The Moons of Vulpnana written by Emma Reeves and directed by Samuel Clements

What’s it about: The Doctor has returned Mags, formerly of the Psychic Circus, to her native world: Vulpana. Not the savage Vulpana that Mags was taken from, but Vulpana in an earlier era. The Golden Millennium – when the Four Great Wolf Packs, each devoted to one of the planet’s four moons, oversaw the height of Vulpanan civilisation. A time when the noblest families of the Vulpanan aristocracy found themselves in need of new blood… A golden age that’s about to come to a violent end!

The Real McCoy: The Doctor has designed new and interesting technology to stop Mags from killing him. He once stopped six different alien incursions between breakfast and elevenses.

Werewolf in Space and Time: This should have been a chance for Mags to truly shine. It should have been the story that took the singularly unique factor of her character and really bring out into the (moon)light. Instead it the wolfy nature is dealt with so cack-handedly that she is a character that descends into ridiculous melodrama and horror movie clichés. If this is what we could have come to expect had Mags joined the team after The Greatest Show in the Galaxy then I’m glad it never happened. Poor Jessica Martin has no hopes with this script. It’s one that turns very quickly into a Doctor Who version of Twilight that sees somebody with an uncontrollable bestial nature having to stave off the attentions of lovesick puppies. I wish some restraint had been applied. There is a great story to be told about a companion who turns into a monster (remember when Izzy turned into Destrii in the comics?) but Reeves writes so obviously, with so much angst and so little emotion that I was shaking my head at the melodrama rather than involving myself in it. Mags is so suspicious of the Doctor’s motives that she considers him looking for her in the TARDIS as the equivalent of a hunt. She’s very sensitive about the wolf inside of her and threatens to rip his throat out for exposing that side of her. Mags doesn’t have a home because her people were driven from Vulpana years ago, refugees who were persecuted for being different. She had forgotten how beautiful the full moons are. Her people are intelligent and sophisticated, their sense highly evolved. She’s not shallow that she would leave the Doctor just because a fellow wolf has doffed his cap at her.

Standout Performance: I couldn’t tell if the actors were sabotaged by the script or simply giving terrible performances. Perhaps the latter accentuated the former. Either way I find it hard to remember a Big Finish story quite this poorly acted.

Dreadful Dialogue: ‘Is it fun being fought over like a piece of fresh meat?’
‘What’s your secret, bright sisters?’
‘They’ve released the prey!’ ‘You mean they’ve let them go?’ Oh Mags…
‘The Outlander may taste unusual but flesh is flesh!’
‘Not your precious moons again!’
‘Your fake moon killed hundreds of people!’
‘My Mooooon!’
'I die like a Vulpanan!'

Great Ideas: There was a thousand years of peace and harmony on Vulpana, for a millennium the Vulpanans were left alone to develop their civilisation. On Vulpana breeding is the only thing of importance. The Vulpanans get to examine their prey before they are released into the wilderness. In a laboratory, a Vulpanan is looking to find a permanent cure for their condition. There’s a fifth moon, a dark moon. It shields itself from the other planets and hides behind them.

Audio Landscape: Those howls. Christ, those howls.

Musical Cues: Listen to the isolated music track. It’s rather glorious. It gets completely lost in the horror of the production.

