MR 130 A Thousand Tiny Wings - Andy Lane

It's amazing in retrospect how little of an impression Klein left on me in Colditz considering what an incredibly enervating character she is in the Klein Trilogy, being immediately engaging in A Thousand Tiny Wings from her very first season. Even if there is a bit of overlap character-wise with the older English Nazi.

So, anyway--

I totally agree--this is a real standout story! And I may be getting ahead of myself here, but for all the attention our fandom lavishes on the 7th Doctor's "Hex Arc," I personally found the Klein Trilogy much more interesting. That it consists of only a small number of stories definitely helps it feel more focused--with all the fat trimmed. You can even see, in places, where things were cut!

But, erm, yeah, back to the exquisitely-titled A Thousand Tiny Wings:

I have a few peculiar obsessions. You might call them hyperfixations. Starships are the big one. RPGs with playable lizardpeople are another. And yet another? Avian aliens. Who are really just lizardpeople with feathers, right? So, hell yeah! I really love the aliens here! And they're so weird! Sentient flocks of sparrows that have a parasitic relationship with primates. So cool! How could anyone not love these fluttery little birbs?

Anyway.

More seriously.

Predictably this story's greatest weakness is that it's falls victim to what I'm gonna start calling the POV Problem. A Thousand Tiny Wings takes us to Kenya amid revolution... and our POV characters are the white British colonizers. So sympathizing with them in general is gonna be an uphill battle... but then, of course, we learn that they're also literal Nazis. The only native African character we meet is, of course, a duplicitous villain plotting in secret to murder all of the white women. Oof.

Sorry, did I call it the POV Problem? I meant to call it the POV Problem. Bolded because it's a biggun.

That said, I do appreciate the story shining some light on, you know, the existence of Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers among the Allied nations. This is one of those uncomfortable realities that tends to be ignored entirely in fiction. Maybe one day we'll go a bit further and get a Nazi story that acknowledges the role of white supremacists in the United a states inspiring Hitler's systematic genocides in Europe. I won't be holding my breath, though.

Anyway.

Less seriously.

Can we all please pause for a moment to acknowledge the ironclad fact that, moreso than any other actor with the role, Sylvester McCoy's Doctor is the absolute best at entrances?

Quote of the episode: "From rifles to tea in less than a minute. What a record, even for me."

I wonder how many other people listening to this story had no idea who Klein was and had to look it up? And I didn't even listen to Colditz that long ago. And, of course, wow, it's crazy to think that there's almost a decade separating these two stories. We all know Big Finish is pretty big, yeah? But it's still easy to forget just how BIG they really are. The sheer scope and scale of their output can be... overwhelming.

Anyway.

Lastly.

In what is broadly applicable to the Klein Trilogy as a whole, I think A Thousand Tiny Wings did a really good job in making reprehensible characters sympathetic. A part of me does question why this is necessary for Nazis, but MR 130 was released in 2010, which--I am reliably told--was a very different time. A time when, perhaps, fascism was a bit less than a tangible threat, and more a historical relic. Ah well. So things go.

Lastly-lastly-for-realizes-this-time.

A great story in most respects, but I definitely had to raise an eyebrow at the ending. So we've got this alien lab filled with bio-weapons. This is not an unprecedented problem. The Doctor decides to bury the lab. This is not an unprecedented solution. But I question the logistics. How is one old woman going to bury the lab deep enough to protect it? Even with her husbands help? They'd need a lot of heavy machinery, right? And tpeven then there'd always be the danger of accidental resurfacing. If only there were someone around with a spaceship who could safely fling the bio-weapons into the sun.

It also seems like the Doctor is a bit too trusting. This woman--this Nazi woman--is going to dedicate the rest of her life, and lives of her descendants, protecting a cache of bio-weapons? Is a Nazi really the best person to trust with WMDs? And let's not even get into the unfortunate (unintended) colonizer apologia--most wealthy white settlers who remained in former colonies did so not out of altruism, but greed.

But, like, as I'm sure y'all know without my saying so (tediously overlong wall of text notwithstanding) these are all pretty minor quibbles in the face of a riveting adventure story and fantastic companion(?) debut. I know Big Finish did a number of mini-arcs in this period, and while I've been burned once already (6th Doctor/Charlie) A Thousand Tiny Wings makes me optimistic for the others. Here's hoping my next MR trilogy (6th Doctor/Jamie) is even half as good as the Klein Trilogy.