The Chimes of Midnight

An audio adventure featuring the Eighth Doctor and Charley

Written by Rob Shearman and directed by Barnaby Edwards

Polarity Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Imagine my festive frivolity when, randomly choosing my next Big Finish production to review in mid-December, a story presented itself that was set on Christmas Eve. Not only that, but the blurb on the back of the CD suggested it was some kind of Edwardian murder mystery. Sign me up, I said, and quickly went about listening to it so that I could post my review on this very day, Christmas Eve itself.

A quick word about Christmas stories and Doctor Who. When a story is set on Christmas, it never is about Christmas per se, but rather it involves some kind of an alien invasion set on Christmas Day (one obvious exception is the single episode aired on Christmas Day for "The Daleks' Master Plan," which I have not yet had the pleasure to listen to). There may be robot Santas wielding laser guns and a festive holiday party about to be torn to shreds by a tragedy a la The Poseidon Adventure, but I would love to see or hear a story that involves the concept of Christmas itself as a basis for the plot. (I would refer anyone seeking such a story to the recent Iris Wildthyme adventure, The Claws of Santa, which really hits the nail on the head in this department.) Such is the case with The Chimes of Midnight. There is a great deal of talk about Christmas pudding, one or two carols are sung in passing, but other than that the thing could have been set on Saint Swithen's Day and we would have had the same story.

Not that I have any huge gripes with most of the story. When the TARDIS materializes in the pantry of a country estate in 1906, the Doctor and Charley are involved with the comings and goings of five members of the household staff. Strangely, nothing is heard from the gentry having a Christmas party upstairs, and indeed when the Doctor tries to ascend to the upper levels of the house, he is deterred with unexplainable and uncharacteristic threats of violence from the staff. It's not long before a murder occurs and, in true Ten Little Indians fashion, the staff begin to be bumped off one by one, each at the grandfather clock's striking of the hour: the scullery maid, for instance, is found drowned in the washing basin, and the cook is found sprawled across the kitchen table, force-fed her infamous Christmas pudding to death. These events may seem like spoilers, except that the same characters inexplicably show up minutes later alive and well, oblivious to the fact that they were found murdered moments before. The Doctor and Charley and the listener, of course, are baffled.

This was the perfect setup for a wonderful cosmic mystery. Why are the characters admittedly unsure whether or not they could be the murderer? Why do the household duties of each of the characters change every time they return from the dead? Why do they recognize the Doctor as some kind of famous amateur sleuth? Through the first three episodes, I thought I had it all figured out: of course, I figured, the Doctor and Charley were stuck in some sort of land of fiction as in "The Mind Robber," where an author of whodunnits was constantly rewriting a draft of his latest murder mystery, never quite sure who the proper murderer should be in the end or even the right victim.

My solution, needless to say, was not the correct one. Unfortunately, the true solution to the mystery would have led me to give this story a 4.5 rather than a 3.5 if it didn't leave me scratching my head. I suppose there are fanboys and fangirls out there who love stories involving paradoxes and time folding in on itself, but these type of stories rarely work for me unless they're spelled out for me like I'm a nine-year-old (the old favorite "Blink" comes to mind). In all fairness, I could go back and listen to the last episode, but I just don't think that would be proper. Why go back and listen to a story and purposely look for the good things when the writer and/or director failed to get the point across the first time?

I rarely think this when listening to Big Finish stories, but this one would have been a wonderful televised story for Christmas Day. There were certain passages here that would have translated better on the screen, and the holiday element could have been used a bit more than it was. If Paul Cornell could translate his novel Human Nature so well on to the screen, I say let Rob Shearman have his pick of a few audio adventures, definitely including The Chimes of Midnight, and see what magic he can make of those. He is, after all, the writer who brought us Dalek, for some the epitome of the perfect Dalek episode in the new series.

If you're new to Big Finish (or to the Eighth Doctor adventures), I'm told by folks on the forums that The Chimes of Midnight is one of the best out there. I beg to differ. Pick up a copy of Sword of Orion or Storm Warning instead. Unless, of course, you're one of those fans who love to put the 10% of the missing pieces of a puzzle together yourself. In that case, perhaps you have a better imagination than I and more power to you.

