4 episodes. Written by: Nigel Fairs. Directed by: Mark J. Thompson. Produced by: Mark J. Thompson, Sharon Gosling.
THE PLOT
Liz decides to spend a day off visiting Jean, an old university friend. When Jean fails to show up at their scheduled meeting, though, Liz goes to her house and finds that her friend has vanished. When the Doctor arrives at the scene, he tells Liz that there have been several disappearances in the Cambridge area.
As Liz investigates a link between Jean and another missing person - Jean's dentist - the Doctor and the Brigadier follow up another lead: a particularly bizarre suicide-by-train. A look at the dead man's body confirms the Doctor's worst fears. The body has been infested, and partially converted, by Cybermats. The Doctor is about to pit his wits against the Cybermen once more...
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: Writer Nigel Fairs does a fair job of capturing the Pertwee Doctor's gentler side. The Doctor is compassionate with Liz in every scene. He is also unfazed and unruffled by the dilemma. Even when Liz is herself infected, he refuses to give up, identifying the means of this new Cyber conversion process and using his considerable skills to find an antidote.
Fairs does a good job of keeping the viewpoint Liz's while at the same time keeping the 3rd Doctor in the foreground of the story. The only thing that's missing from the Pertwee Doctor is the spikiness. Look at the televised stories from Season Seven, and Pertwee's Doctor is very short-tempered, even downright antagonistic, to characters in each of those stories. Here, we only get the 3rd Doctor's softer side. That makes for a more likable characterization, perhaps, but a slightly less interesting one. Still, Nigel Fairs captures the Doctor here somewhat better than James Swallow did in Old Soldiers, and Caroline John manages to suggest something of Pertwee's style of line delivery, making it quite easy to picture Pertwee throughout.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: The Brigadier is very much on the periphery of this story, and he ends up being the one regular Caroline John can't capture in her line deliveries. She basically just lowers her voice and grits out the Brig's lines in gruff tones, making for a rather one-note Lethbridge-Stewart. Still, the story does convey both his efficiency and his chivalry, in trying to protect Liz from harm. He is definitely the worst-captured of the regulars in this audio, though.
Liz Shaw: The Blue Tooth is Liz's story, so it comes as small surprise that the character is recreated quite effectively. The best characterization comes in the early episodes, which Nigel Fairs uses to fill in a lot of backstory for Liz (including why a seemingly over-serious, studious Cambridge scientist has such a penchant for such extremely short mini-skirts). It adds an extra emotional dimension to the character to have her personally affected by the Invasion of the Week this time; and while the audio never does quite answer its own question ("When did I decide to leave the Doctor?"), it at least points to some potential reasons for the character to have decided to move on.
THOUGHTS
The Blue Tooth succeeds in many respects. It recaptures its era quite well. This feels very much like an extra Season Seven story, with the Doctor and the Brigadier working together but not 100% harmoniously, and with UNIT even setting up temporary offices on-site (in this case, at the college), rather than at UNIT headquarters (a set which did not exist until Season 8). There is a sense of seriousness to the proceedings, a sense that this story takes place in something very like "the real world." Even the Cybermen are treated in a way that brings them closer to the real world, using a real world outlet that often is a source of anxiety (in this case, a dentist's office) to make the threat feel credible. Honestly, if you were to take a time machine back to 1970 and commission the production team to bolt a 4-episode Cyberman story onto the end of Season Seven, I could easily picture the result playing out much like this story does.
One thing I do enjoy about the first set of Companion Chronicles is that Big Finish had not yet decided on a "set" number of episodes for each story. All stories were single-disc, but there were both 2-parters and 4-parters. That's something I wish they would return to, the idea that different stories might benefit from being structured in different episodic formats. The Blue Tooth is very much structured as a 4-parter, and it benefits from that. The Companion Chronicles range has remained strong (it's my favorite BF range at the moment), but I do regret the rigid, "one disc = 2 episodes, every time" format.
My only major gripe with the audio, and one which does cost it a point, is the resolution. The climax - with the Doctor and Liz in the midst of a nest of Cybermen - had me. I was quite gripped, and the images were vivid in my mind. And then... Liz passes out, and the Doctor fills her in on the denouement retrospectively, and not in a great deal of detail. It's the equivalent of a TV episode cutting from the moment of greatest crisis to the tag scene, and having the Doctor tell the companion, "Oh, I sorted it out." The summary of this off-screen resolution also feels a bit too easy, almost as if Fairs had written himself into a corner and couldn't quite write his way out again. It still works better than "Pertwee wrapping a green tentacle around his neck and thrashing a lot." But it's weak, and lets down an otherwise first-rate story.
Rating: 7/10.
Preceded by: Inferno
Followed by: Terror of the Autons
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