What's it about: Molly O'Sullivan is still trying to help people, but now she is back in London, staying in Baker Street. But there are dangerous forces abroad. Where are the young deserters disappearing to? Who are the Huntsmen? And what is really going on at the Blackwell Convalescent Home? Perhaps the mysterious 'Surgeon General' has the answers. To find out, the Doctor must tackle an old and baffling enemy.
Battle Scarred: The Doctor know where all the hidden
passages are and takes great delight in showing Molly where he has secreted his
TARDIS. That might be the most unintentionally suggestive sentence I have ever
written. This is one instance when the Doctor simply arriving in a particular
time and place is the catalyst to everything that follows. He has lighted the
blue touch paper before even stepping out of the TARDIS. Shaun's virus is
activated by temporal energy, just a trace of residual artron energy in the
house after the TARDIS materialised was enough to cause the virus to activate.
When he travelled in the TARDIS, surrounded by artron energy, the virus
blossomed and bloomed. The first Dark Eyes box set had a particular goal in
mind with the eighth Doctor, rehabilitating him after the loss of so many
friends and showing that there is still a fight out there that is worth being
involved in. The second set seems to have put him on the back burner for the
first two instalments, giving the meat of the stories to Liv Chenka and Molly
O'Brien. He's active in both stories but mainly on the periphery, running about
and trying to help and turning up somewhere near the end to explain what has
been going on. But in both The Traitor and The White Room the real eyes that we
are seeing the stories through are Liv and Molly. Fortunately in both cases
both the characters (although Liv needs a little work make her less like a
Dalek Empire throwback) and the actresses are more than up to the task.
Dark Eyes: Molly didn't come to London to seek her fortune,
she is working in a hospital in the capital city. Molly's dark eyes look as
though they are going to be a big part of the plot of this box set again (they
could have just re-introduced the character and used the name as her nickname).
For a moment she is pleased to see the Doctor but itself long before the full
force of her Irish wrath is upon him, as he exposes her cousin as a murderer
and his re-appearance in her life co-incides with the retrogenic particles in
her eyes reactivating. They writers could have bowed down to critical opinion
and failed to use the term 'tardy box' at all but that wouldn't have been in
character. I rather liked the little affectation (but then I am quite strange)
and it isn't overused in The White Room. In an emergency she calls him 'my
Doctor', suggesting the affection that she really has for him. When she thinks
she has died, Molly prays for her soul. Molly informs the Doctor that she
hasn't been waiting around for him to show up in her life again. She has a
vocation, a calling. Why on Earth would she want to pass the time of day with
an unshaven itinerant like him? She's not a fool for wanting to use the only
skills that God deemed to hand her, as an able nurse.
Standout Performance: Ruth Bradley is such a presence as
Molly it is a shame that she was written out of one of the instalments of this
set. Some of Molly's more fiery characteristics have been toned down (I always
liked her temper but there were times when she could almost reach Tegan
proportions of grumpiness) and she is much more savvy about futuristic
technology and alien races since her travels with the Doctor. She's much more rounded
now and she was a pretty nicely formed character to start off with. I would
quite like some standalone main range adventures with the eighth Doctor and
Molly because Paul McGann and Ruth Bradley clearly get on like a house on fire
and that really translates in these stories. However with Dark Eyes III and IV
on the horizon it looks like this pair are destined to star in galaxy spanning
epics for the time being.
Great Ideas: Tommy, Molly's cousin, started executing people
back in Dublin two Easters back. He seems to be included simply to open up the
story on a dramatic stand off but it does add a little colour to Molly's back
story (giving her some family). How can a window break twice unless time is
changing, moving backwards and the same events playing over and over again. As
long as they hold onto Shaun they can continue to leap backwards in tie with
him. This is all very intriguing,
Sapphire and Steel style material,
even if it is promptly forgotten for ten minutes in favour of more running
around. I was always rather fond of the Viyrans and I thought it was a shame
that they were only used for a brief while at the tail end of Charlotte
Pollard's time with the sixth Doctor. They are instantly recognisable thanks to
some identifying sound effects, come with a great aural hook (stealing peoples
voices) and their cold and clinical attitude towards their subjects made them
quite a chilling race, not thinking twice about murdering if it would kill of a
suspected disease. We didn't find out even half enough about them at the time
and this is a great opportunity to fill in some of the gaps. The virus was
brought here indirectly by the Viyrans. Many thousands of years from now will
trace the strain of virus to this place and time. A containment breach will result
in the Viyran becoming infected with this temporally active virus. Molly is
immune to its effect and that is what piqued the curiosity of the Viyrans. An
old plague well has been excavated, one which a house was built over and named
after. The establishment is a plague farm, people being infected with all kinds
of diseases, not just those known on Earth. Dr Goring is operating a
bacteriological research facility, digging out the back well in search of the
Black Death. Meanwhile thousands of years in the future, the Viyran contracted
a virus which transported him back to 20th Century Earth. Having brought an
alien disease into the past, he needed to inform his colleagues of his
whenabouts. Everything it needed was in Goring's research facility. Using an outbreak
of the temporal virus to paint a sign to 20th Century Earth for his fellow
Viyrans to follow and extract him - depending on the loss of life involved in
that crude attempt at a temporal flare gun, that is
cold. A Viyran
incendiary bomb creates a firestorm so wild that it will wipe out in any virus
in its wake, another example of their emergency measures not accounting for
human (or otherwise) life. The Doctor goes an puts his foot in it when he
suggests that the virus might have passed from continent to continent...giving
them the idea of simply blowing up the world and having done with it. This
whole story is stuck in a causal loop; the virus transports the Viyrans back to
its point of origin at Blackwell only for the Viyrans remains to become the source
of the virus in the future. That's rather neat. And gives the Doctor an excuse
not to have to tidy things up, the clever sod. The idea that as soon as the
TARDIS leaves all those infected with the virus will drop dead is a poignant
one. Never before has moving on to another adventure been greeted with such an
unpleasant aftertaste.
