The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Review

So Thursday night, I celebrated the release of the final Hobbit movie, and indeed what looks very likely to be the final Middle-Earth movie directed by Peter Jackson, in the best and most epic way possible: by watching the first two films at the cinema back to back straight before watching the midnight showing of Five Armies. Yes, it was a lengthy watch to say the least, but totally worth it. I’ll be reviewing The Hobbit as a whole later on, but for now, I’ll focus my thoughts on the concluding instalment.

The film begins directly where the 2^nd film left off, and I do mean directly: Smaug attacking Laketown. I always thought that was a rather odd ending for the previous film, especially since Smaug is pretty quickly dealt with in Battle in the first ten minutes. It almost felt like having only the first two thirds of the Battle of Helm’s Deep in the Two Towers before showing the rest in Return of the King. Right after the resolution of the Smaug storyline, it becomes clear that Thorin, now that he has finally reclaimed his treasure, is becoming more and more obsessed with it, and to be honest, I think showing the start of his greed would’ve made a much more suitable cliffhanger to Desolation of Smaug.

This film has the title of The Battle of the Five Armies. I think it’s no exaggeration to say that this, bar the beginning of Smaug and the resolution of a couple of other important threads, is almost entirely what the final instalment is about, with the first half of the film being focused on the build up to the battle as the armies start to meet and the second being the battle itself.

The build up is pretty good, as it mainly focuses on Thorin’s greed and his growing obsession with the gold he now possesses. It’s not only putting a strain on the friendships we’ve seen built up over the trilogy, but his jealous possession of the treasure is leaving a lot of people pissed off, including the men, women and children of Laketown due to so many losing their homes in the opening ten minutes, and the Elves, because the woodland King wants his jewels back. (Seriously.)

I really enjoyed this part of the storyline, not just because it was a great part of the novel that I loved seeing adapted on screen – namely, seeing one of the ‘heroes’ not be perfect and lose sight of what’s important, a storyline that as a child was just fantastic stuff to read and as an adult, is still a fantastic story now – but also because it’s a great allegory of greed and how destructive it can be, something that feels even more relevant than ever. Amongst all of this, themes of loyalty and the true meaning of friendship are explored, and there are great moments of humour, too.

After all of this build up, we then come to the Battle itself. Now, this is a battle that really didn’t take too much time in the original novel – perhaps about ten, maybe twenty pages at most. In this film, it takes at least a good, solid hour to show. Now, if this hadn’t been handled right, this could’ve gotten old real quick. But I’ve gotta be honest: if there’s one thing that actually makes me think, “Maybe splitting a novel 300 pages long into 3 films wasn’t too terrible an idea”, this battle is it. It is absolutely amazing. Peter Jackson pretty much established himself as a master of fantasy battles on-screen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and this battle just might be his greatest one yet, which is really saying something.

For one thing, he really knows how to mix things up at exactly the right moments. Sometimes, this could go from focusing on the larger scale to something a lot more personal, sometimes, this could cut from the battle itself to quieter moments of drama, or even just bring a whole new army in at the worst/best moments. No matter what he does, he knows exactly how to pace things out, know when to make things painful or brutal to watch, or, in some cases, just plain fucking awesome.

Now, this is something I have to describe about not just the battle itself, but of other key moments, particularly early on focusing on Gandalf at Dol Guldur. If there was ever going to be a ‘Most Unbelievably Fucking Badass Moment of Middle-Earth” award, the Battle of the Five Armies is pretty much the closest thing to that. Seriously, every fucking major character (or even one played by Billy Connolly, which is just fucking awesome by itself,) gets a moment of pure fucking badass at different points in the film. Just when you thought, “Holy crap, that was awesome!”, another character comes along and makes you go, “What the fuck? Holy fucking fuck, that’s badass on a whole new level!”, and then another character comes along that makes you go, “You...have...got...to...be...fucking...kidding!”

I’m saying a lot about this battle not just because it takes up a huge part of the film, but also because it’s definitely one of the more impressive pieces of effects work I’ve seen this year. Sometimes, when a film just keeps throwing CGI at you just for the sake of explosions or destruction, it becomes less impressive and more boring to watch. Battle was different. Watching it felt like being a kid again, and that’s not something I can say of many films this year. It’s something that makes me want to see it on a big screen at least one more time due to how impressive and genuinely epic it really is.

One more but no less important question: how well does this instalment work as both the final instalment of the Hobbit trilogy and as, let’s face it, a prequel to the Lord of the Rings? Because while the Hobbit was written first, being split into three movies plus moving the focus occasionally outside of Bilbo’s and the Dwarves, as well as being made after the adaptation of the sequel had quite the impact on movie and geek culture, meant that we always had to expect more than a few deliberate nods and ties to the other film trilogy. This was something that was pretty much confirmed right from the opening scene of Old Bilbo and Frodo in An Unexpected Journey. So, as a conclusion to one trilogy and a bridge to another, how satisfying is it?

As a bridge, I’d say it does it just right. There’s plenty of nice hints and foreshadowing of what’s to come, especially in the Dol Guldur sequence, without quite overdoing it. And this is what makes it satisfying as a conclusion to one of my favourite stories in its own right. Because The Hobbit wasn’t written as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings, it was written as very much its own story that, by the end, didn’t really need a sequel (it says something of Tolkien’s brilliance that he not only wrote a sequel based on one of the tinier aspects of the story, but wrote a sequel so brilliant that they actually decided to make the movie version of that first). And while a film version of that story was pretty different, in some ways, (not so much the story itself but how that story was told), the final instalment remembers to focus on the really important things, by the end. Not on the return of an enemy to Middle-Earth or the importance of a magic ring, but on how a character who had led a simple life comes back changed through his experiences, and how much his adventures and, far more importantly, the friends he made along the way, meant to him. And nothing highlights this more beautifully than the final scene at the end. I won’t spoil it for you, but it will bring tears to your eyes.

9/10

Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD Review

Just got back from a UK premiere screening in London of this documentary. This is one I've not only been excited about for a while (perhaps appropriately, the most excited I've been about any feature since Dredd), but also something I strongly suspected wouldn't get a particularly wide release, especially as there's no actual release date for it. So I was so happy that I was able to get a ticket for it (with a Q&A with not only the film's producers, but also two men who worked heavily on the comic, including creator Pat Mills. Being only metres away from fucking legends was so awesome). Add to that a packed screening with an audience that clearly enjoyed themselves, and you've got one happy fanboy!

Now, onto the documentary itself. As I said, I had high expectations for this documentary, but even I was incredibly impressed at just how in-depth it all was. At approximately 2 hours long, the documentary covered a great deal of the entire run of the comic, including its creation in the 70s, its incredible high volume of originality, excellence and influence in the 80s, its shocking lows in the 90s, and its return to form and brand new highs in the 00s to now. Also covered in all of this is the comic's influence on American comics, especially the creation of Vertigo, as successful 2000AD writers and artists like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrisson and Dave Gibbons came to the attention of DC.

What really helped make the documentary so interesting is that so much of the material comes first hand from so many people who had worked directly on 2000AD, and all these interviews are hugely and refreshingly honest about everything. Yes, there's a lot of praise for the comic and how influential it was, but there's also a lot of points made regarding 2000AD's views on creative ownership which a lot of writers and artists are clearly pissed off with, or how terrible some decisions in the 90s truly were.

I think what makes this documentary worth watching is, more than anything, the story it's telling of an underdog, of a comic that was so unlikely to last as long as it did that it had the "futuristic" title of 2000AD. Even with fucking awful publishers, censorship issues and a declining British comics market, it's clear that a lot of people who worked at 2000AD had a lot of fun, not just despite the difficulties they had to face but even because of them. There's a lot of love and passion by everyone interviewed (including Anthrax member Scott Ian, who seems like a big kid when talking about his love of the comic), and it comes across well.

If there's one slight niggle I have with the documentary, it's a tiny one, and something I perhaps wouldn't have noticed if it hadn't been done so well at the start: namely, just a little more context of the times the comic went through. We got plenty of information and footage of what 70s Britain was like and how its numerous problems influenced the creators particular punk style for 2000AD, it's just a bit of a shame that this didn't carry on for the rest of the documentary, as it really helped make it incredibly clear how much of a product of its culture 2000AD was when it started. But like I said, this is a tiny complaint.

