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Post by omega on Aug 14, 2017 8:21:05 GMT
DOCTOR WHO - MAIN RANGE » 180. 1963: THE ASSASSINATION GAMES Released November 2013SynopsisLondon. The end of November, 1963. A time of change. The old guard are being swept away by the white heat of technology. Political scandals are the talk of the town. Britain tries to maintain its international role; fanatics assassinate charismatic politicians and Group Captain Ian Gilmore is trying to get his fledgling Counter-Measures unit off the ground. When his life is saved by a familiar umbrella-bearing figure, he knows something terrible is going on. Whilst Rachel investigates an enigmatic millionaire and Allison goes undercover in an extremist organisation, Gilmore discovers a sinister plot with roots a century old. The Doctor and Ace are back in town. A new dawn is coming. It's time for everyone… to see the Light. Written By: John Dorney Directed By: Ken Bentley CASTSylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Sophie Aldred (Ace), Simon Williams (Group Captain Gilmore), Pamela Salem (Rachel Jensen), Karen Gledhill (Allison Williams), Hugh Ross (Sir Toby Kinsella), Oliver Cotton (Sir Gideon Vale/Handler), Gemma Saunders (Eleanor Vale/Amanda Caulfield), Gerald Kyd (Martin Regan/Sir Robert Devere/Mulryne), Alisdair Simpson (Sir Francis White/Ritchie)
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Post by omega on Aug 14, 2017 8:26:05 GMT
I really to love this one. It feels a lot like a Counter-Measures story guest starring the Seventh Doctor and Ace, with the political intrigue being more at the forefront than the alien nature perpetrators. Each character gets their time to shine without being overshadowed by the others, which can be tricky when you get crossover stories in spin-offs. There's a nice little joke about Professor Jensen not being into the Bond films, when Pamela Salem was a Bond girl.
The cliffhangers are all excellent, taking the story into into new areas. The one for Part Three is especially good because it's not about the Doctor or companion in danger, or a plot swerving revelation, but the Doctor leading the charge to go save the world.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2017 9:41:10 GMT
It's got that wonderful feeling of late 80s doing early 60s as well. There's much to like about it, everything from the manouvering of the characters, the rather eerie nature of the Light and I think The Assassination Games might be one of my most favourite titles for a Big Finish release. It's wonderfully evocative. Just the right blend of that Season 26 wit and an almost New Adventures spark of complexity. A lovely entry for all concerned.
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Post by omega on Aug 14, 2017 10:08:56 GMT
It's got that wonderful feeling of late 80s doing early 60s as well. There's much to like about it, everything from the manouvering of the characters, the rather eerie nature of the Light and I think The Assassination Games might be one of my most favourite titles for a Big Finish release. It's wonderfully evocative. Just the right blend of that Season 26 wit and an almost New Adventures spark of complexity. A lovely entry for all concerned. This trilogy has another of my five star releases, Fanfare for the Common Men. As for the tone, dorney gets it spot on. The Doctor is never the master manipulator, and indeed it sounds like he gets a kick out of solving the pieces of the conspiracy. Ace doesn't have any emotional baggage, and is a breath of fresh air. I love the sequence where she's driving the motorcycle with the Doctor onboard, and she says she's a great driver only in a very unassuring way (she never passed her test, but was out of hospital after several months). |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2017 10:27:16 GMT
