The Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Nine

 

The Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Nine

Doctor Who The Fourth Doctor Adventures Series Eleven Boxset Two The Nine is a set featuring precisely one story of The Nine, which I think adds to the whole thing that just giving boxsets their own title doesn't necessarily make things less confusing to newcomers. You know that a series starts with volume one and goes to volume two - you don't know that it goes from Solo to the Nine or Back to Earth to Into the Stars or What Lies Inside to Connections! But oh well, false advertising aside, I don't know what else you'd call this loose but frankly fun little collection of stories. Most boxsets have abstract names like Hidden Depths or New Frontiers anyway. And I'm rambling, because One, I have to fill out this paragraph that encompasses the entire boxset as a whole, and Two, There isn't very much to say about these stories having much in common except for Tom Baker on his own, doing his thing with whoever has to tolerate him this week. I was thinking the other day about how Tom Baker works really well on his own, and yet some Doctors, even among my favorites, don't. Series Eleven may be the strongest series of Fourth Doctor Adventures yet - although series Eight does give it stiff competition - and it's hard to really say why, especially considering Doctor Who is such a static character in all of them. The Fourth Doctor is not the sort of chap to be changed by the events of what is happening, and yet, and yet, this is a gem of a trilogy of tales, and they all sort of, for the most part, just move beyond that part. This series sort of beats classification. As many have complained about The Ninth Doctor travelling on his own, it does make me wonder why Four is any different. He shouldn't be better at doing this sort of thing - and yet, and yet, these stories are just, for the most part, fabulous. 

As these reviews go on, it becomes increasingly apparent to me that whatever score I choose to give a story is frankly variable and arbitrary. I might feel in a good mood and give a story a 6 and mean that as a good ranking but then some other day I might give the same story a 6 and not really like it much. I'm killing off the ratings in this and all future posts. You'll just have to pay attention to what I'm saying more. 

The Dreams of Avarice by Guy Adams

The Dreams of Avarice is the most bombastic and least in-line with what could have in any universe appeared on television in 1976. Taking the previously established Doom Coalition/Ravenous villain known as The Nine and sort of making a story exclusively based around that character. Following on from where we left The Nine in the Legacy of Time boxset - which regrettably, is sort of a prerequisite for this one, even if that's not strictly advertised, The Nine just decides to put on a big fricking heist, and The Fourth Doctor has to stop him. The story evolves to the gargantuan extremes that are likely for a character like The Nine - never one to do something simply if a complication would do. 

The Dreams of Avarice is trying to be the definitive Nine story, making things as big as they can possibly be. It's The Nine's very own Dark Universe in that it does feel like event television, that a story is unfolding that likely will have massive repercussions. Guy Adams referred to Dark Universe as "comic-book storytelling," and I think I agree with that sentiment - it's the same genre of story, even if it's the same character, and even if they go in wildly different directions. The Dreams of Avarice is this big, bold and punchy story that goes places.

It's witty and feels much more at home as a Eighth Doctor script than a Fourth Doctor one, but I also appreciate that it's Baker here. His witty and full of himself nature puts him at odds with the authorities in a way that very few other Doctors could possibly manage. Having a companion in the mix would dampen the adversarial nature the story really needs to get off the ground, and so would being fundamentally decent. This is one of the only Doctor Who stories I can think of where the plot wouldn't really work if The Doctor wasn't constantly pretentious. It's very important for his dynamic with the police to approach working. They don't trust him, and he's too annoyed with them to talk down to their level, which means they trust him less. It's a fine arrangement for as long as it lasts - the sort of thing you can do with a Solo Doctor once or twice but would get annoying if it was stretched out to a series.