Honestly, this is a documentary I'd recommend to anyone, whether you've read any 2000AD or even if you've never heard of it. It's an incredibly in-depth feature that's honest, refreshing, and even at times absolutely fucking hysterical (seriously, I lost count at how many times we in the audience laughed our arses off because of an anecdote or very strong opinion of a writer or artist), and while I doubt it will get a wide cinema release, I hope others can check it out asap. 10/10

Predator Versus Judge Dredd Versus Aliens Review

As cool a title as that is, two things should be kept in mind: one, it’s actually two different stories in one volume, with each story featuring Judge Dredd dealing with each of the two monster icons separately, and two, one story is clearly better than the other.

First things first. I liked Predator Versus Judge Dredd, but there were a few key things that could’ve been improved that could’ve turned it from an interesting crossover into a great one. 

First, the world of Dredd could’ve been introduced better, as an introduction to the world of the Judges feels a little clumsy within the narrative. Obviously, there’s always going to be readers brand new to the world of Dredd, and certainly, you should find ways within the narrative to do that, as long as you can make it feel natural. Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgement on Gotham was a perfect introduction to the world of Judge Dredd because we were seeing it through the eyes of Batman, and as such, bits and pieces of the insanity of this world are slowly explained to him, and therefore a new audience as a result. 

For Predator Versus Judge Dredd, the introduction of the world is one I’m kind of against: the narrator directly telling and explaining to the audience everything about the lead character and his world rather than letting us discover it ourselves piece by piece. And that’s kind of a shame, because the writer is none other than John Wagner, not just the creator of Judge Dredd but a writer of so many brilliantly told stories within that universe at least. Which is probably part of the problem – he’s aware that there’s likely to be a brand new audience, no matter how small, reading this comic and checking out the universe of Judge Dredd for the first time, but he’s been such an expert at developing Dredd and his world for so long that trying to see from a fresh viewpoint might be difficult. That’s the only explanation I can see for why the introduction for that fresh audience isn’t handled well. It also doesn’t help that the only point of view from outside Dredd’s world is the Predator, and let’s face it, he’s not a character who’s likely to be put off from the insanity of Mega-City 1 – on the contrary, it’s partly that insanity that’s why he’s drawn to it.

Another problem I have with this story is that not a lot of characters feel like they have a great deal of depth. There’s not many characters we get to know very well outside of Dredd, Psi-Judge Schaefer (great-great-granddaughter of Dutch Schaefer from the original Predator movie) and, oddly enough, the Predator itself, so the violence doesn’t quite sting as much as it should. This is something I’ll cover more when I get to the Aliens part of the collection, but for the moment, while the violence is still cool, the overall story and world lacks the certain depth that so many of the great comic stories gives us for Dredd’s world.

One final, but much smaller criticism I have is the artwork. While it’s ok, I don’t think it suits the multi-coloured insanity of Judge Dredd, or 2000AD in general. In fact, the first thing I think of when I see it is more 90s DC. Perhaps not surprising really, considering that one aim for the crossover was undoubtedly to try and sell Judge Dredd to an American audience, but still, I think the artwork just lacks a certain charm that some of the more regular artwork of Judge Dredd has, even in the 90s.

Now that the key criticisms I have for the Predator story are out of the way, overall, it’s really not that bad a Judge Dredd story or a Predator story. For Dredd’s part of the story, it’s the classic Judge Dredd case: a perfect alien hunter arrives in Mega-City 1 and starts killing the Judges for sport – it’s up to Dredd to track him down and stop him. For the Predator, it’s a story set in Earth’s future and more than a hundred years after earlier visitors hunted in the jungles of Earth, both tropical and urban. Now another has come to Earth to try and find a new type of prey, especially one as highly armed and trained as the Judges. And that’s one key thing that makes the crossover worth reading: Dredd and the Predator are really suited to each other. Not quite as perfectly as the Predator and Aliens, but still a worthy fit. They’re both universes that are full of action and are violent as fuck, both protagonists (whether hero or villain) are very smart and very efficient at what they do, especially when killing their targets, and both are perfectly matched. It’s just a shame that it’s only a good story overall, when with just a few key improvements, it could’ve been a great one.

This is where Judge Dredd Versus Aliens: Incubus comes in. Not only do I think that this succeeds so much where the previous story failed, I think, reading Aliens immediately after Predator, it probably highlights everything the previous story did wrong in the first place.

First, there’re the characters, and I think it’s this key strength that simultaneously make it a great Judge Dredd story and a great Aliens story. In both universes, a big reason that made us fans fall in love with the universes as much as we did wasn’t just the violence – it was how much it stung. And why it stung was for a very simple reason: how much we found ourselves already starting to care about the characters. How much they felt like they had lives outside of their jobs (not something that was easy to do perhaps in the Predator story when the victims were always the Judges, people whose jobs really didn’t allow them to have any kind of life outside of the job); how much they felt like three-dimensional human beings, even after knowing them for such a short time, and how shocking it always felt when an alien burst out of their chests or acid blood was suddenly sprayed all over them. This is what makes Wagner such a perfect fit for the Alien universe: he has always been absolutely brilliant at making us care about characters who get such nasty deaths in so little time, and it’s nice that, along with co-writer Andy Diggle, both are at their A-game.

What also helps is that the story has a lot more depth than Predator Versus Judge Dredd. Whereas the first story was very straightforward, with Dredd and the Predator effectively hunting each other, here, there’re a lot more sides to it. First, we’re given the mystery of how the aliens arrived in Mega-City 1, which also introduces us to the human criminals involved, all of whose motives are for a variety of reasons: some political, some pure greed, and some just for the evulz.

Surprisingly, the story actually adds a lot of decent mythology to the Dredd universe, including the return of a few significant characters and even the introduction of a new Judge: Sanchez, brand new to the job and full of nerves, to say the least. So much so in fact that you’re forced to wonder if she’s really cut out for it. Interestingly, her perspective is probably the closest thing to being the ‘new reader introduction’ we get, and honestly, that’s not much of one, as the story really does throw readers new to the world of Dredd in the deep end. Now, I’m a huge fan of everything Judge Dredd (bar the Stallone movie, of course), and as a result, it’s harder for me to assess how easy a story like this would be for new readers to jump on board with. In the long term, it’s an approach I prefer to the more heavy-handed introduction the Predator story gave us, and the story itself is simple enough to follow. Plus, if readers did need more of an introduction, at least the Predator story is included in this collection.

We also get to see more than just the Judges perspective, as a pest control team is sent in to initially deal with one single chestburster. Yeah, you can guess how well that goes, but, as an Aliens fan, the pest control team is a fantastic addition to the story – all of the characters feel like real people with lives and jobs back home who feel like they know completely what they’re doing when it comes to tracking one little pest. Again, very predictable, but in this case, it’s in a good way. While lacking any direct continuity to the Aliens series beyond the Xenomorphs themselves – no mention of Ripley or any of her direct descendents, no mention of the company etc – it’s the characters and their story that gives it a truly authentic Aliens feel.

Of course, what else gives it an authentic Aliens feel of course is violence, and lots of it! People get burned in acid, chests are burst, shot to shit, ripped to shreds...in short, the kind of violence that feels right at home in a Judge Dredd comic. With the added bonus of giving us characters to actually give a shit about, the extra sting makes that violence work even better.

I mentioned how well the universes of Predator and Dredd suit each other, and naturally, the same goes for Dredd and Aliens. The difference being in this crossover is that the best of both worlds are used to their full advantage. The Aliens are such a great fit for Dredd’s world, (especially considering all the crazy aliens he’s dealt with over the years,) and the story really gives us both fleshed out characters and a world with depth. It avoids being a random encounter for both universes and instead feels like something big for one in the case of Dredd, another great selling point. Add to that the artwork of Henry Flint, a veteran artist of the comics that gives us that mixture of gritty style with the mixture of bright and dark colours of Mega-City 1, and you have a great story that’s well presented. As far as Judge Dredd crossovers are concerned, outside those exclusive to the 2000AD universe, this is one of the very best, up there with Judgement on Gotham, the story that made me a fan of the character in the first place.

One final point: the book itself. Going for the price of £25 in the UK, this is a very pricey book. Is it completely worth that price? Maybe not quite. The quality of the hardback itself is very nice, with a dust-cover over a completely black cover with just the title in red letters, so it really does make quite the impression on the book shelf. But there’re no extras at the back or front, no interviews with the writers or artists on how a crossover like this happened, nothing revealed about any unused story ideas or what might’ve been. Covers for individual issues at least are shown at the start of each relevant ‘chapter’, including some alternative ones, which are welcome, but besides that, there’s not much new. So I’d say that if you’ve read these two stories before and in previous separately released trade paperbacks, I’m gonna be honest and say there’s really nothing new for you here. If, however, you’re like me and you’ve never read these two stories before, it’s definitely worth a look, especially if you’re a fan of any of the three major icons. Judge Dredd Versus Aliens: Incubus really is not just a fantastic crossover story, but a brilliant comic book story period, and even Predator Versus Judge Dredd, while not being quite as good, is still worth a look if you're a fan of both characters.

