Missy and The Monk Out Now (Spoilers OK)

Me listening to Missy and the Monk: the TLDR version --

Body and Soulless: I dunno why y'all are so down on this set, it's not great but it's pretty decent.
War Seed: Okay, I can kinda see it. That was a bit generic.
Two Monks One Mistress: oof.

....    ....    ....    ....

So where I think I am now is here: probably a good idea to stop boxsets.

Though I suspect I might be less down on this set than some of y'all: it's chief offense is that it's just kind of boring, which while disappointing, is a far cry from the insipidity of Missy 2 -- a set which I really think exemplifies all of Big Finish's worst impulses.

Bit, uh, let's set that aside for now (and forever, why not) and dig into Missy 3.

MIS 3.1: Body and Soulless

• I suspect we can all agree this is the best story of the set, right?
• Pretty fun premise, though it feels like they don't quite know what to do with the Monk, and we therefore get a Master Lite. EG I don't really buy the Monk as a military strategist--that kind of thing requires the kind of long-term thinking that the Monk's character is kind of... entirely built upon him lacking. It also creates this weird dynamic where the Monk is framed parallel to the Master, which calls back to that whole Master Lite thing.
• Absolutely love the detail that Missy's favorite episode of Star Trek is, "Spock's Brain." Because of course it is.
• So the biggest problem with this story? The best scene in it is the one where Missy somehow convinces the Monk to remove his own brain... and they didn't bother to record it. Look, the whole point of writing a narrative in media res is to skip past the boring bits and jump right into the interesting stuff... not the opposite.
• The conclusion felt a tad Deus Ex Machina to me. Really leans in hard on that "mothership" trope -- you know the one. Where if the good guys just do the One Thing, the giant evil army conveniently disappears forever. Or as I like to frame it: using genocide as a narrative crutch. It's lazy, which is bad, but what's worse is that it's the most boring possible way to resolve conflict.
• Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Pet peeve and all.
• What I do really like is how this story (finally, three boxsets in) starts to lightly nod in the direction of Missy's TV arc. The one big problem with Moffat's Missy is that we were told that the Doctor saw something in her, some redemptive potential... but we, the audience, never really got to see that for ourselves. And here we finally get some of that! Sure, she's as self-serving as ever, but you can tell that Missy maybe enjoys playing a hero a bit more in this incarnation than others. Simply leaving the planet she saved--even knowing it's doomed--is not something I can really imagine any of the other Masters doing.
• And let's talk about that denouement. Missy is an exceedingly flamboyant, theatrical character. It was great to see her drop most of that affectation in the final scene with the Monk -- it lets her feel more like an actual, real-life person than the Manic Pixie Dream Villain she so often is in other stories.

MIS 3.2: War Seed

• Not a whole lot to say on this one other than to lament the wasted potential. We've got the Master's child! But there's not much to them. We also get a opportunistic Evil Capitalist Villain... who is somehow even more toothless than the TV show's recent Trump expy. All of the ideas in this story are potentially really great... but they're just not taken far enough, the script just not tightened enough, to really shine. As result it feels, simply, generic. A by-the-numbers Doctor Who story where replacing the Doctor with the Master results in little more than slightly more snark.
• That lack of any real strong, narrative hook to grab our attention really helps clarify one of the reasons why, I think, this Boxset doesn't work. The Mink and the Master are both characters who can be very funny... but the humor they generate is very different. The Master tends to relish in macabre, black humor... whereas the Monk is more comic relief. And the two styles simply do not mesh well. Especially, as we see in the next story, without any drama to balance out the goofiness, or any "straight man" to play against.
• Still, though, and I can't stress this enough... this story could've been really good! The Master creating a child who is in a constant state of agony, incapable of dying. A woman so stupid she'd wonder aloud who won a nuclear war that never happened. A generic Doctor Who baddie marooned on a dead world surrounded by monsters for his hubris. It could've been so much more interesting with just a bit more editing and revision. If there's one ironclad commandment for writing, it is this: never, never, never skimp on revision!

