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docbeard posted:... but which must have inevitably led to more than one young writer frantically grafting the Doctor into the cyberpunk story they've been working on since they were fourteen. (Which I'm convinced is how Transit came about.) I really felt that about Transit as well. It's just so not Doctor Who, even the whole concept of the "space-subways" which is radically anachronistic from what little we knew about future Earth's history and technology. I always pictured Aaranovitch riding the Tube and daydreaming "what if this just went to MARS!"  IIRC this is also what happened with Witch Mark, and I think the author even admitted it. He took some book he wrote about veterinarians and parallel universes filled wth magic and dropped the Doctor and Ace in.
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Mar 15, 2015 01:22
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Wheat Loaf posted:Anyway, getting away from all that, one BBC book I remember really liking was The Time Travellers, a First Doctor which was written as a bit of a send-off for Ian and Barbara. This is the one I'm reading now. I'm really impressed at how much it feels like a First Doctor story. It's doing stuff, of course, that a televised story couldn't, but there's that same air of danger, of vague helplessness, and wanting to get home that no other era really has. Guerrier also REALLY has a handle on the characters. It seems like it's just starting to get crazy, but it's been really tense so far.
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Mar 15, 2015 02:20
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Rochallor posted:This is the one I'm reading now. I'm really impressed at how much it feels like a First Doctor story. It's doing stuff, of course, that a televised story couldn't, but there's that same air of danger, of vague helplessness, and wanting to get home that no other era really has. Guerrier also REALLY has a handle on the characters. Guerrier writes some of the best Companion Chronicles for BF. Hell, Peter Purves name checked him in a interview in DWM saying how he really well he writes for Steven.
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Mar 15, 2015 15:39
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 Memory Lane takes a creepy premise and slowly but surely injects it with comedy, favoring an increasingly light-hearted tone slightly marred by a repeated scene of torture. While the humor undermines the creepiness and essentially forgives the rather callous and cruel actions of the antagonists, it is perhaps for the best as beyond the premise itself the writer seemed unsure how to develop or continue the story in that vein, and going slowly more comedic ends up salvaging a story that could have easily gone off the rails. Managing to provide "screentime" for both McGann's 8th Doctor as well as his two companions, nobody feels surplus to requirements or shoehorned in, a competent balancing act that sadly isn't always achieved in Big Finish's stories featuring more than one companion. There is a street in the suburbs, somewhere in England and somewhere in the past. Is it the 70s or 80s? Maybe even the early 90s? There is no way to know. Each house looks the same, and inside one house Tom Braudy is playing with his Lego, building a spaceship while his Grandmother watches the snooker on television, the broadcast signal interrupted every so often and instead playing excerpts of some sci-fi show about a crashing spaceship. At first the casting seems odd, as Tom is clearly supposed to be a child and yet is clearly being played by an adult who is putting on a young sounding voice. Audios have done this before and it's usually to poor effect, but it works well here because as we're soon to learn, Tom is a fully grown man.... but he thinks he's a child, and so does his Grandmother. What about the neighbors? Well there are none, each house is identical and inside each house is the same Grandmother, watching the snooker and making supper. When Tom goes outside to play (or to get an ice-cream from the ice-cream van that periodically drives by), he simply returns to any house on the street, where his grandmother is always waiting, ready to give him supper and then go back to watching the same eternally playing snooker match while the fully grown Tom continues playing with his toys. The street is endless, stretching out beyond the horizon, and every single house is the same... until the Doctor arrives. Intending to bring Charley and C'Rizz to the countryside of a planet named Lucentra, the Doctor is rather put out to find himself seemingly back on Earth AGAIN. More importantly they've landed in somebody's living room, Tom's Nan (Mrs. Baudry) seemingly non-plussed to have a blue Police Box materialize before her. As weird as this all is, the Doctor takes it in stride and is quite excited to see the snooker on, and even more excited when he hears the chimes of the ice-cream van and takes the others out with him to get a treat. The ice-cream man seems confused to see them, and even more confused by their requests for particular flavors/brands, even though at least some of them are on his chart. Once he