What’s it about: Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow And everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. The TARDIS is empty. The Doctor has gone. Jo Grant steps outside into the darkness and finds the frozen body of her friend, and the ship's log recorder. On it is attached a simple message - 'Use Me'. As she explores this place, recording her every move, Jo discovers the horror that lies in the shadows. But by then it is too late.
Groovy Chick: Set in her final season after The Three Doctors and the Time Lords have given the Doctor control of the TARDIS back, here is a chance to show Jo at her perkiest and most confident. In fact this seems to be set post-Planet of the Daleks because Jo mentions the TARDIS log. Strange, because I thought the end of Planet segued straight into The Green Death but this isn’t the first time that Big Finish have taken liberties with a gap that shouldn’t exist (all those adventures they squeezed between Planet of Fire and Androzani). She feels like she has to live up to his expectations, to do what the Doctor would want her to do. It is what dictates her every action. She’s seen enough skeletons to last her a lifetime. By trying to figure out what has happened to the bodies she has stumbled upon, Jo starts scaring herself half to death! Jo is using her previous adventures and what she has learnt from them (specifically The Daemons and Planet of the Daleks) to help her to do the right thing. She is pretty nifty at karate and once she even knocked Sergeant Benton out cold! Once she is made of pure sound she strikes up a friendship with Ben and is devastated when he is wiped from the recording forever, her only companion in this lonely world snatched away. As she is consumed by white noise and screams hysterically for release it struck me that we had never seen this character in such a impotent, terrifying position before. The only story where Jo gets trapped in the body of a man…I can envisage a whole other story with a much bubblier tone where Morris could run with that idea.
Good Grief: The Doctor’s pockets contain a UNIT card and
codebook (are there so many top secret rooms and gadgets that it requires a
document full of ridiculous code words? Brilliant!), a membership card for a
swish London club (naturally the conservative third Doctor would have one of
these), Venusian conkers, jelly babies…but no TARDIS key. Like James Goss did
in The Scorchies, Jonny Morris figures a dash clever way for the Doctor to be
able to speak to Jo in this environment without Jon Pertwee having to be
present or Katy Manning to have to play the character. Jo was busy in the
wardrobe room when they materialised so he thought it best for all concerned if
he had a quick scout around to see where they were. A big mistake, causing all
of this bother. The Doctor does a rather fine Jo impression, I have to say. He
agrees to lie on Ben’s behalf, to tell Jo that her friend is sleeping and will
be returned to a body one day.
Standout Performance: Katy Manning is used to playing
several roles on audio now. Nothing will ever quite beat her stunning array of
performances in Not a Well Woman and her aural talents were also put to
dazzling use in The Scorchies earlier in the year. In Ghost in the Machine she
gets to play Jo and the villainous creature that has captured her voice and it
just goes to show how much of Jo is a work of fiction. She brings her voice
down very low, slows down her reading and the net result is a performance that
gave me the chills, especially in comparison to perky, quirky Jo. Watch out for
the astonishing sequence where you have Katy Manning playing the Doctor
attempting to do an impression of Jo…that takes some skill to slip in and out
of both characters. Her interpretation of the Doctor is so warm and comforting,
you know things are going to be okay as soon as she gets her hands on the
character.
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘We’re now prisoners on the same reel of
tape.’
Great Ideas: The first time I saw the cover I thought it was
one of the Big Finish placeholders that they put up on the website before the
final cover is ready to be released but over time I realised it was the
finished article. After listening to the story I went back and looked at the
cover again and saw it afresh and it is as subtle but as packed with detail
about the story that I had completely missed before. I hadn’t even spotted the
grinning skeleton pawing away at the corner. Eight bodies wearing white lab
coats greet Jo as she steps from the TARDIS into this eerie environment. If
anybody objects to Jo spending much of the first ten minutes of the story
talking to herself and making observations about where they have landed,
suggesting that it is a ridiculous idea to make an audio story work should be
made to watch Planet of the Daleks episode one over and over again where Katy
Manning pretty much holds up the entire first episode in this fashion. A
stairwell that has been blocked off with concrete and skeletons piled to the ceiling
looking as though they were screaming when they died, screaming to set them
free. Talk about developing an atmosphere of claustrophobia, I went and grabbed
a glass of water at this point. Their leader dead, the scientists were trapped
underground with no hope of ever seeing their loved ones again and then people
began to change, to turn on each other, fighting over scraps. Bringing back the
dead from a tape recording of their voices. The people brought back wouldn’t
have bodies but they could live inside the recording and still be able to make
contact with the world outside. Cleverly Morris has left behind a tape
recording for Jo to discover but it is fragmented and repeating on a loop so
she only gets part of the answers, just enough to built up a general picture of
what has happened but not so much that she doesn’t have to work anything out.
