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Orbis
7TH MARCH 2009 - 14TH MARCH
2009
(2 EPISODES)
Big Finish’s
third season of eighth Doctor and Lucie adventures has certainly been their most heavily publicised to date. Without a full series of
televised adventures to keep us ravenous lot sated this year, Big Finish
have looked to plug the gaping chasm with a rather inspired idea – every
Saturday night at 7pm from they will make a
brand new eighth Doctor and Lucie episode available for download. CDs will be available too, in due course, to those prepared to
splash out an additional fiver on their subscription (a no-brainer,
surely?), but in the interim we are treated to what is, essentially, a
good old fashioned ‘broadcast’ season
of Doctor Who.
The first story
to be released in this fashion is Orbis, written by Alan Barnes and
Nicholas Briggs, who also directs. In a departure from previous seasons,
this story sees the return of the twenty-five minute (well, half an hour!)
format. Now whilst this move was essential for Big Finish to be
able to stretch the season out to the length of the television
series’ usual run, I can’t say that I’m all that keen on the notion. I say
this for two reasons – firstly, I struggle to stay interested in
any story over a number of weeks (I’m the type who has to record an
entire volume of Heroes, or season of 24 before I can sit
down to watch them, en masse) and so the reintroduction of
authentic two-parters doesn’t appeal to me. Perhaps more
importantly though, I’ve always looked on these eighth Doctor and Lucie
stories as being a ‘missing link’ of sorts; a grey area where the classic
series blends into the new, and as such a return to the old format feels
like a significant step back.
Listening to
both episodes of Orbis though (in one sitting, of course), such
concerns swiftly evaporated as I was drawn back into the world that I had
left behind last August. The story picks up the ride around six months
after the events of The Vengeance of Morbius from Lucie’s
perspective, and a staggering six hundred years after the same from
the Doctor’s!
It seems that the Doctor didn’t perish when he fell
into the chasm on Karn; the Sisterhood transported him into E-Space, where he
decided to hang up his boots and settle down with the jellyfish-like
Keltans on Orbis. For Lucie’s part, she was irrefutably gunned down by the
Headhunter… but, as is revealed here, with time bullets!
Given the above,
the first episode quite naturally spends a lot of time setting up where
the characters are now at both physically and mentally. Due to the passage
of time, ‘old Doctor’ has long-since forgotten about Lucie and their
adventures, and he appears to have attracted a new and apparently
rather sweet companion in Selta (Laura Solon). Lucie, on the other hand,
is dragged by the Headhunter into the TARDIS, who rewinds the time bullet
and tells Lucie that she must help her to find the Doctor on Orbis,
otherwise she’ll speed up the time bullet and let it kill her. Very nasty.
“This pink
prawn, your protector?”
The first
episode also introduces us to the story’s main alien protagonists, the
clam-like and hermaphroditic Moluscari. Andrew Sachs (who recently
appeared as Adric in Paul Magrs’ divisive Boy That Time Forgot),
gives an absolutely astonishing performance as the leader of their number,
Crassostrea. The voice that he gives to his character is very distinctive;
it sounds like one of the Blue Meanies from the old Beatles movie
Yellow Submarine! And, when combined with the percussion of his
pincers, the whole, vile picture that the sounds conjure up is absolutely
marvellous. Better than the telly, as they say.
Of course
though, one undeniable
advantage of the two-parter is the
big juicy
cliffhanger stapled across
the middle, and this one is
oddly
memorable. It’s one of those lovely ‘realisation’
cliffhangers, as oppo-
sed to the more traditional ‘peril’
ones, but more
than that it has an extraordinary sense of humour about it. At first, the
whole excited about the tights / couldn’t care less about Lucie
angle is really quite comical, but when the reality of it sinks in, it’s
downright brutal. The listener feels like slapping the Doctor, never mind
Lucie!
The second
episode I enjoyed even more. Like the first, it is polished in
every respect but what sets it apart is that it has one or two tricks up
its sleeve to boot. I think that listeners could be forgiven for
looking for a dues ex machina on the horizon – after all, they
couldn’t realistically just add six hundred years or so onto the Doctor’s
clock, could they? Character implications aside, it would certainly beg
the question of his age.
“And to
be honest, I lost track of how old I really was aeons ago. I tend to round
it down a
bit, making a
few adjustments for variations in year length across the cosmos. I could
be four hundred
years old, seven hundred, nine hundred; or in some parts of a partic-
ularly obscure
galaxy, I’d be just… two. But however old I am, I wasn’t born yesterday.”
To my delight
though, there was no cop-out – quite the opposite in fact. The climax of
Orbis hits you like a hammer in the face. The issue of the Doctor’s
age is negotiated beautifully by the writers,
as are the ramifications of his spending six hundred years on
one planet that is suddenly ripped out of his life, not to mention
existence. It certainly puts his relatively brief exile on Earth into perspective.
“The universe
doesn’t just stop because you’ve opted to play happy families with a bunch
of jellyfish for six hundred years. Someone’s got to do the saving whole
of creation stuff,
and frankly I and certain of my associates have been
getting rather sick of it…
As much I hate to admit it, the universe can’t
do without him. Welcome back, Doctor.”
By the end of
the story though, the toys are back in the box (well, there’s probably an arm or two still hanging out of the box, for later stories
to pop back in… or not) and the Doctor and Lucie are all set to
resume their adventures in our universe. The end of Orbis also ties
back into The Vengeance of Morbius very agreeably too, leaving
things nice and open for the old ‘other’ Hand of Omega thread to be picked
up in a future story.
On a final note,
I have to praise the performances of the cast here. This story
features one
of the most interesting performances from Paul McGann that we
have probably had since Terror Firma, and Sheridan Smith is every
bit his equal, stealing most of the scenes that
she appears in. Big Finish
stalwart Katarinna Olsson also impresses once again as the Headhunter, and
I can’t wait to see her return, remote stellar manipulator in hand…
All told then,
the eighth Doctor and Lucie’s third season is off to a
flying start – the strongest start that they’ve had yet, in fact. See you next Saturday night at 7pm…
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