Nightshade

 

Nightshade by Mark Gatiss and Adapted by Kyle C Szikora

I can't help but feel that Nightshade lost something in the adaptation to audio format, because somehow, despite the wondrous cast (Seven and Ace!! Carole Ann Ford! Louise Jameson! Samuel Barnett! Tom Price!!) it just doesn't pass into the glorious zone. It tries, it just doesn't. Mark Gatiss wrote a brilliant novel to start with. There's something about the original concept of the novel that doesn't play well in modern times. The Seventh Doctor is exhausted, and he feels like he's going to end up retiring. Which at the time, was ridiculously apt meta-commentary on how this came out in the Wilderness Years. The show was spent. The Doctor seemed, at least from the perspective of the time, a character that was old as fuck, considering whether or not he wanted to go on. This texture somehow doesn't fit with the way McCoy plays it, especially now since we have gotten around Six new main Doctor's since, and the Doctor is now more a youthful character than ever. I'm just not sure why, but instead of this melancholic reflective nature that we're supposed to feel, I ended up more inclined to rolling my eyes. Nightshade just has ended up losing something beyond that though, and I feel it's hard to specify. I'm not sure it's whether the story specifies that it's going to be dark and scary at the start (legitimately with a warning) and never is. I'm not sure it's a few beats with Ace's love interest guest character that mirror Love and War so much it's a bit annoying. I'm not sure what it is? It's just faltered. While the book's Susan appearance was a bold surprise, this story plasters Carole Ann Ford's name on the cover and builds up her appearance in a very unsubtle manner. I don't know how else to say this, but Nightshade is boring. It's really, really, boring, and that's just the death throes for something like this. A contemplative nature can sometimes work wonders, and with this, it should, but that nature is just gone, and I don't know where it went. Usually you can tell a novel adaptation from just another audio drama, and see where the novel would have diverged, and you can accept that this is a different format, and it's going to try and turn that big thick novel into something digestible in a mere two hours. Love and War and All Consuming Fire both translated wonderfully into a modern audio format, but while I want to love a story like this that seems so damn brilliant (hell, the mere concept of this old Doctor Who inspired old actor for the show dreaming up these monsters from his old television program is just gorgeous) I can't help but feel that Nightshade needed a much more adept pen at making it work for audio, because at this point I'm willing to believe that tagline on the back of Virgin books insisting that their stories were too bold and crazy for the two hour format. I will give this much more points than usual audios of this level of boredom simply because the foundation is so strong, but holy cow are you in for a snoozefest 5/10