Softer Six: The end is nigh for Sixie and Charley just as
they had established themselves as the signature duo for Big Finish in the new
regime. I understand that they couldn’t keep these secrets up forever and its
rather wonderful that we don’t get too much of a good thing (ala the eighth
Doctor and Charley going on and on and on…) and it does go to show that Briggsy
and co do want to try new things on a regular basis. All these are good reasons
to bring this relationship to an end but it still doesn’t make it any less
upsetting because they have made such an engaging pair and the writers have
managed to have some great fun with the concept of Doctor hopping. As usual the
sixth Doctor adventures are where all the fun is at.
The gloves are off now and the Doctor wants to know exactly
who Charlotte Pollard is and if that is even her name and he isn’t going to be
nice about it! He recognises that Charley wanted Carmen’s time machine in The
Raincloud Man for reasons other than the ones she stated. He’s vicious until he
realises she isn’t faking her illness and suddenly he is full of concern for
his new friend. The Doctor admits that over the years he has been searching for
a cure for Charley he has been caught up in a few scrapes (you could happily
insert stories like Davros in here). The Daleks cannot risk killing the Doctor
because they know they meet him in future incarnations so instead massacre
their way through the familiars to get his co-operation. Also they torture him
for something of a giggle. . The Doctor doesn’t have the strength to protect
the station and it s secrets if it means losing Charley, he has been searching
too long and hard to give up on her now. He hardly knows Charley at all and
he’s certain that she has been hiding the truth about herself since they first
met and yet he feels a connection with her. The Doctor has had a misspent life
around operating systems and you soon develop a seventh sense! He thinks he is
gambling on a certainty that the Daleks wont allow the station to explode – it
is an insanely dangerous plan because if he is wrong they will all go up with
it but he has often been known for his recklessness. He tells Charley (who is
in fact Mila) that she can stay but she has to back peddle on the overdone
flattery.
Edwardian Adventuress: Just when you think things cannot get
any worse for Charley than having to live life on the run and lie through her
teeth during every adventure now she has contracted a disease that leaves her
incapacitated for a long time and has her body stolen! Poor Charley has
spent years of her life in the zero room as the Doctor tries to work on her
condition. He pops in every now and again to make sure she is alright but he
still hasn’t managed to help her. Every time he gets close the virus outfoxes
him. Mila recognises that there is something different about Charley and that
is that the TARDIS doesn’t like her. Nick Briggs latches onto the idea
that Charley is different from the other companions because the TARDIS wont
protect her. It recognises her as a web of time deviant and rejects her
presence which gives Mila the opportunity to latch onto her body. Who ever
thought there would be so much mileage left in this character? She is far more
interesting now than she has ever been before and the clever notions dealing
with her defection to a different Doctor keep coming. Charley screaming in the
distance as Mila feeds the Doctor a pack of lies about her so called secret
past she has been keeping from him is devastating. Given that the Doctor is
happy with this explanation and seems to be ready to head off for fresh
adventures with her there is every chance that the real Charley will stuck
watching his adventures with the fake Charley for a long time. Sometimes you
have to wonder if she was better off dying on the R-101. Even Charley admits she
has cheated death for far too long and now nobody knows that she even exists…
to hear her say ‘Memoirs of an Edwardian Adventuress’ after all this time and
everything that has happened broke my heart.
Disembodied Voice: The very idea of Mila is par for the
course of the innovative and spectacular concepts in this Charley arc, a girl
who has been trapped within the TARDIS since the days of the first Doctor and
has been watching all the comings and goings ever since and not being able to
reach out to anybody. The amount of time she has spent unable to communicate
has driven her quite insane and now Charley has contracted the same illness
that draws her out of physical reality she wants to use the opportunity to pour
herself into Charley’s body and live a normal life as the Doctor’s companion.