It's got that wonderful feeling of late 80s doing early 60s as well. There's much to like about it, everything from the manouvering of the characters, the rather eerie nature of the Light and I think The Assassination Games might be one of my most favourite titles for a Big Finish release. It's wonderfully evocative. Just the right blend of that Season 26 wit and an almost New Adventures spark of complexity. A lovely entry for all concerned. This trilogy has another of my five star releases, Fanfare for the Common Men. As for the tone, dorney gets it spot on. The Doctor is never the master manipulator, and indeed it sounds like he gets a kick out of solving the pieces of the conspiracy. Ace doesn't have any emotional baggage, and is a breath of fresh air. I love the sequence where she's driving the motorcycle with the Doctor onboard, and she says she's a great driver only in a very unassuring way (she never passed her test, but was out of hospital after several months). Well, it is internally consistent; the Doctor took umbrage at Ace's driving in Remembrance as well. I like how you can see certain threads pulling together, it's all moving towards that inevitable end point, but they're not quite there yet. Aside from the scene towards the end where a member of the Light sacrifices themselves to ensure that the Doctor's party cannot talk their way out of a firefight, I'd say that I really, really enjoyed Allison being reprogrammed. I have no idea if it was intentional or not, but it practically breathed The IPCRESS File. In fact, a lot of this story does. That's a fantastic achievement. |
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Post by omega on Aug 14, 2017 11:00:39 GMT
This trilogy has another of my five star releases, Fanfare for the Common Men. As for the tone, dorney gets it spot on. The Doctor is never the master manipulator, and indeed it sounds like he gets a kick out of solving the pieces of the conspiracy. Ace doesn't have any emotional baggage, and is a breath of fresh air. I love the sequence where she's driving the motorcycle with the Doctor onboard, and she says she's a great driver only in a very unassuring way (she never passed her test, but was out of hospital after several months). Well, it is internally consistent; the Doctor took umbrage at Ace's driving in Remembrance as well. I like how you can see certain threads pulling together, it's all moving towards that inevitable end point, but they're not quite there yet. Aside from the scene towards the end where a member of the Light sacrifices themselves to ensure that the Doctor's party cannot talk their way out of a firefight, I'd say that I really, really enjoyed Allison being reprogrammed. I have no idea if it was intentional or not, but it practically breathed The IPCRESS File. In fact, a lot of this story does. That's a fantastic achievement. I remember that scene. The Doctor was explaining the origins of the Daleks to Ace, the truck goes through a tunnel and they've swapped seats. Mind control brings to mind The Manchurian Candidate. Mental conditioning is an interesting subject that got a lot of use in the 60's. A few Counter-Measures stories have used it. In a way that's what propaganda, like that used in the Cold War, was meant to do. East vs West, the fear of Communism. Mind control was a fairly popular trope in spy stories I believe. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2017 11:32:02 GMT
I remember that scene. The Doctor was explaining the origins of the Daleks to Ace, the truck goes through a tunnel and they've swapped seats. Mind control brings to mind The Manchurian Candidate. Mental conditioning is an interesting subject that got a lot of use in the 60's. A few Counter-Measures stories have used it. In a way that's what propaganda, like that used in the Cold War, was meant to do. East vs West, the fear of Communism. Mind control was a fairly popular trope in spy stories I believe. Oh, the banter's great. Comedic without being farcical: The Manchurian Candidate is definitely the most famous example of it, 1960s spy and science fiction both employed it quite a bit. That and various kinds of "rays". I'm not sure what it was about that period, but light beams were almost like that decade's version of the microchip. The Avengers, The Man from UNCLE and UFO, in particular, all employ the idea of psychological conditioning as a means of subversion. Danger Man demonstrated what happened when a man was broken and not reconditioned, he wasn't quite whole anymore. Captain Scarlet treated it as literal murder tactic where the original is destroyed and replaced by a perfect duplicate fashioned to respond to sabotage efforts. It wasn't just on television either, Ian Fleming had Bond reconditioned by Russian intelligence to assassinate M in the literary version of The Man with the Golden Gun and Fu Manchu was a noted master of hypnotism. It was absolutely everywhere. I wonder if it was the proliferation of ideas like psychedelia that lead to people pondering whether it could be used for military applications. |
