The Horror of Hy-Brasil

The Horror of Hy-Brasil is an origin story for an ancient celtic myth about an island that appears only once every few years. In this short story, the 2nd Doctor, Zoe, and Jamie are pulled into an alien research enclave where dastardly experiments are going on. The aliens are Formorians: Balor and his daughter Eithne, and they’re conducting experiments to undo the damage he has done in sterilizing their entire race with chronon radiation. Ultimately the TARDIS crew has to put a stop to Balor’s ruthless deeds, and the only legacy of Formorian race is the one successful genetic hybrid: heather.

This is a story the listener will appreciate more if you’re familiar with the legends it’s playing on. Otherwise it’s a fairly unremarkable Short Trip.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

Where the first story of Short Trips Volume 4 was a bleak story that turned happy at the end, the second story starts unassuming and almost bland, takes a turn for the sinister, and ends with proper comedy.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish sees the 2nd Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe investigating a planet’s mining operations and confronted by an alien health & safety monitor named Jack.  The TARDIS crew soon falls into the gaping hole in the ground, and have to survive the hazards of loose rock, cave-ins, and indigenous creatures.  It turns out Jack is not only the monitor here, but also in charge of operations and the owner of the whole mining business. He even owns entire retirement planets!  But his race, the Larians, are obsessed with accumulating wealth yet unable to spend or enjoy it – thus he lives in squalor and doesn’t enjoy his holiday planets at all.

When the Doctor thwarts Jack’s attempts to have them killed in the mine, and even brings down a rocket he sends up, the confrontation is on.  There are some odd encounters with the wildlife that the Doctor was able to pacify with his recorder-playing, and Jack is finally rescued/exiled on one of his holiday planets.

Although he is in paradise, he howls with rage and cannot enjoy it.  Boy is that theologically rich, by analogy!

One Small Step…

Among the early Short Trips, in 2004, stands the story One Small Step… which was eventually recorded and released to Big Finish subscribers.  This is a surprisingly dark-yet-cheering entry featuring the 2nd Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe.  The two companions are playing on the beach on the Isle of Wight, almost flirting.  The Doctor goes up to get an ice cream, talks to a little boy, advises him to go home and tell his parents where he is, and then watches the boy get run over by a car.

He rushes back to the TARDIS (which is invisible on the beach… there’s a handy feature!?), ends his companions’ holiday, and spends what seems to be a few months trying to bring the TARDIS back to the same place a few hours earlier in time in order to allow them to re-live their beach day with no ice cream so he doesn’t interfere and get the boy severely injured.

It’s a rare story of time being overwritten, rather than re-treading their own timeline like would usually happen in this sort of instance.  The Doctor is described as performing a “forbidden” (or similar word) sequence on the TARDIS controls, so it’s pretty clear that what he’s up to here is pretty obscure and unusual.  Besides, the TARDIS’ impossible steering back then made this goal of his all the more difficult.

One Small Step… is book-ended with the little boy in question living his ordinary life.  He is initially afraid of being interrupted in the bath, but ultimately comforted to the voice of his “uncle” saying “it’s only me” walking down the hall outside.  It turns out the uncle is actually the Doctor, come to check that everything’s turned out alright.  This opening and closing for the story is a subtle build-up and release for the central events, giving us a sort of before-and-after regarding the Doctor saving the day – though in a somewhat ironic sense since in this case it is the Doctor who caused the problem in the first timeline, and had to fix it by not-doing-it the second time ’round.

Many of the early Short Trips are an acquired taste and this story is no exception.  They’re not always stories so much as they are isolated moments, ideas, character snapshots.  One Small Step… shows us a tragic mistake that the Doctor takes great pain to correct.

Last of the Cybermen

In mid-2015 Big Finish Productions embarked on quite a neat trilogy idea: mis-matching Doctors and companions.  The 7th Doctor would team up with Jo Grant, the 6th with Jamie and Zoe, and the 5th with Steven and Vicki.  How this would work and why, well, we’ll just have to listen and find out.

The second of these stories sees the 6th Doctor thrown into the 2nd Doctor’s timeline, with Jamie and Zoe, a “few weeks” before their final adventure together in The War Games.  They find themselves on a planetoid where there is a sort of cyberman monument where a mysterious treasure lies, behind a maze of traps and logic puzzles.  It is time to face The Last of the Cybermen.  We’ve seen the 6th Doctor interact with a fictional version of Jamie before, and briefly meet an older Zoe, but this is a full-on adventure with all three of them, and it’s a lot of fun.  And best of all, it really feels like a 2nd Doctor story; even the music track evokes the late 60’s ambiance.

