Tag Archives: Seventh Doctor

The Legacy of Time – The Split Infinitive

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Written by John Dorney and directed by Ken Bentley.

The Legacy of Time episode 2.

Spoiler-free verdict: A solidly acceptable nostalgic thriller elevated by high-concept storytelling.

Recommended pre-listening: The Sirens of Time, Lies in Ruins

***

The Legacy of Time is an unusual aniversary special. Unlike most Doctor Who celebrations, this isn’t a tribute to the show, but rather a tribute to what Big Finish has done with it. That was clear in what the previous episode did with Bernice and River, but it’s even more clear here. The Seventh Doctor and Ace teaming up with the Counter-Measures team isn’t really something one would typically propose as a tribute to the Seventh Doctor era, but it is something that pays tribute to a major Big Finish spinoff.

This ethos greatly governs the story. There’s not really any revelations to be had about any of the characters, and the Doctor and Ace take their time to even turn up in their plot. In terms of style and structure, this is an episode of Counter-Measures, with grounded sci-fi thriller trappings and Cold War claustrophobia. The choice of villain widens the net a bit, with the Rocket Men, originating from some rightly beloved Companion Chronicles, turning up in a surprise fanservice twist. But that’s about all this story has in terms of meat on its bones: loving homage to other things Big Finish has done. Themes beyond nostalgic gaze at action stories and thrillers are in fairly short supply, and the story doesn’t really flex any emotional manipulation muscles.

It’s fortunate, then, that it’s told by someone as talented as John Dorney. The unfolding of the plot in two time periods, with Ace and the Doctor in each with a different period Counter-Measures team, keeps the familiar thrills bubbling into more exciting material. The set-pieces are pleasantly bonkers and largely well-judged; it’s hard to go wrong with throwing characters out of an airplane. And overall, the script oozes love for what it’s getting to do. It’s fun hearing the characters compete with pop culture references from different periods of what thriller the plot reminds them of (Bond references aplenty!), it’s fun hearing the distinctive Counter-Measures incidental music offering up oodles of stye, it’s fun hearing hints of Ian and Rachel going out together, and it’s fun having the whole story come down to a shaggy dog joke about UNIT dating.

But, I have to confess, this just isn’t the sort of fanservice that I live for. I enjoy the Counter-Measures range, but it’s not something that occupies a very large space in my heart (aside maybe from Lady Clare, who is wonderful and needs to be in everything and I got very excited by hearing referenced here). The Seventh Doctor era, including and especially at Big Finish, is something that means a lot to me, but more for the long-running arc with Hex, who is sadly absent from this set, or the stuff with Benny, who’s already been covered by the previous story. And aesthetically, it doesn’t hit the political or emotional depth I associate with the Seventh Doctor era (which, it must be said, featured nicely in The Assassination Games, the Seventh Doctor’s last run-in with this team), or even the splash of camp I controversially love from season 24. This is fairly white, traditional action romping. So while The Split Infinitive is a clever story that it’s hard to muster much critique for, I equally find it hard to muster much investment.

It’s a perfectly welcome addition to the box set. But it’s not something I’d buy a set for.

6/10

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