I only rarely bring up politics - this is supposed to be my fannish journal - but let's just say this week had started really badly in real life terms (not that it was unexpected, but the European Election results were really as terrible as feared), so I have to say it was oddly charming and relieving to be reminded of positive European interaction again when returning to Munich on Friday. Because: never have I ever seen and heard this many Scots outside of Scotland. Friday was the first game of the EM, Germany versus Scotland, which meant lots and lots of Scots. In t-shirts and kilts. And a punning headline: "Schotten rocken München" (Scots rock Munich, only the German word for "skirt" is "Rock", so it's a pun on the kilts as well.) The Scots were cheerful and fun, and seemed to be universally embraced, not that there also wasn't much joy when Germany won the football match. None of which makes up for the election results, obviously, but even for not football fans like myself, it caused smiles and cheer. Thank you, Scots!

On to Doctor Who. In several incarnations. Last weekend there was a reduced prices sale at Big Finish for historicals, so in honour of the late William Russell I went and bought a couple of First Doctor era historicals narrated (mostly) by William Russell/Ian Chesterton. There's were:

Transit of Venus: Set after The Sensorites. Team TARDIS gets split up, with the Doctor and Ian ending up with Captain James Cook on the Endeavour while Susan, Barbara and the TARDIS appear to have had a watery fate. (Obviously not.) Ian is increasingly convinced that the ship's scientist and botany fan extraordinary, Joseph Banks, is behaving weirdly and Up To No Good. This story (written by Jacqueline Raynor) went for a bit of an Edgar Allen Poe flair where the question is whether our narrator or everyone around him is bonkers, with the mystery resolved in a Whovian way. (Sidenote: given I knew Joseph Banks would have to go on and became the grand old man of expedition financing in his later years, I was a bit less inclined to believe that Ian had to be right than I otherwise would have been.) Cook, interestingly enough, is hardly in it (though Russell does a Yorkshire accent for him when he does appear), but there is a great and silent scene between Ian and the Doctor which captures this early stage of their relationship very well.

The Fires of Cadiz (by Marc Platt): This time, our foursome have ended up in pre-Armada launching Spain, and William Russell shares narrator duties with Carol Ann Ford as Susan. I was a bit disappointed by the first half beause the opening monologue by Ian looking back seemed to foreshadow that would go for something more complicated than Evil Catholic Spaniards versus Heroic Protestant Brits, and then we promptly went into a story that seemed to tick all the cliché boxes - Spanish Inquisition, going from accusation to instant torture and execution (this is not how these trials worked!), fanatic population, with Ian's "I had to remind myself that in England, Catholics were persecuted in this era" as the sole nod outside the cliché. True, there were non-evil Spaniards included, too - the Morisco Esteban whom Ian befriended and defended, and the couple where Barbara, Susan and the Doctor found shelter with, Catalina and Miguel -, but still, I was somewhat discontent.... and then we had the grand rescue-from-the-autodafé already mid story, with the second half indeed devoted to making things more complicated, not solely but also by showing the attack of Ian's hero Sir Francis Drake from the pov of the terrified Spanish population of Cadiz. Plus this story also checked (in the most agreeable way) a lot of First Doctor era boxes: Ian is heroic and compassionate, Barbara and the Doctor clash and she gives him a What's What speech, the Doctor pulls off a fun impersonation and a madcap rescue, and it's a historical without any alien involvement, and unlike alas too many early serials gives Susan lots to do instead of letting her twist her ankle again. Oh, and if you haven't figured out who Don Miguel is by the time he makes the Doctor ride on a mule named Sancho, you really don't know anything about the era. ;)

The Library of Alexandria: My favourite of the three! (Written by Simon Guerrier, whom I knew from the Cromwell + Seventh Doctor, Hex and Ace story The Settlement): Narrated by Russell again, and by Susan Franklyn as Hypatia. For verily, our heroes decide to take a break from adventuring and stay for a weeks when the TARDIS arrives in late antiquity Alexandria. Though I have to say, given Hypatia's terrible (historical) ending, I was wondering how the story would work around that, and the answer is, it's not a question because Hypatia doesn't die in this story, which is set years before her death and shows her in her prime. (It does, however, feature the burning of the Library of Alexandria.) One thing I very much appreciated in all three serials was that the fact Ian was originally a science teacher is a constant part of his characterisation, and here he happily geeks out at the chance to chat with Hypatia of Alexandria, while Barbara is in history teacher bliss at the chance to be in the famous library. Guerrier's story also does a great job of showing Hypatia's brilliance by the way she deduces various things about the Doctor and the menaces du jour, and by the end I was sad continuity and history didn't allow for her to join Team TARDIS and escape her gruesome fate a few years later. (I mean, given that Big Finish gave the Fifth Doctor lots and lots of adventures with Peri and Eminem between his last but one and his last tv adventure, I suppose she could have, but the First Doctor wasn't able to steer the TARDIS yet and couldn't have brought her back in time, not to mention that bringing a friend back to be torn apart by a mob is something I have a hard time seeing even the First Doctor doing...) Anyway, Russell again does a great job both narrating as old Ian looking back and speaking the younger Ian within the story, and it's a story I certainly will listen to again.

And now for this week's tv episode.

( Speaking of Ancient Egypt.... )

Started but won't finish: the latest miniseries take Great Expectations, starring Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham. It's one of those productions which in theory sound good - colourblind cast, scriptwriter coming from successful original show (Steven Knight) - and in practice is just a mess. Also one that's mostly filmed in grey, both the marshes that form the landscape of the early episodes and London (the end of the first London based episode is where I stopped). Estella's dresses are sometimes the only dots of colour.

( Great Expectations: The G.R.R. Martin Version ) See, Dickens is anything but subtle with his own moral lessons, but he knew how to interweave them with compelling characters and a good yarn. Removing the vitality of the characters in favour of "here are the evils of 19th century British society in human form" in overdrive does this adaption no favours, and there's only to much leisure time I have, so, goodbye, tv series (despite Colman being excellent as the creepiest, most predatory of all Havishams).

Whereas what I go through at quick pace because it's compellingly, emphatically and wittily told while being no less critical of the society it describes (and ours): A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, by Emma Southon. As with Southon's biography of Agrippina the Younger, I consumed it in audio form, not least because that struck me as eminently suited to her style of writing, which is very conversational . This book basically uses murder in its many many aspects as a read thread through several centuries of Roman history (from the 2nd century BC to the end of the Antonine period, to be precise - Southon stops before the Third Century Crisis) to provide us with a social history of Rome. Individual chapters: "Murder on the Senate Floor", "Murder in Roman Law", "Murder in the Family", "Murder in Marriage", "Murder in the Slave State", "Murder by Magic", "Murder in the Imperial House", "Murdering an Emperor", "Judicial Murder". Behind those chapter titles hides a clever, somewhat surprising and incredibly effective structure, as Southon starts her book with the most prominent asassination (Caesar), then goes back to the Gracchi, and forward again, instead of building up to it. The reason why this is effective is because it's not actually the prominent murders among the elite that lie at the heart of the book, but the wives getting killed by their husbands who weren't part of a ruling family, the every day violence against slaves on whose backs the entire system was built, and the gruesome executions (be they in the arena or by cruxifiction) that remind one all over again what inspired Collins' Hunger Games.

(Of course, the written sources mostly were written by and focused on the Senatorial class, but for example tombstones manage to provide glimpses of other stories, like the couple of Imperial slaves who managed to get permission to have a tombstone for their infant baby son, or the freedman mourning his wife who like him started out as a slave.)