leaves, he contacts his supervisor where they have an irritated conversation where it becomes quite apparent that neither man is quite on top of things, almost immediately undermining any sense of threat the characters might have. That actually works in some ways, as the Doctor and his companions become more aware of the creepy situation they've found themselves in, the notion that even the people maintaining this trap/prison/experiment are in some way suffering from the effects on memory and personality creates a kind of sense that nobody is actually in charge, that this whole thing is running itself and everybody in it are prisoners in one way or the other. This turns out not to be the case, but for the first half of the story or so, you could be forgiven for thinking so. Each of the three main cast are given some meat to their respective storylines, with each getting to their own thing without any of them feeling overlooked or underserved. C'Rizz encounters another person hiding in the street, a crewmate of Tom's - Kim - who has managed to keep hidden from the "keepers" who run the street, and is beaming recordings of their ship's crash into the street's televisions in the hope of sparking Tom's memory of who he really is. The two immediately clash personality-wise, with C'Rizz getting in one hell of a zinger when he reveals his chameleon-like nature causes him to take on some of the personality traits of the people he is around (explaining a lot about his rather bland and often contradictory character), so if she is finding him aggravating, unreasonable and suspicious then maybe she should look in a mirror and ask what that says about her. Meanwhile, the Doctor is able to stitch together Tom's backstory by watching the recordings Kim has been broadcasting, and figure out what is causing Tom to believe he is a child living with his Nan in some nostalgic memory of one of the endless summers of his childhood - nanomachines infest the area, keeping anybody who ingests them trapped in a mental state where they believe the environment they are in, an environment that is projected by their own minds. Unfortunately this means all of them are in danger, including Charley who finds herself regressing to childhood mentally alongside Tom. Tom's Nan informs her she needs to return home because her mother is looking for her, and directs her to "the big house", which has now appeared amongst the otherwise identical homes stretching out along the endless street. She returns home and happily tells her mother (voiced by Anneke Wills, Polly from William Hartnell/Patrick Troughton's time) all about her day, fully believing in the illusion her own mind is projecting. With the TARDIS having been driven out of the street (it simply fades from view, the street is endless) attached to the back of the ice-cream van, the Doctor has to reunite everybody and figure out a way to break Tom's mind free and get them all out of there. Unfortunately his efforts succeed only in causing Tom's mind to project the spaceship he once traveled on, a ship that he and Kim escaped from because a dangerous creature called a Marmadon had gotten onboard and was tearing everything apart. The "cell" holding Tom prisoner can't deal with the multiple minds projecting conflicting images onto it, and things begin to quickly fall apart, with the Doctor escaping the spaceship projection only to find himself in Charley's home - a timeless place, a composite of varying points in Charley's childhood. Meeting the local "rag-n-bone" man, who is actually the ice-cream man from Tom's projection, the Doctor steals his cart and escapes the cell entirely, where he discovers the truth finally about what is going on. Comedy has slowly been creeping into the story and its apex probably comes with the Doctor forcing a rag and bone onto the rag-n-bone man and then cartjacking him. At this point, as things are revealed, things take a darker turn before jumping headfirst back into the comedic aspects, which causes a fair amount of tonal whiplash. The Doctor learns that Tom's escape pod crashed onto the planet Lucentra (he is delighted, he piloted it correctly after all!), and the inhabitants locked him into a cell and regressed him mentally to a child.... so they'd have someplace safe to hold him until they could reenact the event for an enthusiastic public, something they appear to do annually to celebrate "first contact" with an alien race. The Lucentrans, it turns out, are an advanced race with the odd (and not entirely believable) physiological deficiency of lacking an ability to form lasting memories - they have to constantly remind themselves of meetings/decisions/events, and while many things are intellectually recalled, there is no personal element of memory, no individual sense of what it felt like to watch, to experience, to feel - just a vague feeling that something important happened, and this text says it was <x>. So Tom is their most prized possession, made ageless so that every year they can recreate the events and experience them personally again for what feels like the "first" time. In order to do this though, they need Tom, and the Doctor currently has him safely tucked away in his recovered TARDIS, so the two