• The world-building. The universe that this story takes place in is well-established, perhaps helped by being able to work off the base provided by The Ark in Space. There is a sense that this place existed before - and will continue to exist after - the Doctor and Lucie stepped onto the page. The Earth has been abandoned due to dangerous solar flares from the sun, and colonists have spread out in search of new worlds to settle, new places to call home. With that comes the dangers that face many new colonies on the frontier, whether it be space or the desert or the jungle, and each group learns to survive in different ways. But there also comes the sadly all too familiar bigotry when different groups meet up - the common insult used in this story is "Indig" for those multi-generational colonists who have established new places for humanity to live, only to be treated like second-class citizens by the "pure" humans who serve in the military/are based in the central Government that looks after all these new frontiers. Humans become alien to each other, hostility, contempt and bitterness builds, and it makes it all the harder to provide the united front needed to deal with an external threat like the Wirrn.
  
  
• Lucie's pro-active stance. From her very first line, Lucie is taking charge in this episode and trying to get poo poo done. First of all it's immediately taking stock of their surroundings and (correctly) deciding to get the gently caress out of dodge because there is obviously nothing good to come of it. Then when she and the Doctor are left stranded in space (including an adorable section where she accidentally turns off her helmet mic) and "rescued" by the military, she refuses to sit meekly back and instead questions everything. She doesn't anybody get away with anything, pressing the point, refusing to play along, and forcing action. When the soldier "guarding" her panics, she is the one who takes control, and she is the one whose altruistic actions lead to the peaceful (if distasteful) resolution with the Wirrn. Lucie isn't just re-established as the Doctor's partner in crime by this point, she's an active protagonist who moves the story along rather than just being along for the ride.
  
  
• Sheridan Smith sees a Wirrn. It's not actually within the parameters of the story, but in the behind-the-scenes interviews she talks giddily over how creepy the Wirrn were and how she deliberately didn't go back to look at pictures from The Ark in Space so she could maintain that horrific image in her head. When Nick Briggs actually shows her the picture, her reaction is adorable
  
  
• The Doctor's open mind. Nicholas Briggs talks openly in the interview section about how the intent of season 3 (at least this first half) was to show a Doctor more detached from humanity than normal considering the length of time he spent on Orbis. This is never more evident than in this story, where despite his growing reattachment to Lucie he still demonstrates a distinctly (and perhaps more appropriate) inhuman/alien mindset. He looks at a situation that is pretty much revolting/unacceptable and he declares it - if not good - then at least necessary. It also follows on from his attitude as seen in Hothouse, where his initial refusal to kill a human being who was being taken over by an alien lifeform changed across the course of the story. Here, he faces the same choice, and this time he doesn't even seem to hesitate to make it. That's a commitment to development that I have to approve of, Big Finish made a creative choice and stuck with it. That said....
  

• The Doctor's open mind. Despite appreciating Big Finish's commitment to their creative decision, and even understanding their possible intentions to begin the slow process of prepping the 8th Doctor for the (at the time believed never to be touched) Time War and "The Moment".... I did NOT like what they did with his choice in this story. Whether it's a demonstration of an alien mindset/morality or not, it's fatalistic and that does not fit with the Doctor, and especially not THIS Doctor. From the moment the Wirrn attack, the Doctor is aware of the horrible fate awaiting one of the characters and not only makes no move to attempt to deal with it, but actually seems to approve of the situation. When he discovers what Delong's (played by Daniel Anthony from The Sarah Jane Adventures) people used to do on this planet in order to co-exist with the Wirrn, he almost lauds their foresight. Delong is disgusted, calling them barbarians, but the Doctor prefers to think of them as realists, and pragmatically decides the key to their own salvation is in the sacrifice of the already-infected person, condemning her to a horrific fate which the story does little to allay with its talk of "race memory". This leads into the next problem....
  
  
• The Wirrn. In The Ark in Space, the Wirrn were horrific because they were just so goddamn alien, even if it was in a familiar "nature is hosed up" way. Like a wasp, they laid their eggs inside living hosts which hatched and then ate out the host from the inside, slowly changing the host's body and DNA until it became a fully formed Wirrn itself. Seeking to take the Earth partly out of a desire for revenge and partly for survival (humanity spreading out had lead to competition for territory, as seen in this story), they were destroyed by a victim who managed to retain enough humanity to sacrifice himself to save the rest of the crew. In this story, that concept gets shifted about a bit, as we learn that the Wirrn's intelligence is based on the hosts they use to propogate the species. Most of the Wirrn in the story used cattle as hosts, and as a result have little to no intelligence of their own. Various Queens that hatched inside intelligent human hosts have kept the swarm under control as much as possible but now most have died and only one remains, barely holding the stupid masses in place. These changes not only make the Wirrn somewhat sympathetic, but make them understandable in a way that lessens their impact as a "monster" - you can argue whether that is a good or bad thing, but to me it dilutes the concept of the alien monstrosity that so threatened the 4th Doctor and his companions. They just feel too "normal" now, as opposed to the bizarre, monstrous and alien creatures I remember from The Ark in Space.
  
  
• The resolution. So when the resolution comes, it feels.... wrong. The Wirrn's victim is sacrificed on the altar where Delong's people held their superstitious rites over the generations, creating a new intelligent Queen that can hold the swarm in check again. But the attempts to downplay this barbarism fall short, the victim in question was very much committed to the destruction of the Wirrn and the fact that once infected she became more accommodating of the idea of keeping them alive just gives the impression that for all the talk of the mind/memories surviving, she's basically just been completely devoured and replaced by the parasite. There WAS an interesting potential avenue this could have gone down, because the audio seems to go out of its way to show that Lucie has also been cut by a Wirrn, and I thought it might have been interesting to see the Doctor all gung-ho for the "peaceful" resolution only to lose his poo poo when discovering somebody important to HIM was infected, exposing some hypocrisy over his more "enlightened" approach to the situation. Instead, once everything is resolved they just return to the TARDIS where he sprays her arm with some medicine and informs her she'll be fine now and that would appear to be that, unless something comes of it in a future story. Even the story seems aware of how untenable the resolution is, as other characters point out that the military is still out there and sure as gently caress aren't going to accept regular sacrifices of humans to the Wirrn in order to maintain peace with a race of parasitic insects that "eat" humans from the inside-out. The Wirrn just.... go, the swarm heading up into the stars and out in the blackness of space - ironically, they may end up so hunted down and reduced in numbers that they end up being the ones who board Space Station Nerva in The Ark in Space, rendering the whole thing moot.
  

twistedmentat fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Feb 14, 2016

Davros1 fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Feb 14, 2016