Predator Versus Judge Dredd: 6/10

Judge Dredd Versus Aliens: 9/10

Overall collection: 8/10

Slaughterhouse 5 - An Analysis

One thing I have to get right out of the way: this book was, in many ways, not exactly what I had expected. But then again, perhaps that’s because I didn’t exactly have a clear idea of what to expect. Until a short while ago, the most I knew about this book was that it was an anti-war novel, and that it was something of a classic. That was literally it.

Then a couple of months ago, over drinks down a pub (where many great stories begin), I was talking to one of my oldest friends which, along with other important matters like Doctor Who, awesome presents, and what titles we could come up with for porn movie titles of classic movies, we also discussed reading and writing, including my own science fiction novel that I had been working on-and-off for some time, with one key idea being the main protagonist finding himself travelling mentally backwards and forwards in time. This, to my surprise, brought up the main plot of Slaughterhouse 5, in which main protagonist Billy Pilgrim finds himself doing the exact same thing, going backwards and forwards in time, mainly from travelling from two key periods in his life: his time as a prisoner of war and his eventful life afterwards, which included getting married, getting a job as an optometrist, and living on the planet Tralfamadore.

As you can imagine, this wasn’t what I had expected from an ‘anti-war classic’.

Of course, it was only a week or so later, after my friend had actually bought me a copy of the novel for me to read, that I discovered just how completely unusual it is, not just in terms of war stories, but in literature overall.

The first thing that leaped out was how much author Kurt Vonnegut was himself a part of the story and its telling, including an opening and closing chapter on some of his personal experiences and even how he came to write the story and why he wanted/needed to write it. This actually threw me off at first because I was just expecting the novel to simply leap into the story of Billy Pilgrim, but after finishing the novel, I think it’s one of those key things that I’ll appreciate more on a second reading. Because it establishes that the writer of this story and his experiences are as important as the story he’s telling. Considering that, in my experience, writers themselves when it comes to fiction at least tend to be essentially invisible when telling their stories, the fact that Vonnegut not only does this but does it in such a way that he doesn’t come across as a massively pretentious wanker is already incredibly fascinating.

The second thing that leaped out about the novel was how funny and blackly satirical it was at times. Vonnegut’s writing is packed with brilliantly deadpan wit, especially when telling things that were at the same time absolutely ridiculous and perfectly everyday. This is never more clear than how he presents death in the book, something that is not only commonplace but is always punctuated with the words, ‘So it goes’. His continual use of these three words at the end of every single death described, even if those deaths were completely horrific – no, especially if those deaths were completely horrific – was something that I always found blackly hysterical. This is mostly due to the deliberate detachment Vonnegut has to most of the characters, as the writer himself admits at one point that in this book there are no characters, at least not in times of war, with everyone growing essentially detached from both their own lives and from life itself.

Even in Pilgrim’s life both before and after the war, there are many characters – including those in Billy’s own family, especially his daughter – that don’t come across as human beings as such. Not to call them flat or one-dimensional, but more that they have a detachment and lack of human empathy or sympathy at times that reminds me a great deal of the works of Roman Polanski. Another great friend of mine, Jean, who has written some brilliant analytical reviews of Polanski’s work, has noted that a common theme amongst his films is that a great deal of them involve protagonists who are sympathetic victims that are surrounded by ‘monsters’, in his terms – men and women who generally seem to lack empathy or sympathy or even humanity, even if it’s in the mundane way possible. This is, to me, the perfect way to describe a great deal of the characters in Vonnegut’s novel. The one time a character is even described as such is someone who we’ve always been told is essentially a doomed man, a victim that’s heading for, like many other people in war, a meaningless death.

Now, for the time travel. I’m a man who loves his time travel in stories – whether comedic or dramatic, some of my favourite stories have involved brilliant uses of this storytelling device. In fact, when it comes to many stories, there are times when I take it too seriously – Looper’s use of it was great throughout its first half, with a protagonist facing himself in both his past and his future, and neither viewpoint particularly likes the other, but then the completely non-sensical ending partially ruined it for me (the rest of it was ruined by a second half that just did not seem to fit the brilliantly nourish and character based first half) – so I was worried whether my obsession over things like cause and effect, what can and can’t be changed and any ‘rules’ of time travel that are presented in a story that are or are not adhered to, might ruin my enjoyment of a novel, even a greatly loved classic. But Slaughterhouse 5 is a story that has used it in a way that I’ve never really seen used before, and it’s one that I adore.

Firstly, whenever Billy Pilgrim travels, he always seems to know exactly where he is in his life. If he arrives in 1945, he knows he’s a prisoner of war in Germany. If he arrives in 1968, he knows he is a widower with a daughter. He even knows the exact date he’s going to die and how. And he never really attempts to change or prevent a single moment – once again, there’s a key detachment that’s focused on, and the detachment that Billy has is to time itself. He still finds degrees of happiness and sadness in his life, but overall, he has a unique perspective of time that no one else has. It’s almost like an experience of life that has been edited for Billy in the wrong order, and he just allows himself to go wherever time takes him, whether it’s as something as blissful as his honeymoon or whether it’s something as terrible as seeing the ruins of a bombed city and digging out rotting bodies out of ‘corpse mines’ afterwards.

The way Vonnegut has used time travel here is unlike anything I’ve seen in other time travel stories, mostly because it just works on so many layers. Looking at how the narrative and Billy constantly switch from the war to afterwards, I can’t help but think of the perfect metaphor here of how everything about war never truly leaves you. Afterwards, you can get married, you can have kids, you could even get abducted by aliens and fuck Hollywood stars on an alien world, in Billy’s case, and you can even experience things as terrible as grief. But as much as you can try to focus on the good things afterwards, war never truly leaves you. The things a man sees, the things a man lives through. The soldiers and the innocents who die in such conflicts. The sheer soullessness of it all. Vonnegut has written a war novel unlike any other by doing what all the greatest science fiction writers have done: using a key science fiction idea to put across something important – perhaps something even deeply important and personal to the writer himself – to allow a reader an easier understanding of something that perhaps is almost impossible to understand unless it’s something they’ve been through.

But I think Vonnegut’s novel is a lot more than just about war. It’s about life and death – these two extremes especially – and everything in between. It’s about how broken and fractured life is in general, about those moments that we always come back to, the best and the worst. It’s about all the things I’ve mentioned and, I strongly suspect, so much more that I’ve missed, and therefore make it a story that I will inevitably come back to. It is literally quite unlike any other novel I’ve ever read, and one I am so grateful to have read.

7th Doctor Audio Overview (2 of 7)

 Audios

Main Range

·         The Harvest

·         Dreamtime

·         Live 34

·         Night Thoughts

·         The Settling

·         No Man’s Land

·         Nocturne

·         The Dark Husband

·         Forty-Five

Meet Hex – full name Thomas Hector Schofield, he was working as a nurse at St Gart’s Hospital when he bumped into the Doctor and McShane. This is the part where I tell you that there’s nothing special about Hex (he realised that the middle name ‘Hector’ did him no favours back in school), that until he met the Doctor and Ace he was perfectly ordinary, and from his perspective, that would, to an extent, be true. But there’s something about Hex that makes him special that he doesn’t know. Something the Doctor is keeping secret from him.

It seems to be a bad habit of the Seventh Doctor’s, meeting companions that he immediately keeps secrets from. First when he met Ace, he later admitted he knew or at least strongly suspected right then that Fenric was the reason why she ended up on another planet, that she had Fenric’s curse, but he never told her, right up until he broke her faith in him. It almost destroyed the relationship between the two. Now? It’s interesting to note in these audios that not only has Ace noticeably grown up and matured, but she’s clearly learned a lot from the Doctor. That’s one thing that’s great about introducing a new companion like Hex into the mix – really seeing how much she’s generally become used to the TARDIS life. More than that – she’s become used to the Doctor, even grown fond of him. Now in some cases, this could be just considered rather sweet in a Doctor/companion relationship. But there’s an element to it that’s also slightly worrying. Because the Doctor is not the man he once was, nor the man he’s going to be. He’s not so upfront with his companions in this incarnation. He’s a man who likes his secrets, who is always keen to state that he may not know things but he “has his suspicions”, and these secrets sometimes gets his friends in danger. Sometimes, they’re worse than that. They’re important facts that his friends have a right to know, secrets he likes to keep to himself for a very long time…

Hex, on the other hand, at least questions the Doctor’s methods from time to time. While Ace simply complains and practically jokes about how the Doctor is always deliberately landing them in trouble, Hex will, from time to time, question him and his motives. (And oh boy, does he have a very good reason for that.) This is why the Doctor-Ace-Hex dynamic is so excellent to listen to. Hex isn’t actively against the Doctor, but it’s nice that while one companion will not only be defensive but also joke of the Doctor’s behaviour, the other will, quite rightly, from time to time at least question it.