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Post by omega on Aug 14, 2017 11:42:45 GMT
I remember that scene. The Doctor was explaining the origins of the Daleks to Ace, the truck goes through a tunnel and they've swapped seats. Mind control brings to mind The Manchurian Candidate. Mental conditioning is an interesting subject that got a lot of use in the 60's. A few Counter-Measures stories have used it. In a way that's what propaganda, like that used in the Cold War, was meant to do. East vs West, the fear of Communism. Mind control was a fairly popular trope in spy stories I believe. Oh, the banter's great. Comedic without being farcical: The Manchurian Candidate is definitely the most famous example of it, 1960s spy and science fiction both employed it quite a bit. That and various kinds of "rays". I'm not sure what it was about that period, but light beams were almost like that decade's version of the microchip. The Avengers, The Man from UNCLE and UFO, in particular, all employ the idea of psychological conditioning as a means of subversion. Danger Man demonstrated what happened when a man was broken and not reconditioned, he wasn't quite whole anymore. Captain Scarlet treated it as literal murder tactic where the original is destroyed and replaced by a perfect duplicate fashioned to respond to sabotage efforts. It wasn't just on television either, Ian Fleming had Bond reconditioned by Russian intelligence to assassinate M in the literary version of The Man with the Golden Gun and Fu Manchu was a noted master of hypnotism. It was absolutely everywhere. I wonder if it was the proliferation of ideas like psychedelia that lead to people pondering whether it could be used for military applications. The 60's were big on ridiculous spy capers. I like Get Smart, which sent up a lots of spy tropes at the time. In one episode Max made the robot his best man, and Hymie was used to sneak a bomb into CONTROL headquarters. In an earlier Hymie appearance Max told him to act naturally. He copied everything Max did. The 60's were a boom time for spy stories, and it's a genre Counter-Measures has comfortably fit in. It's ideal for mad scientists, double agents and ludicrous science, which Counter-Measures can easily say is alien technology. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2017 12:04:56 GMT
The 60's were big on ridiculous spy capers. I like Get Smart, which sent up a lots of spy tropes at the time. In one episode Max made the robot his best man, and Hymie was used to sneak a bomb into CONTROL headquarters. In an earlier Hymie appearance Max told him to act naturally. He copied everything Max did. The 60's were a boom time for spy stories, and it's a genre Counter-Measures has comfortably fit in. It's ideal for mad scientists, double agents and ludicrous science, which Counter-Measures can easily say is alien technology. It's interesting to see how the decade is bookended by the very grim (for the time period) Danger Man in 1961 and the very surreal The Prisoner in 1969. Counter-Measures feels almost like a martini-brand half-and-half of Quatermass's alien intrigue and Danger Man's earthy politics. I can't remember which story it was, but it was written by Justin Richards, one of them is a very close riff on Quatermass II with alien organisms in isolation domes. |
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Post by omega on Aug 14, 2017 12:15:44 GMT
Maybe the 60s fascination with rays was left over from the image of the future cultivated in the 50s. All jet packs, flying cars, monorails and food pills (think The Jetsons). Ray guns were popular weapons in the scifi B-movies of that era. That could stem from satellite dishes and microwave emitters, spreading radiation. That's what Dalek weaponry was early on, the screen flooded with radiation to kill or incapacitate victims. It must have been the late 70's that Dalek weapons became a directed beam of energy, like the blaster shots in Star Wars. Remembrance was also the debut of the x-ray skeleton effect of extermination.
