The Real McCoy: Fenric asks the Doctor if he thinks his
mortal realm of stars and galaxies actually matters. His reaction to the
Haemovores being set loose on his friends injects the moment with some real
horror. He’s scared because Fenric is insane and ridiculously powerful, there’s
no telling what havoc he could wrought. For a moment the Doctor thinks that Ace
is dead and declares her a ‘stupid, headstrong brilliant girl!’ For a
second you can feel how much she means to him. He can’t answer the questions as
to whether he trusted Ace and Hex with the knowledge of what has been going on
all along…he just feigns innocence and tries to bluff his way out of answering.
The Doctor cocks up a saying and it amuses Fenric to think of the ‘good old
days’, showing just how far back he has been watching this particular
incarnation. In his arrogance the Doctor believed himself to be Fenric’s
opposition, his equal but he soon comes to realise that he has just been
another piece on the board. Its interesting to see the Doctor relegated to a
background player when The Curse of Fenric went to such efforts to make his
battle with Fenric a clash of the Gods. Personally I prefer this turn of
events, I like the Doctor to be the underdog rising up against his enemies
rather than the omnipresent manipulator with delusions of grandeur. But I’m
sure there are people out there who are weeping at the thought of the Doctor
being defrocked in such a fashion, to be told that he isn’t a celestial player
after all. All the Doctor had to do was to bring Hex to the game, that was the
extent of his role. How humbling.
Oh Wicked: ‘My name’s Ace, I’m from a dysfunctional
family and I cope by blowing things up!’ Just about sums her up nicely!
Fenric senses movement on his chess board and smells a she-wolf and calls Ace
one of his own. Ace figures that if she can’t beat action Barbie (Lysandra)
than she is just going to have to join her (I wish she had figured that in the
last story but its better late than never!). It doesn’t take them long to be
arguing amiably over the fact that they are both old enough to be each others
mothers. As Ace starts painting her picture of Fenric and tells Hex about the
time storm that brewed up in her bedroom and whisked her off to Iceworld it is
a strong reminder of how long she has been travelling with the Doctor for now
and how long Fenric had a hand in her adventures from the very beginning. Her
own personal hell is to be taken back to Perivale so naturally that is exactly
where Fenric takes her, to the point just before the time storm took her away
on her journey of discovery. She has the option to stop the event that changed
her life, to have some other poor wretch by chosen by Fenric and take her
place. How different would her life have been had she never been tainted by
Fenric and nor met the Doctor. Would she be a success? Or was this what made her
a success? She’s angrier than she has ever been with the Doctor – you can tell
that by the way she isn’t shouting (that does seem a rather apt point and an
infinitely preferable state of affairs!). Ace is the one who asks the pertinent
questions – if Weyland wants to destroy the universe and they are trying to
destroy his opponent, does that make them the goodies or the baddies? At the
end of his life Ace tries to tell Hex that she loves him but he stops her,
knowing that it will stop him from sacrificing himself. The fact that he asks
her to pull the switch that will kill him says something about their bond but
she can’t do it. Even though she understands why she has to. She’s
hysterical at the end, practically animalistic in response to Hex’s sacrifice.
Goodness knows what will happen between her and the Doctor next.
Sexy Scouse: There’s a very funny moment when Hex tries to
suggest that in his travels with the Doctor he has learnt that not all alien
lifeforms are to be treated as villains and the blue, scabby monsters that are
approaching might be quite friendly. The Doctor points out quite early on that
his name means ‘curse’ which should be a big clue to where his character is
heading. When his wound from Scutari starts to bleed again, it confirms it.
It’s a bloody portent of doom. Weyland reveals that Hex is his creature and
that without his protection he would have long since bled to death. Hex is
Weyland’s secret weapon, brought to the game invisibly, masked by all the
Doctor schemes and traps. The trouble with having pieces on a chess board that
can think for themselves is that they wont obey the rules of the game. The
black and white pieces joining forces defeated Fenric during the first contest
and now Hex chooses to defy Weyland in the second contest in exactly the same
way. Once Weyland is out of the way Hex then manages to best Fenric too, by
having faith in the one person that he never got to know. His mother. Beneath
all the bluster and complications of this arc, the whole thing turns out to be
about Hex and his mother and how he uses her memory to defeat Fenric.
Ex-Forge: When visiting the future, Lysandra sees the moment
when Sally murders her for information she simply doesn’t have. It takes
Lysandra to take action and obey Hex’s wishes at the end.
Sally: She went to Mars with the Doctor to check out the
Tomb of an ancient Star God. In the future she has an important position with
the military and has developed a cold, efficient attitude to her work. She’s
willing to torture Lysandra in order to get the truth out of her. Sally watches
herself activate the weapon that will destroy the world. It’s all part of
Fenric’s evil plan, allowing them to see this. Fenric wanted to turn them
against Weyland so that he would lose and deliver him the shield.
