Seizure

Ravenous vol. 2 ends, at last, with the reveal of a Ravenous creature itself. In Seizure, the Doctor, Helen, and Liv receive a distress call from The Eleven, desperately asking for rescue from something. The companions are perfectly willing to let the Eleven hang after their last encounter with him, but the Doctor has to check it out. And so they go, finding themselves onboard a spooky dying TARDIS not unlike what the early 8th Doctor and Sam Jones experienced in Dead Time.

Here we learn, bit by bit, about what happened: the Eleven hijacked this TARDIS and killed its owner who is now a ghost in the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits, and all are on the run from a creature called the Ravenous which, when we last saw the Eleven he got a hint of, but is now stalking him. It turns out this creature feeds on life energy, especially the regenerative ability of a Time Lord. Between that and the other TARDIS’ constant scream of pain and terror, neither the Doctor nor the Eleven are thinking very clearly, and Liv nearly gets left behind. Eventually the Eleven steals the Doctor’s TARDIS and runs away, and the Doctor, Liv, and Helen escape the dying TARDIS thanks to the ghost’s self-sacrifice, just before the whole ship dissolves into the Vortex forever, taking the Ravenous with it. Now our crew are stranded, but at least are alive.

On the whole, this is a strong story for creepiness factor, and the concept of the Ravenous is interesting and appropriately scary. Yet, while the portrayal of the creature was very good, I found its self-narration for Liv’s “benefit” (mostly to scare her) a little prolonged. We, the audience, needed that information to know and fear the Ravenous, but it was presented a bit too exposition-heavy. I mean, I’m not an expert critic, so I’m not in a special position to call this out as an issue, but I figured that if I felt this way, others might too. Anyway, however you feel about the balance of this story, we’ve got the primary antagonist of this quadrilogy of box sets firmly introduced now. Let’s see what happens in the next two sets!

Better Watch Out & Fairytale of Salzburg

After their escape from Kaldor, the TARDIS crew tries their luck with Christmas in Salzburg.

What follows is a two-part story which may actually rank as my favorite Doctor Who Christmas story of all time. (Sorry, fans of The Chimes of Midnight, this one is just brilliant too!) The story of the Krampus takes center stage, and we get a tale equally thrilling, funny, and terrifying as fiendish imps start snatching people away to eternal punishment at the hands of the Krampus for their sins. And it’s all because of a Scrooge-like landlord and a spiteful young woman who makes a careless wish to a magical wish-granter. (The nature of the wish-granter, beyond magic, is never explained. But we’ve seen enough reality-re-writing aliens in Doctor Who lately, so whatevs.) Oh, and because it’s Salzburg, the Doctor is also constantly making The Sound of Music references, which is sheer comedy gold. Especially when Liv doesn’t get them and Helen sighs every time.

The first half, Better Watch Out, is told mostly in a linear fashion with occasional narration by the Doctor to an unknown man as well as between an unknown old lady and another guy. The second half, Fairytale of Salzburg, leans into those narrations and reveals the characters involved. As things come to a head in Salzburg, Liv and Helen try to hide people in the TARDIS, but as a last resort, Helen figures out how to dematerialize the TARDIS and go looking for help to defeat the Krampus. She spends decades alone in the TARDIS, trying to figure out how to pilot it and get it where she needs to go, and finally she makes it to 4th-century Asia Minor (modern day Turkey). There’s actually a different person playing Old Helen, but she sounds so similar to Hattie Morahan that I actually recognized her as an aged Helen well before the reveal. I guess she did too good of a job! In any case, she brings back the one person who can stop Krampus: Saint Nicholas! Yes, the kindly old bishop of Myra got to save the day by shouting down a demon, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So Salzburg is returned to normal, the Scrooge-like landlord repents, and the father who apparently killed himself (to the heartbreak of his reckless-wishing daughter) proves alive because the Doctor cheated history and warned him ahead of time to fake his death instead. It’s all very neat, very fun, and surprisingly lovely. And, like many of the Ravenous set stories thus far, it stands on its own without reference to larger story arcs.

