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?
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