Doctor Who: Seven’s Sonic Seasons, Part 1

As I’ve previously described, Big Finish announced the arrival of their Doctor Who audio dramas with the oddball multi-Doctor adventure The Sirens of Time, followed by a brace of stories featuring the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors to establish their credentials at telling solo stories featuring the Doctors of the 1980s. Over 1999 and 2000s, they continued to put out their monthly range, expanding each Doctor’s line of audio dramas until they eventually had done the equivalent of a short season of the television show for each of them.

For this article, I’m going to look at their early Seventh Doctor stories, following The Fearmonger. On the one hand, the Seventh Doctor’s brief television run ought to have set him in good stead for adaptation to the audio drama format – his seasons of the show were good enough to act as a showcase for how writers could get the best out of McCoy’s interpretation of the Doctor, but were brief enough to leave all sorts of directions unexplored. On the other hand, the Virgin New Adventures had taken the character in an odd new direction which on the one hand would never have flown on television, but on the other hand had been broadly embraced by the fanbase. This left Big Finish at a crossroads with their Seventh Doctor material: do they mimic the TV show, follow the lead of the New Adventures, or try to find their own way?

The Genocide Machine

The Doctor and Ace have come to Kar-Charrat – a jungle world that is home to a vast library that rivals even the Matrix of Gallifrey for the sheer range of information it contains. Chief Librarian Elgin (Bruce Montague) is only too glad to greet the Doctor, who becomes quite interested in the new “wetwork” technology the library has deployed for data storage. Meanwhile, spacefaring antiquities thief Bev Tarrant (Louise Faulkner) and her team are excavating a nearby ziggurat – said ziggurat being the latest antiquity Bev has been assigned to steal – when they are assailed by violent robotic pepperpots YELL-ING ANG-RI-LY. It’s the Daleks – but what are they doing here?

Penned by Mike Tucker, The Genocide Machine is the first of the loose Dalek Empire series which ran through the Doctor Who monthly range in its early years. In theory it’s a connected arc, but in practice it doesn’t seem like there’s much connecting the arc beyond “here’s this incarnation of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks on Big Finish”; the Dalek Empire title would later be assigned to a Doctor-less spin-off series about the Daleks doing one of their bids for galactic domination and some homebrewed heroes trying to stop them.

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As the first Big Finish story featuring Daleks, this is obviously a bit of a landmark – not least because it’s the first time Nicholas Briggs got to do his Dalek voice in an officially-sanctioned Doctor Who context. Prior to Big Finish, he and others had been involved in Audio Visuals, a series of deeply unofficial fan-made audio dramas in which he not only played a bespoke version of the Doctor but also got to workshop his Dalek voice, and of course eventually he’d be the designated Monster Voice Guy for new-Who, voicing characters ranging from the Daleks to the Cybermen to the Nestene Consciousness.

That’s lovely for Briggs, but using Daleks in an audio adventure has some inherent problems – namely, all their dialogue is presented as HARSH, ANG-RY YELL-ING. If that’s a source of joyful nostalgia to you, that might be a plus – but if you find it irritating and grating to listen to for extended scenes, that’s going to count double in a format where the story is told exclusively through sound. Inter-Dalek chatter is particularly grating – at least if they’re talking to someone else there’s some variation in what you’re hearing.

Still, that’s a challenge which can be overcome by a sufficiently compelling story, which unfortunately this isn’t. Right down to the “Daleks on a jungle planet” gimmick – something seen in The Chase, The Daleks’ Master Plan, and Planet of the Daleks – and the inclusion of a character with the surname “Tarrant”, this is borrowing an awful lot of stylistic gimmicks from Terry Nation, but largely we’re dealing with his more tired ideas. If you have a lot of nostalgia for Terry Nation specifically, that might be a good idea, but if you think that the best Dalek stories of the 1960s were David Whitaker’s season 4 stories, believe Genesis of the Daleks was only as good as it was because Terrance Dicks pushed Nation into trying harder and Robert Holmes was there to script edit the results, reckon Blake’s 7 would have failed without Chris Boucher onboard to corral and tune up Nation’s ideas, and in general you see Terry Nation as a writer whose ideas landed best when filtered through someone with less hacklike instincts – if, in short, you are like me – then The Genocide Machine will grate in this respect.

