The Fourth Doctor Adventures Series Three
The Fourth Doctor Adventures Series Three
This is going to be an incredibly long post. It's been a very long time (since the infancy of this site, in reviews that are quite frankly, hardly accurate) that I covered a full eight part series from Big Finish in one post. If you don't care to read all of it, let me sum it up real quick - this is very similar to 4DAs series two, in that pretty much every story not written by Nicholas Briggs is excellent and worth your time. Every story that is - well, that's when it starts to vary. If any of these reviews come across as aggressive, please note that I bear no ill will towards any of the lovely people involved in the production of them. I shouldn't have to say that, but this is the internet, so, you know, a disclaimer can be helpful. Please enjoy the overlong rambles of a mad, mad, person, who lost their sanity long ago -
The King of Sontar by John Dorney
The King of Sontar is a surprisingly phenomenal tale, especially considering I don't really care much for Sontarans. They're fine, I don't hate them, and I actively would rate them quite high compared to most Doctor Who recurring villains - I most certainly prefer them to the Ice Warriors, Silurians or Judoon for instance. But The King of Sontar is one of those stories that just happens to know how to do everything right. And this surprised me, it really caught me off guard, because the story opens with an seemingly eight minute or so long action sequence that truly makes you think this is one of the stinkers of the millenium. What follows is anything but. The King of Sontar is essentially ribbing off of the central conflict of Genesis of the Daleks. It's a loving ribbing, it's not stealing the complete plot of it for instance. General Strang is no Davros, and it's not an origin story. But it does have the ultimatum from the Time Lords lifted directly from it to add gravitas. To make the story have weight. And then the resulting quick and excellently paced story that follows doesn't have to spend six parts on things like Genesis did. It knows to value your time, and it's got a tight focus to it. It's end goal is to bring us to a some really good drama.
I can't get over how particularly clever the story is in general. It gives the Sontarans an extremist character and then looks at the dichotomy of how the Sontarans in a certain situation could end up just just as much a threat to the universe as the Daleks. I especially like that it doesn't spell it out to you. It doesn't draw comparisons, it doesn't have the Sontarans be a discount monster or any different to the way they are normally. It invites comparison but it also makes the clear choice to constrast them and to not rely on the aforementioned holy grail of Doctor Who that is Genesis. To bring up Genesis is to make your own story seem weaker. The King of Sontar is using Genesis, yes, but that's more as a detail. It's giving a familiar Doctor Who backdrop that doesn't take much time to bring up in order to spend the majority of it's runtime on characterization and conflict between our leads. It's using it's quick one hour time frame to it's advantage. Background: done. Villain: Sontarans, just plug them in. It then focuses on what matters.
The Doctor and Leela's relationship is what this story is about, and the reason they even bother to bring up Genesis of the Daleks is to use a famous Sarah Jane story and directly contrast Leela's characterization with that of Sarah Jane. Sarah Jane had a runtime on the show longer than Hartnell, or Troughton. She's the most famous Classic Who companion, and would be the most famous of all time if it were not for Rose Tyler. Leela is the opposite of Sarah Jane, a fierce, complicated and aggressive character who is not identifiable to the audience in the way that Sarah Jane is. Leela is a character that was created to follow up on Sarah Jane with a very different direction. Louise Jameson is on fire in this piece, giving one of her best performances, particularly in the latter half and final few scenes. What may surprise you to hear is that Tom Baker rises to the challenge and delivers a performance that is quite outside his usual range of emotion. Baker's increased age adds to the performance. While his voice is markedly similar to how it was back in the day, at several points Baker allows the façade to drop and show his age, his wise nature as an ancient time lord, and indeed, his rare moments of vulnerability. It's brilliant material. We all know that Louise Jameson didn't have as good a relationship with Baker on television as he did Sladen. I think it's remarkable that Dorney dramatizes this. The final moments in this story, where Leela goes off and does something shitty and truly doesn't understand what she's done wrong are electric. It's morally ambiguous, nasty and confrontational, and finishes the story with an astonishing high note. The comparison of "Do I have the right?" directly contrasted with "Yes, of course I have the right!" It's meaty material that the actors involved relish.
