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charameiI've been putting this off and putting it off, and you'll probably see why soon enough: it's long. This was the final 8DA story, by the way: the series has ended now. I hope 4DA fills the gap as admirably as I'm expecting. On the whole, I've enjoyed 8DA a lot more than Big Finish's main line, which I am now hopelessly behind on.
So.
Let's start with a quick rundown of 8DA's arch plot, since I know not many people in fandom will have been following this.
Series 1: Lucie Miller, a human girl from 2008 Blackpool, appears in the Doctor's TARDIS one day, much to his annoyance. She's beendumped on him put there as part of a Time Lord witness protection scheme. It would help if she could remember why. They become friends. Adventures, etc, you can all guess this bit.
Series 2: There's some adventuring, during which the Doctor and Lucie run into Lucie's Auntie Pat and deceased uncle in 1984. Turns out the uncle is a friendly Zygon, and when Pat dies he takes over Pat's life instead of his old one. The Doctor knows about this, but promises not to tell Lucie (and doesn't). The Doctor falls off a balcony while fighting with Morbius and, since everyone thinks he's dead, the Time Lords send Lucie home.
Series 3: Lucie gets home only to run into a supervillain who sends her off back to the TARDIS (meanwhile, the Doctor has spent 600 years civilising jellyfish). More adventures. They make it through the climax unscathed, then the Doctor takes Lucie home for Christmas. S04 starts with the Christmas episode.
Series 4: Lucie gets hit by a car and finds out that Auntie Pat's a Zygon. Her faith in the Doctor destroyed, she leaves the TARDIS.
An Earthly Child fits in here, although it's not strictly a part of 8DA (it was a subscriber special). The Doctor meets up with Susan and discovers she has a son, Alex. Alex is more human than not: the full list that we get is 'one heart, not regenerative, not telepathic' and '7% Time Lord'. He's also played by Paul McGann's son, so if you're keeping track of the Bizarrely Incestuous Who Family Tree, update your charts now and pray Jake McGann doesn't marry Colin Baker's daughter.
Back in 2010, someone puts an ad in the paper looking for a new time travelling companion:
The Doctor investigates. He, and several of the unwanted applicants, get sent to the wrong place, so he never finds out who wrote the ad - but he does stop a robot invasion and meet a woman called Tamsin. She's a bit of a wet blanket, but she's... I mean, her heart's in the... no, it's no good. I hate Tamsin. She wants the Doctor to do more to help people (fair enough), but seems completely incapable of learning from her mistakes or of understanding basic concepts like 'messing with Time is bad, don't do it'.
Adventures ensue. They run into the Monk and the Doctor breaks his TARDIS (again). Oh, and the Monk has a companion now too! Guess which ad Lucie answered...
The Monk dumps Lucie on a moon called Deimos due to, er, differences of opinion (she thinks he's insane), and picks up Tamsin instead. Lucie demands that the Doctor takes her home, which he sort of does, but first he insists on having Christmas with her. And Susan. And Alex. Lucie and Alex hit it off and, in the end, leave to travel 22nd-century Earth together.
Solo adventures ensue. Then, in 2195(ish? I don't recall an exact year reference, but it's been 30 years since Dalek Invasion of Earth), a sickness ravages humanity.
And that's where Lucie Miller starts, with Lucie and Alex stuck somewhere halfway around the world while everyone's dying. Lucie gets sick, loses the sight in one eye and a fair amount of use of her legs: she's either in a wheelchair or on crutches from here on out. Alex and Susan are not-so-mysteriously immune; Susan manages to get Alex and Lucie back to London, and then Daleks invade.
Again.
So that's where we are for the finale: the world's only just been rebuilt and it's all happening again, Lucie's faith in the Doctor has already been fairly shaken, and the Doctor is... nowhere to be seen. He remains nowhere to be seen for the next two years, which is the span of time occupied by Lucie Miller.
Lucie Miller is mostly narrated by (you guessed it) Lucie, speaking into a little tape-recorder thing, with occasional jumps out to actual scenes. So first things first: have I mentioned before that Sheridan Smith is a terrific audio actress? (Yes, I have). Well, she is. All of that despair and heartbreak and bitterness and crushed hope, all of her pride in Alex, everything - Lucie undergoes a fairly massive personality shift in the course of one hour-long episode, and it never felt out-of-place. That's talent.
Jake McGann, as I have mentioned several times now, isn't so great at this. He's beginning to improve: it's just as well, because he has quite a lot to do these two episodes as Alex completes the transition from 'confused nineteen-year-old doing Business Studies' to leading a rebel army into the middle of the Daleks' control centre. Apparently the kid has a head for tactics: who would have guessed?