There’s other issues. Bev Tarrant, as an artifact-hunter with a daring streak, is a rather blatant Bernice Summerfield ripoff, and was used for only one other Doctor Who story before being shunted over to Bernice’s line. On top of that, doing another “massive library/archive” story so soon after Whispers of Terror isn’t all that original. There’s a “fancy new technology turns out to have a terrible secret” angle which is somewhat predictable (in the sense that fancy new tech usually has terrible secrets in Doctor Who when it is foregrounded to the extent the library’s liquid storage system is here), and seems to exist largely to give a moral justification for the Doctor being opposed to a library – a stance he takes even before the dreadful secret is revealed and feels incongruous for the character.

In short, this piled up enough red flags by the end of the first episode that I couldn’t get into it. At the end of the day, it’s yet another “running away from Daleks on a jungle planet” tale and we already had way too much of that in the TV show.

The Fires of Vulcan

We open in 1980, in the archaeological digs around Vesuvius – where a bizarre artifact has been uncovered, and is taken into custody by UNIT. It’s none other than an English police telephone box, buried there since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD… Back in the 1st Century, the Doctor and Mel have arrived in a charming Roman city. The TARDIS systems have glitched out and the Doctor doesn’t precisely know where they are – but he soon works it out, and informs Mel. He gives Mel the decision on whether they should simply leave immediately or not, and she’s up for having a quick look around before the time’s due. Soon enough, though, Mel realises that someone’s tailing her and the Doctor – and the locals are giving the Doctor and Mel dirty looks for their anachronistic attire and Mel’s immodest uncovering of her hair. They have bigger problems in the offing, though – for they are in Pompeii, and Vesuvius is due to erupt, and thanks to that discover UNIT alerted him to back in the 1980s, he believes he’s not going to be able to use the TARDIS to get out of this one…

This is a pure historical! It’s not the first time Big Finish would tackle such a thing – that honour goes to The Marian Conspiracy, which I’ll be getting to when I do the Sixth Doctor’s equivalent of this article – but it’s notable that Big Finish decided to do one of these featuring Mel, which would put this somewhere in season 24 – hardly an era of the show when a pure historical was remotely likely to occur. Author Steve Lyons seems to be in a weird spot here, in part because he has to try and work out how to do a pure historical for these characters in particular. He throws in some attempts to work in lots of historical detail in a bid to go educational like the Hartnell-era pure historicals, but its attempt to stick to content which would have been permitted in the classic show means it’s forced to allude to the depictions of phalluses all over the place but isn’t actually allowed to even remotely describe them. This means if you’re already up on the history you can figure it out, but if you’re not you’d perhaps be confused.

The depiction of Pompeii is rather dated – depicting it as a place where the social mores of Rome are strictly observed and people in unusual garb would be regarded as unusual, whereas the current understanding is that Pompeii was very cosmopolitan and kind of a party city, and I somewhat suspect that Lyons is guilty of assuming that the moral restrictions of the aristocratic circles of Rome itself were applied universally to the rest of society. The folk of Pompeii would have likely been very used to people dressed in all manner of styles coming and going, particularly considering how vast the Empire had become prior to the eruption, and the idea that a foreigner or commoner would be held to the same restrictions as a woman from the propriety-obsessed circles of the Roman aristocracy feels tenuous. On top of that having people tutting at Mel and disapproving of her generally throws up barriers to her being especially involved in the story, which is not particularly useful for the purposes of this tale.

The plot hinges on the Doctor believing that he must die here, because he’s aware that the TARDIS gets dug up here later on and so there’s no way he and Mel can depart in the TARDIS without causing a timeline-shattering paradox. This is resolved by the end, of course, and the rest of the story just involves a lot of busywork to pad out the story in between establishing that by the end of the first episode and resolving the matter by the end of the fourth. There’s been pure historicals before where the whole gimmick was based around keeping the characters doing busywork until they get a chance to return to the TARDIS and leave, of course, but the really good historicals like The Aztecs managed to offer something on top of that in the meantime.

