More Adventures in Audio-Land
A couple of weeks back, I posted that I'd been listening to some Big Finish Eight Doctor audios, and wrote down some thinky-thoughts about the four series of adventures with Eight and Lucie Miller that I'd worked my way through.
I did originally start with Eight from the beginning (Storm Warning) but I got distracted by the Lucie stories and so I listened to all of those first and have now gone back to the beginning.
I have to confess, had I not already liatened to the "new" EDAs, I might have given up on these earlier stories. I know from reading reviews and posts here and elsewhere that there are some real belters coming up, but I did find the first half-dozen stories a little hard to get into. I'm sure that, as with anything new, it was a case of writers, actors, production staff etc. finding their feet, but it took quite a long time to get to the first of the EDAs in the main range which I thoroughly enjoyed and couldn't wait to get back to whenever I had to have a break (for things like feeding kids or going to work!)
The first story, Storm Warning wasn't bad. It had to introduce the new companion (Charley Pollard) and in a sense, a new Doctor, too. I know that Eight had existed since his one TV appearance in 1996 in a series of DW novels but this was the first time (I think) that Paul McGann had reprised the role.
And I can't help thinking that it took him a while to work out what he wanted to do with it. IMO, Eight, in the earlier stories is a little bit... generic? He's the Doctor in the sense that he's clever, he's clearly in charge, he's quite charming and a bit absent-minded, but I didn't get that sense of fun and wonder that Eight had displayed in the TV movie.
Also - I think fandom is going to hate me, but I'm not really warming to Charley at all. She's okay and I don't actually dislike her, but... I think that like Amy coming after Donna, Charley is suffering by comparison to Lucie. Still, it's early days, and I've still got quite a bit of Eight and Charley to go, so there's plenty of time for me to change my mind.
As an opener, then Storm Warning was okay, introducing Charley and also setting up some future plot points to do with the fact that she was supposed to have died on the day she met the Doctor.
These stories are released in groups of four, I think, and the next two were not much more than potboilers, really. Sword of Orion featured the Cybermen (in their pre-RTD days, so they still came from Telos or Mondas) and the Doctor and Charley stuck on a drifting space-transport with a mistrustful crew and secret-android captain. Then comes The Stones of Venice... which was the only story I didn't listen to again this time round because, er... well, wtf?
Minuet in Hell started quite promisingly. Unlike the other stories, which all Began at the beginning, so that the listener was always "in the know", Minuet started in the middle, as we discovered the Doctor in prison, with no memory of who he was or how he got there. But sometime around half-way through, the whole thing kinda goes off the rails and not even the presence of the velvet tones of Nicholas Courtney can save it.
But I persevered, because I knew there was a good 'un coming up. Invaders from Mars was fun; I liked the idea of using the infamous War of the Worlds panic as part of the story, and Orson Wells is obviously someone that the Doctor should meet on screen :) Oh - and comedy aliens, all from the pen of Mark Gatiss, no less.
And then I was on to The Chimes of Midnight by Robert Shearman, which I'd been led to expect was a stonker of an episode - and it certainly was. I was honesly on the edge of my seat wanting to find out what the hell was going on and how our heroes were going to get out of it this time. It's a bit of a timey-wimey story, set in an old house (a la Upstairs Downstairs) where the servants keep getting murdered... or do they? It's also the first time we get a real sense of the possible damage that's been done by the Doctor saving Charley from the crash of the R-101 in Storm Warning. I can I can heartly recommend this one - it's excellently written and acted; here and in Invaders is when I started to feel Eight begin to "find himself" a bit more and start to develop his own personality a bit more.
It was in the next story - Seasons of Fear - that I finally said to myself "there he is!" This is the first time that I recognised the Eight I'd met in the TV movie. He's mischievous, funny, charming and a bit bonkers; and gets some of his best lines so far.
Roman Soldier: You're in time for the bloodbath.
The Doctor: Story of my life.
Heh. So true.
Then there's his attempt to weasel out of responding to Charley's question about the orgies - they did... rude things (snigger), his bemoaning the fact that he can't seem to keep a shirt intact, his being frequently distracted by shiny things (Bats! Great!) - and lots of other completely silly, yet endearing things going on... which took me back to the Eight who could enthuse so greatly over a pair of shoes that fit :-)
I love Paul McGann as an actor and I think he’s a great Doctor - but even so, somehow, in Seasons of Fear, it’s like a lightbulb has gone on - not just in the writing, but also in the performance. It's a cracking story and the Doctor positively sparkles at the centre of it all.
This is another timey-wimey story which sort of starts at the end, and is (unusually) linked by narration from the Doctor himself. We don’t know to whom he’s speaking to start with, and the story opens with the Doctor meeting a man who says that he has killed him. He and Charley follow him back in time to Roman times, the court of Edward the Confessor and the time of the Hellfire Club (as featured in Minuet in Hell) - and there’s a suitably wibbly-wobbly conclusion followed by a bit of a cliffhanger and the discovery of to whom the Doctor has been relating this story. I thoroughly enjoyed and would definitely recommend it. Oh - and it was written by some bloke called Paul Cornell. *g*
Up next are Embrace the Darkness, Time of the Daleks and Neverland.
