MR 41: Nekromanteia (Spoilers)

The unfortunate truth is that reality tends to be considerably more horrific than anything any writer can come up with.

I finished this today. Let me start with the positives - The concept and the story wasn’t too bad, even probably interesting.. but that’s just it. The only plus that I could find. The end result was that it gave me a headache. All the screaming and screeching got on my nerves. Overdone in my opinion. I can’t stand too much of noise and hence the headache. And the way Erimem was treated - again overboard. I don’t tolerate stories with crime against women or for that matter any violence beyond a certain limit.
A decent plot with a messy execution.
Now i’m listening to Caerdroia to recover from it

This was released in February 2003, not 2017.

So I listened to it and guess what? I was actually bored!! I thought I would have a lot of different responses to this one, but I just thought it was a bad story and it bored me. It felt like the author was using the violence to try an make it interesting because he had no idea how else to do it. It didn't work.

While not the worst Big Finish Doctor Who story I can think of, it's certainly in the bottom 5%

Go for it if you have a high tolerance threshold for -
1. Noise. Loads of it - screeching
2. Violence and sexual abuse - a lot of it was unnecessary
3. Story going no-where after a point.
To give due credit, the concept was interesting and the last 5 minutes were the most bearable part of the entire duration. (Reviewing this story feels like doing a performance review of grossly under-performing team members where you need to dig out their positives and project them before discussing points of improvement   )

Such things are emotionally conflicting When you are their boss and you have to choose among your team for ratings and increments. That calls for difficult decisions at times

Nekromanteia definitely feels like a story that could've used a rewrite. Grimdark pretty much sums it up.

It's got an interesting central concept: undead witches worshipping the skeleton of a long-preserved physicist, but it's got its problems. The Fifth Doctor is almost optimistic to a fault, but I have a hard time believing that he'd be naive enough -- particularly in this part of his life -- to walk straight into a decapitation without any kind of backup plan. An effective cliffhanger, but we could've gotten there without the idiot ball. Peri's characterisation seems to take a few steps backward from Eye and Crown. Unfortunately, she's much closer to her more ineffectual television counterpart than what she grew into on audio. Erimem's assault lacks any sort of catharsis, it's not used to explore her character in any way, but just as a moment of shock horror.

I think it falls into a very common trap that turns up in fiction where dark subject matter automatically equals good storytelling. "Dark" in this case being unpleasant characters in gritty scenarios. Just War works as well as it does because we like Benny and we care about what happens to her. Same is true of something like Watchmen, which uses its grimmer environs to deconstruct the whole concept of superheroes. Nekromanteia, on the other hand, just seems to be about meanspiritedness. It doesn't really have a focal point for all its dark moments and it suffers quite heavily because of it. It lacks the likable cast, the pathos, the clever critique, it's just nasty for the sake of nastiness.

I'm honestly very curious about the kind of story -- good story -- that could theoretically be salvaged from it.

Ohh, it rings a bell, but... Yeah, I can't place it either.

Yeah, I think it's probably one of the Fifth Doctor's most enduring traits outside of being the determinator. He's a defiant idealist, probably the most idealistic of all the Doctors (possibly beaten by Eight). He's got this inherent moral "goodness" that blinds him to more dubious means of gaining the advantage, mainly I think because they just don't occur to him. Resurrection of the Daleks is a bit of a watershed moment in that regard. I don't think he's a coward as Davros claims, but his assessment that the Doctor "denies what is real" when he refutes war as a universal truth really seems to get to him. I think he worries sometimes that his idealism gets in the way of saving lives. That maybe he trusts too easily.

But then, if The Caves of Androzani is anything to go by, that idealism is probably his most endearing trait as well. In Enlightenment, he doesn't badger or try to convince Turlough of his way. He simply lets him make the choice, confident in the capacity for good in others and that's ultimately how you make more of it. Kindness begetting kindness and so forth. Maybe he takes that risk because of its potential rewards and if he does get a spear through the chest, well, it's more energy devoted towards him rather than the people he's trying to protect. He puts himself first -- straight into the line of fire -- hoping that reason will win out against brute violence.