First off, the relationship built between the 6th Doctor and Jamie is a lot of fun: they get pretty adversarial, even to throwing punches at one point early on.  Zoe ends up being more the “adult” in this story, partly because she more readily accepts this new Doctor and moves on, and partly because her genius with numbers and logic pays off in dividends.  There’s even an in-universe tie between her upbringing and education and the backstory of one of the other main characters of this story – a particular school that garnered a dark reputation after a pro-Cyberman movement started up there, in which a group of people believed that humanity needed to be more calculating and logic-driven.

The only real downside is that Wendy Padbury doesn’t sound nearly as young as she was fifty years ago, so it was a little difficult to keep the old mental image of Zoe matched to the voice she has now.  But, you know, people age differently (and at least she was still recognizable) so that’s just an unavoidable feature of life.

The handling of the Cybermen in this story, that is, addressing the end of the great Cyber War that took place between The Invasion and Revenge of the Cybermen, was pretty interesting.  It’s been a very long time since I’ve watched either of those stories, so I’m not terribly familiar with that backstory setting… plus my sense of Cyberman chronology is vague at best.  Still, this was a good entry for this classic villainous race, and works well with the lore established in the show, telling a part of their story that hadn’t been explored before.  I bet if I were to catch up on some of the other Cyberman stories from Big Finish, like the miniseries spin off, Cyberman, I’d find more world-building references to appreciate.

As in the previous story of this trilogy, the Doctor is cautious about his involvement in his own past, and goes through a few rounds of theorizing the purpose of his displacement.  Again, he suspects that this is a chance to correct or improve his past, preventing some failure on his part.  Still no answer is forthcoming; we have to wait for next time.

Along those lines, I have mixed feelings about the Doctor’s decision to call in the Time Lords.  He has, with Jamie, a brief conversation very similar to the one the 2nd Doctor has with him in The War Games, introducing the Time Lords and building a hypercube with the intention of calling in their help.  Though this time he bills it as turning himself in, rather than expecting to try to flee before they show up, it’s still a re-hash of that classic conversation.  I do generally like nods to classic episodes, but something about this scene was too… precise? in its recapitulation.  I was relieved when the hypercube was never sent.

The story is wrapped up with a curious bit of time travel and re-writing of history to make sure continuity is (visibly) preserved to avoid creating a paradox.  It works flawlessly except for the massive question of how the TARDIS manages to revive itself and get back to the original planetoid.  Simply “figuring out how to resolve a paradox” doesn’t energize the TARDIS, right?  So that scene stuck in my craw as a plot hole.  Unless I missed something, of course.

Anyway, it’s a good story with only a couple hiccups that I’m able to overlook.  I hope you enjoy it too!

A Comedy of Terrors

Our Second Doctor [story] of Christmas is A Comedy of Terrors, in which the 2nd Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe end up on a transport ship to a planet with a Queen Regent and a Princess, and there is some difficult history between the destination planet and the royal family.  The Princess is on her way to collect a lost heirloom that was recently unearthed, which will then symbolically finish her preparation time to be crowned as reigning Queen.  Unfortunately there is an agent in the works who is prepared to scupper the whole deal and make permanent the rift between the monarchy and this planet…

The clues are laid out pretty clearly for the reader almost from the start: there is a renegade Raxacoricofalipatorian here in disguise, conspiring to disgrace the royal family and keep the planet in servitude.  It turns out that this member of the Blatheen family has local mining interests and wants to keep turning her nasty profits under the planet’s heavily imperial taxation – a tax which the Princess intends to repeal upon her ascension to the throne.

But all that is in the background and the final reveals.  The front-and-center attention of this story is that the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe are initially mistaken for actors to star in a set of pantomimes.  While this is a funny premise for a brief misadventure, it felt a little dragged out.  Yes, I get it, the 2nd Doctor is sometimes described as a bit of a clown… we don’t have to dress him up for a pantomime to accentuate that further.  Having the three of them playing roles in short plays, and outing the Raxacoricofalipatorian (in part) by her lack of theatre-savvy took the absurdity of the story a little too high for my taste.

The Christmas connection was less central to this story, too.  In fact, it was not even truly necessary to the story at all… the Princess just happened to be arriving around Christmastime, and the pantomime has some precedent as an English Christmas tradition.  But in the end this ended up more like a number of the New Who Christmas Specials… silly for the sake of being silly, and only tenuously connected to the Christmas holidays.

The Five Dimensional Man

In a classic 1950’s science-fiction style, The Five Dimensional Man is narrated on an external layer by an American voice as if its main character, Betty Brown, had written a shocking story of aliens and space travel of her own.  She’s an aspiring writer, after all, not just a proper 1950’s American housewife.