captors decide the best course is to torture the Doctor mentally to force him to open the TARDIS (the key won't work for them) - he is constantly returned to a deadly situation in his memory, adjusted so it ends each time with the deaths of first Charley and C'Rizz and then himself.... at which point he returns to reality in the torture chamber unable to remember how many times he has been through this trauma, with the demand that he open the TARDIS doors or suffer through it again. It's a rather dark element that removes any possibility of sympathy towards the Lucentrans, which makes what follows fall a little flat, as well as fell out of place since it takes such a comedic bent. Charley, C'Rizz and Kim escape the cell when they realize that it shapes itself to their mental desires, and that C'Rizz's nature as a mental/emotional chameleon will overload it with conflicting desires. Confronting their captors (who barely remember who they are), they free the Doctor who offers the solution that has been unknowingly present since the moment of Tom's initial crash - there are ship's recordings on Tom's escape pod that have recorded every single thing that happened on that ship, up to and including Tom's crash on Lucentra. The Doctor gifts them the amazing and wondrous technology of.... a VCR, and the memory-deficient Lucentrans are in awe that they will now be able to see/experience these "memories" at will, any time they personally feel like it. It's a comedically simple ending and it might have worked if the torture scene hadn't been present to make the Lucentrans essentially irredeemably cruel whereas up till this point they had mostly been harmless idiots who hadn't quite understood the impact of what they were doing - the torture adds an element of deliberate cruelty that makes it difficult to accept an ending that paints them once again as goofy. This itself is somewhat redeemed by an EXCELLENT line by the Doctor though, when C'Rizz tells him the Lucentrans got off too easily. The Doctor posted:Revenge is a dish best left to go cold..... and then thrown in the kitchen bin. The Doctor returns Kim (I have barely touched on her story, which involves an entirely different kind of time travel) and Tom to Earth, in a different time so they don't have to face inquiries or public scrutiny, the latter being something both have had more than enough of. Leaving them to live their lives, he, Charley and C'Rizz return to their own, their little trip down Memory Lane happily ended without death or destruction following in their wake for once. In the end, the whole thing was ultimately a bit of harmless misunderstanding, and that's a good description of the story itself. Creepy to start, funny to finish, with some unfortunate bumps along the way, Memory Lane is a serviceable story that does its job competently enough. While it isn't going to stick in your mind very long, it does a solid job of using the small cast it has well, particularly the main cast trio - and it's that rarest of stories, one that actually makes a good and effective use of C'Rizz and his alien nature.
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Mar 15, 2015 23:48
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Memory Lane had a pretty compelling mystery around it, and learning that it was a prison was okay, but learning the purpose behind Tom's imprisonment was...well, it rather derailed my enjoyment that I'd had til that point. It's still probably the strongest of the immediate-post Divergent universe dramas, though. --- Finally got round to those visual guide things. I'm going to cover the multi-Doctor audios, and the spin-off stuff seperately. Feel free to say if I've left anything major out, spelling mistakes, legibility, or suggested improvements and all.  These all contain spoilers for companions        
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Mar 16, 2015 02:24
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Pesky Splinter posted:Memory Lane had a pretty compelling mystery around it, and learning that it was a prison was okay, but learning the purpose behind Tom's imprisonment was...well, it rather derailed my enjoyment that I'd had til that point. It's still probably the strongest of the immediate-post Divergent universe dramas, though. On the one hand it was disappointing to see them go so comedic and effectively squander the creepy premise, but on the other it felt pretty obvious that outside of the premise itself they really weren't sure how to move on from there, so it was probably for the best that they just went with comedy rather than spinning their wheels with the dark, creepy stuff which would have quickly got old. Pesky Splinter posted:Finally got round to those visual guide things. I'm going to cover the multi-Doctor audios, and the spin-off stuff seperately. Feel free to say if I've left anything major out, spelling mistakes, legibility, or suggested improvements and all. Oh man that's really awesome, thanks for doing these. The only issue I have is that the light yellow on the blue background is hard to read (Dodo, Liz Shaw, Adric etc) and could use some kind of bordering/stroke to help it stand out. Otherwise, this is a great job, thanks for doing it.