Its completely nuts, much like the singing Daleks in Brotherhood of the Daleks
and the war concluding Top Trumps in The Raincloud Man and like both of those
ideas it is utterly unique and rather brilliant. She’s the companion that has always
been with him and he has never been aware of it. Mila hid away from the Daleks
in one of their time machines and because they were so scared of the Doctor she
wanted to go with him. She waited until they caught up with him in The Chase
and sneaked into the TARDIS and she has been ever since. Mila’s ability to kill
the Daleks with little more than a touch makes her a very scary prospect
(especially how she talks to it with such a cute giggle!). The Daleks were
experimenting on Mila with a virus that was supposed to change what you were,
if you caught it your DNA would mutate into whoever you caught it from (I’m
going boss eyed). They were experimenting with it because they wanted to use it
to turn people into Daleks (mutants I hope) but the reaction to the virus was
too violent. They kept experimenting on her and she knew they would be happy
unless she had become a Dalek or was killed…and she ran away to escape either
option. They were using Mila to test the virus on, they thought if she could
pass on the disease and make copies of herself and survive it was a success and
could be tested on Daleks. It worked but the when they tested it on themselves
the Dalek test subject died and they were furious. They bombarded Mila
with radiation again and again and again until finally she couldn’t even
remember who she was and she phased into another dimension. When Charley
realises that the Doctor has never seen her even though she has been by his
side for so long you understand the real tragedy of the character. With Charley
unprotected Mila uses her disease to switch places with her – Charley is
becoming Mila and Mia is becoming Charley…that’s why she loves her because she
is about to embrace her and take her life. The whole point of the station is to
prevent the use of these viruses as a weapon, the Viyrans are coming to take
them away and destroy them. Mila conceiving a story that the truth that Charley
has been keeping from the Doctor is that she was a prisoner of the Daleks works
for her because that is an honest account as far as Mila is concerned
(and handily it makes sense of the Daleks recognising Charley in Brotherhood of
the Daleks). She very cleverly uses the information she would have witnessed in
The Daleks’ Masterplan and Power of the Daleks to weave together a sense of
hero worship that she development during her imprisonment with the Daleks – how
precisely would Charley know this information if she wasn’t a prisoner
of the Daleks?
Standout Performance: It has to be India Fisher who has
grown so much as an actress since she has been playing the part of Charley it
is impossible to reconcile her with the squeaky voiced amateur of her first
season. Since she hopped Doctor’s she has been given so much more to do and a
darker, more conniving role to play and it has brought her performance right
down to Earth. In Patient Zero she gets to play all manner of emotions but her
real coup is when she takes on the role of Mila which is pretty much the same
role she was playing back at the beginning of her tenure but with a more girly
tone and a sly wink to the audience every now and again. The contrast to
Charley is subtle and obvious. She even has to play one of the Viyrans!
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘He used to make me laugh! He made them
all laugh, those girls. They all loved him but they left. Every single one of
them. None of them stayed.’
‘How ironic…rescued by the Daleks.’
‘If in doubt shout. Never fails, does it?’
‘What’s going to happen to me?’
‘Soon we will be able to start our work…’ – there is
something haunting about the Daleks calling the deployment of genocidal viruses
work.
‘Perhaps its best this way. Charlotte Pollard fading away to
nothing…’
‘You know, I should be grateful that you never learn,
shouldn’t I? Grateful that ultimately it always boils down to one simple move
that outwits you, ties you in knots and destroys you. Its often a long time
coming and the suffering along the way sickens me but sometimes what really
hurts about you, you – the Daleks, the supreme beings is that you
fly in the face of everything I hope for in the universe. Change, growth,
learning, the ability of beings to eventually transcend their limitations. To
become something better. And here you are, trapped in your rage to survive and
exterminate. Believe me when I say its truly pitiful. Goodbye’ – one of the
Doctor’s best ever speeches.
Great Ideas: It’s the return of the Viyrans who made an
ambiguous introduction in the one part adventure that tagged along with The
Minds Eye (to my memory the only time a one parter impressed me less than the
main release) but they are given a far better introduction here. They are
spoken about in hushed voices and it Fratalin is told it would be wise to
evacuate before they arrive and sterilise with their usual efficiency. There is
a wonderful cut to Charley in the Zero Room and we discover it is years later
and the Doctor has been trying to figure out a cure for her illness – you
expect there to be a reset at some point but it never comes which really
shocked me. In that time the Doctor has probably been having loads of
adventures, if you were the sort to go all timey wimey he might have had his
adventures with Flip in that time, whilst still working on a cure for Charley.
The fact that it is handled so matter of factly is what makes it so effective –
to the Doctor this is just a couple of years but for Charley this way longer
than she has even been travelling with the two Doctors put together. The Daleks
are very reluctant to damage any part of the station (unless they have to) so
the Doctor simply has to know why. The very idea of Daleks asking to
have the door opened for them rather than blasting their way through feels so
discordant I almost did the ‘human female has escaped self destruct…’ from
Death to the Daleks! If one of Fratalin’s familiars are killed he can feel it.
