Missy – The Broken Clock

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Written by Nev Fountain and directed by Ken Bentley.

Spoiler-free verdict: Juggling a perhaps too-complex plot, true-crime pastiche, and surprising emotional depth, The Broken Clock is a ballsy script that has no right pulling it all off as well as it does. Mad and exceptional.

Recommended pre-listening: A Spoonful of Mayhem; Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated

***

The old cliche is, of course, that a broken clock is right twice a day. So what does that say about the character of Missy? Is she irreversibly wrong? Or is there a possibility for right in her?

Such a question has made her by far the most compelling take on the Master on TV, reaching a remarkable climax in The Doctor Falls. And here, Nev Fountain examines it from a different angle, with similarly compelling results. As she confesses to fellow ex-soldier Joe Lynwood, she once knew what side of good and evil she existed on, but now, it’s not so clear.

To hit this home, Missy is put in a tentative position of narratory power over a story haunted by iconography from her past lives, namely a mysterious grandfather clock and a man with a pointed beard. While, quite cheekily, neither of these are what they seem to be (no multi-Master shenanigans here), they nonetheless are loaded choices in terms of her emotional development. This post-War Master is haunted by the person she has been, to the point where even just trying to reclaim an old ship is a struggle against the people she has wronged, in this case the ship itself, a humanoid TARDIS named Mark. Sure enough, she does some horrible things here, most exquisitely taunting a security guard over his impending death, and shooting a few actors that may or may not be real. But it’s noteworthy that she also fails to kill Joe in the end. She says to the listener that she’ll let him off the once, but maybe, just maybe, this broken clock is showing right. Or maybe she isn’t quite broken after all.

Adding on the framing device of a cheesy True Crime documentary very nearly destabilizes this mix, one incongrous, bizarre ingredient that threatens to take up all the oxygen. There are, perhaps, a few too many scenes of characters pondering whether they are actors in a recreation or real people, and the story never quites go as far as it could to justify this on a plot level. But on a thematic level, it’s fitting. The questions of subjectivity and narrator control echo across this fractured identity for the woman who was once the Master, and by foregrounding how she gets portrayed as determining who she might be, most deliciously of all in a comedically weak performance by a reenactment actor, Nev Fountain creates the richest portrayal of the Master on audio perhaps ever. As Joe highlights at the end, the murders of this story were, from another angle, no murders at all; subjectivity is king, and no single storyteller shows the whole picture, so instead, let’s embrace the fractal pattern as the truest whole of all.

But beyond that, the narrative device adds something vital to this story: fun. For a rich character study examining trauma and morality, this is gleefully bonkers, with comedic record-scratches, bad accents, arch narration, and catchy diegetic music. As many laughs are to be had here as in the previous episode’s face-off with the Monk, a remarkable achievement in the absence of star quality like Rufus Hound. In short, The Broken Clock is a magnificent achievement, a juggling act of absurdity and depth that perhaps shouldn’t work, but like its star, manages to use both to create something wholly remarkable and memorable.

A hightlight of the year.

10/10

Missy – Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated

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Written by John Dorney and directed by Ken Bentley.

Spoiler-free verdict: Michelle Gomez vs. Rufus Hound is an inherently good idea. There’s nothing more here, but let’s be real, we don’t need it.

Recommended pre-listening: A Spoonful of Mayhem

***

Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated is a difficult story for me to review. I tend to like to talk things like character arcs, themes, pacing, structure, and most of those things are entirely irrelevant to a story like this. This story barely bothers with anything so prosaic as a plot, because it doesn’t need to. It’s a delivery mechanism for two great comedic presences to cut loose at each other, and on those terms, it certainly succeeds.

That’s not to say this script doesn’t do good things to elevate that. For a starter, it is genuinely funny, something which you kind of need to sell a comedy. There are endlessly quotable lines here, and wonderfully constructed scenes escalating the absurdity. In general, the premise is solid, giving the Monk and Missy both secrets to hide from each other and a historical backdrop to heighten the tension and add specificity and color. The story may not have anything to say about King Henry VIII or his reign, but it does get a lot of humor out of his legacy, from the infamous song to beheading gags and, quite pleasantly, a sincere presence from Catherine Parr. It also allows the most audacious conceit of all, that of Missy and the Monk playing chicken with getting married to each other. That alone is worth the price of admission.