So, after listening to Hex’s first 9 stories in the main range, what were the highlights?

The Harvest

Hex’s introduction story is a great listen. The way the companion is introduced to the TARDIS especially has a very modern feel to it, which considering this was released a year before the TV series came back, is very impressive. Dan Abnett – an excellent science fiction writer that I’m always keen to read or hear more of – writes the whole team really well here, especially Hex, who’s very much grounded in an almost but not quite (it’s set in the near-future) modern day setting. Add to that a new take on one of my favourite enemies and some slight hints of what’s to come, and you’ve got a really solid introduction story for a great companion. 8/10

Live 34

This might just be the highlight of these early stories. Being a wildly different take on a Doctor Who adventure, the entire story is in the format of four instalments of a radio show for another planet, colony 34, as the Doctor, Ace and Hex investigate a corrupt political system. There’s a lot we have to piece together, as a lot of usual key elements to a Who story – open the story with the team arriving, have them slowly find out what’s going on etc. – are something we only learn about from the main characters being “interviewed”, rumours that the radio reporters here about, scraps of information that we have to piece together. I love the wildly different approach to this, but more than that – dramatically, it’s an approach that completely works. I cannot overstate how impressive that is – for a similar but far weaker approach of having a Doctor Who story told from a completely outside perspective, see Love & Monsters. Unlike a lot of fans, I don’t completely detest the story, but it’s far, far from the best it could’ve been, and Live 34 really shows just how it’s done. There’s some fantastic and absolutely thrilling drama, with one hell of a ridiculously fucking awesome climax in which the Doctor once again proves just how goddamn badass he is. Highly recommended to anyone, whether you’re a Who fan or not. 10/10

Night Thoughts

Night Thoughts is also worth a listen for its sheer creepiness factor alone. It’s interesting in that this story explores time travel and changing history in a way that I’ve never quite seen before, almost like a new spin on classic stories like the Monkey’s Paw or Pet Semetary. There’s some really grotesque and horrific imagery throughout the story – bodies found in a lake, eyes ripped out of sockets, walking embalmed dead girls – and even more disturbing ideas, as most of the main characters in the story try to make up for a terrible, terrible mistake they made ten years before by changing history. It’s also got a fantastic moment for McCoy’s Doctor (and spoilers for the story for what I’m about to describe): the Doctor trying to stop the main characters from changing history. Which sounds like an obvious goal, but in this case, the history that needed to be changed was the team killing an innocent young girl due to believing her to be suffering from a terrible disease and simply easing her pain, when all she had was an eye infection, which they only discover afterwards. A truly horrible decision, but even worse is what happens when they try to change history by sending a message back in time to warn them: only a minor change occurs. They all still have the knowledge of killing the girl, nothing major has changed for any of them in the present day…except this time, the girl is both dead and alive, a walking corpse as a result of history trying to correct itself. It’s a truly horrific idea, and a wonderfully original combination of both time travel and classic horror. Knowing the consequences, the Doctor goes back in time and tries to force them to kill the girl anyway. When they refuse, the Doctor makes the shocking decision of killing the girl himself with carbon dioxide. This was a moment that really shocked me. Even knowing what would happen, killing a young girl still seemed like a step too far for even this Doctor, an incarnation who has been more willing to do terrible things for the “greater good” to take. Could he really do it? As it happens, no, in the end, he reveals to his companions that he couldn’t go through with it. To me, that summed up McCoy’s Doctor nicely and what makes him so great: he may have shades of darkness to him, and he may try to see the “bigger picture” at times, but he is still the Doctor, still someone who wouldn’t kill an innocent life, even for the “greater good”. For that alone, Night Thoughts is well worth listening. 7/10

The Settling

This is a brilliant drama, for two reasons. One, it’s a great story that really uses its historical setting well, really examining both the kind of man Oliver Cromwell was and the lives he affected, most notably those he fought against. Secondly, Hex: this story is a really great one for putting him centre stage and really pushing him into new directions. Firstly, he’s forced to confront not just the ugly side of history, but a history that he knows about, stories of how truly terrible and awful Cromwell was as told by his nan, stories of how he slaughtered so many Irish lives. When Hex finally meets him, is he as terrible as Hex was lead to believe? Well, he’s not quite the completely inhuman monster that Hex was lead to believe, and in some ways, that makes it worse. Because Cromwell is a man of reason, who believes when it’s right to kill and when it’s right to show mercy, who really believes that what he does is right, but is open to some of Hex’s suggestions, finding him an intelligent man and engaging in lively (and more importantly, for serious male bonding, drunken) conversation. Hex wants to try and change history and make Cromwell a better man, which makes the story all the more tragic when, of course, the inevitable happens and Cromwell commits the terrible atrocities that he’s infamous for.  The feeling of knowing the inevitable is increased further in the fact that the story is told almost entirely in flashback, with Hex and Ace going over the events afterwards and trying to work out what went wrong. Even these scenes are important, as Hex begins to realise something: he loves travelling with the Doctor and the adventures, as difficult and terrible as it can be sometimes…but he’s beginning to love Ace even more. And the sad fact is that it’s clear she doesn’t feel the same way, only thinking of him as a friend. This angle of a companion feeling unrequited love for another is another reason why I love the Ace/Hex dynamic, and it’s something that’s explored or at least hinted at more in subsequent releases. In short, a fantastic release for Mr. Hex. 9/10 (One more thing: LOVE the fact that the TV movie TARDIS is “introduced” in this story. It’s another nice link between the end of the classic series and the start of the TV movie, where an older 7 is seen travelling alone in his wonderfully Gothic TARDIS. But more on that later.)

Forty-Five

A great release to celebrate 45 years of Doctor Who (at that point), this is a slightly different release in that it’s four short stories written by four different writers. What’s very impressive about this release is how consistent in quality all the stories are – all the stories are great to listen to and pack in a lot of plot and drama into 25 minutes. Particular favourites are episodes 3 and 4: the former for not only examining more of Ace’s past and mother issues but also for having Hex closer to finding out the truth, and the latter episode for just being so fucking excellent on so many levels. Seriously, The Word Lord, the only episode I had listened to before (as preparation for a later story), strongly stands up to repeat listening. That’s because of the brilliantly clever and bonkers ideas, strong characters and of course, a fantastic villain: Nobody No-One, a being from a far off dimension where the rules of physics are completely different to our own. A smart but completely insane and ruthless bastard, he might just be one of the most powerful foes the Doctor has ever faced, for one simple reason – if someone says that he can do something, he can and probably will do it, and with a name like his, that basically means he can do the impossible. In this story, stuck in a remote and cut off base, he’s not even at his most dangerous. It’s much later, in one of the greatest stories ever (and I mean ever) that we really see just how dangerous he is, and what it would take to truly stop him. And believe me, the cost is higher than you dare believe. But, again, more on that later. (Yes, I am a big fan of How I Met Your Mother. Why do you ask?) For this story, it’s an excellent one-off listen, borderline perfect for a 25-minute episode. 10/10 for The Word Lord alone.

So what do I think of the other releases from this individual run? Dreamtime was a bit too strange for me, especially for Hex’s first journey in the TARDIS. There’re some nice ideas in there, but a little too flat out weird for me. Nocturne was ok, but despite some interesting ideas, the story just didn’t grab me. I’ve also never been particularly keen on stories where the Doctor returns to one of his favourite places in the universe that he’s visited plenty of times and yet we’ve never heard of before. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t – in this case, for me personally, it didn’t quite work. Neither did much of the comedy in The Dark Husband, although there were some cool moments, including the Doctor arranging to get married, the exploration of a single race deeply divided into two, and more hints of just how much Hex really likes Ace, to put it very mildly. No Man’s Land is actually pretty good, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the highlights in this blog. There’s some nice exploration of Hex’s past as we learn more about his life as an orphan, about how he never knew his mother, and I loved those scenes. I also loved a lot of the drama and exploration of World War I and the different reactions from the soldiers. I think for me the story felt just a bit padded at times and didn’t quite drag me in. I love World War I stories, but this took place far from the true horrors of it for it to interest me, focusing more on brainwashed soldiers being programmed to hate and obey orders, and I would’ve loved it if there was less sci-fi and more exploration of that time period. If it had explored more the horrors of war like the Settling, I think I would’ve loved it, but then, considering it came so soon after that particular story, (including a rather direct reference to it at one point,) I can understand why it didn’t quite go with that angle.