The big difference to the Dickens adaption cited above is that while Southon is no less dedicated to exposing the baked in injustices (seedy underbelly would be the wrong term, really, because there was nothing hidden about, not least because it wouldn't have occured to the Romans there was something to hide) of the Roman society, she does so while keeping everyone human, and sketches out the legal and belief systems for context really well. The generally flippant narrative tone comes with deep empathy that manages to keep it real that everyone killed was a person in their own right with a story and feelings, not a moral lesson or a joke.

Now, some of her takes I could argue with. (I mean, I agree that whether you're categorized as a good or a bad Emperor by historians who were senators definitely had to do with whether you managed to provide the Senators of your own time with the illusion that you cared about their opinion, or rubbed their noses into the fact they had no real power, but I wouldn't have chosen Caligula vs Hadrian to illustrate that point, because Hadrian, while counted among the Five Good Emperors by tradition, was very much disliked by the Senate of his time and had a very mixed press among historians.) And there's one big glaring mistake early on - Cicero didn't execute Catiline without a trial, he did this with several of Catiline's followers. Catiline himself died in battle against the forces led by Cicero's fellow consul Antonius Hybrida. (See also Sallustius for describing his last stand.) And Emma Southon doesn't just make this mistake once, she's referencing it two or three times. (Because these executions without a trial came back to bite Cicero big time, and played their part in the continuing decline of the Republic. But, again, Catiline himself wasn't among the executed.) (After this mistake, I wondered whether there might be others I missed, but as far as I could tell, no.)

None of these nitpicks take away from how immensely readable (listenable?), enjoyable and moving I found this book, though. And she may have swayed me on a couple of topics. (The question as to whether or not Livia arranged anyone's death, to be precise.) Plus, I really need to get around to reading Apuleius one of those days.

I had something of a minority experience for people my age and younger with this in that I read the book first and saw the James Dean movie years later, on tv, and felt very much let down by it. I mean, sure, I could see why it made James Dean a star, but it only covered the last fourth of the book, and even there considerable departed from the characterisations, not to mention it left out my favourite character, Lee the Chinese-American, and the key debate between hiim, Adam Trask and Samuel Hamilton that presents the core of the book and sets up the ending entirely. This said: though I had liked the (700 plus pages) novel, I didn't love it, which means I haven't read it again since my teenage years.

Now, last year, an eight part audio adaption (in German, though American musician Stephanie Niles was hired to do the music and write a new song for each of the parts in addition to the one she already wrote inspired by East of Eden, Kate in the Haze of Rum, was produced for radio and now released on CD, which I've just finished listening to. It is superbly done - incidentally, for viewers of the Netflix show Dark, Maja Schöne who played Hannah in that show plays East of Eden's main villain and most important female character, Cathy/Kate/Catherine here - , does adapt the entire book, and reminded me how Steinbeck's story manages to be compelling yet also something that doesn't invite rereading (or in this case, relistening) until years have passed. And yes, it also reminded me of how much of a huge simplification and ironing out anything complicated the movie was, even taking into account it only adapted a small part of the book.

The book is an ensemble saga across several generations, framed by the life time of one of the main characters, Adam Trask - it essentially starts with his birth and ends with his death. Note that I say "one of the main characters", not "the main character", because while Adam is pretty important and his life is the red thread guiding the reader/listener through the story, he's often not the pov, and he's also usually, though not always, passive and reacting, while other characters' actions propel the story forward. In a way, he's like Dickens' David Copperfield, who once the childhood part of the story is over retreats into the position of observer more often than not. If you've osmosed anything about East of Eden, it's that it's a modern replay of the Cain and Abel story, and that's true twice over, though again, it's more complicated than that. The Cain and Abel tale plays itself out twice, with Adam and his brother Charles (three guesses as to who is who), and with Adam's sons, Caleb and Aron. Except, of course, since Adam obviously survives, there is no literal fratricide going on. Not to mention that despite what snappy summaries might tell you, "fratrernal rivalry" isn't a description that I think fits either generational C & A replay, at least not how I'd define it, because rivalry implies two parties striving for the same goal, conscious competition. In both generations, however, this striving is entirely one sided. Charles and Caleb yearn to be the best loved son of their respective fathers, but the two As, Adam and Aron, don't feel the same. Adam doesn't love his father, Cyrus, at all. (Unsurprisingly: Cyrus is an abusive jerk, a horror to his wives, the first of whom committed suicide, who also manages to be an inspired con man.) Whether Aron loves anyone or just thinks he does is up for debate, but at any rate he's incredibly uncomfortable with Adam's fussiness and plans for his future and can't wait to get away from him even before the climactic catastrophe.

What this story does have is unrequited love in several variations, only one of which is romantic, and a very few requited examples, and long term damage across the generations. It says something about just how messed up the Trasks are that the Charles and Adam fraternal relationship, which includes Charles beating Adam nearly to death once in a frenzy of jealousy when they're teenagers, as well as Adam reacting to a non-violent disagreement they have by vanishing for years when they're adults, is probably the closest thing to a mutually affectionate family relationship they have in their generation. But at the same time, the novel is anything but relentlessly grim. Partly because the subplot about the Hamilton clan, Steinbeck's own relations, is mostly upbeat and presents a breathtakingly normal family in contrast, but also because the ability of the human species to do better in bad circumstances is pretty much central.

Now, in terms of female characters, this is not a book ahead of its time. There are a few in minor supporting roles, but only two of actual importance to the story, and the second one doesn't show up until very late, in the last fourth. While or main female character is introduced by the narrator as a soulless monster from the cradle onwards. Said villainess is Cathy, who as opposed to the Trask boys comes from loving parents and whose evilness is thus completely due to nature, not nurture. ( Spoilery bullet points in the career of a female Sociopath. ) In the notes the audio adaption, the (female) adapter/producer says she struggled with this one dimensionality, but then the actress playing Cathy, Maja Schöne, asked why Mephistopheles shouldn't be a woman for a change, and the adapter also concluded that the novel doesn't stop exploring Cathy and while she does not have a redemption arc (anything but!), her story is as thoroughly told as anyone else's. In terms of biblical characters, Cathy is never Eve, she's the Serpent. (And described with a lot of snake similes.)

(I would add that the repeated emphasis on Cathy's almost childlike figure and small breasts - as an adult woman - makes the way (almost) every male keeps falling for her way more creepy in terms of the men than what Steinbeck probably intended.)

Where the novel does surprise you in terms of progressiveness is how it treats and how it uses Lee, probably its most sympathetic character, who combines smarts and empathy (proving these are anything but mutually exclusive qualities). We meet Lee as a Chinese(-American) servant hired by Adam Trask shortly after Adam and Cathy moved to California. The novel's second most intelligent and empathic character, Samuel Hamilton, quickly deduces that Lee's Pigdin English can't be real, and in their first genuine conversation Lee tells him that yes, he went to university and studies philosophy in his spare time, but he's found that unless he performs the Asian stereotype, people literally do not listen to him and take in what he says. It's Lee who does most of the raising of the twins after Cathy's departure leaves Adam in a ten years hole of depression, and Lee who in the central scene of the novel, when he, Adam and Samuel Hamilton debate the story of Cain and Abel from the bible, hones in on the different possible translation of the Hebrew term "timshel" in what God tells Cain. (That a theo-linguistic discussion is written in a rivetting way and turns out to be the turning point of the novel, making the final scene incomprehensible without it, is one reason why this novel, flaws and all, is great for me.) Lee has had as hard a life as any other character - and his birthstory is incredibly gruesome - but he became a compassionate, wise human being who proves a lie to the cliché that the "bad" characters are more interesting than the good ones. He gets as much narrative space as Charles or Samuel Hamilton and more than the twins or Abra, so you can imagine that his complete absence in the movie put teenage me in a sulk right then and there.

