The Real McCoy: Swallow wisely keeps the Doctor in the
shadows throughout his story, capitalising on that dark, purring observer that
made such an impact in season 26. Ace doesn’t think that he is a magnet for
trouble but more rather trouble was a magnet for him. This is a Doctor with no
need for psychic paper, Ace wasn’t sure if he knew how to hypnotise people into
giving them an appropriate cover story or if he just knew the right thing to
say at the right time. Trying to keep up with the Doctor’s plans is a full time
job and one that Ace did not sign up for. His latest incarnation considers this
period one of his more circumspect eras. How interesting for the Doctor, her
Doctor, the master manipulator to be manoeuvred by a future incarnation of
himself. I wonder how it feels when the boot is on the other foot and you are
on the receiving end of a good sharp kick.
Troubled Teen: As soon as Sophie Aldred starts belting out
that cringeworthy slang that Ace was so often lumbered with you are instantly
transported back to late eighties Who, a time of extreme naiveté in some ways
and a time of exciting experimentation in others. When you travelled with a
Time Lord and were a wanderer through time and space, every day was different
from the one before. She has picked up a fair amount of technobabble on her
travels and could just about understand what the Doctor was going on about when
he got lost in Time Lord speak. Probably about as much as he understands her
cod street talk. She still winces at the sound of her real name. For Ace to
suggest her nickname is a title like ‘Your Ladyship’ is hilarious because she
really is anything but. Whilst I find the enormous rucksack that she carries
about hilariously cumbersome on screen in her early stories, it makes perfect
sense for one of the most resourceful companions the Doctor ever travelled with
to step out of the TARDIS with so much gear for every eventually. Step ladders,
explosives, a baseball, water…she’s got something for every occasion. For Ace,
having to leave a young girl behind to die is failiure on her part despite the
fact that none of this disaster is her fault. Although she has heard the word
bandied about a lot back home, you really can’t understand what the word
awesome meant until you have watched a world in its death throes. Even with the
worst monsters you can understand them, perhaps even reason with them but the
blind destruction of the shockwave is devastation in its purest form. Not thinking
or feeling, not working to a plan. Just demolishing everything in its path.
That would be a shock to anybody’s system, the sort of fear you might feel if
facing the force of an oncoming tsunami.
Ace learns a terrible lesson about saving the wrong person, giving a
girl the gift of life because of her presence in this time zone who then abuses
that kindness and spells out certain death for everybody. Her relationship with
Nine Jay twists and turns unexpectedly, forcing some dramatic reactions from
the tortured teen. The eleventh Doctor reminds Ace of a quirky geography
teacher. She undergoes something of a spiritual experience, questioning whether
the shockwave genuinely changed Nine Jay or whether it simply consumed her. The
fact that she is questioning shows that she is open to the possibility of
enlightenment. That feels very season 26, Ace experiencing a crisis of faith
and the story refusing to insist on a direction for the character either way.
Standout Performance: I don’t want to be hard on what is
generally an extremely passionate and good-natured reading by Sophie Aldred but
I do have to question the overdone Scottish accent that she adopts to play the
seventh Doctor with. His Scots brogue was never that pronounced on screen (its
more of a calming soft lilt) and at times I was reminded strongly that this was
an interpretation of the character rather than with some of the other readings
of the DotD series (especially Hines, Ward and Bryant) where I was so convinced
by the translation that they simply came alive in their own terms. This aside
though, Aldred comes to the story with all the vigour and energy that she
approached the TV series with in the late 80s and as such it is as effortless
to lose yourself in as the best of Ace’s era on screen (Remembrance, Greatest
Show, Ghost Light). It’s probably the weakest take on the eleventh Doctor
though, especially coming after Nicola Bryant’s spot on interpretation.
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘The space station blew apart like a
fist full of glitter thrown into the air…’ – sign this guy up, Big Finish, this
is top quality description of the kind I haven’t heard since Paul Magrs at his
best.
‘All you could to was try and outrun it.’
Great Ideas: In a few moments of various audio environments,
James Swallow manages to capture just how diverse each day was when you agreed
to travel aboard the TARDIS. A gigantic angry bruise in the sky…Swallow has a
real gift for descriptive language (his novel The Peacemaker was beautifully
delivered with similar descriptive beauty).