I will admit though that there was something I enjoyed about the ending – namely, the revelation of who were behind the sci-fi elements of the story. A nasty little group that the Doctor has encountered twice before, who like to use alien technology and do what they like in the name of “King and Country”. They’re known as the Forge. And the last time he encountered them, it nearly destroyed a close friendship.

In his Sixth incarnation, he travelled with Evelyn Smythe. The first time they had met the Forge, they had made friends with a young woman, Cassie Schofield. Her life was ruined however when she was infected with a virus and turned into a vampire. The Doctor promised her a cure, and so she waited…and waited…until she was finally picked up by the Forge and turned into one of their most dangerous agents. During the second time she met the Doctor and Evelyn, she was understandably pretty pissed off, but one thing got through to her. One little thing that made her decide to help the Doctor and Evelyn, even at the cost of her own life – her infant son, Tommy. Her death and the Doctor’s shockingly casual reaction to it badly shook things between the Doctor and Evelyn. Eventually, they recovered, but things were never quite the same between the two again.

Eventually Evelyn left the Doctor, fell in love and got married. She eventually reunited with the Sixth Doctor though, and after a rather taxing ordeal which endangered her life, she was recovering in hospital when a little man with a Scottish accent and umbrella appeared. It didn’t take her long to realise that he was the Doctor – from her perspective, the future Doctor, the Seventh Doctor. He decided he owed her, and told her that he had found Cassie’s son, or rather, Thomas Hector Schofield had found him. He hadn’t told Hex about his mother, but he will, in time. He just wanted to tell Evelyn to at least try to make things up to her…not realising that, by keeping such a huge secret from Hex, he’s going to do have to do the exact same thing for him ten times over.

That’s the tragedy of the Seventh Doctor – he doesn’t learn from his mistakes, but instead keeps repeating the same ones over and over. He keeps things from his closest friends because he’s so sure he knows what’s best and always ends up breaking their hearts. He knew about Ace and her relation to Fenric and never told her, and almost destroyed their friendship over it. When Hex finds out about the Doctor’s history with his mother and how he watched her die and never told him, will it finally force the Doctor to change his ways?

What do you think?

7th Doctor Audio Overview (1 of 7)

Audios

·         The Lost Stories: Season 27

-          Thin Ice

-          Crime of the Century

-          Animal

-          Earth Aid

·         Destiny of the Doctor

-          Shockwave

·         Main Range

-          The Fearmonger

-          The Genocide Machine

-          Dust Breeding

-          Colditz

-          The Rapture

In my last blog, I mentioned how it was such a crushing shame that Doctor Who originally ended when it did – when it had been at its best for the first time in over a decade and had seemed to be given a new lease of life. With a new direction in the series of companions with more depth, stories for the family with a touch of darkness, and a Doctor with more mystery to him than ever, it seemed like the show was finally starting to find its feet again, and it looked like the BBC had cancelled it at the wrong time.

However, having listened to the stories that were originally planned for season 27 before its cancellation, I’m instead now wondering if, as terrible as it is to say it, the BBC made the right decision after all.

That’s not to say that season 27 is terrible, in fact, there’s a number of things to enjoy about it. There’s the brilliant character of Raine Creevy for a start, perhaps the only companion in Doctor Who history where the Doctor’s not only been there at her birth, but delivered it, too! I love her mixture of having an excellent education, well manners, and of course, the pleasure she gets from being a thief. Beth Chalmers is excellent at not just playing the posh, clever girl but also Raine’s own mother. That’s one thing I really loved about this season – that it had such a cool idea as introducing a character first as a baby, then have the Doctor skip ahead over 20 years to when she’s grown up and have her tag along for a few adventures. With some characters, that’d probably be considered creepy, but for someone like the Doctor, especially the Seventh Doctor, it’s almost Gandalf-ish in the way he turns up out the blue (or in this case, out of a safe that Raine was trying to break into) and brings Raine along for an adventure due to knowing her parents first.

There’s something else I like about the season – there’s a little more development of the Doctor’s character, of seeing a little more of the man with the master plan at work. What I love is how he not only comes up with such brilliant schemes to fight his enemies with, but how one little thing can bring those plans crashing down. And that’s where the Doctor really shines – when he has to think of something on the spot at the very last minute to save the day, and the fact is, he usually does it brilliantly.

So what’s the problem? Why don’t I enjoy “season 27” as much as seasons 25 and 26? Well, for one thing, there are the stories. Again, they’re not terrible, and I really enjoyed both Thin Ice for the really strong ideas (then again, it was written by Marc Platt), and Crime of the Century especially is such a ridiculously fun listen. But while those two stories are pretty good as the highlights of the season, there’s nothing that matches the greatness and multi-layered complexity of stories such as Remembrance of the Daleks, Ghost Light, or The Curse of Fenric.

One thing that possibly doesn’t help is that, surprisingly, there’s a considerably lighter tone throughout this season, which is a shame, as the darker storytelling of season 26 in particular made it one of my favourites. This is especially noteworthy of the Doctor – while he’s still a man who likes to have his plans, we see less of the secretive, darker nature that we caught glimpses of in Ghost Light and Curse of Fenric, although I must say (and this is another reason why I enjoyed Thin Ice), it was great to see him testing Ace, sometimes being forced to leave her in the lurch to see if she’s ready for a potential major change in her life. It’s disappointing that there wasn’t more of this throughout the season, really.

Interestingly, had Thin Ice been made on television as originally planned, this would’ve been Ace’s last story in the series, as she would’ve been sent away to Gallifrey to become a Time Lord. However, Big Finish made the bold move of adjusting the story accordingly so it fitted better with the continuity that Big Finish had created rather than simply aiming for a “what if?” season and have Ace fail to enter the Time Lord Academy – as a result, the rest of the season contains a significant difference than its original televised form by including Ace for the entire run.

Neither Animal nor Earth Aid left much of an impression on me. There were some good ideas in there, but neither story grabbed me. Good ideas were that in Animal, there was a nice way of dividing the 4-part story into two distinct halves, the first half involving flesh eating plants at a university, the second involving altogether different aliens on a spaceship. Earth Aid has the return of an alien race introduced in Crime of the Century and even reveals more about their origins, so I liked that the season had a number of arc elements throughout.

What I didn’t like was how the stories were executed. The aliens in Animal weren’t particularly interesting, a complaint I also have of another race entirely that’s introduced in Earth Aid. There was also a potentially interesting idea of Ace pretending to be the captain of a starship in the final story, but I felt that it wasn’t written quite as well as it should’ve been, as I often found myself questions such as “Why wasn’t the Doctor pretending to be the captain when he clearly knew more about the job than she did? Wouldn’t it have made more sense for him to be undercover instead of her?”

Overall, I found season 27 to be good with a couple of hit-and-misses, but after the excellent season 25 and 26, it’s just a bit of a disappointment, especially with its slightly lighter take of the 7^th Doctor than what we had seen previously.

The next story I listened to was the seventh release of the Destiny of the Doctor series, which focuses on a different incarnation with every story, all in very different adventures and yet with hints of a much larger story, especially the messages that every incarnation is receiving from a certain guy in a bow tie. Listening to this between season 27 and Big Finish’s main range’s story of the Seventh Doctor and Ace seemed as good a place as any, and honestly, I thought this was much more in tone with the darker Doctor we had seen in the final TV season than in what would’ve been the 27^th. The Doctor and Ace arrive on a spaceship escaping from an exploding star, and Ace thinks that they’ve arrived to help everyone. But the Doctor has his own agenda, arriving there specifically at a point in history when it’s easy to retrieve an object that’s usually impossibly secure. This idea of the Doctor working towards his own agenda and even using history itself in his aims to achieve it, no matter how terrible Ace might feel about it, fits in much more with the Doctor who kept secrets from his companion on why she was taken away from her home in the first place, or forcing her to confront a childhood nightmare than the portrayal we got in the Lost Stories. He may still try to save people, but more and more, he’s becoming more interested in something that’s potentially dangerous: the ‘greater good’. It’s this part of the Seventh Doctor that makes him such an interesting character to me.

