Over the past couple months, I've listened to the eighth Doctor's triumphant return to Big Finish Productions' monthly Doctor Who range, alongside new companion Mary. I'd been anticipating these immensely, and on the whole, I found them quite enjoyable...
Doctor Who #153: The Silver Turk
written by Marc Platt
directed by Barnaby Edwards
starring Paul McGann as the Doctor, Julie Cox as Mary
released October 2011
Paul McGann! Nothing gets me excited like a new start for the Eighth Doctor, even if it’s a new old start.
The Silver Turk takes us back to the Eighth Doctor’s early days, before Charley Pollard, to his travels with Mary Shelley, picking up from the end of
The Company of Friends. So I was pretty jazzed to get ahold of it at long last.
In
The Company of Friends, the Doctor left Samson and Gemma in Vienna to answer a distress signal, so here, the Doctor tries to get back to the duo with his new friend Mary. Alas, adventures with the trio of Samson, Gemma, and Mary are not to be, for the Doctor gets the time wrong, accidentally landing in Vienna some 57 years into the future, where Alfred Stahlbaum is showing off his brand new invention, the automaton known as the “Silver Turk.” Only it’s not an invention at all, as the Silver Turk is quite clearly a Cyberman…
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Doctor Who #154: The Witch from the Well
written by Rick Briggs
directed by Barnaby Edwards
starring Paul McGann as the Doctor, Julie Cox as Mary
released November 2011
In their third adventure together, the Doctor and Mary land in the 21st century, where they are promptly attacked by a witch. Along with a pair of human twins they’ve met, they travel back to the 17th century to find out where the witch comes from. But something’s not as it seems (of course) and soon Mary finds herself back in the 21st century, fighting the same threat as the Doctor in the 17th. Such is the premise of
The Witch from the Well, the second audio drama from Rick Briggs, who previously penned
The Entropy Composition on
The Demons of Red Lodge and other stories.
Briggs writes a nice story. I mean
The Witch from the Well will never be called a classic of the genre, but it’s one of those
Doctor Who stories with a couple monsters, a nice idea, and a lot of running around that never really flags, and never bungles things up. What could be a bog-standard runaround is saved by the use of the two different time periods. In these days of wibbley-wobbly Moffaty-sophistry, it’s nothing new or impressive… but the story doesn’t ask us to be impressed, either. It’s a new layer or complication added into the plot, a bit of colour that actually does quite a bit to energise the story.
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Doctor Who #155: Army of Death
written by Jason Arnopp
directed by Barnaby Edwards
starring Paul McGann as the Doctor, Julie Cox as Mary
released December 2011
The previous Mary Shelley
Doctor Who adventures have taken Mary to only her near-future and her past; the furthest afield they’ve gone was Space Year 2011, and even then, Mary spent most her time running around a historic mansion. This has thankfully dodged a problem I predicted ever since it was announced that Mary would be the companion for these three stories: Mary can’t go to the future.
The reason is Mary Shelley’s “other” science fiction novel,
The Last Man. Oh yes, everyone knows
Frankenstein, and that story’s themes have suffused this run of plays to great effect. Mary has been sympathetic to the “monsters” she’s come across, but there’s always an undercurrent of repulsion, as in
Frankenstein itself, where the narrative seems to never quite admit that the creature deserves our pity. But Shelley also wrote
The Last Man in 1826, about England in the far-off 2090s… a time where the only changes have been the abolition of the monarchy and the use of balloons for travel. (But only in one scene. Shelley seems to otherwise forget this.) There’s even a subplot about the creation of a national portrait gallery, England having been unable to even manage that. How, then could Big Finish convince me that Mary Shelley had ever been to the future when her own ability to predict it had been so meagre?
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