The Rapture

 


The Rapture by Joseph Lidster

Inviting confusion at every turn, the Rapture is in particular one of the oddest tales that Big Finish put out under the Doctor Who license, which is by no means a small feat from the company that put out Zagreus. Even by appearance of the cover, you can tell it's off the chain. It's blisteringly experimental and mad and honestly by most degrees actually rather dumb - but I am overjoyed that it exists, because it's very existence is a sign of bravery by the company. Big Finish was quick to realize that putting out a Doctor Who play each month was going to be quite a task for their small team, and knew very early on that they needed to figure out what worked by being bold and adventurous in their Doctor Who - doing bonkers things that most of the insane people who wrote the wilderness novels would balk at. This endeavor led to dozens and dozens of classics, often made by a direct shoeing off of the Doctor Who mold - the return of the pure historical (Marian Conspiracy or Fires of Vulcan, etc.) experimentation in kinds of stories - (Live 34, Doctor Who and The Pirates), story structure (Natural History of Fear, Creatures of Beauty, Flip-Flop), stories that could only be done on audio (Again Natural History of Fear, Scherzo, Whispers of Terror, Omega) Multi-Doctor stories gone mad (Project: Lazarus, Zagreus) or just letting Rob Shearman off the leash (All of his stories). For every Big Finish play giving us some stereotypical classic monster run-arounds, there were two more pushing the boundary of what Doctor Who was by having Ace being traumatized by actual fucking Nazis or Davros talking about his childhood where he ate corpses. A lot of brilliance came out of this, brilliance that can only be accomplished through experimentation.

Which is why I'm glad they took a few stories to figure out what didn't work and then never did it again because holy cow 

The Rapture doesn't work. It's trying to be sleazy, it's trying to be a drug trip without real explanation, it's trying to do something, and whatever it is, I sure as hell don't get it, don't even understand it enough for me to analyze on what makes it fall apart exactly. It's an insane literally-drug-fuelled plotline tied together with some family drama concerning Ace. It is almost good for the first episode and then completely loses me by episode two, and I legitimately could not summarize a single moment in it after that absolutely ridiculously mind-boggling episode two cliffhanger. It's Impossible to summarize, the Rapture. But we can agree on a few things: One- I'm glad it exists so they figured out not to do stuff like this. Two - It has a hell of a great soundtrack. 

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Comments

  1. Gemjax MajoranSeptember 25, 2021 at 7:15 PM

    A Strange tale that to this day has me asking...what was this even about though

    ReplyDelete

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