The War Doctor Begins: Battlegrounds

The War Doctor Begins: Battlegrounds

Battlegrounds is an interesting release to say the least, the third volume of the War Doctor Begins series, a loose sort of season that sort of reminds me to a certain extent of the similarly done Ninth Doctor Adventures boxsets. Both have one of those increasing trends of Big Finish sets, the weird all or nothing approach. The weird all or nothing approach is my strange little term to say it's not a set like Water Worlds or Doom Coalition where the stories all form an arc but are all their own stories. The All or Nothing approach isn't like that. It's these sets that don't have any stories in common with each other. You either get a set like Ravagers or Warbringer or Kaleidoscope where it's ostensibly one tale, each dependent on the previous installment, (all) or sets like The Outlaws, Lost Warriors, Silver and Ice, where the tales don't have any continuity between eachother at all (nothing). The War Doctor volumes adhere to this pretty closely, tending to either do sets like these of random stories or big three part war stories of dynamic proportion. And of course, they must have titles. I'd prefer if titles were saved for sets with themes or sets with only one story. The result is things like this - Battlegrounds. That's just any War Doctor set, isn't it? Couldn't you call any of them that? What is it about Battlegrounds that makes it any different from Forged in Fire?? And to tell you the truth, for better or worse, there really isn't anything at all one could consider exclusively this volume. These are just stories. A part of me hates that, but another part of me finds it appealing - after all - Stories can be anything.

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 Keeper of Light by Phil Mulryne

The Keeper of Light is very weird because it's a rather droll and unimaginative Doctor Who story, but that's almost also the point of it from a strange metatextual sense. On the one hand, cool, glad you're being experimental, but on the other hand, sitting through fifty minutes of this droll stuff to get to the final sublime last ten minutes of the story that upturns the whole thing on it's head is ultimately almost not worth it. Right away you know something's a bit off if you read the cast list and realize that the voices of the characters are that of Adele Anderson, Emma Campbell-Jones (Cass!) and Ken Bones, but at the same time, the story is smart enough to indeed trick you if you don't look at the cast list. Both Bones and Anderson are unrecognizable, disguising their voices quite admirably, and Emma Campbell-Jones' voice is one you're probably not intimately familiar with. Thus, the trick that The Keeper of Light sets up does indeed work, unless you've been spoiled (hopefully not from this) or have already parsed it. On the other hand, it probably doesn't make much sense to me for the majority of the story to be character work for Dorothy and David when ultimately they're almost superfluous. They're going to be erased - so is this whole adventure. So, yes, of course, it would be rubbish if this was going to be the best War Doctor story and it didn't happen, so I can sort of understand the methodology. This is a clever way to have the specter of Cass haunt the range for a bit, and that's very fun. I like that a lot. However, with the amount of content the story actually has, I can't help but feel this would be better off at a half-hour length, like one of the Shadow of the Daleks plays for example, rather than an hour. 

Temmosus by Rossa McPhillips 

I don't know what to say about this one - it's interesting to me how unimaginative the expanded universe of Doctor Who can sometimes be with the time war. Granted, you do get some series that do very good stuff with it on a very consistent basis. And yet there's just this massive misunderstanding surrounding it.  We result in tales like Temmosus where there is truly nothing in this adventure that denotes a story that needs to be set in a time war. It's just a war story - and I wouldn't care if that war story was making a statement about the horrors of war or something like that. There's nothing here that's particularly about war either as a statement. It's just a story where the Daleks are the villain - and while it has a okay hook, it gets increasingly frustrating as it goes on. 
Temmosus is about a ship and a crew on a ship and the crew of the ship are THALS! And the Thals are going to go fight the Daleks, but the Captain of the Thal ship could possibly be a Double Agent. You get the general picture from that synopsis - none of the characters surprised me at all. Temmosus is all about a ship going behind enemy lines, and so you'd think they'd try a submarine allegory with space stealth ships and at least try and make something exciting, but that isn't really attempted. Temmosus spends a good amount of time with it's characters on both sides of the war in-fighting. This could be a really good point about wars and how they're essentially political games between two parties, but at the same time, I really don't care about the Dalek Time Strategist and Dalek Red Leader having a hissy fit and feel roughly the same way about Thal military structure. Temmosus ends with the conclusion that this war is the THALS war, and we should be supporting the Thals and everything, and just, really, I'd rather not. It's a pretty embarrassing scene - not only for Major Tamasan (how would she fall for something like this) but the audience.  This story doesn't really give any good reason we should ever see these characters again - what happened to that thing in Genesis of the Daleks about anti-war commentary and how both sides of the war are deplorable and awful people and either of them could have ultimately made the Daleks?? I just found this very disappointing - not horrible, not like, painful in any way, I want to clarify that - I've seen a lot of media over the years and this is quite far from the worst, but just, it's really rather disappointing. 

Rewind by Timothy X Atack

It's frustrating I can't just buy a copy of Rewind and instead have to shill out for the entire set, because let me tell you that Rewind is the absolute best War Doctor play currently out. It's an absolute triumph of a script, almost because it does so much with so little. Ignis is a woman on a Time War struck planet, where she dies every day and remembers every single one of those deaths as a time loop takes place. It's a horrific idea, one of the very few actively horrific ideas we've seen out of the Time War that gives credence to the fear and reverence we saw Eccleston and Tennant refer to it with. The vast majority of the tale is cleverly written narration. Ignis has to record events so she remembers them. As such, the story has a conceit to it that allows it to work particularly well in the audio drama format as opposed to television. This story wouldn't work anywhere near as well in prose or on television - it's one of those special stories that we love so much. Anyway, I don't have much critique about Rewind other than I'd like more stories to utilize narration and ballsy concepts like this one did, as this one really allowed me to actually feel like I was in a Time War story and not a Dalek War nonsense thing. Utterly fabulous - it's such a jolt in your seat after the previous two stories of mediocrity that I can almost advise buying the set exclusively for the majesty that is Rewind's nature.