I'm still not too happy with Alex's character development: it makes sense, it just feels a little rushed. I suppose it has been several years in-universe for him, though.
Susan is an interesting one. Carole Ann Ford is amazing, of course, but she doesn't get much screentime. She's just being casually, calmly awesome in the background, so subtly that it's hardly noticeable. How much work, and how many favours, must it have taken to arrange for Lucie and Alex to be moved halfway around a pandemic-stricken world when at least one of them had no valid form of identification? Seriously, Older Susan is incredible.
Back to the plot... the Daleks are doing something in secret over in America. Our Heroes, whoc are tapping their phone lines, don't know what, but it's clearly bad, so they should...
...well, they've got nuclear submarines, so yeah. Time to nuke some Daleks.
They sneak into the base. They plant their bombs. Their communications cut off andAdmiral Ackbar Lucie realises that it's a trap. Meanwhile, the Doctor finally lands and gets himself captured by Daleks. He's locked in a cell on a Dalek ship as the Daleks make their escape form their doomed base.
And everything would be fine, if said Dalek ship wasn't taking potshots at the submarine that Alex, Susan and Lucie are on, and if Alex didn't still have a nuke left...
Lucie Miller is a pretty slow episode: it's mostly setup for this. And actually, To The Death wasn't my favourite 8DA finale: it got a tad convoluted and could possibly have used a bit more time to set up properly.
But then, it's got to end Lucie's story, it's got to provide some resolution to the Monk and Tamsin's plot, and it's got to save the Earth from the Daleks. Every single one of these was done admirably... which brings me to the massive spoilers.
MASSIVE SPOILERS
With a title like To The Death, it'd be foolish not to expect someone to die. And when Lucie started saying how much she misses the Doctor and wants to travel with him again - into a tape recorder, no less - well, the signposts were going up all over town, really, weren't they?
So no, Lucie's death was not a surprise. Nor was Tamsin's. Alex's threw me for a loop, though.
Keeping track there? To sum up: all the humans (or mostly-humans) died, and all the Time Lords walked out physically unscathed. So. One by one.
Tamsin
The Monk's behind the Dalek invasion, you see. He made a deal with them: they'll wipe out the planet, he'll collect the artefacts. He's also been preventing the Doctor from landing. He hasn't told Tamsin that she's complicit in her species' extinction - she thinks the Daleks are medical missionaries, a callback to S01E01 Blood of the Daleks when Lucie thought the same - but she knows that everyone's dying and it's her job to catalogue the Earth's collected treasures. And Tamsin's not given to asking too many questions.
To her credit, she does eventually start piecing things together once Lucie has a (somewhat irate) chat with her. She dies wanting to make amends. But she does die, and it's not a heroic death. Pretty much, she was created to be shoved in a refrigerator and so a Dalek shoved her into a refrigerator. (Well, it exterminated her. But you get the point.)
Susan
Again with the casually being awesome in the background! She still doesn't do much, but what she does do makes up for it. Her crowning moment of awesome comes when, after Alex and Lucie have tried and failed to convince both the Doctor and the Monk to fly a Dalek ship for them so they can make a last-ditch attempt at stopping the Daleks, Susan says, "Oh, I can do that."
There are three Time Lords in the room, kids. You might want to pay a bit more attention to Alex's batty old mum.
Alex's death obviously hits her hard, but since it happens at the climax there's not much time for her to react. I think it's extremely noteworthy that even under these circumstances, with her life annihilated and the Doctor practically begging her to come with him, she still chooses to stay behind and rebuild. Talk about choosing the hard path.
(I have a bit more to say on Susan, actually, but it's in the Doctor's section.)
The Monk
Is quite clearly being set up in direct opposition to the Doctor now: I assume this is Big Finish's latest attempt to get around their ongoing problem of not having Anthony Ainley.
It's working, especially now that he's been responsible for the deaths of both Alex and Lucie (and made Susan cry). At the same time, he's not the Master. It's clear that he does care about Tamsin, despite treating her like a two-year-old, and he seems to be genuinely trying to make amends at the end. He rescues the Doctor and Susan, but it's far too little far too late.
What this means in terms of the story arc, I'm not sure. In some ways, his reaction to Tamsin's death seems healthier than the Doctor's reaction to Lucie's and Alex's: he's not the one threatening to go back and meddle with the timeline to prevent the bad things from ever happening. All of the animosity's coming from the Doctor at present, too.
