The Curse of the Fugue

I have to be honest; this is a short story that I didn’t really enjoy all that much. The Curse of the Fugue is the first Short Trip with Lucie Miller back since her character arc ended, which is a point in this story’s favor as she’s a lovely character with a great dynamic with the 8th Doctor, but unfortunately the writing was a bit confusing. Or maybe I was just distracted when I was listening to it… sometimes that happens too.

Whatever the case, this story deals with a couple people in an elderly home with memory problems (hence fugue, in the psychological sense). Both were involved in WW2 and had dealt with a strange (alien) artifact that messes with people’s minds. In order to be whole again, they had to let go of their respective pieces, trusting the Doctor to get rid of them and not abuse its power himself. Lucie had the rough end of things here, having to work as a personal care assistant in the home for a couple weeks while the Doctor orbited around the time period in the TARDIS, and so it is through some of the trust built up with her that the two people were able to relinquish their artifact pieces to the Doctor.

It’s a low-key, soft-spoken kind of story. There is dramatic tension and a narrative rise and fall, but it’s not action-packed. That doesn’t make it boring – many good Short Trips are fascinating non-active scenes – but this one just didn’t hold my interest as well. Maybe a second listen would help me appreciate it more.

The Caves of Erith

The 8th Doctor and Lucie Miller is a fantastic duo, and even in a short story narrated by neither Paul McGann nor Sheridan Smith it’s fun to hear their dynamic together. In December 2015, a few years after Lucie’s departure from the Eighth Doctor Adventures, we got the short story The Caves of Erith, which is basically a little Christmas episode.

It features a young teenaged boy who’s into conservationism and hides a secret of strange dealings with strange creatures living underground who want to sterilize the human race so they can reclaim the Earth, or Erith as they call the planet. This is rather inconsiderate, as the boy’s mother is a midwife by profession. The 8th Doctor and Lucie are staying at their house for a night or two before Christmas, as she’s had to open a B&B to get by with the mysteriously lower birth rates.

It turns out the lad is in league with a race of bat people, whom he has nicknamed homo echo, and when the Doctor and Lucie find him with them in a cave underground and are taken prisoner, Lucie convinces him to stop their plans. The Doctor convinces one of the bat-people to turn away from the sterilization plan too, but the council is less impressed; its’ the boy’s lead that foils their immediate plan.

Most Short Trips are self-contained; they don’t typically reference other stories or the grand sweep of Doctor Who continuity. They’re meant to be small, focused, and simple. Exceptions may be found, of course, and this story is one such exception in a very gentle way: Lucie argues her case (and for trusting the Doctor’s and her experience) by talking about her experience of the Daleks when she first met the Doctor. She doesn’t mention the Daleks by name, as if to do so would break the unwritten rule about short trips, but her story is clear. This is a nice touch, not simply because it’s a nod to her character’s past, but because it uses continuity in character; it shows us not simply what she has experienced, but what she’s learned because of it. It’s not just name-dropping, it’s experiential.

So that was probably the best scene in the whole thing. Honestly I’m a little skeptical of stories about other humanoid races coexisting with us on Earth – it works for the Silurians (et al) because they’re from a number of million years ago and a few colonies survived in hibernation, but claiming a parallel race still native and active, but hidden, is a bit of a stretch for my suspension of disbelief. Scenario aside, the character work was good.

Late Night Shopping

The Short Trip Late Night Shopping is a delightful (and slightly silly) brief adventure in a grocery store.  Its description is fantastic:

The Doctor and Lucie go on a late night shopping trip to rid a supermarket of alien superweapons disguised in the form of tomatoes.

As it turns out, the superweapon isn’t so much disguised as a tomato, as it is a sort of genetic trap inside a crop of tomatoes which will then mutate anyone who eats it.  It’s a rather similar scenario to the “God Seed” in Fiesta of the Damned, but instead of being played for the terror it’s played for the comedy, like the whimsical invasion of cuddly animals in Cuddlesome.

The solution to neutralizing the last of these infected tomatoes is very scientific indeed: they must be heated up in order to neutralize the genetic enzymes, and then metabolized quickly before they can reassert themselves.  In short, the Doctor cooks and eats them, right there in the grocery store.  This plays humorously off a smitten hairdresser and a perplexed security officer and manager, with Lucie in tow trying to explain everything to these hapless bystanders with her own imperfect grasp of the science.