The pacing of these various comedic beats is very solid, too. Going from a riot of a hook, the story steadily builds toward the delightful wedding setpiece, only to escalate itself from there to the song, and then call it a day at its peak. That’s all quite efficient, and makes for an engaging listen. The humor keeps the pace up in general, too. Though not every gag lands (Missy’s hypnosis trigger word left me scratching my head at the reference), they keep coming thick and fast enough for listeners to not mind, and Gomez and Hound are more than capable of elevating every joke to sublime.

There is a plot, of course, organized around disturbances to the web of time and creatures that like to vacuum-preserve historically important figures (which, in another story, could be a fascinating starting point: how do you decide who’s significant?), but that’s not what any listener is going to come away from in their memory. They’re going to remember Michelle Gomez and Rufus Hound delivering jokes. The jokes are good. The story, then, is a success.

7/10

Missy – A Spoonful of Mayhem

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Written by Roy Gill and directed by Ken Bentley.

Spoiler-free verdict: A gleeful genre satire that captures the joy of Missy as a character and the queer chaos she brings.

Recommended pre-listening: None.

***

Well, it was inevitable. Missy’s aesthetics finally produce a story about her as the evil Marry Poppins she resembles. Who could have guessed, though, that it would be so delightful?

The magic nanny genre has a rich history in modern culture. We have our Mary Poppinses, our Nanny McPhees, and so on. As TV Tropes describes it:

“A Magical Nanny is a woman who is hired to look after children, but ends up having a profound effect on the whole family. She may have genuine magical powers or she may just have a magical effect on the household. Even children who have scared off a number of previous nannies can be tamed by a Magical Nanny.”

There’s a lot of things implicit in this. I mean, the idea that children need to be “tamed” is, well, yikes. But it speaks to a coded idea for a family, and typically, a very English, upper-class one.

Doctor Who has played with the genre before. The Snowmen uses Clara as such, with some subtle implicit critique: she’s not an upper-class Governess but rather a barmaid, and there’s a nice moment about how their detached father needs to stop hiring people to care for his children and actually look out for them. It’s a small element in the story, but a welcome one, and it points to how things are done here.

Because Missy is, unlike Clara, in no way someone that should be allowed around children. She is a creature of id and chaos, and so binding her in a world of Victorian rules and, indeed, capitalism, creates an implict tension. Writer Roy Gill relishes in the details of this aesthetic, embracing magic and steampunk as part of the havoc she wreaks on a buttoned-down world. The ideas and imagery here are marvelous, from the brilliant opening scene where Michelle Gomez discusses murdering a phoenix and then pushing a man off a roof, to the zany climax in which she uses a genie to hijack a steam train at speeds in excess of 30 miles per hour. Suffice to say, there is a lot of fun to be had.

And that’s the point of this story, in the end. Missy as a character crashes into the old, familiar character of the Master and blows him up from cackling villain to source of chaotic joy, just as she does with the magical nanny genre. A more cynical Master story would probably, have her kill the precocious and mildly irritating children she takes under her charge, but instead, Missy serves as their inspiration, to embrace the chaos in themselves and break from Victorian boundaries. Telling this story from their perspective is a strong choice to foreground this theme, even if some of the narration works better than other bits. Her frockish disregard for the rigid nuclear family and gender expectations turns Missy into something very nearly aspirational, to the point where the kids resolve to be bad enough to get Missy’s attention again one day.

There’s also something distinctly queer about this chaos, in the sense of queer as a rejection of norms and embracing of personal expression and identity. Both Oliver and Lucy are kids stifled in their expression, Oliver in his scientific experimentation and Lucy in her rigid adherence to rules, both learning to more freely express themselves through Missy’s chaos. It’s no shock that this story has Missy reminiscing about a wife, if nothing else. She is a very queer character, tearing apart gender, sexuality, and society in general, and this is the sort of story that naturally extends from that. By doing so, we get a model for what a Missy story looks like: though violent and chaotic, Missy is a lot of fun, and inspires embracing of the chaos in us all.

This is all, of course, surface level. This is a very pleasures-at-the-surface kind of story, racing from mad image to mad image with wild abandon, but not necessarily constructing much deeper underneath. There’s some walls it hits with that: the exoticism with the genie, for example, hits complex issues of orientalism in esoterica and Victorian society without really digging deep into them, and “lock up the rulemakers in a genie’s bottle” is in no way praxis (it is, on the other hand, hilarious). But it doesn’t need to be. Sometimes, light, queer, chaotic fun is all you need. A Spoonful of Mayhem achieves that, while defining what a Missy story can look like for other writers to come. All in all, a strong start to a brand new range.