Speaking of theological discussions: one of the many characterisation differences between the film and the novel (and thus also the audio) is that movie!Adam is very religious - complete with prayers at the table and all - , and the implication is that part of his wife's leaving him and his distance to Cal is because of that. ( Which isn't the case in the novel and audio at all. ) Adam, who as a young man was forced into the army by his father and despite disliking the army remained there as a way to stay away from his father, and who spent several years afterwards as an unemployed hobo travelling through the country, isn't a particularly good parent (did I mention Lee does most of the actual kid raising during his decade of depression?), but he's very much not Disapproving Conservative Dad Who Only Loves One Of His Sons which is what the film offers.

Cal, otoh, also isn't the film's Blameless Woobie whose fears of his own capacity for evil are clearly utterly unfounded. ( Comparison of the novel's two Cain figures. ) Not to mention that by making Adam that much colder towards Cal and removing Lee from the characters, the film positions Abra as the first person to offer Cal any type of affection, and again, that's not the case in the book or audio. Not to mention that Abra and Aron break up for reasons unrelated to Cal in the novel, whereas the film gives Aron the obligatory "stay away from her!" scene and introduces a romantic rivalry that does not exist in the book. Like I said: everything is simplified and or altered.

Mind you: novel and audio do stake the emotional odds in Cal's favor, because Aron is possibly the least sympathetic character in a story that includes his mother the female Voldemort. He's self righteous (which none of the other "good" characters are), priggish, and crucially lacks kindness. I mean, Abel character No.1, Adam, has his share of flaws, and not just after he becomes a father. But one early key character scenes for Adam is when he, as a child, gives his stepmother - the only person nice to him in the Trask household - anonymous little presents to cheer her up a little. They work as intended, only she believes they come from her son, Charles, and that Charles pretends not to know about them because of Dad. When Adam realizes this, he doesn't correct her error, because in an awful life with Cyrus the jerk, this idea is pretty much the one thing his stepmother has. There is no corresponding scene where Aron does something selfless for another character, not as a child and not as a teen, and his wish for a virtuous life thus makes him more a character in the tradition of St. John in Jane Eyre - with morals but no heart. It's therefore difficult to feel for him in the big showdown, as opposed to feeling the temptation to borrow a phrase from Chicago and hum "he had it coming". Still: what he had coming was the reveal, not the fallout, and certainly Aron would have been capable of becoming a more empathic, humbler person in a different future.

Which fits with the central theme, the geeky discussion about what exactly God tells Cain in Genesis: "Sin is crouching at the door, but you shall overcome it." Or: "you must overcome it". Or, which is Lee's translation of "timshel" - "you may overcome it. This, argues Lee, is what makes the story: not a guarantee or a command or a promise, but a choice only the individual human being can make. And the novel making the case for this is why I consider it still worth reading.

Listened to: The Stuarts, an audio series by Mike Walker, whose Caesar!, an audio series picking various Emperors (or their opponents ) from GJC till Romulus Augustulus as its subjects I had enjoyed a lot. I also was vastly entertained by The Stuarts, but good lord, was it ever partisan and royalist to the nth degree. (Which the Roman Emperors series was not.) The Stuarts featured in it are: Mary Queen of Scots, James VI and I., Charles I, Charles II, James II, William and Mary, Anne, Bonnie Prince Charlie, his daughter Charlotte as the titular "Last Stuart". The two Charles' get a two parter each, and of course there's huge overlap in the William & Mary and Anne episodes, as well as between the Charlie & Charlotte episodes, but they do shift the focus.

The Mary Queen of Scots opening episode is that rarity: a fictionalization of her life which does not invent a meeting with Elizabeth I. In fact, Elizabeth does not show up at all, though of course she's talked about. It starts with Mary's arrival in Scotland and ends when she leaves the country, then gets a "where are they now?" type of epilogue which, since the entire episode is told from the various povs of Mary's Scottish friends and opponents, works pretty well. (And at one point has hilarious fourth wall breaking, as when Bothwell snarks about John Knox that Knox the Überpious, so ready to rant about Mary's sex life, was at the same time after a sixteen years old, and Knox in his part of the epilogue says "she was seventeen, and I married her!" Compared with the recent movie, this episode sticks a bit more closely to the facts (no Mary riding into battle), though it can't resist the bit which the 1970s movie about Mary invented and which shows up in Mary fiction ever since, that Rizzio has an affair with Darnley which later gives Darnley additional reason to hate on Rizzio. As with the rest of the episodes, Walker ruthlessly cuts down the ensemble and tries to avoid confusion (so instead of four favored ladies in waiting all called Mary, Mary has one standing in for all four with a different nickname), though I regret one thing not being mentioned, which is Darnley's mother (and maternal ancestry). This is in fact pretty crucial as to why Mary married him in the first place. In the episode, Darnley's father the Earl of Lennox gets mentioned and shows up, but what really is important is that Darnley was the son of Margaret Douglas, who was the daughter of Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII. This made him cousin to both Mary and to Elizabeth and gave him a blood claim to the English succession, though not one as good Mary's own. Meaning: Mary, who was trying to strengthen her claim to Elizabeth's throne, didn't just marry him for his pretty face. Since that marriage was arguably the biggest mistake of her life, in retrospect, one would think such a circumstance would not go unmentioned, but no, it doesn't make the cut. (Which turned out to foreshadow a great deal of mothers, daughters and sisters not making the cut. Look, Wallace, I get that royal genealogy is a headache, but in that time and age, it often was really important regarding everyone's claims on the top job.

Anyway, the episode about Mary's son James is perhaps the most sympathetic take on James VI of Scotland and VI. of England I've come across, cutting between two timelines, James the boy and young man on the one hand, and old James looking back on the other. Boy James is a terrorized-by-brutal-teachers-and-guardians clever, lonely and fearful kid whose childhood fears are also later used as an explanation for the witch persecution and whose loneliness gets temporarily soothed when he meets his first love, Esmé Stuart. (Here the episode pointedly does not mention James was 13, which when I looked it up did make me raise an eyebrow because the age does give his teachers and advisors a non-homophobic reason to be against the Esmé affair.) But inevitably they are torn apart. In the old James timeline, his last lover, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham has just returned from the ill fated Spanish trip with James' son Charles, and old James is frustrated as he sees the young guys eager for war instead of having learned from him how important peace is for a kingdom. Not to mention that Buckingham has all but traded him in for Charles. Again, culling down the number of relations makes a difference in characterisation: When young Charles is eager to intervene in the continental wars (who happen to be the early stage of the Thirty Years War, and James is against it, the episode makes it easy to entirely sympathize with James because it has James refer to "your cousin" the Protestant King of Bohemia whom Charles wants to help and James does not, wisely wanting to keep out of the continental slaughtering. As a matter of fact, it's Charles' brother-in-law, husband to his sister Elizabeth, whom Charles wants to help here, and it's his daughter James not only refuses to help but refuses later, when she's a penniless exile, to allow returning to England. By removing any reference to Elizabeth, Walker ensures the sympathy for James and his decision making remains unmuddled.