Alex
First things first: yes, I'm pretty sure that Alex is genuinely dead. Susan specifically said in Relative Dimensions that he's not regenerative, and even if he was, the building he's in gets blown up not long after he dies.
But, you know. He might not be.
In any case, he won't be played by Jake McGann any more, which is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing, because Jake McGann isn't a very good audio* actor, and a curse, because he was improving and I was looking forward to hearing him continue to improve.
*I have never seen Jake McGann perform on stage or screen, so I refuse to pan him outright. For all I know his visual acting might be amazing.
I've more or less said my piece on Alex's character development: too fast, but basically believable. Here we see that it really was too fast, as he tries to be the Doctor and gets killed for it. As Susan's been saying since An Earthly Child: he takes too many risks.
Lucie
Oh, Lucie.
Massive props to the writers here, because Lucie Miller went out like the big damn hero she is. In fact most of Big Finish's companion deaths do, and it's a hard line to walk.
Farewell, Lucie. You will be missed.
The Doctor
Holy crap, someone broke the cutie.
In this instance, I think two videos and an audio clip are worth a thousand words.
Bear in mind: back in Deimos, a mere four episodes ago (though admittedly that's at least six years from his perspective due to Prisoner of the Sun), the Eighth Doctor explicitly denounced the sort of meddling that the Seventh is so famous for. He was about one step away from calling Seven the Valeyard.
So this...
...is a simply enormous change, and one that leads straight into this:
And it also makes this Susan (start at 1m29s, sorry about the crappy quality).
No question about it.
An emotionally packed climax, some serious long-term impact for the Eighth Doctor's future, Daleks... there's a reason this took me so long to process, and that's that this finale was incredible.
So.
Let's start with a quick rundown of 8DA's arch plot, since I know not many people in fandom will have been following this.
Series 1: Lucie Miller, a human girl from 2008 Blackpool, appears in the Doctor's TARDIS one day, much to his annoyance. She's been
Series 2: There's some adventuring, during which the Doctor and Lucie run into Lucie's Auntie Pat and deceased uncle in 1984. Turns out the uncle is a friendly Zygon, and when Pat dies he takes over Pat's life instead of his old one. The Doctor knows about this, but promises not to tell Lucie (and doesn't). The Doctor falls off a balcony while fighting with Morbius and, since everyone thinks he's dead, the Time Lords send Lucie home.
Series 3: Lucie gets home only to run into a supervillain who sends her off back to the TARDIS (meanwhile, the Doctor has spent 600 years civilising jellyfish). More adventures. They make it through the climax unscathed, then the Doctor takes Lucie home for Christmas. S04 starts with the Christmas episode.
Series 4: Lucie gets hit by a car and finds out that Auntie Pat's a Zygon. Her faith in the Doctor destroyed, she leaves the TARDIS.
An Earthly Child fits in here, although it's not strictly a part of 8DA (it was a subscriber special). The Doctor meets up with Susan and discovers she has a son, Alex. Alex is more human than not: the full list that we get is 'one heart, not regenerative, not telepathic' and '7% Time Lord'. He's also played by Paul McGann's son, so if you're keeping track of the Bizarrely Incestuous Who Family Tree, update your charts now and pray Jake McGann doesn't marry Colin Baker's daughter.
Back in 2010, someone puts an ad in the paper looking for a new time travelling companion:
TRAVELLER IN TIME AND SPACE seeks male or female companion with good sense of humour for adventures in the Fourth and Fifth Dimensions.
No experience necessary.
No time wasters, no space wasters please.
The Doctor investigates. He, and several of the unwanted applicants, get sent to the wrong place, so he never finds out who wrote the ad - but he does stop a robot invasion and meet a woman called Tamsin. She's a bit of a wet blanket, but she's... I mean, her heart's in the... no, it's no good. I hate Tamsin. She wants the Doctor to do more to help people (fair enough), but seems completely incapable of learning from her mistakes or of understanding basic concepts like 'messing with Time is bad, don't do it'.
Adventures ensue. They run into the Monk and the Doctor breaks his TARDIS (again). Oh, and the Monk has a companion now too! Guess which ad Lucie answered...
The Monk dumps Lucie on a moon called Deimos due to, er, differences of opinion (she thinks he's insane), and picks up Tamsin instead. Lucie demands that the Doctor takes her home, which he sort of does, but first he insists on having Christmas with her. And Susan. And Alex. Lucie and Alex hit it off and, in the end, leave to travel 22nd-century Earth together.
