Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Sep 3, 2016

NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Sep 4, 2016

• The concepts. Predating The Doctor's Wife by about 3 years, this story by Marc Platt features some amusing similarities to Neil Gaiman's - the Doctor and his male and female companions end up in a pocket/bubble reality outside of normal time/space, his TARDIS is "killed", a mad woman is living in a bottle insisting she is the Doctor's wife, lunatic shipwreck survivors are surviving on whatever they can salvage, and there is a dark and mysterious entity lurking on the fringes and even seems to be hunting the companions at one point. These similarities are all surface level of course, but it's always welcome when Big Finish actually makes use of their audio format to do something weird and outside of the box. This includes the "umbrella-birds", giant rooks (Ruhk) that exist outside of time dragged into the "reef" and wrecked by suddenly being subject to the already unstable flow of time in the space. Or the barely touched upon society of the "sailors", a race that is simultaneously interplanetary while also being very much trapped in the romantic image of 18th Century military figures - their commander is the official "hero" of their voyage, cursed with eternal life by a soothsayer since a glorious death on the battlefield is his greatest wish. Or the bizarre Lady Vuyok, the sacrifice of some other mysterious race who was blasted into their sun to be the "wife" of one of their deities, only to be sidelined into the Time Reef and now obsessed both with maintaining her class distance and finally meeting her husband. There are even elements of Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead (which only barely predates this story, and they were probably written at roughly the same time) with the dead apprentice hero who circles the Time Reef trapped in the final moment before his demise, cheerfully waving hello to everybody he passes with no idea that he died days earlier. This is a story chock-a-block with really interesting ideas and themes and it presents them all in a way where they just seem kind of natural, nothing feels particularly forced - the weirdness feels right.
  

• Thomas Brewster. Unfortunately for the above, Brewster's character hangs like a millstone around the neck of the story. It's nothing against John Pickard, but the character as written is just extremely frustrating. The idea was to go Adric "but right", getting to grips with the original "Artful Dodger" intention for Adric. The trouble is that Brewster just completely lacks both the charm and the gift for the gab that would offset or mollify the recklessly stupid, selfish and self-destructive things he does. So in the end it all feels like retreading familiar ground, as just like Adric Brewster is constantly loving things up for the Doctor and Nyssa, making bad situations worse, openly lying to them, only ever telling the truth when trapped into it by circumstances of his own making. Without charm or an ability to talk his way out of these situations, it feels extremely unnatural that the Doctor's attitude is mostly mild irritation and even more weird that Nyssa is constantly defending him for absolutely no reason beyond it says in the script that this is what the character does. Brewster almost constantly fucks things up for everybody else by pursuing short-sighted and reckless schemes for his own benefit, then clams up when questioned or tries to change the subject until enough time has passed that the other characters just move on and then he does something just as stupid. Even in this story when he basically curses multiple people to being marooned in the Time Reef (which includes at least one death) he never really faces any comeuppance for it. In fact, the whole thing kind of gets treated with a,"Awww shucks" kind of shrug, with a lame explanation given that he had a bit of a thing for Lady Vuyok as if that in any way excuses his actions. Brewster also looms large over the story, and though efforts are made to keep up the Doctor and Nyssa's parts (somewhat successfully for the Doctor, far less so for Nyssa) the fact it's a three episode story means nothing really gets a chance to really stretch its legs. The fourth part of the story - A Perfect World - repeats these same issues, though at least in that case the fault is only technically Brewster's.
  
  
• Cosmic plumbers. Happily, A Perfect World wraps up Thomas Brewster's time as a companion - but it does so in a rather unsatisfying way that also gives him a particularly unearned (and rather nonsensical) happy ending. Telling the story of a young woman whose life is falling apart until a chance encounter with Brewster, the world then becomes disturbingly perfect. The reason why is a bit of techno-babble time-stream nonsense that basically boils down to the idea of cosmic plumbers. Just where this obsession in sci-fi (is it only a British thing?) with working class "characters" cheerfully doing the universe's maintenance work comes from I don't know, but it's something I more often than not find eye-rollingly bad (I seem to recall Douglas Adams did it well, maybe everybody is just trying to poorly imitate him?). Two "on-call" blokes accidentally pick up Brewster and Connie's conversation and take their reference to a perfect world to be a maintenance request, and proceed to cosmically make everything on Earth "perfect". The whole thing just doesn't sit right with me, the humor/twist is obviously meant to be in the godlike powers being manifested in the form of a couple of likely lads but to me it actually makes the universe seem smaller, almost squalid. Sometimes Doctor Who gets mighty cosmic beings right (the Eternals for one, and - apart from the very disturbing racism - the Celestial Toymaker was a great concept) but it is very easy to screw up, and they do so here.