An English Gentleman: He’s a Doctor of lots of things that
end in ‘ology.’ Giving the Doctor a little rest isn’t such a bad thing every
now and again to spotlight the companions (although given Big Finish has an
entire range to fulfil that purpose it shouldn’t really let it bleed into the
main range as well) but giving him sod all to do in two of the three stories in
the trilogy is a shocking oversight on the script editors part. Perhaps it
should be called ‘The Tegan Adventures’ instead. The very idea! He’s so
superfluous to requirements he doesn’t even appear in the last episode until
nearly fifteen minutes in! Is this the first example of the ‘Doctor on holiday’
syndrome from the 1960s in Big Finish? ‘I wondered when you would show your
true colours’ says the Doctor of the traitors in this story as if he knew
all along. Do you not think he should have told his companions about his
suspicions or is he genuinely trying to bump them off?
Alien Orphan (the Older): Nyssa wants to go home and take
the Rictus cure with her but she has reached a dead end in her research. Her
characterisation when the story gets going is one of the best things about this
story. She has developed a nice chemistry with Turlough (they barely exchanged
a glance on screen so this has been one of the more interesting consequences of
the foursome reuniting) and takes charge in episode two in the absence of the
Doctor. What would Nyssa rather do, save her friends or find a cure for
Richter’s disease?
Mouth on Legs: Rather strangely Tegan sounds slighted by
Nyssa’s confession that she wants to go home which seems a bit rich when that
was all Tegan harped on about in her first year in the TARDIS. This new,
productive, helpful, pleasant Tegan is a much improved version than the one on
the television, I wont deny that, but how do you reconcile her with the return
of the super bitch that is in evidence after this run of stories ends (its set
between Enlightenment and The Kings’ Demons and Ms Jovanka is particularly
horrid in the latter). Its not like with the other Big Finish innovations in
character – there is a definite softness to the Doctor in Terror of the
Vervoids that wasn’t there in Mindwarp so you can explain away that he has
mellowed in the time in between with his adventures with Evelyn, Flip, etc. Mel
herself has been treated to a great deal of development and maturity but since
she was feisty in Vervoids and acts with a great deal of autonomy and spunk
during season 24 it is that much of a leap between how Big Finish characterise
her and the up and down treatment she had on television. The Tegan of this
trilogy is so completely different to how she was on television (if she was as
humorous and gentle as she has been in these last three then I would be
declaring her my favourite companion rather than my least favourite) that I
cannot see how this naturally fits into her time on the show. Its an improvement
without a doubt but its also tonally very jarring. When Tegan was reminiscing
about fun times back home in Brisbane and laughing about them amiably I thought
I had been zapped into an alternative dimension where absolutely nothing made
sense.
Alien Orphan (the Younger): Its nice that Turlough gets a
larger share of the action again because he has been rather neglected in this
run of stories for this team but like Kiss of Death the material is hardly
going to set your world on fire. He does realise that Sally isn’t what she
seems, but you’d have to be lobotomised not to realise that.
Standout Performance: I can only assume that they felt put
on the spot because the entire regular cast seem to think that this
cliché-packed script is the best one that they have worked on yet. Really?
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘What does this all have to do with Rats
because let’s face it everything else can wait at the moment!’ Tegan needs to
stop making such sense! My brain cannot handle it!
Dreadful Dialogue: ‘I was born in London, the South West.
Its supposed to be the posh part but there’s a lot of council estates there
too. And when I was sixteen I left school, a lot of us did. Most of the girls I
knew got pregnant, ended up on housing benefit or the social. But not me. I
didn’t want to be one of the millions unemployed, worked my way up, four years
typing letter, making tea…’ and there ladies and gentlemen is the perfect
illustration of how not to introduce a character. I mean have you ever
met somebody who has given you a potted history like this? Let alone making
points about their social status and career? Its just ridiculous. Only people
in fiction would ever vomit up this in their opening gambit…bad fiction.