Fun Facts:

• The character names for Shaughnessy, the butler, and Mrs. Baddely, the cook, were derived from the names of the script editor and the actress who played the cook in the classic British show Upstairs, Downstairs.
• These are not the only characters to glean inspiration from Upstairs, Downstairs; Edith, the scullery maid from The Chimes of Midnight, bears a striking resemblance to the feather-brained scullery maid Ruby in Upstairs, Downstairs.

The Romance of Crime

A novel featuring the Fourth Doctor, K9, and Romana II

Written by Gareth Roberts

Polarity Rating: 4 out of 5

Season 17 is arguably the worst period of the Fourth Doctor's era, what with the uninspired "Destiny of the Daleks" (did we really need to see Davros again?), the boring "Creature from the Pit," and Doctor Who's failed attempt at pantomime in "The Horns of Nimon." I imagine Gareth Roberts truly wanted to challenge himself by writing a novel set between those aforementioned stories, or perhaps he's a fan of season 17 and just wanted to celebrate it. In any case, The Romance of Crime somehow feels like a season 17 story, except it turns out to be much better than most of the stories in that very season.

The flavor is in the description of the characters, with guards that wear red frockcoats, a judge who, if he had been portrayed on television, would have chewed the scenery to bits, and villains that seem like hilarious caricatures of some of the more forgettable baddies in Doctor Who's long history. The flavor of this era of the program also can be read in the description of the setting, a space station with meandering corridors in which the characters inevitably run back and forth in. And, perhaps best of all, the portrayal of the Doctor and Romana is crafted straight from the late era of the Fourth Doctor, with the usual banter between the two of them. Take, for instance, this quote from the Doctor as he barges into a control room filled with villains:

"Hello everybody. It's nice to see you again, Xais, and you Mr. Pyerpoint, and you charming Ogron gentlemen, and, ah, you must be the Nisbett brothers. You don't know me, I'm the Doctor, this is my friend Romana, and that's Mr. Stokes, and do you know unless you listen to me I think we're all going die."

It's as if Gareth Roberts was actually channeling Tom Baker. Try having any one of the other ten actors that have played the Doctor say that line, and it wouldn't feel right at all, not even if David Tennant gave it his best.

Most of the story unfolds aboard the Rock of Judgment, a space station which cruises the galaxy and functions as both a kind of galactic courthouse and prison. The captain, for lack of a better word, is a judge named Pyerpoint, who spends the first half of the story trying to keep order in true bureaucratic fashion after the Doctor and Romana arrive. The Rock is home to a number of interesting characters, including security chief Margo, who seems to suffer from erratic bouts of possession from forces unknown, and Menlove Ereward Stokes, the resident artist and winner of this story's most eccentric name. (Stokes spends much of the story cowering behind corners, whining about every situation he finds himself in, and trying unsuccessfully to hit on Romana. He reminds me very much of a heterosexual version of Dr. Smith from Lost in Space.)

We soon learn that Margo is slowly being taken over by the spirit Xais, an evil female mutant who had been executed at the Rock years earlier for slaughtering dozens of non-mutants, whom she calls Normals. Xais can kill human just by looking at them, but they don't just drop dead; they literally fold in on themselves in a grisly display of flesh and bones. Xais has her own allies, the Nesbitt brothers, intergalactic gangsters who look like Drew Carey and act like Gordon Ramsey. Oh, and the Ogrons make an appearance as well, and Roberts handles them much better than they way they were portrayed in "Day of the Daleks" and "Frontier in Space." (No spoliers there -- there's a drawing of an Ogron on the front cover.)

What Xais has planned I will not tell you. What I can tell you, however, is that it involves a number of allies and a tangled web of deviousness that I relished reading. What results is a typical "base under siege" story, with characters being split up, reunited again, and split up again into different combinations. Of particular note is K9's role in the story as he accompanies a rough undercover police agent who ends up taking a shine to the tin dog.

Xais' evil plot aside, the main attraction is reading about these characters rather than the way the story moves. Perhaps the plot itself is the story's weakest link, as it's all pretty straightforward, but it's the tasty ingredients in the story itself -- namely, the characters -- that make this stew particularly good.

