The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Shades of Fear
The Ninth Doctor Adventures Shades of Fear
Assumedly this set takes place in a parallel universe, as to my shock, two of the stories in Shades of Fear are actually connected to each other. The Horror! Egad! This is something I think was sorely missing from Series Two of The Ninth Doctor Adventures, as although all four sets from this season are quite consistent indeed, there's very little linking material regarding them - and as a matter of fact, the stories taking place within the season are even out of order - with Break the Ice originally intended for the first set of the season and Auld Lang Syne the second. This is probably a semi-good choice to reorder them so the sets fit more thematically speaking, but it still doesn't fix the problem that this season needed a much more concrete arc - and pretending that there was one all along in the last set doesn't necessarily work. If The Color of Terror was placed in a previous set then the finale of Red Darkness could actually have felt rather momentous.
The Color of Terror by Lizzie Hopley
I've shit on Lizzie Hopley a lot on this website, so let me be clear when I say that It certainly isn't personal, and I'm always happy when ANYONE makes a good story. Should The Curse of Lady Macbeth or Precious Annihilation have been made?? Probably not. But when this woman writes a good story, she writes a DAMN good story, and I'm not filled with so much hatred and bias that I can't admit that the Color of Terror is very good - and up there with The Miniaturist as probably her best script yet. Bravo.
The Color of Terror takes place in a charity shop, run by a sour woman that will likely remind you of Sylvia Noble but worse. When a woman tries to buy a Red Wedding Dress from the Charity Shop, everything Red across London soon becomes hostile. This is an excellent abstract and lovecraftian concept that really really works for the story. The guest cast are really good - Frank Skinner, who I only know from Mummy on the Orient Express appears, and he plays basically the same guy from Mummy on the Orient Express but with a different name (who cares, I still like Budget Perkins) and Cath, who is quite likable.
The story is really ambitious for an audio play, and so it could have messed up a lot, but it really ended up working. I was expecting the worst, but it's always lovely to get a nice little surprise. If you liked some of Big Finish's early and more experimental work, this might interest you a lot.
The Blooming Menace by James Kettle
The Blooming Menace is one of James Kettle's best scripts yet, an absurdist comedy taking place in Victorian England, where several members of a gentlemen's club all suddenly become obsessed with and married to giant plant aliens. It's a creative and lovable script that is genuinely just a lot of fun. With Dave Hearn who you may know from the exquisite The Goes Wrong Show, one of my all time favorite comedy programs, we meet one of my favorite "companions of the week," Toby Entwhistle, a really funny straightman to The Ninth Doctor.
Stories don't just work for me based off of humor though, and so I'm happy to report that like the best of The Ninth Doctor Adventures, these stories live and die off of their guest stars. The Blooming Menace has a really solid cast even ignoring Toby, and has an excellent emotional core with the character of Phil, who I believe is a woman who prefers to live life as a man. The story never delves deep into their preferred choice of pronoun or whether they are an LGBT figure, but if they are merely cross-dressing, Phil and Toby's relationship is delightfully gay coded at the very least. Having a moving relationship like this at the heart of the story makes the nonsense marriage plants all the more amusing, and Christopher Eccleston relishes the chance to show his comedy chops.
I'm not sure if The Blooming Menace is quite as good as The Hunting Season (few audios are) but it's certainly just as creative, and more than worthy of your attention. Definitely the highlight of the set.
Red Darkness by Roy Gill
Red Darkness should work for me on paper, a story starring The Ninth Doctor versus the Vashta Nerada with a little something extra from the Color of Terror giving the peaceful Vashta Nerada a reason to become violent. It also is a story that supposedly concludes the Ninth Doctor's two season character arc regarding companions (we'll see if this sticks) by teaming him up with an adorable talking dog and - a whotuber, I guess?? I really have no clue who Adam Martyn is, he does fine with Callen's character, but I think my problem relating to this is more that I bought into The Ninth Doctor's connection with some other characters more. It's certainly odd.
Anyway, Roy Gill delivered an IMMENSELY good finale in season one that has aged in my brain like a fine wine, and I don't think that Red Darkness really matches it. It's got a much tighter runtime of one hour, and while the Vashta Nerada are cool, ostensibly in this story they sort of become an entirely different monster with their own rules and dynamic. This is still an enjoyable audio - I think a lot of that is due to the immensely likable Doyle the talking dog, who is a lovely successor to characters like Frobisher.
Eccleston is likely the highlight of the whole thing, who has decided to REALLY go hard with his performance in this one for some reason, resulting in the Vashta Nerada feeling like an immensely personal enemy (even if currently, they don't have much reason to.) I liked seeing this angrier side of the Ninth Doctor again after seeing Nine be so happy go lucky throughout these two seasons. This is a solid enough conclusion to the season that hardly left me displeased or anything, but had much more potential - and in earnest, I would have stuck the set with the Vareen and not the Vashta Nerada, but that probably wouldn't sell as well.
I will likely be signing off from the series here as I'm trying to ween off of the big expensive modern Big Finish boxsets, so let it be said that these two seasons have ultimately, at least personally for me, done their job. They aren't perfect by any means, but they have arguably more good stories than bad, even with a Rocky start like Ravagers' beautiful mess and a few more misfires than usual in series one. Eccleston is better than ever, and I'm excited to come back sometime later in a few years and see what he does next - I'm sure it'll be fantastic.
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