Of course, he’s not all bad – after all, the key thing about the Doctor is that, no matter what incarnation he’s in, he always tries to be a hero. This is something I saw throughout the earliest productions from Big Finish featuring the Seventh Doctor and Ace. His character isn’t as dark as what I saw in season 26, but it’s hardly as light as what I listened to in season 27, either. This is helped by the stories having a somewhat darker tone than even the TV series a great deal of the time, although overall I’d say it doesn’t venture too far into ‘adult’, with the possible exception of the Rapture, which I’ll get round to. Grouped together, these 5 stories aren’t perfect, but overall, I enjoyed them more than the Lost Stories.

Highlights are The Fearmonger, Colditz and, for originality and radicalness at least, The Rapture. The Fearmonger’s an excellent tale that examines fear, paranoia and mob mentality. The alien in the story is an intriguing premise in that it’s not out to take over the universe or even ‘possess’ people, it’s just a creature that feeds on fear itself, and the way it does it in the story is so brilliant that I really can’t give anything more away. But it was a story that felt modern while also feeling like a natural extension of where the series was heading, and an excellent use of the audio medium of storytelling, especially with the monster.

The next story, The Genocide Machine, wasn’t so great. Worth listening for being the beginning of the Dalek Empire arc that continued with 6^th Doctor story The Apocalypse Element (featuring the first time the Daleks invaded Gallifrey), 5^th Doctor story The Mutant Phase and 8^th Doctor story Time of the Daleks (with the arc also setting up events for the excellent spinoff series Dalek Empire), but the story of the Daleks invading the greatest library in the universe just didn’t grab me. I loved the return of the Emperor of the Daleks though, and the story is great at highlighting just how dedicated and cunning the Daleks idea – the idea of an ancient ziggurat on the planet turning out to be a Dalek ship that had waited thousands of years for the opportunity to enter the library was especially brilliant.

The story also introduced thief Bev Tarrant, who bumps into the Doctor and Ace in the following story Dust Breeding. Overall, while there were a few characters who didn’t grab my interest (the psychotic artist especially was one I really wasn’t keen on), I liked it a little better than the Genocide Machine, quite possibly helped by the fact that the second part of the story has an AWESOME twist that brought back a much loved enemy into the Big Finish audio range. With how vicious the Krill are, the story could be considered a little too violent at times (although hardly much of a problem on audio), and the story of possessed dust and artwork is ok, but the story didn’t interest me quite as much as it should have.

Thankfully, this is where the excellent Colditz comes in. The Doctor and Ace arriving at an important place in history – in this case, the prison Colditz castle in World War II – is refreshing, and there are a number of excellent characters throughout. The Nazi soldier Kurtz (played by at the time future Doctor David Tennant) is a wonderfully evil and sadistic character who believes that what the Nazis are doing is right but frustrated and paranoid at the thought that he might be too easily ignored by his superior officers. Schafer’s equally excellent in that, while he might be in charge of his prisoners, he treats them with respect, particularly Gower, a man more eager for himself and his fellow prisoners to escape than anyone. It comes as quite a blow when Gower pushes Schafer to do as he asks or Gower will inform the Commandant for all the favours that Schafer has already done for him. As I said, all the characters in this story feel real and three-dimensional, and the fact that the historical part of the story is (minus the Doctor and Ace, of course) inspired by real events more than likely helps.

But the best character of the story, and indeed the best reason for listening to the story in the first place (yes, better than hearing the Tenth Doctor play a Nazi) is Elizabeth Klein. She’s a Nazi, but not from 1944 Germany – she is, in fact, from England in the 1960s, or rather, an alternative timeline accidentally created by the Doctor and Ace’s arrival in Colditz. Played brilliantly by Tracey Childs, Klein is someone who genuinely believes that England is a better place under Nazi leadership, who believes that living in a country of peace is more than worth the cost of both countless lives and freedom. More interestingly, she believes her version of history to be “the real one”, and is surprised that the Doctor seems keen to change it for reasons such as genocide when in her mind there have been far greater crimes across history. Considering how excellent and intriguing Klein’s character is, and the implications of not just an alternative history, but also an alternative timeline Doctor manipulating Klein to alert ‘our’ Doctor and put history back on track, it’s no wonder that Klein not only returned later in the audios (much, much later – it was 8 years before Klein finally returned in a Big Finish story), but has arguably become one of its most popular original characters. As for how her story develops, well…more on that later.

Overall, I’d rate Colditz as highly as my favourite 7th Doctor TV stories, and believe me, that’s saying a lot. A mixture of some fantastic time travel ideas with excellent characters and a great use of history, this is a highly recommended listen.

The Rapture, while not being quite as good, is still another great listen in how radical its approach to Doctor Who really is. Featuring the Doctor and Ace arriving in Ibiza and a story that involves clubbing, drugs and long lost family members, this story at times almost seems closer to Torchwood than Doctor Who (unsurprisingly, writer Joseph Lidster later wrote an episode for series 2 of Torchwood). And that’s why I like it. It tries something different, and while at times, especially with the clubbing scenes, it tries too hard to be ‘hip’, for the most part, I think it succeeds really well. With a story that features characters trying to escape depression through drugs and dancing and one of the alien characters of the story being less ‘mad’ and more genuinely mentally ill, this is certainly a story with a lot of darkness to it. But, and this is where I really appreciate Lidster as a writer, he’s not afraid to throw in some humour in there, too.  The Doctor’s usual routine of trying to check up on Ace is given a great twist when Ace is at a club and the Doctor is struggling to convince the bouncer to let him in is a wonderful example. There’s not a lot of humour, but it’s enough to add a little bit of light in a very dark story with some surprising depth.

Overall, the audios have been enjoyable to listen to so far. A little hit-and-miss in some places, but ultimately worth it for such excellent stories like The Fearmonger and Colditz. And thinking about that, it brings me back to my earlier point. When I began this blog, I said I wondered if the BBC actually made the right decision in cancelling Doctor Who when it did, which I’ll finally explain. Firstly, as I mentioned, the stories planned to follow the final season of classic Who weren’t particularly great, or at least, they didn’t match the standard that had been set by the previous 2 seasons, and Doctor Who had been living with the axe over its head for a number of years at that point. I was frustrated that the BBC had decided to end it just as it was starting to become great again, but having listened to season 27, I beginning to wonder if it might have been a blessing in disguise. When the show finished, it ended at such a high point that it left the fans wanting more and no one felt it had outstayed its welcome (well, not the people who were still watching the show at least, anyway).

The second reason why I think that the BBC letting Doctor Who go is a good thing is that, as I said before but to re-emphasise, the fans wanted more. And one way or another, we got that. It was no longer on television, but we got it. We got it from books, we got it from comics, and of course, we got it from audios. Based on Big Finish’s earliest stories featuring the excellent pair of the Doctor and Ace and compared with what was planned for season 27, in my opinion I think we’re rather lucky with the directions they’ve taken both the Doctor and especially Ace in, the latter of which growing up in Colditz and finally deciding to use her real name of “Dorothy McShane” (well ok, maybe not the first name, but it’s still a wonderful bit of development). I’ve really been enjoying the earliest Big Finish stories featuring the two, and I can’t wait to hear the next lot. Especially as they’re about to introduce the brilliant companion Thomas Hector Schofield aka Hex. I am so eager to start listening to that team from the start.

Actually speaking of which, there’s a lot of things I’m looking forward to about listening to all of the Seventh Doctor audios in chronological order. These include:

·         Arcs. Bloody hell, there’s so many that I don’t even know where to start. The excellent thing about Big Finish is that they love setting up arcs or little threads that can take years to pay off – there’s a secret the Doctor keeps from Hex that Hex doesn’t find out about until six years after he was introduced. Admittedly, this is helped by the fact that Big Finish have not just four Doctors to include in their main range but even more multiple on-going storylines – in fact, Big Finish being able to have such variety based on one single series is just another reason why I love Doctor Who so much – but still, having on-going threads that pay off in big ways like Project: Destiny and Gods and Monsters is a rewarding experience. The latter especially had so many details – including elements from a whole mixture of arcs, not just the season it was in but the Black TARDIS from the season before, the Elder Gods appearance from Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge from the season before that and even a hint of a returning villain in 2009’s The Magic Mousetrap – that I’ve been dying for an excuse to listen to all of it all over again and try and make as much sense of it as possible.

