The War Doctor: Only the Monstrous

 

The War Doctor: Only the Monstrous

Hello. I'm back. It's been a while, and I've been doing a lot of writing. That's why you haven't seen me post on here, because when you write, your ability to critique other things is dwarfed by the ability to critique yourself. Every time you say a story is something, you wonder if you're guilty of the same problem. You wonder if you're being an asshole. So that's been the cycle for a while, and why I haven't put anything out. But I want to get better as a writer any way I can, and I think reviews are perhaps one of the best ways I can improve, especially with words. I strive to be honest, fair, kind, and also not lie, which can be tough, but I want to be able to do it. Hopefully it will help me with my own work. So I'm returning to reviewing with quite a bit of a challenge. 

I've put off reviewing this bugger for years. It's become a bit too large and important to avoid, so I'll be taking a look at it alongside the rest of Sir John Hurt's War Doctor. I've listened to it quite a few times, oddly. Five (probably six) years ago, I borrowed the set from my public library, it being the only Doctor Who they had, and it was one of the very first audios I ever experienced, right after Diary of River Song 1 and 2, Doom Coalition 1, The War Master Only The Good and the first three Tenth Doctor sets. I was in the childlike era of excited with the new possibilities that were unfolding before me. I wasn't used to the medium quite yet. It was a long time before I was able to even admit that Big Finish stories could be anything less than perfect, I was a different being. And even then -- I really didn't like it much. 

It's a big proper three-hour story. Currently on BBC Sounds it's split into six parts, although on disc it's only three. I think the six parts work well for it, even if not every cliffhanger rocks. It helps you realize the size of the thing. It's without a doubt one of the most important audios in Big Finish's history, the first proper NuWho audio. There was of course, a few weeks before it, the UNIT audios with Kate Stewart dipping into NuWho, but this is the first one with the Doctor. It's also one of Nicholas Briggs' boxset epics. He's done a few now. The first "epic" he did was the first Dark Eyes boxset, there's this one, and most recently, The Ninth Doctor's Ravagers. I’d also count The Third Doctor Adventures’ The Annihilators. While it’s not the first installment of the range, it’s the first installment of its new format, and is certainly a large boxset. All of these sets have its own critical consensus, but they inform each other, I think, and I shall have to at least discuss Ravagers a little in this review. And lastly, it introduces two of Big Finish's most important characters in recent years, the omnipresent Ollistra and Veklin, who you can find just about anywhere if you really look. So yeah, it’s really quite important.

The first disc is The Innocent, and I think it's probably the best of the three, even if I'm not obsessed with it. It focuses on a much more single point than the other two, mainly John Hurt's recovery from the detonation of a time destructor (straight from DMP) right in his face. It also introduces the woman who you think is going to be the War Doctor's companion, Rejoice, and focuses mainly on the relationship between the two. I don't have many problems with The Innocent, but I think I should segue into what I do have problems with, because the set on the whole sort of blends into each other. 

It's to do with the nature of the time war, and the steady increase of how Star Wars they keep trying to make it -- the beauty of the time war was, initially, in it's inexplicability, and you can explore the time war, sure, but it becomes all the more frustrating if you explore it and it's very explicable. The big premiere of the War Doctor is this story, a story that despite being set in the time war, might as well be set in the Dalek-Movellan war. The most absurd element is the Dalek's ultimate weapon, which hurls a thousand planets at Gallifrey. I'm not sure about you, but I think, as large an idea as that is, that I can explain it. And the problem that I largely have with The War Doctor's boxsets -- all the way up to The War Doctor Begins, because it keeps doing it -- is that pretty much every story is like this. For every story that embraces the weird time stuff of the time war, we get 11 more that aren't that. I know because the only story that embraces the weird time stuff in John Hurt's original run is The Neverwhen. Does this mean that entire original run sucks? No, but it is a flaw that's not very ignorable. And it gets worse when there's nothing to distract from it. 

The Thousand Worlds and The Heart of the Battle are this weird big blob of every Dalek story you've heard before. I'm not sure where to begin about them, because my criticism regarding them just seems to repeat itself. It reminds me of Terry Nation, in more ways than one. He was an immensely talented writer, one of the smartest, but there was part of him that just kept wanting to tell the same sort of stories. They had to make him put out a brilliant story that innovated on what he had done before, and that was Genesis of the Daleks, a masterpiece that Doctor Who hasn’t stopped milking forty-eight years on. It’s a lovely story, but they had to make him do it, and he’d have rather written Death to the Daleks again. Nicholas Briggs is the same way with the stories he writes — he can do something brilliant… but he likes to do the same few things. 

