The First Doctor Adventures Volume 2 is a truly infuriating set of stories. It contains one of the very best Doctor Who audio dramas I've ever had the pleasure of listening to... followed immediately by one of the very worst.
This summer I've gotten into Big Finish in a big way, listening to well over 150 stories since May 2020, and that experience has been uniformly positive. I love stories, and Big Finish is very good at telling them. The First Doctor Range in particular has been a highlight, with each of the first three stories ranking among my all-time favorites. It is this high standard of quality that makes the fourth story, 1DA2.2, so immensely disappointing.
And honestly I don't really want to talk about it. I
hate writing negative reviews! I
hate discussing media that I don't find compelling or interesting. It's so boring and unproductive! I'd much rather spend that time extolling about what I love (speaking of which, I'm still planning on making that
Evelyn Smythe Appreciation Thread, just you wait). But 1DA2.2 was such an excruciating listen. It took me hours to get through, as I had to keep pausing it for little breaks because the whole thing was just so
wrong. And now I need to get it all out of my system so I can move on.
But first, let's talk about the preceding story, 1DA2.1.
The Invention of DeathSomething I could help but notice: the First Doctor Adventures began strong, and each succeeding story has been markedly better than the story preceding it. And all of the first three stories in this range--
The Destination Wars,
The Great White Hurricane, and
The Invention of Death--are among my very favorite, especially
The Invention of Death.
Which is really weird because on the face of it, this story doesn't really work.
Simply put, the drama is pretty forced, the conflict arbitrary, and the stakes cliched. The translucent Ashtallah are a typically silly concept for an alien race, and much of the story's airtime is wasted on the kind of cheap tension that was the bane of so much Classic Who--the murder mystery, the random imperilment of resident heroine Barbara. Superficially, the drama doesn't work very well at all.
The Invention of Death is not fundamentally a dramatic story, so spending so much time on these dramatic elements feels unnecessary--almost as though the writers or producers lacked confidence in their audience's ability to engage with a story absent the superficial trappings of the adventure genre.
So what makes
The Invention of Death so compelling? I think it's down to being what I call, "big idea science fiction." The actual plot is of little importance: what matters more are the themes and ideas explored. The learning, the growing, the changing--at both the individual and societal level; both physiologically and psychologically. To frame it more simply, this is not a story about
what, or
when, or
what, or
who, or
how--it's a story about
why. It is, fundamentally, a story about the total transformation that can occur simply through exposure to new ideas.
It is a delight to see as Harlan and Brenna fumble their way through new and utterly alien concepts of mortality, love and loss, curiosity and change. The story as a whole or it's around their transformation--and it is beautiful to witness, both poignant and profound. It is the egg hatching, the cocoon opening, the child maturing: radical metamorphosis.
All too often,
Doctor Who stories revolve around objective-based conflict. The Doctor arrives at a planet, encounters two opposing groups who each desire something specific, and helps whichever side is deemed morally superior to acquire that objective. The sociopolitical change affected by the Doctor occurs because specific objectives are met. It's a very simple, accessible, and infinitely repeatable dynamic--and one that
The Invention of Death abandons entirely. Here, the Doctor changes the Ashtallan's world simply by introducing them to new ideas and modes of thinking. As the protagonist of an adventure series, the Doctor is typically a very active character: he possesses all of the agency in his stories, and he effects change very deliberately in order to reshape the world according to his own goals, in accord with his own ethics and morals. But here the Doctor exercises no agency: his mere presence in the world is enough. He is but a witness, watching the world change. It is a mundanely fantastical idea: the Ashtallan's entire world is upended entirely simply by meeting new people. So, too, does our world work. Meet someone new, and your whole world--your perception of reality and your place in it--can change.
It's very optimistic and idealistic. A very
Star Trek kind of story--that through diversity we learn, we grow, we change, and we become better than we are. This change is not, as is typically the premise of dramatic narrative, the product of conflict, but a natural and inevitable effect of
living. And that's really what the Doctor's presence does: it impels to Ashtallan's to learn what it means to live, and to know all of life's attendant anxiety, desire, hope, and regret.