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Mar 16, 2015 03:19
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Pesky Splinter posted:Finally got round to those visual guide things. I'm going to cover the multi-Doctor audios, and the spin-off stuff seperately. Feel free to say if I've left anything major out, spelling mistakes, legibility, or suggested improvements and all. I like this. I like you. May I post this on my Wordpress with appropriate credit?
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Mar 16, 2015 04:18
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It's great, the only thing I'd like to see is maybe an alternate version showing the stories in order by companion. For me, the way I've listened to most of the stories is "in order." So I will listen to a run of stories with the same group of companions, by Doctor. For example with the First Doctor you'd have The Beginning as the very first. Then all the Susan, Barbara, Ian stories. Then Vicki, Barbara, Ian. Then Vicki and Stephen, etc. For Five you'd put stories in different order based on when he was traveling with which companions. One of the most difficult things when listening to stories "in order" is the jumping around. Especially for Doctors who have stories in multiple ranges (Lost, Main, Companion, etc). Like can you imagine the difficulty of trying to listen to Peri's entire arc in order without a guide?  An ordered list would be perfect.
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Mar 16, 2015 06:07
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The Doctor Who Reference Guide hasn't been updated since the Day of the Doctor was broadcast, but it's a good starting point for chronology.
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Mar 16, 2015 06:36
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Personally I always just go with release order if only because there is a pretty noticeable jump in quality across the years that is difficult to go back to, and also out of paranoid fear of spoilers or lack of context (The ending of Thicker Than Water, for instance, requires a lot of "future" knowledge to work in context). That does get rather aggravating at times though, I'm a handful of stories away from ending the 8/Charley/C'Rizz combo at which point I can jump back into the 8th Doctor Adventures series, and once I'm through the first four seasons of that I can FINALLY listen to Dark Eyes. The one time I decided to make an exception was with UNIT: Dominion, through which I learned about the return of a particular character ([spoiler]Klein[spoiler]) as well as where they ended up, and pretty much the entire story of their long character development through their appearances.
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Mar 16, 2015 06:42
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Jerusalem posted:Oh man that's really awesome, thanks for doing these. The only issue I have is that the light yellow on the blue background is hard to read (Dodo, Liz Shaw, Adric etc) and could use some kind of bordering/stroke to help it stand out. Otherwise, this is a great job, thanks for doing it. Thanks, I've made them darker colours for clarity. CobiWann posted:I like this. I like you. May I post this on my Wordpress with appropriate credit? Thanks, yeah go ahead, probably best to use these slightly corrected ones with some darker names: Linked here Astroman posted:It's great, the only thing I'd like to see is maybe an alternate version showing the stories in order by companion. For me, the way I've listened to most of the stories is "in order." So I will listen to a run of stories with the same group of companions, by Doctor. I'll look into it, but I can already tell some of it would be a nightmare trying to place chronologically. [e]: whoops! Sorry linked. VVV Pesky Splinter fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Mar 16, 2015 |
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Mar 16, 2015 13:02
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Can you link the images rather than repeatedly posting really long images in-thread?
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Mar 16, 2015 13:41
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Wheat Loaf posted:I didn't mean to imply she did? I'm sorry, I've always seen "shacking up" as a completely gender neutral ribald colloquialism, if that's what's causing the confusion here. Oh it is, I was doing my standard gripe about novelists missing how many young women Ace groped and/or asked to come away with her over the course of seasons 25 and 26.
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Mar 16, 2015 13:48
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Jerusalem posted:Personally I always just go with release order if only because there is a pretty noticeable jump in quality across the years that is difficult to go back to, and also out of paranoid fear of spoilers or lack of context (The ending of Thicker Than Water, for instance, requires a lot of "future" knowledge to work in context). Yeah, release order seems to make the most sense to me. It's not like most people would watch Memento or Lost in chronological order (yes, I know, there are people who do this). It's kind of fun to listen to it as they develop the story, rather than the order the story is supposed to take place in (and frankly, with the Sixth Doctor, it's close to to impossible to tell, anyway. I still can't tell if Evelyn was before or after Charlie). I'm listening to The Doomwood Curse (I just finished the first part), and I'm pretty sure I can already tell where it's going. It's about as preposterous as you'd think for a story with that name, although of course there's an in-story explanation (I am certain) for most of its absurdity. My guess is that it will be a fun listen, but not one of the Six Doctor's best stories.
