What Happens On New Vegas...

Librarian in the TARDIS, Review 9.02

Title: Night of the Whisper
Written by: Cavan Scott and Mark Wright
Team TARDIS: Ninth Doctor, Rose Tyler, Captain Jack Harkness
Adversary: The Whisper
Originally Released: September 2013
Range and Number: Destiny of the Doctor #9

Synopsis (from TARDIS Wikia) -
New Vegas, 23rd Century — a sprawling city huddling beneath an artificial atmospheric bubble on a distant moon. Pleasure seekers flock there from every corner of the galaxy, to take in the shows and play the tables in the huge casinos. But beneath the glitz and the glitter, organised crime rules the streets.

Whilst Rose Tyler works as a waitress in the Full Moon nightclub, Jack Harkness poses as a reporter for the Daily Galaxy. Meanwhile, the Doctor is helping the police department with their investigation into the Whisper, a strange vigilante that has been terrorising the city's underworld. But the Doctor is also on a mission of his own — to save Police Chief McNeil's life at all costs.

My Review:
I had resigned myself to having no audio story to review for the Ninth Doctor, but then I realized that I could do what I’d done for the Fourth Doctor and review the “Destiny of the Doctor” audio that Big Finish has been producing with AudioGO this year. And since “Night of the Whisper” came out just before I was gearing up to post my review of “The End of the World,” I thought it was perfectly good timing (though I do have an audio-only adventure for the Tenth Doctor that I’m planning on reviewing already, so don’t expect this to be the norm).

This story is remarkable in that it’s the first one that Big Finish has worked on with characters from New Who (licensing rights and all that stuff). It’s also remarkable in that it’s the first of the “Destiny of the Doctor” range that is not performed by someone who was once a companion. Nicholas Briggs, veteran voice actor and executive producer for Big Finish, takes on the roles of the Ninth Doctor, Rose Tyler and Jack Harkness - as well as other creature characters AND the narrator. And I have to admit - I really like his Christopher Eccleston voice. It’s quite good.  There is a bit of a sense that it's a shame that they couldn't get Billie Piper or John Barrowman to perform this story (heaven knows that Eccleston would have been out of Big Finish's price range), but Nicholas Briggs steps up to the plate and does a fantastic job in this installment of this series.

I will say that it was strange to have a pre-theme-tune, cold open for these audios. At first, I thought my copy was defective because I was expecting it to start out with the theme song. But, nope - they went with the New Series tradition of cold opens, which I appreciate (along with the tradition of using each Doctor’s specific version of the theme that Big Finish has employed for quite some time now).  It put me very much in the mode of the New Series for this story and that was a nice little acknowledgement of how the Doctor's stories have been told since 2005.

As for the story itself - after you think about it for, like, ten seconds, the setting is patently obvious, this being a story where Captain Jack has come on board for the ride. Of course they’d go to a planet (sorry - it's really a moon) called New Vegas and of course Jack would have once been on the committee that voted the place as the most debauched in the universe. Nothing Jack does in this story surprises me. Even though this is an audio adventure and I've come to expect a certain kind of storytelling from Big Finish's Classic Doctors’ stories - this still very much fits in with the tone of the Ninth Doctor’s era and could very well be a taste of what a second Eccleston series would have been (complete with Captain Jack being his silly, flirty self instead of the great big ball of overbearing-angst that he became in Torchwood. But that’s neither here nor there).

The story starts out fun and innocent enough - strange goings-on on this moon and Team TARDIS splits up to investigate. And I have to comment on one Miss Rose Tyler. In my previous review, I commented at length about her potential to be a remarkable companion and how she proves herself in small ways in her first stories. Well, by this time in her time-and-space travels, Rose has grown into that potential. Her first appearance in this story, she is working undercover as a waitress in a diner that the Whisper has been known to attack and she’s trying to find out information. One her own. By herself. While the Doctor and Jack are off doing their own investigations.

In the Ninth Doctor’s era, I think it's safe to say that there’s a tonal shift after “The Doctor Dances.” Number One: Jack joins the team and adding a companion to an established Team TARDIS always shakes things up (and because I’m talking about Captain Jack Harkness - *insert obligatory double-entendre here*). Number Two: Rose has been on enough travels and adventures - and she even gets split off from the Doctor for a significant amount of time - that she finally feels like she can handle herself without the Doctor hovering over her shoulder all the time. And he seems to feel the same way. Of course, the Doctor isn't too far away, should Big Trouble happen and Rose does need his help, but she’s proven herself to be a perfectly competent companion (unlike a certain not-quite-companion-because-he-failed-the-audition in Adam. Poor guy - how would you like to be known as the one who lost the chance to travel in the TARDIS simply because you just couldn't hack it?) I’m not quite certain where that change came for Rose, or if it was simply a gradual thing and all of a sudden we realized how much she’s grown since she first met the Doctor. I tend to put it after “The Doctor Dances” - mostly because a lot of spin-off Ninth Doctor media takes place after that story.

This story is also quite representative of most Ninth Doctor stories.  There's a neat balance of the Ninth Doctor's fun, silly, happy-go-lucky side with that gritty, grim, serious side that he's well-known for.  I don't want to get into spoiler territory here because this is new enough that people might not want to have the twist ruined, but the Doctor's response to what the Whisper really is absolutely bone-chilling.  And it's nothing more than what the character would usually do in these situations.  That is all down to Nicholas Briggs' spot-on portrayal of the Ninth Doctor.  There were a few times that I wasn't certain that they didn't get Christopher Eccleston to come read this story - Nick Briggs is just that good!

Maybe if all the New Series stories they do for "Destiny of the Doctor" are as well-done as this one, we could possibly see some more Big Finish stuff from the New Series.  Fingers crossed!