Tonally, it fits right in with the majority of the adventures the 8th Doctor and Lucie Miller shared: it’s fast-paced, funny, even zany, and before you know it they’re off to their next adventure!

All the Fun of the Fair

This is one of the few short trips so far that have kind of let me down.  It begins with a neat premise: the TARDIS has been captured by a showman who doesn’t know how to use it properly, and is using it as a carnival ride, sending people into the future (and stranding them there), making a pretty penny without apparent consequences.  All the fun of the fair, indeed.

What doesn’t make sense of this (or, isn’t explained) is how the TARDIS is going back and forth from the present day to the future without an operator.  The Fast Return Switch would be the obvious method, but no pilot is ever mentioned; it’s as if the ship is on autopilot, doing its round trip whenever the doors are shut.

Lucie Miller finds an ancestor of hers who works as a detective, and they confront the showman, bundle him into the TARDIS, and they all go to “the future” together and rescue the Doctor and the others who’ve been stranded there.  The Doctor takes everyone home and the showman is persuaded to live an honest life thereafter, which he does.  His quick and apparently earnest reformation is another slightly odd moment bringing this story to a suddenly-perfect end.

On a side note, it’s interesting hearing India Fisher (who plays Charlotte Pollard) voicing Lucie… they are radically different characters with very different accents and mannerisms, so the switch-up of voicing is kind of amusing to experience.

The Young Lions

The Young Lions is a sneaky story, at first, because it uses the Mary Shelly trilogy title music, but actually features Lucie Miller as the 8th Doctor’s companion.  If I had my way, that would’ve been the music for all of the Lucie Miller era, as its cheerful bounciness fits the tone of that period of time really well.

This short story is indeed a short story – some short trips are character pieces or thought experiments, or theme explorations, but this is simply a quick story.  A regiment housed in a local village has a strange history and a peculiar land deal.  Their commanding officer seems to have an alien advisor, is thrown off a parapet, and recovers from life-threatening injuries overnight.  Other soldiers reveal a similar trend of rapid healing.

The Doctor and Lucie set to work investigating what’s going on here, impeded in part by some local protests over pasturing rights on the village green.  The alien presence is based in a egg-like ship, which the barracks grounds encompass and hide, and it controls peoples minds with the aid of DNA injections which are responsible for the fast healing and the susceptibility to its mind control.

Maybe I wasn’t in a focused state of mind at the time, but I found this story a little difficult to keep up with.  Maybe there were too many characters to keep track of in a short period of time, voiced by one reader?  Anyway, it’s a neat story, if nothing spectacular.

Island of the Fendahl

The Further Adventures of Lucie Miller (volume 1?) draws to a close with its 4th final story, Island of the Fendahl.  As the title implies this story sees the return of the Classic Who villain ‘The Fendahl,’ which is an entity that’s basically death incarnate – the far end of the food chain.  It had one appearance in the original series and at least one more appearance in a novel.  The Doctor thought he had destroyed the Fendahl’s essence by dumping its skull into a supernova, but somehow it’s back in action on Earth.

In some ways this story is a bit like Image of the Fendahl – a coven is formed, relatives of two or three of the key characters of that story appear in this, the Fendahleen are killing unsuspecting victims, and an unwilling “core” for the Fendahl is being sought and drawn to the ritual chamber.  Familiar images and symbology from the original story are described in this story also, though typically by Lucie (who doesn’t know about the Fendahl) rather than the Doctor.

One random thing I particularly liked was the fact that the Doctor didn’t instantly remember the Fendahl.  It took him several clues to put the pieces together, including information from Lucie about what she’s heard and seen.  I guess I’ve been thinking about this lately – the Doctor has had so many adventures and seen so many things over the hundreds, or thousands, of years he’s lived… shouldn’t he be a bit slower to remember stuff sometimes?  He’s got a lot of information to sift through in that brain of his!

The opening scene of this story picks up on the closing scene of the previous.  There, the TARDIS refused to materialize where he wanted to go, and he violently forced the TARDIS to land, much to Lucie’s dismay.  In this story’s beginning, he continues his mad ramblings until he’s electrocuted at the TARDIS console, calms down, but has to reset his hearts in a coma to recover properly.  This provides the initial impetus for Lucie to leave him in the TARDIS to get help and thus begin the events of this adventure.  The Doctor experiences another episode of losing his mind later on, but perhaps we’ll wait for a spoiler warning on that.

Spoilers after the picture, as usual.