Crucially, the change the Ashtallan's face is not something they fully understand. They desire the coming changes greatly, but also fear them. That mix of fear and hope leads them to make mistakes, commit grievous sins, but the story does not condemn them for these mistakes. They are allowed to learn and grow from their experiences, with the ultimate message that they will become better. It is a beautiful story, and one that I think resonates deeply in our own, current, dark times.
To quote a fragment of one of my favorite poems:
That which we are, we are
One equal temper of heroic hearts
Made weak by time and fate
But strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find
--And not to yield.To live is to learn, to grow, to suffer, and--always--to search for something new. Without the looming threat of mortality, the Ashtallan's were not truly alive: their society was static, dedicated entirely to lethargy and frivolity. An unchanging, irrelevant, utterly uninteresting state. One might well rename this story,
The Invention of History, because the moment the TARDIS materializes is the moment that everything for the Ashtallans truly
begins.The Barbarians and the SamuraiAnd now it begins.
Even before starting this episode, I contained a multitude of anxieties. I live Doctor Who, and I love Doctor Who's purely historical stories, and I harbor a great affection for history--with an affinity for the Bronze Age and, naturally, feudal Japan.
And, as I noted in my criticism of
Sympathy for the Devil a few weeks ago, Big Finish--and the Doctor Who franchise in general--tend to be not-very-good when it comes to writing stories outside of their native, Western perspective. And the thing about
The Barbarians and the Samurai is that it's details are, for the most part, remarkably accurate--but the story itself comes across as
deeply inauthentic. In other words, the superficial details are largely correct, objectively, but the spirit of the story is not.
As Jeanette Ng
recently wrote in an excellent essay on the Han supremacist leanings of Disney's 2020
Mulan, "It is very possible to string together false narratives out of true facts." And
The Barbarians and the Samurai rings incredibly false.
I don't really want to get I to too much detail here, the story just isn't worth it, but I would like to share some snippets from my "venting sheet." That's right: I had to scribble notes on a sheet of paper while listening just to give myself an outlet for the mounting frustration I had with this story.
- These Japanese character names are the equivalent of a story set in 17th century Paris, where the city is ruled with an iron grip by the nefarious, "Lord Billy."
- Samurai! Saamyoorai! Sam-You-Rye!
- Gee, I wonder why the Japanese would want to militarize in the 18th century? Guess that's a question we absolutely should not ask.
- Of course the Japanese are the aggressors here--those poor, innocent British merchants were just minding their own business, only to be massacred for no good reason! No good reason at all. (Please don't google.)
- So Keiko is the unmarried daughter of a daimyo, but has been Shubei's "lover" for how many years? Eww.... (Please don't do the math.)
- Oh. Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no. The title is meant to be ironic, isn't it?
- He wants to rape the white woman because of course he does.
- This brutish, thuggish Lord Mamoru is gonna turn out to be a space alien masquerading as a samurai, right? He doesn't even remotely resemble what you'd expect from an Edo-era samurai lord. So shouty. Seems more like a cliched Mongolian warlord (hallo, Genghis) than a glamorized Warrior-poet bureaucrat..
- LOL, the sound effects for the battles are all parries and clanking metal. A katana is basically just an "exotic" rapier, right? (Please don't Google.)
- LMFAO at the idea that a single daimyo, with zero allies and a lousy personality, would be able to overthrow the bakufu with just a single shipload of modern firearms.
- Well, good job successfully thwarting a samurai rebellion against the Tokugawa Shogunate in the late 1840s! I'm sure the bakufu will be very safe and secure for a very long time to come. (Please don't Google.)
- Oh, god, Barbara's description of the "future" is soooo heavily sanitized. They're really desperate to avoid even the faintest of allusions to the broader historical context here, huh? (Please don't Google.)
So if it's not clear from my immediate reactions, the core, cardinal sin of
The Barbarians and the Samurai is that it tells a story that is superficially accurate, with all of the correct nouns and dates, but fundamentally ahistorical, and deeply colored by racist tropes, stereotypes, and assumptions. The great, superseding falsity of the story is not so much about what's in the text as what's
not.