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Mar 16, 2015 14:10
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Davros1 posted:Guerrier writes some of the best Companion Chronicles for BF. Hell, Peter Purves name checked him in a interview in DWM saying how he really well he writes for Steven. I really like his writing style. There's a lot of pessimism in his stories, but on a level you can understand and care about, unlike say, Lidster's poo poo. His portrayal of Steven is great 'cause we get a good look into how losing several friends in the space of a few adventures (and being imprisoned by the Mechanoids!) really damaged his self-esteem, and he's very understandably ready to just give up more than once.
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Mar 16, 2015 18:55
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Simon Guerrier is also a top bloke and always stands his round.
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Mar 16, 2015 19:06
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So I was listening to The Trail of the White Worm today, and I gotta say Geoffrey Beevers really sounds a lot like Roger Delgado sometimes. IIRC it's light canon that the decayed Master is supposed to be the unregenerated dying form of the Delgado Master, and I can really hear that. I would have zero problem if Beevers did some Third Doctor audios...
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Mar 17, 2015 00:35
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I've always felt this must have been the case - the last time we see Delgado's Master he's on the run from the Daleks, and the next time we see the Master he's a decaying husk of a body holding on to life through sheer horrible will. In my mind, the Daleks caught up with him and blasted him, it was his last regeneration and he just refused to die, eventually finding a Trakenite body he was able to occupy for a time till once again reverting back to his old form. Somewhere along the way he regenerates, but whether it's after the events of the TV movie or into Alex MacQueen or John Simm, who knows. Edit: Reading up on things, I seem to have made up the idea in my head of the Daleks being pissed at the Master at the end of Frontier in Space, so pretend I said that they were PROBABLY pissed off that he allowed the Doctor to escape and he went on the run as a result.
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Mar 17, 2015 00:39
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Jerusalem posted:
I think it's safe to say that the Daleks were pissed off for any set of circumstance, short of exterminating all non-Dalek life.
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Mar 17, 2015 01:10
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So in preparation to meet Sylvester McCoy, or "The Radagast Doctor" as the kiddo calls him, we watched Remembrance of the Daleks. 1. Dear GOD, late 1980's special effects. 2. Dear GOD, shoddy late 1980's Dalek construction. Thatcher and her anti-labour ways have a lot to answer for. I haven't seen a Dalek wobble and shake like that since the last Doctor Who porn parody. 3. Dear GOD, shooting outdoors and bad sound mixing. 4. Ace is AMAZING. She is now the kiddo's favorite companion and demands to see another Seven/Ace story (leaning towards Battlefield). 5. McCoy's little mannerisms are great. The way he hangs his umbrella from an eyehook on his jacket, his facial movements, the "switch passenger/driver' trick in the tunnel, and his little snide remarks. I love McCoy, but some of his magic is lost on audio. 6. Dear God, was Davros in a plastic Hefty bag with telephone cords draped all over him? 7. The "no coloureds" sign led to this exchange... Kiddo: Well, that's just wrong. Me: It's the 1960's, dear. People aren't as enlightened... Kiddo: I don't mean the racism, Cobi. I mean the spelling! Who spells 'colored' with a 'u?'
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Mar 17, 2015 01:16
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The Doctor would, because he recognises the One True English. 
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Mar 17, 2015 01:23
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CobiWann posted:7. The "no coloureds" sign led to this exchange... The child was cute, now it can 
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Mar 17, 2015 01:31
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Presumably the TARDIS telepathic translator thing resolves regional spelling variations. A Brit in the US sees all British spellings.
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Mar 17, 2015 01:34
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I managed to get Karen Gillan's autograph at KC Planet Comicon this past weekend. They also had Caitlin Blackwood there and I know some people were doing photo ops with both Amys Pond.
