An audio adventure featuring the Fifth Doctor and AmyWritten by Jonathan Clements and directed by Lisa Bowerman
Polarity Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Big Finish's three-part "Key 2 Time" series is, in a way, a sequel to the six stories of the Fourth Doctor's era involving the Doctor's quest to recover the six missing segments of the Key to Time, reassemble them, and defeat the evil Black Guardian. On the 30th anniversary of the series, Big Finish has added three new stories involving the same premise, including a new companion, but this time with the Fifth Doctor.
The second installment, The Destroyer of Delights, is a standalone adventure in that you don't need to listen to the first installment, The Judgment of Isskar, to understand what is going on (I jumped full into it purposely knowing nothing about the first story). The Fifth Doctor has been joined by Amy, a new companion who has apparently been incarnated by forces unknown into a humanoid entity to help the Doctor in his quest. One of Amy's talents is that she can sense the presence of a segment by instinct alone, much like the contraption used by the Doctor and Romana in the classic series (you know, that plastic wand that sounded suspiciously like a radiation detector). Also, Amy adds an extra element to the narrative as a "newborn" entity: she doesn't understand emotional concepts like pain, enjoyment, or sadness. I have to admit that this does not add much to narrative structure or enjoyment of The Destroyer of Delights, and she simply reminded me of Lieutenant Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Granted, of course, I have not yet heard her contributions to the first and third installment of the series.
Since The Destroyer of Delights was my first foray into this trilogy, I had a minor quibble right from the start: apparently the Doctor has already assembled the first four of the six segments in the very first story! To my knowledge, The Judgment of Isskar is a full four-part story (as opposed to four shorter stories), but I cannot understand why the producers chose to split the Key to Time into six segments for three stories when they could have split it into three segments (or, alternately, split it into six segments with six two-part stories). Then again, maybe I am jumping the gun here.
But back to the meat and potatoes. The story opens with the Doctor and Amy looking death in the face as the TARDIS is about to engulfed by the sun, when an unknown power freezes the TARDIS in space and time, saving their lives. Their knight in shining armor turns out to be the Black Guardian, whose powers have atrophied since the Key was broken up. He is willing to aid the Doctor in his quest, as the loss of the Key to Time would, in essence, mean the end of his existence and his possible domination of space and time.
I really enjoyed the surprise addition and handling of the Black Guardian in this story. When we last saw him in "Enlightenment," he was as evil and hellbent as the Daleks, but here we come to understand him not as the embodiement of all that is evil, but all that is rebellous and chaotic as well. The White Guardian, he explains, is the embodiement of all that is structured and lawful, like dinner with your mother-in-law or the legalization of marijuana (that second example is my own). The Black Guardian is played excellently by David Troughton, son of Patrick Troughton, and we saw David as early on as "The Curse of Peladon" and as recently as "Midnight." And yes, he sounds almost exactly like his father.
What with the Key to Time broken and dwindling in power, the Black Guardian is unable to locate the fifth segment: his intuitive powers seem to point him to three different locations in time and space (including 9th century Sudan), but he simply cannot pinpoint where or when it could be. Amy is in a similar quandary. This is the point when, through means and reasons I cannot understand after multiple listenings, the Doctor and Amy literally drop out of the sky in 9th Century Sudan.
Amy finds herself in the estate of Lord Cassim, who has been evading the taxman for the last two years by hoarding gold and giving it instead to an ominous-sounding alien who is hiding out in his crash-landed ship. It took me a while to realize that Cassim is actually the Black Guardian in human form; on a second listening, it occurred to me I was supposed to realize this immediately once Cassim was introduced, but Jonathan Clements tries to convey this by a single subtle line. I had initially gone almost three-quarters through the story before realizing the characters were one and the same. Again, maybe it's my own ignorance and short attention span that failed me here, but it really affected my enjoyment of the story the first time through.
The Doctor winds up in the desert, where he is helped by nomads and eventually takes refuge with the Legate of the Caliph, a tax collector who is none other than the White Guardian himself, also trapped in human form on Earth because his powers, like his counterpart's, have atrophied. Of course, the White Guardian is desperate for the Doctor to find all the segments of the Key to Time, as he is stuck in human form until it can be reassembled.
The Destroyer of Delights suffers from the problem that is evident in so many Big Finish productions: the first two or three episodes are all dragged out with exposition, introducing new characters with uninteresting subplots, while the fourth episode often tends to be a little anti-climactic by the time it's all wrapped up. The real villian in the story is the ominous Djinni, an alien stranded on Earth after his ship made a crash-landing. The Djinni is using the Black Guardian to collect gold to power the ship, but doesn't do much of anything throughout the entire story other than shout and provide an alien spacecraft for all the action in the end.
Unfortunately, I do not have a lot of positive things to say about this story other than the performances by David Troughton and Jason Watkins as the two Guardians are a joy to behold; the bits between them steal the show. Even Peter Davison seems to be just going through the moves, although since I'm not particularly a fan of the Fifth Doctor I'm a little biased. There's a cliched romance between a servant girl and a prince, and Amy spends much of the time acting bewildered and, in classic Doctor Who companion fashion, requires much of what is going on to be explained to her.
If one is looking for an excellenet science fiction adventure, my recommendation is to look elsewhere. One interesting point, though: the character of Lord Cassim, whom the Black Guardian is masquerading as, was an actual ruler in Sudan. He was made infamous in the history books for his mysterious hoarding of gold. I like the fact that Jonathan Clements nipped a tidbit of history to put in his story, but I wish he could have tried harder when delivering the goods.