The Innocent, as said, is a character analysis piece, at least after the relatively dull first bit where Doctor Who liberates the planet from the evil Taalyens or whatever. Most of it, at the least, is a character study. I don’t think it’s a particularly revolutionary one, but it is a decent one because of the delicacy with which John Hurt is treated, and that the climax relatively speaking takes place at the middle, allowing the second half of the episode to really focus inward on The War Doctor, who, frustratingly, is always called The Doctor in this. It’s not bad initially, but as the set goes on, you enter an endless loop of War pouting and whining “Don’t call me that name, I don’t deserve it!” Any critiques I could make on this write themselves. But what I’m trying to point out is The Innocent’s relative subversiveness as a premiere, and the strength that it gains from doing so. Most of the second half of the Innocent is the War Doctor, a man enlisted in the most horrid war conceivable (and inconceivable) and he’s literally just going on a fishing trip. The dichotomy of that makes the Innocent, while not exactly world-shattering, quietly superb, and it makes the return to the Time War all the more infuriating.

The Thousand Worlds and Heart of the Battle borrow a fair bit from Dark Eyes, specifically X and The Daleks and The Traitor (which in turn borrows from Dalek Empire) while taking into account a healthy amount of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, just, without the Earth bit. Although it sort of points out the similarities to Dalek Invasion’s slavery stuff, so I’m uncertain how much to be mad at that. It is notable however, how many times we've seen the "slaves rise up against the Daleks" plotline, it was always one of Terry Nation's old favorites. The elevator pitch for these stories is The War Doctor’s return to Keska, which is now a horrid slave planet of doom overseen by the Daleks. The War Doctor is sent there with an elite strike force by Ollistra to rescue a guy, and if you have seen literally anything before you know that this goes wrong, and the guy doesn't want to be rescued. It’s a little hard to talk about Only the Monstrous as it goes on, because as it does, it sort of congeals. The side characters aren’t very interesting— It’s hard to believe that Veklin will go on to become an important character based off how she is portrayed here. Rejoice, initially the audience’s perspective character, and the one person we are emotionally invested in, is sort of furniture, and the events of the story, her entire life passing by us without us getting to know her, make her unavailable at best as a companion figure. And because of all this, The story is playing with large-scale war to the extent that our connection to the stakes are purely numerical, and the action scenes mean that I largely enter a dreamstate until the admittedly fantastic final monologue.

Only the Monstrous is the most ambitious unambitious story I’ve ever heard. It’s got one of the hardest jobs ever, and as a premiere, it certainly falters, but I’m unsure of what it really can do to fix itself. The best time war stories tend to look at the Time War in a completely different way, and this one just is every kind of space war we've seen before. I really don't get this one or understand it's popularity, aside from John Hurt and Jacqueline Pearce being quite the persuasive leads. And that brings us back to it's impact. It's one of the most important sets they've done, because it shaped one of the other most important sets they ever did -- Ravagers, an incoherent mess of a story in a similar format that didn't do it any favors. To be fair to Ravagers, I do love it despite it's shortcomings, but it's sad to say that both the first volume of the War Doctor and the Ninth Doctor were markedly the worst showings of the range, especially when we got so little of Sir John Hurt at all. 

People love this one though, which is what I'm going to end this with. I certainly don't, but I think I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that when someone put up a poll of all the War Doctor audios on discord, when I checked the poll results, I was staggered to see that Only the Monstrous had twice the votes of every other story on the poll. It was a small sample size, but I do think it's worth noting that my perspective is not the only one, and this was quite a popular release among fans. There should be space to tell stories like Only the Monstrous -- every now and then, we can use a story written in the vein of classic old Terry Nation. It's something that Big Finish do quite well -- emulate Holmes or Dicks, Letts, Hinchcliffe, Cartmel. But this wasn't the place for it. Big Finish is so used to telling stories in gaps, in times that have passed, it's where they operate, and when presented with a vast area of enormous potential, I don't think they were really quite sure what to do. They made a relatively competent story, a safe bet. The safety of Only the Monstrous is part of what makes it so frustrating beyond words to me. You can't decide to write a big three hour event, and also to make it "safe." I think as the start of a glorious and fresh era, it's all the sadder we didn't see something truly off the wall and ambitious. But that's just me. What do you think about it?