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Post by Deleted on Feb 13, 2021 15:29:15 GMT
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed this and thought it was a worthy and fitting end to the Fifth Doctor's adventures in the main range. A good contrast to his first, Phantasmagoria, too, where he was a cheerful optimist and Turlough a (rather out-of-character) typically loyal companion - here the Doctor is world-weary and tired of humanity, and Turlough is reflective and ready to part company with his friend.
These kind of stories, where human greed takes centre stage, have been flirted with all through Doctor Who's history (Kerblam, The Sun Makers, The Beast Below the recent World Traders audio etc) and I have no problem with occasional forays into the world of profit-over-humanity - after all, it continues to go on in real life (a bit of a bugbear of mine, as I work in an industry where if the multi-million pound company can rip of a struggling agency worker, they will do so. Ooh, I could tell you some stories). The Doctor's disgust at the human race is fascinating, and brilliantly played - rather than being 'indomitable', we can be a pretty callous bunch. Not individuals perhaps, but corporations, businesses and the like - and if Doctor Who can make stories highlighting the hypocrisy and abuse of 'the work ethic', then I'm all for it; it will always be relevant. I think The Doctor's anger and despair fit well with this stage of his Fifth life, especially as the audio story Singularity might well have recently occurred, where the Doc is similarly saddened by events. As far back as Warriors of the Deep, the Fifth Doctor has questioned why he likes the people of Earth so much.
True, Turlough doesn't appear to have a lot to do here (you could say that's in-keeping with the majority of his TV stories), but his idea virtually saves the day at the end, which I like.
I agree that a lot of the themes were made in a pretty heavy-handed way, but then unethical business-types are too arrogant to feel the need for subtlety. 'People are more important than profits?' It'll never catch on!
I love Doctor Who stories where the monsters aren't the poor green CGI creations or actors sweating in rubber costumes, but the 'normal' decent' humans. Twilight was great in that regard, and whilst this is a very different tale, it still carries the same message. I loved it.
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Post by timegirl on Feb 13, 2021 18:27:53 GMT
I liked the beginning of this one, but then it got tedious drawn out and repetitive. I like “Corporate is evil” stories as long as they are done well, like The Sun Makers or Oxygen, but this was just too slow, drawn out, and satire didn’t feel well executed. I definitely see what they were going for but this just didn’t do it for me. Also the side characters were really annoying especially the one who said “My dear” all the time. The actors were giving it their all but the scripting just had too many problems. It’s odd even though 5 is my least favorite tv Doctor, I love almost all of his BF audios, but unfortunately for me I will have to rank “The Blazing Hour” only just above “Necromantia”.
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Post by slithe on Feb 14, 2021 9:57:34 GMT
The satire definitely fell a bit flat. I wonder if this story was hit by changes in politics since it was initially written - the Prime Minister is definitely supposed to be a parody of Theresa May (who left the scene a while ago now and has kept a low profile). The characterisation doesn't really fit the incumbent. The events of the pandemic have also possibly, though I have no evidence of this, had an impact - the idea of people being trapped and left to die may have been softened. I wonder if in the original draft, none (or very few) of the colonists survived.
I also think that this is one of the few releases where none of the characters are actually that likeable/have redeeming qualities. Whereas with The Sun Makers - the Collector was quite humorous (as was the sycophantic aide), it isn't the case with this one. It is a shame as there are themes here that could have been well developed - especially the colonial aspect.
The slow pace doesn't help either.
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dorney
Big Finish Creative Team
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Post by dorney on Feb 14, 2021 10:09:57 GMT
Sadly, this story gives away when it was written. The Prime Minister is a carbon copy of someone who left office over a year ago... Wrong guess, I’m afraid. It was last year. I script edited some of it during a late night bus journey post first lockdown! In fact, it wasn’t even storylines til after the first one, iirc.
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Post by slithe on Feb 14, 2021 10:15:32 GMT
Sadly, this story gives away when it was written. The Prime Minister is a carbon copy of someone who left office over a year ago... Wrong guess, I’m afraid. It was last year. I script edited some of it during a late night bus journey post first lockdown! In fact, it wasn’t even storylines til after the first one, iirc. Ok... That is surprising as I envisaged the Prime Minister as looking almost identical to Mrs May. Being really cynical, I suppose the Prime Minister in this release cannot really be like Mrs May - she is relatively successful and keeps a tight run on things. She, unlike our version, is 'strong and stable'.
