The Dispossessed written by Mark Morris and directed by Jamie Anderson

What’s it about: The Doctor, Ace and Mel are caught in a forever night. After crossing the threshold, a strange world awaits them. An army of tortured souls. A lift that leads to an alien landscape. An alien warlord, left for dead, and willing to do anything to prolong his life… it’s all in a day’s work for the Doctor. But when his companions become victims of the desperate and powerful Arkallax, the Doctor will have to do battle in a psychic environment where he must make a choice. Save his companions… or himself.

The Real McCoy: I’m looking for some kind of substance in the Doctor/Mel/Ace dynamic and I’m coming up blind. There’s just nothing. Three characters rubbing shoulders and going through the motions. Their first TARDIS scene couldn’t sound more generic and less interesting. It’s frustrating because there is clearly some potential in this trio (you could catch glimpses of it in Dragonfire – especially the class differences between Mel and Ace and how middle class was tentatively judging lower class and how lower class was biting back) but it has been ignored in favour of ‘wouldn’t it be nice if the Doctor, Mel and Ace travelled together.’ That seems to be the goal of this endeavour, that this combination could have happened without anybody asking what the consequences of that line up would be like for the characters, allowing them to grow or to even provide some dramatic contrasts between them. Comparing to another ‘sisterly’ dynamics, this has nothing on the genuinely fascinating Peri/Erimem dynamic, it fails to capture the warmth of the Tegan/Nyssa chemistry (the Peterloo trilogy) or the interest of the Flip/Constance relationship (which you can tell is massive step up from the characterisation here because you can justifiably call it a relationship). My question is this…you have established Big Finish characters that have already proven their worth tenfold so why by bringing them together are they yielding so few results? It’s baffling. McCoy has been doing this for too long now, listen to how the Doctor can barely muster any enthusiasm at the first cliff-hanger to exclaim his friends name. it’s almost as if he knows that northing truly bad is going to happen to them.

Oh Wicked: Ace’s first rule of combat is always getting in your retaliation in first. I appreciated Mark Morris writing for Ace as though she was a character from the eighties, so many writers forget that. She might sound mega naff, but she does at least sound authentic. Sophie Aldred got to shout and shout and shout and shout and shout and shout and shout…and we know hoe much that plays to her strengths as an actress, don’t we?

Aieeeeeeee: Mel has never liked tower blocks, recalling her days wandering Paradise Towers. This encapsulates what I’m saying perfectly about the writers failing to capitalise on the chance to say something incisive or powerful about the characters. I could imagine a writer like Robert Holmes turning Mel into a social piranha, and making her distaste for tower blocks a comment on the middle class looking down on their lesser affluent contemporaries. Tower blocks as functional dirty places, full of poor people clinging on to what little space they have. Mel could sit back in her ivory tower of a 4-bedroom detached with a wraparound garden and turn her nose up at the stench of poverty. It wouldn’t be a particularly likable slant on Mel but who the gives a fuck about that? It would be believable and characterful and making a social point. It would be dialogue with substance. Instead Mel just rolls off some continuity about a previous story, which is the easiest trap for a writer to fall into. Unbelievably Mel is reduced to a pitiful screamer in the last episode. After all the development those early Big Finish stories gave her she is actually regressing to the one dimensional characterisation she had on television.

Standout Performance: Listen to McCoy at the start of episode four as he is possessed by Arkallax. I don’t think he’s been this excruciating since Unregenerate.

Dreadful Dialogue: McCoy practically chokes on ‘We must be trapped in a chronologically locked stasis bubble’ whilst delivering no drama to the line.
‘We’re not going to get anywhere by being shrinking violets, are we?’
‘They’re coming straight towards us!’ ‘And from every direction! They’re cutting off our retreat!’ – I was groaning out loud at these blatant visual signposts. Big Finish script editors should be much, much better at removing these sorts of blatant stage directions from dialogue. All of this could be done with some skilful editing, the voices of the dispossessed getting closer and closer and surrounding the characters.
‘I refuse to die while I’m waiting for a lift!’
‘You make me sound like a common psycho!’
‘O-M-G!’

Great Ideas: Arkallax was appointed Commander of the Seventh Battalion. In the instant before his ship was reduced to atoms his consciousness abandoned its life-shell and I transported itself here. The Jalfreeth exist on a physical and mental plane. They are first and foremost creatures of consciousness. They create their life-shells simply for the sake of convenience, in order to interact with the physical universe. When they choose they can disengage from the physical and become creatures of pure consciousness – moving across vast distances, interacting with the technology they have created to establish their own realities. The Jalfreeth are a powerful psychic race. Warlike. Ruthless. They cut a swathe through the Jovic Cluster, absorbing the mental energy of hundreds of worlds, and destroying them in the process. There was word they were coming, so at least their enemies were able to form alliances, defend ourselves. It still took the combined force of over thirty planets to stop them. The Jalfreeth commander wouldn’t accept defeat. For him the choice was either total glory or total annihilation. When the war turned against him he hit the self-destruct button. His entire fleet, our fleet, and a bunch of planets in the immediate vicinity. As well as creating an impenetrable bubble using the mental energy of those it has drained, the technology has converted what’s left of them – their physical forms – into hunting units, destined to prowl this tiny kingdom that it’s created in a vain search for new energy to absorb. The Dispossessed. Way to make the idea not scary, making the slavering zombies of this story a quirk of alien technobabble.