Nyssa actually says in all earnestness ‘come out…come out
wherever you are…’
‘A plague! That’s overkill on a massive scale!’ Tegan
simplifies things for the audience. No different than putting down rat poison
though, is it?
‘Are you going to throw me into a maze or something? Make me
squeak for some cheese?’ Make it stop!
‘One puff from this and you’ll be back squeaking for
cheese!’ – etc, etc…
‘He only came because of his stupid mid-life crisis!’ Nobody
in this story talks naturalistically!
‘You let them in whilst I was making the tea, didn’t you?’
Great Ideas: Operation Daylight was a Second World War
attempt at liberating France controlled from a set of war rooms deep in the
cliffs under Cuduggen castle. Three glory seekers poking around in the ruins of
an underground bunker – that is perfect horror movie material. The Rats join
their tails together to form some form of telepathic consciousness that allows
them to communicate with the humans. The Rats have been genetically advanced to
the level of geniuses through constant experimentation, each generation larger
in size and more advanced in intellect. Eventually they overcame the scientists
and captured them. The idea was to create a spy that nobody would suspect…a hyper
intelligent Rat that could scurry into places and listen to human
conversations, to remember that information, bring it back and disseminate it.
The ultimate secret agent. The Rat King is a communications hub for a
genetically achieved Super Rat Hive Mind. I really enjoyed the idea of the Rats
scurrying about in the TARDIS corridors, that is a genuinely innovative idea
that would have looked fantastic on screen.
Audio Landscape: Scream, cocking a gun, rats scurrying down
the corridors, explosion, crackling electricity, rat voices, walking in rat
shit (yep, they actually bring that delightful experience to life aurally),
running in a wheel, electric shocks, the tape running out, electric charge,
rubble falling, screeching rats escaping.
Musical Cues: A waste of Andy Hardwick’s talents, this is an
excellent score that really wants to get under your skin but the stories
deficiencies fight against it. Again listen to this in isolation and you will
appreciate it much more.
Isn’t it Odd: Perhaps skip the very first scene. The
dialogue is so clunky and deliberately informative about the guest characters
it never once sounds like anything a human being would say. The voices for the
rats are simultaneously creepy (they definitely sound alien and unknowable), unintelligible
(definitely unknowable because you can’t figure out half of what they
are saying!) and very distracting. They also sound very similar so when they
are talking to each other I found I couldn’t differentiate them. Isn’t the idea
of hyper intelligent rats seeking revenge on humanity by attempting to treat
them like laboratory specimens boiling this down to the most simplistic it can
possibly be? The cliffhanger to part one is far too busy for its own good and
then ends too abruptly. Putting humans onto a treadmill because that is what
they do to the rats? Oh please. Come the end of episode two you have the
Doctor being threatened by squeaky, histrionic Rats and groaning, mutilated
scientists…yep, this is sophisticated stuff! Since there is nothing profound to
be found in exploring the Rats and their desires, the only surprises that Tony
Lee can offer is how they became so intelligent in the first place. That’s not
the most satisfying of narratives, when the best surprises come before
the story began. There’s nothing original in the characterisation of Dr
Wallace, you’ll find this stock scientist character in a million of shows
(hundreds of times over in Doctor Who). To say that one of the glory seekers
was a plant for the Rats was not a surprise is the understatement of the
century. This is dreadfully predictable stuff. No I take that back…I didn’t
guess that Caitlin was Wallace’s daughter but that’s such a terrible soap opera
twist that springs from nowhere that it is hard to even take that seriously (I
had a similar reaction in Dexter season four, an otherwise peerless season of
television marred by the supposedly knockout but actually completely daft twist
that the Trinity Killer’s unknown daughter has been a major player in the
season and we weren’t aware of the connection). I’m starting to wonder if Dr
Mengale was the only misguided scientist on the planet because he is the only
bugger that ever gets mentioned when comparisons are to be made. Sally is so
stupid that she is told all about the temporal grace in the TARDIS and yet
tries to attack Turlough anyway and is surprised that she gets a shock for her
trouble! They don’t make henchwomen like this anymore…thank goodness. As if the
conclusion wasn’t cliché packed enough you have the Doctor talking about
contacting UNIT in one breath whilst a character walks into the TARDIS and
declares ‘but its huge!’ in the next. There’s nothing new here. Move it along.