Then we move on to Charles and the English Civil War, and here's where the seies being royalist really becomes glaring. The first of the two Charles I. episodes is told from the pov of Henrietta Maria, his Queen, and the second from Charles himself on the day of his death. Now, it's not that the two parter doesn't let Charles make mistakes, which are called out as mistakes, it does. But not the type of mistake the Parliamentarians would complain about. Instead, Charles isn't ruthless enough and too damn polite and nice. His great sin which haunts him in part II (and you do get the sense the narrative agrees with him there) is not having stood by his friend Stafford and having let himself be bullied by Parliament into signing his execution warrant, the big mistake not executing the ringleaders when he still could have. The Parliamentarians are a bunch of fanatics, way too paranoid about Catholics, and are shown uniformly so. Factions, what factions? Now, Walker makes a moving story out of this, don't get me wrong. The first episode is a good take on the arranged marriage trope, as Henrietta Maria first is a lonely stranger at the English Court since Charles is still way too bff with Buckingham to let her get emotionally close, and only when Buckingham dies does she get to know Charles as a person and understand how having been the unfavorite son of his father, the sickly child expected to die, has formed him. And the second part is basically told backwards, from the royal execution to the moment Charles signs Stafford's death warrant despite having promised Stafford not to at the end of the previous episode, and while hardly high literature Walker does a good job of telling a story in this tricky format. Also, the two parter has one of history's most entertaining ambigigous shady ladies in a supporting role, to wit, Lucy Hay, Lady Carlisle, who is introduced as Buckingham's misstress and spy in new Queen Henrietta Maria's entourage, who switches sides and becomes Henrietta Maria's friend because she can see in the long term Buckingham is doomed (and is going to drop her anyway, whereas Henrietta Maria will not), and who then in part II also can see where the wind is blowing and switches sides to the Parliamentarians while becoming Pym's mistress. Lucy was one of the inspirations for Milady (de Winter) in The Three Musketeers, and she's a very colorful part in these two episodes.

The Charles II. two parter gives us young Charles, penniless exile on the continent (with flashbacks to child!Charles getting a good hard look at reality during the Stafford trial when he was sent by his father to plead for Stafford's life with Parliament) , culminating in his restoration, while part II provides us with middle aged Charles scheming and maneouvring against Parliament to esnure brotherJames' succression. After three tragic Stuarts - James VI and I is a successful King but he's also tragic because lonely - , you can telll Walker has fun with Charles the survivor and quipster, though again the rl ensemble is ruthlessly cut down. Only two of Charles' mistresses make the cut, Louise and Barbara, and of the siblings only James. No sister Minette means Louise gets her lj job of being the sole intermediary between Charles and Louis XIV for the secret treaty, while no other sisters will have consequences for the Wililam and Mary characterisation. But the most royalist element of this second two parter isn't so much parliament being drawn (again) as a bunch of irrational anti Catholic fanatics, but brother James being fussy, pedantic and too honest for his own good about his Catholicism, but otherwise well meaning with no actual negative qualities, while Charles' oldest illegtimate son Monmouth is an ungrateful complainer whose sole lines seem to consist of "I'm a Protestant and I should be King!" Basically, this is the gospel according to James, and it gets laid on even more thickly in the next part, where we hear from James, from the pov of the Churchills, no less, Jack (future Duke of Marlborough) and Sarah (future Rachel Weisz in "The Favourite") , who get entertainingly characterized as a cynical courtier power couple that James maybe an annoying fusspot but never had a mean bone in his body and basically was too naive and good natured for the job. Which, what? I mean, even if you assume that every negative word about James as King was written by the victor (i.e. William of Orange) in justification of his takeover, there's still plenty of material from his Duke of York years. The entire saga of how James' first marriage came to be, for starters. (It's still exile time when James promises Anne Hyde, daughter of brother Charles' chancellor-in-exile, he'll marry her. They have sex. She gets pregnant. They get married. By then, however, the Restoration is on the horizon, James is a royal Duke with money again instead of an exile with a title, and NOW he changes his wife, declares the marriage wasn't a marriage, and gets his male friends to claim they had sex with (by now highly pregnant) Anne so she's a whore and the kid can't be his. At which point brother Charles intervenes and lays down the law: the marriage stands, Anne is his sister-in-law. And that's the guy whom Mike Wallace has the most cynical narrators of the episode dclare "has no mean bone in his body"!

James being too nice a guy (just like Dad) for the job who only wanted to give everyone freedom of conscience, otoh, means you have to explain why both his daughters turn against him in this and the subsequent episodes. Especially since hes also written as an excellent father. (RL Events like his complaining about Mary and Willliam hanging out with exiled Monmouth, or him telling Mary her husband is cheating on her in order to estrange them? Do not happen.) This is barely justified by historical necessity, family ambition and outside influences. (I.e. William wants to be King, and the Churchills are influencing Anne.) Otoh, William is a nicely enigmatic and ambigous character (and another good take on the "arranged marriage turns real" trope). Here, the narrator is Willilam's bff and possible lover, Bentinck. (As opposed to the James I./his boyfriends affairs, which are presented as love affairs, here the narrative presents the William/Bentick relationship as a platonic friendship, with with with emotional romantic overtones. William is another lonely royal boy temporarily saved form loneliness by finding a true friend, but he's far more prickly and defensive than James I. was, and way more ruthless later on in terms of realpolitik. Otoh, he's probably the most competent ruler in this series, and despite being enigmatic does become sincerely attached to both Bentinck and Mary. Alas, Walker has removed any references to his mother having been a Stuart (the older sister of Charles and James), so his version of William can claim the throne only via his marriage to Mary, not also because he is, in fact, part of the succession as well. And we get such lines like teenage Mary complaining of having to marry a guy she's never heard of. (Teenage Mary did weep at the prospect of having to marry abroad, but she definitely had heard of her first cousin William before.) Mary starts out as a naive girl but becomes a power realist and does find happiness in her marriage. Meanwhile, Anne starts out even more naive but also solidly underestimated and eventually learns that a ruler can't afford ambitious friends. She doesn't get rid of Sarah because of Abigail Masham (who does not show up in the Anne episode), she gets rid of Sarah because Sarah overreaches herself, and so does Marlborough.

Anne is the last crowned Stuart, but there are still two more Stuarts to go. Because now the Stuarts are in exile and not in power anymore, Walker can milk the underdog romance for what it's worth, but he also provides a clear tragedy trajectory for Charles Edward Stuart, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie - he has just charisma, belief and energy and courage enough to get the most successful Jacobite uprising going and going pretty far, but he's absolutely incapable of dealing with defeat, and from the moment he flees after the battle of Culloden, he's headed for self destruction, drinking more and more, with what started out as a romance turning abusive until . BPC himself isn't the narrator, his episode is told from the pov of his more realistic younger brother Henry and of his mistress Clementina (the mother of Charlotte later). By the time the episode ends, Charlie is an alcoholic wreck and Clementina has run away with their daughter to save her life. The last episode, about Charlotte, in a way is a counter part and wrap up with the Mary Queen of Scots episode that opens it, again a story of a woman told from various friends and foes. Mary started at the top; Charlotte starts at the bottom, being no one's heir at first, her mother had to declare her illegitimate and put it in writing she wasn't married to Charlie in order to get help from her not-quite-in-laws. Through sheer dogged determination, charm and energy, Charlotte first secures an existence for herself by becoming rich Cardinal Rohan's mistress and then eventually wears her father, the alcoholic wreck in Rome, down into receiving her. Once there, she takes over his household (by then, he's been married and left by his late life wife) and brings some semblance of order and, surprisingly for both, affection back into his life, and he actually fades out on a good note, having made Charlotte his official heir, thus giving her finally the recognition she wanted all her life. But alas, she herself has only two more years to live. Charlotte is perhaps the most interesting of the female Stuarts as written in this series, with a core of impossible dreaming hidden in the veneer of a cynical adventuress, and she has a neat verbal sparring relationship going with Uncle Henry (neither trusts the other an inch but both uneasily recognize they have quite a lot in common), and so this listener found it most unfair that real life cut her down just when she had made it to the (exile) top. Then again, between the French Revolution and Napoleon, whoever claimed to the the Stuart pretender was to become pointless anyway in a radically changed world.

