The Ghost in the Machine

Jo Grant finds herself alone in the TARDIS, having spent a bit too long rooting through the cavernous wardrobe for something new to wear. Not finding the Doctor, she leaves the ship and wanders through what she takes for a darkened scientific installation, eventually finding the Doctor immobile and unresponsive. But there is horror lurking out there with her; there are skeletons heaped up on the stairs as if they all died trying to get out, to get away from something. And that could well mean that whatever killed those people is still inside. Inside with Jo.

Brilliantly creepy stuff is this: wandering around in the dark with the odd bit of sudden sound at a distance is a great formula for tension, with the unseen being a lot scarier than what is out in the open. I’m reminded of some moments in The Blair Witch Project where unidentifiable sounds crackle in the distant forest, although this time it gets one creepier when it’s a voice reciting “Mary had a little lamb”.

Ghost in the Machine borrows a bit from other episodes where there has been an enemy that is contained in a recorded medium, including the televised episode The Idiot’s Lantern but more obviously Big Finish’s own Whispers of Terror which was made so many years ago maybe they themselves forgot about it. But the real terror is in the idea of the intangible enemy that can still harm you even if it has no physical presence itself. And it’s not like we’ve never gone there before with an enemy either – the Great Intelligence itself is at the top of the non-corporeal enemies list but there are no robots to do anyone’s bidding here, just voices on tape recorders.

Ghost is another one where the story is told in “real time” and not in some kind of past perspective, so this is definitely Jo while she was with the Doctor and not afterwards, putting the continuity back to somewhere before The Green Death. There’s a danger in doing audio where the protagonist serves as the narrator as well; I don’t know anyone who constantly chatters away about what they are doing and what they are seeing even if they’re not recording themselves of tape as they go, so it can feel staged and forced and naff unless handled properly. There’s an advantage to taking this approach here, though, because that’s not too far off how Jo really would operate, especially when nervous and frightened. And we have seen her do it before in Planet of the Daleks.

Jo’s time on the televised series has already ended, and next up comes her final (so far) audio…

NEXT EPISODE: THE ELIXIR OF DOOM

Council of War

Sergeant Benton has gone undercover as a councilor in the small town of Kettering. This is not his normal beat but he’s doing it for the Doctor, who has become concerned about a spate of ghost sightings, and while neither believe in ghosts it still requires investigation While undercover Benton meets a woman named Margery Phipps who discovers that she will play an essential role in the future of another world, but to realize this they will have to survive alien abduction and the dawning of a war.

To finally add Sergeant Benton to the Big Finish audios is really the final piece of the whole UNIT experience, unless they go one further and get Fernana Marlowe to come back and do a turn as Carol Bell. Benton was not seen on screen after his appearance in 1976’s The Android Invasion aside from a fan-produced one-off called War Time. But here he is at last with his own story to tell.

Benton always seemed to be overshadowed by everyone else around him; he did not get and major plot threads of his own and he was routinely shouted at by the Brigadier and almost pitied by Jo and the Doctor. Here in Council of War he is in the right place at the right time: Mike Yates has taken some leave to recover after his experiences in The Green Death and Jo Grant has left, leaving UNIT without two of its major players. Although it may seem like Benton only got sent in because there was nobody else to go, he proves to be competent at his work, getting into the thick of it quickly and identifying the key people who are involved and working to the solution. Until the alien abduction part, which is more the Doctor’s thing than his. To just see him on television he comes across as bit of a bumbler and a more loveable kind of chap, but he is actually a good officer and a good soldier.

Margery is a good foil for Benton; she's a woman of her times with all the modern ideas about vegetarianism but a slightly tiresome line as a 70s feminist. getting outraged at men left and right. She has a soft spot for Benton though as she shares the adventure with him, letting some of her guard down and enjoying his attentions and his charms. She's different from Jo Grant by miles, and a bit of a foreshadow of future series companion Sarah Jane Smith.

Some of the more menacing angles of the story start to fall away in the second half, putting the episode in danger of being written off as farce eventually, but on the whole it’s a good vehicle for Benton to come to the forefront at last, and give us a chance to get to know him all over again.

NEXT EPISODE: GHOST IN THE MACHINE

The Scorchies

Jo is an unwilling guest star on The Scorchies Show, a television puppet revue which is a hit among the younger set. The Doctor disappeared while investigating the program and Jo has followed, but she is required to sing a song, make a thing and tell a story if she wants to stay alive. These are not the children’s entertainers they are made out to be: the Scorchies are from another world and they move from planet to planet burning them down as they go. And now they have come to Earth. And they say they have killed the Doctor.