This was Gareth Roberts' fourth novel for Virgin's Missing Adventures series (the first three were Seventh Doctor New Adventures) and he went on to pen a handful more and wrote three scripts for the new series, namely "The Shakespeare Code," "The Unicorn and the Wasp," and "Planet of the Dead." All three of these scripts lack much of the humor and rib-poking that fills The Romance of Crime (with some exceptions, particularly in "The Unicorn and the Wasp"), and I'm hoping that his upcoming installment for the Eleventh Doctor brings some of this back. He was certainly an asset to the novels published by Virgin, and I look forward to reading more by him.

Fun Facts:

• Roberts brought the large, eccentric, and bald artist, Menlove Stokes, back in The Well-Mannered War and he later became a regular in the Benny New Adventures.
• For this first time (I think) we're told that the Ogrons are from the planet Braah, where drastic changes in the climate caused the Ogrons to undergo an evolutionary hiccup. As a result, they're not unlike a cross between an ape and a koala bear.

Revenge of the Cybermen

A televised adventure featuring the Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane, and Harry

Written by Gerry Davis and directed by Michael E. Briant

Polarity Rating: 2 out of 5

Long before Star Trek: The Next Generation presented us with the Borg, two wily chaps named Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis sat down to create the race of alien villains for the First Doctor's final story, "The Tenth Planet." There's no record or citation for this, but I am willing to bet that they wanted something fairly less banal than Terry Nation's Daleks, which had taken the country by storm three years previously. Pedler and Davis' Cybermen could walk up and down stairs, perform tasks that required appendages, and withstand extreme climate changes without needing a special floor to provide static electricity. As the canon progressed, we learned that Cybermen are also allergic to gold dust and, perhaps creepiest of all, use unwilling human subjects to create more Cybermen. (This last feature was exploited in "The Tomb of the Cybermen" and rather disturbingly in Steve Lyons' novel Killing Ground, and totally eliminates the need for any Cyberwomen. Hear that, Torchwood?)

Prior to "Revenge of the Cybermen," the villains had made a handful of appearances during the Second Doctor's era but never lifted a silver-gloved finger to pester the Third Doctor. Season 12 presented the audience with a four-story arc involving the transmat system to and from Space Station Nerva: "The Ark in Space," "The Sontaran Experiment," "Genesis of the Daleks," and finally "Revenge of the Cybermen." Upon viewing, it's no surprise that "Revenge" rounded out the end of the season, when the production crew will look for ways to cut the budget wherever possible. The sets are borrowed from "The Ark in Space" (although not to the story's detriment), most of the costumes look like they were slapped together with tin foil, the special effects are laughable, and the alien effects are unconvincing. Suffice it to say that the actors all tend to pull it together at the end of the day, although I cannot say the same for those that penned the story.

Ah yes...the story. Although I will go on about that in a moment, I should add not all the blame must be laid on Gerry Davis; he thrilled us so well with "The Tomb of the Cybermen." I was shocked to learn that none other than Robert Holmes was responsible for many of the blemishes in the story; after reading Davis' story, as script editor Holmes made a number of changes, including adding the unbearable Vogans.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is after all, a Cybermen story, so surely the creators gave the much-missed aliens something clever and cool to do after their long hiatus following "The Invasion." (A word of warning: As this story has yet to see the light of day on DVD, I'm a little hesitant to reveal a lot, but I simply cannot bring myself to criticize this episode without revealing a lot of details, so spoilers abound.) This time around, after recovering from their war with the Vogans, whose world is made up entirely of gold, a small crew of Cybermen are making their way towards the Nerva Beacon, which thousands of years later would become Space Station Nerva in "The Ark in Space." The Cybermen have spearheaded their visit with the help of a human ally, Professor Kellman, who has planted a number of adorable Cybermats on board the beacon; the Cybermats have bitten and killed 46 people aboard the beacon since their introduction (plus one more just after the Doctor and his friends arrive), and the crew has mistaken this for some sort of space plague.

