AndwhatIseeisme fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Jul 27, 2015

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Dr. Gene Dango MD fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Jul 27, 2015

Tim Burns Effect fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Jul 27, 2015

Linear Zoetrope fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Jul 29, 2015

• Paul McGann. As the 8th Doctor, he seems to revel in this episode's inherent silliness/camp factor and gleefully goes along for the ride. There is a sense that he pretty much has everything figured out from the beginning, short of a few of the details, but is mostly playing along to confirm his suspicions. It does give the 8th Doctor a real sense of fun, and McGann seems to be thoroughly enjoying himself in his performance. Of course, this does raise questions about it being a bit lovely to just play along when people are dying, but this is an issue addressed in the resolution, as the Doctor reveals that nobody (that I can remember) has actually died throughout the entire story.
  
  
• Sheridan Smith. Lucie is just a lot of fun in this episode, especially in her interactions with the Doctor. As he plays Detective, she gets in on the fun by just throwing wild "deductions" out there as the Doctor wearily points out that you can't just wildly throw out speculation based on nothing but,"Hey what if? " - she's excellent comic relief, but gets to have her own time in the sun as she becomes a fill-in presenter for Max Warp and helps the Clarkson/May parodies actually demonstrate at least a little more depth... well, Space-Clarkson at least. She enables him to prove he's not just a one-dimensional bigot going through a lengthy mid-life crisis.
  
  
• The parody is spot on. This is very, very, very, very obviously a Top Gear parody and your feelings on the merits of that aside, the execution is well handled. While the Hammond character is mostly absent from the story, the Clarkson/May parodies are well done, capturing the bombastic personality of Clarkson and the earnest enthusiasm/vintage love of May well while exaggerating their traits for the purposes of caricature. The theme song is an obvious take on Top Gear's own, the format of the show is familiar to even a cursory viewer, even the complaints (sexist, xenophobic and far too laddish) made about the show would be familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with Top Gear as a concept.
  
  
• The concept of the Kith. They're bizarre "sponges" that also appear to share some features of trees - too often in Big Finish the alien races are the same basic humanoid types we see due to the budgetary limitations in the television series (as are the "Varlon" race in this story, they're basically just human beings). Given that Big Finish is audio only, budgetary considerations don't need to take account of things like,"What you're describing on paper is literally impossible to conceive on the screen" but all too often the writers seem to play it safe, or just go for bigger humanoids with a dash of a particular animal species thrown into the mix. Let things get weird, like the giant floating baby heads in UNIT: Dominion or the screaming mouth full of billions of species-that-never-were in The Nowhere Place. In that respect, making the Kith utterly bizarre and alien serves well both as taking advantage of the audio format as well as making the human uneasiness/xenophobia feel more understandable. After all, it's fairly easy to accept something that mostly looks like you, but something utterly alien in appearance and biology? It's very easy to "other" that, which in turn makes the story ring (depressingly true) when characters exhibit bigotry towards the aliens. The aliens are pompous themselves, but not in the over-the-top, possibly anti-immigrant writing style of the Slithergees in Flip-Flop.
  

• The execution of the Kith. For all the kind words about how cool it is to see Big Finish getting weird with the concept of this alien race, the sad fact is they don't execute that idea particularly well. Perhaps it is simply a failing on my own part, but it was very difficult to get any sense of what exactly the Kith were supposed to physically be like. That's all well and good for the alien nature of their species, except the audio tries to have its cake and eat it too by having a Kith disguise itself successfully as a human, and then later as a Public-Relations Robot working for the President. The descriptions of the Kith are vague and sketchy, parts of them are described in some detail but the rest left unspecified, which allows them to fit into whatever part of the story the writer would like, but leaves them feeling unfinished... or worse, that the writer lacked the imagination to pull the species off.
  
  
• The Top Gear parody. Parody is all well and good, but in stuff like Doctor Who it usually works best as a brief bit of humor, as opposed to being the bulk of an entire storyline. Top Gear is an enormously popular show but it's not for everyone, I've certainly only seen a few bits here and there from various episodes and that was enough for me - getting a complete episode of Who dedicated to the joke of,"This is just like Top Gear!" left me feeling a little flat. In the opposite to my feelings about the Kith, here I think the concept was "meh" but the execution of that concept was extremely well done. Also, by so clearly basing the characters on pre-existing people, it raises the issue of being rather offensive - Space James May is a sad sack who tries to clumsily seduce Lucie, while Space Jeremy Clarkson is a xenophobic would-be mass murderer who attempts to genocide an entire race. With a joke like this, either you like it or you don't, and if you don't you've got 45 minutes or so to put up with it before it is over.
  
  
• The Supporting Characters. They're paper-thin and entirely unremarkable. The most interesting thing about the Security Officer is that she's voiced by Katarina Olsson, who has become a regular fixture of The Eigth Doctor Adventures. The President is just as weak a character, and considering her lofty position and the seriousness of the developing situation, her complete lack of security is pretty appalling, making it seem more like she's some small-town politician or local celebrity as opposed to the most powerful Varlon in the galaxy.