It’s more or less a case of Doctor Who and the Muppets from Hell here, which is such a creepy concept I don’t really know if I love it or hate it. Just look at that cover. Sheesh. The writers’ directions were actually to make the Scorchies a lot like Muppets, right down to the songs they sing (yeah this one has a soundtrack) but without going too over the mark for obvious reasons. I’ve never really liked the Muppets anyways – some of them are plain creepy, and I thought the episode of Angel called Smile Time was disturbing enough… but now here they are in Doctor Who.

The Scorchies are aware of the Doctor and know the threat that he poses and when they think they have dealt with him they rejoice at having succeeded where other aliens have failed, rhyming them off in song. They’re that confident of their prowess that when UNIT shows up outside the studio they rush outside to fight the soldiers head on. Brazen for puppets for sure, but also alien murdering puppets so that’s bound to boost their confidence. Their song rhyming off the Doctor’s past foes though includes the gel guards of The Three Doctors so we’re looking at a point in Jo’s final season after the Doctor’s exile has been lifted, and as it is not necessarily being told as a hindsight story it really doesn’t have to wait until after Jo’s departure to be enjoyed like some of the others.

Katy Manning does overtime again on the voice front, providing not only for Jo and the Doctor but some of the Scorchies themselves. I think she actually pulls off more characters than her co-star, Melvyn Hayes. Oh the magic of audio.

Katy Manning is no stranger to hard work on the audios and she has really put in her time adding to her era of the show with more from Jo Grant, but there were other members of UNIT around with their own stories to tell, including a certain sergeant Benton…

NEXT EPISODE: COUNCIL OF WAR

The Many Deaths of Jo Grant

Life with the Doctor has been an emotional rollercoaster for Jo Grant to say the very least; she’s travelled further than she ever expected to, met all sorts of people and monsters who she will never forget, and she has experienced the joy of life on the edge. But there is also the experience of death, and Jo is dying. A lot. The Doctor has been injured while away from Earth and as he returns so does an alien spaceship. Purple fungus is growing everywhere and anyone touching it becomes infected. And Jo dies. And dies again. And again.

The Many Deaths of Jo Grant is one of the later Companion Chronicles which lacks the whole retrospect angle; the story is told as if it were plunked right there sometime between Planet of the Daleks and The Green Death with the Doctor off somewhere in the TARDIS. Jo unwaveringly believes that the Doctor will always come back because Earth is his home, but the Brigadier is more realistic and knows that one day he is going to have to cope without his alien friend there to save him. I’ve previously decried the preoccupation some Big Finish / Virgin / BBC Books writers have with trying to be all heavy about foreshadowing things that we know are going to happen, but this feels like a more genuine approach with it being dialogue between two characters rather than some internal musings. It also has some poignant notes of what conversations are eventually going to be like once the Doctor has actually left.

Jo is being tortured. There’s really no other way to put it. There’s a guy named Rowe who is there every time Jo dies – he’s obviously part of whatever is going on but every time Jo gets close to figuring it out she dies again. And again. And every time she dies it’s during a selfless act where she is saving the Doctor from his own death. The series back then didn’t dwell on the relationships between the Doctor and his companions to the same extent it does now – indeed there were never any awkward moments where the companion got all doe-eyed and fell for the Doctor and had to leave because she wasn’t going to get that love returned – but it’s perfectly obvious that there was more to the third Doctor and Jo than just co-workers. I doubt anyone is ever going to try and suggest that they were getting it on when nobody was looking but there’s no denying the genuine affection each had for the other. The Doctor’s sudden cold departure from Jo’s engagement party at the end of The Green Death spoke volumes even if there were no words, and here we have Jo repeatedly dying to keep the Doctor alive (and we’ve seen her willing to do this already in The Daemons). It’s the sort of story that wouldn’t really be made into a TV script back in the day not because it’s not good, but because it might just be a bit too much for the audience to take.

Canadian singer Jann Arden has a song called “I Would Die For You” which could easily be on the soundtrack for this one. But as I told her once, be careful who you say that to, just in case they show up to collect.

NEXT EPISODE: THE SCORCHIES

The Prisoner of Peladon

Five years after joining the Galactic Federation, Peladon has become an active member and is providing support to refugees fleeing the civil war on Mars. King Peladon is eager to help and prove that his people deserve their place in the Federation, but when a killer starts to walk among the refugees he fears that their position could be under threat. The new overlords of Mars threaten to attack all sponsor planets who offer support to the political refugees, adding to the peril. But once again, in Peladon's time of need, the Doctor has arrived to help.