I did originally start with Eight from the beginning (Storm Warning) but I got distracted by the Lucie stories and so I listened to all of those first and have now gone back to the beginning.
I have to confess, had I not already liatened to the "new" EDAs, I might have given up on these earlier stories. I know from reading reviews and posts here and elsewhere that there are some real belters coming up, but I did find the first half-dozen stories a little hard to get into. I'm sure that, as with anything new, it was a case of writers, actors, production staff etc. finding their feet, but it took quite a long time to get to the first of the EDAs in the main range which I thoroughly enjoyed and couldn't wait to get back to whenever I had to have a break (for things like feeding kids or going to work!)
The first story, Storm Warning wasn't bad. It had to introduce the new companion (Charley Pollard) and in a sense, a new Doctor, too. I know that Eight had existed since his one TV appearance in 1996 in a series of DW novels but this was the first time (I think) that Paul McGann had reprised the role.
And I can't help thinking that it took him a while to work out what he wanted to do with it. IMO, Eight, in the earlier stories is a little bit... generic? He's the Doctor in the sense that he's clever, he's clearly in charge, he's quite charming and a bit absent-minded, but I didn't get that sense of fun and wonder that Eight had displayed in the TV movie.
Also - I think fandom is going to hate me, but I'm not really warming to Charley at all. She's okay and I don't actually dislike her, but... I think that like Amy coming after Donna, Charley is suffering by comparison to Lucie. Still, it's early days, and I've still got quite a bit of Eight and Charley to go, so there's plenty of time for me to change my mind.
As an opener, then Storm Warning was okay, introducing Charley and also setting up some future plot points to do with the fact that she was supposed to have died on the day she met the Doctor.
These stories are released in groups of four, I think, and the next two were not much more than potboilers, really. Sword of Orion featured the Cybermen (in their pre-RTD days, so they still came from Telos or Mondas) and the Doctor and Charley stuck on a drifting space-transport with a mistrustful crew and secret-android captain. Then comes The Stones of Venice... which was the only story I didn't listen to again this time round because, er... well, wtf?
Minuet in Hell started quite promisingly. Unlike the other stories, which all Began at the beginning, so that the listener was always "in the know", Minuet started in the middle, as we discovered the Doctor in prison, with no memory of who he was or how he got there. But sometime around half-way through, the whole thing kinda goes off the rails and not even the presence of the velvet tones of Nicholas Courtney can save it.
But I persevered, because I knew there was a good 'un coming up. Invaders from Mars was fun; I liked the idea of using the infamous War of the Worlds panic as part of the story, and Orson Wells is obviously someone that the Doctor should meet on screen :) Oh - and comedy aliens, all from the pen of Mark Gatiss, no less.
And then I was on to The Chimes of Midnight by Robert Shearman, which I'd been led to expect was a stonker of an episode - and it certainly was. I was honesly on the edge of my seat wanting to find out what the hell was going on and how our heroes were going to get out of it this time. It's a bit of a timey-wimey story, set in an old house (a la Upstairs Downstairs) where the servants keep getting murdered... or do they? It's also the first time we get a real sense of the possible damage that's been done by the Doctor saving Charley from the crash of the R-101 in Storm Warning. I can I can heartly recommend this one - it's excellently written and acted; here and in Invaders is when I started to feel Eight begin to "find himself" a bit more and start to develop his own personality a bit more.
It was in the next story - Seasons of Fear - that I finally said to myself "there he is!" This is the first time that I recognised the Eight I'd met in the TV movie. He's mischievous, funny, charming and a bit bonkers; and gets some of his best lines so far.
Roman Soldier: You're in time for the bloodbath.
The Doctor: Story of my life.
Heh. So true.
Then there's his attempt to weasel out of responding to Charley's question about the orgies - they did... rude things (snigger), his bemoaning the fact that he can't seem to keep a shirt intact, his being frequently distracted by shiny things (Bats! Great!) - and lots of other completely silly, yet endearing things going on... which took me back to the Eight who could enthuse so greatly over a pair of shoes that fit :-)
I love Paul McGann as an actor and I think he’s a great Doctor - but even so, somehow, in Seasons of Fear, it’s like a lightbulb has gone on - not just in the writing, but also in the performance. It's a cracking story and the Doctor positively sparkles at the centre of it all.
This is another timey-wimey story which sort of starts at the end, and is (unusually) linked by narration from the Doctor himself. We don’t know to whom he’s speaking to start with, and the story opens with the Doctor meeting a man who says that he has killed him. He and Charley follow him back in time to Roman times, the court of Edward the Confessor and the time of the Hellfire Club (as featured in Minuet in Hell) - and there’s a suitably wibbly-wobbly conclusion followed by a bit of a cliffhanger and the discovery of to whom the Doctor has been relating this story. I thoroughly enjoyed and would definitely recommend it. Oh - and it was written by some bloke called Paul Cornell. *g*
Up next are Embrace the Darkness, Time of the Daleks and Neverland.