Echoes of Grey

Years after she has seen a counselor for her bad dreams, Zoe finds herself face to face with a woman named Ali who she does not know, but who says she knows her. Ali insists that she and Zoe met not too long ago in the company of the Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon. Zoe is confused; she knows that she has a perfect memory but it does not include any adventures with the two time travellers, yet her vivid dreams tell her otherwise. Ali offers to help Zoe uncover some of her lost memories, in particular the ones where she is present, centering on events which took place at an advanced medical research centre. Zoe allows Ali to help her, and the memories of the horrors she faced there begin to return.

Echoes of Grey seems to get panned by a lot of critics as one of Big Finish's least ambitious tales, with complaints being mostly about what some feel is a sub-par performance by Wendy Padbury as the biggest issue. And in some ways maybe this is true; she is not tremendously animated as she speaks of the events she witnessed, but Zoe is supposed to be under some kind of influence as she recalls things, almost a trance, which would account for why her delivery is a bit stiff and unenthusiastic. The other reason for it, though, may be something that Big Finish were working on behind the scenes without feeling the need to spell it all out for listeners: Zoe is probably slipping into depression. Her life before the Doctor and Jamie was fulfilling enough for her at the time with logical puzzles to solve and work to do every day, but as she has returned to it and is now older, the daily joyless grind has just switched off any enthusiasm she might have had. She says herself that she lives alone and has no friends, she just does her job and knows she is good at it given that she if gifted with total recall. Imagine what these blank bits in her memory and the bad dreams can do to the confidence of a person like that.

As for the meat of the episode we are told a tale of genetic engineering and a species bred to draw out infection and disease and cure patients of all their worldly ills. Not a bad leap really, although having a race about packed full of distilled disease doesn't sound like the best solution; we're talking walking biohazards, living waste receptacles. The ethics of creating a species just to lumber them with sicknesses and let others live longer is a minor concern to the people who created them, these Achromatics - after all the bigger picture is all the lives which are being saved, not the few lives which have been created just to act as vessels. We've come across this in a lot of other science fiction and fantasy, most notably the Clones in The Clone Wars of the Star Wars franchise; if you've created a life form, don't you get to determine it's fate?

Echoes is actually the start of a Zoe trilogy, much like the three tales of Oliver Harper and the last few adventures of Steven Taylor; Zoe has attracted the attention of the Company, and her interaction with Ali is really just their first stab and getting into her head and at her memories. I enjoy this sort of an approach, with a bit of a theme to pull the adventures together - especially where Jamie and Zoe are concerned as there can only be so much convenient recall before the device gets tired.

But I don't think this approach will.

NEXT EPISODE: THE MEMORY CHEATS