In conclusion: like I said, every entertaining, but in its unabashed royal partisanship something to behold, thus awakening the urge to call for the English Republic again.

jI finished listening to the audio series Caesar!, written by Mike Walker, produced by the BBC, which has it's own wiki entry, starring a great bunch of actors including Anton Lesser as Cicero, David Tennant as Caliigula, Frances Barber as Agrippina the Younger, Andrew Garfield as Hadrian's lover Antinous and Tom Hiddleston as Romulus Augustulus, the last of the Western Emperors.

Some general observations:

- Walker thankfully does not exclude the women and sometimes gives them central focus - most of all in the episode "Empress of the West", which is about Victoria, played by Barbara Flynn, but, say, the Constantine episode ("Maker of All Things") has as much Fausta (his wife) and Helena (his mother) as it has Constantine and Crispus (his son).

- the first few episodes are based on Suetonius' "Life of the Caesars", but not uncritically so, as is most noticeable in the Caligula episode, Peeling Figs for Julius, about which more in a moment; Suetonius' himself shows up in the Hadrian episode, which is decidedly not based on his writings, and the later episodes for the post-Julian/Claudian Emperors seem take their cues mostly from the Historia Augusta

- Walker has a talent for using unexpected and interesting characters from the respective eras - I'm not bad in Roman history, but I had to look up several to check whether they really existed, which yes, turns out they did, like Julia Balbilla, female poet and companion to Hadrian's wife Sabina, or whether they really had a connection to the Emperor(s) in question (yes, Galen of medical history fame worked as a doctor for Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus)

- the fiirst few episodes have the obviious elephant in the room of how to not to be I, Claudius, given that Graves also used Suetonius as a main source, which is presumably why Claudius himself never shows up, but using George Baker as Tiberius for a scene in the Caligula episode was a nice casting gag anyway

- Walker gets around the fact that a lot of the rl people, especially the women, have identiical or similar names and complicated family connections by radically cutting down the cast; for example, the Caligula episode does not mention Caligula had any other siblings than Drusilla; neither his two older brothers nor the other three sisters make the cut, and in the next epsiode, which is about Nero, where Caligula's sister Agrippina is the other main character, the fact that she was his sister and the off stage's Claudius' niece is utterly unmentioned

- unexpected Latin is unexpected: it's really startling when Constantine for the first and last time in this series switches from English to Latin at the end of his episode, and very effective for what he says (more about this in a moment)

- while the actors in general are all very good, I make an exception for Jim Sturgess as Commodus in that his three scenes are all played on the same hysteric note; I mean, the script is enough to indicate just how unstable Commodus is anyway, Sturgess, less is more, and I'm glad the episode in question actually belongs to power couple Septimius Severus (Ray Fearon) and Julia Domma (Helen McCrory).

- other than in the very first episode where the Republic still exists, not a single character, be they good, neutral or terrible, later on wants to restore the Republic, thank the Olympic Gods (it works in I, Claudius, but it does not work in all the subsequent films, books, movies, and by the time Gladiator had Marcus Aurelius of all the people express a desire of Republic restoration I was ready to scream, so THANK YOU, Walker, for not using that ploy to make the characters sympathetic to a modern audience

- all the more so because the episodes still show that the Principate might have been historically inevitable but was still way too much power for any person, including the "good" Emperors, to have.

( More detailed observations with spoilers for this series' particular interpretations of historic characters and situations below the cut. )

Favourite trivia worked in: it's a tie between people calilng young Caligula "Bootsie" (which is what the "Caligula" nickname means, and why it was given to him when he was a child with his father's army in Germania) and everyone teasing Suetonius about his books "Lives of the Famous Whores" (subsequently lost) being the one he'll always be most known for.

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:

( Spoilers meet Queen Mab, lots of aliens, and Ace )

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.

( Here it gets a bit more spoilery )


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 Ruritania 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.

Big Finish has started doing dramatizations of the Doctor Who New Adventures novels that were published in the 1990s. Both audios I aquired in Britain feature the Seventh Doctor, but admittedly that was a minor reason for picking these two instead of others; I picked "All Consuming Fire" because it co-stars Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, and I picked "Damaged Goods" because the young Doctor Who fan turned writer responsible for the original novel was one Russell T. Davies.

Thoughts:

Damaged Goods: jesuswasbatman told me that RTD hadn't wanted the novel to be republished once New Who hit the screens, which would have been an option, because he considered it too violent and dark for the kids. Having listened to the audio, which, googling a description of the novel tells me, Big Finish did brighten up a bit: no kidding. Even the Big Finish death score is still high, but that's actually the least of it (after all, both Old and New Who have the occasional episode where a lot of people die, if usually off screen - there was that time the Master wiped out a quarter of the galaxy back in Five's day, for example). It's the psychological and emotional darkness in one of the major plot threads.

Damaged Goods foreshadows a lot of later RTD, and not just because there's an estate family, last name Tyler, involved, joining Vince Tyler from Queer as Folk, Rose Tyler from DW and Johnny Tyler from The Second Coming. (I swear, if our Rusty ever writes a story set in the Stone Age, you can bet there will be a Neanderthal by the name of Ty-Ler.) The Doctor sends the TARDIS away early in the story because Reasons, and the action takes place entirely in late 80s Britain in a working class council estate. It's ensemble-tastic, and one of the major guest characters, David, is gay and after the male Companion, Chris. (The Companions, Chris and Roz, were from the New Adventures, I take it, not RTD original creations, but this is there debut in Big Finish; they're played by RTD veterans, Travis Oliver and Yasmin Bannerman.) Chris' subplot allows for a very RTD subversion of a certain cliché; at first, when Chris seems to ignore David's various code-spoken hints about "one of us", "a friend of Dorothy" etc., it seems like the conventional joke of a straight character not getting that a gay one is making a pass, but then, when David says "you really have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?", Chris impatiently retorts "yeah, I get that you're hitting on me, what I don't get is why you don't just ask instead of all this code talk" (because Chris isn't from the 1980s but from the future, where categories aren't relevant - hello, Jack). This, google tells me, in the novel leads to actual sex; Big Finish toned it down from a blow job to just snogging for the audio version (no blow job in Big Finish?), but either way, leave it to RTD to let the "Companion and guest character flirt" trope result in m/m for once.

(Otherwise, David is luckier than his novel counter part; ( spoilery fate comparisons ensue ))

The middle-aged mother figure is divided between the good one (working class Winnie Tyler) and the bad one (upper class Eva Jericho), though just how much Eva's actions are the result from her going bonkers for plot reasons and how much is character is up to debate. Because of a dialogue between Eva and her husband that reminded me a bit of the COBRA scene from Torchwood: Children of Earth where Denise Riley suggests statistics to deal with a certain selection (it's that type of class cruelty verbalized), I'm going with "character, with worst traits amplified due to plot" myself. Anyway, the Mrs. Jericho subplot is the one I was referring to when saying I get why this one isn't for children. (Otoh Eva in the audio has a moment of redemption she doesn't have in the novel, according to google.)