An interesting cast of characters are drawn together for this story.  There’s a detective searching for a missing girl, a German scientist investigating the local caterpillar species (among other things), a hippie commune (actually the coven) in an abandoned monastery, and a crowd of village yokels who really give an 1807 vibe even though it’s 2007.  Come to think of it, apart from Lucie’s 2000’s references and style, this really felt like a 1970’s episode of Doctor Who.  Pretty neat, that.

Lucie, herself, continues to be the upbeat, sarcastic, and relentlessly funny character she’s always been.  She gets a few bleak moments though, especially being drugged with chloroform and being observed with a ‘death on her’ or something like that.  The latter is a foreshadowing of the fact that she eventually dies, a nod to the pre-established continuity that this box set of stories is placed into.

So, the story of the Fendahl here is that the Doctor didn’t successfully destroy the skull way back when.  Instead the skull held itself together, ended up in the impossible space between the event horizon and singularity of the black hole, and influenced the Daleks to to protect it and deliver it to the Doctor in order to release it back into the universe.  When the Doctor saved everyone from the black hole, the Fendahl skull was free to return to prehistoric Earth and influence a new line of humanity to prepare itself for reconstitution.  This time the Doctor is its chosen core to take over.  And somehow the skull has grown to a massive size, becoming the island of Fandor where all this takes place.  The Doctor realizes that they’ve been traveling across the galaxy forming a giant pentagram in space which is going to be the massive new interstellar powerbase region for the Fendahl to roam freely.

Multiple times it seems like the Doctor has to be shot and killed in order to prevent the Fendahl from surviving.  The main instance of this simply involves rock salt (the surefire way to kill Fendahleen), so he’s just wounded a little.

Finally Lucie is able to eject the Fendahl skull out of the TARDIS into the same supernova it was first dumped, such that it meets itself and the blinovitch effect destroys it for good.  She gets to save the day, and the Doctor, using her wits and the sonic screwdriver.  All in all it’s a pretty fun story with a satisfying connection to The Dalek Trap.  Though the “flying pests” thing was a red herring after all, I guess.

The only negative consideration I have to point out is just how much exposition it took to get through this story.  The Doctor keeps rattling off facts about the Fendahl that he learned back in his fourth incarnation.  Dr. Dieter keeps explaining things about the Fendahl and its worshipers that he’d read from others’ notes, also left over from the events of Image of the Fendahl.  Granted it’s a relatively complicated character/monster concept, but for a one-hour story it did feel like there was a bit more pure explanatory monologue than I would’ve preferred.

Still, it was a good story over all, and I’d be happy to see the 8th and Lucie back again for more Further Adventures another time!

The House on the Edge of Chaos

The House on the Edge of Chaos is the third story in the Further Adventures of Lucie Miller box set, and has no apparent connections to the previous two stories.  Unless an element of it is picked up in the fourth and final story, this is a complete stand-alone.  It certainly doesn’t seem to leave any plot strands open, other than an ending scene that sets up for the next adventure.

The story title, and the story description on the website, indicate that this takes place in a house, outside of which is only static which is beginning to “leak” in.  So it’s literally a base under siege story, with a Regency flair inside complete with sharp class divisions (upstairs & downstairs) and fancy clothes and massive dinner parties and attempted arranged romantic pairings.  What makes this siege interesting is the nature of the enemy – the static – that seems to be trying to get in.

Spoilers after the picture.

It soon is revealed that the static is taking (or using) the form of the governor of the house colony’s first, deceased, wife, and is somehow coming out of her portraits as if through a portal.  The house is the only inhabitable part of the planet, which was being terraformed, but something has clearly gone wrong.  The ladies of the house take a fancy to Lucie and invite her to live in the upstairs, as there’s apparently a shortage of eligible young women, and the master of the house’s heir needs a new (and worthy) love interest.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is investigating a recent death-by-static, and sees the static creature first-hand.  Working with a sort of security guard, he gets the backstory discovery underway. The story and belief is that the only thing holding the static at bay is order; whenever chaos or deviation occurs, the static gets in.  Lucie and the house heir eventually confront the master of the house, discover that he was basically responsible for the previous love interest’s death, as he actively lets the static into the house to wreak havoc on people when they deviate from his vision of right order.  They also discover that this man isn’t even human anymore, but a robot, and when the Doctor joins them he confirms that the whole house is actually built of bone and tooth enamel from the man’s cloned body parts, so his consciousness is literally the house.