On a practical level, rays would have been easier to incorporate with special effects.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 15, 2017 0:35:11 GMT
Maybe the 60s fascination with rays was left over from the image of the future cultivated in the 50s. All jet packs, flying cars, monorails and food pills (think The Jetsons). Ray guns were popular weapons in the scifi B-movies of that era. That could stem from satellite dishes and microwave emitters, spreading radiation. That's what Dalek weaponry was early on, the screen flooded with radiation to kill or incapacitate victims. It must have been the late 70's that Dalek weapons became a directed beam of energy, like the blaster shots in Star Wars. Remembrance was also the debut of the x-ray skeleton effect of extermination. On a practical level, rays would have been easier to incorporate with special effects. That's not a bad theory. Radioactive up until the 1970s had more focus on the word "radio" than "active" and those transmitters were still a fairly new technology at the time. On television and in film, it was essentially accomplished with a variety of light bulbs. One of the virtues of monochromatic television is that you can get away with a lot more due to that lack of colour than not. Goldfinger's laser showed what they would have likely done had they the resources to achieve it and, by the next decade, it had all proceeded along to the point where they could. Ironically, the old fashioned "burnout" of the screen has actually aged better than the blue line painted across the videotape for Dalek exterminations. |
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Post by eric009 on Aug 24, 2017 18:52:39 GMT
for me, the end of part one is one of my fav endings
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Post by Tim Bradley on Jan 19, 2021 0:04:53 GMT
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Post by slithe on Jan 23, 2021 12:43:09 GMT
Without a doubt, one of my favourite 7th Doctor stories. The style and setting fits this incarnation so well. The manipulation and intrigue is just perfect. It is the time when Britain is changing - the end of the old ways and the ushering in of a new era (we forget that the 60s weren't all The Beatles!), with lots of hidden dangers and traps along the way.
Tightly scripted and McCoy really enjoys himself here. Cast is excellent and it is great to have the Counter Measures Group back again. This would have worked well on TV. Wish BF would revisit the idea of the Doctor being a low-key MP - amazing idea. For the arch-manipulator it is the ideal role for the 7th Doctor.
With the exception of the Klein trilogy (and perhaps Subterfuge which is in a similar vein), this is one of the best 7th Doctor stories from the MR.
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Post by nitronine on Jun 5, 2021 1:26:18 GMT
Just finished relistening to this for the 3rd or 4th time and I thought it was better than ever. One thing though, what happened at the end in the epilogue? Has it ever been followed up on?
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Post by Kestrel on Oct 28, 2021 11:27:22 GMT
I think I've finally done it: I've discovered the worst John Dorney story: The Assassination Games slides down to the bottom of my (nonexistent) list with the very low score of... 4 out 5. I kid, I kid. Well, not entirely. I had a lot of fun with this story, but I also have more to criticize here than I usually do with Dorney scripts. It was one hell of a ride, but not everything landed quite so well for me as it perhaps it could or should have. So I'll just jump right in: - The opening scene with the curt, back-and-forth dialog between the two spies (Counter-Measures regulars?) has the exact same cadence as the spy skits in A Bit of Fry and Laurie. But even those skits, as I recall, were based on some old TV series--which given ABOFAL's age would've aired in the late 80s? Regardless, it made me smile and very quickly got me engaged with the story.
- And while I've said this many times before, I intend to say it again now, and repeat it as often as possible: Dorney is a master of dialog. Every character speaks with a very strong, recognizably unique voice. This skill is an asset in writing with any medium, but is especially crucial, I think, when it comes to these audio plays.
- That said, I am currently pretty unfamiliar with the Counter-Measures crew, knowing them only from their very brief appearance in The Legacy of Time. To my mind they're basically a cross between UNIT and MI6? Or maybe MI5? It's not really clear to me what their jurisdiction is. Regardless, I think this unfamiliarity hampered my enjoyment of s the story because it made it somewhat difficult for me to keep track of who all of the characters were.
- It also feels a bit disconcerting going into this that some of these people know the Doctor and Ace well enough to recognize on sight (Ian?) while others don't appear to know anything about them at all (Ian's boss?).
- Gonna toss this episode into the pile of stories with premises way too damned good to be limited to be one-offs. I mean, come on! The 7th Doctor running for office? Serving out his term in office, presenting his contituency? Getting knee-deep in Cold War-era politics? How is this not an entire boxset?
- And, cripes, the dialog in McCoy's "politician" scenes? Absolutely enthralling. I could listen to this all day.
- Not entirely sold on the inciting incident here: Ian writes a memoir that had been published by 2010, which the Doctor discovers, which mentions him and Ace... but would he really be able to publish memoirs? Presumably Counter-Measures activities would've been deeply classified, and often involved paranormal/extraterrestrial mishaps... doesn't seem like the kind of thing you'd just find on a shelf.