Standout Scene: There’s a terrific moment that came
completely out of the blue when Nyssa is talking with the Rats and she declares
their treatment of the scientists to be obscene, even if they did experiment on
them and kill their families. They turn the tables on her and ask what she
would do if she could get her hands on the Master after he has murdered her
father, her step mother and destroyed her entire planet. Its something that I
long wish somebody would explore in more depth because there is so much
dramatic potential in Nyssa’s backstory. This is barely touched upon here but I
really appreciated the mention.
Result: Rat Trap tries to mix politics, social commentary
and action adventure to brew up a potent tale of Rats (they are so latitudinous
they deserve the capital) turning the tables on humanity. Unfortunately in the
first two cases the script barely scratches the surface and with the latter the
plot fails by resorting to a lot of rather tedious running around. The villains
of the piece are so ineptly handled in both their realisation and their
motivation I was longing for somebody to just toss down some poison pellets so
we could get on with something more engaging. The location is ideal to tell an
effective, claustrophobic Doctor Who story in but beyond some insistent (read:
raucous) sound design it fails to live up to that promise. It strays into
torture porn territory with characters being tormented, wading through rat shit
and mutilated but that’s just a tasteless layer of nastiness to distract the
audience from the fact that the plot is failing to shift. Proof that Ken
Bentley suffers from the same affliction as Gary Russell, his direction is only
as good as the script and if it is a particularly fine example he will produce
magic but if it’s a duffer he can barely find the enthusiasm to inject any
existence into it. With Rat Trap he seems to have lost control, the
performances are hysterically over the top for the most part, the sound design
gave me a headache with its ceaseless echoes and inaudible rat voices and the
(excellent) musical score is lost amongst the cascade of noise. With its
attempts to brew up an attention-grabbing situation but fudging it
spectacularly in the realisation (both scripting and direction), this might be
the finest interpretation of season 20 yet. The human characters aren’t what
they seem? Check. The evil scientist that created the Rats is actually a
misguided good guy who sacrifices himself at the end? Check. There is a Rat who
wants to help humanity and works against his own kind? Check. The Doctor turns
up in a last minute triumph and defeats the Rats with a quirk of technobabble?
Check. Its just so routine on every level. Some people might say that I
should cut Rat Trap some slack because it was a last minute replacement for
something that fell through which would be a reasonable argument if The War Games,
The Shadow in the Glass and Midnight weren’t also last minute concoctions that
just happened to be brilliant. If you want to experience a truly chilling story
about rats taking on humanity than check out James Herbert’s Rat Trilogy.
Its more imaginative, horrific, exciting and satisfying than anything here. I’m
so bored of criticising this run for the Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan and
Turlough…there must be a decent story for them soon. Rat Trap is a
noisy, empty affair that climaxes another disappointing trilogy for this team: 4/10
4 comments:
Of the first six stories with this TARDIS crew, this and "Cobwebs" were the only ones that I really liked. It was also great to hear Terry Molloy play a character other than Davros. He's brilliant as Davros but I tend to forget how good an actor he is when it comes to other parts. Dr. Wallace is really the anti-Davros!
You know, the basic idea of lab rats using humans for an experiment is hardly new. Douglas Adams did it in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.
i was lukewarm on this one but Davison's doctor is so pleasant to hang out with and Turlough wasn't a complete shit for once. OMG the rat telepathic voices were impossible to listen to AAAAAAAAA
Well it wasn't as boring as Kiss of Death, for whatever that's worth. Still not very memorable.
Post a Comment