Apparently, he and his wife had had disagreements about the future of the colony and the goal of planetary terraforming, and that disagreement led to an accident that resulted in the wife’s death, which in turn made the man feel guilty, which finally manifested in the terraforming machine creating this sort of destructive “static” around the colony house.  It’s a bit convoluted to explain, and it seems to hinge on the idea that the terraforming machine has to have someone’s DNA profile in order to work (something I certainly would never have assumed myself).  But the solution was simple: turn off the machine.

So the Doctor uses the house heir as life insurance against the house’s vengeful efforts to keep his first wife’s death secret, and the group of main characters find their way to the machine, turn it off, and both the house and the static disappear.  The colonists, after however many generations of being on this planet, now have to start all over again, albeit on a pristine habitable planet.  (I just hope there’s no harsh winter coming, or they’ll die by the hundreds in a few months…)

There are a few amusing quips throughout the story, largely surrounding Lucie’s ‘eligibility,’ and the range of interest that’s provoked around her, including another female character joking(?) about eloping with her.  The Doctor, too, makes a comment about never getting stuck in one place for “more than a few centuries or so”, which might make one think of his time on Orbis, except that takes place after this story, so it’s more likely a nod to the Earthbound Arc from The Burning until Escape Velocity.

All in all, this story made me feel like I was back listening to the Eighth Doctor Adventures from 2006-11 again.  And that’s a good thing!

The Revolution Game

The second Further Adventure of Lucie Miller is The Revolution Game, in which Lucie and the 8th Doctor attempt to celebrate her birthday at a roller derby on a slightly-low-gravity planet where everything’s run by a mega-corporation called Heliacorp, best known for its 120% efficient solar panels.

But there’s more than meets the eye at this game: people are playing for the lives of their impoverished loved ones; the corporation has a sinister hand overseeing proceedings; a vengeful and invisible alien presence wants their planet back.

Spoilers after the picture!

Unlike the previous story, this one is not “Doctor-light”, which was a relief.  Instead the Doctor and Lucie are in full swing, getting to know a pair of company employees, the Director, and an alien (well, native there) insect called Spartacus.

One of the noteworthy characteristics of the Lucie Miller era was humor, and this story has it in spades.  But it isn’t humor for the sake of humor; nearly every gag plays into the larger story and plot.  Lucie messing around in the low gravity and falling on her coccyx leads to her improved ability to participate in the derby and survive an abduction, covering longer distances with less effort.  The insect calling himself Spartacus is the first of several examples (continuing the humor while legitimately world-building) of the insect race imitating elements of human culture that they enjoy, especially movie night and the derby games.

The background scheme, of Heliacorp harvesting the insects special light-bending properties, to increase the output of their solar panels, was particularly brilliant.  It wasn’t just another exploitation- or disregard-of-the-natives story, but a calculated harvesting of their natural abilities for financial gain.  Dastardly schemes are always more compelling when they “make sense” in a clear way, and the bureaucrats aren’t just being cruel for the sake of being cruel.

One last comment is worth making.  These insects are, at point, referred to as “flying pests” by the company Director.  The previous story, too, included unseen “flying pests” that the Daleks were exterminating and the stranded humans were fleeing.  It could be a coincidence, but the repetition of the same phrase in similar situations in two consecutive stories seems more like a continuity clue to me.  So let’s keep an eye out for more clues as the other two stories unfold!

The Dalek Trap

Now this is exciting.  Since I’m spending most of my Big Finish listening catching up through the massive backlog of stories (and I’m currently in 2013 and ’14), I don’t get to check out the newest releases yet.  With glee I watch them appear, and then sadly add them to the list of things to get back to when I’m caught up in a couple more years.  But then along came The Further Adventures of Lucie Miller and I rejoiced for a set of stories that I could actually listen to when they’re new!

These four stories are set squarely between series 1 and series 2 of the Eighth Doctor Adventures.  In the opening narration, Lucie mentions a few adventures she had with the Doctor, culminating in the events of Human Resources in which she elected to stay with the Doctor once they were finally free of each other by Time Lord mandate.