***
Next Time, on Librarian in the TARDIS -
Review 9.03 - Not sure if this is what nature had in mind for the human race...

Previously -
Review 9.01 - Welcome to the End of the World

So Much Cooler Online

Librarian in the TARDIS, Review 4.03

Title: Babblesphere
Written By: Jonathan Morris
Team TARDIS: Fourth Doctor, Romana II
Adversary: The Babble Network
Release Date: April 2013
Range and Number: Destiny of the Doctor #4

Synopsis (from TARDIS Wikia) -

The violent, volcanic world of Hephastos is home to a colony of composers, painters, authors and poets, all striving to create the greatest works of art the universe has ever seen. But in pursuit of their goal, artistic collaboration has been taken a stage too far...

When the Doctor and Romana arrive, they discover the colonists have neglected their well-being and their once beautiful habitat, which has now succumbed to decay, and they are enslaved to the Babble network which occupies their every waking moment. Every thought, however trivial or insignificant, is shared with everyone else and privacy is now a crime.

The colonists are being killed and the Doctor and Romana begin to suspect that a malevolent intelligence is at work. With time running out, the two time travellers race to discover the truth before they too are absorbed into the endless trivia of the Babblesphere...

My Review:

I had THE hardest time deciding which audio story to review for the Fourth Doctor. I just want you all to be aware of this. I listened to a few Companion Chronicles and some of the new Fourth Doctor Adventures range from Big Finish, but none of them were really good enough (in my mind) to warrant a spot on this list. They weren’t bad, exactly, but I wasn’t excited enough about them to want to write much. But Traveling the Vortex (man, how many times have they saved my bacon in this project? They deserve all the publicity I can give them right now - EVERYONE! LISTEN TO THEIR PODCAST!!) is reviewing the Destiny of the Doctor series this year in conjunction with the various 50th Anniversary celebrations (which, Destiny itself is an audio series celebrating the 50th Anniversary, produced by Big Finish and AudioGO). Anyway, I listened to “Babblesphere” a few weeks ago in anticipation of Traveling the Vortex's review of it and I loved it! Truly, it’s the only Fourth Doctor audio story I’ve heard that I enjoyed enough to want to write about. Make of that what you will.

A word on Destiny of the Doctor - This series is most comparable to Big Finish’s Companion Chronicles where one of the Doctor’s companions is featured and the actor playing that companion narrates. One other actor is brought on to play one additional supporting character. The main difference between Companion Chronicles and Destiny of the Doctor is that the story isn’t necessarily narrated from the companion’s point of view (this is how, for the Second Doctor’s installment “Shadow of Death,” you can get Frazer Hines presenting Jamie’s point of view, but he can also step in and do a fantastic scene with just the Second Doctor and... another character that I won’t spoil for you, but it’ll probably be spoiled in this review, so never mind). It’s kind of a blend between traditional audiobooks and Big Finish’s Companion Chronicles and it works really well (at least, it has so far).

"Babblesphere" is narrated by Lalla Ward (who played Romana II on TV and continues to do so for Big Finish audios) and she does a fantastic job. About half of the story is told from Romana’s point of view, since the Doctor gets captured early on in the story. That’s an interesting flip of the typical trope of the companion getting captured and the Doctor has to face down the baddies. It’s a nice twist that I really enjoyed and Lalla Ward seems to have fun with the narration as well. Romana can more than hold her own as she explores the planet and meets up with what could be best described as The Knitting Circle Resistance (seriously - love these older ladies fighting against the Babble Network). Though I think the Babble Network later dismisses these ladies a little too soon when he (she, it, they, whatever) says that he can’t stand boring people. I mean, Romana seems to find them interesting enough. Hell, I think they’re wonderful!

While this entire story is fun and clever, the moment when I think the Fourth Doctor really shines is when he and Romana are overwhelming the Babble Network with mundane trivia. If there’s one thing the Fourth Doctor does well, it’s making a scene with mundane trivia compelling and exciting. Remember - this is the guy that randomly offers jelly babies to hardened adversaries in the midst of great danger. If there was ever a Doctor made for non-sequitur references, it’s the Fourth Doctor (Douglas Adams has his fingerprints all over that, certainly).

One thing that is fun about doing Classic Who stories in modern times is the ability to bring these characters forward into the future. You don’t have to be tied down to the time period in which their stories were originally produced, even though you do have to be careful about what characters from 1960s and 1970s Earth know on their own. Even then, you can handwave it as “Oh they traveled with the Doctor to two-thousand-whatever and saw the internet and smartphones and stuff like that” (but how fun is it to have mentions of creatures introduced in New Who - like the Krafayis and the Ood - in a Classic Doctor story? Not to mention Zagreus from Big Finish! Yay!)

So, it’s easy (and a lot of fun) to depict what I call for this story “Social Networking on Steroids” and have the Doctor and Romana fight against an entity bent on finding only the most interesting people and disposing of the boring ones (though, how the Babble Network got away from duck-faced selfies and Beliebers I have no idea) (and, just to depress you even more - Google Drive recognizes “Beliebers” as an actual word. There is no red squiggly line denoting it as not in the dictionary. God help us all).

As the Doctor and Romana leave the Babblesphere after the Babble Network is defeated (spoilers, sorry), Aurelius and Phyllis voice concerns about how the people are going to communicate to one another, since they’ve been so used to connecting telepathically on Babble. And I laughed at Phyllis’s complaint that people are still sharing more information than anyone wants to hear. And while this song is more about using social networking to project a more impressive version of yourself than what’s reality - it’s still funny (and William Shatner's in the video, so bonus nerd points for that).



***
Next Time, On Librarian in the TARDIS -
Review 4.04 - That Was... A Book. Yup. Definitely a Book.

Previously -
Review 4.02 - Haven't I Seen You Somewhere Before?