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dorney
Big Finish Creative Team
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Post by dorney on Feb 14, 2021 10:19:13 GMT
Wrong guess, I’m afraid. It was last year. I script edited some of it during a late night bus journey post first lockdown! In fact, it wasn’t even storylines til after the first one, iirc. Ok... That is surprising as I envisaged the Prime Minister as looking almost identical to Mrs May. Being really cynical, I suppose the Prime Minister in this release cannot really be like Mrs May - she is relatively successful and keeps a tight run on things. She, unlike our version, is 'strong and stable'. I will admit to never really getting a May vibe from the script. Might be performance tones, things like that. It all feeds in! Certainly I think James was more influenced by Chernobyl than our own government.
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Post by slithe on Feb 14, 2021 10:25:32 GMT
Ok... That is surprising as I envisaged the Prime Minister as looking almost identical to Mrs May. Being really cynical, I suppose the Prime Minister in this release cannot really be like Mrs May - she is relatively successful and keeps a tight run on things. She, unlike our version, is 'strong and stable'. I will admit to never really getting a May vibe from the script. Might be performance tones, things like that. It all feeds in! Certainly I think James was more influenced by Chernobyl than our own government. Ahh.. It must be the performance - the voice and inflection is very similar to May. I did get a Chernobyl vibe here and can see the parallel to that. The slow moving car-crash and the cover up. Also parallels to our own government and its handling of the pandemic (phase I).
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Post by Deleted on Feb 14, 2021 15:34:08 GMT
Sadly, this story gives away when it was written. The Prime Minister is a carbon copy of someone who left office over a year ago... Wrong guess, I’m afraid. It was last year. I script edited some of it during a late night bus journey post first lockdown! In fact, it wasn’t even storylines til after the first one, iirc. Amazing what you can do on a bus home...I studied for years on buses lol
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dorney
Big Finish Creative Team
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Post by dorney on Feb 14, 2021 15:44:21 GMT
Wrong guess, I’m afraid. It was last year. I script edited some of it during a late night bus journey post first lockdown! In fact, it wasn’t even storylines til after the first one, iirc. Amazing what you can do on a bus home...I studied for years on buses lol These were very empty and quiet, due to the pandemic - rather the reason I chose that time to travel!
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Post by Deleted on Feb 14, 2021 15:46:00 GMT
Amazing what you can do on a bus home...I studied for years on buses lol These were very empty and quiet, due to the pandemic - rather the reason I chose that time to travel! Am lucky as I travel back and forth to work if there is another passenger apart from me and the driver it’s like an UBER bus
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Post by Timelord007 on Feb 18, 2021 8:59:45 GMT
This story would've been tailor made for the Seventh Doctor towards the end of his life as the story's tone fits his incarnation perfectly.
As a Fifth Doctor adventure it just doesn't quite work, i noticed that recently the Fifth Doctor stories are becoming darker & while it's good to shake things up once in a while the Fifth Doctor is more a boyish adventurer, charming & compassionate.
Good ideas & good performances but the audio drama didn't quite gel together for me although i will give it another listen at some point even though the word "Dear" became quickly annoying to hear.
And it's obviously Teresa May they based the PM on.
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Post by number13 on Feb 18, 2021 13:35:44 GMT
This story would've been tailor made for the Seventh Doctor towards the end of his life as the story's tone fits his incarnation perfectly. As a Fifth Doctor adventure it just doesn't quite work, i noticed that recently the Fifth Doctor stories are becoming darker & while it's good to shake things up once in a while the Fifth Doctor is more a boyish adventurer, charming & compassionate. Good ideas & good performances but the audio drama didn't quite gel together for me although i will give it another listen at some point even though the word "Dear" became quickly annoying to hear. And it's obviously Teresa May they based the PM on. Agree - right up to the last line!
To my ears at least her speaking style is very individual, in fact all the PMs in my lifetime (starting with Wilson) except one have had voices & speaking styles which are, frankly, a gift to stand-up comedians and impressionists! Even a bad impression of one of them is instantly recognisable as PM X, Y or Z.
By contrast I thought the two politicians in this story sounded carefully smooth and polished like many U.S. politicians; as if they were trying to sound strong and stable and succeeding - and artificial, manufactured and completely identity-free. They could have been swapped over and made no difference had it not been for Violet Hardaker having that annoying verbal tic, dear. Which is probably why she had it, dear. One has to stand out somehow or how will the voters know one, dear?