A sun that is falling into a spatial anomaly (for a moment I thought I
had wandered into Star Trek: Voyager), throwing out a lethal space/time
energy effect charged with artron particles. The Senders are considered a
doomsday cult by many, believing that the collapse of the star was pre-ordained
and waiting for the Shockwave to arrive. They believe that when it hits they
will be transformed by the energy, ascend into a new form higher being. The
writer leaves the audience with no illusion that if the populace didn’t make it
onto one of the ships that were engorged with refugees, they would be left
behind to die when the Shockwave consumes Tarsus Six. The thought of a space
race for survival is terrifying, each ship trying to outmanoeuvre the others to
try and survive the awesome speed and destruction of the shockwave. Swallow
adopts a trick that was so favoured during the shows first two seasons cutting
off the Doctor and his companion from the TARDIS. This time the artron energy
that the shockwave emits would poison the ship if they attempted to escape,
leaving the travellers stranded in a very dangerous situation and hanging on
for their lives until the end. In the vault are the contents of art galleries
and museums, rescued from the fires of destruction. The Doctor’s mission is to
obtain after the Voice of Stone, a small cube discovered by the colonists of
Tarsus four centuries ago. He needs to listen to what it has to say. It is from
Gallifrey and recognises Ace, one of the communication cubes that featured in
The War Games and The Doctor’s Wife.
Audio Landscape: Lapping waves, alarms, screams, a desperate
crowd attempting to escape, the low chanting of the Senders, a destructive wave
bouncing off the shields, a screaming baby, a T-Mat capsule activating, the
door breaking.
Musical Cues: Daniel Brett deserves a massive round of
applause for not only capturing the horror of Keff McCulloch’s synthesised
dance beats in his score but somehow managing to mould that style into
something rather catchy. Of all the stories in the series, Shockwave is the one
that most describes the era that it came from through the soundtrack and left
me beaming because of it.
Standout Scene: The eleventh Doctor’s cameo in this
adventure is the very reason that the Doctor got involved in the first place,
trapped inside the cube and calling to his former self to rescue him. It’s
another delightful appearance and I am really looking forward to seeing how
these jigsaw pieces of cameos come together.
Result: Another enjoyable offering, although perhaps not
quite as strong as the last three. Shockwave opens with an incredible first
fifteen minutes, presenting the audience with a dramatic disaster scenario and
realising it through some strong characterisation of Ace and plenty of
evocative description. It is almost too good an opening that the rest can only
feel anti-climactic in contrast. Once we get on board the spacecraft trying to
escape the path of the shockwave, the story becomes a much more routine affair
albeit buoyed up by Sophie Aldred’s brisk, peppy narration and plenty of strong
dialogue for all the characters. Unlike some of the other entries in this
series, Shockwave feels as though it is being told entirely from Ace’s point of
view, highlighting the unknowable alien quality of the seventh Doctor. It is at
this point in the series that I think a huge round of applause should go to
John Ainsworth who has not only made each story an enjoyable experience in it’s
own right (even Hunters of the Earth, which I have found the weakest of the
series to date but still with much to recommend it) but also captured the
essence of each Doctor’s era with a real sense of affection and authenticity.
Shockwave perfectly slips into the style of late 80s Who; straight to the
point, fast paced, somewhat melodramatic and a little synthetic. The score is
excellent, channelling Keff McCulloch but managing to be rather good in spite
of that. I have never made a secret of the fact that the seventh Doctor and Ace
aren’t my favourite of audio bedfellows (adding the sexy Scouse to the mix
worked a spell on me for much of their run together though) and I have to admit
this was the story I was looking forward to the least in this run. Imagine my
surprise when it turned out to be this pleasurable to listen to, Aldred’s
lively narration, the more complex than it initially appears characterisation
and the concluding appearance of you know who helped this to fly by like a
dream. If space opera isn’t my favourite variety of Who, this is still a
superior example of the genre: 7/10
I always hate having to agree with your criticism of Aldred, but you are right that the heavy brogue took me right out of the story once or twice. But hey, she does a great Ace...
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