Isn’t it Odd: Both Sylvester McCoy and Jessica Martin overplaying their first scene together to point of pure ham was not an optimistic sign. I’m very confused about the consistency of these stories. In The Monsters of Gokroth, Mags was refused to let somebody extract the wolf side of her, admitting that it was a part of her identity and yet at the start of The Moons of Vulpana she’s really excited about the idea of being cured. Why would you introduce a character in one story and then skip ahead to what is clearly a fair while into their relationship and not explore these two getting to know each other better? The dialogue in the scene after the title music is pure awkward SF exposition. Martin and McCoy struggle to make this sound like a natural conversation. ‘What do you do when you’re too freaky for the freakshow?’ is not a line any actor should be handed. Listening to McCoy attempting to subdue a bunch of werewolves is the most embarrassing thing since Capaldi turned up on a tank with an electric guitar. The werewolf voices are somehow more irritating than all those monster voices in the previous story. There really should be a ban on these sorts of modulations, they are difficult to understand and hard on the ears. Hardly the sort of thing a company releasing audio adventures should be endorsing. Listen to the dialogue of the werewolf Queen trying to pimp out the shaggy boy folk of the pack to Mags and tell me that this is a well written script. Was anybody surprised that the prey that the Vulpanans hunt turned out to be people? It’s written as if it should be a shock but directed as though it’s an afterthought. Does Mags really think that the Doctor just dumped her like a piece of ‘space trash?’ Has she learnt nothing from their adventures together? Yes, we get it, there is something up with the moons of Vulpana. The bloody story is called The Moons of Vulpana. Why does the Doctor spend three whole episodes looking up at the orbs in the sky and going ‘oooh, there’s something not quite right there…’ Get to the point. The Doctor and Mags escape in the TARDIS in episode three and I was hoping they would head off into another adventure, never to think of Vulpana again. Wishful thinking. The mystery of who built the fifth moon…isn’t really a mystery. Even if it is presented as one. The last time a marriage was suggested at the end of part three of a werewolf story was Loups-Garoux. The comparison scarcely bares thinking about. Once the villains true identity is revealed, he’s clearly not the same character he was in episode one. From lovesick whippersnapper to mad scientist in the blink of an eye. He goes on and on in the last episode, saviour and condemner. It’s a psychological battle that could have been quite interesting if he wasn’t presented like your typical Doctor Who ranting villain.

Standout Scene: The end of episode one. Seriously, the end of episode one. Was that even directed? It sounds like McCoy was left at the mic whilst everyone went out for lunch and he provided the wolf howl himself. It’s beyond unacceptable for a company that has been producing audio drama this long and so prolifically to produce a scene as appalling as this.

Result: ‘So the mighty new lord of Vulpana is scared that girls might laugh at him!’ Atrociously written, this is a lead weight of poor quality and hopefully the lowest the main range will sink for a long while. You know you’re in for a tiresome experience when episode one – historically the most exciting and attention grabbing of the four – is this unconvincing and lacking in interest. Jessica Martin, who was so impressive in Gokroth, delivers an feeble performance, which sabotages any chance of positive character development, makes the scenes between her and McCoy flat (and he’s hardly at his best here either) and listening to her struggling with the horrific dialogue ‘Doctor, I don’t know much about off world etiquette but here on Vulpana we do not use such epithets!’) was akin to a form of Chinese water torture. It feels like a script that has been written by somebody who doesn’t understand how to form a sentence. There’s an odd, stilted quality to the structure of each line, a leaning on exposition, favouring angst and melodrama over more naturalistic conversation. How did anybody think the hormonal competition between two Vulpanan pups trying to win Mags would be intriguing listening? It’s agonisingly long too for such an eventless story, filled with endless painful dialogue scenes. I don’t believe this was written, script edited or directed. It was created out of an amalgam of other audio stories, spliced together from previous recordings. I jest, but I do have to question the talent of people who can produce and charge for this kind of material. Vulpana would not be on my list of tourist spots I’d most like to visit in the universe. Let’s prey that we don’t get a sequel. By making her homecoming so thoroughly tedious, any chance to Mags making a mark on audio has been squandered. How any story that bangs on for over two hours can feature so little of what we call ‘events’ is beyond me. The Doctor keeps visiting Mags, asking how she’s getting on and popping off to ponder over the moons. This happens over and over again. By the end I was screaming at the speaker ‘get to the bloody point!’ A very good friend of mine was listening to this story whilst driving and said he had to turn it off in fear of driving himself into a tree to end the torture. That feels like a fitting epitaph for The Moons of Vulpana. I’ve read reviews elsewhere (Blogtor Who, Who Review) and they are praising this story to the high heavens. Maybe I’m the one at fault but clearly my critical faculties are in a completely different place to theirs. Avoid: 1/10

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