The Silver Turk

 


The Silver Turk by Marc Platt

The Silver Turk - the other Mondasian Cyberman story by Marc Platt has a reputation of being fucking perfect in Big Finish circles, and I'm here to dose out the extra hot take and very contrarian take .... .....that yeah, it's pretty damn good. 
The Silver Turk is of course, mostly brilliant because it utilizes a very good and intriguing companion who never really got her dues (Mary Shelley) in a story that could only really be done to it's best with her. This is the Mary Shelley story, showing her and all of her layers, this amazing, very real woman who had a real love for the demented and strange, carried a knife, and made out with Percy Shelley in Graveyards. Mary Shelley next to the Byron-esque Eight could have been in fact, his definitive companion, if she was not stifled to only an anthology episode and a trilogy. It's disheartening to hear Mary say that her trips have only just begun at the end of this one when in fact, we know that her trips are regrettably incredibly short-lived. But of course, The Silver Turk is an excellent story even beyond Shelley herself, turning over some very macabre and incredible ideas, along with some of the most stunning and vivid imagery I've heard in an audio - everyone who's ever heard this can see the Cyberman climbing the Clocktower, as vividly as if they saw it on television. But it doesn't end there, oh no, because The Silver Turk is not just a brilliant Mary Shelley story, or a brilliant Cyberman story - it also properly utilizes horror ideas beyond the Cybermen, and they're, well, perfect horror ideas, of someone making marionette dolls with human eyes stolen from corpses. Because Torchwood is too subtle a show. 
Yes, it does sort of lose itself as it goes on a bit, there are a lot of similar voices in it, I found, but Briggs is a haunting and surprisingly personal Cyberman, and McGann and Cox really manage to tie the thing together. So I did get a little lost and need a relisten, but I don't regret that. It's a blurry audio, but the standout scenes are so standout (Go to hell, sir) that I can't help but feel even it's losses are to it's benefit. 10/10 

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