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Mar 17, 2015 02:25
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qntm posted:Presumably the TARDIS telepathic translator thing resolves regional spelling variations. A Brit in the US sees all British spellings. serioustalk: There's an idea in some parts of DW fandom that the TARDIS translator "curates" or censors stuff. Some writers/fans argue that it's got, like, a swear filter or something, or that it trips up on figures of speech, or whatever, and I absolutely hate that entire line of logic. I mean, for one, the Doctor wouldn't stand for it. Not my Doctor, at any rate. The idea that the Doctor would allow the speech of his friends to be censored, or that he'd casually censor the world around him and his friends, is absolutely atrocious. Would the TARDIS have that capacity? Certainly. But the Doctor would have turned that poo poo off. As for the idea that the translator malfunctions - well, I don't think the Doctor would stand for that, either. The Doctor wages war with words, with language and rhetoric and emotion, and encourages the people he meets to do the same. The idea that the translation is anythign short of perfect undermines his entire lifestyle and worldview. so yeah
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Mar 17, 2015 02:39
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The TARDIS telepathic circuits are just a simple and straightforward way of explaining,"Why can everybody - including aliens - understand each other?" and they don't need any further/deeper explanation of them than that.
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Mar 17, 2015 02:44
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Jerusalem posted:The TARDIS telepathic circuits are just a simple and straightforward way of explaining,"Why can everybody - including aliens - understand each other?" and they don't need any further/deeper explanation of them than that. Well yeah, that too. I'm one of the most staunch Doylists in the entire Doctor Who fandom. Still, there are cool little jokes or tricks you can pull with the translator - there's an audio where the translation circuit is weaponized, for instance, and it's really clever, but it's also treated as a really bizarre thing to do. I just hate the whole idea that the Doctor is really all that "alien", really. Like, yeah, the Doctor (particularly Doctors Six, Eleven, and Twelve) can be an oblivious twat, but you don't need to be an ~alien who doesn't understand human behavior~ to be an oblivious twat. Plenty of human beings are oblivious twats every day. Treating the Doctor as "incompetent" with regards to humanity, or (as I've even seen argued) acting as though he doesn't actually speak or understand human languages without the TARDIS, or any of those other ~alien~ characteristics, all rub me the wrong way. The way I see it, being a ~Time Lord from Gallifrey in the Constellation of Kasterberous with two hearts and a respiratory bypass system" is easily the least interesting thing about the Doctor.
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Mar 17, 2015 02:58
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I think logical and sensical universal translation is even harder to rationalize than logical and sensical time travel.
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Mar 17, 2015 03:03
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Rochallor posted:I think logical and sensical universal translation is even harder to rationalize than logical and sensical time travel. Which is why you don't. Full 100% no-exceptions Doylism is the only reasonable perspective to have on any work of fiction, ever. 
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Mar 17, 2015 03:11
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CobiWann posted:5. McCoy's little mannerisms are great. The way he hangs his umbrella from an eyehook on his jacket, his facial movements, the "switch passenger/driver' trick in the tunnel, and his little snide remarks. I love McCoy, but some of his magic is lost on audio. I was just listening to Fearmonger the other day, and there's this great little moment in the middle where he really comes through in the audio. He's just pulled the usual Doctor trick of walking up and giving orders amid chaos, when someone turns to him and says something along the lines of "yes, thank you, Doctor. I believe this is the part where you insinuate yourself into the situation so no one questions you?" The very next thing you hear is a receding "Goodbye" which just immediately perfectly conjures McCoy in the mind's eye. A finer moment in the audios is not had until C-Bakes channels Winnie the Pooh in Light at the End.
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Mar 17, 2015 05:17
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I am really digging Eight's chemistry with Lucy at the end of the second season of Eighth Doctor Adventures.
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Mar 17, 2015 05:49
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PantsOptional posted:A finer moment in the audios is not had until C-Bakes channels Winnie the Pooh in Light at the End. To what moment are you referring?
