The Blue Tooth (BF audio): my review
jph...@aol.com
Big Finish Productions, Companion Chronicle 1.3. 1 CD, 4 episodes.
Written by: Nigel Fairs. Directed by: Mark J. Thompson.
THE PLOT
Liz decides to spend a day off visiting Jean, an old university
friend. When Jean fails to show up at their scheduled meeting, though,
Liz goes to her house and finds that her friend has vanished. When the
Doctor arrives at the scene, he tells Liz that there have been several
disappearances in the Cambridge area.
As Liz investigates a link between Jean and another missing person -
Jean's dentist - the Doctor and the Brigadier follow up another lead:
a particularly bizarre suicide-by-train. A look at the dead man's body
confirms the Doctor's worst fears. The body has been infested, and
partially converted, by Cybermats. The Doctor is about to pit his wits
against the Cybermen once more...
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: Writer Nigel Fairs does a fair job of capturing the
Pertwee Doctor's gentler side. The Doctor is compassionate with Liz in
every scene. He is also unfazed and unruffled by the dilemma. Even
when Liz is herself infected, he refuses to give up, identifying the
means of this new Cyber conversion process and using his considerable
skills to find an antidote.
It's a strong characterization, and Fairs does a good job of keeping
the viewpoint Liz's while at the same time keeping the 3rd Doctor in
the foreground of the story. The only thing that's missing from the
Pertwee Doctor is the spikiness. Look at the televised stories from
Season Seven, and Pertwee's Doctor is very short-tempered, even
downright antagonistic, to characters in each of those stories. Here,
we only get the 3rd Doctor's softer side. That makes for a more
likable characterization, perhaps, but a slightly less interesting
one. Still, Nigel Fairs captures the Doctor here somewhat better than
James Swallow did in Old Soldiers, and Caroline John manages to
suggest something of Pertwee's style of line delivery, making it quite
easy to picture Pertwee throughout.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart: The Brigadier is very much on the
periphery of this story, and he ends up being the one regular Caroline
John can't capture in her line deliveries. She basically just lowers
her voice and grits out the Brig's lines in gruff tones, making for a
rather one-note Lethbridge-Stewart. Still, the story does convey both
his efficiency and his chivalry, in trying to protect Liz from harm.
He is definitely the worst-captured of the regulars in this audio,
though.
Liz Shaw: The Blue Tooth is Liz's story, so it comes as relatively
small surprise that the character is recreated quite effectively. The
best characterization comes in the early episodes, which Nigel Fairs
uses to fill in a lot of backstory for Liz (including why a seemingly
over-serious, studious Cambridge scientist has such a penchant for
very, very short mini-skirts). It adds an extra emotional dimension to
the character to have her personally affected by the Invasion of the
Week this time; and while the audio never does quite answer its own
question ("When did I decide to leave the Doctor?"), it at least
points to some potential reasons for the character to have decided to
move on.
THOUGHTS
The Blue Tooth succeeds in many respects. It really does recapture its
era quite well. This feels very much like an extra Season Seven story,
with the Doctor and the Brigadier working together but not 100%
harmoniously, and with UNIT even setting up temporary offices on-site
(in this case, at the college), rather than at UNIT headquarters (a
set which did not exist until Season 8). There is a sense of
seriousness to the proceedings, a sense that this story takes place in
something very like "the real world." Even the Cybermen are treated in
a way that brings them closer to the real world, using a real world
outlet that often is a source of anxiety (in this case, a dentist's
office) to make the threat feel less like science fiction and more
credible. Honestly, if you were to take a time machine back to 1970
and commission the production team to bolt a 4-episode Cyberman story
onto the end of Season Seven, I could easily picture the result
playing out much like this story does.
One thing I do enjoy about the first set of Companion Chronicles is
that Big Finish had not yet decided on a "set" number of episodes for
each story. All stories were single-disc, but there were both 2-
parters and 4-parters. That's something I wish they would return to,
the idea that different stories might benefit from being structured in
different episodic formats. The Blue Tooth is very much structured as
a 4-parter, and it benefits from that. The Companion Chronicles range
has remained strong (it's my favorite BF range at the moment), but I
do regret the more rigid, "one disc = 2 episodes, every time" format.
In any event, most of this story works quite well, better than I had
remembered it working in fact. Caroline John does an effective job as
narrator, and recreates her performance as Liz with a good degree of
success. The story is well-structured, for the most part, building to
a rather gripping climax in Episode Four. It also benefits from
particularly strong production values, with a nicely eerie score by
Lawrence Oakley and Robert Dunlop.
My only major gripe with the audio, and one which does cost it a point
I'm afraid, is that the resolution feels weak. The climax - with the
Doctor and Liz in the midst of a nest of Cybermen - had me. I was
quite gripped, and the images were vivid in my mind. And then... Liz
passes out, and the Doctor fills her in on the denouement
retrospectively, and not in a great deal of detail. It's the
equivalent of a TV episode cutting from the moment of greatest crisis
to the tag scene, and having the Doctor tell the companion, "Oh, I
sorted it out." The summary of this off-screen resolution also feels a
bit too easy, almost as if Fairs had written himself into a corner and
couldn't quite write his way out again. It still works better than
"Pertwee wrapping a green tentacle around his neck and thrashing a
lot" at the end of the otherwise-excellent Spearhead from Space. But
it still seems like a very weak ending, one that lets down an
otherwise first-rate story.
Frustrations with the resolution aside, though, it is a first-rate
story. With a stronger finish, I'd give it an "8." As it stands, it
still gets a quite solid...
Rating: 7/10.