howe_sam fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Jun 16, 2016

• The narration. A huge amount happens in the first half of the first story in order to set the stage for the second half and the follow-up audio. Lucie Miller handles this well by using the titular character as narrator, voicing a message she left for the Doctor detailing a sketchy version of the events that have happened since his absence. It succeeds in detailing events and answering a lot of questions that would have been left hanging if we'd just arrived in the story at the end of the plague/invasion/collapse of society etc. It also allows some explanation (though not necessarily satisfying ones) for shifts in character/personality for at least one particular character.
  
  
• EXTERMINATE! For various reasons - some good, some bad - there has been a lengthy tradition of Daleks threatening to exterminate without actually doing it.... at least not to "important" characters. In general you can expect companions (and certainly the Doctor) to escape unharmed from the Daleks no matter how often they are in their power or under threat of extermination. Sure plenty of other people are killed, but they're usually extras or a one-off character introduced for little more purpose than to be Dalek-fodder to prove they're still dangerous. In these two stories, there are at least two instances where important recurring characters are at the mercy of the Daleks who proceed to... just straight up exterminate them and move on, exactly as they threatened they would. The first such death (____Tamsin____) is shocking but kind of fits in with the aforementioned "Dalek fodder" argument, because it seems their entire character was created to be an "important" victim of the Daleks. But another character (_____Alex____) is both a character and an actor you expect to see make frequent if irregular returns, and instead they're just unceremoniously killed off. Finally, a massively important character (_____Lucie____) dies fighting the Daleks. It reaffirms the notions that the Daleks aren't entirely toothless, and (for Big Finish) at least introduces at least an element of doubt that when they've got somebody "important" in their power, that this character (or characters) isn't necessarily going to make a miraculous escape.
  
  
• Lucie's final speech. After a season of popping in and out of the show, Lucie makes what feels like a final appearance in this story, and she goes out strong. Her final lines feel completely in keeping with her character, and wrap things around rather nicely to her initial brash and forthright appearance way back in Blood of the Daleks (yes, yet another Dalek story). If it is her final story, as it feels like, then it is a good way for her to say her goodbyes.
  
  

• It's relentlessly grim. I make a point of usually not looking up who wrote a particular story until AFTER I've listened to it, to avoid preconceived notions. But as I listened to these two stories, I started to get an uneasy feeling in my gut and eventually had to go and check to make sure I wasn't listening to a Joseph Lidster piece. I was surprised to discover I wasn't, the two stories were by Nicholas Briggs, demonstrating an unusually grim take on his generally standard (which isn't necessarily a bad thing) fare. It starts dark, it gets darker, and by the end when multiple major characters have been killed and the reeling survivors are left to ponder the seeming futility of life I just felt like I'd suffered through a couple of hours of misery porn. I can only assume that the idea was to further the idea that the 8th Doctor was getting darker, moving into a colder and crueler universe in order to set the stage for the (at the time untouchable) Time War period alluded to in the revival. The idea of course was that eventually the Doctor would wipe out not only the Daleks but his own people in order to save the universe, and stories like this go some way towards explaining how the endearing, sweet and hopeful (sometimes naive) 8th Doctor could end up in such a state. Thankfully the 8th Doctor was finally spared that fate in the wonderful Night of the Doctor which gave Paul McGann a televised send-off and essentially absolved him of this crime, showing that the 8th Doctor - in spite of all the poo poo he went through - never gave up on hope that things could and should be better. But that reveal means that retroactively a lot of this Big Finish stuff that was trying to set the scene for a perceived take on the character just feels out of place and even over-the-top. It may be unfair to judge it on those grounds, but I feel like even if I had listened to it before I saw Night, I still would have felt it was overly dark.
  
  
• Rehashing old content. Though it's kind of the point, it doesn't help that this story is rehashing one of the best Doctor Who stories ever made - The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It can't help but feel like a watered-down version of a far superior story, and the fact that everything repeats feels like it is negating/rendering pointless a lot of the "gains" from that story. The Earth was invaded but it survived and rebuilt itself (slowly and painfully) and then all of that gets tossed aside as the Daleks just do the same thing all over again and everybody just kind of falls back into line with the Robo-Men and the plague and the resistance and the giant mine-works etc. A reason is given for this rehash, but it doesn't excuse it, and it does make at least a couple of Eighth Doctor stories feel effectively meaningless as a result (especially An Earthly Child).
  
  
• Detached reactions. A number of important characters die in this story, but there is an oddly detached sense in case in particular that stands out given reactions to the other two. Three characters lose people who are extremely close to them, and while two of them are left reeling the third - who should have the most extreme reaction - feels oddly detached. When ____Tamsin____ dies it horrifies the Monk, when ____Lucie____ dies it horrifies the Doctor, but while ____Susan's____ reaction to ____Alex's____ death is initially strong, it quickly just seems to.... go away. If anything, the Doctor and his own loss - ignoring that Alex is his great-grandson! - seems to be treated as the bigger deal, which while understandable from a main character point of view doesn't make much sense from a narrative standpoint. For a story that is trying to sell the idea of,"This poo poo is important, things have gone down, major events have happened" this air of detachment takes some of the wind out of the sails.
  
