The_Doctor fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Oct 15, 2015

CobiWann fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Oct 16, 2015

• The Doctor's manipulations backfiring. The Doctor swans into this story full of confidence that doesn't just border on arrogance but invades and occupies it. Throughout the first episode and a half or so he smoothly and smugly allows events to unfold exactly as he has planned, barely even bothering to hide his presumptuous contempt for the beings he is attempting to screw over.... and then it all goes horribly wrong. Often described as the "chessmaster", this time the Doctor is completely outplayed and made to look the fool, and the result is the last couple of episodes feature him scrambling not just to catch up, but to keep his head above water. While it is fun to see the 7th Doctor outmaneuver his opponents, he rarely did so on television without clearly taking a careful and even respectful appraisal of their talents, as well as attempting to account for any margins of error. Had the Doctor's plan been executed smoothly in this case, not only would it have been uneventful and boring, but it would have the result of portraying the Doctor as a very cold, callous and even contempteous figure with a Godlike intellect so far above his opponents as to make the contest of wits a one-sided affair. Having the Doctor's own arrogance used against him, seeing him in a near panic and watching as he slowly but surely regains control and inch by inch retake the initiative made for a far more interesting character arc. McCoy does a good job of selling the Doctor both when he seems confident to the point of being bored, as well as when he's in a near-panic and struggling to maintain his sanity, questioning and condemning his own actions and arrogance.
  

• The overly packed supporting cast. There are just too many characters for what should be a fairly intimate story. Even forgetting the various guests of the hotel and their varied size roles, the Doctor is joined by two companions on this story and it is one too many. Ace is joined by Bernice Summerfield, a character that can be vaguely (though not accurately) described as a proto-River Song. This Big Finish audio is actually based on the portrayal of the characters of the Doctor, Ace and Benny from the Virgin New Adventures range of books that helped some fans get through the wilderness years between the end of the Classic series of Who and the start of Big Finish (and later the Revival TV series). Still in the early days of Big Finish, there isn't much to distinguish the Doctor and Ace from their portrayals in Big Finish to that point, but they certainly do seem to be playing up more of the sense of the Doctor as a somewhat aloof and hard to read figure, and Ace as the soldier/fighter figure (the "badass" photo of her on the CD cover is pretty cringeworthy in this day and age). The story spends too much time split up following the three main cast, who spend times with other members of the supporting cast in their own little individual scenes. The idea is to give everybody something to do, but in my opinion it waters down the events far too much, especially given the relatively cramped setting of the story, and nobody really gets a chance to be focused on/allow the listener to become invested in their stories, or to give the actors enough material to get their teeth into. Also, it may have just been me, but I frequently found myself mixing up characters because neither their voices nor their actions really gave them much to distinguish them from each other, helping the fall thing kind of fall into bland and forgettable territory.
  
  
• The setting/plot. Despite being an audio, this very much feels like a product of the JNT television era, and not really in a good way. The setting of the small hotel in Kent feels like it is being used because the BBC had access to a small hotel in Kent in which to do location filming, because it sure as hell has no reason to be the location for this story. The premise is that three conventions are being held at this hotel at the same time, each covering wildly different areas.... but only two of them really make any sense, and the rather lame explanation that comes late in the story for why the third (and most important) was in the same place doesn't make for a very convincing argument. A researcher has designed a VERY rudimentary time machine and is showing it off at the convention in the hopes of getting funding to continue his research (and get rich himself). But this is a (very rudimentary) loving time machine we're talking about here, why is he showcasing/trying to sell it at a a hotel in Kent? Why is the biggest and apparently most highly coveted potential buyer is the owner of a local avionics company? Why aren't the military there? Or some super technology company? Some giant-multi-national or arms manufacturer? Why are they in some rinky-dink hotel in the middle of (sorry Kent) nowhere sharing space with a convention for believers in the supernatural and cross-stitch enthusiasts? Put simply the story is too dense, the characters too packed, the events too major etc for the setting that it all takes place in. The whole thing has an air of an attempt to recapture some of the spirit of atmospheric stories with big stakes like The Curse of Fenric or Ghost Light, but the giant stakes and the nature of the dimensional invaders contrasting with the relatively "common" setting of the hotel sadly give the story more of a Delta and the Bannermen feel. Given that the author of this story is none other than Paul Cornell was a big shock to me, because he's always been well regarded as an author of Doctor Who - perhaps this would have worked better as a novel? In any case, his later works were certainly more successful, especially his contributions to the revival television series.
  
  
• The voice modulation. The bad guys - The Scourge - suffer from the same problem a lot of early Big Finish "monsters" do, their voices sound rather lame. It seems all too evident that their has been an attempt to artificially give them a booming, growling menace that isn't achieved by either the original performance or the voice effects added afterwards. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if any nuances there might have been in the original performances were sanded down by the effects, and in the end what we end up with sounds like it falls somewhere between a regular voice played at half speed and a 1980s Cyberman voice. It makes it very hard to take the so-called "Demons" seriously, a frequent complaint I've had about these early Big Finish audios - they were obviously trying very hard to produce distinctive voices that brought to mind the type of creatures they were describing, but there is an air of amateurishness to it, something which has happily improved quite a bit over the years.
  

CobiWann fucked around with this message at 11:22 on Oct 16, 2015