4-3. The Prisoner of Peladon.

2 episodes. Running Time: Approx. 66 minutes. Written by: Cavan Scott, Mark Wright. Directed by: Nicola Bryant. Produced by: David Richardson. Performed by: David Troughton, Nicolas Briggs.


THE PLOT:

A coup on Mars has left the Martian royal family dead and Grand Marshall Raxlyr's "New Martian Republic" in charge. Raxlyr warns the galaxy that Mars is now a closed planet, and he warns other worlds against harboring Martians fleeing from his regime.

King Peladon (David Troughton) ignores this threat, agreeing to make his world a haven for the refugees. He finds a fast friend in Lord Varnaak, the spokesperson for the Martians, and he has the support of the Galactic Federation. The decision causes some unrest among Pel separatists, but tensions seem to be gradually easing.

...That is, until a second ship of Martian refugees crash lands. King Peladon's men and Varnaak are able to save most of the passengers with the unexpected help of an old friend - the Doctor. Not long after the crash, however, Varnaak is murdered - apparently the work of a Pel separatist. Then another murder happens in the refugee camp, and several Martian children are kidnapped.

Varnaak's hot-headed replacement, Lord Axlaar, accuses the king of ordering crimes against his people. Once again, Peladon turns to the Doctor for help. But the Doctor's behavior isn't quite as King Peladon remembers it...


CHARACTERS:

The Doctor: The Doctor does exactly as he promises King Peladon, investigating the crimes and collecting genuinely important evidence. However, the king isn't wrong to think that he's behaving differently. The Doctor is at his most aloof, keeping secrets even when he has no reason to. This builds toa memorable scene in which the king accuses him of treating a life-and-death situation like a game.

King Peladon: In The Curse of Peladon, I found this character to be bland and weak. Though he remains several steps behind the Doctor and could just about claim, "What is happening?" as a catchphrase, it's clear that he's matured into a strong ruler. He maintains his calm when facing down a furious Lord Axlaar, and he insists on personally assisting the survivors of the crashed ship and on touring the refugee camps, in both cases against the advice of friends concerned for his safety. He is eager to accept the Doctor's advice - but unlike in Curse, he is also willing to stand up for himself as the planet's ruler.

The Ice Warriors: Though Peladon is now home to a Martian refugee camp, there are only two Ice Warriors we get to know. The aged Lord Vaarnak is the leader of the refugees, a respected Martian hero who refused to side with the military coup and who has become King Peladon's trusted friend. Lord Axlaar is his younger cousin, and he's prone to anger and outbursts. Other Martian characters are either extras (the refugees) or muscle (Axlaar's right-hand man, Slern).


THOUGHTS:

The Prisoner of Peladon has a lot in common with The Curse of Peladon. Like that story, it's enjoyable and well-paced. The actual narrative is engaging, but also very straightforward. By the end of Episode One, most listeners will know who the villain is and be able to make a decent guess as to his motives. From there, it's mainly a game of waiting for the characters to catch up.

I enjoyed this story much more than its television predecessor.

The script's biggest asset is its character work. King Peladon may be stuck playing Watson to the Doctor's Sherlock Holmes, but he is neither a weakling nor a fool. David Troughton recaptures enough of his old performance to keep the king feeling like the same character, only his long rule has stiffened his once noodle-like spine. A part of him wants to defer to the Doctor, but his old friend's behavior makes that difficult - and as king, he can't entirely avoid keeping a secret or two of his own.

In addition to giving a good performance in his main role, Troughton does a rather good Third Doctor. Like most of the Companion Chronicles narrators, he doesn't really sound like Pertwee, but he captures many of his mannerisms. This helps to differentiate the speaking voices of the Doctor and Peladon. The two share several conversations, but thanks to Troughton's ability to give them separate voices, it never really sounds like one man talking to himself.

This story is set shortly after Jo's departure, and it's one of a Doctor Who subgenre that the New Series has created: an examination of the reasons why the Doctor needs a companion. On his own, he succumbs to his worst traits, showing off his cleverness in ways that don't always serve the situation. Jo wasn't shy about acting as a buffer between the oft-prickly Third Doctor and others, and their relationship genuinely softened him. Without her or someone like her, he comes across as... Well, as Peladon accuses: Playing games with innocent lives.


OVERALL:

The Prisoner of Peladon benefits from some excellent sound design. It's narratively straightforward, concealing few surprises, but it's well-paced and thoroughly entertaining. What elevates it, though, are the characterizations of the Doctor and King Peladon. The Third Doctor is well captured by writers Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, and his worst tendencies are accented by his solitude, while Peladon is granted a bit of steel that he sorely needed in his television story.

Just on a narrative basis, this would be a fun throwaway, but the Doctor/Peladon material elevates it into something memorable... and, unless The Monster of Peladon ends up being a lot better than I remember, this is likely to be my pick as the franchise's best Peladon story.


Overall Rating: 8/10.

Previous Television Story: The Green Death
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1-3. The Blue Tooth.

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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1-2. Fear of the Daleks.