So far so good. Once the Cybermen arrive, they plan to capture the three remaining humans left alive on the beacon (excluding Kellman), strap bombs to their bodies that look not unlike bowling balls, and then force them to transmat onto Voga where the bombs will "fragmentize" (the Cyber Leader's word, not mine) and destroy the gold-enriched planet. One assumes, therefore, that the Cybermen feel they'll be safe as houses because Voga is the primary source of gold in the galaxy, which is a contentious point but not particularly bothersome to me.

The Vogans, on the other hand, have their own plans. Kellman, it turns out, is really a double-agent working with the Guardians (a rebellious warrior faction of the Vogans), who have spent two years building a rocket ship (which, by the way, bears a strange resemblance to a NASA spacecraft, as well as the rocket in "Genesis of the Daleks") which will be aimed to strike Nerva Beacon at the precise moment all the Cybermen are aboard, thus ensuring the safety of Voga and proving the love of the Vogans for their children at long last.

So herein lies the problem that I couldn't get the fuck out of my mind while watching this story. The Cybermen have a space ship and bombs. The Vogans live on a big meteor made out of gold, and it appears that their only advances have been interior decorating, spelunking, and tram-building. Yet the Cybermen lack the technology to build a big goddam missile that will blow Voga to shit, and the Vogans have pulled this giant rocket out of their green asses, albeit they did it in two years. Hello, Robert Holmes, anyone home?

On top of it all, not unexpectedly the Doctor foils the Cybermen's plans, at which point they begin to execute their "alternative" plan: crash the Nerva Beacon into Voga, but not before escaping in their own ship. Why didn't they just show up, kill the remaining four humans, then nose-dive the beacon into Voga in the first place? Someone really needs to sit down with the Cybermen in the local IHOP and explain to them that complicated plans are not necessarily the best. This plot, compared to their Rube Goldberg plan in "The Moonbase," simply makes the mind boggle, although it apparently bears some credence to a Cybermind.

As for the design of the Cybermen themselves, I have no idea why the production team thinks it should be changed every time they make an appearance. This new design is not a vast improvement of that in "The Invasion," nor is it really any worse than the later appearance the Cybermen would make in "Earthshock." And the sound effects people simply lost the memo on how to make the Cybermen talk, since what we have here are some actors talking loudly inside their helmets; gone is the creepy computerized voice we hear in every other Cybermen story.

The design of the Vogans is a dismal failure. They look like William Hartnell mated with a Klingon, and the actors themselves fail to make the aliens plausible. The effects crew has done better in previous seasons with races such as the Draconians, and I saw no need to make the Vogans anything more than humanoid.

But it's not all bad. The chemistry between the Doctor and his companions is as fun as ever, particularly between him and Harry ("Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!"). It's a shame Harry left the TARDIS crew in the story after this one, as watching the banter between him and the Doctor would have been a joy to behold. Jeremy Wilkin as the sneering Professor Kellman also makes a good turn, and I was sorry to see him bludgeoned to death three-fourths into the story (killed by a rock fall accidentally caused by Harry, no less).

Another fun bit in this story, as is often the case, is Tom Baker's performance. After the Cyber Leader forces the Doctor to strap on a bomb and explains his plan to destroy Voga, Tom Baker lets loose with a monologue reflecting his utter disrespect for the Cybermen, most memorably calling them something like "silver-plated structures used by people to hang their hats on." Fun, fun stuff.

Where "City of Death" was a diamond placed in a season among a shitpile of abominations, "Revenge of the Cybermen" is just the opposite: a turd sitting in the fragrant garden in which the rest of season 12 seems to bloom forever.

Fun Facts: Look closely at what the Vogans are using for decoration in their gallery/control room. Doesn't that piece of art bear a striking resemblance to the seal of Gallifrey? Also, this story marks a point in Doctor Who history as the first one available on VHS (you can now purchase it on ebay for anywhere between $11.99 and $20.00). As of this writing, it has not been released on DVD, and I wouldn't hold my breath. Apparently, I am not alone in my lack of enthusiasm for this story; in October of 2009 the readers of Doctor Who Magazine ranked "Revenge of the Cybermen" 13o out of the 200 current stories.