Standout Performance: Olivier always impresses me as Hex and
has done right back from the start of his adventures but I was left gobsmacked
as he switched between the vicious, antagonistic Fenric and the much gentler
Scouse lad that we all know and love. Its effortlessly done and proves to be a
gripping final performance piece for an actor who brought a great deal to his
stories.
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘At last I shall make my true form
manifest…and let the chains of Fenric shatter!’
‘It was always a toss up between you and a lovelorn young
motorcyclists in…Wales.’
‘A bleeding man on a planet of vampires?’
‘For all your huffing and puffing Fenric, you’re just a boy
who likes pulling the wings of spiders, aren’t you?’
Great Ideas: Fenric likes to play chess because it is the
game of Gods. The Doctor figures that the Elder Gods need mortal men to give
their universe scale, to be something to their nothing. We can happily
live without them but their lives are meaningless without us. In a wonderful moment
of surreal imagery, Hex, Lysandra and Sally reach the end of the world and
realise that it is flat and it just falls off into nothingness (it’s the
literal representation of the chess board that they are playing on). Suddenly
they are confronted by literal chess pieces, giant castles and the like and
they realise that they are piece themselves. Bringing the two sets of
companions together was swapping one castle (TARDIS) for another, the Doctor
diverting Fenric’s attention. The Doctor realised a long time ago that somebody
was stirring up the Elder Gods, as far back as the giant chess set in the Swiss
Sanatorium (The Magic Mousetrap). Whilst Ace and Hex slept the Doctor followed
traces of the Elder Gods on a thousand worlds over thousands of years and they
were all talking about the same thing – Weyland’s Shield. Fenric thinks the
shield will allow him to re-attain his natural form as a creature with
limitless, unspeakable limbs that can creep across entire dimensions. Nimrod’s
last secret hidden away at the heart of the Forge is a weapon that fires a beam
of electrons that kills the Higgs-Boson, fire it at anything and it simply
becomes unstuck. In the future there is a White fleet of ships hanging over the
Earth poised to attack – they could use the weapon to destroy it but it would
be reduced to a poisonous goo that would infect the Earth. Either way, dead.
The pass code to weapon changes every time it is used to the next move in a
game of chess. The Elder Gods gather for the end of the game, like thunder
cracking in the sky. Weyland is Fenric’s true opponent, a maker of weapons and
tools for Gods to fight other Gods. The Forge was always Weyland’s creation and
he went unseen by those who thought that they were in charge of it. He filled
the TARDIS with his black pieces – Lysandra was a product of his Forge and
Sally’s parents were killed in a volley bullets that he made. Weyland has been
watching Fenric as back as Perivale. When the Doctor described Ace’s town as
having ‘lush green fields and a village blacksmith’ he never imagined
that Weyland was operating there. The description of Weyland’s foundry beneath
the Earth, a death factory to create weapons of holy destruction is one of
those ideas that Big Finish touts every now and again that really gets my blood
pumping. I would love to see more of that, it is an astonishingly vivid
location. The person who wields the shield can re-shape everything that ever
was and will be, Weyland made it and such power would set him up above the
Gods. Fenric challenged him for it and can only take it if he wins the game.
The whole of reality is at stake in a chess match between the Gods. Peggy (from
Protect and Survive) has been one of Weyland’s allies all along and refuses to
give him the shield unless he returns Albert to her. She’s sacrificed by
Weyland simply snapping the head off her piece.
Audio Landscape: A bubbling stream, the clanking chains of
the Ancient One, the chaos of a time storm raging, Perivale recreated with cars
and buses passing by, thunders, birds screaming, assault helicopter, alarms,
Sally putting a bullet through her brain in the future, Fenric’s army rising
from the waters, the roaring Weyland, the Doctor at Weyland’s forge, metal on
metal, wind whipping through the TARDIS doors.
Isn’t it Odd: Try not to be too embarrassed by Sylvester
McCoy’s ramblings in the very first scene. I’ve not heard anything quite this
nonsensical from him since Unregenerate. Doctor Who also sported a fantastic
array of the sound effects to make its monsters seem more alien and over the
years Big Finish have happily capitalised on that fact and given this fanboy
many hours of pleasure recalling various sound effects from classic TV stories.