Escape from Kaldor

After the traumatic events of the first Ravenous box set, the 8th Doctor decides to take his companions on nice visits to pleasant places. Liv is first: we’re going to her home planet of Kaldor! Needless to say, things go awry, not least hinted by the title, Escape from Kaldor. Liv and Helen are touring a fancy new shopping mall opened for the rich elite of Kaldor when the robots attack and the whole place goes into lockdown. I guess these robots going rogue and killing people is the only(?) story we ever get with regards to Kaldor, since it was first introduced in Robots of Death, and revisited in Robophobia and other other stories since. This time, the reason they started attacking people was because:

1. the company that controls them had turned off the life-preserving protocol to enable them to hunt vermin while the shopping plaza was under construction
2. lower-class protestors (almost terrorists) found a way to suppress the robots’ programming, unwittingly reverting them to their hunt-all-life mode
3. a jamming field prevented the company from restoring the robots to working order

So while it’s really the same old jam with these robots, it’s more about the class struggle on Kaldor. Nevertheless, the Doctor does get to reason with a Super-Vox robot towards the end, after the kill-everyone order has been suppressed and replaced with a self-destruct-the-entire-mall-so-there-are-no-surviving-witnesses order… he convinces a robot to think for her/itself and evaluate if the self-destruct order is right or wrong in the face of innocent bystanders who’d die as a result. Thus this brings in the trope of robots (or artificial intelligence in general) thinking for themselves and approaching sentience, albeit in the more hopeful light of someone suggesting they can do good rather than the usual storyline of an AI going rogue and evil.

Another critical plot through this story is the strained relationship between Liv and her sister Tula. They haven’t gotten along, especially in light of their father’s death, and this story proves to be a confrontation and initial reconciliation for them. At the end of the story, Liv actually stays behind on Kaldor for a year to deal with unfinished business; Helen and the Doctor travel ahead to pick her up. What she stays behind to do is not revealed in this or the rest of this set of stories, though I suspect that this is what the The Robots spin-off series is covering.

Planet of Damnation & Sweet Salvation

Stories #3 and 4 on Ravenous vol. 1 are a two-part story together, and although most of the Dark Eyes and Doom Coalition box sets are continuous four-part stories that I’ve reviewed individually, this time I’m putting two stories together into one entry. Partly this is because it’s hard to separate out in memory what happened in which part, and partly because neither really can stand alone without the either; the narrative is continuous and the perspective and tone doesn’t shift significantly from one to the next. It’s also because I found these stories a little confusing, so it’s difficult for me to recall or explain exactly everything that happened.

World of Damnation introduces us to a prison world called Rykerzon, in Liv’s home time interestingly enough, where the Eleven and Helen crashlanded, causing a great deal of collateral damage. This prison is famous for rehabilitating its inmates, and one such reformed-criminal-turned-cooperative is an android made from sugars called the Kandyman. Yes, the one from that odd 7th Doctor story Happiness Patrol. He has a new appearance (as per the cover art) and his voice is fully human until he is severely damaged toward the end of the box set when his artificial sound from Happiness Patrol briefly comes back. It turns out he was rebuilt by The Seven at one point, so the Eleven now has a mental hold over him, enabling a turning of the tables in this prison.

Helen has been incarcerated too, but has spent her time trying to rehabilitate the Eleven and helping him overcome his evil ways, regain control of himself, and reform. She truly believes he can change, and is changing, but by the end of Sweet Salvation she finds no such salvation for him. It’s also unclear whether she still has the powers of the Sonomancer and refuses to use them, or if those powers have waned over time.

When the Doctor and Liv show up, it is in the midst of the crazy goings-on resulting from a prison coup staged by the Eleven and the Kandyman, though we spend most of the first story’s runtime not realizing the time differential between the two groups. It’s a nice twist, but I failed to appreciate it on first listen because I had a tough time following the narrative. One my challenges is that the Kandyman and the Elven actually sound pretty similar to me, and the governor of the prison also had a voice that didn’t stand out distinctly to me, so it was not always easy to hear who was whom. Maybe I just shouldn’t listen to audio plays in the car anymore.