·         The return of Klein. Like I said, I loved her first appearance in Colditz, and I’m really keen to re-listen to her further appearances, especially the excellent epic UNIT Dominion. She’s also in the current season that Big Finish are releasing, which I’m really eager to get round to, especially as it’s set very near to the Seventh Doctor’s final chronological appearance in the TV movie, but I think it’s better to wait it out and reward myself with such a trilogy when I finish.

·         A Death in the Family. I love this story. I think it’s a beautiful, beautiful story that…well, like I said, more on that later, but it honestly is one of my favourite Doctor Who stories in any medium, and I’m hugely eager to re-listen to it.

·         Hex. Did I mention Hex? Hex is awesome! But shockingly, there are a number of his earlier stories that I’ve yet to listen to, which is almost everything between his first story The Harvest and The Magic Mousetrap, so it’ll be great to hear his whole story for the first time.

Right, that’s my thoughts on the first part on my journey with the Seventh Doctor done. Time for me to take a short break by listening to Dalek Empire III while waiting for my next cds to arrive. Hope you enjoyed the blog!

Diary of a Who Addict: The End of the Classic Series (Why It Sucks and What To Do Afterwards)

Well, that’s it. Almost 3 years after finally starting to watch (or, in the case of missing episodes, of which in Troughton’s case there are far, far too many, listen to) every episode of the original series in order, today, I have finally completed that task with Survival, Part Three. And, to be honest, I’m feeling a little sad about that. Oh, I know I’ve got the entire new series to re-watch (of which I’ve done a considerable number of times already), but the ending of Survival is a harsh reminder of the age I grew up in: the age without Doctor Who.

Oddly enough, despite watching some repeats of Pertwee's Doctor beforehand, it wasn’t until the TV movie was shown on television 7 years later that I really noticed it, so in some ways, I’m rather lucky, but having discovered a show with such beautiful and brilliant ideas as that of an alien who travels through time and space in a magic box that was bigger on the inside than the outside, a man who dies and is reborn in a completely different body, a man who was once old but is now young, a man who fights against monsters, gods and demons with nothing but his wit, his intelligence and his friends, that it was harsh as hell, growing up as a child knowing how brilliant this show was but never having an era that I could truly call my own.

There were novels and audios, of course, but the novels always seemed to be aimed at a more ‘mature’ audience than I was, including graphic violence and sex that wouldn’t have likely been included in the tea-time tv series (perhaps understandable, given that the tv series itself was 26 years old by the time it had finished and it was assumed that most of the main fandom by then were adults anyway. Whether that assumption was correct or not, it was what Virgin and BBC novels tended to aim for). The audios weren’t necessarily been a bad option, (although even they tended to go for the ‘mature’ angle, but not too often, certainly not recently), but costing £14 each was a little out of my high school price range back then, especially with a story released every single month. I partially regret not aiming for releases that featured ‘my’ Doctor though, Paul McGann, as he was not only the current Doctor at the time, but it would’ve been the closest to growing up with ‘new’ Who that I would’ve gotten as a child. I did get Neverland, the finale to the 2^nd season of the Eighth Doctor audios, to prepare myself for the 40^th anniversary’s 3 cd epic Zagreus. I loved Neverland. I was disappointed by Zagreus, but that whole discussion should be saved for another blog. Let’s just say that, after listening to that story and realising that it didn’t quite match my expectations for it, I decided not to invest any time or money in Big Finish for quite some time.

It wasn’t until 2005 that I could finally watch Doctor Who on the television and have it be brand new for the first time since 1996. At which point, I was 16, so it had just missed my childhood, unfortunately. But that didn’t stop me from feeling like a big kid when watching it, the best thing that truly great Doctor Who can do, in my opinion. But, like discussion on the 8^th Doctor audios, that’s something that should be saved for a later blog, really. The key discussion of this one is the original series, why it ended, and how I really feel about that.

I really enjoyed watching the series in order, seeing how it had such humble beginnings as a children’s show that was designed to entertain while possibly teaching children about science and history (with the help of the two school teachers that were stuck with the Doctor), to one of the longest and greatest science-fiction shows in the world. Throughout the 60s and 70s, the show went through multiple Doctors, all who played the part brilliantly, numerous companions, and just as importantly, a huge range of monsters! The longer the show went on, the more the producers realised that, while it did purely historical stories (ie stories set in the past where the only science fiction element where the main characters themselves) brilliantly, the scifi stories, particularly the ones where the Doctor would fight some scary monsters, were more popular with the kids, particularly the recurring enemy introduced in the show’s second ever serial, the Daleks.

Of the first two decades, the series continued to adapt and grow. Sure, it followed the basic formula of the Doctor fighting monsters all the time, but it always did it so damn well. Arguably the best period for the show were the first three years of the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, and not primarily for Baker (although he was absolutely brilliant throughout). No, it was the fantastic production team of Philip Hinchcliffe as Producer and Robert Holmes as Script Editor that gave Doctor Who an edge like never before. Suddenly, a lot of the stories weren’t just about monsters - they were scary, they were gothic, and they were violent. That last point did perhaps go a little too far in some stories, but just a little, just enough for the little children to get a good taste of how fantastic truly great horror could be without making them run away from it. It was also filled with such excellent, one-off characters: the cold and distant Vira who slowly opens up in The Ark in Space; Davros and his completely devoted assistant Nyder in Genesis of the Daleks; the mad Dr. Solon in The Brain of Morbius; Henry-Gordon Jago and Professor George Litefoot, two characters so wonderfully written that more than 30 years after their first and only appearance in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, they got their own audio spinoff, and a truly brilliant and fantastic spinoff it is that truly evokes the greatness of the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era. Close to everything about seasons 12 to 14 – the casting, the writing, the directing, hell, even the fucking lighting (there are a considerable number of times where the horror of a situation in another era was more than slightly dampened by how keen the lighting technicians were to do their job and make the sets as BRIGHT as possible) – was consistently excellent. To be honest, I’m almost tempted to dig those seasons out right now.

So where did it start to go wrong? Certainly not in the rest of the Tom Baker era – true, its significantly reduced horror and increased humour wasn’t always something I was keen on (although City of Death is one of the greatest stories ever because of how beautifully witty it is), and, to my surprise, not even the early 80s – Tom Baker’s last season, while a little too serious about its science sometimes, really was terrific to watch, and I did enjoy a lot about Peter Davison’s first year, particularly the wonderful Kinda – but, the longer the show went on, the more you got the feeling that the BBC started to care less and less about their once favourite science fiction show. The production started looking cheaper, exterior shots that were once shot on film were instead shot on video, and even the production team struggled to find an identity.

This is perhaps most clear during season 22, with the production team trying to make the show more appealing to the ‘adult’ fans while still potentially aiming for the family audience and simultaneously trying to remind long-term fans that it is the same show. The violence was increased while generally lacking horror, there were continuity references in a lot of episodes, sometimes at the expense of a truly great and original plot, and the Doctor was more difficult to like than ever, with the great idea of making the 6^th Doctor totally unlikeable at first, with a more arrogant and alien attitude than before, not exactly handled well. Don’t get me wrong, I love Colin’s Doctor now, but at first, especially in his first story, the attempt at making him unlikeable was, perhaps, too successful, as the Doctor not only comes across as a pompous git but attacks his companion Peri, continually acts like a coward and, worst of all, gets the worst taste in fashion of any incarnation ever.

Now there’s ‘unlikeable’ and then there’s seriously fucking unlikeable. The first is where the character is presented as someone you’d hate to meet in real life, but on television or film is just brilliant to watch. Classic examples are Fitz in Cracker, who acts like a total arsehole and sees the worst in everyone, and more importantly, turns it into a skill; Randall in Clerks, who’s pretty much an asshole to every customer and yet somehow gets away with it because he’s hysterical to watch; and finally Withnail in Withnail & I, who arguably has less redeeming features than Randall and yet, again, is at times both hilarious and tragic to watch.

The other kind of unlikeable is the kind where a character’s so difficult to watch that you feel compelled to switch off the TV. That was an impulse I strongly felt when watching Colin’s Doctor in the Twin Dilemma i.e. his opening story. As a result, it’s probably not much of a surprise that perhaps the viewers or the BBC were less interested in the show in his next season.