Jo is smart enough to realise that if what Ben says is true she has to re-play
her own recordings and see if there is anything different each time she
listens. If there is, then Ben is alive within the recording and trying to
communicate with her. Why is it wherever you go in the universe that nobody
labels the switches properly? Before Jo realises it she is trapped within the
tap recording herself and the thing that has borrowed her voice has
escaped into the real world. The Doctor resisted the recording creature and so
the recording knocked him out and put him in a coma. Two people can exist on
the same recording, be transferred from one reel of tape to another. They
managed to discovered the first phonograph recording of Thomas Edison reciting
Mary Had a Little Lamb and in the process of restoring the sound they
discovered that there was another noise in the background. You can only speak
the words you have recorded, Jo tries to say words that she didn’t say on tape
but she can’t. What a hollow existence that would be, made up of only
the words you have already spoken. The scientists are trapped as voices
screaming in the dark, trying to escape in a perpetual loop. The creature is
not of the Earth but it has trapped here for such a long time. The Doctor left
USE ME on the TARDIS log because he knew Jo would use the tape and end up in
the recorded realm with him. That man Morris, he always writes such a tidy
narrative that I really cannot fault him. The TARDIS key was inside his mouth
all the time. Ben has no body to return to and so asks the Doctor to erase the
tape and cut his life short. It is no existence at all to remain alive as a
recording.
Audio Landscape: The doors opening automatically, screaming,
intercoms playing a whispering version of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, waves of
white noise the cut right through you.
Standout Scene: The very creepy moment when Jo realises that
her voice is changing on the recording as well. When she realises that somebody
is speaking to her through her own voice. If you make an audio recording, it
will use your words against you. If you play back the tap recorder, that’s how
it gets out… Subtle, but spine tingling.
Result: ‘If you can hear this then you are in terrible
danger…’ Louise Jameson shows an awful lot of skill in her Doctor Who
directional debut because it is not easy to have one character talk to
themselves for nigh on half an hour with nobody to react to and make it this
gripping. I know Jonathan Morris has a massive hand in events too but Jameson
has to bring this to life and ensure that what is essentially a monologue
doesn’t lose the audiences interest levels. She coaxes a fulsome performance
out of Katy Manning and chooses her sound effects and music carefully to build
up a sinister atmosphere. The joy of the companion chronicles is that the
intimate nature of the first person narrative allows for stories like Ghost in
the Machine that are so scaled back that the first episode is Jo on her own
discovering the aftermath of a terrible disaster and scaring herself half to
death with theories of how it might have happened. It’s a fantastic mystery and
Jonathan Morris deploys some memorably grim imagery and you’ll be working as
fast as Jo at try and figure out the truth so you can escape the claustrophobic
location with her. How can a recording of Jo’s voice by so damn frightening?
The first episode leads up to one the creepiest audio cliffhangers ever, just
as we figure out what is happening to Jo it is too late. Even the title music
sounds scarier. There is a real atmosphere of Sapphire and Steel to the
whole story, conceptual horror at it’s finest. How does Jonathan Morris keep
knocking out great scripts at such an incredible rate? No wonder he won my
favourite Big Finish writer poll, he can turn his hand to any genre
successfully and this is his best horror tale yet. Mark Ayres better watch out,
who know what boogiemen lurk on the Doctor Who soundtracks he so lovingly restores:
9/10
1 comment:
It's not suprising this was so good. They should have jonathon morris write for the new series
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