I could talk about this story for longer than it in fact lasts, so I'll cut myself off here. But note that I didn't even get to talk about the Late David Collings' excellent turn as Rosato, a very good character with a satisfying arc, or how excellently Dan Starkey changes his voice as Strang to be completely unlike any other Sontaran he plays. There's so many layers to the King of Sontar, so much cleverness. I wouldn't say it's perfect, but I do love it, and I do think that it's a testament to the brilliance of Baker and Jameson - one of the best TARDIS teams you could ask for, and one that I'll always be happy to return to. 9/10
White Ghosts is already on my side for not cheating and immediately resolving King of Sontar's ending off-screen, and yes, it is on the much more generic side and would be pitiful if it was four parts, but it's got some really standout scenes and I think the ultimate result is something that does work. The story is one of those stories that does little things that you can't do anywhere but audio, such as setting a story on a planet of pure darkness where tendrils of light hunt visitors.
White Ghosts isn't trying to do anything mind breaking, to be fair. It's trying to do teatime at the 70s, of course, which can be detrimental, trying to invoke an era so much, but White Ghosts also isn't a bad story. It's not got the best side characters in the universe, but it does indeed further The Doctor and Leela's character arc from the previous story and (regrettably) does wrap it up in a neat bow. If you don't want to bother with the entire series, one can grab King of Sontar/White Ghosts and view them together as a complete package, similar to MR releases like Warzone/Conversion or Vortex Ice/Cortex Fire.
White Ghosts' primary strength, minus the continual and rather nice characterization from the previous episode, is in it's imagery and how well it utilizes the audio format. Very few stories try to use the audio format so much, many of them sort of forgetting that this isn't a television script with expository dialogue. White Ghosts is cleverer than this in how it uses it's imagery relating to these weird and vivid glowing plants on it's dark world, and how it enters character's minds and allows them to briefly narrate. The latter isn't a plot point, but rather a brilliant way to do an action sequence on audio, and one I've never seen before. Leela narrates her thoughts in the midst of battle, and does almost a homage to the discombobulate scene in Robert Downey Jr's Sherlock Holmes. It's EXCITING, and that's something you NEVER get in audio fight scenes, often the bane of my existence.
For a nice and kooky story without that much ambition to it, White Ghosts is told with so much flair - like the aforementioned fight scene, the dialogue, and the sheer effort put into making Four and Leela's character consistent from the previous episode. All of this near auxiliary information elevates it to a completely different level. It's a cracking episode, I really couldn't be more pleased. 8/10
"Scarcity doesn't imply value. It could represent a lack of interest."
The Crooked Man by John Dorney
The Crooked Man on one hand, has nothing to do with the really goddamn cool character arc from King of Sontar/White Ghosts, but on the other hand, it's a banger. I would have really liked the Fourth Doctor and Leela's arc to have been spread throughout a few more episodes, but I suppose it could have gotten tiring. The Crooked Man, for the record, isn't tiring. It's a story about stories, and it does connect to some prior Doctor Who media concerning that, although I don't care to spoil it's particulars. Luckily, this connection which could easily have been groan inducing isn't bad, because the story justifies it's inclusion. The majority of the Crooked Man is very much doing it's own thing that has very little to do with the Classic Who lore that it's built itself off of. This also works because said Classic Who Lore isn't an unoriginal monster showing up to burden the narrative. The story has been constructed in a way that helps to have this lore, but it doesn't necessarily require it.
It's a story with really vivid guest star characters, a struggling mother who is selling the old books in her house to pay the rent, an old has-been who is desperately trying to convince everyone on the street that she's brilliant because she was on the telly once, a man who is deeply in love with a married woman but is far too noble to dare try and ruin her life by admitting it. It tells it's story not through lame exposition or set pieces, but by having us slowly get to know the people it's talking about.