Solo adventures ensue. Then, in 2195(ish? I don't recall an exact year reference, but it's been 30 years since Dalek Invasion of Earth), a sickness ravages humanity.
And that's where Lucie Miller starts, with Lucie and Alex stuck somewhere halfway around the world while everyone's dying. Lucie gets sick, loses the sight in one eye and a fair amount of use of her legs: she's either in a wheelchair or on crutches from here on out. Alex and Susan are not-so-mysteriously immune; Susan manages to get Alex and Lucie back to London, and then Daleks invade.
Again.
So that's where we are for the finale: the world's only just been rebuilt and it's all happening again, Lucie's faith in the Doctor has already been fairly shaken, and the Doctor is... nowhere to be seen. He remains nowhere to be seen for the next two years, which is the span of time occupied by Lucie Miller.
Lucie Miller is mostly narrated by (you guessed it) Lucie, speaking into a little tape-recorder thing, with occasional jumps out to actual scenes. So first things first: have I mentioned before that Sheridan Smith is a terrific audio actress? (Yes, I have). Well, she is. All of that despair and heartbreak and bitterness and crushed hope, all of her pride in Alex, everything - Lucie undergoes a fairly massive personality shift in the course of one hour-long episode, and it never felt out-of-place. That's talent.
Jake McGann, as I have mentioned several times now, isn't so great at this. He's beginning to improve: it's just as well, because he has quite a lot to do these two episodes as Alex completes the transition from 'confused nineteen-year-old doing Business Studies' to leading a rebel army into the middle of the Daleks' control centre. Apparently the kid has a head for tactics: who would have guessed?
I'm still not too happy with Alex's character development: it makes sense, it just feels a little rushed. I suppose it has been several years in-universe for him, though.
Susan is an interesting one. Carole Ann Ford is amazing, of course, but she doesn't get much screentime. She's just being casually, calmly awesome in the background, so subtly that it's hardly noticeable. How much work, and how many favours, must it have taken to arrange for Lucie and Alex to be moved halfway around a pandemic-stricken world when at least one of them had no valid form of identification? Seriously, Older Susan is incredible.
Back to the plot... the Daleks are doing something in secret over in America. Our Heroes, whoc are tapping their phone lines, don't know what, but it's clearly bad, so they should...
...well, they've got nuclear submarines, so yeah. Time to nuke some Daleks.
They sneak into the base. They plant their bombs. Their communications cut off and
And everything would be fine, if said Dalek ship wasn't taking potshots at the submarine that Alex, Susan and Lucie are on, and if Alex didn't still have a nuke left...
S04E10: To The Death
Lucie Miller is a pretty slow episode: it's mostly setup for this. And actually, To The Death wasn't my favourite 8DA finale: it got a tad convoluted and could possibly have used a bit more time to set up properly.
But then, it's got to end Lucie's story, it's got to provide some resolution to the Monk and Tamsin's plot, and it's got to save the Earth from the Daleks. Every single one of these was done admirably... which brings me to the massive spoilers.
MASSIVE SPOILERS
With a title like To The Death, it'd be foolish not to expect someone to die. And when Lucie started saying how much she misses the Doctor and wants to travel with him again - into a tape recorder, no less - well, the signposts were going up all over town, really, weren't they?
So no, Lucie's death was not a surprise. Nor was Tamsin's. Alex's threw me for a loop, though.
Keeping track there? To sum up: all the humans (or mostly-humans) died, and all the Time Lords walked out physically unscathed. So. One by one.
Tamsin
The Monk's behind the Dalek invasion, you see. He made a deal with them: they'll wipe out the planet, he'll collect the artefacts. He's also been preventing the Doctor from landing. He hasn't told Tamsin that she's complicit in her species' extinction - she thinks the Daleks are medical missionaries, a callback to S01E01 Blood of the Daleks when Lucie thought the same - but she knows that everyone's dying and it's her job to catalogue the Earth's collected treasures. And Tamsin's not given to asking too many questions.
To her credit, she does eventually start piecing things together once Lucie has a (somewhat irate) chat with her. She dies wanting to make amends. But she does die, and it's not a heroic death. Pretty much, she was created to be shoved in a refrigerator and so a Dalek shoved her into a refrigerator. (Well, it exterminated her. But you get the point.)
Susan
Again with the casually being awesome in the background! She still doesn't do much, but what she does do makes up for it. Her crowning moment of awesome comes when, after Alex and Lucie have tried and failed to convince both the Doctor and the Monk to fly a Dalek ship for them so they can make a last-ditch attempt at stopping the Daleks, Susan says, "Oh, I can do that."
