Lampsacus fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Nov 9, 2015

misadventurous fucked around with this message at 12:43 on Nov 9, 2015

misadventurous fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Nov 9, 2015

Android Blues fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Nov 9, 2015

• Colin Baker. Every individual actor who plays the Doctor brings something unique to the role, it has been to the show's great benefit that to date the casting has never really gone wrong. For the longest time, perhaps the only exception to that rule was that people would qualify it with,"Well.... except for Colin Baker." Baker took over the role at a very dark time for the show, hobbled right out of the gates and suffering many indignities during his brief and often unlamented run as the title character. For years people who defended Baker pointed out all the behind the scenes (and on-screen!) issues that he had to deal with, but there was always a sense that they were excuses, that the fact of the matter was he was miscast and unsuited to the role. Big Finish changed all that, as Baker got to jump back into the role without many of the handicaps that had marked his on-screen time, and he quickly became a favorite of the listeners. ...ish is a story where this shines the most, as Baker dives enthusiastically into the role with a gusto that is to be admired, and gives a performance that makes the whole story worth listening to even if the rest of it was no good (happily, most of the rest of it is quite good!). I can't think of any other Doctor that could have made the story as written work anywhere near as well as Baker does - the stuffy setting, the absent-minded academics, nervous bureaucrats and quasi-anarchic para-students.... the Sixth Doctor is right at home with them all, reveling in playing off against them, and more importantly in eagerly taking part in the linguistic lunacy. To me, there is a sense that Baker loved the script, that the chance for lengthy dissertations on the nature of language and words appealed greatly to his desire to perform. There is something wonderful about hearing a talented actor embrace their role/the script with such obvious enthusiasm, and that is what Colin Baker brings to this story.
  
  
• Nicola Bryant. Given how strong a performance Baker gives, it would be easy for Bryant's Peri to be overshadowed or tucked away into a smaller supporting role and getting very little to do. Happily this is not the case at all, the script quite neatly divides up the time between her and Baker, separating them and giving Peri more than enough to do herself. From her casual flirting with a young "student" in the school cafe, to making use of her botany knowledge to hold her own in a fun little game of linguistics, to getting talked into a casual prank that suddenly turns dark, to developing a bond with the computer A.I, to assisting the conference organizer as they attempt to shut down the means for the "...ish" infection to spread - Peri has a ton of stuff to do, a ton of stuff to say, and plenty of space in which to do it all. Bryant sure as hell isn't phoning it in, she's proactive and engaged from start to finish and the progression through events feels natural and not at all rushed. The story manages to easily fit both her and the Doctor's parallel storylines into its runtime without feeling cramped - it's a credit to writer Phil Pascoe, who sadly has only a couple of other pieces of Doctor Who writing on his resume.
  
  
• The "A.I". The idea of an artificial intelligence (which may or may not go wrong) in sci-fi is hardly new, so the presence of "Book" in this story almost immediately gives the viewer the sense that they know what is inevitably going to happen. Happily this is somewhat subverted, as Book turns out to be both more complex and far more simple than the generic "A.I" seen in most stories. The term A.I even today is thrown around willy-nilly with no real sense of what that actually means, and Book proves an exception in this case when it confides to Peri that the term is incorrectly applied - it is a highly complex program but nothing more than that, it simply reacts according to its programming to an enormous set of variables. In one particularly line it notes that all it can do is put on a good show, it doesn't actually really understand/know/apply any meaning whatsoever to anything it is saying - it is just outputting data. Which makes the way the story progresses all the more fascinating, as the listener (or at least myself) is left wondering whether Book is just being anthropomorphized through familiarity/wishful thinking, or it it is actually beginning to "wake up" and develop a rudimentary (but erudite!) consciousness of its own. When directly compared to another, far "freer" A.I, Book comes across as the more measured, thoughtful and "learning" by comparison. Technically less advanced than its "brother", Book has the advantage of being completely aware of its own limitations, which in turn helps it to overcome them. A scene where it explains to the Doctor how it is resisting the "...ish" infection is rather brilliant in its simplicity - the word is repeating in people's head to the point that it becomes meaningless, driving them to obsessive repetition. So Book carefully measures and meters out meaning, by noting when the word is becoming just a meaningless repetition of a single syllable and then strictly applying a new meaning from its databank of obscure or outdated definitions. Each time allows it a few minutes or hours of retaining control of its faculties, and the process of puzzling out solutions to its conundrums seems to help in its apparent growth of consciousness. By the end of the story, there is a sense that Book is very much a person in its own right.... or to put it in linguistic terms, a new definition of what a person can be.
  
  
• The "swearing". For a story all about linguistics, there is a rather brief but hilarious section where the Doctor applies "censorship" earbuds to Peri's ears to prevent her from being infected by the "...ish". The high-minded becomes lowbrow in a sequence where the dialogue could easily be misconstrued for a network airing of an HBO show. It also gives Peri the opportunity to (probably) say,"We're hosed!" for the first time in Doctor Who history.
  

• Death. Events are kicked off by the death of the old associate the Doctor is coming to visit. This death is handled very poorly, there is confusion over whether it is a suicide or a homicide, but regardless of which the body is rather unceremoniously left to rot in its office, with the barest lip-service paid by both the Doctor and the bureaucrat in charge of the Conference of contacting the authorities or actually showing any respect to the body. A later scene where the Doctor effectively reconstructs the personality of the deceased for a final conversation is a further indignity that serves only to make the rather callous treatment stand out more. Then towards the end of the story, there is a very confusing section where the personality of the victim seemingly returns to life, though whether as an agent of the "...ish" or through some unexpected consequence of the Doctor's actions or not is unclear. It smacks of an effort to write a "happy" ending for the character, a character who we saw so little of to begin with that their return really strikes no emotional chord at all, and serves only to confuse.
  
  
• Dropped threads/red herrings. Throughout the story, a number of plot threads are introduced and then either unceremoniously dropped or turn out to be misunderstandings/red herrings. These include the anarchic undertakings of a "student"; the revelation of the relationship between the conference organizer and said student; or the hurried explanation of how the infection's point of origin was during some other trip Book and the academic were on before the story actually started. But the most puzzling is the section where the Doctor and Peri spot the TARDIS and don't know what it is. It's a brief section about halfway through the story and, thrown together with some lines about the "...ish" trying to spread out throughout the English language, as well as the Doctor talking about his natural immunity and his puzzlement as to why Peri was unaffected, gave me the sense that the TARDIS was what the "...ish" was truly after and it (or the Doctor's subconscious) knew this and had taken steps to cut it off. But then at the end of the story when all has been resolved, they simply return to the TARDIS where Peri casually reminds the Doctor what it is called and they just get in and dematerialize without another word. Was this a red herring? A potential plot thread that got forgotten/mostly edited out of the script? It stands out like dog's balls, and the lack of any kind of resolution was very confusing.
  
  
• An anti-climactic ending. The story moves along at a very good pace and gives all the characters something to do.... but then it just kind of ends. All the characters are put into place, the "villain" looks set for his comeuppance, the Doctor has figured everything out.... and then it all just kind of wraps up unceremoniously and everybody goes on about their business. It's a very weak ending to a very strong story. Not a bad ending by any means, but not a good one either. It just.... ends.
  

Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Nov 9, 2015