The ultimate result is a story that's not my favorite by any margin, but in earnest is really very good. It's 100% very modern storytelling that reminds me of early Russell T Davies at his cleverest and subtlest, but it's not overbearingly so, and it's got the Hinchcliffian edge you want from Fourth Doctor tales of this era. The soundtrack is quite nice, and the titular Crooked Man is a baddie that really blends in nicely with that sentiment. Neil Stuke is excellent in both his roles in the story, however it's as The Crooked Man he excels, managing to sound wicked and gremlin-like in a way that doesn't cross into melodrama or pantomime and in fact ultimately results in something bravely sinister. A very good piece, the strongest of the series' yet. 9/10
Of course, it couldn't be long before some previously established villain would suddenly materialize to weigh the series down in nostalgia (a dangerous thing for a series already so ingrained in it) and this time it's The Master, but he comes with a healthy dose of The Faces of Evil. Fortunately, this story has an incredible concept. Unfortunately, it's incredibly poorly executed.
The story essentially is about the Doctor and Leela arriving at generic Classic Who location #34, where the evil Robot Mantis people are attacking the poor colonists aboard a cruiseliner. It's all painfully by the numbers, but that's rather the point of it, because the entire time, Briggs is using this comfortable classic who setting to try and get under your skin with horror stuff. Once in a while, the Doctor will break character and start mocking Leela about how she couldn't save her father from dying, or there will be some horrible kind of hissing or something, and it's ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT.
This is all, of course, if you couldn't tell, because of The Master, and the Master is trying to hypnotize her to get her to kill the Doctor, which allows the first half to be peppered with some gorgeous mindscrewy stuff, and would give great content for the second half to be about Leela breaking out of said illusion. However, ultimately, the story gives up, allows the Leela focus to fade away next to completely and has her give into the hypnotism and try and kill the Doctor, and the second half of the story is instead him running away. In fact, he runs away so well that he goes to a completely different planet to have his own plot thread about inter-galactic insurance, which feels more like something to waste time so the Master can get control over Leela more quickly.
The said Master controlling Leela plot is stupid, because it's really good and then it's incredibly not good. Suddenly the story becomes an action story (oh no) and we get several exceedingly long sequences focusing on The Doctor and not Leela who until now has been the entire crux of the story. It's ridiculously jarring, and there's very little to say about it other than "Leela tries to kill him," "Four says LEELA YOU'RE IN THERE SOMEWHERE" and it goes on for thirty minutes.
The story ends in uninspiring fashion, frustratingly attempting to bring about character development relating to Leela's self worth that we know cannot exist for the sake of STATUS QUO and also because I have already listened to other content after this season, I know the Doctor does not do what he says he is going to. The Evil One is one of the most frustrating experiences I've done in ages, because it's just so undeniably brilliant and incredible a concept, and such horrid an execution. Building up a slow burned character focused horror content thing with actual cool concepts and atmosphere and suddenly doing something so immeasurably different and more bad for the sake of having a runaround is beyond frustrating. Nicholas Briggs is a very very talented man, but I think he was probably too busy to give this the time it deserved: 4/10
Last of the Colophon makes you think it's going to be really shit early on, and then to literally everyone on the planet's surprise (because it is called Last of the Colophon) it actually isn't. The story is about the Doctor and Leela arriving on a planet where a possibly deranged maniac, possibly not deranged maniac is barely alive and kept prisoner by an creepy medical droid. It's very gothic Hinchcliffe horror. It's very Classic Who Four, and it's very much what this series has been missing - this has been a set of episodes that has been far too reliant on pre-established villainy when you can simply dig deep into Hinchcliffe nonsense and immediately obtain an interesting character who can carry an episode.