To her fascination and excitement, a young woman – Zoe – materialises in her house and tells her about the mad plot she was escaping from.  They go over how they might be able to return her to the future, but the Doctor surprises them both by showing up in the TARDIS (able to track a gizmo Zoe was holding) and then returning via the Fast Return Switch.  Betty goes with them, partly because she really wants to get a taste of real space travel, and partly because they realize that she’d be invisible to the robots on the space station as she’s not in their databanks.

A mad scientist has spliced himself with a giant millipede.  He plans to use his space station and his powers to transform the human race.  His robots are kind of useless most of the time.  Nevertheless, it takes the combined distracting forces of the 2nd Doctor, Jamie, Zoe, and Betty to stop the man.

In the end, Betty is returned safely home, and is inspired to begin writing at last!

Shadow of Death

The 2013 special, Destiny of the Doctor, continues with its second story Shadow of Death.  Here, the 2nd Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe arrive on a barren planet orbiting a pulsar which gives off time distortions due to its extreme gravity.  They’re exploring a strange facility in which a group of human explorers are on a long-term mission of discovery on this planet.  Outside the facility, time is moving very slowly; inside is synchronized with normal space away from the pulsar.  A series of quakes have damaged the facility, however, and time leakage is creeping in – ageing to death one of the crew before Jamie’s eyes!

The big mystery occupying this story, thus, is the nature of the time leakage, which seems to move with an intelligence and purpose.  Eventually the Doctor comes in contact with it, and it turns out to be the “Quiet Ones” – the theorized inhabitants of the planet whom the explorers were trying to study.  Apparently they live in a different time stream (not unlike the phenomenon encountered in a Short Trip from 2010), which accidentally results in the death of humans on contact; the Doctor however is able to survive it because he has a “special relationship with time.”  Although the 2nd Doctor never revealed his Time Lord heritage until the end of his travels (in The War Games), this story comes close to him admitting it.

Another curious moment in this story is when the Doctor is trying to escape the spreading time leakage: he receives a message via psychic paper from a future incarnation – the 11th Doctor – who encourages him to return to the control room and investigate the Quiet Ones.  Doing so ultimately brings him to the peaceful conclusion of the story, even though he spends “several years” with them compared to Jamie and Zoe’s few minutes at the end of the story.  This intervention from the 11th Doctor suggests that he was one of the meddling forces in the previous story also.

On the whole, this story didn’t particularly stand out to me as anything special.  It’s just another nearly-one-hour audio story.  But I must say that Frazer Hines (Jamie) does a fantastic job reading it!  It didn’t take long before I could visualize the 2nd Doctor, his imitation of Patrick Troughton’s voice was so good.  So that made an average story into an excellent listening experience.

The British Invasion

At the moment, my memory of the 2nd Doctor is perhaps the weakest.  I haven’t watched any of his stories for over a decade, and have only had brief exposure to his character in a novel and a Short Trip or two recently.  So as I listened to The British Invasion I was struck by his sneakiness.  He made a plot, unknown to his companions and the audience, carried it out to defeat his opponent, even using unwitting Jamie in the process.  It was a manipulation worthy of the 7th Doctor!

The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe arrive at the Festival of Britain in 1951.  They explore the exhibits and discover a space radio transmitter/receiver that isn’t working as billed.  The woman overseeing it is upset and gladly accepts their help.  It’s a touching tale, and Jamie resonates with her plight as he feels particularly small and insignificant seeing his future, where the Jacobite cause for which he’d fought seems to have amounted to nothing.  But then, of course, there’s an alien plot behind radio exhibit.  It turns out that a Vardan vanguard is present, plotting to restore its power and take over the British airwaves to conquer the galaxy with ideas.  Vardans, as you can read at the link, are creatures of pure energy that typically exist in waveforms but can inhabit corporeal forms.  It’s one of the more abstract aliens invented in the 70’s, but as usual they get a more scientific sort of explanation and treatment here in Big Finish.

Perhaps my favorite thing about this Short Trip was the attention it gave to the reactions of Jamie and Zoe to their visit to 1950’s London.  For Jamie it was a future where his cause was forgotten, and English propaganda reigns supreme.  For Zoe it was a curious look into her race’s past, and the ‘ordinary’ life of people in a common society.

Again, I’m noticing with this, and many other Short Trips, that even the standard companion characters are often given judicious introductions, such that even if you’ve never encountered that Doctor or those companions before, you get to know them well enough to follow the short story.  Especially for the early years of Doctor Who and the newest generation of fans, this is a helpful feature indeed.

