Audio review: BFA 105: “The Condemned”
Audio review: BFA 105: “The Condemned”
Charley here is fresh from The Girl Who Never Was, in which I reallyreally liked her. My relationship with her is really tumultuous, because the writing for her character is wildly uneven. When she’s entitled, Mary-Sue sassy, unrealistically self-abnegating (as in ‘not near upset or disconcerted enough about suddenly being paralyzed from the neck down’) and ludicrously over-qualified in this perky, hollow ‘isn’t Charley great’ sort of way I want Ramsey the Vortisoar to get peckish and eat her. When she’s enthusiastic to the point that it can overshadow good sense and she’s observant and useful in a more believable way, she has an engaging sense of humor and isn’t too self-righteous, and I’m not expected to believe she and Eight share a Grate Lurve such as he has never known for a companion before her (say, in Seasons of Fear), we get on great.
The Condemned gives me Category 2 Charley, and all is well. I hope I can expect the forecast of ‘likeable Charley’ to hold for all of she and Six’s reign. Though really I’m not clear on why she needs to keep ‘hanging out with Eight’ secret from him. If by the time he’s Eight he’s forgotten her appearance and personality and everything about her, then can’t we assume the whole memory of her’s been occluded somehow, and thus she can let on not details but the general picture, and Six won’t press for details because he knows better than to, with his wibbly-wobbly majestic Time Brain?
Ah well. I didn’t believe that saving Charley from the R101 was a real problem either, and I learned to pretend it was for the sake of the series (until the opportunistic incursion of anti-time finally provided a sufficient reason it might be).
So! The Condemned! It earns points for having the sentient building thing: a sci-fi/horror creature I’m always fond of. In German the word used for the concept ‘uncanny’ is ‘unheimlich,’ or unhomelike. Unhouselike. There’s something about the denaturing of residential space that’s successfully creepy, and especially the already alienating, slightly surreal environment of a large run-down apartment building. More could have been done to up the eerie here, but the neighbors who appear through the crack of a door that’s quickly slammed shut, who kill themselves due to the creature in the architecture’s blind, barely-articulated terror, draw on the same themes that have made the Silent Hill series so popular.
I love Sam’s mix of denial and bafflement as to his new condition. He doesn’t realize his will is connected to the state of the building, Ackley House, or know how he knows what’s going on inside him, or even grasp that he isn’t in the darkness, he is the darkness, a swollen pool of unlight in the basement he thinks he’s being held in. It’s sort of an interesting encounter with Cartesian duality: Sam in convinced he’s imprisoned in the building, but the building is really simply his body. He is freer than people cowering from the environment in man-made structures, but he didn’t choose to be, and unable to move he’s more trapped than any of them. His seemingly instinctive appropriation of the telephone lines as a means of communication natural to him is equally good.
Maxine, the milquetoast girl holding Charley captive for Sam’s manipulative alien lover Antonia Bailey, is a realistic, banal take on Who henchmen, and I think she and Charley’s scenes are believable and well-written. Though I’m not too sure how many men who served in India brought back the recipes or the knowledge of how to scrape together ingredients for them in England in the 1920s, Charley’s footman…
D.I. Patricia Menzies just makes me think that she was probably trained by Gene Hunt. I can’t help it, LoM has gotten to me. Anyone in the Manchester PD with that accent’s going to make me think of crossovers. But the Gov would never put up with this alien bullocks. Good female character, by the by: she could as easily have been male and it wouldn’t have much changed her or the story. And what a dramatic change from when this same actress played Novice Hame in the show!
Six was charming, and apparently wearing this mysterious Blue Coat of audio fame. I thought the degree to which he was cooperative with and understanding of the law enforcement’s efforts was interesting: I expected him to bluster furiously or demand to call UNIT or anything but be very reasonable. He displayed exactly the right amount of concern about this new Charlotte girl: enough not to be an ass, but not personally invested yet. His sardonic initial reception of her was very nicely done, and his attempt to get rid of her at the end equally so.
The whole police plot clicks along nicely. Primarily this audio is good, but not fantastic. Nice of it to bring back ‘deadly aspirin.’ Apparently D.I. Patricia Menzies comes back in another audio, which sounds fine, if not something I’m enthusiastically awaiting. I am excited for more Six and Charley audios, though!