Whateverso, there are some political machinations, some search and chase scenes, and finally a confrontation in a factory where the Kandyman’s dastardly foods are made and psychically controlled by a Mind Spider and a powerful psychic simultaneously enslaved by and directing it. The Kandyman and the Eleven are turned against one another, somewhat predictably, and they both seem to meet a sticky end, though their survival is more than likely to the audience.

There are rumblings, toward the end, of a legendary force called The Ravenous. They are glimpsed in a mirror, and/or in purely psychic realms, and the Eleven is terrified while the Doctor is incredulous. At least we know we’re going to learn more about this in the future. This confusing story with the Kandyman is probably not going to get any more clarification moving forward. Perhaps I should give it a re-listen at some point. But there are so many more stories to explore!

How to make a killing in time travel

After a serious opening story, Ravenous vol. 1 gives us a comedic entry. How to make a killing in time travel sees the 8th Doctor and Liv interrupted on their way to find Helen by a time travel experiment. It’s a bit similar to a 5th Doctor story which also takes place on a space station and also features a murder mystery. This story is far funnier because the station’s security chief is blatantly incompetent, there’s a constantly-thwarted heist attempt for an experimental time machine, blackmail, mistaken identities, a royal family feud, and very few characters are actually killed off.

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone; this story is just a lot of fun. Go get it and check it out!

Their Finest Hour

After the defeat of Padrac and his Doom Coalition, the 8th Doctor and Liv set off in the TARDIS to see if they can find and rescue Helen from The Elven if she’s still alive. Thus begins a new set of adventures, a third 4-box-set epic of four stories each entitled Ravenous. And, just like it took a while for the Doom Coalition to be revealed in Doom Coalition, it’s going to be a while before we find out who the actual Ravenous creatures/beings/characters might be.

We start off with what is essentially a stand-alone story, in which the Doctor and Liv Chenka pay Winston Churchill a visit in 1939 while they wait for the TARDIS to finish some calculations concerning how to track Helen’s trail. An alien threat has presented itself, and the Doctor and Liv are here to make sure they don’t interfere with history. It’s fun to see another incarnation working with Churchill – the 11th Doctor popularized this relationship in Victory of the Daleks, Churchill reminisces on an encounter with the 9th Doctor, and one could argue that the 6th Doctor is the one who started it in the novel Players – so in between them we get to see the 8th Doctor jump into that ongoing banter. He, too, is protective of the TARDIS and careful to guard his knowledge of the future of the war. Liv, amusingly enough, is from far enough in the future of the human race that she’s unaware of Churchill, and completely underwhelmed, which rather takes the wind out of his sails of usual bravado and charisma.

The main characters we get to spend time with, though, are two Polish pilots, representing a whole squad of Poles-in-exile who participated in the Battle of Britain. This is a neat piece of history that I didn’t know about (if not found surprising) and their heroism is celebrated as they bravely fly planes for the Doctor and for Liv investigating an invisible alien space ship nearby which has occasionally shot down British fighter planes.

We eventually learn that the aliens have a tradition of fighting proxy wars: rather than killing one another they choose someone else’s war, pick sides, and whoever wins the proxy war “wins” the virtual/cold war. Only this group of aliens is cheating, and getting involved in a way they shouldn’t be, so the Doctor is able to call home, get them recalled, and save London from destruction in the nick of time.

It’s a simple plot, in the end, which makes room for a nice heart of a story as we (especially through Liv) get to know the Polish pilots, and share her sense of bitter loss upon finding out that one of them got shot down by Nazis some time after surviving the alien encounter. It’s a classic war story in that regard, and I’m glad we got a chance to have a stand-alone story even though it’s the beginning of a new box set of adventures.

Stop the Clock

Stop the Clock is an action-packed closing story for an action-packed box set. The events of four box sets – a quadilogy of quadrilogies – come hurtling to a close in this final hour of story-telling. The ending of Dark Eyes 4 was cool, too, but this one is far better. Unlike Dark Eyes, the Doom Coalition series was largely pre-planned, so most of the plot strands were seeded in the beginning and woven across the whole series, rather than inventing things on the fly.

