Glad people are enjoying the extras content! Thanks for everyones kind words on the music and sound design, feeling the love.
Thanks
Rob
Loved the music in this and like others I was
very happy that we got such insightful extras in this way that showed the entire creative process from all parts of the production.
Fields of TerrorLike some others have said, this one didn't wow me so much because it didn't feel like much of a
Companion Chronicle. Vicki narrates the events, but she doesn't really do anything or have any deep insights into what's going on. Steven is also a wallflower in this one, which is
very uncharacteristic. It feels like it's an
Early Adventure with just fewer cast members, but even then the TARDIS crew is just far too static. Thankfully, Robert Hands' Lagrange is so wonderfully charismatic. It's amazing how he can say such horrific things and be so magnetic while doing so. It feeds well into the theme of the story. All-in-all this was a story about tension, but it felt like with everyone so static that we were just waiting for the ending to arrive. There wasn't a lot to hold the attention other than Hands' performance on the way there. I also have no clue why Nicole was in the story. I thought that she was going to end up being significant, but nope.
I do enjoy Maureen O'Brien's performance as Vicki, and her Nicole was quite good as well. You can tell that she's spent a lot of time in France, because her accent is spot on. I just have a hard time with her doing male voices. Her first Doctor doesn't sound anything like him nor does it hold any of the mannerisms that he had. I was also disappointed with her Steven, which sounded like the most generic male voice imaginable. You'd think after working with Purves so much in the last few years that she'd be able to do a better job than that.
{Spoiler}
It annoyed me when Vicki from the 24th century suggests that there may be creatures lurking in 18th century France unknown to the science of her time. That seemed a bit much. While I appreciated the "Scooby Doo" nature of the villain and appreciated that more than it being some monster or alien, I would have preferred that the speculation about monsters be limited to Lagrange's men. If Vicki had suggested that maybe it was an alien stuck on Earth that would have made far more sense. Definitely glad that they went this way, though, because I always feel like psuedo historicals in the first Doctor's era should be very rare.
Across the Darkened CityI felt like they missed a trick with this one. I think this would have been a far more interesting story if it had been set between "The First Wave" and "The Massacre". It would have been nice to have Steven dealing with his grief after "The Daleks Master Plan", and since Vicki doesn't factor into the story at all they wouldn't have needed to change much at the bookends. Still, it's not a big deal and they probably felt that a Steven who'd gone through Masterplan would probably be too jaded to warm up to a Dalek this quickly.
I loved this one. It felt like a real
Companion Chronicle because we got to learn a lot about Steven. I also liked that for most of the story it was just Steven and the Dalek. That kept things very intimate and it meant that the actors could focus on their particular roles. I also really liked that they used Terry Nationesque names like Shade and The Chaons. It made me grin every time.
Purves really gets to shine in this one because much like in "The Massacre", Steven gets to take the lead role. I love his ingenuity, and I love his moral indignation and outrage about the Daleks. Sadly, it seemed to be so much more apparent in this one than in previous stories that he's getting on in years. Usually his Steven sounds just like his 1960's self, but this time I could hear the age in his voice. Still, his narration is excellent and he's a fantastic actor, so it's not a huge drop in quality. Nick Briggs also does a fantastic job making 210 a little more interesting than your typical Dalek. There's a little more nuance here than we're used to, which is why Steven read so much into it's words and actions.
The whole pivot that the story twists upon with them constantly making you guess whether Steven or the Dalek will betray each other or work together is fantastic. They really do keep you guessing until the final moments.
Three nits - Turning a spaceship with artificial gravity upside-down will do nothing. Why invent the Chaons when you already have the Mim? Why do energy absorbing monsters not drain a transmat capable of beaming people across
galaxies? The power on that must be enormous. That seemed awfully convenient.
It sounds like I'm alone in not liking the fanjodrellish ending. It felt like a desperate grab to make this story more important somehow when it didn't need it. I would have preferred an ambivalent ending because anything out of the narration no longer feels like a CC, and I feel that leaving it to the listener's imagination would have been better. If they insisted on giving us more I'd have preferred just leaving it with the pre-credit sequence.
