Good Grief: I am so used to the image of the third Doctor
chivalrously putting his arm or cloak around his female companions that it is
easy to forget that there was a brief period between Liz departing for
Cambridge and Jo Grant tripping into his laboratory where he lacked a
companion. Vengeance of the Stones exploits that period, the Doctor
unencumbered and able to throw himself into this investigation with objections
and with gusto. Mike liked the Doctor immediately, there was something
disarming and unofficial about him that appealed to him. The Doctor wants to
fly a military aircraft on the same flight path as the one that crashed,
something that Jon Pertwee would have leapt at in a second. Showing how much he
has already become attached to the Earth since his exile the Doctor states that
even if he could leave he wouldn’t whilst the planet was in danger, a far cry
from his attempts to depart amidst invasion in Spearhead from Space.
Chap With Wings: The Brigadier follows the Doctor on his
foolhardy mission because he needs looking after, he has a terrible habit of
getting himself into trouble. As usual he's there to pick up the pieces when the Doctor's plans go awry.
Camp Captain: Perhaps there was always more to mine from
Mike Yates’ character than I originally thought or perhaps he has gained
prominence as beloved performers from the same era have died. Either way
Richard Franklin has been afforded more opportunities in the past five years
than ever before in audio Who. The Nest Cottage audios gave him a chance to
square off against Tom Baker’s fourth Doctor (something that never happened on
TV and is exploited because of it) and he has featured in a number very strong
companion chronicles from Big Finish too. Franklin is a thoughtful performer
and imbues Mike with far more subtlety than he was afforded on TV in the 70s
(the scripts were too busy offering us a rollicking good time to get too mired
down in complex characterisation) and through these stories on audio there has
been some proof that Mike Yates has a great deal more layers that previously
thought. Originally conceived as a male love interest for Jo Grant and
eventually written out as a traitor to his own friends (with one last story for
him to seek redemption), there’s a great deal of mileage in that journey. Vengeance of the Stones offers something completely new, the
first instance of Mike Yates discovering about the existence of UNIT and being
seconded by the Brigadier during one of his adventures. He was rather foisted
upon us in Terror of the Autons so its lovely to finally discover how Mike came
to work for UNIT. There are very few gaps in continuity that have been left
untold (thanks to the likes of Gary Russell, Craig Hinton, etc) and this one of
the few that can be exploited. He’s been posted at Fort George in Inverness for
the past two years and spent much of his childhood in Scotland. To have
something from his childhood turn supernatural is his first exposure to the
Doctor’s world and it pretty much sums up the effect he can have on your life,
introducing to concepts that change your perception of how the universe at
large works. Mike’s reaction to meeting aliens is not to panic but to ask
sensible questions, negotiating rather than judging. Given his maturity in
handling alien life you can see precisely why he would an ideal choice for
UNIT. Even after his threats, the Doctor tries to save Galen. Its simply in his
nature. Interestingly his secondment to UNIT comes with a promotion which must
have sweetened the offer.
Great Ideas: The aliens are scientists from a planet called
Faris and they came to the Earth as an exploratory research group. They are
aren’t here to colonise but to look for resources, minerals mostly which the
Earth has in abundance. They have a telepathic affinity with stone,
manipulating the forces within rocks. They came four thousand years ago, a
party of ten scientists and were set upon by tribal warrior types. In recent
times road works have disturbed the ground they were buried in, re-activated
their capsules. Faris was destroyed over three millennia ago in a conflict.
Audio Landscape: Hawkers screaming through the sky,
intercoms static, Bessie honking and growling, groaning Officer Parry, muddy
footsteps, the stones attacking, knocking UNIT soldiers to their deaths, a
diving plane hitting the ocean and bursting beneath the waves, helicopter
swooping over the ocean, water dripping, seagulls screaming, clashing steel,
screams, UNIT soldiers charging in, gunfire.
Standout Scene: Every story in the series has seen the
current Doctor (Matt Smith) make contact with his previous selves in some way
and Vengeance of the Stones is no different. Franklin offers quite an accurate
version of Smith, excitable and childlike and his recorded message comes at a
point when the action wanes. He’s manipulating all of these adventures in some
way and I hope that they are all going to be linked together in some fiendishly
clever way come the 11th story in the series. The third Doctor
considers that idea of sending a message back into his own time stream
extremely reckless but then it really wasn’t done back then. He has no idea how
reckless he will become or how loose he will play about with the laws of
Time.
Result: There’s something rather wonderful about how these
Destiny of the Doctor stories are leaping from one era of Doctor Who to another
and exposing just how much the show changed as it became the responsibilities
of different central actors, producers and script editors. Hunters of the Earth
offered a swinging sixties pre-Unearthly Child thriller, Shadow of Death
focussed on the claustrophobic, base-under-siege atmosphere of the Troughton
era and now Vengeance of the Stones capitalises on the rural horror and
military action of Pertwee’s time on the show. All three have been very
different in style, tone and pace and yet all three have been indefinably
Doctor Who which reveals how malleable the show is. As the Doctor and the
Brigadier enter his life, Mike Yates’ world is turned upside down and it is a
delight to finally see how he was seconded to UNIT and ended up joining the
show. After two stories with a reasonably economic sound effects, Stones allows
director John Ainsworth to embrace the Earthbound setting and indulge in some
recognisable soundscapes. Ultimately this story is made of up of some old ideas
(a threat buried beneath the Earth, a planet long since destroyed) but I’m
finding these Destiny of the Doctor tales less effective as standalone
adventures and more enjoyable as snapshots of their respective period. As such
a little cliché is understandable (and probably necessary) since it is the
building blocks of those eras that defined them. Its also clear that given the
new series intrusion into each of these adventures that this series is building
up to something special. Its an innovative idea to seed a germ of the final
story in the series into every other adventure and I can only hope this is
heading somewhere truly pioneering. Vengeance of the Stones wont shake your
world up but it’s a pleasant enough tale with some authentic characterisation
and a decent introduction of Mike to the world of UNIT. I enjoyed it: 7/10
1 comment:
OK - I really enjoyed this.
It was very evocative of JP's time as the Doctor.
In my mind, I saw a small Scottish town, with stone circles and aliens and a silver haired chap driving around in a nifty yellow roadster... Classic stuff.
The Third Doctor still lives.
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