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Post by theotherjosh on Oct 9, 2016 13:02:33 GMT
I picked this one up on the strength of the recommendations in this thread, and I was not disappointed. It perfectly blended the sweetness with the steadily increasing dread. This is the kind of story that keeps me coming back to Big Finish. I had no idea where it was headed as it was unfolding, so it felt like anything could happen.
I'll give it the greatest praise I can: It makes me feel like I felt when I watched Doctor Who as a kid.
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Post by glutamodo on Oct 9, 2016 16:18:29 GMT
Due to my backlog of podcasts and other BF titles I didn't listen to this one until yesterday. I was impressed. (yes, the core concept of resurrection was maybe a bit dodgy but I let it go). I had no problems with Matthew's voice/reading of this. Thought it was one of the best Short Trips yet.
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Post by shallacatop on Apr 4, 2018 21:15:25 GMT
Gave this one a relisten this evening. It’s just fabulous, isn’t it? Matthew’s sweet, almost Winnie the Pooh-esque way of reading is a great parallel to the growing sense of dread the story portrays. As others have said, you just hang on to his every word as the plot thickens.
One of the very best Fourth Doctor titles Big Finish have put out, I think.
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Post by Ela on Sept 3, 2018 23:20:37 GMT
I listened to this for the first time this weekend. Fantastic story, well-read by Matthew Waterhouse. Really bittersweet in it's premise of an Adric who gets to live long enough to marry and have kids and grandkids, and then goes back to undo it. Loved every minute of this story. Thanks, omega, for the heads up about the behind the scenes notes. I often forget to look for those.
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Post by omega on Sept 3, 2018 23:28:56 GMT
I listened to this for the first time this weekend. Fantastic story, well-read by Matthew Waterhouse. Really bittersweet in it's premise of an Adric who gets to live long enough to marry and have kids and grandkids, and then goes back to undo it. Loved every minute of this story. Thanks, omega, for the heads up about the behind the scenes notes. I often forget to look for those. The behind the scenes notes are very rare now. The Main Range gave up on them several years ago.
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Post by Ela on Sept 3, 2018 23:48:01 GMT
Actually, I don't think that's true. I've seen behind the scene notes on a few recent releases, including the most recent main range releases.
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Post by Kestrel on Sept 28, 2020 10:50:59 GMT
Hm... this one is pretty enjoyable overall, but definitely loses points for being an almost-beat-for-beat copy of DS9: The Visitor. To the point where I'm honestly surprised Big Finish okay'd the script. The actual mechanism may be different from the random temporal energy thingy in DS9, but they don't exactly do much with the idea of the dead coming back to life--it's just a device to kill off the Doctor and Romana.
And as strong as the voice performance is, the emotional resonance of the conclusion... just isn't there. We don't really get the sense that Adric, or anyone else, has lost anything with the Doctor and/or Romana's death. He seemed to be doing pretty okay! As was the world, and the universe. The script can say, "The universe needs the Doctor," but does nothing to justify it. And it is a pale, toothless imitation of the boy who needed his father.
on the face of it, there's nothing wrong exactly with taking someone else's story and rewriting it... Just look at George R. R. Martin... but if you do that, you need to add something unique or interesting. Otherwise there's no point, and it just seems lazy.
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Post by BHTvsTFC on Sept 28, 2020 20:46:23 GMT
I love the score and it's eerie and worth a listen as the extra. I have a soft spot for Adric and the story really fits into the Season Eighteen mould. Decay is all around.
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Post by barnabaslives on Sept 29, 2020 4:27:33 GMT
I kind of got hung up on the technical and ethical aspects a little when I first heard it because it is a strong story in that sense but I don't think the format lent it justice there, but as far as I'm concerned the only thing I really wanted it to add to Adric's story is time and that I think it does beautifully.
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Post by relativetime on Sept 29, 2020 10:01:25 GMT
Hm... this one is pretty enjoyable overall, but definitely loses points for being an almost-beat-for-beat copy of DS9: The Visitor. To the point where I'm honestly surprised Big Finish okay'd the script. The actual mechanism may be different from the random temporal energy thingy in DS9, but they don't exactly do much with the idea of the dead coming back to life--it's just a device to kill off the Doctor and Romana. And as strong as the voice performance is, the emotional resonance of the conclusion... just isn't there. We don't really get the sense that Adric, or anyone else, has lost anything with the Doctor and/or Romana's death. He seemed to be doing pretty okay! As was the world, and the universe. The script can say, "The universe needs the Doctor," but does nothing to justify it. And it is a pale, toothless imitation of the boy who needed his father. on the face of it, there's nothing wrong exactly with taking someone else's story and rewriting it... Just look at George R. R. Martin... but if you do that, you need to add something unique or interesting. Otherwise there's no point, and it just seems lazy. I think this is a story that needs to be understood in the context of everything that WE know happens to Adric after this story. It’s the tragedy that Adric did get to grow up and live a happy life, but not our Adric; that he grew to a point in his life where he could make that kind of a decision but not our Adric; and it’s a story about learning to move on from grief for a character who we know has lost a loved one on screen but our Adric only just got to the point where he could move on. I think this story humanizes Adric in a way no other story has before or since. We never really got stories like this on TV for really any of the companions in the 80s - and CERTAINLY not Adric. It could be argued this story also turns Adric into the most important character of the latter day Fourth Doctor era and the entire Fifth Doctor era because without him, none of it would have happened.
