Teeth and Curls: He’s living at 107 Baker Street these days. The Doctor thinks Mork and Mindy is a less than accurate account of extra-terrestrial life. He’s the sort of fella that would give a cabbie an extra three pounds and tell him to invest wisely.
Aristocratic Adventurer: Romana is astonished to have three channels and three choices on British television. Three? Yep, that's all I got from Romana in this story. Gosh, they're doing her justice.
Great Ideas: When it comes to black holes you’ve just got to have been there otherwise they’re just not funny. A Movellan power pack is unearthed, dated back 2000 years. It’s an intriguing opening and gives a good reason for the main storyline to get started. It has exactly the same sort of opening as Resolution, excavators digging up something alien that turns out to be more trouble than its worth. Humanoid in appearance, aesthetically beautiful but robots, slaves to logic and lacking all emotion. Their mission is to create a weapon to defeat the Daleks.
Isn’t it Odd: The Movellans have overcome their need for a power pack? They’ve overcome their need for power? They’re robots!
Standout Scene: The cliff-hanger features the Doctor trapped in an airlock and running out of oxygen. A bit like that cliff-hanger in The Ice Warriors without the drama. A bit like the cliff-hanger in Frontier in Space without the suspense. A bit like that cliff-hanger in Shada without the wit.
Result: +++++ STOP START +++++ REVIEW WRITTEN BY THE SAME COMPUTER THAT SPITS OUT 4DAS +++ The curse of the 4DAs trips up another reliable writer, this time Andrew Smith. How a writer who contributed towards the season that this story is apparently set in could fail to capture its tone or style so spectacularly boggles the mind. Big Finish has an obsession with picking over Doctor Who continuity like a vulture over a corpse and the poor bird has only got the scraps like the Exxilons and the Movellans left now the really juicy stuff like the Wirrn and the Zygons have been used up. It smacks of desperation on the part of the writers of this range, using an element of the past to dredge up some interest because ultimately without it this would be a hollow, shallow action adventure of no consequence whatsoever. I don’t understand why the revelations about the Movellans are packaged in this way because we already know all the set up about them from Destiny of the Daleks. Let’s take a step back and consider what workmanlike means because I often use it to describe these fourth Doctor stories – it suggests a competence, a reliability and that at least some effort has gone into making the piece entertain. Half the time these hour-long vignettes feel like they have been plotted by a computer; fitting together to form the most predictable pattern it can. Even the performances seem listless and drained of any vigour. The Movellan Grave is so tedious it saps the life out Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, two of the sunniest performers in Big Finish’s arsenal. It’s a story that is about a race of cold, emotionless robots and so the cast have no choice but to deliver monotonous performances, except the one Movellan that sounds like you typical ranting Doctor Who monster. His name is Chenek, which is as vanilla a name as a Doctor Who villain could have. I’ve tried to review this story three times and each time it has left me cold and desperate to turn it off. Avoid at all costs. +++++ REVIEW ENDS +++++ START STOP +++++: 2/10
2 comments:
Yeah I'm kind of glad I stopped listening for several years to this range, I started finding a lot of them really underwhelming. Not bad, but like you said, "workmanlike", a generic story that just lets Tom Baker run around for a bit and that's all.
I did listen to the most recent series though, which I found...mixed. Some were fine, others were kinda bland. Nothing about the range has really stood out recently. I may try again next year though, since it sounds like they're going to try and break away from the nostalgia-trip now, and most of the stories will be 4-parters, which may give them time to explore more ideas and characters. Fingers crossed I suppose.
Man, I'd hate to be the writer tasked with doing an unironic Movellan story. I'm sure they'd work well in a Wilderness Years-style deconstruction/reimagining (and I wouldn't be surprised to learn this had been done), but I shudder at the thought of writing a tale predicated on them being inherently interesting.
Post a Comment