8/10

Monthly Range – The Sirens of Time

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Written and directed by Nicholas Briggs.

Spoiler-free verdict: A proof of concept for Doctor Who audios that sells the concept much less effectively than one would hope, though with occasional hints of the better things to come.

Recommended pre-listening: None.

***

Listening to The Sirens of Time in 2019 is an odd experience. Obviously, it’s something Big Finish want to encourage, given they’re commemorating it with a six-hour epic homage later this month (and yes, I did pre-order that the moment it was announced, like the good little consumer I am). But it feels in no way prepared to hold up to present day scrutiny. To be honest, it’s not very good, but I also feel a bit bad for criticizing it.

I should probably stress first, for those who don’t know, that while this is the first Big Finish Doctor Who production, it is not their first audio work in that world. The company began with an adaptation of Paul Cornell’s novel Oh No It Isn’t in 1998, followed by an entire series of Bernice Summerfield novel adaptations, the strength of which eventually got them Doctor Who rights. Doctor Who audio drama was also not a new thing at the time: Nicholas Briggs had himself worked both on the Audio-Visuals, a series of fan audios, some of which were later adapted for Big Finish, and on BBV productions, audio dramas which used Doctor Who actors and licensed properties but lacked the rights to the show proper. Failings of The Sirens of Time, then, can’t be chalked up to inexperience. So what is going on here?

Well, first, I should probably outline the failings. The Sirens of Time is conceptually misjudged, a largely tedious piece of Time Lord fanwank and banal science fiction tropes which fails to amount to a case for Big Finish to take up the reins. To be blunt, any story opening by focusing on Coordinator Vansell of the Celestial Intervention Agency is going to be fighting an uphill battle to be interesting. The structure itself is admittedly solid, three episodes with different Doctors on different adventures, followed by a fourth together, providing the fannish multi-Doctor pleasure and tying plot threads together. But the concerns of those episodes is rather telling: only one of them is historical and set on Earth, and no contemporary material is found, the rest being far-flung sci-fi. This is a story hinging on a number of dud big ideas, namely the Temperon, the Knights of Velyshaa, and the Sirens themselves. That’s not to say these couldn’t work, but they’re never given the grounding to. The multi-Doctor approach also comes without any involvement from companions, losing a human touch, or, for that matter, a female one.

There’s only two women in this entire production, and neither comes off well. Maggie Stables would go on to be one of the greatest parts of Big Finish, but her character here is disgraceful, an unsuccessful comedy of silly voices and bodily functions who gets labeled by one character as a “mad old bitch” without much pushback from anyone, not even the Doctor. But in comparison to the other woman, she comes off well, because the other woman turns the surrogate companion role into a source of great and terrible evil: the Siren of Time. I should stress, I am not attributing a hate of women to Nicholas Briggs, who has done many wonderful, even feminist, things, some of which I plan to review soon, and seems to be a genuinely good egg. But by clearing all female space in this story to make the companion evil, it comes across less as a clever twist and more as hateful derision. The early joke about not twisting her ankle feels far more dismissive than it could have, for example. And the resolution of the story, leaving her to die rather than be saved by the Doctor, misses tragic and lands on downright uncomfortable. This shouldn’t be too shocking an outcome, it’s the inevitable result of grafting in the myth of the siren, a tale of fearing the seductive power of women, uncritically into science fiction. But in practice, it feels like a fanboy telling women to get off his turf so he can play with his spacemen action figures.

So why do I feel bad criticizing it? Well, 90s fandom was a different time. Nicholas Briggs has shown himself to be capable of better. And Sirens does accomplish some things well. I have to compliment the second episode in particular, a pleasant historical with the wonderful concept of guest characters who can’t understand each other as a result of the language barrier, despite the Doctor and audience understanding both due to TARDIS translation. And as mentioned previously, the structure is genuinely solid. It also accomplishes what this story needs to: showing that Big Finish can assemble something that can be comfortably considered Doctor Who and give solid material to Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy. It’s also particularly notable that the story chooses to hinge its climax on the Sixth Doctor; Big Finish would go on to gain a reputation for the work done to redeem his character after his (rightfully) derided TV era, and here, the violence of his era is redefined as a pragmatism that sets him apart and can occasionally be heroic. I’m not entirely fond of that; there can often be a tendency to revel in the grimdark of nominally pragmatic heroes. But here, it works just well enough to state that Big Finish are planning greater things for his character and thinking critically about him, and sure enough, they deliver on it.