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Mar 17, 2015 07:39
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I don't remember exactly when it happens, but throughout the whole thing Colin has a very Pooh-like sound to his voice that he didn't really have when he was younger, and at one point he exclaims "oh bother!" and it was basically everything I needed.
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Mar 17, 2015 14:08
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DoctorWhat posted:As for the idea that the translator malfunctions - well, I don't think the Doctor would stand for that, either. The Doctor wages war with words, with language and rhetoric and emotion, and encourages the people he meets to do the same. The idea that the translation is anythign short of perfect undermines his entire lifestyle and worldview. I dunno, nothing else about the TARDIS works right, I can't see the translator being the one infallible part. Maybe he keeps better care of it than certain other parts of the machine, maybe it only screws up on edge cases, but there's no chance the translation matrix is perfectly-functioning. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 14:22
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Happy St Patrick's Day! (am I doing this right?)
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Mar 17, 2015 14:40
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I believe this is the most appropriate video for the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ8MZzJFZIE
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Mar 17, 2015 17:29
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Pesky Splinter posted:Memory Lane had a pretty compelling mystery around it, and learning that it was a prison was okay, but learning the purpose behind Tom's imprisonment was...well, it rather derailed my enjoyment that I'd had til that point. It's still probably the strongest of the immediate-post Divergent universe dramas, though. I'm not sure if you're counting them, since they're not Big Finish, but Jon Pertwee did three audio plays before he died.
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Mar 17, 2015 21:21
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 No Man's Land comes sooooooo close to getting it right, to successfully throwing out multiple red herrings before just delivering a straightforward and well executed historical where the twist is that there is no twist..... and then it throws in a last second "twist" that was meant to be a jawdropping moment and instead just left a sour aftertaste from what had been a very good story. It's a mystery, an anti-war piece AND a psychological thriller that borrows liberally some of the mechanical elements of 1984, but what it most definitely is NOT is a sci-fi story featuring aliens or advanced technology... until they just couldn't resist a bit of wallowing in their own pet creation - the recurrence of the sadly rather naff THE FORGE, which have made frequent appearances through the various audio adventures of the 6th and 7th Doctors, as well as at least one appear in a 5th Doctor story, though he seemed unaware of them - essentially the same thing as was appearing throughout RTD's second season of the revival, though Big Finish's creation existed well before Rusty's. The 7th Doctor, Ace and Hex are in the basement of an old building retrofitted into a military hospital, having been discovered much the worse for wear in "No Man's Land" by British soldiers. It seems they have landed bang in the midst of World War I, and at first my thought was that they were going to do a rehash of The Settling, replacing Cromwell's Irish atrocities with the madness of the Great War. The characters even comment on this themselves, concerned about so quickly running into another great conflict, but the story quickly takes a more metaphysical bent, as they are released from their confinement by the Lieutenant-Colonel running the hospital who offers apologies, respect, and the run of the place. Why? Because he's just received orders informing him that "The Doctor" and two companions will be arriving to investigate the murder. What murder? The one that hasn't happened yet, of course! Much to their surprise, it seems the trio have been anticipated by somebody, and that their job is to either prevent or uncover the details of a murder yet to happen. So immediately there appears to be some temporal element to the story, and ideas of time loops and predestination paradoxes run through the head. The Doctor is less concerned by how the orders came though, and more concerned with the murder they are predicting, and since the surprisingly accommodating Lieutenant-Colonel is willing to give them the run of the place, he takes it and jumps into his role as investigator with great gusto. Ace does the same, and Hex follows along reluctantly in her wake, as they investigate the hospital and begin uncovering all sorts of weird things. The convalescing soldiers are put through a daily "hate" ala 1984, listening in anguish to prepared audio files of German speeches bellowing over the shrieks and cries of British women and children, then opening fire with blank rounds on dummies dressed in German uniforms. One new arrival tells Ace about his "cowardice" during an early battle in the war, where he was struck a glancing blow to the head and knocked out while the fighting went on, and woke to discover an "angel" floating above him. All throughout the story, moments of stress or the issuing of