Needless to say, this is not a story that one can jump in to; it’s a season finale, episode 16 of 16.

I’m not going to summarize the whole plot as I often do because you can read a lengthier summary at the TARDIS Wiki page. But I will review some aspects of it….

Some things about it are predictable: Caleera the Sonomancer finds out that Padrac has been exploiting her from the start and doesn’t love her at all. Once River tried to convince her of this, it was obvious that she was going to figure it out for herself in the nick of time. But what was not as predictable was that Padrac had prepared for this eventuality: once Caleera was hooked up to the Resonance Engine, she was unable to stop her Sonomancing powers.

Another predictable part of this story was when Padrac and Caleera sell out the Eleven. But again, there are some intriguing twists to make these expected events remain exciting for the audience.

Most pleasingly, the Doctor takes up the psychic disguise that he used at the end of the previous box set, and does an impersonation of the Eleven in order to get into the room with Padrac and Caleera. The acting chops from Paul McGann for this was super fun; it’s been a while since he’s had to do multiple voices and sounds besides his regular Doctor persona. It also provided for a fun awkward moment when the real Eleven contacts Padrac with the Doctor already alongside them.

The Eleven, himself, returns to his status as a dastardly villain. He ruthless mocks and kills a guard holding him prisoner. He takes Helen as a hostage, and attempts to kill her.

This is where a neat, if a little odd, thing happens. Caleera gives Helen some of her Sonomancer powers. How? I have no idea. What does this entail? I have no idea. All we see is that she can pause time, turn away the blast from the Eleven’s gun, and control his TARDIS to smash into the Resonance Engine, destroying Caleera, and then careening into the vortex possibly to be destroyed or lost forever. (Spoiler alert, the existence of the Ravenous and Stranded box sets indicate that Helen Sinclair survives in some way, which was hinted at in this story’s conclusion anyway.) This would be a complete Deus ex machina – even more literally than usual – but for one important call-back to the previous meeting between Helen and Caleera, and their kinda-sorta-bonding moment as the “forgotten women”, always overlooked by men in power. I felt like that connection could have been given a little more build-up ahead of time; it was pretty sudden.

The capturing and freezing of Padrac at the end was a thoughtful recall of the very beginning of the series, and provided a cool explanation for the mysterious Red Lady, also back in the first box set. I had originally guessed it was a trap laid by the Eleven, but in actuality it’s a shattered fragment of Caleera after her destruction. In the end she appears with Padrac, forcing him to see her beauty in much the same creepy way that others were fatally drawn to her in that earlier story. Poor Padrac. I really took to him before he was revealed as the chief villain of the Doom Coalition. But now he has landed himself a lifetime of suffering in stasis with Caleera, who is still (creepily) obsessed with him.

So, Doom Coalition… this is one of the best self-contained series of all Doctor Who, audio or otherwise. You don’t need to listen to Dark Eyes before it; Liv Chenka gets a lot of her character-building in this series so it’s okay to miss her introduction if you’re trying to be selective about what stories to purchase. There are some great villains with well-rounded personalities and motivations, a growing angsty awareness of the Time War in Gallifrey’s approaching future, excellent pacing between fast and quiet stories, and ample time to get to know the Doctor and his companions. If we never hear from Helen again, her story will still be very well put together and feels complete. But, of course, she’s out there somewhere, with the Eleven, so we’ve got a hook into the next series, Ravenous, in which the Doctor and Liv will have to find her and rescue her again. I look forward to it!

The Side of the Angels

Doom Coalition 4 leaped into action immediately, but it took the first two stories to bring the Doctor, Liv, and Helen all back together. Now they’re traveling back in time with Veklin (a recurring character in the War Doctor stories) who had been a plant spying on Padrac’s coalition, to meet up with Cardinal Ollistra in her secret hiding place… in 1970’s New York City.