I struggle to recommend The Sirens of Time as anything more than a historical artifact, a time capsule of a company still proving itself to a far more masculine and trad fandom. After all, this is still early days, and the company had to show it could be a stable source of Doctor Who, if not necessarily the most radical or progressive one. That makes it easier not to hate. Because the glimmers of what Big Finish could be are there, even if not shown at their best, and sure enough, many stories would build on them. Not all, there will always be duds learning all the wrong lessons. But enough for me to pre-order a six hour tribute to this the moment it was announced, at the very least.

3/10

Virgin New Adventures – No Future

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Written by Paul Cornell.

Virgin New Adventure book 23.

Spoiler-free verdict: A frothy evolution of Virgin’s vision of Doctor Who into principles of feminist fandom and political activism, and a fun and emotional story to boot, if a little mispaced in the plot.

Recommended pre-reading: Love and War, Deceit, Blood Heat, The Left-Handed Hummingbird, Conundrum.

***

For a series that birthed itself with two major plot arcs, Timewyrm and Cat’s Cradle, the Virgin books have grown light on long-form storytelling. The Alternate History Cycle, beginning with Blood Heat, has been something of a much-needed shakeup, and on the whole, No Future is an utterly wonderful bit of closure.

For those just joining in, the last few books have revolved around a figure messing with the timelines, creating alternate realities which the Seventh Doctor, Bernice Summerfield, and Ace are forced to clean up after. This has been used to draw out several new conflicts in the team, some more organic than others. On the more forced end of things, Ace and Benny have increasingly gone at each other’s throats, something which has provided many frustrating moments, and continues to here, but also some real triumphs, including many of my favorite moments of the previous book, Conundrum. Mostly, this serves Ace as a character; “New Ace” has been a famously prickly prospect for both writers and readers, and so by putting her into conflict with Bernice, these issues can be externalised and resolved through repairing her relationships. Meanwhile, both companions are put into a place of questioning the Doctor, mostly built on his destruction of the alternate universe from Blood Heat, which over the course of the arc serves as a sort of exorcism of the inadequately addressed destruction of a solar system at the climax to The Pit.

If this sounds like a lot of clean-up work, that’s because it mostly is. No Future takes on these conflicts in order to establish a sort of clean playing field for the series going forward. On the whole, it succeeds at this very well. Ace’s surrogate companion relationship with the Meddling Monk (unsurprisingly, the Time Lord responsible for mucking with history), while a ruse to play both him and the Doctor, serves to highlight her needs as a time-traveller. And both she and Benny get to have a go at experiencing what it’s like to be the Doctor through the brilliant choice of faking his death; Ace gets to pull the strings in arranging these machinations, and while thinking he’s dead, Benny gets to briefly serve as the frothy adventurer the Doctor once was and illustrate a different kind of hero. The Doctor gets a little bit less, having been thoroughly interrogated by Kate Orman’s The Left-Handed Hummingbird, but there’s some wonderful payoff for both him and Ace in regards to that book’s themes, of whether the Warrior can become the Healer. The answers are complicated but meaningful, and it’s no wonder that provides a thematic basis for numerous new series episodes.

That isn’t to say all the character is successful. Though Ace gets much-needed and quite beautiful development, particularly in the first and last thirds of the book, in the lengthy middle section, the nature of the plate-spinning plot means that her motivations are murky, and thus her emotional interiority largely disappears. This isn’t a total wash, as there’s some gorgeous scenes between her and Benny’s anarchist bandmate Danny Pain allowing her to vent away from the Doctor and Benny. The plot shares these issues. Major reveals like Artemis the Chronovore or the Brigadier’s true allegiances are held back far longer than needed, resulting in a deneument to the book that grinds to a halt for the Doctor to explain everything for a few pages.

In a lesser book, pacing issues like this would be fatal, and they have been to several past New Adventures. But Paul Cornell is too talented to leave this slack middle space empty. This book is awash with meaningful ideas and aesthetics to keep things moving in meaningful ways. For a start, it continues the engagements with metafiction from Conundrum to comment on Doctor Who, both with the hilariously rubbish Vardans manipulating media space and with the Monk using Artemis to edit Doctor Who stories to get his victory. The opening chapter is a particular triumph in this regard, the Monk watching a fairly stereotypical action adventure result in the brutal death of Ace.