The Daleks are there to retrieve patient zero which is a great mystery to be
solved if ever I heard one! A ‘mass conjoining’ of familiars? Sounds
disgusting! Patient Zero is the origin of the infection and in this case it is
Mila. The station contains the biggest stockpile of viruses in the universe and
if the Daleks get hold it they will make life intolerable for every living
creature in existence (see Lucie Miller in the EDA range). The Viyrans were charged
with the duty of taking all captured viruses and destroying them in the heart
of Amathustra, Amethyst’s sun. The Daleks on the other hand want to
dematerialise the station and all the viruses away. The Doctor sets the Dalek
engines to explode and they have to focus all their attention on keeping the
explosion inactive leaving the Doctor enough time to escape. The viruses the
Daleks discovered where scattered through time and space…which means they must
have been released at some point. The Doctor has to destroy the station via the
Daleks time engines because that has already been written – the viruses were
released and so he has to do it. He is the cause. It becomes a race
against time with the Doctor trying to cause an explosion so devastating that it
will destroy everything and the Daleks wanted to cause an explosion that will
allow the viruses to spread. Their defeat is their victory. Charley/Mila knocks
the Doctor unconscious so he isn’t taken from her in the explosion he plans to
cause.
Audio Landscape: Charley fading in and out of existence, the
TARDIS console going nuts, the awesome Dalek time machine sound effect (I love
that!), is this the first time we have had a motorised hum when the Daleks move
around like they do in the TV series, Dalek heartbeat, a lovely (and pleasingly
brief) montage of the various Doctors talking, alarm, ugh – the sound of a
Dalek being glooped and drowned by one of the familiars, the familiars
screaming and melting away to nothing, extermination blasts, the Viyran horn
sounding as their ship approaches, the clumping footsteps of the Viyrans and
their electric humming, I love the assimilation of language the Viyrans use,
the TARDIS grinding, fizzing and popping, the Daleks shooting the console,
Daleks versus Viyrans in some action packed scenes.
Musical Cues: Howard Carters music is always something a bit
a special. Towards the end of episode one where the Doctor is being executed as
a saboteur there are strings and an organ playing that make it feel as though
this really could be the end. The music gears up to new heights when Charley
mentions Mila’s name towards the end of episode two and then punches you in the
gut over and over as the Daleks step up their attack at the climax to part
three. There are several set pieces in the last episode where the music is so
bombastic and exciting it could have come from a summer blockbuster being
played by a full orchestra – go and listen to the score during the climactic
final act. It is superb.
Isn’t it Odd: Some people might criticise this amount of
complication in the plot but I love it. As long as it ideas that are
well thought through, imaginative and for a purpose I am more than happy.
Perhaps this story does lack a sense of aesthetics (flowery sensual dialogue)
but that’s not what this is all about.
Standout Scene: When you realise the full horror of what has
happened to Mila as a prisoner of the Daleks and that is followed up with the
full horror of what is happening to Charley now…who said that the third episode
was always the weakest? I love the way Mila’s voice slowly melts into Charley’s
and India Fisher’s subtle shift perfectly matches the devious character that
has been established. The thought of poor tortured Charley existing as a
disembodied presence in the TARDIS is yet another cruel punishment for her many
infringements to the Web of Time. Make sure you listen out for the scene after
the closing credits – Charley is in a bad place and its going to take some work
on the Doctor’s part to undo it.
Notes: The viruses catapulted into space at the end of this
story are gathered by the Dalek controller and put to devastating use in Lucie
Miller. Their plan to create a plague planet to shuttle through space and wipe
out entire worlds brings the EDAs to a spectacular close. Well worth seeking
out although make sure you take a hanky.
Result: Dramatic, complex and very exciting, Patient Zero is
another scorching Sixie/Charley tale that starts to round off their adventures
with some real aplomb. Nick Briggs knows how to spin a Dalek yarn but inspired
by the insane shenanigans of this incredible arc he has plucked a number of
very clever ideas from the situation and created a frightening and unique
character in Mila and found new ways to torture Charley. There is a boldness to
the presentation that I really like, it is pacy and exhilarating (with an
inspired musical score) and forces you to keep listening whilst the
intelligence of the writing keeps you thinking. Things are definitely coming to
head with Charley and somehow I can’t see her getting a happy ending but her
continual bad luck is proving to be ever more stimulating. The Viyrans finally
make a decent appearance and go head to head with the Daleks in some punchy
scenes and the fact that the result of this adventure leads to an even more
hellish time for the eighth Doctor (it seems he and Charley are still linked)
in the future means that regardless of how good this is it is also essential
backstory for Lucie Miller/To The Death. You would think two Dalek stories so
close would be a cause to complain but both Brotherhood of the Daleks and
Patient Zero find interesting new things to say about them and after all this
time that is no mean feat. Electrifying and it has left me desperate to
hear the rest of this trilogy now the Doctor has left with an imposter: 9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment