Archeological Adventuress: Peter asks his mother if she
thinks they can beat the Deindum and like the good mother that she is she says
‘of course we can’ but with just enough uncertainty in her voice to let the
audience know that she thinks they are screwed. I love the scenes where
everybody gets together and chips in theories about the Deindum and how they
can be defeated – it feels just like old times! Bernice knows that playing
about with the timelines and practically becoming the Braxiatel that they all
condemn isn’t the way they are supposed to do things. But things are bad and
they’re going to get worse. When the news that Adrian might have died filters
through that practically clichés it for Benny. She recognises that after this
is done then no more. Manipulating the lives of others is off the menu.
The last Bernice sees of Peter is him being shot by the Deindum as she is
dragged away by Braxiatel. Now she has no choice but to set her plan in motion
and eradicate the Deindum’s warlike future – nothing will stop her from
protecting her son.
Super Genius: When you hear Braxiatel publicly admitting
that they are lost and to give up hope…well its unheard of. He’s desolate and
depressed, subject to the Deindum experiments and doesn’t want to see any of
his previous allies. His reaction when Bernice rushes in to save him
(against her better judgement) made me howl with laughter. This is their chance
to finally get some answers out of the man and to hold him to account for his
actions…and it has been a long time coming. He asks what Bernice wants from him
and all she wants is to see that he cares. Braxiatel used to but he has
become so involved in his madly complicated schemes he’s forgotten the cost.
Worlds have been lost, lives lost and the future ruined and Bernice wants him
to know that it wasn’t worth it. She has no qualms about telling him
that if she hadn’t needed him to complete her plans she would have left him to
the Deindum. He’s never been happy with his TARDIS since he got into the Jade
colour scheme and has been redecorating. Despite the fact that everybody knows
what Braxiatel has done he doesn’t hide away from the people in his care but
instead assumes responsibility for them. Brax tried to be honest with Bernice
about his plans (to which naturally she is appalled) and he makes a very good
point that perhaps she would have preferred it if he had gone behind her back
and done it so she could find out later and come down on him like a ton of
bricks but still reap the benefits. When it comes down to Bernice and
Brax being the last two people able to make a difference and fiddle the
timelines so the Deindum scourge is deleted she tells him that she doesn’t
think what he has done was right but she does understand his motives.
It’s the closure both characters needed before they moved on (or lost) their
lives.
Angry Adolescent: When Braxiatel made Peter kill Jason he
unleashed something inside of him. He has to live with that action for the rest
of his life.
Art Thief: She’s reluctant to leave the Collection because
six months down and the Deindum haven’t attacked it yet. She tells Adrian that
she loves him when she has to send him into certain death. Its nice to know
that there is still room for romance in this universe.
Alien Gardener: Hass is tortured to within an inch of his
life by the Deindum who want him to tell them where Brax is and he doesn’t
break. He’s been letting the radiation build up in his suit the whole time just
in case it is needed. Brax returns with a plan for Hass to kill again by
releasing that radiation and to give them a chance to put their plan into
operation. He agrees but it might just kill him inside to do it again. Lianna’s
toe curling scream as Hass unleashes the full force of his radiation onto
Maximediras is unforgettable.
Shaggy Dog: Adrian is a direct man and prefers facing his
enemies down and not hiding in a bunker and sending out other people (the BPMs)
to do his dirty work for him. He feels it’s a war played by children and not
men. Being free in this way feels like being in prison and he doesn’t like
spending so much time with the man who almost tortured him to death once.
Adrian is all about building and Bernice is all about ruins and that sums up
why they could never have worked as a couple.
Food Stains: Since he started working for Braxiatel he has
become a psychological wreck who has rarely slept because he cannot switch his
mind off and now he gets the chance to tell him how much he hates him for that.
Before time is rewritten Doggles is shot down in a hail of bullets.
Standout Performance: This one belongs to Miles Richardson
through and through as Braxiatel is trapped in the unfortunate position of
being kidnapped by Bernice and friends and has to make an account of himself.
Richardson gets the chance to be serious, tortured, charming, funny, clever,
benevolent and humble. He’s such an asset to this range and whilst I understood
the reasons why they wanted to effectively reboot it and try new things after
this story it pleased me no end to find him back at the end of the Legion box
set. He’s simply too good a character (and actor) to not have around.
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘Back home in the present monsters from
the future with technology that’s as advanced as any I’ve ever seen they have
spent the last six months systematically destroying everything I’ve ever
known…’
‘I wish I hadn’t been so important to you.’
‘Its hard enough planning in four dimensions without you
being enigmatic!’
‘Maybe I’ll go back to the future and dig it up myself one
day!’
‘Goodbye Irving’ ‘But not for good I hope Benny. In another
life where the story takes a different path…’
Great Ideas: Bernice has tried travelling into the future
after the Deindum’s end to find out how they had died (clever idea) hoping to
get some clues on how to beat them. Instead they found the remains of their
Empire, the whole galaxy crippled by their Occupation and terrified by the
notion that they might come back. Its very clever to open on this footing
because we know from the off that if the Deindum aren’t defeated they will
leave a trail of devastation in their wake the likes of which the galaxy has
never seen. They have to be stopped. In the future that Bernice knew
(and had explored with the Doctor) humans had certainly survived but in the
future in the wake of the Deindum humanity has been completely wiped out. There
was an odd jump on Deindus (well what else was it going to be called?) where
their technology increased and they evolved from a humanoid reptilian race to
giant, glowing reptile heads that are currently causing a menace back in
Bernice’s time period. There’s a lovely General Grugger kicks K.9 moment
(Meglos) when the Deindum toss Joseph onto the street battered and bruised (he
very sweetly goes ‘ow!’). The fiends! Because they are from the future the
Deindum have all the advantage, they know how Benny, Brax and all the
others are going to jump and can always be one step ahead. Bev wonders if the
Deindum are so aggressive because ultimately they are quite vulnerable. There’s
a terrifically exciting moment when the Deindum use the BPMs to track Doggles
and Adrian’s base of operations and send missiles back at them to destroy their
hiding place. One date was recorded, enshrined and remembered forever by every
civilisation the Deindum had ever trampled over – the day when their future and
past selves met and they found out what they were going to become. Bernice’s
plan is to provoke a war between the Deindum from the past and the Deindum from
the future by convincing those from the past in the moment where their warlike
future versions descend from the heavens to tell them what will becomes that
they aren’t their future selves but interlopers who are trying to manipulate
them. A war between the same race at different stages of their evolution,
that’s brilliant. Even Brax thinks its audacious! Rather wonderfully the
crew reconvene in Braxiatel’s TARDIS to created a fake history for the Deindum,
a home planet and a mythology that they can use as bluff. They need to go into
the past to install their fake history and Braxiatel can muddy the timelines
she they don’t notice that things have been changed. He wants to move the
Collection, to keep it constantly in movement so the Deindum can’t get a handle
on where Brax or his allies are. By using the TARDIS to hoover up spillage from
the time fissure he can harness that energy to shift the Collection’s location.
They found a quiet little planet similar to Deindus and everybody played their
part in making this seem like a real civilisation. Doggles worked on fake
technology, Adrian on fake architecture, Bev on fake artefacts and Bernice put
together the whole history through remains. This is such an intelligent idea
because it utilises the skills of everybody on the Collection.
Ultimately the only way to force this range to move on is to
delete the Collection and its inhabitants out of existence. Now it doesn’t
officially state that but by playing about with time it is a massive
possibility. Cleverly Robson has re-jigged the timelines so that there is the
potential that all those Bernice Summerfield characters are out there somewhere
but they could be doing anything and might have lived completely different
lives. For now the series has to move on but who knows when we might see any of
them again? I like that ambiguity, it’s a very creative way of having your cake
and eating it. They could be brought back and the ending of this story still
makes perfect sense and they might never be seen again and it would still
make sense. Clever stuff. And as low key and dramatic as it was this is
certainly a more spectacular and memorable end to the Collection than ‘Bernice
goes off in a huff’ in The Wake.
Audio Landscape: The winds of Deindus, screaming crowds, the
growling Deindum voices, explosions, alarm, explosion, Brax’s TARDIS, the
articulated lorry TARDIS, birdsong, Adrian facing an all out conflict with the
Deindum, rolling waves, explosions as the Deindum catch up with them.
