Missy Volume Three - Missy and The Monk

 

Missy and The Monk

On the one hand, giving Missy a companion was probably inevitable, and making it The Monk does make a lot of sense with the vibe established in the first two volumes. On the other hand, Missy and The Monk is probably most of the problems of the first two volumes amplified, with the decreased number of episodes from 4 to 3 genuinely hindering it immensely. You can get by with having 1 clunker in a set of four, but in a set of 3, that becomes all the more difficult. Especially considering the biggest problem with this set in my opinion is the format. Slow paced comedy is very difficult, and the stories struggle to fill out their timespans. I'll get into it briefly, but they do all struggle in at least some aspect. 

However, Missy remains a series that is still somewhat worthwhile merely by the virtue and elegance exuded from Michelle Gomez, without a doubt one of the best performers Big Finish has ever managed to get under their belt. These sets are stronger than their peers in say, Paternoster Gang or UNIT merely by the presence of Michelle Gomez, whose understanding of how to perform on audio is unlike any performer I've ever heard. She almost considers it as an invitation to get even more camp and arch, which works wonderfully as all we have to go off of is her voice. She considers this a challenge, and in pretty much every Missy audio she says something utterly wonderful in an unexpected way. While ordinarily I would condemn this set for it's rather subpar scripts compared to the first two volumes, I want it to be understood that this is much harder to do, simply because Michelle Gomez is so astonishing an actor who manages to chew the scenery without there being any scenery because it's an audio play. That's worth commending before we begin.

Body and Soulless by James Goss

Body and Soulless opens the set in somewhat predictable fashion, with the fun concept of this one being that Missy has cut open the Monk's body and put his still alive brain in her carpet bag. This is a delightfully morbid concept to center the play on, and in addition, it allows Hound to really steal the show, with his mortified and consistently humorous remarks as a brain in a bag (not a jar). It's the sort of thing you can only do on audio, but it also somehow manages the difficult task of not removing The Monk's dignity as a character, with his intellect being used as a major feature relating to the plot. This is something that the other two stories in the set do not do, so bravo. The fun bit of this story is Missy and The Monk playing war games against each other with entire armies. The less fun bit is how uninspiring every single character bar Missy and The Monk themselves are. The story is very funny, but it also manages to somehow become boring due to the somewhat obnoxious aliens with a voice-distorter who crave human bodies. 

This whole concept would have been much more fun if it was historical warfare and something, and Missy decided to co-opt the Vietnam War or the Napoleonic Wars or something a lot more interesting than these incredibly generic and lifeless aliens that dull down the plot. In addition, the story feels incredibly long and drawn out, an issue that as mentioned, plagued the set. The story cannot be a fast paced comedy all the way through, it's an hour and six minutes long, and while the story beats that it covers are on paper, spectacular, they could be a lot stronger in execution. I feel slightly that Goss hadn't done as much with this story as he usually does with other scripts. But then again, that's a hard task. I feel that if this set had transferred to six thirty minute stories the variety issue as well as the overlong issue would both be solved. As it is, this is a magnificent thirty to forty minute story stretched out to an hour and six, one of the biggest problems with modern Big Finish. The entire piece needed a far tighter edit. James Goss is too talented for this not to be pretty good, I suppose, but it could be a lot better: 5/10 

War Seed by Johnny Candon 

I had never heard of Johnny Candon before this, which is delightful, as War Seed is his first Big Finish script! Congratulations, it's always lovely to have new talent. Of course, they really did bum him off with one of the hardest series to make work correctly and he hasn't come back since. Shame. 
War Seed exhibits a true and total aimlessness that I have never before seen in an audio, a near to complete lack of structure. The result, due to the talent of our actors and the wittiness of the jokes is strangely not as bad as it seems, however the story never seems sure what to do next. This is because the concept is next to impossible to work with. Missy decides to arbitrarily prove to the Monk that she can be a "nice" and "good" person by saving the earth. Okay, fine, decent I guess, but this is ignoring that Missy on audio is already a lighter shade of black than the usual Master and this isn't even that out of character. They travel to a fun future Earth where a company is selling regeneration energy of time lords as a skin cream product. This is fucking brilliant, and should be what the story is about. The story is not about this. No, Missy just marches up to the executive, and decides that she's going to give him an army. She takes him and his side character army into her TARDIS and they go to another planet where the War Seed that he has gained all of his regeneration nonsense from has taken over. The problem is the transition to the other planet is somewhere around the thirty minute mark, and pacing wise, the story never recovers. In addition, the final bit of the story is all of the side character army and the executive dying to the War Seeds, and Missy deciding "oh well," and moving on. The Monk meanwhile, has done nothing the entire story. 

