Softer Six: The Doctor receives the best corporate handshake he has ever had. If Peri is Mrs Smith and her fella is Mr Smith then that makes the Doctor their eccentric Uncle just along for the ride. I love the idea of the Doctor as a force for moral good in the universe, investigating something as a shady as an institute that is creating the ultimate designer babies, against all the natural laws of the universe. Of all the Doctors, Colin Baker’s sixth Doctor is the most outwardly morally indignant and this feels like the perfect avenue for him to go on the attack. He’s also the Doctor that allows his companion to go through the most hellish of scenarios and so allowing Peri to experience the horrors of this technology is not entirely out of character. All he is sometimes is a pile of words wearing a cravat trying to move onto the next adventure because dealing with the implications of this one are too much.
Busty Babe: Where Peri comes from, these crafted embryos are called designer babies. She’s not sure how she feels about indulging in this obscene service in order to investigate the Institute and the second they start interacting with a child that she and Joe may have in the future it is clear that this is a very bad idea indeed. Nicola Bryant is the sort of actress that is going to make this kind of material really hurt and so Peri is a twisted choice to put through this kind of story. It feels sickly appropriate given how badly Peri was treated on television as an object of sexual desire that a story should use a science fiction concept to mess with her understanding of what having a baby is. It’s an invasive peek into a future of what her body may create. When she sees several scenarios play out, she admits it is like choosing a child to live and a child to die. Why did Peri’s children turn into monsters in the future? She has been genetically altered so many times on these adventures that perhaps her DNA has been fucked up because of it. Potential children of Peri’s are out there in that technology, and she can’t understand how the Doctor can just skip back to the TARDIS and move onto the next adventure when she has been so disturbed by this one.
Her Fella: Joe seems to be completely at home with this genetic tinkering. He feels this is a natural extension of technology that already exists in the eighties. At this point we are still supposed to take Joe on face value, with no real explanation of how he came to join the TARDIS crew.
Standout Performance: Bryant is extraordinary in the final scene. She’s almost too good at expressing Peri’s distress.
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘It’s just the way things are heading, isn’t it?’ has probably papered over a multitude of sins over the years.
Great Ideas: If you pay enough credits, then the artificial moon can wink at you on your birthday. Both Incubator shells hold a fertilised egg and an algorithm shows how they will develop as an individual both in looks and personality and feed in the personality of the parents and how they will interact with the child. Both nature and nurture are incorporated. Being able to see to the life of a child from inception to their death is something that no parent should be able to see. That’s the whole point of having a baby, the journey that you go on. The amount of variables this technology must be working with boggles the mind. Why worry about arguing with your children in future years when you can choose a more agreeable child?
Standout Scene: What happens when both versions of the child that you want come to be but as a parent you have chosen one over the other? A satisfied child on one hand, and a rejected monster on the other. The story is straying into some dark waters with this concept; exploring the idea of children that have been walked away by parents and grown up as monsters as a result. Should any Doctor Who be suggesting a monstrous psychological disfigurement to a child that has not been chosen by its birth mother? Being forced to answer ‘why her and not me?’ is a shocking moment when the parent dispassionately gives her reasons (they are utterly superficial, and terrifying because of it).
Result: ‘It’s not my fault, I’m just the customer!’ Dangerous waters for a Doctor Who story and that is exactly the sort of thing that I want to see from Big Finish. So much of what they have produced in latter years is either nostalgic for the past or a popcorn entertainment version of what the television series is bringing out now. I’m surprised The Baby Awakes made it past the BBC censors given it is offering its opinion on creating designer children and it doesn’t shy away from the horror or the psychological implications of that. Nicola Bryant is a thoughtful actress and refuses to shy away from just how disturbing it is to see many future iterations of a potential child. This works well as a vignette. I’m not sure if I could have handled a full-length adventure in this vein. Ultimately Doctor Who is not the avenue to tackle issues this sensitive in a brutal and insensitive way (go look at the New Adventures for some horror stories in that vein) and so scraping the surface of the notions is probably enough. The story ultimately falls on the side of anti-abortion whereas a more balanced view would have been a safer approach. This is brave, and disturbing. I don’t agree with what this story is saying but I love the almost tasteless angle that the story takes. Should Doctor Who ever grapple with the idea of abortion, especially in a Christmas special? Probably not, but that is why this offers some hope for inflammatory storytelling in the future instead of the same old nonsense featuring screeching Daleks and temporal paradoxes: 8/10
I have also got a bit fatigued with a lot Big Finish's recent output except most of the Sixth Doctor stuff which has continued to be well worth getting, which is sad considering how bold the tv series has been recently. I might check this realise out.
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