Madame President: There’s a delightful chemistry between Romana and Narvin these days that is borne of years of tension, rivalry and now friendship. He’s gone from the person that she cannot trust at all to the only person she can trust completely. That’s some fair development between two characters regardless of how long they have been working side by side. I like how she can gently mock him for his cynicism and age, whilst still entrusting him to have taken all the paranoid precautions he is famous for. If Romana is the Doctor then Narvin is her ultimate companion, even more so than Leela. She likes to try new blood for field work because some senior officials are getting a bit too long in the tooth for it (yeah, Narvin). She believes that they can win the war without destroying everything in their path and becoming like the people they despise.
Narvin: How wonderful to have Narvin, the seasoned (let’s not say old) CIA agent partnered with a young wanabe with no experience of field work whatsoever. He’s appalled at the idea that Eris might take notes on their mission. It’s a great story for Sean Carlsen, this. I loved the scene where he gets to express his shock at how far the Time Lords would go to win the war (let’s not forget that Narvin himself would have been delivering these sort of bombshells in the first few series of Gallifrey) and then his panic as a fellow Time Lord is shot to death over and over and then how he has to try and reason with a primitive mind and explain the concept of the Time War and Gallifrey to her to save his own life. It’s a script that gives Carlsen a lot to play with and he is more than up to the challenge.
Standout Performance: ‘We’re all working towards the same goal to ensure the right-side wins…’
‘And the deaths of several million people are considered acceptable collateral?’ ‘Yes, given the wider context…’
Great Ideas: Romana is afraid of intervention in the timeline on Ysalus. One day it will be of considerable strategic importance but in the time zone that they are visiting it is of no importance to anyone. Someone is meddling in its history. The planet is in the middle of a major war, the worlds first major global conflict. On one side a bunch of rather nasty ideological puritans and on the other side another nasty bunch of xenophobic imperialists. The collapse of these sides leads to a global government committed to pacifism and the exploration of space. If life ends on Ysalus instead the way is open for the Daleks to take the planet and all its resources. It has an abundant supply of a mineral oil that is rare that the Daleks need for their form of time travel. CIA have been collecting information of the planet for some time now and its time for Narvin and Eris to push the planet (and the War) in their direction and to help history take its rightful course. Have the War Council been raising Brax’s shelves or did he take more with him than Romana suspected? Would the Time Lords end all life on a planet just to aid the war effort? Do I need to even answer that question? The idea is to make the Daleks think that their own interventions on Ysalus have been a success, wait for them to turn up in the future and wipe them out. Typical Time Lord plotting, over complicated and dizzying. A temporal freeze can pause a whole world in a moment of time, caught in a moment before history changes for the worst. The people survive but don’t exist, not until they are unfrozen after the Time Lords have made the alterations they choose.
Isn’t it Odd: The trade off to losing Leela, Brax and Ace from the series means that a series of newbies step into the fray and bolster the numbers and the comparison between the two is not in their favour. It’s not that the performances are terrible or that the new characters aren’t well defined (to be honest it’s a little hard to tell at this point) but just that a cast list that includes Louise Jameson, Miles Richardson and Sophie Aldred (okay maybe not that last one) is packed with talent, colour and shade. This new bunch are just starting out and are nowhere near as rounded or interesting. I figured there would be a twist in the tale somewhere. This story has several and the least impressive is the idea that the fascist organisation that Narvin thinks are trying to destroy the other side are actually the benevolent faction. For a story that is written in such an intelligent way that really is an obvious twist.
Standout Scene: I was quite surprised when the story dared to have a character shoot a Time Lord over and over, running through their lives. It comes to a point where the villain of the story is begging for their final life. It’s the most shocking moment in the story, and it’s treated as a throwaway moment in the grand scheme of the story. It quite turned my stomach. The ending is…ambiguous. It’s either audacious to refuse the listener a coherent conclusion. I can’t help but think that this will be picked up before the end of the set so I will defer judgement until then.
Result: ‘We are fighting for the whole of Time!’ Your opinion of Partisans will depend entirely on whether you prefer the story set on Gallifrey that deal with political machinations or the stories set off world with all kinds of temporal jiggery pokery. If it’s the latter, you’re in luck but if it’s the former you might feel like the promise of the first instalment of this et made false promises. We have never really had a story like this before, where the stakes are so high that our heroes have to head to a world and interfere with its political development to ensure that in the future it won’t be a stepping stone for the Daleks in their aim to bring down Gallifrey. It’s a huge concept but it’s brought down to a comprehensible level thanks to an informative briefing by Romana and some enjoyable interplay between Narvin and Eris, the old hand and the new boy. Add in a presence from the new fascist Gallifrey to oppose their mission and turn the planet to a more sinister purpose and you have a delicious premise for a story. I was unconvinced by the situation presented on Ysalus because in classic Doctor Who style (or should that be in economic audio style) it is reduced to a few speaking characters trying to suggest an epic conflict happening elsewhere out of sight (hearing). However, the suggestion that the planet could be pulled in one of three ways; Romana’s hope for a peaceful future, the Time Lords hope for a strategic post or the Daleks’ mining facility for their time travel exploitations means that there is an underlying tension to the story regardless. Una McCormack has written an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional one. I respected the writing, appreciated the performances but I didn’t really feel anything because this is all realised conceptually. That’s an interesting approach, an experimental one and it does suggest the enormity of what is happening in the wider universe. Ysalus is a world that is talked about in great detail but experienced in scant moments. Sean Carlsen excels: 7/10
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