Audio Landscape: Gun cocking, horses on cobbles, people
chatting on the streets, breaking glass, Molly and the Doctor listening to
themselves looking for the TARDIS, knocking, a projector, crackling fire,
ticking grandfather clock, birds twittering, the Cylon style humming lights of
the Viyrans, the Doctor falling down a well, Molly fighting her restraints,
footsteps, Viyrans blowing the crap out of each other, church bells
fireworks...the end of the War.
Isn't it Odd: The White Room takes the exact opposite
approach of The Traitor. Where the debut story went to pains to paint a picture
of the setting at the expense of the narrative, this story leaps straight into
action with barely any time or detail about where and when the Doctor is. If
you had listened to the first box set you will have a general idea of the time
that Molly comes from and be able to judge but if you haven't you will be
completely in the dark as Alan Barnes starts the story running. This continues
on into the first half of the story, the narrative hoping about from place to
place and time to time not making a great deal of sense until the Viyrans/Dr
Goring show up to explain what is going on. I can remember finding the
individual elements of the first Dark Eyes set quite hard to differentiate when
they seemed to be part of one enormous story broken down into chunks. If that
was the case then why were they individually named rather than just ducking under
the umbrella title of Dark Eyes? With the second set there is more of an
attempt to give each story an individual identity (and the presence of three
separate writers pushes that even further) since The White Room is different in
just about every respect (tone, content, pace) to its predecessor in the set.
And yet I think I am going to wind up having the same problem, because this
story isn't a continuation of the previous one (one which ended on a
cliff-hanger) and it has plot elements that aren't resolved here. It is clear
that all the threads are going to come together in the last two parts to make
one overarching storyline. It's the Trial of a Time Lord syndrome, wanting to
tell both standalone tales and a bigger long running storyline, with the former
suffering because all the important resolution will come at the climax of the
set. The Viyran just happened to be thrown back to 20th Century Earth where a
friend of the Doctor's who is immune to the virus happens to live? And he just
happens to land the TARDIS in a time and place where the TARDIS will cause the
activation of a time virus? And Dr Goring just happens to have a virus research
facility set up to help the Viyran contact his people and continue his
research? I believe in co-incidence and clearly Alan Barnes too because we
wouldn't have a story without them. The Doctor mentions a list of things that
still need wrapping up at the end of this story - just like the sixth Doctor
did at the end of The Mysterious Planet. It is as frustrating to wait for the
answers here as it was there.
Standout Scene: The end of the war should be a moment of
triumph but Molly in on hand to remind the Doctor that he cannot run away from
his responsibilities. At least this gives us a time and place at last, just as
we depart the story.
Result: A jigsaw of a story and one which has some
lovely constituent elements but fails to cohere into a complete picture. Quite
a lot has to be known going into this story for it to even begin to make sense;
especially about Molly, where she comes from and the whole situation with her
dark eyes. That's before we even get to the actual plot of this beast of a tale
which juggles an alien race known to regular followers of Big Finish, a mad
scientist dabbling with viruses, an alien bacteria that plays havoc with time
and a great big time bomb that threatens to wipe everybody away. It's messily
plotted for sure because the opening 20 minutes seems to keep stacking more and
more unwieldy elements on top of each other and it isn't until a lengthy wrap
up close to the conclusion that it all ties together and begins to make any
kind of sense. Once the explanations are in place it is quite an enjoyably
conceived tale but you should never have to work to the point that it is a
chore for something to start to cohere. It seems to come from a completely
different box set to The Traitor and you could be forgiven for thinking that
you have put in a disc from a completely different release. How all these tales
will come together is a mystery. Complaints over, what about what works in The
White Room? Molly O'Brien. She's been refined slightly (she's less bossy and
more quick to observe and theorise) and it is such a pleasure to have her back.
I hope she sticks around this time. The Viyrans always were a terrific audio
presence and they work just as well in the early days of the 20th Century as
they did in the far future. When these two elements come together, this story
sings. There's also some temporal jiggery pokery which raised an eyebrow of
interest and a dramatic resolution that sees the Doctor inadvertently puts the
Earth in danger of being destroyed by a Viyran incendiary device. This is one
script that feels like it needs to go through one more re-write to make the
first half a little less scattershot and unwieldy. Because if it had been
simplified this would have been a tasty instalment of the Dark Eyes trilogy (if
one that is based a little too much on co-incidence) that re-introduces the
magnificent Ruth Bradley back to the party:
6/10
1 comment:
While I agree with most of your critiques, I didn't feel that those flaws effected it that much to make it a 6. I'd say a 7 or 8.
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