- I'm also a bit perplexed that Ian would mention Ace saving his life, specifically, in the Memoirs while simultaneously withholding any useful details beyond the approximate date.
- The enemies here suffer from what I can only describe as "extremely bad SEO." Which is a way of saying their name is far too impracticality generic. That they would call themselves, "the Light," is by itself pretty eyebrow-raising--but the fact that the Doctor immediately recognizes them from this extraordinarily daft name is just absurd. Obviously this ain't a big deal so far as these things go, but it pulled me out of the story.
- And now we're at the ugly stuff: the stuff that makes The Assassination Games the most disappointing Dorney story I've come across so far: the entire premise behind the light.
- Do I even really need to explain this? The premise here is that aliens have infiltrated Earth--and they inject their DNA into babies to create "sleepers" with which to rule the world. They're literally nonhuman monsters indistinguishable from the rest "of us" controlling the highest realms of political and financial power? Sound familiar? If that makes you think of the Illuminati, you get half credit. This shit is straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (EG) and thoroughly rooted in deeply anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
- Like... I very much doubt this parallel was intended... most likely this premise was motivated simply by thinking something like, "secret societies are cool," -- but it's there.
- That said, I do like the detail that this conspiracy ultimately failed because the aliens placed all of their eggs in the one basket of British Empire, and then got caught by surprise when the Empire collapsed. But... that pe plantation also feels a bit strained. The British Empire didn't collapse overnight--it was a(n often violent) process that too, decades. Surely alien knowledge and technology could have been used to prevent that collapse? Well, regardless, I do still greatly appreciate how limited and fallible these "Light" creatures are. It's very refreshing compared to the usual overblown bombast....
- ...Though they don't fully evade that nonsense entirely, given that these aliens are apparently famous(?) for secretly ruling an entire Galaxy (ours?) despite having so little relative power here on Earth.
- And speaking of odd disparities, the finale makes it seem like the Doctor is embarking on a brand new arc against a fearsome new foe, on,y from what I can see on the wiki... "The Light" is entirely confined to the Counter-Measures range. Odd, that. If this was always the plan, why establish the, as a major galactic threat?
Well, those are my thoughts on The Assassination Games. For now, at least. I think the conspiracy angle could have worked better, perhaps, without the baby-stealing/subhuman angle. Again I think (and hope) this was accidental, but it's still pretty problematic. Enough so that while I enjoyed this story, I'm not sure I'd ever recommend it to anyone else, let alone with the rabid enthusiasm I typically muster for Dorney's work. Because, I mean, not to come across like too big of a fanboy here, but this dood really knows how to write some fantastic Who.
And while it's less significant, I'm also kind of bothered by how this whole conflict is resolved: the mothership trope? Really? I dunno. That's just kinda lazy, right? Ya' kill the boss and all the underlings die immediately. Mordor sinks into the Earth, and all the flying saucers crash. Especially considering how fallible "the Light" are and that they were apparently meant to be recurring antagonists, it feels kind of wasteful that we're given such a "clean" ending here--why not skip the mothership trope and set up the remnants of "the Light" (oof, that name) as the Counter-Measures team's next foe, one they'll have to face without the Doctor? Why not really dig into the implications of an alien third party intervening in the "espionage war" of the Cold War era? They could've made this story into a really exciting "pilot" for the Counter-Measures range with very little modification.
Well, blighted nitpickery aside, it was a still a really fun ride, all the way through, and it's hard to ask for more than that. Though I do want to reiterate just how unfortunate it is that this was only the one story... this could so easily have been expanded into a (glorious) boxset.
Quote of the story:
"Knowing's what the Doctor does--I just blow stuff up."
Remarkable dialog:
"Sleep is where we go when we are bored of consciousness, and I am not yet bored--now, who said that?"
"No?"
"I did. Just now. You should pay more attention." |
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