MIS 3.3: Two Monks One Mistress

• Ulgh... I don't even want to talk about this one. I just... consistently failed to connect with this story on just about every level.
• The script is just very grating. So much soliloquizing, constant use of the dreaded As-You-Know cliche, so much constant exposition... it was really hard to soldier on through to the end.
• And the BTS track is downright painful, because they make it clear that they were well aware of all the issues likely to get in the way of this story working. They were right: farce relies heavily on the physicality of theatre that does not exist on audio. They were right: comedic narrative needs to be balanced with drama to really land and this scripted is very unbalanced. Yet they recorded this anyway.
• To paraphrase The Incredibles (as I think I also did in response to the Rory boxset): when every line is supposed to be funny, no line is funny. Y'all noticed that, right? Literally every single line in this script is a joke. Every single one. So while there are occasionally some good jokes (child-bearing hips and all that) none of the, land even half so well as they should, because they're crowded out by all of the other jokes.
• Overall I feel like this set is built atop a fundamental misunderstanding of Missy's character. She can be funny, yes, but she is not a "comic character." This is the same reductive lens through which the Rory set was constructed. These characters are more than just vehicles for gags!
• Okay, I really wanna be done with this, but one last point. You know why we all love multi-Doctor stories so much? Because each incarnation of the Doctor is different to the others, and the friction produced by these differences is typically very engaging. So why is it that we have two Monks here... and they're portrayed as exactly the same person? What, then, is even the point?

So... yeah, I'm done here. A very underwhelming set. And I hate to keep harping on Rory, but it feels like a pretty clear pattern, yeah? Big Finish set out to make a "comedy boxset" -- and that's just something they absolutely do not know how to do well. They put all of their eggs in the basket of "being funny" which, just... why?

And to add insult to injury, we're now being asked to pay more money for less content. This set consists of one fairly good story, one fairly mediocre story, and concludes with one helluva stinker. Imagine how different this set might be if there were a fourth story to balance it out? If nothing else there would have at least been the opportunity to end on a stronger note.

Does Missy have any soft, redeeming qualities, though?

Her characterization doesn't really differ much--at all--from prior masters apart from being a bit more manic, and a bit more inclined towards mischief over murder (but only a bit). She's basically just the Simm Master dialed up to 11--even her "romantic" fixation in the Doctor can be read as originating in the homoerotic subtext of the Simm/Tennant stories. Her capacity for "redemption" is an informed characteristic that we don't really ever get to see in her actions or performance until the actual episode where she is "redeemed."

This is why I like the first story in this set--it's the only Missy story that really suggests at there being more to her than just a desire to dominate everything in her path.

I confess I was picturing her as being in a Nun’s habit until she was talking to Missy about her name and it became obvious she wasn’t. 

If she hadn’t been pictured on the cover in that outfit I probably wouldn’t have made that mistake.

i think this was the key for me.  It didn’t really work on a first listen; it was fine but didn’t grab me.

i listened to it again a few weeks later and really enjoyed it.  Still not a ‘top 10’ but a lot more fun.  I didn’t particularly pick a time when I was really in the mood for a laugh but I guess I must have been because somehow it clicked second time around.

Yeah, the first set is Missy getting the Master TARDIS, which she does in the end. It sort of vanishes at the beginning of the second set and she miraculously gets it again by the end of the third. There’s not much consistency with it and it’s to the detriment of the range; when I finished Series 3, I was just thinking about the 7 stories I had to endure just to get back to the same place Series 1 ended!

There's chat about all three Missy series, including the latest, from Roy Gill in his first-ever podcast chat, Johnny Candon on War Seed, and musician and sound designer Joe Kraemer, in this week's Power of 3 podcast.

Listen to 86: Hey Missy! by The Power of 3 Podcast on #SoundCloud
soundcloud.app.goo.gl/U6EVB