• The setting. This is a period that I do not recall EVER seeing covered in Doctor Who, and the backdrop of The Mau Mau Uprising is used to great effect. The mixture of paranoia, dread and the infamous British "stiff upper lip" made for a heady combination, aided by the obvious deliberate choice to make the British holed up in the house all female and specifically upper class. These are sheltered people who have been used to having everything their own way, and the uprising scares them less than it outrages them. This is Colonialist Britain, these are people who consider themselves the best of the best and the people of Kenya (always pronounced "Keen-ya") to be little more than savages at worst and children at best. They're insufferably smug in spite of their predicament, but not cartoonishly so. These are people of their time, and the way the Doctor gently but mercilessly pokes at their mindset is a real treat. The audio nicely gets across not only the heat/humidity of the jungle but the simultaneous isolation/claustrophobia. Of being miles from anywhere but also feeling vulnerable from some ever encroaching "other".
  
  
• The ALIEN aliens. When the women find "Abraham" in the jungle, they are utterly flummoxed by what he is. At first they think he might have been tortured, then they presume he may have birth defects. What they all struggle with is just how alien he is. While humanoid, his joints bend the wrong way, he has too many thumbs, he shows no ability to speak. Is he an animal or a man? Even the Doctor can't translate his language, and the reason why is an extremely well-realized moment that ties in beautifully with the overt racism of the British towards the Kenyans. The Doctor mentions that avian-based intelligent spacefaring races are rare due to the difficulty they have with tool use. Abraham IS that tool, a perching post/body that tiny alien birds settle onto, using their collective mind to force him to do their bidding. Even their base is off-putting, the large spaces used by Abraham are understandable but the walls and roofs are riddled with tiny tunnels where the ACTUAL occupants live and move and rest in when not using Abraham. The birds are the same as the British women, they believe themselves "naturally" superior to Abraham, that he exists purely to be used to make their lives easier. Abraham's every waking moment is a misery, artificially kept suppressed and treated as a disposable tool. The parallel with the Kenyans is (painfully) obvious, and Abraham's rebellion proves the death knell for the alien birds, much like the uprising - despite being defeated - eventually resulted in Kenya declaring independence and becoming self-governing instead of treated as just another asset for exploitation by their "betters".
  

• THE DEADBIRD SPEAK(S)! The little birds are wonderfully alien and the nature of how they accomplish things is horrifying. This is all handled extremely effectively... until the story "requires" exposition. In a failure of imagination, the writing reverts to having the birds explain their evil plot to the Doctor via Abraham. Their collective voice is underwhelming and their goading is cartoonishly supervillainish. After leaning in so hard to the alien nature of the birds, having them engage in conversation really undermines what made them so effective in the first place.
  
  
• The road to Damocles moment. The overt racism on display throughout the entire audio eventually leads to a moment where the Doctor and Klein return and find a sole survivor, who has had a Road to Damocles moment due to their exposure to all the death and grasped that there is no difference between people regardless of race or class or any other social standing. Except this is COMPLETELY unearned. Her reaction comes out of nowhere, and if anything the actions that lead to her being the sole survivor would seem to fall completely in line with and reinforce her prejudices/mindset. That she is effectively "rewarded" by the Doctor with a charge to guard the alien base and make sure it is never reopened feels particularly off given the suggestions she made in the story to Klein about wanting to establish fascism in the United Kingdom. Which brings me to...
  
  
• gently caress Nazis. I heard a lot of good things about this story for many years and was really looking forward to watching it. Unfortunately it's very much a product of its time, and unfortunately 10 years after it was first produced I listened to it in an extremely different climate to the one it was made in. Nazis are bad is not a new philosophy, but in 2010 there was multiple decades of them being a joke, a spent force and a failure of philosophy. So when Klein from the story Colditz was left as a hanging plot-thread, there was interest in seeing her come back as a recurring character. In a strange deviation of My Fair Lady, instead of the Doctor trying to make a "commoner" into a "lady", he's trying to turn a Nazi into a better human being. The entire idea is that the Doctor will show Klein that her philosophy is wrong, that Nazis/Fascism were wrong and bad. Klein, of course, comes from an alternate reality where the Nazis won, so she argues the opposite: that the Nazis were a good thing. She's wrong, there is never any doubt about that, and the entire conceit of the Doctor taking her on as a companion is so he can prove that to her. But it's 2020 when I listened to this and... I just can't stand it. Hearing the Doctor sit there and calmly and even cheerfully debate the merits of fascist ideology is just revolting, even if I know his intent is to set Klein to rights. But she's a monster, a murderer, a torturer and a racial supremacist who at best agrees that Dr. Mengele was "misguided" in his "enthusiasm". With actual Nazi assholes running around in the real world proclaiming their bullshit all over again and getting plenty of platforms to do so, this dynamic just doesn't work for me. This is no way an indictment on Tracey Childs, who does a fine job, but the character just makes me sick.
  

Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Jan 26, 2020

Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jan 26, 2020