Category Archives: Missy

Missy – The Belly of the Beast

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Written by Jonathan Morris and directed by Ken Bentley.

Spoiler-free verdict: The delerious joy of Missy as a character becomes strained, though not erased, in a bleaker piece of traditional action fare.

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

***

Throughout Missy series 1, there’s been a sense of the darker side of the character being held at bay. There’s been a fair few gleeful murders, but it’s been light on outright evil and horror. It’s inevitable, then, that in the end, the set changes pace, reveling in the character at her most brutal as a slave-driving tyrant. It’s in some ways necessary, and provides a welcome contrast to the previous stories, which while wonderful, are sometimes a bit too whimsical.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to say this makes for as enjoyable an experience. As I highlighted in my review of The Broken Clock, the success of Missy as a character, and of this set at its best, has been in recognizing she’s something more multifaceted than previous Masters, and is on the road to redemption. However, here, there’s no question what side she’s on. She’s evil, just in a chaotic ADHD variety (and that isn’t an approach that lends itself well to heavy topics like slavery). As a result, the hard turn to brutality makes her less interesting to spend time with for me, even while Michelle Gomez continues to be a winning presence — one which this story wisely doubles for its strongest sequence.

Another problem arising from this grimmer approach is that the story never quite decides whether it wants to be a hard, traditional rebel story or a satire of the same. The plot construction suggests it’s leaning more toward satire, with a rebellion and a slave force both run by competing Missys for their own amusement during an easy, low-stakes scheme. But far too much of the story comes from the perspective of the rebels, rather than Missy, even while it refuses to develop them as distinctive characters for plot reasons. And sure enough, the plot that they are all clones used by Missy because it’s cheap is effective, if a bit nonsensical (this is Missy, nonsensical is never an issue). But it never quite goes anywhere with it. The reveals happen, and we stay focused on the rebels in their responses to them, but they never really transcend or develop past that. Indeed, we have to hear the same characters respond to this news a few times. And in the end, Missy wipes the lot out, her victory having been achieved. It’s nearly poignant, with the clones returning to their false past memories only to be wiped out entirely during that vaguely happy ending, but they never make enough of an impression as characters to feel to saddened by it, and their backstory is presumably deliberately stilted as part of the core satire. It’s brutal, but it’s hard to get much out of it.

And so Missy waltzes off in a triumphant cliffhanger, assuming power over some vaguely defined “Master TARDIS” I can only presume will be a focus for a future series, but it’s difficult to feel particularly swept up by it all. There’s magnificent moments, but the depth never quite materializes, and the aesthetics clash with the more positive anarchy of the previous stories. Maybe that’s inherent to building a range around Missy; again, it’s probably necessary to showcase her more evil side. I also expect it’s an effective olive branch to people who long for the traditional Master, with the apotheosis of her plans feeling more like something out of a War Master story, all calculated brutality. But it’s nowhere near as meaningful to me, nor as fun.

A frustrating end, then, but after three stories of utter delight, it’s acceptable enough. And Missy dancing with herself is always, always a good idea.

4/10

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