Big Finish Doctor Who Audio Reviews - "Project: Twilight" and "Living Legend"
Living Legend is one of the Big Finish audios that have been given away with Doctor Who Magazine and it's less than half an hour long. It stars Eight and Charley, and its premise is obviously borrowed from Great Expectations and almost every crime drama series or film ever made (although it cheerfully admits that borrowing). But the idea of appealing to the vanity of a villian (or in this case, an invading alien) in order to trip them up is good fun, and the story doesn't try to be anything other than it is: a brief, amusing adventure where the aliens aren't really all that bad so much as plain stupid - and where the good guys aren't motivated by much more than the desire to have a nice holiday.
The aliens in question - two Threllips - are the advance guard of a massive invasion force and they're almost ready to unleash their armada on Earth (from Italy), but the Doctor and Charley arrive in the nick of time to put a spanner in the works. Realising they have to stop the invasion, and noting that the aliens have quite large guns with them, they decide the only way they can stop the Threllips is to destroy the machine that will allow the invasion to happen. And the only way to do that is to divert them: cue the arrival, by TARDIS, of Supreme Time Lady Charleyostentatious and her assistant, the Doctor. This role reversal is quite interesting and amusing, and it's clear that McGann and Fisher are having a great time doing it.
Charley's unbelievably bossy and officious, and the Doctor does a fair bit of fawning (which he doesn't seem to mind), as the pair con the Threllips into believing that they are about to make history, and then proceed to lie to the Threllips. Vengor is initially flattered by the Doctor into believing that he will become a legend amongst his people, but then terrified when he discovers that he's been infected by a terrible plague: World Cup Fever (the story is set during Italy's 1982 celebrations for their World Cup win over West Germany). While the Doctor's working on Vengor - telling him the only cure is to drink copious amounts of a particular medicine (which is really alcohol), Charley exploits Thom's long-suffering nature to stir up tensions between the pair, claiming that Vengor's future memoirs make no reference to him, save for a small furry mascot named after him that meets a very sticky end.
The Doctor and Vengor reunite with Charley and Thom, and Vengor's so plastered and Thom so incensed that they begin a brawl, allowing the Doctor to reprogramme their transport, and then Charley gets officious again and says she'll have to send them back home, but they are sent somewhere rather more distant and quite deserted instead.
At the end, the Doctor tells Charley "You know something Charley, you make a far more convincing Time Lord than me", to which she replies "Thank you Doctor", only to be told, "That wasn't really a compliment." which I confess left me giggling.
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I'm trying to eke out the Eighth Doctor & Charley stories by alternating them with Sixth Doctor & Evelyn stories, so yesterday I listened to Project: Twilight, which is a far darker tale than Living Legend. The Sixth Doctor and Evelyn are in present day London, on a visit to the "Slow Boat Chinese Restaurant" where they discover a number of animal carcasses which seem to have been eaten. Elsewhere though, something very strange is going on at the Dusk Casino where odd experiments are taking place.
The pair soon encounter some vampires, who are the sworn enemies of the Time Lords, and the Doctor's passionate nature does not help the situation, any more than his naivety: Amelia Doory, who (along with Reggie 'the Gent' Mead) runs "The Dusk" club, tricks the Doctor into helping her - supposedly in the hope of curing the vampires, only for her to turn the tables on him once his usefulness is at an end. Colin Baker gives an amazing performance and I really felt that when the Doctor was this worried then the situation was very serious indeed. Aside from a few quips at the beginning of the story, the Doctor is so affected by what is going on around him that there is little of his endearing humour - the circumstances are too grim for that.
Evelyn spends much of the audio in nearly as grim a mood as the Doctor after she encounters Cassie, a single mother, who's been disowned by her parents and runs away to London in the hope of making her fortune. Sadly things don't quite go her way and she is not only disowned, but blackmailed, beaten up twice, has her face cut to pieces, is vampirised, and is then temporarily abandoned in Norway, where the nights are longer and she is away from temptation.
There is a strange, shadowy figure, called Nimrod, who already knows of the Doctor but is quite underwhelmed once he finally meets the Time Lord, and who seems to help and hinder by turns. I gather "Project: Twilight" is the start of a short story arc, so I trust Nimrod's character will be further developed in the later stories...
This wasn't an easy story to listen to and I was glad to follow it up with the light-hearted "Living Legend" earlier today...