Yeah, I did spoil the whole thing to you right there, and I rarely ever do that in reviews, but I think a view of the entire piece is exceedingly important, as while the story is consistently funny, it is, as mentioned, very directionless, and I was constantly wondering what the point of it was, even though the story had plenty of fun ideas. The aforementioned regeneration skin cream (that should have been the entire plot, come on, give me Missy does Devil Wears Prada) and The War Seeds. The War Seeds are sort of fun, being creatures born of Missy's DNA which teases us with the idea of Missy talking about her "sons" for a bit. None of these are properly explored though, and Missy comes to the conclusion at the end that she's somehow saved the earth even though she didn't want the executive guy to die at all and she wanted him to take over. I seriously don't know. While this story, at fifty minutes exactly, is shorter than Body and Soulless, it feels very much longer and more dull because it just doesn't have any idea what it's doing, and like I said, the actual plot beats of the story that I laid out, can be summarized very quickly, and could be done in thirty minutes easily. Maybe if you expanded the regeneration skin care thing into something different that could be it's own thirty minute episode. 

Regardless, it's sad that Johnny Candon got saddled with this for his first Big Finish script, because it's totally one of, if not the hardest series to write for. There's this cluelessness as to what to do with Missy, and I think it's partially because her darkest aspects haven't truly returned since the first set - maybe with a lovely little inkling in The Lumiat. Set One was a romp that grew progressively darker, but Set Two and Three have merely been romps, and romps of variable quality of that. What the heck are you supposed to do with something as directionless as this plot? Quite frankly, it's a little sad that Johnny Candon is probably never coming back, because there were worthwhile ideas and cleverness hidden in all the garbage, and given any other series, he may even have excelled: 3/10 

Two Monks, One Mistress by James Kettle

I really, if you couldn't tell, did not like this set at all up to Two Monks, One Mistress, and thank god this one is good, because dear lord, it was a hell of a hard time getting to it. James Kettle is one of my favorite writers and I haven't been disappointed by one of his scripts yet. I wonder if Big Finish know exactly what they have here. Two Monks, One Mistress is essentially a repurposed Shakespearean farce complete with the occasional soliloquy, as Missy, The Monk, The Nun and several other characters confuse each other over everything. This is such a fun concept for the story, and actually allows the story to use time well, as you know, the rambly-ness of Shakespearan dialogue and all of the talking does actually eat up time so the runtime isn't anywhere near as bad. The Monk is incompetent, sure, and that's mildly annoying, but it helps that there's a psychic scroll affecting everyone so there's an in universe explanation for it. Plus Gemma Whelan as The Nun continues to be astonishingly good. It's amazing to me that after I see her play so many grounded and serious characters on television, she's even better at being a camp arch-villainess, and her being exceedingly competent works well considering how much trouble she gave Ten in Dalek Universe. Of course Missy as a series is somewhat girl power, but I'll forgive it, I'm halfway there myself. Anyway, yeah, my literal only gripe with Two Monks, One Mistress, was that it didn't go further. It should have gone all in, and at least attempted Iambic Pentameter in old timey language. It's clearly what the story wants to do, with crossdressing, misunderstandings, and complicated relationships between all the characters, all viewed in a modern context. The Nun's introduction to the story is done quite well, and it makes complete sense to me that she would be best mates with The Monk, because The Monk literally meddles with time, and them teaming up makes too much sense. This is quite good, and quite mad, and quite funny, but I still came out of it wanting more: 8/10 

Missy Volume Four hasn't come out this year, and perhaps that's a good thing - the fact that they're taking a little more time on the scripts and information about it leaves me optimistic towards the future. As although this series is certainly on the iffy side, let's not forget that it's given us quite a few bangers, like The Lumiat, Broken Clock, and I'd even say Divorced Beheaded Regenerated although it's lost quite a bit of magic due to the requisite Monk sequels stealing it's dynamic that made it special. This set was without a doubt a mistake in my opinion, and The Monk being there didn't do too much minus the first tale. Well, now that Missy is on her own once more, I hope that she gets something nice and juicy to sink her teeth into - as she was without a doubt the highlight of Masterful, it only makes sense that one of the best Masters ever gets a series equivalent to that. Let's cross our fingers.