This story takes place in the mid-to-late 19th century: the Edo era. A period of Japanese history notable primarily for being a long and sustained era of relative peace and prosperity. An era that will soon come to a rapid and violent change: civil war will depose the ruling Tokugawa family, the Emperor will assume total autocratic power in Japan for the first time in nearly a millennia; Japan will swiftly modernize, embracing Western medicine, technology, philosophy, fashion and politics; Japan will embrace imperialism, and in the next century the Japanese Empire will cut a bloody swath across East Asia and the Pacific in grim mimicry of the Western colonialist powers, ending only with the horrific and unconscionable atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.
And none of this occurred in a vacuum.
The context here--the context that
The Barbarians and the Samurai very deliberately omits--is that 18th and 19th centuries saw the British and American Empires conquer virtually all of Asia. By 1839, the Qing Dynasty, one of the oldest and most powerful nations in the world, succumbed to British rule. All of Asia was devoured by Western Imperialists, with the British Empire at the forefront. Only two Asian countries would manage to remain fully autonomous and escape the yoke of the colonialist powers: Thailand and Japan.
And the latter did. so by rapidly modernizing it's military (advancing several centuries in just a few decades), and emulating the imperialist doctrines of the Western empires that threatened it.
It is no exaggeration to say that the British Empire was one of the greatest sources of evil in all of human history. This is a defining truth of our world, as the legacy of British imperialism, and the evils it perpetuated, persist and continue to shape global culture to this day. It is also a truth that Big Finish resolutely refuses to accept, acknowledge or explore. And that absence is especially glaring in
The Barbarians and the Samurai because it is the defining context of this time and this place.
I'm sorry, but if you wish to write a story that ignores the problems of Empire, you have no business setting that story in an era where the machinations of Empire are
everything. Japan may have tried to isolate itself from the world, but the world did not reciprocate!
And then there's the issue of all the racist framing throughout. The Japanese are presented as violent, thuggish, selfish and ambitious--the British arms dealers mere bystanders to their totally independent, self-generated chaos. The
Bushido code of honor they mention frequently, was invented by the ruling Tokugawa after the end of the
Sengoku period, a civil war that persisted throughout most of the 16th and part of the 17th centuries. It was designed to pacify the militant samurai warrior caste, and quickly transformed the samurai into simple, non threatening bureaucrats--men who self-styled themselves warrior poets, but had no real cause or opportunity to make war. The samurai swords they wore weren't weapons of war, but symbols of social class and political status. The barbaric and bloodthirsty samurai warlord is a fine archetype to use in certain settings, but it does not fit very well into this specific era.
But that's the main concept of this story, yeah? That the samurai call themselves civilized while acting anything but, and dismissing foreigners as barbarians when "we all know" that it's the Westerners who are
really civilized, and the Japanese who are
really barbaric. It's the classic racist framing of the world:
their culture is feigned;
our culture justified by innate superiority.
And if that weren't more than sufficiently evident from the text of the story, it is doubly-so in the "Behind The Scenes" track. When describing feudal Japan, Nick Briggs uses a very specific set of adjectives to describe the local culture: brutal, hostile, alien. Funny how this is how he sees 19th century Japan, when the analogous era of British history, the Victorian era, with its perpetual war, chattel slavery, war profiteering, and severe lack of hygiene is typically presented as the exact opposite. He makes it abundantly clear that he see feudal Japan as a totally and fundamentally alien planet, no different than Mondas or Skaro or Trenzalore or any other strange, new world the Doctor might visit in a typical Doctor Who science fiction adventure story.
But, Nick, the Japanese are
not space aliens.
The Barbarians and the Samurai feels like a story where the writers were very careful to use the appropriate wording, and through in some historical facts, to drape a veneer of accuracy to the story, all the while being either incapable of or unwilling to confront their underlying assumptions about this world of ours and the people in it. It's as though they sought to "research" Japan with just a few cursory Google searches, and were unmotivated to reach any real understanding of Japanese history, culture or language. They then patted themselves on the back for their brief efforts, with zero awareness of how silly even something so minor as naming a character "Lord Mamoru" might be. I can all-but guarantee they simply googled, "common Japanese names," without considering that different names might be more or less appropriate in different eras. Hence Lord Billy.
