A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 42.2.3 The Great White Hurricane Episode Three (The First Doctor Adventures Volume One, Big Finish, 2017)

This is much better.  Now that he's established how miserable a place Five Points is, Adams focuses on two specific plot threads--and to my relief, all this set up with Rosalita is in service to one of those threads which amplifies how mercenary living in such misery can make you.  

Susan and Patrick are still on the run, and The Doctor and Daniel (with the pistol-packing Alley Dogs leader in tow) take to the streets to find them.  Meanwhile, a minor train disaster prevents Rosalita's husband from escaping back to Queens...but the disaster puts a whole trainload of people in peril, leaving Ian and Barbara to persuade someone to help them for virtuous, rather than financial gain.

This is the first time in this serial that I felt I was listening to Ian and not Jamie Glover.  In the sequence at the train station, Glover nicely channels the hotheadedness and humanity that the character had at times during the show's original run.  Jemma Powell's Barbara sometimes comes off shriller than Jacqueline Hill was....but then, I might be operating from an idealized memory of what my favorite of the initial quartet sounded like.

But the thing I responded to in this segment is how Adams makes it clear that the Blizzard of '88 is an integral part of the story.  The storm provides major complications to both human dramas, and those complications could only be caused by such a high-impact weather event.  Hell, the cliffhanger to this episode is motivated by the situation with Patrick, but takes advantage of the fact the blizzard was so cold it caused the East River to partially freeze over.

I should point out that, now that we are deep into the Blizzard itself, the sound design by Howard Carter is exceptional.  Since the bulk of this happens outside, the crunch of snow is ever present, and the winds howl without interfering with the dialogue.  Carter makes this place come alive so I can vividly see how this would have played out on screen.

As I mentioned when I discussed the first part of this serial, Guy Adams is my favorite Big Finish writer....and with this segment, I remembered why.  

A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 42.2.2 The Great White Hurricane Episode Two (The First Doctor Adventures Volume One, Big Finish, 2017)

The second part of this Big Finish Audio starring the actors who played the actors who played the first Tardis crew gets on with the typical team split-up.  Ian and Barbara help Rosalita to her home and hear her backstory just long enough to discover her abusive ex-husband has taken her son away.  Susan and Patrick continue hiding out and run afoul of the Alley Dogs, the rival gang his gang was fighting with in the first episode.  And the Doctor visits Patrick and Daniel's home, only to find out why the Alley Dogs are so insistent on finding Patrick...

That poverty porn feeling that I worried was going to overtake the serial is still pretty prevalent, and not just from the Rosalita storyline--the scenes in Daniel's room, with the Doctor tut-tuting away actually takes away from the wonderful chemistry David Bradley and Cory English developed in the first half hour.  The titular blizzard continues to be referenced, but it seems to be reduced to a backdrop for this leg of the story.  I never quite felt the concern I suspected I was meant to feel for Susan's safety in her thread of the tale, and the unique flavor the 19th Century New York backdrop gave the first episode seems faded away.

Pure historicals for me should either give us a vivid portrait of the time period or the culture.  The best of them tell an interesting story that weaves that portrait into the action.  This half hour (well, twenty-four minutes) seems to be at war with itself, as it wants us to be moved by the squalor of 1888 New York and tell a suspenseful story, and neither side meshes.

(To be fair, some of my discomfort might be from my familiarity with the source material Adams is riffing from...)  

I have confidence in Guy Adams as a writer, and there are hints in the later half of this segment that makes me believe there is a more compelling story waiting for me in the next two episodes.  I am still onboard, even though I am getting wary that this might be all there is.

A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 42.2.1 The Great White Hurricane Episode One (The First Doctor Adventures Volume One, Big Finish, 2017)

I might as well state this up front--of all the Big Finish staff writers, Guy Adams is my favorite.  I find his tendency for unconventional story structures engaging, and at turns both scary and fun.  He has spent a lot of his time writing material for the older Doctors, particularly the first four.*

This particular Adams episode is from the first in a series with a curious pedigree.  You see, they're full audio featuring the four actors who starred in the telefilm Adventures In Space and Time.  Previously, the full audio 'early adventures' handled the lack of Hartnell and Hill due to death with a mixture of narration and having one of the companions do an approximation of Hartnell.  The effect of having actors playing the actors playing the first Tardis crew can be...disconcerting at time.  While David Bradley and Claudia Grant do fairly good First Doctor and Susan,  Jamie Glover and Jemma Powell can get sketchy at times as Ian and Barbara. 