And she’s not alone; the first Time Lord we actually hear there is Reverend Mortimer, an incarnation of the Meddling Monk. Although the Monk is not forthcoming about his past incarnation(s) and experiences with the Doctor, we know from The Secret History that this is an incarnation later than the one whom the 8th Doctor already dealt with – so they both have some bad blood with each other, both having lost people they cared about. Their difficult past bubbles over as soon as they cross paths, and things prove very intriguing very quickly.

To the Doctor’s horror, Ollistra is not planning to stop Padrac from destroying the universe; she’s written that off as non-preventable. Instead, she and the Monk are building a Time Lord enclave in NYC, essentially building a backup Gallifreyan citadel, from which to launch a takeover of Gallifrey so Padrac at least won’t rule after his plan succeeds. Even worse, the Time Lords have made an arrangement with the Weeping Angels: they provide power for the Time Lords, they feast less on people for now, but will get a feeding frenzy just before the universe is destroyed. But can they be trusted to withhold their appetite for potential temporal energy?

So we’ve got multiple parties at play, now. There’s a local politician who’s just trying to make NYC a better place. The Doctor, Liv, and Helen want to enlist help to stop Padrac from destroying the universe. Ollistra and her company simply want to wait it out and overthrow him after he’s done. The Weeping Angels just want to eat, and will make a deal with whomever has a decent offer. The Eleven shows up, sent by the coalition to stop the Doctor from interfering at the last minute. The Monk is caught in between – ultimately he just wants to protect his own interests – so he shifts between Ollistra and the Eleven as circumstances dictate.

The Weeping Angels are surprisingly creepy in audio form. A little bit of spoken observation about their movements, careful use of the music-based sound effects that accompany their advance, and the listener can visualize exactly what we’ve seen on screen. I’m aware that there is one other audio story that use the Weeping Angels (I think it’s from one of the Classic Doctors, New Monsters sets), and I bet it’s handled similarly in that story. Nevertheless, the Angels are primarily a visual scare, both in-universe and for the audience, so they’re not a foe that can really continue to be effective in an audio medium. It was fun to encounter them here, and their nature played into the scenario perfectly, but I also hope they don’t get too much more use in Big Finish.

In all, this story was very fun to listen to and brought together a lot of characters and ideas without feeling crowded. If you’re not familiar with the Weeping Angels then this story must be pretty confusing – they get a little bit of explanation for the benefit of Liv and Helen, but for the most part the audience is expected to know about them already. The appearances of the Monk and Cardinal Ollistra, however, are not so reliant upon prior knowledge. In fact, neither the Monk nor the Doctor explicitly talk about their past (saving run-time and avoiding getting bogged down in continuity that the listener may or may not know about). And Ollistra is in an earlier incarnation! Indeed, her appearance is almost more of an easter egg for those following the War Doctor series. You don’t need to know anything about her, this is basically the Doctor’s first time ever meeting her, but for those who do know the War Doctor stories, this gives us a bit of backstory to how Ollistra came to be the woman we know during the Time War.

In the end, the Doctor, Liv, and Helen have to zip away back to Gallifrey through a collapsing time vortex in a last-ditch effort to prevent the destruction of the universe. The end is nigh…

Songs of Love

Rather than picking up exactly where the first story in Doom Coalition 4 left off, Songs of Love winds back to the moment that the Doctor, Liv, and Helen were set adrift in the time capsule and follows River Song’s escapades with Padrac and the Time Lords. And, my goodness, do things get pretty involved pretty quickly.

Her immediate reaction, in line with her established mercenary character, is to congratulate Padrac and ingratiate herself with his coalition, convincing him that she will be loyal to their cause, and even revealing her identity as someone who killed a future incarnation of the Doctor, albeit in a timeline that he’s probably about to overwrite. He is able to confirm this with a biodata scan somehow, and is intrigued by her physiognomy – being a time-sensitive human and all that jazz. So he takes her back to Gallifrey with him to finish setting his plans in motion.

Soon she is embroiled in the world of Gallifreyan politics. Padrac is trying to convince the High Council of Time Lords to approve a “harmony” vote to ensure Gallifrey’s sole survival from a catastrophic universe-destroying event that is fast approaching. Unknown to the public, the Sonomancer (Caleera) is preparing to make her resonance song that will unravel the entire universe, according to Padrac’s grand plan to rescue Gallifrey from the otherwise-inevitable Time War. She just needs a Resonance Engine to enhance her abilities to complete the job; she’s searching the Matrix for the information to build one.