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Post by Timelord007 on Feb 19, 2021 8:03:18 GMT
This story would've been tailor made for the Seventh Doctor towards the end of his life as the story's tone fits his incarnation perfectly. As a Fifth Doctor adventure it just doesn't quite work, i noticed that recently the Fifth Doctor stories are becoming darker & while it's good to shake things up once in a while the Fifth Doctor is more a boyish adventurer, charming & compassionate. Good ideas & good performances but the audio drama didn't quite gel together for me although i will give it another listen at some point even though the word "Dear" became quickly annoying to hear. And it's obviously Teresa May they based the PM on. Agree - right up to the last line!
To my ears at least her speaking style is very individual, in fact all the PMs in my lifetime (starting with Wilson) except one have had voices & speaking styles which are, frankly, a gift to stand-up comedians and impressionists! Even a bad impression of one of them is instantly recognisable as PM X, Y or Z.
By contrast I thought the two politicians in this story sounded carefully smooth and polished like many U.S. politicians; as if they were trying to sound strong and stable and succeeding - and artificial, manufactured and completely identity-free. They could have been swapped over and made no difference had it not been for Violet Hardaker having that annoying verbal tic, dear. Which is probably why she had it, dear. One has to stand out somehow or how will the voters know one, dear? Don't play a drinking game when the word "Dear" is said we'd end up in hospital alcohol poisoning . Dear oh dear (groans)
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Post by slithe on Feb 21, 2021 12:01:17 GMT
This story would've been tailor made for the Seventh Doctor towards the end of his life as the story's tone fits his incarnation perfectly. As a Fifth Doctor adventure it just doesn't quite work, i noticed that recently the Fifth Doctor stories are becoming darker & while it's good to shake things up once in a while the Fifth Doctor is more a boyish adventurer, charming & compassionate. Good ideas & good performances but the audio drama didn't quite gel together for me although i will give it another listen at some point even though the word "Dear" became quickly annoying to hear. And it's obviously Teresa May they based the PM on. Agree with this... It fits the Seventh Doctor far better - solo Seventh as well (Turlough is pretty much redundant in this in respect of being useful to the Doctor). With a few tweaks this could have been a 'weary 7th Doctor' in the style of Valhalla. That would have made for a more interesting tale. I prefer the 'darker' Fifth Doctor style - it does something new with the incarnation. I always wondered if there was a darker, more repressed side to the incarnation that was hidden and controlled. That would have been a better angle to have seen on TV - the gradual shift from 'nice chap', to a more darker/moodier character. Would have been great - a Season 22 of a darker Fifth Doctor which then culminated into the regeneration into Sixie and the more brash approach - 'not a moment too soon'. Sixie could link the trauma of not being able to save Adric and the weariness of everything to a 'mid life crisis' which is eventually resolved through the regeneration and subsequent adjustment. Perhaps BF would be interested in a Season 21b? I definitely got a Teresa May vibe with this one for the PM. I thought the 'Dear' part was deliberately patronising to the Fifth Doctor and I would liked to have seen him bite at that. Better on a subsequent register, but still flawed.
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Post by aussiedoctorwhofan on Feb 26, 2021 6:19:20 GMT
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Post by Kestrel on Mar 1, 2021 8:38:38 GMT
Oh, man. I am really shocked at how all-over-the-place our reaction to the episode is here. Usually, I think, there's much more of a clear consensus. Personally I found The Blazing Hour to be a really solid story. Perhaps I wouldn't rank it up among my very favorites of the MR, but I'd definitely rate it above average.
Turlough's performance, especially, I found incredibly engaging. I'd say he really made this story work--he just so delightfully abrasive! All of the dialog is just... chef's-kiss-perfect.
In particular I found his attitude with regard to humans a lot of fun. I really need to listen to more of Turlough's stories--I don't exactly remember him too well from the TV show, but if he's this entertaining in his other audio outings, I think I'm gonna have to prioritize them.
And overall I think the story had a lot of really solid humor, like the woman who got all upset about the idea of pinning the wings of a butterfly while not so much as blinking at the "execution" of a fellow human being on display directly in front of her. It's a lovely comedic line that cleanly betrays the reality of the (many) people who will happily ignore videos of horrific violence and brutality perpetrated against POC in their own neighborhoods, yet cry and protest animal abuse on the other side of the planet.
And while I can see how some of y'all may' em simply been tired of the trite "evil corporation" tropes at play here, I think they wound up working well precisely because they were played more for comedy than drama. The evil lady and her constant duplicity, especially, was quite fun to listen to. I especially enjoyed Davison's performance when she told the Doctor that Turlough was dead--he just sort of accepts it: his companions do have a tendency of getting the selves killed. They're basically goldfish.
