You Can't Go There for the First Time Again

Big Finish recently announced series 6 of its ongoing The Diary of River Song range. Like previous installments of their River Song range, it features River encountering an element from classic Doctor Who. This one has her becoming involved in the background to events we saw on screen; its four stories will include prequels to The Web of Fear (1968) and The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977). Previous ones have seen her meet the eighth, seventh, sixth, fifth, and fourth Doctors, as well as four different Masters.

I myself have beaten the drum against Big Finish's overreliance on continuity elements from the old show. At my other Internet home as an audio reviewer for Unreality SF, I am constantly complaining about Big Finish stories that bring back enemies or characters from old stories in ways that seem gratuitous or pointless. The last few months have seen WOTAN from The War Machines (1966) in Torchwood, Ogrons from Day of the Daleks (1972) in The Eighth Doctor: The Time War, the Kandyman from The Happiness Patrol (1988) in the New Eighth Doctor Adventures, and the Yeti and the Great Intelligence from The Abominable Snowmen (1967) in The New Counter-Measures. Except for the last one, it's hard for me to imagine who these combinations are supposed to appeal to, as they seem to combine mass appeal new series concepts with mediocre original series villains.

I even keep a Google Doc charting what classic Doctor Who stories have Big Finish sequels. Of 146 stories that are not themselves sequels, 87 of them had had some kind of follow-up from Big Finish. That's 60%. This gets even worse when you drill down to specific eras; of 26 non-sequel stories broadcast 1973-78, fully 22 of them have had BF follow-ups. 85%!

I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but the fact is that much of this stuff is mediocre. WOTAN is the weakest part of Torchwood One: Machines, the return of the Kandyman was largely botched, and the Yeti story is probably the worst Counter-Measures story Big Finish have ever done. The Ogron story does have some spark, I admit, though it's not as good as it could be.

Now I myself am no stranger to continuity-heavy tie-in fiction. Those familiar with my brief, unlamented career as a professional writer of fiction will know that it began with a story entirely designed to reconcile an inconsistency between one tie-in novel and another, when no such explanation was needed. I have two defenses. One is that I think the story takes this apparent inconsistency and builds a real story on it. (In theory at least. Probably not in execution.) And the other is that there is no way I would write that story now if someone lost all sanity and asked me to write a Star Trek e-book.

I was skimming the Twitter feed of John Dorney the other day; Dorney writes about one-third of Big Finish's output these days, and is responsible for writing the forthcoming River Song prequel to Web of Fear. Someone commented that they felt the River Song range was unoriginal, even by Big Finish's standards, and they had a little bit of back-and-forth about it. Here's what I see as the key bit:

I mean, sure, he's right about Wide Sargassa Sea and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. But Torchwood One: Machines: The Law Machines, Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor: The Time War 2: Planet of the Ogrons, Doctor Who: Ravenous 1: Sweet Salvation, and The New Counter-Measures: Series 2: Time of the Intelligence are hardly in the same league, are they?

Big Finish isn't exactly producing bold literary rewritings of classics of British literature that play with our accepted ideas of canon and gender and race. They're plays where the Doctor bumps into an alien robot who looks like Bertie Bassett. And most of the time, they're less interesting than the originals. Dorney's right that sequels don't preclude originality; some of Big Finish's best stories are sequels. But stories like Omega, Davros, and Master, that tear apart their eponymous characters to see what make them work, are few and far between. Most Big Finish sequels give you the same thing you already saw before, only ground down slightly by a sense you've seen it all before. Because you have.

In his history of sf, Trillion Year Spree, there's a bit where Brian Aldiss argues that originality is necessary to science fiction. I'm paraphrasing from memory here, but he essentially says that a sequel to Dune could be just as good as Dune in every way, but it still wouldn't be as good, because in Dune, Frank Herbert created a world, and in the sequels he only returned to one. There is an aspect that a sequel can just never have.

It seems a bit disingenuous for Dorney to claim that he can't see the line between the fourth Doctor, Leela, and K9, and the fourth Doctor, Leela, K9, and the Daleks. The former group can go anywhere, can tell any kind of story. The latter group is locked into a much smaller possible range of stories. And possibly all kinds of crazy and interesting things could be done with them, but I've heard enough Big Finish to know that what comes out of my headphones when I plug in my iPod isn't going to be written by Tom Stoppard.