With the Haemovores they’ve drawn a bit of a blank though because their raison d’etre
was that they were silently stalking warriors that hunted you down and never
tired…how do you produce that sound on audio? By having them grunting and
groaning all the while, that’s how! Its nowhere near as effective, in fact it
sounds like a gang of Walking Dead zombies are pursuing our friends
throughout this tale. One of the best aspects of The Curse of Fenric was the
exploration of faith, those who had it were able to survive and those without
were killed. Its handled pretty shabbily here though with Ace’s faith in the
explosive abilities of Nitro Nine feeling like a piss take. Despite the
magnificence of the last ten minutes there is something a little off about
Hex’s character – he has been bitching an moaning about the absent Doctor for
quite some time now and when they are reunited he firmly tells him that he
wants a few words with him…but then a few scenes later without any sign that
they have had it out they are head back to the TARDIS as jolly as can be. It
feels a bit jarring. Oddly, they never get to have that conversation either
because there is far too much going on. It feels like a wasted opportunity. The
battle between Gods resorts to name calling (‘Fenric! Trickster! Player of
games!’) and fist waving – if we didn’t know that whole armies were being
swept up in their wake it might feel strangely anti-climactic (but then how
else can this sort of battle of deities be realised on audio?). Having
commenting on the action like your Grandma watching an episode of Doctor Who
does nothing to help. It all feels a little too human for my liking.
Just as Weyland brought in Lysandra and Sally to distract Fenric whilst he
sneaked in Hex as his secret weapon thus Alan Barnes and his writers have done
the same thing – ultimately they prove to have no impact on the story
whatsoever aside from keeping the audience thinking that they are important
whilst Hex is manoeuvred into his sacrificial place.
Standout Scene: When all the fireworks are over with and we
think that the fight is over, the writers pull one final nasty trick out of the
bag by revealing that Fenric has hidden away inside of Hex. As the poor lad
slowly bleeds to death in the TARDIS he begs to be allowed to die, rather that
than provide a host for the Elder God to inhabit. Its an act of pure
selflessness, Hex proves to be altruistic right up to the end. Unforgettable
(if a little too hysterical for my tastes). Keep listening after the credits
and a return appearance by Fenric in Hex’s form might be possible…
Notes: Stories that you might want to watch/listen to to
make sense of all this…
Dragonfire – We visit Ace before the time storm whips her
away from Perivale. The Doctor mentions ‘a village blacksmith.’
The Curse of Fenric – Obviously!
The Project Trilogy (Project: Twilight/Project: Lazarus/Project:
Destiny) – Introducing the Forge, Hex’s mother Cassie and Lysandra.
The Magic Mousetrap – A chess board motif emerges…
The Angel of Scutari – Hex is shot.
Lurker’s at Sunlight’s Edge – After which the Doctor builds
his second TARDIS
The House of Blue Fire – Sally is introduced.
Protect and Survive – A pair of Elder Gods make an
appearance
Black and White – The chess pieces come together. The
introduction of the Weyland’s shield.
Result: Written by Mike Maddox (aided strongly by Alan
Barnes), set in a fantasy realm where anything goes and tying together a mass
of threads stretching back into the misty dawn of televised Who…there is more
than a touch of Legend of the Cybermen about Gods and Monsters. This doesn’t
quite have the subversive creativity of that finale but it is still an
innovative and titanic conclusion. What is especially impressive about this
climactic story is how tightly plotted this arc feels and yet when you listen
to the extras it is revealed to have been pretty much made up as it went along
with the writers grasping at elements of the previous stories to drag them all
into one cumulative saga. You would honestly think this was all planned from
the outset. I actually preferred the dovetailing of various narratives and the plot
surprises to the identity of the villain of the piece – bringing Fenric back is
exciting in a very fannish way but once you are over the fact the truth of the
matter is that John Standing doesn’t bring a great deal of menace to the part
and the Haemovores worked far better on the television than a groaning
background presence here. Saying that they pull off a massive coup in the last
episode when the possessive powers of Fenric creates a chilling villain in
Philip Olivier’s Hex. Its during these powerful moments that you remember what
an effective opponent this particular Elder God was. Its when focusing on the
Doctor, Ace and Hex guys that Gods and Monsters really comes alive and I’m
pleased to say that they all get real moments to shine. This is hugely complicated,
utterly inimical to any fresh listeners but regardless manages to build the
entire McCoy era (televised and on audio) into an impressive house of cards
with Gods and Monsters right at the summit and gives a companion the
unforgettable exit they deserve. I had a few problems with this but if you keep
your wits about you it proves to be a rewarding experience: 8/10 (an
extra point for the last handful of scenes)
I have had to re-rate this story as the more l think about its construction out of continuity retroactively, the less convincing it feels. Its striving a little too hard to be epic at the expense of older, better stories: 6/10
I have had to re-rate this story as the more l think about its construction out of continuity retroactively, the less convincing it feels. Its striving a little too hard to be epic at the expense of older, better stories: 6/10
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