Standout Scene: The confrontation between Bernice and
Braxiatel was everything that I hoped it would be. Robson allows the action to
pause so we can share a moment between the two most important figures of this
range. Once good friends and now the best of enemies, Bernice has finally got
the chance to tell him everything that he has put her through. She wants him to
admit that he had Peter kill Jason (because until now it has only been a
suspicion) which he does and barely shows the slightest bit of remorse. Jason
had discovered that Braxiatel was altering history and on a more personal level
he had been manipulating Bernice and whilst Brax could have altered his
memories (again) the real danger was that he was about to recruited by the
Deindum. He would have been a valuable asset to them against Brax and something
had to be done. He used Peter to bind Bernice to him – if she thought her son
was dangerous she wouldn’t want to cope with him on her own. When he realised
the Benny was inextricably linked to the future of the Deindum he thought he
could influence them by influencing her. He’s been monitoring her via her time
ring ever since she left the Collection. The truth is Braxiatel has his own
reasons for wanting to defeat the Deindum that are far more important that the
squalid path of destruction they have created since their inception. But he can
see how much this means to Bernice and he has to live in this time period so he
sacrifices the energy he needed to resurrect the Time Lords to save this corner
of the universe and the future of its citizens. For a moment Bernice wobbles and
tells him that she appreciates the sacrifice he is making. The last scene is
spectacularly dramatic as both Bernice and Braxiatel are killed by the Deindum
just as the timelines start warping – they might both be alive once
continuity has settled by for this moment in both their lives they are dead.
Notes: Unlike short story collections in the past the
anthology Present Danger is not an essential purchase because the main plot
developments of this story take place in the audios. The six month period between
the end of Resurrecting the Past and the start of Escaping the Future is
charted in the novel and you get to see how the resistance was built and the
lengths Braxiatel, Benny and the others are going to try and hold this menace
back. Because there is no hope of a resolution (that’s here) it’s a very
serious tome but its gripping because of it and with authors such as Lance
Parkin, Kate Orman, Simon Guerrier and John Dorney contributing the hit rate is
very high. Some people might object to the novel/audio format where you skip
from one to another between stories but I think it’s a terrific approach to
telling stories because you get the benefit of the intimacy of the written word
and the immediacy of audio. It’s a very fulsome experience. And as long as they
choose one dominant media to tell all the important moments in (the audio
series is definitely top dog) then having the books to back them up just makes
it a more intimate, detailed experience.
Result: ‘Bernice your brilliance has cleaned up my mess
admirably. You have been remarkable…’ Unpredictable and seeded with great
ideas, the conclusion to this two hour blockbuster wasn’t at all what I was
expecting and is all the better for it. What’s great about Escaping the Future
is that it doesn’t go down the obvious path of telling a war story (the
anthology Present Danger has already filled a lot of the messy, violent blanks
during the Deindum invasion plus we have already explored a war setting on the
Collection in the Life During Wartime/Death and the Daleks double bill and it
was hardly going to better that) but instead uses its time to spoil us with
long overdue confrontations, the joy of seeing enemies turn into allies and
experience this team working together to create a plan of monumental importance
to defeat the Deindum. What I thought was going to be a depressingly shallow
combat tale instead becomes a hugely imaginative and triumphant piece about
these characters we have come to know and love triumphing against all the odds
even at the cost of their lives. There’s exciting moments (missile alert!),
performance pieces (the riveting Bernice/Braxiatel confrontation which sees
Bowerman and Richardson at their best) and a real atmosphere of doom as the
entire population of the Collection try and provoke a conflict between two
evolutionary stages of the same race and manipulate the timelines. They are
literally playing God. It’s a story where Bernice gets to scrub an
entire war out of history (it might be one that could have been avoided but
that is a moot point now since it has happened) and even as she puts her
plan in motion she understands (as do we) that it will mean consequences.
Consequences for her and consequences for the range. This two parter has been
triumph in both re-igniting interest in the series and polishing off
over ten seasons worth of storytelling. It has managed to be epic and intimate,
exciting and involving, clever and creative. Its all the things I have come to
expect from this range at its best with the added excitement of knocking down
the house of cards once and for all. Who knows what the future will hold but at
least we had the chance to play with all these wonderful toys one last time.
The last scene is brilliantly climactic and unforgettable: 10/10
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