• The voicework. Due to the nature of the villain/s and how they occupy space, as well as Lucie's internal (and external!) dialogues, there is some neat stuff going on with the voice acting in the story. For Sheridan Smith in particular, there are lengthy sections where it is just her talking to herself... except she's having an argument with herself. It's remarkably well done, as you very much get the sense that you are hearing two completely different people arguing - it's only when I listened to the behind-the-scenes interviews that it really hit me that Smith was simply sitting in her recording booth performing two roles at the same time, with voice modulation and editing being used to enhance the impression of two people arguing at and over each other. Smith pulls off the dual roles very well, you can absolutely hear Lucie's voice in the other person, but she changes inflection, pace, emotion etc accordingly and comes across like a completely different person.
  
  
• The sound design. The story is expertly constructed, with Big Finish doing a very good job getting across crowd scenes, open spaces, confined spaces etc. That's their job, of course, but it is remarkable how much they've improved over a relatively short timeframe. Of particular note is the voice modulation they use for the villain/s - it's just enough to give them an alien nature, something crawling down your spine telling you these things are wrong, but it doesn't overpower the voices, make them difficult to understand or overshadow the actual underlying performance. Voice modulation has in the past been hit or miss for Big Finish except for when Nick Briggs is doing Dalek or Cybermen voices, but they really get things right this time.
  
  
• The sense of closure/new beginning. All throughout the season, there has been the underlying sense of unfinished business, of cleaning up the mess of previous seasons. The Doctor/Lucie enforced partnership being renewed by the Headhunter in Orbis, the stellar manipulator from Vengeance of Morbius being the elephant in the room, even the Doctor being fed up/detached from humanity after so many centuries of intense interest in their affairs and dedication to helping/saving them. By the end of this story, there is very much a sense that these issues have basically been cleared from the table. The Doctor and Lucie are friends and traveling companions because they genuinely enjoy each other's company, the stellar manipulator has been dealt with, recurring characters have seemingly had their stories come to a natural end etc. What looks to be a fresh start is a good thing in my mind, and I appreciate this story if only for wrapping things up so smoothly.
  

• The pacing. After the (excellent) cliffhanger of The Eight Truths, things kinda just meander along after that point. Aside from the Doctor performing a raid on an enemy stronghold early in the story, mostly what happens feels like filler to take up time before the climax. A subplot about a couple of villains trying to pull of a coup basically goes nowhere aside from teaming up the Doctor with another character. It's there to supposedly show us the fickle nature of the bad guys and how they can't even trust themselves, but that itself rather undercuts the supposedly horrifying reveal of the head baddy's scheme to turn on her own kind and make them slaves like the humans - it actually feels kind of justified now, because she's right, her people CAN'T be trusted. You could argue that the intent here is to show that it is in their very nature to be suspicious and treacherous, but the vast majority of them seemed perfectly willing to go along with her as the big boss with no sign of wanting to overthrow her. So there are a lot of scenes that end up feeling redundant or stuffed in to pad out the running time before everything gets to where it was going to be anyway. It's not so much setting the table as making everybody wait before they can sit down at a table that was already set for them.
  
  
• The "Lytton" Effect. Two characters in particular have had recurring roles throughout the first three seasons of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, one of them - the Headhunter - I think appearing in more audios than she hasn't to this point. I am not sure if they were Eddie Robson creations or not, or if he just felt a particular interest in them since he was the one to most flesh them out. But their return in this story and the emphasis they get feels like a step too far, like pet characters that the writer insists on including because he thinks they're just as important/interesting as the main recurring cast. Like Lytton from Resurrection of the Daleks and Attack of the Cybermen, the Headhunter is given plenty of scenes to showcase just how smart/clever/strategic/cool she is, all of which have basically the opposite effect. Early on she smoothly informs the head villain that should she try any of her tricks on her, they will fail because she is prepared for them. She is never caught by surprise or off-guard, always affecting not only disdain but indifference to most reversals of her fortune, often in fact suggesting that actually she was the puppetmaster pulling the strings all along to get everybody into position for HER scheme. A rather bizarre attempt at redemption occurs late in the story when she is attacked by the villain and manages to hold her off long enough to save the day, all while the Doctor calls her brilliant and expresses surprise at her actions and suggests that maybe he misjudged her. It smacks of the 6th Doctor speaking up on behalf of Lytton or his frequent declarations of the Rani's brilliance while she was mostly being an idiot, and for me it just doesn't work. By the time she's (seemingly) gone for good, all I could really think was,"Well thank goodness for that."
  
  
• The (lack of) impact. Sharing a fault common to the RTD years of the revival (and creeping back into the latter Moffat years), this story wants to have its cake and eat it too by having an enormous world-changing event happen openly in modern-day London/Earth (it was set in the "near-future" of 2015) and then just having everything go back to normal. The episode itself seems to recognize this, by having the Doctor attempt to make the population forget what they saw happen while a casual line is dropped of,"What do we do about all the news footage?". This disconnect between making everybody forget and the obvious/highly recorded & reported events of the story is particularly galling because a major theme of the previous story was the reporter who was hammering on constantly about the dangers of just accepting things at face value and questioning what you see. In essence the Doctor does what the villain did - decides for people what they should think - and even if he does it from a "good" moral standpoint, it meshes badly with the theme of the previous story. In the end, nothing really seems to have any impact, they might as well have kept the entire thing under wraps and had it all take place on a military base or some underground installation or some small village or something for all the impact it has on the wider world.
  

CobiWann fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Mar 3, 2016

After The War fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Mar 4, 2016