Here, the story doesn’t – and since the major obstacle here is really rooted in the Doctor’s future knowledge rather than anything inherent to Pompeii specifically (the TARDIS could be dug up from any volcanic eruption, after all), the busywork doesn’t engage with the history either. Some of those old Hartnell historicals certainly came across as the old show spinning its wheels – but whilst the realities of TV production meant that sometimes you just got a story emptily spinning its wheels, it’s uninspiring to hear those wheels spinning in an audio drama.

On top of that, when Fires of Pompeii is right there, it’s hard not to see this as a faint copy of it. The result was I also didn’t make it all the way through this one. I’m glad I know it exists because it means that, thanks to the events of The Giggle, I can imagine Donna and Mel chatting in the UNIT canteen about their trips to Pompeii and comparing notes. But I don’t consider it enormously worth listening to.

The Shadow of the Scourge

This is a bit of an oddity because it’s not in the main Big Finish continuity – rather, it’s an example of what Big Finish would tag early on as a “side step” story, one which is based heavily on the continuity established in other strands of Doctor Who tie-in fiction. Specifically, the blurb described it as a side step “into Virgin territory” – a not too subtle allusion to the fact that this is a brand new story set during the continuity of the Virgin New Adventures.

Specifically, it’s set at some point between the events of All-Consuming Fire and Blood Harvest. At this stage of the continuity the Doctor is travelling with Ace, but it’s a very different Ace from the one we are used to from the TV show (or from early New Adventures entries like the Timewyrm and Cat’s Cradle series): after parting ways from the Doctor for a bit, she spent several years as an elite operative in the Dalek Wars of the 25th Century, and is therefore now more adult, more badass, and has a more sexualised costume. (Ah, the 1990s.) She’s also not the sole companion any more – just as significant in the TARDIS crew is Professor Bernice “Benny” Summerfield, a wise-cracking, hard-drinking, sex-having archaeologist from the future who’s in her early 30s at this point in her timeline, and therefore is a bit more mature than companions in the TV show often were, because this is a continuity for cool adults who can cope with hard-drinking sex-havers.

Big Finish, in fact, made their start doing audio adventures for Bernice Summerfield’s solo adventures, building on the work Virgin did with the New Adventures line after they lost the Doctor Who licence and retooled it to make Benny the lead character, so they already had a well-established voice actor for Benny – Lisa Bowerman, who’d previously played Karra, the lesbian catgirl from Survival that Ace bangs. In that respect, it was simplicity itself for Big Finish to offer up a New Adventures story, because they already had McCoy and Bowerman on speed dial, and bringing in Sophie Aldred and setting the tale during the span of New Adventures when Ace and Benny were both in the TARDIS. Adjust McCoy and Aldred’s costume on the cover so the Seventh Doctor in the “linen suit, no question mark pullover” look he adopted at that point in the New Adventures and is in her 25th Century space warrior catsuit and job’s a good’un.

This time, the Doctor, Ace, and Benny have arrived in… Kent, in the rather boring Pinehill Crest hotel. Today, the Pinehill Crest is paying host to several different conventions; there’s a technical conference where Dr. Pembroke (Michael Piccarilli) is demonstrating his new invention, New Age channeller Annie Carpenter (Holly King) is promulgating the word of alien space brothers, and the cross-stitchers are stitching crossly. A dead vagrant is cluttering up one of the lifts, and the Doctor’s had a funny turn – a side effect of someone doing time experiments somewhere in the hotel. As the Doctor, Benny, and Ace investigate, it becomes apparent that the alien Scourge are up to no good – so what’s the Doctor playing at, surrendering Earth to the Scourge on behalf of the Time Lords?

To reassure listeners that this is well and truly a New Adventure, Big Finish got Paul Cornell in to write it. Cornell, of course, is one of the most revered New Adventures authors; his Timewyrm: Revelation was far and away the most experimental and radical of the Timewyrm series, offering a vision of “Doctor Who for grown ups” which could actually have artistic merit rather than just being edgelordy, his Human Nature got adapted as Human Nature/The Family of Blood in the revived show, and in Love and War he created the character of Benny in the first place, as well as narrating Ace’s dramatic (albeit temporary) exit from the TARDIS.