...But credit where credit is due, I suppose: if nothing else,
The Barbarians and the Samurai at lease avoids the tiresome trope of defining its Asian characters with the sole characteristic of a nebulously-defines-but-all-important sense of "honor." That the additional character traits it leans on for the Japanese characters are pride, greed, lust and gluttony, however, do not necessarily constitute and improvement. Though, superficially, I suppose that if you must rely on racist character tropes, it's better to use more than one. Maybe?
(Yes, how astute of you to notice, I am using this opportunity to toss some shade at this summer's PlayStation 4 game, The Ghost of Tsushima, also-inauthentic samurai fiction written by Westerners, for Westerners, rife with ahistoricity masked by thoroughly-researched and accurate set-dressing.)I suppose many of the problems with this story could be attributed to, but certainly not excused, the fact that
The First Doctor Adventures audio range very deliberately apes to same overall approach to storytelling as the original, 1960s version of the TV show. Certainly, by those standards,
The Barbarians and the Samurai is positively woke! But that was more than a half-century ago, and standards--and expectations--are much different now. And what would pass without comment, or even earn praise in the 1960s, can still be deeply problematic today. Falsity isn't just about telling lies, after all: it's also about concealing truths. The British Empire raped and pillaged across The whole of the world, and it is utterly unconscionable to set a story against this backdrop without at the very least acknowledging this.
And the sad thing here is that this is a very compelling setting for a Doctor Who story! I can think of few times and places in Earth's history where a time traveler might randomly pop up one day, and produce a monumental effect on the course of human history--or at least risk doing so. This is a period of great chaos and change, the aftermath of which will drastically shape the future course of human history.
This story was a potential opportunity to really examine the evils of Empire in-depth, and explore the enormously detrimental affect western Imperialism would have on Japan specifically--how this an evil Japan ultimately fends off by embracing it for themselves.
Alternatively, this was also a great opportunity to really dig into the intricacies and ethics of time travel from the seldom-seen perspective of the first Doctor. The Shogunate will fall to armed rebellion, and soon. And it is a great historical irony that this rebellion was motivated by isolationist sentiments. The traditionalist reactionaries who depose the Tokugawa out of fear for the bakufu's efforts to modernize the country, embracing Western ideologies along with science and technology, will themselves soon embrace (to an alarming extent) that same policy of Westernization. This is a major societal change that they can see coming, are desperate to avoid, but ultimately realize is impossible to prevent. To present an analogy perhaps more familiar, imagine the Doctor's TARDIS materializing in the midst of WWII, and the Doctor must prevent an allied invasion of France in 1943: he knows it is the correct course of action both morally and historically, but feels compelled to prevent it nonetheless simply because it is
premature.
Just as in
The Invention of Death, this is a situation where the Doctor doesn't need to actually
do anything to affect massive societal change. His presence alone is sufficient. Imagine the contemporary Japanese perspective: an Englishman manages to infiltrate Japan unnoticed! And even if they don't recognize the TARDIS as a vehicle predicated on technology beyond their comprehension, at the very least they would see an Englishman confident enough to build a structure that clearly proclaims its foreignness. His presence could easily be read as a deliberate act of subversion or aggression against the bakufu. Simply by being here, the Doctor could set off the bakumatsu early! And inadvertently create an even more powerful Japanese Empire which, in turn, would dramatically alter the course of global history in the 20th century.
In other words, there are possibilities for great stories here. So many great possibilities! Few things in life are more annoying to me than seeing an excellent premise for a story wasted so utterly. This set's second story could have been so many different stories, almost anything could have happened, and most of those stories could have been incredible to experience! But instead what we get in
The Barbarians and the Samurai is trite, tiresome, "apolitical" nonsense, marring what could otherwise have been the
perfect Doctor Who audio range.
It is, I am sorry to say, an immense, monumental, deeply unfortunate disappointment. And that's all I care to say on the matter (my thanks and condolences to anyone who managed to read through all of this). Now, I think, I shall take a break from the 1DAs: to remove
The Barbarians and the Samurai from my mind, and perhaps forget the story entirely. So that one day, yes, one day, I might return to this range, and fall in love with it once again.