Other than Eva and the British class system, the antagonist/threat/menace of Damaged Goods is an ancient Gallifreyan weapon reminding us that the Time Lords had a spectacularly nasty imagination when it comes to creating these things. ( Spoilery plot detail discussed that connects this with New Who and Old Who alike ) There's also the dastardly scientist conducting experiments who shows up not just in RTD written stories, granted, but, this being an RTD story, turns out to be working for - well, that differs from the novel (which tied him to an ongoing New Adventures subplot) and the audio (which instead has him working for another Rusty creation, give you three guesses which one.) And various drug dealers, drugs being one of the plot threats mingling the late 80s estate setting with the sci fi. (The drug in the audio is called "Smile"; in the novel, it's plain old cocaine. The function is the same, plot wise.)

Doctor and Companions characterisation: this is a post-Ace, melancholic Seven, though he does indulge in a magic trick in order to get one of the kids to trust him. Roz is a classic no-nonsense sensible and compassionate RTD female; Chris comes across as a bit more reckless and less sensible, but he also does the emotional bonding with locals (and not just because David hits on him). Neither of them looks like they are in danger of making the Doctor the center of their universe. That Roz is black while Chris is white is mentioned two times, but otherwise doesn't impact the plot.

Pace: after establishing "The Quadrant", the estate in which most of the action takes place, it's pretty rapid, but with enough room for character and comedy scenes (the cultural misunderstanding between David and Jack, the somewhat tense situation between Winnie Tyler and her daughter Bev) and the pitch black dysfunctional marriage scene where Eva Jericho crosses the moral horizon and which RTD later cribbed for his Second Coming. (I checked; it seems to be identical in the original novel and the audio, not changed via adaption.)

In conclusion: worth listening to, even if it leaves you reeling, because the story does make you care about its characters.

All Consuming Fire: original novel by Andy Lane, also a later veteran, and in fact at least in the audio adaption a bit more heavy on the Sherlock Holmes side than on the Doctor Who side of crossover-dom. The first half is narrated entirely by Watson, Bernice Summerfield (the original space archaelogist with ties to the Doctor long before River Song was a blink in Stephen Moffat's eye) doesn't show up until the second half of the story, and Ace, minus two very brief cameos, not until the last 15 minutes. Before that point, it's Holmes and Watson on the case, occasionally running into a mysterious stranger defying the Sherlock Scan because Holmes can't tell anything about his origins other than the mud on his shoes not being from earth.

Within this premise, the story is, as I said, great fun. The Doctor is suitably enigmatic and twinkly for the occasion, Watson has the good taste of flirting with Bennie even if he's a bit taken aback by her forwardness, and Holmes is somewhat irritated by the Doctor but far too logical and pragmatic not to take help when it comes in useful. In a postmodern twist on Doyle's imperialist tropes, the dastardly Indian cult involved is actually a dastardly British Empire cult (and while Holmes and Watson are faithful subjects, they definitely don't agree with murder, hence aren't deterred from pursuing). And there are cats! What the Doctor does re: the cats at the end is one of my favourite things about the story.

Now I could nitpick that I seem to recall Sherlock Holmes was said to be a fictional character in the Whoverse as early as the Second Doctor's era, but who cares? Not this listener. Highly enjoyable.

Much to do in the last few days, and despite not being a football (soccer for you Americans) fan per se, I wasn't immune to all the excitement, and yes, did watch us getting the World Cup. (You couldn't sleep that night anyway, being in Munich. The celebratory noise level was incredible.) However, I also went on a Seventh Doctor audio binge, which means some thoughts accumulated. Before I get to those, a completely unrelated link: Can we say Vergil wrote fanfiction?, smart meta involving fanfiction as a genre, Vergil and the Brothers Grimm.

Now, on to Doctor Who, audio department thoughts. Big Finish does both standalone adventures and story arcs, and I listened into two of the later plus a standalone for the Seventh Doctor. Now, for some years you had the tv team of the Doctor and Ace with the audio additon of Hex, aka Thomas Hector Schofield, nurse from Liverpool, as a Team TARDIS with a dynamic in their own right; then, at the climax of the audio Gods and Monsters, something shattering happened.

( Which is spoilery, and thus behind a cut. )

One of the very early Big Finish adventures, Coldlitz, had the Doctor and Ace ending up in guess where; I still haven't listened to it because I tend to shy away from the idea of Doctor Who actually tackling the Third Reich in an unmetaphorical way (there are plenty of Space Nazis in the long history of the show, just like in most fantasy and sci fi shows). The dangers of tackiness, caricature or softening a real life horror just seemed to great. However, fannish osmosis told me that one of the villains in Coldlitz, Dr. Elizabeth Klein, who hails from a timeline where the Nazis did win WW II, ended up stranded in the "real" timeline at the end of the audio and was brought back more recently, years later, to serve as the least likely Companion ever. (Unless you count Shalka!Master, I suppose.) This made me curious enough to handwave another of my aversions, to wit: my problem with "Germany wins WWII and the Third Reich continues to rule the world" - just can't see it happen, not with Hitler on top - one reason why Stalin died in bed after decades of tyranny, undefeated, was that he knew to keep the killing within his own sphere of influence and didn't want to be seen as a world conqueror, but Hitler? never would have been satisfied with that even if you suppose technological MacGuffin X forces the Allies to go for a truce - , and not with all the infighting between his upper level paladins if you remove him from the equation. And the corruption within the party. And - anyway. Can't see it happening.

This handwaved, I was curious about Dr. Klein, how Big Finish would develop her, and what type of dynamic she would have with the Seventh Doctor. So off I went and acquired the Klein trilogy - "A Beating of Tiny Wings", "Survival of the Fittest" and "The Architects of History. This turned out to be a great decision. Nitpicks first, so I can get to why and how and praise: perfect, these stories aren't. Beating of Tiny Wings takes place during the Mau Mau Rising in Kenya, but is essentially a version of The Thing (of horror movie fame) put in its opposite surrounding, climate wise, and the Mau Mau Rising context is mostly there so there's a reason why various (white) women are trapped on a farm and can't know whether any new arrival is there to help them or kill them. At some point, it must have occured to someone in the storyediting department that if you set a story in Africa, there should maybe also be a black character. So there is one, but a) he's mostly there to make the point the British ladies (and British society in the 1950s) are racist, he gets no characterisation beyond that, minimal text and an unceremonious death. My other nitpick concerns The Architects of History: I just don't get why German characters other then Klein speak in one of those typical fake German accents when they're supposed to speak German (we're just hearing it as English because this is an English audio.) In fact, it was a HUUUUGE plot point in Survival of the Fittest that the TARDIS telepathic circuits translate whatever everyone speaks into whatever everyone else speaks for everyone. (Which is why at one point Klein mentions to the Doctor he has a stuffy Prussian accent; it cracks me up to no end that this is what the TARDIS found to equal the Scottish accent, let me tell you.) I mean, Doctor Who is just following the custom of the majority of film and tv there, and I wrote an entire entry years ago why I think fake accents (be they French, German, Spanish or whatever) when we're assuming the characters are in fact using their own language are ridiculous. I still think so, let's leave it at that.