dangerous/malicious orders is accompanied by a crunching, distorted sound in the background. There are stories of strange goings-on at the dilapidated remains of an abandoned Church a few miles away in No Man's Land, including a botched mission and subsequent unauthorized rescue that nobody will give any further details about. All things point to some kind of "supernatural" element, some exterior force acting upon the hospital and the soldiers to explain the bizarre goings on. But the answers end up being mundane, and I mean that in a good way. The daily "hate" is a joint exercise managed by the Lieutenant-Colonel and his defacto second-in-command, the professional soldier Sergeant Wood, intended to keep the men sharp and alert while dehumanizing the German soldiers and playing up in the British men's minds the threat to their families back home should they fail. The "Angel" seen by Captain Dudgeon is a real-life reference to The Angels of Mons and ultimately has no direct bearing on the plot. The crunching/distorted sound is merely the audio's way or demonstrating the pressure/force of the conditioning the soldiers have been put through. The incident at the Church is a cover-up plain and simple, an effort to hide the backfiring of the tecnhiques being used at the hospital to return the men to fighting condition. Even the mysterious orders end up having a mundane explanation, not the result of a time-loop but the subconscious result of a sleepwalking private's desperate plea to have the newcomers investigate the procedures that are driving him mad. What is left over is the Doctor, Ace and Hex uncovering an experimental attempt to create better soldiers, raising questions of ethics, morality and whether the ends justify the means. It is a battle of philosophies, and though the debate between the Doctor and the antagonist are a little lacking in that department, the story is stronger for focusing on the dehumanizing affects the war is having on the young soldiers than any exterior sci-fi force or threat. The ultimate showdown, where the conditioning the soldiers have undergone reaches its inevitable conclusion, is strong both for how it gives the antagonist their thoroughly justified comeuppance AND in how depressing it is to consider the cost of that "justice". Lives are lost, thrown away madly and uselessly, and that is undoubtedly NOT a coincidence considering the historical setting it takes place in. The Doctor's plea for the idea of peace, of the strength of first one man putting down their weapon leading to still more, is a wonderful thing, and though this story ends more like a 5th Doctor story (there is a LOT of death) there is no doubt that the survivors have learned a valuable lesson from it - that the ends do not justify the means, that while peace does not mean passivity, action does not necessarily mean aggression either. Had the story ended there, with the Doctor's quiet discussion with Hex about how the very real lives of people become history again once they return to the TARDIS, simply names on paper or etched into monuments, then I would have called this an excellent audio. Unfortunately, with barely a minute left in the story the Doctor suddenly starts talking about how maybe exterior temporal forces were afoot after all, that the research he destroyed was TOO advanced, that the antagonist's "employers" may have a longer endgame in mind than "just" the war. The moment he namedrops who he thinks is responsible I let out a groan of disappointment, it's amazing how this one small footnote could color my perception of the entire story... and yet here we are. No Man's Land is a story that isn't at first what it seems, and is all the better for it... until that last minute addition that changes up everything. It is perhaps unfair to allow such a small part of the story to affect my enjoyment of the story as a whole, and I have to give credit to Big Finish for their attempt to do something beyond standalone one-off stories (remember, this stuff predates Torchwood in season 2 of the Revival), but if it doesn't work for me then it doesn't work, and I'm so tired of this particular subplot that having it crop up AGAIN was frustrating. It makes good use of the main trio, though both Ace and Hex respectively get brief subplots that go nowhere - the hate room for Hex and a disappointing if quickly discarded return to the "seduction" scene from The Curse of Fenric for Ace - but where this story shines is in successfully treading the old ground of the monstrous cost that war has on the soldiers who fight it. That is where the story is at its strongest, and that is where they should have let it lie. Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 23:08
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I honestly thought they were going to reveal that Sgt Wood was Reggie Mead from Project: Twilight, since they were both played by Rob Dixon
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Mar 17, 2015 23:30
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Davros1 posted:I honestly thought they were going to reveal that Sgt Wood was Reggie Mead from Project: Twilight, since they were both played by Rob Dixon I was unaware of that, and I was going to say maybe the same actor was included as a red herring for long-time listeners.... but then why would they put that thought into listener's minds if the reveal was going to be a last minute thing anyway? Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 00:06
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