Meanwhile there is a mysterious force at work which rescues Liv and Helen and supports River Song as she bluffs her way along with Padrac. River recognizes immediately that Padrac is using and abusing Caleera, and doesn’t love her, but when River tries to warn her, she is rebuffed. (But I’m betting Caleera will realize she’s right at some crucial moment in the next or final story.)

Not knowing that they’re being rescued, Liv and Helen force the capsule that picked them up to crash land on Earth, and they find themselves in London, in our future, watching as the Sonomancer’s resonance song begins to destroy the planet. They scramble to steal a ship to get off-world but River eventually scoops them up herself, taking them to Gallifrey with her.

When The Eleven checks in with Padrac he blows River’s cover, but not in time to stop her from rescuing the Doctor from the time vortex. They have a strange encounter, in which his memories of past meetings with her briefly arise, and then she dumps in his TARDIS with Liv, Helen, and Veklin who had just spirited them away from Gallifrey to meet with Cardinal Ollistra, whom she believes can stop Padrac’s mad scheme.

In all, this was an exciting adventure, with a lot to keep track of. It can be a little jarring jumping into all this action, with several more characters to remember, after such a comparatively small cast in the first story of the set. It surely benefits from a second listen-through, especially as it sets in motion the final quest for help that will bring this series to a close in just two more 1-hr episodes!

Ship in a Bottle

After the tumultuous events and the whirlwind of characters (especially in disguise towards the end) of Doom Coalition 3, it was about time we got a story that settled down with just the Doctor and his companions. That is how Doom Coalition 4 begins. The 8th Doctor, Liv, and Helen have been set adrift in a time capsule, coasting into the future where the universe is destroyed. Literally nothing exists outside their rudimentary TARDIS lifeboat, and it seems that Padrac has actually won and defeated the Doctor.

Obviously, this story has to see them escape this situation, and we know from the fact that there are more stories to come that they must escape. So that’s not a major point of tension. Nevertheless, their means of escape and return have to be explored thoroughly before they finally make it work, and the repeated failures build tension and bafflement really convincingly. And more to the point, Ship in a Bottle gives the three characters time to breathe, interact, and re-establish their selves and relationships for the listener. A lot has happened to them in the Doom Coalition series thus far and they’ve had little time to rest and take stock.

They are quick to take an inventory; Helen is hopeful that she’ll find something useful and make a helpful suggestion but the Doctor is unimpressed. Liv takes the opportunity to confront the Doctor about leaving her and Helen behind when he ran off with River Song after the death of the Clocksmith, admonishing him that they are a team and they must stick together. She actually gets him to apologize, proving herself to be one of the rare companions who can push back against the Doctor’s personality (and not just stand her own ground) and get him to budge. Helen is surprised but thankful.

Various methods of piloting this TARDIS shuttle pod thing are explored, but the engines are rigged for one direction (forward in time only), the time rudders are broken, the time sails deploy but break before successfully turning the ship back towards the past. Yeah, there’s a lot of nautical imagery here… this could have been like the submarine theme in Anachrophobia if it was played up a bit spookier.

The Doctor is ready to give up. There’s enough oxygen and food for centuries, and all the books in the databanks they could ever imagine… it’s not a bad retirement, is it? But Liv is determined, and she chafes against the Doctor’s willingness to cave in. When push comes to shove, they come to an understanding that Liv has to exhaust all possibilities before she can give up, whereas the Doctor simply wanted to rest from problem-solving; he’d still consider ways of escape. Perhaps predictably, it’s Helen that helps them arrive at the answer: the only means of escape is one that Padrac, who designed this scenario, would never think of trying himself. So they don space suits, jump outside, blow up the ship, and ride the temporal shockwave back into the universe.

But of course it’s not that simple; the Doctor gets lost in the vortex and Liv and Helen tumble out into the middle of open space. Oh boy.