Those were the nitpicks. Now for the good stuff. Elizabeth Klein turns out to be a great character. One of the things I was most curious about was whether or not the audios would go for a redemption story, especially since she wasn't a member of a fictional fascist organization with fictional victims, like, say, Aeryn Sun on Farscape; having real life victims still among us makes for a different emotional resonance. Speaking of real life, what happened in Germany post WWII was often referred to as "re-education", was aided by the Marshall Plan, and it wasn't until the 1960s - when the children of the WWII generation had grown up - that actual confrontation with the past happened not from outside but from inside on a massive scale. This, clearly, isn't something you can carry out in a series of audio adventures with one character.

Elizabeth Klein as the Doctor runs into her again in Kenya isn't repentant or in any way convinced she (and the ideology she was raised in) was wrong; moreover, as far she's concerned, her timeline was the right one, the current one is a travesty, and it's the Doctor's fault that she lost everyone who ever meant anything to her when her timeline blinked out of existence. However, she's also smart and wants to survive, so teaming up with the Doctor in the Thing-like situation in Kenya makes sense. That she's also a scientist who can talk to the Doctor on that level made me wonder whether the idea for Klein wasn't inspired by the Third Doctor tv story Inferno, where the Doctor temporarily experiences an alternate universe where Britain is fascist, his then companion Dr. Elizabeth Shaw is Section Leader Shaw, and the Brig is equally fascist. The start of the next audio, when we get Elizabeth Klein's backstory wherein she got recruited by the guy heading an alien artificats investigating organzation in a victorious Germany also argues for that. Anyway, one key difference to Inferno is that Three has no backstory with Section Leader Shaw and tries to win her over because he knows her alter ego. Whereas Seven and Klein have, in both senses of the word, history, which makes for mutual (deserved) distrust. This makes for great dialogue because Klein is far from stupid and thus not a ranting cliché, which means she and the Doctor keep their verbal digs at each other while working together on an equally successful rate instead of him effortlessly beating her in the verbal sparring. Also, Tracey Childs is fantastic in the role. (And thankfully not forced to fake a German accent.) When the Doctor at the end offers her a lift, it's an incredible gamble (because she still wants her original timeline back), but you can see the variety of motives on why he does it: not least continuing distrust and control issues (she's a lose element with a destructive ideology and superior technological knowledge in the 1950s), but also being intrigued by the challenge of her (she's clever and ruthless; what could she be if she does change?). And, as it turns out, a sense of responsibility, because it's due to him she's stranded in this timeline in more ways than one. He didn't just restore the original timeline in Coldlitz, no, as turns out at the start of Survival of the Fittest, where we get her backstory, he manipulated her into coming to Coldlitz to begin with, setting her up to give him the means to wipe out "her" universe.

This he did due to the series of events which created the victorious!Germany timeline to begin with; among other things, the Seventh Doctor regenerated into the Eighth not in San Francisco in a bad American movie but in Alt!Germany, though still after getting shot. Poor Eight. Or not so poor Eight, because as Johann Schmidt (hooray for a Paul McGann cameo), he then cons Elizabeth Klein who is trying to figure out how to operate the TARDIS into bringing it to 1944 to his previous self. One reason why the Doctor and Klein combination works is that this way, the dynamic isn't just "the hero and the Nazi". She does have a genuine non-petty reason to hate him because he used her to basically uncreate her entire world; at the same time, her timeline is bad news for so many people that of course one can't wish it restored. Survival of the Fittest sees the Doctor and Klein on a planet where the native population are basically intelligent giant bees called Vriil, who are in danger of getting wiped out by some greedy humans. I thought I knew where this was going: Klein would learn empathy by sympathizing with the endangered Vriil and see the error of her fascist ways. Perhaps this is what in story the Doctor expects to happen, too. But the writers go for something more complicated - and realistic - because while Klein does sympathize with the Vriil and shows compassion for them (aided by her disgust for the sloppy and creating-even-more-damage-than-intended-by-bumbling humans), this does not change her basic goals, chief among them the need to restore the to her real timeline, or her resentment of the Doctor. Which is why Survival of the Fittest ends with a breathtaking cliffhanger, and why Elizabeth Klein fulfills both the Companion and the Main Antagonist role in this trilogy, which I don't think is a dynamic we've ever seen before.

The Architects of History, in which basically every character doublecrosses everyone else at least once, sets itself the additional challenge to make the audience care about yet another alt!world and -characters in addition to the Klein-and-the-Doctor double act, and succeeds. It has Leonora Crichlow (Annie in Being Human; she also guest starred on New Who in Gridlock) as a Companion-who-never-was, and what happens with her in the course of the narrative contributes to the emotional punch. It's both a siege story and a "be careful what you wish for" story, and at no point does the narrative either excuse Klein or make her into a one dimensional villain whom the Doctor can easily (for both himself and the audience) dispose of; to avoid both extremes is truly an art, and this trilogy, including its climactic finale, pulls it off. And speaking of avoidance: Klein falling in love with the Doctor, let alone he with her, is also one easy way out that I don't think the current tv show could have resisted, and it never happens here. Go, Big Finish!

In conclusion: yes, I saw the latest trailer, and I'm looking forward to the show, but to be honest, the audios right now are what I'm truly fannish about as far as Doctor Who is concerned. They have my heart and mind.

The Doctor Who/Beatles play having reawakened my appetite for Big Finish audios, I went on a minor downloading spree, with the result of listening to various excellent and one well intended but not altogether successful Doctor Who stories. As I generally like to end on a high note, I'll start with the later first.
The Council of Nicea: this is a Fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem adventure as well as a pure historical (aside from the Doctor himself, there are no aliens around) reminiscent of the Hartnell era. The obvious comparison would be to The Aztecs, since the key plot issue is one of the Companions decides to change history. On the plus side, there are lot of aspects to admire about this audio: scriptwriter Caroline Symox (a theologian herself) manages to really get across how deeply and violently the religious doctrine debates went across the populace in this era where Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and just what the so-called Arian heresy consisted of in a way that's understandable if you've never heard about the big Athanasius versus Arius clash before. And it's another very strong outing for audio companion Erimem, whose difference of perspective to both Peri and the Doctor due her historical origin - Erimem is a pharaoh who never was from ancient Egypt - was used well in such audio adventures I've listened to as The Church and the Crown and The Kingmaker. For Erimem, the Council of Nicea takes place in her future, not her past, and so her asking the question of Barbara and Donna as to why they can't change events (when the Doctor can and does on other occasions) gains additional emphasis. (BTW there isn't really a good Watsonian answer to this, since the reason is so obviously Doylist.) The inter audio continuity of Erimem making a great organizer and leader is excellent, and the script makes a valiant effort of making the Emperor Constantine (yes, the in hoc signo vince guy) a shades of grey character (pure villainy is reserved for Athanasisus, who is presented as a scheming plotter willing to go over dead bodies, while Arius is presented as an ideal Christian standing by compassionate and pacifist beliefs).