Metafiction for metafiction’s sake is fun, as Conundrum illustrated. But No Future’s engagement with punk and politics takes it a step further, utilizing metafiction to make a political statement on what Doctor Who can be. Some of this happens in small ways, such as Ace complimenting Danny’s “this machine kills fascists” line, or Ace shooting the Queen, or… well, anything with Ace, really, who returns to her “bring down the government” Cartmel roots. Benny joining an anarchist punk band similarly delights, as does Captain Mike Yates’ ascension into anarchy and studded leather. There’s also a delightful acknowledgement of Who fan culture in general, with the Doctor becoming a hero of rumor in fanzines. But some of it cuts deeper and rawer, particularly the more queer and feminist sections. Ace’s story comes down to a sapphically-tinged relationship with the beautiful Artemis, who she frees from being chained to a bed (and who Vardan Pike eagerly ships with Ace), a dynamic which allows her to take total control of the narrative and heal her broken heart.

But for me, the best moment of all is in a little anecdote from Danny about errors made romancing a rape victim. It’s awkward and uncomfortable, a case of a man pushing too hard and hurting someone vulnerable out of not knowing when to shut up and respect boundaries. Ordinarily, telling this story from the perspective of the man approaching the victim is a horrible choice. But the sheer tenderness, the focus on the victim’s needs, and the way failing to help someone in need makes Danny feel like a monster results in something that took my breath away, a gorgeous little moment of humanity. It’s feminist, but it’s feminism from the perspective of the way people can unknowingly perpetuate toxic masculinity, a perspective Who damn well needs, given how long it’s been a man-dominated world (and in many ways continues to be). Moments like this push No Future into something forward-looking and vital, exactly what’s needed after the first ever woman-written Who novel in The Left-Handed Hummingbird.

And that’s the real triumph of No Future: the way it repairs and looks forward. As befits the seasonal theming of summer, this book is about brushing away the wounds and the cold and embracing a frothier, frockier, more feminist future for Doctor Who. It feels like a long time since one of these books ended with the Doctor and friends, heading off on another great adventure, but for once, in the shining light of summer, that’s exactly what’s needed. It’s a step forward into a bright future.

9/10

Short Trips – The Astrea Conspiracy

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Written by Lizbeth Myles and directed by Nicholas Briggs.

Spoiler-free verdict: A detailed historical elevated by exceptional characterization a fresh voice.

Recommended pre-listening: None.

***

Big Finish built so much of their reputation on redefining eras long gone. As a result, it’s always interesting to see them do the opposite, to take the open door from the current show and immediately walk through it. The Astrea Conspiracy is the swiftest Big Finish have ever gone from a Doctor departing the show to that same Doctor appearing on audio. And as a result, the final production feels a lot more immediate.

It’s not that this is a particularly world-changing story in of its contents. There are a number of historical dramas the Doctor has been dropped into from as far back as the 60s. But there is nonetheless a vivid life to this story that makes it engrossing. A significant part of that is the characterization. Neve McIntosh puts in a marvelous Capaldi imitation, but more than that, Lizbeth Myles writes a genuinely marvelous Twelfth Doctor. He’s impish and silly, and merges an alien detachment with a deep sense of care. For anyone already missing his Doctor, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that, this story perfectly captures what’s so wonderful about him.

In terms of values, it also feels like a true extension of the era into new directions. Steven Moffat’s later years with the Twelfth Doctor were accompanied by bigger and bigger steps into overt feminism for the show, both in front of and behind the camera; this is an era which not only advanced the possibility of a woman as the Doctor with characters like Clara and Missy, but has tied itself for most women to ever write a run of Doctor Who, and whose defining director is none other than Rachel Talalay. Myles fits into that tradition nicely. It’s not just that she’s a woman in a Big Finish landscape overwhelmingly defined by men, but it’s that she comes from a distinctly feminist critical tradition of fandom, one which makes itself felt in the story. This also accounts for the fantastic choice of building the story around Aphra Behn. I have to confess, she is not a historical figure I’d heard of before, but from what a cursory Google search has told me, she has been undergoing feminist re-evaluation for several decades now. She’s exactly the sort of perspective that feminist scholarly fandom can offer, and the story’s successes prove that that is a worthwhile exercise.