{Spoiler}
Making this story into some kind of gauntlet seems bogus. Do Daleks not believe in statistical variance? If this was a test, why did the Daleks have prisoners? Why did the Daleks create impure genetic variants in the first place? The whole thing doesn't pass the smell test.
The Bonfires of the Vanities
This one is all about the performances before the story is so bare bones. Anneke and Elliot are amazing in this. They do Ben and Polly like we know that they can, but they both also do amazingly well as the first Doctor. Anneke's Doctor is already better than O'Brien's and Marsh's and Elliot's is in the same class as Purves and Russell. I think his is actually the most technically accurate Hartnell that we've had yet. The other two actors do their own takes on the role, but Chapman is clearly playing the performance as Hartnell would have, which is very nice to hear.
The librarian, Mary is pretty cool and there's some nice, if obvious messaging, but this one falls so incredibly flat for me because the villain is so bogus.
{Spoiler}
So we're supposed to believe that this alien has held a grudge for 100 years but never thought that the humans might fight back and harm him again? I thought for sure that he must have a trump card, but no he didn't. Then after all that he just needs a firm talking to and everything's ok?
At the end, the story just fizzles out instead of actually ending, which was disappointing.
This is another one that felt like it squandered the opportunity to do a
Companion Chronicle. We get a lot of narration, but there's nothing that really focuses on Ben and Polly or gives them a significant moment in their lives. I wish that they'd do more framing sequences because I feel like most of the best CC's use that to help add context to the story. I also felt like creating an "excuse" for the Ben/Polly/first Doctor gap was extremely unnecessary. Big Finish has used far less plausible gaps (the gap between episodes 7 and 8 of "The Daleks Master Plan" comes to mind) without any need for an outside force to "create" a gap and if the timeline had been changed their memories of seeing snow on the scanner would have changed as well, so the whole thing felt kind of poorly done. Oh well, at least we will have more Ben/Polly/first Doctor stories.
The Plague of Dreams
I don't think that I've enjoyed the conceit for a framing sequence this much since Steven and Vicki decided to do their own audio adventures in "The Suffering". At first I thought we were going to see the ole Gods of Ragnorok and this one did have a very "Greatest Show of the Galaxy" feel to it. I liked the way that the story played with the idea of performance and performers while having some meta commentary on creating Big Finish audio adventures. It really helped because the plot for this one wouldn't have listed 30 minutes without having the framing sequence to pad it out, but this is the best kind of padding, the kind that has a life of its own and has its own story to tell, so I don't mind.
Chapman and Wills are once again great, although I felt this time Wills' performance as the first Doctor isn't as good. I wonder if they were recorded out of sequence. This time at time he sounded decidedly more like her impression of the second Doctor. I like Chapman's Player who i think threads the needle between being mysterious and being annoying. He gets it to just the right level where the character is enigmatic, but not annoying. I also loved some of the dream creations. I hope that those are preview of upcoming
Early Adventures.
Of course the whole thing leads up to a fanjodrell ending, which I wasn't that big of a fan of. The whole "arc" nature of the box set felt completely unnecessary. Not only did we not need an excuse to utilize the Ben/Polly/First Doctor gap but the arc was so vestigial to the other three stories as to be a waste of time. Listening to these with my wife, she just found the distortion effects annoying. They didn't add anything to the experience. I also rather like the idea that the Doctor just ends up dying of old age in
The Tenth Planet. The idea that there was some kind of choice here is silly because they'd already established that the Doctor was weak and dying anyway. I guess he could have chosen to go die somewhere else, but why? Also, why would the Daleks use such a roundabout way of interfering with his timeline? This has just as much risk of making him an even worse foe for them than it does of weakening him. It felt like it was added just as an excuse of making this an "arc", and I strongly disagree with Atkins that these box sets need to have an arc or a theme. Just have them be four Companion Chronicles. That's all. If the stories are good, we'll listen.
For more of my thoughts on these you can go
here.