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Post by Max Kashevsky on Sept 29, 2020 11:34:08 GMT
Hm... this one is pretty enjoyable overall, but definitely loses points for being an almost-beat-for-beat copy of DS9: The Visitor.I see what you're saying, but DS9 isn't exactly the first story to do a "what if the protagonist died and the side character had to live on in ways that break the format" sorta story. Also, while the Doctor as Adric's father character is a parallel, I mean, it's not like the Doctor keeps reappearing in a ghostly way. So I think they're more than different enough from each other.
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Post by Kestrel on Oct 2, 2020 1:12:57 GMT
It's a little more than that... in both cases we have the child-among-adults lose their father figure, go on to live a "full" life, and then decide to sacrifice that life/erase the timeline in order to restore that father figure. This worked in The Visitor because we got to see how much Sisko's absence affected Jake's life -- it was a good life, but the trauma of his father's death never went away. He was never allowed to heal. When he decides to restore the timeline, it's a very emotionally impactful moment because we've seen just -why- it's so important to him that he make this sacrifice. It's a brilliant example of tragic writing. Here, however, we see Adric live a normal life... blissfully unaffected by the Doctor's death. He moves on and lives a normal life, and therefore has no -personal- reason to restore the timeline for us the empathize with, nor is there any grander, universal reason for him to do so. That's why the story feels like cheap mimicry -- a copy of a better story where all of the changes only make the story worse. relativetime certainly has a point that much of the impact of this story comes from external context: it's interesting for us to see this glimpse of Adric living a full life precisely because we know he won't get a second go of it. He thinks he's sacrificing a timeline, we know he's really sacrificing his life. But the thing is... that's external to the story being told here, and I'm not really a fan of judging a story's quality by anything outside of the text. It either works by itself, or it doesn't. I also think it's problematic--even for Big Finish, and yes I say this knowing exactly what we're all like--for a story to expect that metacontextual knowledge from its audience or, worse, demand it. I don't think it's terribly unusual for Big Finish, but it is unfortunate: to me, this was another one of those stories that is enjoyable primarily due to a powerful performance (Matt Waterhouse knocks this script out of the park) but remove that performance, and there's not much substance to it.
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Post by elkawho on Oct 3, 2020 14:02:41 GMT
I don't think it's terribly unusual for Big Finish, but it is unfortunate: to me, this was another one of those stories that is enjoyable primarily due to a powerful performance (Matt Waterhouse knocks this script out of the park) but remove that performance, and there's not much substance to it. I have never seen The Visitor so I can't comment on that. All I know is that I love this story. Of course this one is all about the performance. It's a small character piece about what could have been. A way to see how Adric could have grown up into a man the Doctor could be proud of. There is no big bad in this. Just a young man having to grow up in a strange land alone, and what he learns as he grows. I agree that Waterhouse does knock it out of the park, but I don't agree about the substance of the script. I'm not a writer, but I don't believe it's easy to write such a beautiful story full of exposition that doesn't have a moment of tediousness. This is a story that tells it's audience, "Yes we understand that you may have not liked Adric, but you are wrong. He's a character worth knowing." Waterhouse was a relatively new addition to the Big Finish Doctor Who community, and it was a wonderful way of countering the years of people talking about how bad that character was. I came to Classic Doctor Who late as compared to most of you and I didn't hate Adric as much as some, but I did see how the character had been lacking and was never really used as well as he could be. This story and Iterations of I really changed all that for me.
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Post by Kestrel on Oct 5, 2020 6:33:25 GMT
When I say it lacks substance, I ,ran that it's a tragic story that doesn't contain the necessary legwork for that tragedy to work--you have to pull that in from external stories. Which is fine, I suppose, it's just not an approach I enjoy--it feels more appropriate in the realm of fanfiction, or direct sequels, than standalone stories.
I forget the set it was in... possibly The Light at the End(?) but there was a somewhat-similar story called The Death of Jo Grant. {Spoiler}In it, we also see a companion, at the final downward slope of their life's arc, sacrifice their life in order to preserve the Doctor's. With the usual timey-wimeyness, of course. What really makes the story work is the relationship--somewhat toxic as it was--between Jo and the Doctor being reproduced in the text of the story before ultimately being transformed. Basically, before Jo sacrifices her life, we see the Doctor treat her like crap (as he so often did in the TV show), only to realize and acknowledge her worth at the end.
It was a transformative story that reshaped my own understanding and appreciation of a companion I otherwise thought very little of. And it put in the "legwork" to remind me why I didn't care for the character in the first place. So that the story itself could be fully self-contained. A Full Life doesn't really do this. It's interesting and powerful in places, yes, but it fails to properly set up its own pins, if you don't mind a tortured metaphor, and therefore stumbles when it comes time to knock them down.
Perhaps this is simply an unavoidable consequence of the Short Trips format, and A Full Life would have been better fleshed-out in a Main Range or special release story.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 9, 2021 15:27:57 GMT
Tis great. Can’t really say a bad word against it, thoroughly enjoyed it. Very excited for Watchers now as Waterhouses narration here was great
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