Lepidoptery for Beginners

Lepidoptery for Beginners is perhaps the longest Short Trip I’ve heard yet, clocking in at just over 40 minutes.  Thematically it’s very similar to The Wings of a Butterfly, as it explores Chaos Theory’s “butterfly effect”, tracing how a chain events starting with innocuous little things can have catastrophic results.  But where the latter story is about the Doctor playing with a planet’s history in order to undo its destruction, this story is about someone else playing with history in order to destroy the Doctor.

Genius mathematician Iolas Blue has developed a sort of anti-chaos theory: by examining the successive causes of events, the randomness of the universe can actually be perfectly measured and predicted.  He builds a supercomputer, The Predicticon, to aid him in this project, and discovers that he is destined to rule the universe thanks to his ability to predict the future and edit history accordingly.  The only snag in the plan is that, apparently, the (2nd) Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe would eventually turn up and destroy him, so he has the Predicticon work out how to set up a chain of events that will lead to their deaths.

And so the bulk of the runtime is comprised of the Doctor and friends either being foiled by Iolas’ pre-planned schemes, or predictably trying to escape, and Iolas gloating like a melodramatic 1960’s villain.  Indeed the whole mood of this story, both in its confident approach to science fiction and its comical melodrama, evokes the 1960’s feel of televised story-telling.  It sounds like it should be a 2nd Doctor story, and would be rather silly if it featured, say, the 8th Doctor instead.  This is probably both a strength and a weakness to this Short Trip – if you’re already familiar with the early years of Doctor Who, then this is a good match for the tone of the show you already know and love.  If you’re primarily a New Who fan and just discovering Classic Who, this could either be charming or silly, depending upon your temperament and taste.

The ending, in which Iolas’ plan to kill the TARDIS crew fails and backfires, is a little predictable.  In fact, it’s somewhat guilty of an overused trope.  But I don’t need to spoil it for you.  Short Trips are very inexpensive, so check it out and judge for yourself!

Legend of the Cybermen

The first story of this trilogy was subtly showing signs of anachronism and legend-becoming-life.  The second story was clearly a sequence of one fiction after another.  But now that the cat’s out of the bag, The Wreck of the Titan‘s ending revealing that the Doctor and Jamie are in the Land of Fiction, we get to go all out: Alice Little, Count Dracula, Faeries, The Artful Dodger, Rob Roy MacGreggor back from City of Spires, Castles Frankenstein and Camelot… all combine together into one superfiction in which the residents of the Land of Fiction are caught in a desperate fight to turn back an invasion of the Cybermen!

Now the drilling for ink in City of Spires and the harvesting of squid ink in The Wreck of the Titan is clarified: it is in vats of this ink that new fictional characters are reborn after their deaths.  Keeping the literal “blood of the land” flowing was necessary for their continued war effort against the ever-advancing Cybermen.

Along with this revelation comes another one: the Mistress, the mastermind behind the Land of Fiction’s defense against the Cybermen, is none other than Zoe Heriot.  And along the way we also confirm the uncomfortable suspicion: Jamie himself is an unknowing resident of the Land of Fiction, apparently created by Zoe in order to keep the Doctor on track to meet her and help defeat the Cybermen.

It’s a rollicking good time, this story, with all the fictional characters breaking their own fourth wall because Zoe gave them free will.  As the Cybermen take over the computer mainframe of the Land they begin messing with “consensual perception” – effectively transforming the world and the “story” around individual characters in order to neutralize them – and for one brief moment our fourth wall is broken as Jamie is in a sound booth being directed by Nicholas Briggs and recorded by Toby the Sound Engineer while the Cybermen try to get him to speak/write himself out of existence.

There is only one disappointment in this story that stands out in memory, and that’s the concept of the Land of Fiction itself.  There seem to be two explanations as to what it is.

1. It is a computer simulation.  The Master (or in this case Mistress) of the Land of Fiction is plugged into a supercomputer and able to create, change, and otherwise maintain the Land of Fiction.  It’s a bit wonky explaining how other real people get drawn into it, and what the White Void around the Land is, but the concept at least works for us – a modern audience.
2. It is a metaphysical realm outside our universe.  By conquering the Land of Fiction, the Cybermen aim to destroy Fiction itself, and the characters inside (including the Doctor when he finds out what’s going on) are fighting for their survival because they’re destroyed then the human race will lose its ability to conceive of fiction and they’ll end up as unimaginative drones – just like the Cybermen.

How these theories line up is unclear to me.  The TARDIS Wiki prefers the second explanation, though it’s still treated as the first in a few of its references.

But if you can overlook the inherently wonky idea of a Land of Fiction that has some metanarrative link to the human subconsciousness, then you’ve got here a really entertaining story bringing this, one of the most tight-knit of trilogies, to a close.