Musical Cues: What an unusual; musical style this story has, and how refreshing it is to get to say that. You can usually pin a certain musical voice to the score provider but I haven’t explored much of Joe Kraemer in the Main Range to be able to develop a specific quality in my head. Saying that I’m not sure the music in The Dispossessed is to my tastes very much, being very much of the season 24-Keff McCullouch, high camp synthesiser style. It took me quite a while to get used to it in a story that is supposed to be scary, feeling like Paradise Towers does; a contradiction of tones. Also, I’m still hearing cues from Static. At the end of episode three the music kicks into high gear and in a very memorable way. I wish it had been more like that throughout.

Isn’t it Odd: The first scene is probably what everybody who dislikes science fiction imagines all Big Finish stories sound like; people with treated voices delivering bombastic performances (there was more than a touch of Klingon about these two) and speaking melodramatic lines (‘Engage the Armageddon Protocol!’). I’m not saying it’s bad, per se, but it feels flatly directed, overwritten and ill-explained. Maybe I am saying it’s bad. Ruck has a speech so lengthy in episode two when the explanations start coming that the actor is practically out of breath by the end. Dialogue can be delivered in chunks, but this is a particularly awkward example. It’s quite jarring to have scenes of the dispossessed lurking out of the shadows rubbing shoulders with jolly hockey sticks scenes between Isobel and Droney. They feel like they have leapt out of (tonally) completely different audios. ‘Oh the Doctor is brilliant, he’s got mental energy to spare!’ says Mel to the guy who is clearly the villain of the piece and has clearly been mopping up everybody’s mental energy and turning people in zombies. Has characterisation really plummeted this low? Arkallax is hardly Edward Grove, is he? When he turns out to be the villain of the piece after all, I can’t imagine anybody was floor by the revelation. Ultimately, he is a big laughing building with teeth. Subtlety just doesn’t come into it. The last episode is pure b movie

Standout Scene: A moment to really make you sit up and pay attention is Mel and Ace realising that the mountain they are climbing is hundreds of thousands of burnt bodies fused together. Be very, very careful when giving a character a brain tumour for no other reason than a plot point and then skipping over the characters reaction to it in a single scene. Speaking as somebody who has had to deal with that sort of thing up close and personal of late I found the inclusion beyond distasteful. To have a character mocking brain tumours and primitive medicine (‘he could zap that baby right out of your head!’) defies description.

Result: ‘Oh, I know what exactly you are, Arkallax! You’re an ailing consciousness hooked up to a defective life support system, that in protecting you has made you its prisoner!’ When you compare the first episodes of Red Planets and The Dispossessed you have a pair of stories that are diametrically opposed in their approach and yet equally unsatisfying; one explains everything up front and spoils the opportunity to present a mystery and the other keeps you in the dark (hoho) and fails to generate any interest because there is no substance to what the characters are going through. As a result, I was waiting for the penny to drop, for the writer to inform me of the backbone of the story rather than losing myself in its atmosphere. There are superficial similarities to Paradise Towers; the juxtaposition of dark writing and a disco score, a High Rise, McCoy clowning about in this society, the emphasis on lifts, the villains banging on about how hungry they are and the story is even name checked on one occasion. There certainly wasn’t much here to distinguish itself as an individual story, unlike Stephen Wyatt’s High Rise homage. I’m not sure dialogue on audio is Morris’s forte because much of what the characters said in The Dispossessed sounded scripted and awkward, like people speaking words written for them rather than characters speaking naturally. I had a similar problem with Plague of the Daleks. His skill lies in prose and his words fly off the page much easier that way. What Morris does extremely well is pluck big scary ideas from his imagination and there are a number of strong, creepy notions at the heart of The Dispossessed. The imagery occasionally took my breath away but I wonder if that is because on a scene by scene basis I was so disappointed, that moments of grotesque horror could burst forth a repulse more effectively that way. Perhaps if the regulars had been better served I might have had an easier ride with this one (because ultimately it is just trying to tell a decent creepy adventure rather than turn your world upside down) but the characterisation is so functional and McCoy sounds utterly unrehearsed (I realise the writers don’t get rehearsal time but his line readings make it sound as though he’s never seen the script before in his life) and left me with my head in my hands in despair in how he played certain scenes. Unoriginal and painfully embarrassing in parts, this is your average Doctor Who run-around weighed down with far too many audio schoolboy errors to pass muster. Somewhere in the last episode I just surrendered to how bad this was, and started to enjoy it on that level. To my mind the weakest story since The Silurian Candidate. My expectations for the 7/Mel/Ace stories are pretty low and this still managed to disappoint me: 3/10