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Paper Cuts
SEPTEMBER 2009
(4 EPISODES)
Despite their
vast popularity, Malcolm Hulke’s Draconians never really got past
their television debut Frontier in Space. Even within Doctor Who’s
vast panoply of spin-off media, their appearances have been limited to the
most peripheral of roles in novels such
as Love and War and
Catastrophea. This notwithstanding, the Draconians’ presence has still
been felt throughout the canon, fleeting references to their Empire; their
Devil; and even their unique zodiac having permeated not only the new
television series of Doctor Who but The Sarah Jane Adventures
too. And yet no-one has brought them back as the principal protagonists in
a full-length Doctor Who adventure; at least, not until now.
And Marc Platt’s Paper Cuts
doesn’t just bring back the Draconians; it fleshes them out
and really deepens their
culture. Those familiar with Platt’s seminal works Lungbarrow and
Spare Parts will be able to attest as to the man’s unsurpassed
aptitude for world-building, and I’m pleased to report that the same
talent that breathed new life into both Gallifrey and Mondas has now done
the same for Draconia. Elucidating upon every loose thread dangled by
Hulke in Frontier in Space, and adding into the mix a whole host of
his own ideas, Platt’s Draconia has as much depth and as much ethnicity as
any world that we’ve visited before. The same imagination that gave rise
to genetic looms, ‘cousins’ and dodgy shops selling knock-off limbs now
gives us ghostly origami warriors, Sazou and Tombs floating in
space where “deathless” means exactly that. And when considering that Platt
accomplishes all of this without having the Doctor and his companion even
set foot on Draconia itself, you’ve really got to take your hat off to
him.
“They want
me, Charley. In revenge for what I did to their Empire.”
Set in or around our present
day, Paper Cuts is a prequel of sorts to the Draconians’ only
televised appearance to date. Frontier in Space alluded to the
Doctor having saved the Empire of Draconia from a great space plague some
five hundred years prior to that story (see Alex Mallinson’s
stunning visual interpretation, above), following which he was made a
noble of Draconia by the fifteenth Emperor. This story sees the Doctor
summonsed to attend the funeral of the recently-departed fifteenth Emperor
(“the Deathless Red”
Emperor),
where he becomes embroiled in the accession process for the heir to the
Empire and stumbles upon a dark secret that dates right back to the time
of the first “Deathless White” Emperor.
The only trouble is, Platt’s
claustrophobic narrative is slow-moving in the extreme. Now this
wouldn’t
necessarily be the end of the world if the supporting characters were
sufficiently compelling, but regrettably I couldn’t sympathise with any of
them. The Prince and his odd mother are both thoroughly disagreeable, and
the others aren’t
much better. Even India
Fisher’s Charley isn’t herself, literally: Paper Cuts features Mila
from Patient Zero walking around inside Charley’s form,
masquerading as the Doctor’s companion, and for the most part doing a
bloody good job of it.
Indeed, very
little occurs within Paper Cuts that pushes the season’s ‘Stalker’
story arc forward. The first episode begins with a pre-title sequence that
resolves the immediate Patient Zero cliffhanger, and there is one
scene between ‘Charley’ and Gomori right at
the death that
plays into the ongoing story rather deftly, but apart from that you
would be
hard-pressed to
tell Paper Cuts apart from any stand-alone release. In fact,
listening to
the play I
couldn’t help but wonder how late an addition the ‘Mila’ Charley was to
the script.
What’s
more, the Draconians don’t really sound Draconian.
They sound, well… varied;
animated, even. The Draconians
of Frontier in Space were so
damned
measured and impen-
etrable that the actors playing them almost sounded
wooden, and whilst I appreciate that to replicate that same intonation in
an audio drama would be aural suicide, I think that a little less vocal diversity
would have gone a long way towards making this production sound more
evocative.
Fortunately though, the man
that the Draconians (and, it seems, the Daleks) call
Karshtakavaar
(“The Oncoming Storm”) truly lives up his billing, Colin Baker’s storming
performance really carrying the play through its weaker moments. His
scenes with John Banks’ character towards the back end of the story were
particularly well-played, I thought, and genuinely quite affecting.
“Paper
cuts can be nasty, can’t they?”
And so
whilst I appreciated the odd
flourish of humour or action, for the most part I found Paper Cuts
to be relatively sedate affair, the deathless Empire of a Hundred Rising Suns
coming across as phenomenally well-drawn, but ultimately a little lifeless.
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