Which is a shame, as after watching season 22, despite the problems I have with it, Colin Baker was one of the best things about it, as his character was still arrogant and boisterous but more recognisably the Doctor than in his first serial. The season wasn’t even terrible; it just had its problems that made it difficult for the show to connect to the wide ranging family audience that it had once been so popular with. Both Vengeance on Varos and Revelation of the Daleks were brilliant original stories, particularly the latter, but not ideal family storytelling, and I think that Who is consistently at its best when it knows exactly how to appeal to both children and adults, a skill that very few television shows have achieved but which Doctor Who has often excelled at, both past and present.

However, perhaps the final nail in the show’s coffin was made two years later, with McCoy’s first season, by going too far in the opposite direction. I said that season 22 has its faults but isn’t terrible, at least. I definitely cannot say the same of season 24. The show seemed to aim for the children’s demographic far, far too hard in a truly terrible way. It was almost pantomime in its execution at times, with characters coming across less as people you can believe in and more like clichés, especially in the first two stories. The production design looked tacky and terrible, and it was just hard to take seriously as a truly great show anymore. Things started to improve with its final story, Dragonfire, with the introduction of Ace, a more juvenile but ultimately more interesting and developed character than many of the 80s ones, but even then, it’s a fairly average story overall. With a season as bad as season 24, it’s no wonder the BBC were so keen to get rid of it.

So why, upon finishing the series, was I left feeling a mixture of sadness and frustration? Because something happened in the final two seasons. Something which no one expected and, sadly, not many other than the remaining faithful fans paid attention to. The series didn’t just improve, it wasn’t even “pretty good”. It was brilliant.

Kicking off with Remembrance of the Daleks, there were just so many things the series started to get right. First: the balance in storytelling is finally restored to be enjoyable for both children and adults in equal measures i.e. it’s a family show again, and a family show done right. For those looking for easy entertainment, there’s truly awesome sights like Daleks vs. Daleks and exploding all over the place (seriously, how did they get the budget for that stuff?), epic fights involving Arthurian knights and modern day soldiers, scary monsters and villains like the Chief Clown in the Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the husks in Ghost Light and the vampires in the Curse of Fenric. Doctor Who was truly great entertainment again, appealing not just to children but to the child in all of us, and that’s when Doctor Who is, for me personally, at its very best.

But even better than that is that there’s plenty for the viewers who wanted more. There were themes like racism in Remembrance and political correctness gone extremely mad in The Happiness Patrol, all explored perfectly and in a realistic way, avoiding feeling tacked on as a transparently clear moral lesson as a lot of children’s programmes tend to do and instead being a natural part of the story. Another of my favourite stories, The Curse of Fenric, has a large number of themes – facing up to your past, the importance of faith, war, what is and isn’t worth fighting for, all wrapped up in a story about the Doctor battling vampires and an ancient evil god.

Ah, the Doctor. Another reason why it really does well and truly suck that the series ended when it did – the Doctor had finally got his mystery back. For a long time, we thought we knew everything about him – that he’s a Time Lord from Gallifrey, that he ran away from his own people, that he’s an alien hero who loves Earth etc. But then two things happened. The first was that Ace came along, and with it, a whole new Doctor/companion dynamic. Ace wasn’t just the Doctor’s assistant, she wasn’t his intellectual equal, and she certainly wasn’t a damsel in distress, as whacking a Dalek with a baseball bat proved. No, the relationship the Doctor had with Ace was more interesting than any of those. At times, it was almost like he was tutoring her, helping her…other times, well…he still continued to ‘help’ her, but in a very cold and alien way. The best example of this was in Ghost Light, when the Doctor takes Ace on a surprise visit to a Victorian mansion. Then Ace realises that she was there before, in her time, back when she was a child. She told the Doctor about it once, about how terrified she was of it, of how she sensed something evil there. The Doctor’s reaction? Take her straight to it to not only investigate the evil, but have Ace face up to her fear, to try and make her emotionally stronger. It’s a twisted way of doing it, with almost a complete lack of sympathy and compassion on the Doctor’s part, but it’s also a solid reminder that the Doctor, while he may be a hero, is never a human being.

This leads me to the second thing that changed how we saw the Doctor in these final two seasons – himself. Oh, not in a physical, regenerative way, but how he started to act, how he wasn’t just arriving somewhere by accident and getting mixed up in events like he used to. This time, he starts taking a much more pro-active role, actually aiming to arrive somewhere if he hears something odd or dangerous is happening, always working to his own agenda, and this could very well be because of Ace, as he reveals later that he knows it was no accident that they met, and that she was ultimately just a pawn in a much larger game. This is a crucial point about the Doctor, that as much regeneration changes him, his companions affect who he is even more. They can bring out his humanity and his compassion, they can bring out his happiness and his love, they can even bring out the hero and the fighter in him. What does Ace bring out? Not just a hero anymore, but something else, something greater, if perhaps not as ‘good’. She brings out a side more alien and more mysterious than we’ve ever seen before, but more importantly, she also brings out his past. Because just as Ace represents a mystery for the Doctor to solve at times, so too does the Doctor become a mystery to his young companion, and to us.

Suddenly, he’s no longer just another Time Lord but “far more”. There are subtle hints that there’s far more to his past than he’s been letting on, that maybe there’s a part of him that’s more ancient and greater than perhaps even he knows. This is a man who fought with not just monsters but gods as well. For the first time, we are forced to ask: who is this man?

Not that I wanted an answer, of course. I’m not interested in the answers when it comes to the Doctor, I’m interested in the questions. Not too many that it threatens to overwhelm the show, but just enough to remind us the second word in the title. I love the hero and the mystery, and the show at this point had finally found the right balance to it. So of course, just as it had barely started to become as great as it once had…they cancelled it. If they had cancelled it in 1985, after Colin Baker’s first season, I honestly wouldn’t have blamed them. It wasn’t completely awful, but it wasn’t the show it once was. At that point, I think it needed a few years rest at least to fully recover. Instead, they put it on hiatus for 18 months before bringing it back, little better than the previous season.

As I finished watching the series, listening to the Doctor’s final words, I wondered why I was feeling as sad and frustrated about it as I was. After all, I live in an age where there’s now a ton of Doctor Who, on TV, books and audio, where it’s never been more popular, especially in America where it’s really getting a lot of attention. And when I had originally planned to finish Survival, my next plan was just to stick on the TV Movie (especially since it’s now August, the 8^th month of the year – perfect month for the perfect Doctor) and then start watching the whole of the new series before the 23^rd November comes along.

But I don’t think I can do that, not now, at least. When the series ended, it hadn’t just been great – the worst thing was, it had barely even started. The series was like new again, and there were so many directions it could go in – where will the Doctor go from here? Who was he? And, now that he’s more focused on the greater scale than possibly the well-being of his companions, what will he become? When the show came back – both times, really – it kind of moved away from that aspect, of the Doctor walking down a darker, mysterious path. Both kind of returned him to a lighter, more heroic character, although in the case of the new series, a hero who has been affected by War.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom in the 90s, though. Virgin at least started publishing their own series of books: Doctor Who: The New Adventures. I am eager to read these, but the sad part about these novels is, as I mentioned earlier, that they were no longer aimed at both children and adults – with mentions of sex, graphic violence and swearing, this range firmly belonged to the latter group. I will get round to these in time, but not quite yet. So what else is there to do? The answer’s simple: Big Finish.

While Big Finish also sometimes aimed more for the ‘adult’ audience than the family one, mostly, it goes for just the right sort of tone. More than that, though: unlike the novels, I get the performance. While McCoy isn’t my favourite actor to have played the Doctor – sometimes, watching the show, I was never that convinced when he tried to express rage or hate – but he is great at the more low-key stuff, at playing the alien who likes to keep secrets to himself. When he’s given that kind of material, he’s brilliant to watch and listen to. And I’ve heard many Big Finish stories with him, and enjoyed many. But not in chronological order, unsurprisingly – Big Finish tend to do a mix between the 7^th Doctor who travels with his companions, and others where he’s alone and much closer to his end in the TV movie. Still, I’m eager to listen to the 7^th Doctor’s journey, and see how much he changes and how far he goes.

As I finish this blog to dig out Big Finish’s excellent audio production of the originally planned season 27, I’ll finish this on one of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite stories ever that, like many of the 7^th Doctor’s audios, I’m so eager to re-listen to, concerning a companion’s thoughts upon seeing the 7^th Doctor’s future:

“That other Doctor. The older one. Was he really trying to make us happy, do you think, or…was it all just part of some massive scheme? Was he better than our Doctor in the end, or a million times worse?”

It’s time to start finding out.