In her review of Happy Endings, the Cornell-penned 50th New Adventure which celebrated the half-century milestone by marrying off Benny and writing her out of the series (temporarily, in both cases), Elizabeth Sandifer talks about how Cornell seems to be goofing off a little – that he seems to think that getting Benny hitched to this dude and having them go off into the sunset together is actually a terrible idea, and the New Adventures shouldn’t do it, and he’s subtly and not-so-subtly flagging that. Within a few months the New Adventures would blow up Benny’s marriage and bring her back, so she could be positioned to take over as the line’s new protagonist once they had to go Doctor-less. (As Sandifer points out, it’s possible they decided to make that shift as far back as the writing of Happy Endings, hence the hints that the wedding isn’t meant to last, but if you’re already going to retcon that decision why not just… not bother? Do something different for your anniversary blowout story, keep Benny involved, and don’t worry about needing to adjust for her absence.)

It’s tempting to suspect Cornell of doing the same here – having been handed a concept he finds flawed, he opts to spoof the flaws rather than merely glossing over them, even as he also focuses on playing the hits and trying to offer a taster of the New Adventures style, even though I suspect he was under tighter editorial constraints here (the BBC having been very lassaiz-faire in terms of approvals back when Virgin had the licence, but perhaps exerting closer supervision over Big Finish). The most critical problem with the idea of doing a New Adventures-style story in a Big Finish format is that at their best, the New Adventures were all about telling stories too complex and nuanced for the time constraints set by four episodes of the classic show, whilst early Big Finish audios are modelled on offering… four episodes of roughly the length of episodes oof the classic show.

This means that Cornell can’t really do what the New Adventures did best – 90 minutes of audio can’t cram in the level of nuance that 250 pages of prose can (you can’t even read 250 pages of prose in 90 minutes intelligibly, after all). This paints him into a corner where he instead has to mimic the more tiresome aspects of the New Adventures – the 1990s edgelordiness of it all – because whilst that isn’t all there was to the New Adventures, that’s the bit which feels the most New Adventures-y, and if this trip into Virgin territory doesn’t feel New Adventures-ish, then what’s the point?

And to a certain extent, a big load of 1990s edgy, “mature” nonsense is what you get. There’s plenty of references to Benny being a hard-drinking sex-haver, and Ace wearing a hot futuristic space assassin outfit and being a couple notches more bad-tempered than in the TV show, and the Doctor being smug and not explaining anything to anyone. You also get Cornell breaking out some of his more interesting party tricks, like a sequence where the Doctor ends up in his own internal mindscape (as happens in multiple Cornell novels in the New Adventures series), but there really isn’t room for them to breathe here.

As this sort of thing piles up, it becomes apparent that Cornell is not merely repeating the tropes of the New Adventures – he’s outright parodying them. It’s blatantly obvious that the Doctor is only pretending to go along with the Scourge for the sake of conning it, so Ace backs his play by pretending to be super upset about the Doctor abusing her trust yet again and storming off, and then brags to Benny about her performance, in a comic inversion of all the times Ace actually mistrusts the Doctor in the New Adventures. There’s a bit where Benny visits the Doctor’s mindscape and spots the Eighth Doctor from afar – for Cornell decides that the Doctor’s future selves reside in there as well as past incarnations – and she starts asking if the Doctor plans to regenerate soon in a way which suggests she’s already planning to bang Paul McGann (for she does in fact have sex with the Eighth Doctor at the very end of the Doctor-featuring New Adventures).

This sort of spoofing is funny, but it will annoy anyone who was hoping for something along the lines of the more serious New Adventures, it will fly over the head of anyone who’d never touched them, and the whole thing risks becoming onerous. There’s a whole sequence where the Doctor gives a long rambling explanation of who the Scourge are and what they want, and whilst you could read this as a parodic inversion of the New Adventures‘ tendency to play have the Doctor explain nothing to anyone by instead having him give a comically overlong explanation, it still means you’re listening to Sylvester McCoy giving a long blustering speech as a less charming version of the Doctor than the one you saw on TV. There’s also a bit where Ace has herself deafened (knowing she can fix her ears in the TARDIS later) so as to give herself a brute force sort of immunity to the Scourge’s mind control, which leads into jokes about Ace being bad at lip reading; this becomes tedious quickly.