2 episodes. Running Time: Approx. 66 minutes. Written by: Patrick Chapman. Directed by: Mark J. Thompson. Produced by: Sharon Gosling. Performed by: Wendy Padbury, Nicholas Briggs.


THE PLOT:

New companion Zoe Heriot is frightened after viewing the record of the Doctor's last encounter with the Daleks on the mind scanner. The Doctor promises, however, that the adventure in question marked the Daleks' final end.

He then takes Zoe and Jamie to Lavonia, a city built into an asteroid. Lavonia is neutral territory, and it has therefore been designated the site of peace talks between the Xantha Empire and the Tibari Republic.

But not everyone wants peace. Professor Atrika, a rogue Tibari scientist, has developed a device that will allow him to mentally project a subject and also to control that person. All he needs is a person with a strong mind, meaning the arrival of the Doctor and Zoe couldn't have been timed more perfectly.

Atrika selects Zoe for the first practical test of this technology, projecting her onto the flagship carrying the Tibari president. Her assignment is to assassinate the president, which will be blamed on Xanthe. And his co-conspirators?

The Daleks, who are not quite as dead as the Doctor had led Zoe to believe!


CHARACTERS:

The Doctor: Quickly recognizes Atrika's technology as being of Dalek origin. He tries to reason with Atrika, to make the scientist see that his allies cannot be trusted. When the Daleks learn that he is present and come crashing into Atrika's laboratory, the Doctor plays for time, reminding them that they will need his mind to properly work their machine and bring their plans to fruition.

Zoe: Tries with all her will to resist Atrika's control, particularly after she meets the Tibari president and is impressed by her. She manages to force out a couple of veiled statements, but Atrika's grip on her mind is too tight for any direct warning. As the assassination nears, she is horrified by her own actions even as she's helpless to stop herself.

Jamie: Zoe pronounces him "brave," but she also observes that something about him leaves her wanting to protect him. He spends most of the story being little more than present, an extra hostage for Atrika and then the Daleks to wield against the Doctor, though he does get a tiny bit to do at the very end.

Atrika: The placeholder villain for the story's first half. He's worked his evil genius (TM) on Dalek technology so that he can astral project a perfect assassin. When confronted about why he wants to sabotage peace, he just sneers something about how "democracy takes too long!" He was previously close to the president that he now wants to assassinate, and there's a hint that he's jealous that she didn't take him with him when she found political success - but nothing is done with that element, because that might have been somewhat interesting.

The Daleks: Nicholas Briggs does his usual splendid job, varying his pitch to distinguish between the different Daleks. Unfortunately, that's about the only good thing I can say about the Daleks here, as this is a lot closer in quality to the horrible Victory of the Daleks than to the excellent Power or Evil. For one thing, these are particularly stupid Daleks. The Doctor needs to remind them that their plans require that both he and Atrika remain alive. They later indicate their plans to betray an ally right in front of that person, because that couldn't possibly go wrong later. Finally, at the climax, they spend what seems like an eternity screeching about exterminating without ever actually... you know... doing it. Oh, and the total Dalek body count amounts to a couple of unnamed redshirts.


THOUGHTS:

I have very little positive to say about Fear of the Daleks, but I'll start with the one positive that I realized while typing out the synopsis: the bones of this story aren't inherently awful. Certainly, there's not much here that's original, but the premise could have made for a decent action thriller.

Too bad about everything else.

One of the first things that I noticed was the bad dialogue. "We'll worry about your megolomania later!" the Doctor says to Atrika - which might be OK if he was puncturing the scientist's ego, but as delivered here, he's speaking in full earnest. Later, the Daleks go into a rant about fear that plays out as unintentionally comical.

Then there are the clichés. A character has a chance to kill the Daleks, but refuses to because it would make that person as bad as they are. Another character performs a noble self-sacrifice... which, with very rare exceptions, is probably my very least favorite Doctor Who trope.

And, of course, there's a giant hole in the story's own logic. Atrika and the Daleks need minds of the caliber of the Doctor and Zoe for their plans to reach fruition. The Daleks even hold off on killing the Doctor because they accept that they need him. But it's not as if they were expecting him. In fact, it's a plot point that they are surprised when he shows up. So here's the question: Exactly what were they planning to do before they turned up?

Of course, never mind any of that, because the climax shows us that the machine can project the Daleks just fine. So then the question becomes: Since they didn't actually need the Doctor after all, why didn't they just kill him when they had the chance? The answer, of course, is that then there wouldn't have been a story. Not there's much of one anyway...


OVERALL:

Fear of the Daleks is bad. The story itself might have made for a reasonably entertaining runaround, but everything goes wrong in the execution: plot holes, bad dialogue, and clichés that had overstayed their welcome back when the Troughton era was actually airing on television!

It's sad to consider that this was the first-ever Second Doctor audio. Thankfully, better would come before too long. Even more thankfully, the rest of the Companion Chronicles from that first set were of a very high standard, which helped to offset the stink of this rotten turkey.

It's probably not Big Finish's very worst title - but it would have to rate as a pretty strong contender.


Overall Rating: 1/10.

Previous Television Story: The Wheel in Space
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