  
• ____Jake____. Part of the problem with the above is that the character - despite their importance - never really got established, we never really got a sense of who they were and how they felt, not helped by their various appearances each establishing a new "personality" - from bored student dabbling in radicalism to impress a girl to enthusiastic architecture student with no interest in adventure to world traveler to revolutionary militant tactician there was never any point where we knew who the character was beyond their own relationship to existing characters. That isn't a personality, that's just a point of reference.
  

Pesky Splinter fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Jun 18, 2016

• Ace as wife. When Ace jumps to the Doctor's rescue when he is tied to the stake about to be burned alive, it turns out to have been a test to find the brave "Shining Wife". The Doctor and Ace are thus engaged to be married, upsetting Hex who has made no secret of his romantic interest in (the mostly uninterested) Ace. That situation is rife with comedic potential, and you honestly could have produced an entire story just around the comedic misunderstandings of the marriage being set-up and everybody trying to wriggle their way out of it.
  
  
• Danny Webb. A familiar face in British television (including Doctor Who), Danny Webb does a rather remarkable job voicing three distinct characters. Until I listened to the behind the scenes interviews I had no idea it was the same person, he invests each character with their own sense of personality and (most importantly) distinct voice. It's not the same voice doing different accents or going deeper or higher, they sound like entirely different people. In fact for one of them I was wondering if I was listening to Brian Blessed (or at least a very solid Brian Blessed impersonation). This is important not just from a performance standpoint but because it fits in with key elements of the story - the warring Ir and Ri are essentially the same people, just separated by culture and a few meaningless physical differences that they ascribe overblown importance to - along with their reversed species names it's about as subtle as the half black/half white faced dudes from Star Trek. But at the core they are the same, and it is in Tuin (the planet and the character) that they find their joint heritage.
  
  
• The bad guy. The "God" that both the Ir and Ri worship is an interesting take on an old-fashioned bit of sci-fi fun - a kind of take on the old "Toys of the Gods" bit. In this case, it's a hyper-advanced but rejected factory model robot that has ended up on the planet and - in its cold binary way - decided that the flawed inhabitants (who were in danger of ceasing to worship it as they advanced) needed to be culled and replaced by the "superior" model, ascribing the lack of faith to some (genetic) programming fault or error. The rituals and traditions that the Ir and Ri follow are hollow echoes of actual processes, and - while that does come across as a slightly edge dig at organized religion, and is also well-trod ground for sci-fi - it makes for an interesting dilemma/situation for the Doctor to resolve.
  

• Characterization. Hex in particular is wildly out of character, apparently he's now a booze-obsessed heavy drinker and a bit of an rear end in a top hat who likes to insult others on their physical appearance. It's only when Ace gets engaged to the Doctor that a bit of the regular Hex pops out, as he mopes around grumpily and then seizes the chance to take the Doctor's place when given the opportunity. Meanwhile Ace's own desire to go somewhere relaxing feels somewhat forced too, she's never been shy at all about the notion of adventure and excitement with the Doctor so to have her so insistent on it now feels odd. Also the Doctor, while acting in character, feels out of place given this story follows on from Nocturne in which he was taken to task for his deception/manipulation and he himself seemed keen to make it up to Ace and Hex. Now here he is straight back to pulling strings and shoving them into harm's way, with only a kind of bemused,"Oh.... my bad" when Ace and Hex figure out they've been duped again. Even their accusations feel more,"Oh you!" than,"...motherfucker....", which doesn't feel right given the nature of the trouble he's gotten them into as well as the way it follows on from a similar situation in Nocturne.
  
  
• The global/local conundrum. As is a frequent issue with Big Finish audio, the scope of the story they're telling doesn't quite come off in the execution. The Ir/Ri war has been going on for millennia, they occupy Tuin's moons and fight on Tuin itself, the entire planet their battlefield. And yet despite the global nature of this war, the sheer scope and size of it all..... everything in the story is contained within a small section of land. Not in itself a problem, except this is apparently the focal point of both races religion, AND the location of their most important celebration/festival (which is going on during the time the Doctor and companions visit) and yet it never feels like there are more than a few handfuls of people about. Everything is so localized, but we're supposed to see everything on a grand/global scale - especially when the Doctor announces he will be the Dark Husband, such a momentous event should have millions flooding to take part. Instead it feels like he's volunteered to MC the talent show at a boozy local music festival.
  
  
• The story is kinda... boring. A millennia-old global war, a mad "God", the Doctor and Ace getting married, two warring soldiers coming together to save their entire respective populations.... it all sound very exciting and dramatic but it... isn't. The whole thing feels like everybody involved is going through the paces. Maybe it's because it had been a year since their last audio and they were getting warmed up/back into the spirit of their characters, but it doesn't feel like any of the main cast are firing on all cylinders. McCoy in particular had just finished traveling the world performing in King Lear with Ian McKellan (a show I had a chance to see and missed, which I very much regret) so perhaps he was just exhausted, but it's all quite disappointing because you can see the potential there but nobody is quite pulling it off.
  

Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Jun 18, 2016

Chairman Mao fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Jun 19, 2016