If there’s an area where this really works, it’s in the conclusion, where it turns out that the Scourge are in at least some senses the voices of our own worst critics and harshest judges – namely, ourselves. The Scourge themselves are essentially about embracing the worst fears we have about who we are and what we are capable of, and so in rejecting them the story essentially rejects the detritus of the New Adventures – the stuff that seemed like a fresh and exciting departure at the time but became a creative cul-de-sac as the zeitgeist moved on – as well as in some respects engaging with it by framing the New Adventures as a place where the Doctor confronted the worst parts of himself and eventually evolved away from them.

In this light, creating a story that’s all about how the grimdark logic of the New Adventures fails to pass muster against the Scourge – the Doctor’s play against them goes terribly, terribly wrong – and instead has a resolution along softer, gentler lines is a welcome correction. In fact, it ends up shunting things closer to the ethos of the Seventh Doctor’s televised output – which was, after all, in part a reaction against the Sawardian excesses of the immediately preceding eras. Perhaps the setting lampshades this: we get this cosmic horror crisis unfolding in the bland corridors of a cheap hotel, the sort of place you could absolutely imagine the cash-strapped McCoy seasons shooting a serial.

Big Finish would later adapt some of the New Adventures directly – most notably Love and War, the story which introduced Benny, was adapted to celebrate the character’s 20th anniversary. As for Shadow of the Scourge, I wouldn’t say it scratches the itch if you wanted something that was actually much like a New Adventure – at least, not any of the New Adventures which didn’t jump for self-parody straight out of the gate – and it would probably just seem incongruous and unpleasant to anyone who, unaware of the New Adventures‘ house style, didn’t get the joke. And on balance, even if you get past those hurdles, I’d have to say it isn’t so much a good audio drama as it is the sort of absurd mess that makes for compelling car crash listening, and it is perhaps the ultimate rebuttal to anyone who in the early 2000s thought Big Finish should mimic the New Adventures‘ approach.

What, then, are we to make of the Seventh Doctor audio dramas of 1999-2000s? Well, setting aside The Sirens of Time (a multi-Doctor story in theory, a Big Finish proof of concept in practice), you get one really good story (The Fearmonger), one story which purposefully goes for self-parodying so-bad-it’s-good territory (The Shadow of the Scourge), and two stories which just don’t make the cut (The Genocide Machine and The Fires of Vulcan). If we measure that against any of McCoy’s TV seasons, it’s a pretty poor showing. What went wrong?

Well, perhaps part of the problem is that unlike Colin Baker or Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy kind of has nothing to prove from the perspective of the early Big Finish range. The harshest thing you can say about his body of television work is that it’s a bit short, but given how excellent the quality control was you can’t really say that he was short-changed when it came to quality. With Peter Davison, you have a Doctor who was in enough good stories that models for how to best use the Fifth Doctor suggest themselves, but enough bad stories to create a desire to redress the balance.

With Colin Baker, you don’t really have any flat-out classic stories to base your approach on, but in some respects that offers tremendous creative freedom: so long as you cater to Baker’s strengths as an actor in general and a Doctor in particular, then you’ve got a shot at creating something which may or may not be excellent taken in isolation but surely has a better batting average than his TV output, and Big Finish were fortunate enough to have some excellent scripts for him early on.

In other words, precisely because the Fifth and Sixth Doctors had reigns troubled by quality control issues, there’s an obvious route you can take with them early on: give them the sort of stories they could have had if Eric Saward had been better at his job. There isn’t a similar repair job that presents itself for McCoy: you can’t really “fix” the Cartmel era unless your tastes in the show are eccentric enough to regard it as in need of fixing in the first place, and if that’s the case it’s hard to see why you’d want to write for the Seventh Doctor in the first place.

Perhaps this is why Big Finish went to the Virgin New Adventures well so soon – they at least offered an intriguing alternative interpretation of the Seventh Doctor to the televised canon. But as Paul Cornell himself establishes, you can’t really translate the New Adventures approach to the format Big Finish were using here and expect to retain the distinct virtues of the New Adventures, not least because those arose partially from being in the novel format in the first place. This, perhaps, explains why this brace of stories are a bit all over the place – whatever it is you’re meant to do with the Seventh Doctor in the audio format, it hasn’t become apparent yet.