering, the Master gets in a true burn when he, in reply to the Doctor's claim of being anti-tyrants, says "well, Mao was really complimentary about you", leaving the Doctor to say defensively "when I knew him he was a librarian!".
One can quibble about individual details, but all in all it's a very well plotted AU, and how can one not love a story where the Brig ends up as the Doctor's Companion?
Master was written by Joseph Lidster, who has since gone on to write for tv and this season contributed what was one of my favourite Torchwood episodes, A Day in the Death. It was meant as an exploration of one of DW's iconic villains, similarly to another Big Finish production, Davros, and the result fascinatingly manages to simultanously fail and succeed. And, since this was produced in 2003, to pre-empt several ideas that since have shown up on New Who.
What I regard as failure: as an offered explanation of why the Master is how he is, and an exploration of what makes him tick, it doesn't really convince. Which is partly due to the chosen format. On the other hand, as an exploration of the whys and wherefores of the Doctor's behaviour vis a vis the Master, it offers some fascinating stuff.
It makes for an interesting compare/contrast to the New Who episode Utopia, because here, too, the Master spends the majority of the story in a state of amnesia, being a kindly old man, intent on saving lives and having dedicated his past remembered existence (in this case, only ten years) to the public welfare. But the reason for it is quite different, and so is the fallout once the amnesia stops. This being a Seventh Doctor story, we're in allegorical territory, complete with mythic figures and anthromorphic personifications. It's also an exercise in layered storytelling, as we start with the Doctor telling this story to someone else and warning, repeatedly, not to take everything he says for granted. (And within the story, the Doctor at a crucial point also tells a story.) Framing narration aside, we open with Dr. John Smith, dedicated surgeon living in a city that has modelled itself on Edwardian society (but is on another planet), greeting his dear friends, the Schaefers, as they come to dinner. Among other things, this is a haunted house story, a murder mystery (which isn't that hard to figure out if you know your murder mysteries and thus know the obvious red herring can't be the killer), and a morality play. Complete with mysterious stranger showing up at the end of the first act. (And here the audio is teasing us by drawing out the point where the man utters his first clear words and thus we know that it's Sylvester McCoy, though really, it had to be the Doctor - who else?) What happened, apparantly is that the Doctor made a deal with Death herself. (Yes, Death shows up in - female - person. Also in disguise at first. Going by the debates a recent Death appearance has caused, I imagine this alone made it a love it or hate it case for DW fans, with the whole sci fi versus fantasy thing.) The Master would get ten years living without the burden of his past, a new chance at life, and in return, the Doctor had to promise to kill the Master. Which of course he refuses to do now. Lots of mind games by Death ensue.
As I said, this is among other things an exercise in storytelling, and one of the stories we get from the Doctor addresses a favourite subject of fannish speculation - what happened between the Doctor and the Master back on Gallifrey, and by the way, Sylvester McCoy does a great job with that little monologue about two boys living in "a land far, far away" who dream of leaving their society full of rules and confinement and explore the universe, and are best friends until one day, another boy who always bullies them does that once too often, holding one them under the water, and rage rises in the other to the point where he kills the bully with a stone. They could have claimed self defense, but they were convinced that if the death came to light, they would never be allowed to leave the planet, and so they burned the body, holding hands as they watched the pyre they made. And that changed everything. The second version of the story doesn't come until the climactic scene, which, in short form, goes something like this, after a traumatic event has happened that causes the old Master-personality to break through the John Smith one:
Master: I don't believe it. Ten years as a goodie two shoes. This is just typical for you, Doctor.
Death: My servant is back!
Master: Think again. I'm not after death, I'm after power and knowledge. I just don't care who dies so I get it.
Doctor: But I do, so could you please stick with the career change?
Master: No. By the way, why did you never kill me no matter how often you had the chance?
Doctor: ...because I feel guilty for deserting you?
Death: Ah, but this where we get the big surprise, boys. Doctor, I shall now give you back the memory you've always surpressed. You were the one who killed the bully, not the Master. And after that, I came to you in your dreams and showed you just how ghastly your future life as my Champion would be, and you went Winston Smith and said do it to him instead. Your entire life-saving career is based on that act of betrayal of your best friend!
Doctor: *has breakdown as he realizes this is indeed the true memory*
Master:...
Doctor: ...
and the next bit I must quote verbatim as I remember it because I can't do it flippantly. It's played out so movingly that just for this scene, I can lay my principle "this whole "Death's champion" talk does not explain a supervillain career, Lidster!" objection aside. The Master asks whether if Death hadn't come between them, they'd still be friends.
Doctor *in maximum self-loathing mode*: I can't think why you would want to be my friend.
Master: We were children. It was one act.
Doctor: There is no one I would rather be friends with.
At which point Death had enough of Time Lord reunions and breaks them up again by separating them, and the whole story wraps up with her getting John Smith in a situation where he is willing to commit a murder, thus forfeiting his protection against her and becoming entirely consumed again by the Master persona, and the Doctor vowing that one day, "I'll save you, old friend."
Now obviously, the audios are only canon if you want them to be. And as I said, despite some debates of what makes people commit evil acts between the various dramatis personae (especially the Doctor and "John Smith" pre-amnesia breakthrough, but at a point where John Smith fears he might be the killer in the local murder mystery because he can't remember his past and thus doesn't know whether or not he'd be capable of it), settling it with "he became Death's champion after one transferred memory" is somewhat lame if you think about it. But as a drama, as long as you listen, it really works. The guest characters, especially Philip Madoc as Victor Schaeffer, are good; Geoffrey Beevers - who did play the Master on screen, between Delgado and Ainley - is good though not as good as Derek Jacobi in pulling off a complete transformation in a single scene, and Sylvester McCoy is outstanding, whether he bonds with Smith (having to choose another pseudonym for himself this time), smoothly evades questions with the guest characters, fences with Death or guilts, which he does throughout the story in subtle ways and then of course has the big breakdown scene. This being a very meta kind of play, we also get Death taunting him about no longer playing the spoons and mangling his metaphors because he's too busy "destroying planets and cleaning up the mess you made by not being able to go through with it the first time around", which sums up the Seventh Doctor's transformation during his run, from the start in a clown persona to the dark state that allowed him to cooly trick Davros and the Daleks into blowing up Skaro. And of course her gloating that she always knew he wouldn't be able to kill the Master and that she'll make him pay for the rest of his existence for this works ever so well with New Who canon, as does the saving-the-Master-idea (which Three arguably expresses at the end of The Daemons but no later incarnation until Ten).