There are three Time Lords in the room, kids. You might want to pay a bit more attention to Alex's batty old mum.
Alex's death obviously hits her hard, but since it happens at the climax there's not much time for her to react. I think it's extremely noteworthy that even under these circumstances, with her life annihilated and the Doctor practically begging her to come with him, she still chooses to stay behind and rebuild. Talk about choosing the hard path.
(I have a bit more to say on Susan, actually, but it's in the Doctor's section.)
The Monk
Is quite clearly being set up in direct opposition to the Doctor now: I assume this is Big Finish's latest attempt to get around their ongoing problem of not having Anthony Ainley.
It's working, especially now that he's been responsible for the deaths of both Alex and Lucie (and made Susan cry). At the same time, he's not the Master. It's clear that he does care about Tamsin, despite treating her like a two-year-old, and he seems to be genuinely trying to make amends at the end. He rescues the Doctor and Susan, but it's far too little far too late.
What this means in terms of the story arc, I'm not sure. In some ways, his reaction to Tamsin's death seems healthier than the Doctor's reaction to Lucie's and Alex's: he's not the one threatening to go back and meddle with the timeline to prevent the bad things from ever happening. All of the animosity's coming from the Doctor at present, too.
Alex
First things first: yes, I'm pretty sure that Alex is genuinely dead. Susan specifically said in Relative Dimensions that he's not regenerative, and even if he was, the building he's in gets blown up not long after he dies.
But, you know. He might not be.
In any case, he won't be played by Jake McGann any more, which is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing, because Jake McGann isn't a very good audio* actor, and a curse, because he was improving and I was looking forward to hearing him continue to improve.
*I have never seen Jake McGann perform on stage or screen, so I refuse to pan him outright. For all I know his visual acting might be amazing.
I've more or less said my piece on Alex's character development: too fast, but basically believable. Here we see that it really was too fast, as he tries to be the Doctor and gets killed for it. As Susan's been saying since An Earthly Child: he takes too many risks.
Lucie
Oh, Lucie.
Massive props to the writers here, because Lucie Miller went out like the big damn hero she is. In fact most of Big Finish's companion deaths do, and it's a hard line to walk.
Farewell, Lucie. You will be missed.
The Doctor
Holy crap, someone broke the cutie.
In this instance, I think two videos and an audio clip are worth a thousand words.
Bear in mind: back in Deimos, a mere four episodes ago (though admittedly that's at least six years from his perspective due to Prisoner of the Sun), the Eighth Doctor explicitly denounced the sort of meddling that the Seventh is so famous for. He was about one step away from calling Seven the Valeyard.
So this...
...is a simply enormous change, and one that leads straight into this:
And it also makes this Susan (start at 1m29s, sorry about the crappy quality).
No question about it.
An emotionally packed climax, some serious long-term impact for the Eighth Doctor's future, Daleks... there's a reason this took me so long to process, and that's that this finale was incredible.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-19 10:28 pm (UTC)Nice recap of the 8DAs with Lucie. I listened to them all in quick succession a couple of months back and really enjoyed them. (I've posted my thoughts here, if you're interested.)
One of the things that really struck me was how the writers deal with writing stories for a character whose future is written because although they're separate lines and different media, they must be influenced by events they know are part of the Doctor's future and like you, I can certainly see the Eight we meet in To the Death being the Doctor who commits double genocide and later becomes the Time Lord Victorious.
I'm now working my way through the Eight and Charley stories.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 11:12 am (UTC)Yeah, I think one of Big Finish's greatest strengths is the way they're slowly tying everything together: they make it very easy to see how Five becomes Six becomes Seven etc, and on into the new canon. (With four Doctors, they also have the facility to do timey-wimey plots that Moffat would die for.) It does lend itself to a bit of a problem when they try to kid you that the Doctor's going to die, because no, he's obviously not, we've seen when Five, Six and Seven died and we know Eight can't die just yet - but they generally handle that pretty well too.
I haven't heard much of either set of Charley stories. I did like Chimes of Midnight a lot, though: have you got to that one yet?
no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 05:13 pm (UTC)Then on reflection, I thought that perhaps mainlining them all in such quick succession might not have been the best idea, so I'm having a break at the moment and I've listened to a few other bits and pieces - I've just finished The Holy Terror with Six which was great - and I've got some Five and Seven and some other non-DW stuff as well which I'm dipping in and out of.