The Dalek Trap is the first story in the box set, and starts us off with a bang.  Lucie is keeping an audio diary, in which she narrates (and demonstrates) a brief autobiography that effectively catches up listeners who haven’t met her before, as well as refreshes the memories of those of us who have.  We get clips of several mad adventures involving her and the Doctor, but now the Doctor has fallen silent after receiving a distress call.  To Lucie’s concern and fright he pilots the TARDIS into a black hole…

Meanwhile, we’re being introduced to a pair of space explorers wandering around a dark planet, dodging flying monsters and stumbling upon a mysterious space ship that look intact enough to have survivors in it who may be able to help them.  It turns out that this ship is a Dalek saucer, but they neither know about the Daleks nor get themselves exterminated.  Instead the Daleks “agree” to work together to fight for survival and rescue, pooling their resources to send out a distress call, asking the Doctor for help (because the last thing they saw before getting pulled into a black hole was the Doctor’s TARDIS ejecting something into a supernova, turning it into a black hole).

The stage for the drama is set.  Spoilers after the picture.

One of the initial disappointments I had with this story is how little of the Doctor we hear.  I suppose “The Further Adventures of Lucie Miller” is meant to indicate a companion-focused series, rather than simply a revival of the “8th & Lucie Era.”  Still, Lucie bleedin’ Miller is one of the fun companions that I can enjoy listening to for a while, and the novelty of having her back is enough to keep my interest through the box set even if the other three stories are as “Doctor-light” as this.

There are a few mysteries set up in this story that aren’t solved, and probably are setups for further exploration in subsequent stories in the box set.  What is the “Cradle of Darkness” device that the Daleks have, and why are they keen to get it in the Doctor’s TARDIS (unless they really did want everyone rescued from the black hole)?  How did this planetoid exist, and support life, in between the event horizon and the singularity of a black hole?  What did the Doctor “shoot” into the supernova in the first place?  If the Doctor “reversed time” to rescue everyone trapped in there, doesn’t that create some sort of temporal paradox that will need to be resolved?

There’s also the question of memory loss.  The two main human characters that Lucie meets and spends most of the story with are losing their memories; Lucie begins to lose her memory too.  But the Daleks, while apparently concerned about the possibility, don’t seem to have been affected at all yet.  The Doctor was affected immediately with the distress call.  Even after they all escape, the Doctor and Lucie alternatively forget elements of the entire adventure that just took place.  Clearly there’s more going on here than we, the audience, are privy to.  So let’s keep listening and find out!

On its own, though, The Dalek Trap is an intriguing story.  It gives us lots of mysteries to solve, and we walk with Lucie (mostly) as she works out some of them.  We get pleasantly invested in the two human characters, enough to cheer quietly with Lucie to see them survive at the end.  We get to see the Daleks acting unusually cooperatively, which (again with Lucie) we take as a cue that something is seriously wrong here if they’re resorting to receiving so much assistance.  It’s a great first story of a set.  It doesn’t feel as epic as, say, Blood of the Daleks, but its quiet potential could go anywhere.

Flashpoint

A number of the Short Trips I’ve listened to were rather heady pieces exploring a particular idea or character or situation; this one is actually an entire adventure – just (obviously) a short one.

The 8th Doctor and Lucie are on an orbital platform looking down at a storm planet at the height of its electrical storm season.  The beautiful colors and flashes of light draw thousands of spectators every decade.  In the crowd is a young boy with a rough body guard.  The station is attacked, the gallery is opened to space, a few people lose their lives including the bodyguard, and Lucie and the boy are scooped up by an automated life pod right before they black out in the vacuum.  They make it to the surface safely, barely escaping another round of attacks.  It turns out the boy is the son of a judge who has been prosecuting an interplanetary gang, and there’s a hit out for his family; the boy is supposed to be in hiding.

On the surface they have to survive the lightning, are picked up by a hermit, and have a final confrontation with the hit men, SPOILER ALERT, resulting in Lucie electrocuting the last opponent.  Within her narration she’s actively trying to justify herself – he’d killed the hermit, he was going to kill her and the boy, there was no other way.  She seems to convince herself better than I expected.  Certainly better than the 8th Doctor would have, at that point.

I have a few nit-picks: they wouldn’t have been able to hang on to a pillar while air was escaping from the gallery, a planet “always” covered in storms probably wouldn’t have trees growing on it, and Lucie seemed a bit too at peace with her violent decision.

As for continuity, I’m going to assume that this took place late in her travels with the Doctor, say, at the end of series 3 of the Big Finish Eighth Doctor Adventures.  This I assume because 1) she was able to get away with murder in self defense and 2) she mentions her decisions to travel with the Doctor (remembering that in her first series she and the Doctor were stuck together).