Gareth Thomas wins this episode. Morax (yes, he is called this, and yes, it does predate The Witchfinders, thus proving that there are no original ideas) is a phenomenal character with a great performance. He's creepy, you can never really trust him or tell whether he's telling the truth or not, whether he's a goodie or a baddie, and I wish that the story did play with this uncertainty for a bit longer before providing us with said information. The other characters in the story are just stupidly dull in comparison, but it almost doesn't matter, because Morax is RAD, and the attention is on him. He has this immense gravitas that reminds one of classic villains like Sutekh or Roger Delgado’s Master, even though his characterization is quite different from both.
The story also does a VERY GOOD fakeout regarding the end of the story, where you think that everything is wrapped up, and then it isn't - this may not work for you, if you're constantly watching the runtime, but the story seemed to wrap up satisfactorily, and then I realized I had missed something the same time the Doctor had and the story got even better.
Last of the Colophon is comfort food for Fourth Doctor fans, it's the same kind of fun gothic idea we just can't help but adore. It's not going to change your life. But it's honestly rather quite good. It’s the kind of gothic fun Four that you want. I want to see more stuff like this going forward. It's not original, but it feels authentic, and it is new, and it is really really quite fun after the first frustrating ten minutes: 8/10
Destroy the Infinite by Nicholas Briggs
Ironically enough, this was the first story involving the Eminence to be conceived, but nearly one of the last to be released, released after both Dark Eyes Two and The Seeds of War, which both reference the events of this story offhandedly as if it’s common knowledge. I find the way that the Fourth Doctor range creates new stuff and then it shows up in other ranges for very long times before it’s original appearance, backwards, utterly hysterical and also somewhat annoying. Naomi and Harry, eat your heart out. For a story that literally only exists to introduce the Eminence and exposit about what their whole deal is, it’s sort of stunning that they wanted to do more related with them after how dreary this tale is itself.
The story doesn’t have too much plot to it, The Doctor and Leela end up in an industrial hellscape run by generic gas aliens who possess people, and The Doctor fakes being possessed to win. This is as thoroughly dull as it sounds, and that’s not even mentioning the stupid Resistance characters. It was hard for me to process the fact that the Eminence were actually improved upon in Dark Eyes and that it could actually have been worse. What a shock to the soul. The story is entirely relying on the introduction of these characters, trying to make them the new big monumental threat, but it just can’t manage it, because it doesn’t actually have them do anything threatening to The Doctor, who is at his most invincible here.
I have honestly nothing else to say. Destroy the Infinite is very disappointing, but it's also very in-one ear and out the other. Even the astonishing chemistry of Baker and Jameson that often carries these stories struggles with this particular episode. Frustrating. There's like this review on Facebook online where someone gave The Dalek Protocol a 7/10 and Nick Briggs responded to it in fury. I fear that he will ever come across this post, as I genuinely don't hate the man or anything, I respect his work. But this was just a miserable experience. He clearly spread himself too thin in the early 4DAs, the only stories I haven't cared for have been his contributions. 3/10
Except for the fact that it doesn't make sense, gave me a headache, and I didn't really care for it. I know that the story talks about how people have grown dull by not allowing their imaginations to spread forth like wildfire, but this concept doesn't work very well on audio, as all the characters are forced to describe, "oh look, cockroaches! oh wow now they are water and trying to drown us! oh dear the water is now a van gogh painting" and in addition, the fact that the characters never leave the TARDIS results in exceedingly strange story structure - by the ten minute mark as you've been listening to The Doctor and Leela talking about educational concepts for the first ten minutes, you aren't really sure what the story is supposed to be, and it's not really clear at minute fifteen either. Yet it also moves incredibly fast at times too, large segments of part two moving at lightning speed. I am all for creativity, but The Abandoned has creativity and no structure to shape it into something brilliant - the opposite problem a story from Big Finish usually has. That being said, it's still miles above Nick Briggs' contributions to the series, so perhaps it deserves a free pass. 6/10
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