The tale hits the ground running very nicely in it's first half, where it's focus is the most singular, but as the story progresses and we eventually end up in The Nine's TARDIS for the story's second half, discussing massive space crystals, the story does begin to lose me. Getting too bogged down in stuff like this somehow manages to lose it for me - I really liked when the only plot of the story was The Nine stealing things to keep letting him steal bigger things. The escalation is what the story has going for it, and once that breakneck escalation begins to wane off, the flaws in the script are much more noticeable - the gorgeous dialogue can't exactly cover it up when the story becomes too focused on one thing. It's a superficial thing to attempt to describe, but the story truly does let off a lot of steam in it's second half, and after such a superlative opening, it can even approach jarring. Nonetheless, while The Dreams of Avarice isn't necessarily a classic worthy of eternal praise until the sun explodes, it does happen to be a story that isn't like much else out there.

Shellshock by Simon Barnard and Paul Morris

Shellshock, by contrast, is 70s bread and butter. If you are familiar with Simon Barnard and Paul Morris it is likely for them being very good at that. They work chiefly for The Fourth Doctor Adventures and good old Sixie from time to time, having delivered some of MY personal favorite outings, like Aquitaine or The End of The Line. That's not even counting how often they wrote for Jago and Litefoot. Their prior Big Finish work tends to rather classical in nature. They don't often leave the 70s atmosphere, and it's something that they're rather superlative at doing. Not often praised as writers worthy of worship for all eternity by the public, you still don't often find them misfiring. I don't think Shellshock is terrible by any means, I did like it a good deal, but I also think that once you've put out something as wicked good as Aquitaine, you may find it slightly difficult to work your way back up to prior heights. 

Shellshock takes place during The Great War, as it was called, on the German Front, where a hospital of soldiers suffering from PTSD are all having the same dream. When The Doctor arrives, he must work with a Nurse not named Molly O'Sullivan to solve the mystery. If you can't tell from that hook, Part One of Shellshock is utterly delectable. It's got great sinister energy to it, and works at a slow, methodical pace to do what it needs to do to there. Lots of Part One of Shellshock is preoccupied with Poetry. It's gothic and it really really made my brain rather happy, taking time to just recite ominous stanzas and foreshadow that something insidious is going on with the troops that come back from Doctor Sturm's surgery. 

While nothing that follows Part One is strictly bad, nothing ever really great from then on happens either. The Doctor and Hannah, his companion of the week, ping pong between various characters - it wouldn't be a Classic Who story if we didn't get to see the other side of the two sided conflict, and therefore we make an elongated return to the British front as well. The story after a while loses interest in the thing that made it special, it's atmosphere, and once we exit the medical bay where these strange experiments are occurring, it sort of just becomes every story you've heard before. I don't want to be too harsh to Shellshock, because unlike some stories, it does at least have some really admittedly gorgeous elements to it, but that in turn can make it more frustrating. 

Peake Season by Lizbeth Myles

Peake Season is the "bonus" tale to the set, advertised as a little add-on to the proceedings. It may be the odd one out in technicality thanks to it's shorter length, but it's also not as slight as you might initially view it. The whole thing is only twenty minutes shorter than some early Main Range classics like Scherzo - it's runtime still utterly dwarfs the average NuWho episode of forty minutes, coming in at Seventy in total. I ruminate on runtime because Peake Season is every bit the equal of the other two tales, and probably the highlight of the entire season - it's runtime does not dampen it's exceedingly high quality script in the slightest.

Mervyn Peake, random historical figure that I have not heard of, nor that the story really expounds upon, ends up essentially kidnapped by The Fourth Doctor, who just keeps going on about how much of a big fan of his he is, and how he'd love to give him a trip in the TARDIS. Eventually they arrive in a strange nameless city where tiny surreal things keep happening where they are forced to get a job as Newspaper Cartoonists. The story spirals from there. Peake Season is delightfully odd, and unashamed in it's weird nature. It's a tale that reminds me a lot of early Big Finish, where we got stories where Doctor Who would end up in a frankly odd environment that eventually would be explained as some sci-fi thing. It's not too far off from some of the oddities of the Divergent Universe arc and other similar Main Range stories. 

That's really the massive appeal of Peake Season - it's very clever, and witty, and eventually everything that's happening has a succinct explanation that makes everything fit and you go, "oh! that's how it works!" It's a delightful way to end the set, and I don't really care to talk too much more about it as not to ruin the fun. Peake Season is, if you'll forgive me, rather Peak.