It’s also bolstered by the fact that, while the story is true to the Twelfth Doctor’s era, it’s nothing like what this Doctor had on TV. It’s one of those “pure historicals”, in which the Doctor himself is the sole source of sci-fi drama. This helpfully avoids the sense of repition and empty nostalgia recreation, which it’s far too soon after Capaldi’s era to be entirely in need of. If anything, it’s more in-tune with what Capaldi’s run on Doctor Who has been followed by, under Chris Chibnall, sharing an approach to history to the lightly sci-fi-flavored Rosa and Demons of the Punjab, modern stories which have revitalized the genre and served as highlights of Jodie Whittaker’s era. Thus, seeing the Twelfth Doctor in such a story feels less like a throwback and more like a leap forward into new territory—the new territory he helped pave the way for.

The Astrea Conspiracy isn’t perfect. At times, I found myself lost in the historical details as someone who hasn’t researched the period, and the actual plot is fairly slender, mostly coming down to the old Who standby of capture and escape. But the way it is breathed into life with sharp detail makes it feel like so much more. This is a simple tale told well, sparkling in the small moments, the research, and the wit. It’s definitely worth $2.99 and forty minutes of your time.

8/10

Torchwood – Sargasso

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Written by Christopher Cooper and directed by Scott Handcock.

Spoiler-free verdict: A solid Torchwood vs. Autons mashup, with strong themes making up for deliberately unsatisyfing plotting.

Recommended pre-listening: None.

***

What do you want out of a story? That’s the question to ask with Sargasso, the latest audio drama from Big Finish’s monthly Torchwood range, pitting Rhys Williams against the Nestene Consciousness in the form of plastic pollution at sea. If you want a plot with a beginning and a tidy end, some likeable, developed characters, and a general good time, you’d be better off spending on something else. But that doesn’t mean Sargasso isn’t a tight script worth existing. It’s just one that only is interested in functioning on certain levels.

The premise is quite forward with the ambitions of the story: this is a story first and foremost about the environment. Nearly everyone has heard of the so-called “garbage patches” of the ocean, places where human plastic debris accumulates in gyres and swirls around and around, refusing to go away and hurting so many animals. Marrying that to the Nestene, Doctor Who’s plastic-animating squid from space, is an elegant match. We already live in a world where plastics threaten us, and it isn’t a large leap to turn it into a monster.

"Think of the environmental impact!"
"What, versus the impact on us?"

The ending clarifies these themes beautifully. Rhys and guest character Kaitlin Russell burn the plastic to attempt a quick escape from the alien-augmented environmental apocalypse, only for Rhys to unknowingly fail to solve the problem. Kaitlin, revealed out of earshot to be under Nestene influence, reveals her plan to control microplastics — tiny fragments produced when the trash in the sea starts to weather away, building up in fish, and eventually even in people. It’s all very sharp, an indictment of how we try to forget the problem or brush it off with cheap tricks, while all the while it lurks, ready to destroy us in a very real way. Rhys failing to resolve the plot is the best possible choice when the plot is a problem that exists outside the world of aliens, and I like using storytelling to highlight how poorly those real problems are being solved, even if it takes space squid to achieve that.

This is all very good, and what’s more, it’s necessary. Which is fortunate, because the story’s lack of interest in examining other things means there isn’t much more to get from it. Kaitlin is something of a symbolic cipher even before she’s revealed to be under Nestene control, a guilty figure of privilege trying to rectify things by becoming an environmentalist. She exists in these broad political strokes, a person to be engaged as an idea rather than an emotional figure. Rhys, on the other hand, mostly serves as an identification character. There are some strong moments with him, such as his obsession with safety videos as a parent, and a few nice beats suggesting what his life is like following Gwen’s departure in Aliens Among Us, but no deeper insights to be found.

Beyond them, characters purely serve plot support, and the plot itself is fairly boilerplate. There’s a lot of being chased around by plastic monsters, but nothing ever threatens to be as delightful as an early incident with rubber ducks; the action peaks early. That’s a fair enough failing, action storytelling is a hard genre to sustain on audio, but this story doesn’t innovate throughout most of the midsection. It’s never boring, nor bad, but the escalation of tension never quite lands. Instead, there’s a big nothing of a second act, all just holding time to get to the excellent punchline of the third. It’s difficult to see a reason for this story to last the full 50 minutes it does, beyond that being the standard for the range.

Overall, then, Sargasso is both satisfying and frustrating. It’s an easy script to admire for its loftier ambitions, and it more than succeeds at saying the things it needs to say. And yet it’s a hard story to fall in love with, an intellectual exercise that never quite cuts deeper or goes further. This is a story for people who think commenting on sea plastics with Doctor Who monsters is an inherently good idea.

Fortunately, I’m one of them.

6/10

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