However, on the downside: Since Erimem is no Christian, the script which needs to give her a reason to become an Arius partisan makes her side with Arius because she deems him, after just one brief encounter, an honorable man, but what got Arius into hot water and what was debated on the Council were his teachings about the nature of Christ, which Erimem has zero interest in. Her accusing Constantine of not listening to his people and of being a tyrant are staggeringly anachronistic and unlikely from a character coming from a culture where the kings were regarded as living gods. (Incidentally, I can't remember which dynasty Erimem is supposed to be from, but if it's post Akhenaten she would be familiar with the concept of heresy and more likely than not having a negative attitude towards the whole idea of monotheism.) And those are only my Watsonian level problems. Stepping outside of the story: there is a scene early on in which the Doctor explains to Peri and Erimem just why the Council of Nicea was such a turning point and mentions that the church became a political power under Constantine. Erimem asks how this is a good thing and why shouldn't it be changed, which is anachronistic for Erimem as an ancient Egyptian, see above, because religion most certainly WAS politicis in her culture and very much tied to the rulers. But it's still not a bad question, and it never gets answered beyond "then the entire history would change". Well, yes, obviously. But you can just as well argue Christianity becoming a state religion resulted in all the corruption of its ideals and abuse thereafter, and the audio doesn't give you a reason NOT to want history to be changed in this regard. Lastly, this is a story in which the Doctor is almost incidental, not effective or interesting; he keeps having the same "just listen to me "/"No" - dialogue with both Erimem and Constantine, and it's not clear why Constantine botheres to after the first round, since the Doctor does nothing impressive or clever to awaken his interest. (The Empress Fausta deems him a fascinating man when talking to Peri, and he can be, but he's just not in this story, which makes it a bad case of tell, not show.) (By contrast, The Aztecs may be primarily Barbara's story, but you can't say the Doctor is dull or redundant in it.)

In conclusion: interesting but frustrating, and ultimately not satisfying to me; your mileage may differ.

The Condemned: This is the first Sixth Doctor and Charley Pollard story and also a murder mystery in Manchester featuring a fabulous tough female Mancunian D.I. named Patricia Menzies who temporarily teams up with the Doctor. Charley, who spent several years as the Eighth Doctor's audio companion, finally parted ways with him in the audio "The Girl Who Never Was" , which I had listened to some years ago, and which had a cliffhanger ending in that the TARDIS arrives, Charley thinks it's the Doctor...and it is, but the wrong Doctor. This turns out to make for a great new dynamic, since Charley is basically in the River Song position of knowing the Doctor's future self while he doesn't know her and is not a little irritated (though also intrigued) by the fact there are obviously secrets she keeps from him, and that she acts as if she knows him. Also, the romantic angst between Eight and Charley that was in their later stories is gone which is a relief. That said, the majority of interaction actually happens between the Doctor and D.I. Menzies on the one hand, and Charley & other guest characters on the other. I'm told D.I. Patricia Menzies will be back, which is great, because she and the sixth Doctor make a great detective team, complete with lots of verbal sparring, and you almost wish for the Doctor to be stuck in Manchester for a while longer so they can solve some more cases together. In conclusion, this audio is a joy to listen to, works even if you are not familiar with Charley before (then you're in the Doctor's rather than Charley's pov re: her), and has lots of neat details to boot, like the Doctor getting to show off the fondness for cats that is at its peak in this particular regeneration.

The Word Lord: is the audio equivalent of a short story from a larger collection, written by Steven Hall, but can be downloaded individually and should be before listening to the adventure reviewed below, as it introduces the later's main antagonist. It's a Seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex (more about him in a moment if you don't already know him, he's an audio only character) adventure; at a secret station in Antarctica, they run into a being from another dimension, Nobody No One, the Word Lord from the title, who is a renegade from his people is obviously designed as the Doctor's opposite number, very powerful and not a little psychotic, thriving on word play. He gets his power via language and travels in the linguistic equivalent of a TARDIS (called CORDIS), and because his powers allow him to bend reality (if someone says "Nobody can do this and that", Nobody the Word Lord is instantly able to do this and that), he's damm near unstoppable. Which makes him an ideal opponent for the Seventh Doctor specifically, who has to both outthink and outtalk him. The Word Lord only takes 20 minutes or so but is a great mini adventure as well as a good introduction of a new nemesis. Can be heard without much previous knowledge, and also showcases the Ace and Hex interactions in a good way.

A Death in the Family: this, on the other hand, very much a tale which needs both tv show and audio canon knowledge do be properly appreciated. It's sublime. Again written by Steven Hall, it features Seven, Ace, Hex and Evelyn (formerly Smythe, now Rossiter) and Nobody No One the Word Lord as far as recurring characters are concerned. Hex and Evelyn are both audio companions, Hex of the seventh, Evelyn of the sixth Doctor, but their backstories are connected in one particular point which finally receives a pay off. To briefly sum up: Evelyn knew Hex' mother, Cassie, whom she met when travelling with the Doctor, and the Doctor's inability to save Cassie caused the first serious fallout between him and Evelyn. Years later, in the Doctor's seventh incarnation, he ran into Cassie's son (or rather Ace did), who ended up as a Companion, but the Doctor did not tell Hex (the name is short for Thomas Hector Schofield) about Cassie until it all came out messily in the audio Project: Destiny which immediately precedes A Death in the Family. And anyone who's been watching more than one adventure of the Doctor and Ace on tv is aware that they're very close but he also has a penchant for manipulativeness when it comes to her. A Death in the Family has fantastic character scenes for all three relationships - the Doctor's with Ace, Hex and Evelyn -, and, as far as I'm concerned, succeeds in something Stephen Moffat tried to in season 6 of New Who but didn't pull off satisfyingly: killing off the Doctor early on in the tale complete with establishing a puzzle, then using timey-wimeyness and the characters being themselves to come up with a solution that feels emotionally satisfying and earned as to why the Doctor (obviously, since a listener knows coming in that he doesn't die for good in his seventh body) makes it out of the story alive after all. (Another parallel to New Who's season six is that you get an older and a younger version of the Doctor around during some of the time for this that is part of both the riddle and the solution.) My favourite part of timey-wimeyness used is when the Doctor in a conversation with Ace references something Evelyn said to him which, however, Evelyn only says much later in the story, but what makes this emotionally effective as well as clever is that both conversations are ones he could only have with these specific women. Most Companions change while travelling with the Doctor, but with Ace he made a deliberate effort to achieve that (Doylist wise because part of the idea for Ace back in the 80s was that she'd end up as a human going Time Lord, which never happened because the show was cancelled), and there always was an ambiguity about that, so for the Doctor to be confronted with how much Ace has become like him (while still being herself) was fantastic to listen to. Meanwhile, Evelyn was the first Companion already in her 60s when introduced, and the age and experience that gave her contributed to making her such a good foil for the brash Sixth Doctor who became very deeply attached to her and listened to her in a way he didn't to most others. He'd met Evelyn once already in his seventh regeneration (in a short scene on the audio Thicker Than Blood, which is mainly a Sixth Doctor adventure but lets Seven visit Evelyn while Six is busy elsewhere to tell her about Cassie's son), but here he does so for a longer time, and Evelyn, very old now and with the perspective of having known him in a previous regeneration, is the ideal person to question him about one of the key differences between these two selves, tied to Seventh's penchant for withholding information and need to be in control. As for Hex, who hasn't been travelling with the Doctor as long as Ace but still finds himself changing, wondering about the choices he's made, the ones being made for him, and what he wants from his life makes for some awesome scenes with both Evelyn and the older version of the Doctor. Hex, a male nurse before Rory was ever invented, shines in his compassion and need to understand.

All of these character scenes are tied together with the second use of Nobody No One as a really scary villain, whose power through words make him an ideal oponent in a medium that tells its tale through sound, not visuals, and his various showdowns with Our Heroes keep you on your listening toes, so to speak, all the time. This is also a tale very much on a meta level, about people choosing their narratives versus being trapped in them, and while it wraps up the various plots very well, it does leave room for ambiguity where you really want no black and white because ambigutiy is part of the character point. In short, this was both moving and brilliant, and it never cheated. I loved it.

More results from my trip to England were several Doctor Who audio books, which by now I've heard.

( Seventh Doctor: Dust Breeding )

( Sixth Doctor: The Nowhere Place )

( Tenth Doctor: Beautiful Chaos )