Judging from this first episode, this serial is a pure historical set in the New York City of Herbert Ashbury's landmark book Gangs of New York.  I read this text some time ago, and it really left an impression on me--so much so that somewhere, lost in the tousled tides of times, is a short story fragment about the ghosts of said gangs haunting the modern day streets of New York's financial district.  As such, I may be a little predisposed to liking this story...so take my comments with a pinch of salt.

Not much happens--the crew lands in Five Points, which was the notorious slums of 1888 Manhattan, and Ian promptly gets creased by a bullet from one of the warring gangs.  To escape the police, one of the gang members, Patrick (Jackson Milner), takes Susan hostage.  This, understandably agitates the Doctor, who ends up in the local jail when he tries to go off to retrieve her himself.  Barbara accompanies Ian to the hospital and learns that this is the night of the Great Blizzard, an icestorm that crippled the northeast that year, and is still considered one of the most severe in history.

I enjoyed this a lot.  By setting it in this specific time, Adams gives us some New York accents that might sound cliched--but may be historically accurate.  A great deal of time is spent establishing a rapport between the Doctor and his cellmate, Patrick's older brother David (Cory English), and the interplay between these two characters are a joy.  I do worry that this might descend into poverty porn, especially when we get the scenes between Barbara and the immigrant Rosalita (Carolina Valdes)...but I think a lot of that will depend on whether the Great Blizzard of 1888 will end up being just a backdrop, a complication, or a major element in how this play turns out.  But right now I am not resistant to what Adams is laying down right now, and I look forward to hear where this is going.

Although I still have a lot of problems accepting Glover as Ian.  But I'm open for that to change as well....

*--He also writes some cracking good Torchwood stories focusing on Eve Myles' Gwen Cooper and is the 'showrunner' for Big Finish's adaptation of Verity Lambert's follow-up to Who, Adam Adamant.

A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 36.5.4 The Flames of Cadiz Conclusion (The Companion Chronicles, Big Finish, 2013)

So The Doctor's pissiness at Barbara and Susan is defused by Barbara pointing out the calendar year, Ian finally meets his hero Francis Drake and gets disillusioned when he delivers Esteban's message, Don Miguel gets bent out of shape after learning of the Doctor's alerting the King and everything converges in Cadiz. 

It's all neat and tidy, and I can't help feeling a little let down.  The reason Marc Platt is one of my favorite writers in Classic Who was the quirkiness he usually introduced into the story.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this is a pure historical; after all, the greatest charm of his 'Ghost Light' (without a doubt my all-time favorite Who serial ever) is that it takes scientific belief of its Victorian setting and spins them off into an extreme direction while still using that Victorian language to tell its story.  And, to be fair, I think the idea of taking the idea of the Doctor and Crew as witnesses to history to the extreme--literally making us walk into the fires of the Inquisition so we can't just shake our head at its evil--could work.  I suspect that the drama would have been much stronger if this serial stuck to the standard two-episode Companion Chronicles format.  Because Platt's got four episodes to fill, the whole second half seems a little too stretched out, and certain elements seem to be filler.  And in the case of one twist involving the character of Don Miguel, it comes off like Platt thought we needed that sting rather than it being organic to the story.

It seems like Platt had two stories he wanted to tell that he smashed together...and while one story (the Inquisition idea) is well handled, the other (a variation on 'never meet your heroes') seems a little sketchy.  As such, this story ends up a disappointment.

Luckily, when next we dip into Big Finish territory, we've got some full cast audios featuring our original foursome...kinda.

Phase Seventeen of...THE HONEYWELL EXPERIMENT!

To commemorate a new year (and our getting through a really sucky old year), my lab monkey and I present...boobs!

Yeah, we’ve had films with boobs before...but have we had films with boobs based on a bondage underground comic starring one of the premiere video vamps of the 80‘s?

Join Tawny Kitean (you know, that redheaded goddess who writhed all over Whitesnake’s car) and a mostly French cast in this thoroughly bizarre period piece with a real jerk sailor with a grappling hook with a switchblade in place of a whip so he’s totally not like Indiana Jones and a girl who’s supposed to be Tawney’s sidekick but, as we argue, is the real heroine of the picture.  It’s called (deep breath) The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of The Yik Yak, and it’s overproduced like nobody’s business.  Marvel as my lab monkey and I try to figure out what the Hell is going on in this film, and I giggle every time I say the name of the film’s director.

Adjust your thong here

 
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