The only thing is didn't really care for here is that the actual problem did not feel adequately explained. I think I wound up borrowing my understanding of the "explosion" from a very similar event in a Star Trek: The Mext Generation episode, where someone is stuck on the ship while time is "frozen," only to find a warp core breach in engineering and discover that time is still moving, just very slowly, as the antimatter explosion slowly expands. I think that's basically what was going on here: a temporally-misaligned explosion that's slowly speeding up. Only I don't think the story did a great job articulating the nature of the disaster, and I think I might've been over,y confused without that TNG background.
I've also read about the Chernobyl inspiration and... honestly I don't really think that's evident in the script. The key, defining aspect of that story--much like Hideaki Anno's excellent take on Godzilla a several years ago--is that it was about average, trained professionals doing working in exceptional circumstances. The "everyday hero" kind of thing. Whereas characters of that type don't really exist in this story--in fact, I'd argue that they don't really even exist in the Doctor Who universe at all. Everyone in Doctor Who is somehow unique and special--no one is truly mundane, not even on the planet of mundanity (which is an actual place the 8th Doctor visits in the Time War range, IIRC).
Before I sign off here, I'd also like to mention the Doctor's line on genocide. He says, "I've done it before, you know."
I always love it when the Doctor acknowledges the blood on his hands. The choices he's made that he regrets, even if he'd still do the same thing in the same circumstances. (No, I don't fully agree with Moffat's big retcon, but it is what it is.) It did, however, feel like a bit of an odd line to hear in Davison's voice, especially in the wake of the 4th Doctor's iconic, "Have I the right?" questioning that preceded his refusal to negate the Daleks. It makes me wonder: when, exactly, did the Doctor do his first genocide? What was the first planet he killed?
....
Well, I think that about covers it. And so goes the penultimate story of the Monthly Range! We are, my friends, upon the precipice. I'm a bit disappointed that Big Finish didn't really use the last few stories to hint at the final conflict, ala the big bad wolf, but I've enjoyed them all the same. I do think, overall, each of the stories after the SotD anthologies wind up covering the full spectrum of MR-style stories, from very high stakes to very low stakes, from subtle to grand, from personal to expansive. It's almost like a crash-course in all of the kinds of stories the Monthly Range has offered over the years. And ya' know, it's been fantastic. I don't want it to end.
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Post by number13 on Mar 9, 2021 12:44:52 GMT
Agree - right up to the last line!
To my ears at least her speaking style is very individual, in fact all the PMs in my lifetime (starting with Wilson) except one have had voices & speaking styles which are, frankly, a gift to stand-up comedians and impressionists! Even a bad impression of one of them is instantly recognisable as PM X, Y or Z.
By contrast I thought the two politicians in this story sounded carefully smooth and polished like many U.S. politicians; as if they were trying to sound strong and stable and succeeding - and artificial, manufactured and completely identity-free. They could have been swapped over and made no difference had it not been for Violet Hardaker having that annoying verbal tic, dear. Which is probably why she had it, dear. One has to stand out somehow or how will the voters know one, dear? Don't play a drinking game when the word "Dear" is said we'd end up in hospital alcohol poisoning . Dear oh dear (groans) You are so right! In an idle moment, I searched the PDF script for ", dear" and found 47 hits.
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Post by constonks on Mar 9, 2021 13:48:57 GMT
Well, I liked HBO's Chernobyl and get excited any time someone says the word Blinovitch, so I enjoyed this one. Sure it's not a subtle satire or anything, but I didn't take it as an explicit "capitalism = bad" - maybe because I had trouble separating from Chernobyl which has nothing to do with capitalism!
The only time I found someone to be a bit too much of a parody of Big Bad Money Person was when Ffion was going on about her agricultural business and how happy she was abusing her workers. Then, of course, it turns out she was an activist - so it WAS an over-the-top "socialist pretending to be a capitalist" in universe!
Anyway, now I leave you with (imo) Violet Hardaker's best line:
"Trust is for children and acrobats."
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Post by Timelord007 on Mar 10, 2021 15:20:58 GMT
Don't play a drinking game when the word "Dear" is said we'd end up in hospital alcohol poisoning . Dear oh dear (groans) You are so right! In an idle moment, I searched the PDF script for ", dear" and found 47 hits. Blimey alcohol poisoning more like "alas poor yorick i knew him so well"
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Post by johnhurtdoctor on Mar 20, 2021 14:14:30 GMT
Rubbish
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