It's a bit of a departure to have a non-companion tell a story in this range, but it works fantastically. King Peladon was tremendously influenced by the Doctor when he was on his planet, and to have him back fills him with hope for the future. Peladon's disappointment at the Doctor's solitary status is palpable: he was hoping to see Jo Grant again. But the Doctor is somewhat reserved about his involvement right now; Jo's departure has left him somewhat withdrawn and in a funk. This is more a ploy that is used in the new series when the tenth and eleventh Doctors are travelling alone - as with many aspects of the new series this one has been tossed in, or retconned if you will - the third Doctor, however, doesn't seem to be the type to sulk and it's not really an effective device.

The old favourites are here for the story: the Ice Warriors and Alpha Centauri; I never expect a miracle when it comes to imitating some voices on audio so the latter comes off less than successful (and really such a high pitch... my nose wants to bleed thinking about it) but the Ice Warriors are realized very well right down to the heavy breathing that would seem at home on any obscene telephone call. David Troughton himself reprises his original role of King Peladon, his distinctive voice still sounding convincing but sometimes wavering on sounding like his father as the second Doctor.

Hearing from King Peladon makes for a new angle in Big Finish storytelling; there will be other characters in future telling their stories of times with the Doctor, although not as frequently as the companions themselves. Jo Grant herself still has more to say...

NEXT EPISODE: THE MANY DEATHS OF JO GRANT

The Mists of Time

Jo finds herself on a far distant planet years and years after she and the Doctor had previously visited. At the time time of their visit, the dead had a habit of not staying dead, and it seems that nothing has changed according to the sole survivor of the previous visit. Jo doesn't know why she is back here - she left the Doctor ages ago. But whatever was going on then, is still going on now.

Mists was a free audio download from Big Finish, which was nothing short of awesome of them to give away a freebie. And it's a high calibre one, getting Katy Manning back into the recording booth once more. The fact that it was free did not mean anything was sacrificed in quality.

The sound design of Mists evokes some truly creepy atmosphere, which is no mean feat on an audio. Dead people emerging from the fog? Oh yes - classic horror devices which are truly at home in Doctor Who in any format. Big Finish event went to an extra length to reference Mrs Killebrew from The Doll of Death, creating their own bit of continuity.

So Jo isn't the only companion to contribute to the series, though; there are other voices from the Pertwee era who can tell some tales...

NEXT EPISODE: THE PRISONER OF PELADON

Find and Replace

Jo Grant is just trying to get some Christmas shopping done when she is pursued by a man who constantly speaks as if he is narrating her life. At first Jo thinks he is just some holiday nutter until he starts to reference her time with UNIT – but the details are wrong. The Doctor is not in any of the narrator’s commentary, but he takes Jo to who he believes to be her true former travelling companion – a woman named Iris Wildthyme. Together Jo and Iris travel back into the past to search out the truth, back to a meeting with the Doctor.

First thing that grabbed me about this was why Jo after so many years married to a notorious hippie scientist was doing Christmas presents. So much for the stereotype, but really Cliff Jones and his people were never about ending capitalism, just being more responsible about how business is done at the expense of the environment.

The other biggie which was a real jarring moment was Jo not knowing who Iris was, despite them having met in the novel Verdigris establishing her as one of the Doctor's fellow Time Lords. Both were written by Paul Magrs so one would have thought he would respect his own continuity. The BBC Books and Big Finish overlaps were never forbidden so why they chose to go this route and wipe out the established first meeting between these two characters is a mystery. It would have saved a lot of time if they hadn’t; Jo could have immediately become suspicious of Iris and thought it was all some scheme of hers to wheedle her way into the Doctor’s life again despite Jo having been gone from it for so long. Iris for her part, though, is at a loss as to why the narrator is trying to set them up together and erase the Doctor from Jo’s life, and the more the narrator talks, the more the two start to fall under his sway. The only answer is to go back and find him, sometime during his exile, although Jo realizes this could mean meeting her younger self.

So if this were to be a rewrite of Iris’s introduction specifically for Big Finish, it’s not a bad one, it’s just at odds with what I already read before. And Iris is played by Katy Manning herself, giving the actress two roles to play and the dubious task of talking to herself a lot. Manning also does her impression of Jon Pertwee as well, giving her a third role to play but not, as the interviews afterwards suggest, at three times the paycheque. Iris does feature a lot in Big Finish in the future, crossing paths with the Doctor and company and even getting her own series, but she is also a feature in a few more BBC Books novels as well, but hopefully with less of a collision in her continuity.

NEXT EPISODE: THE MISTS OF TIME

The Doll of Death

Long after her time with UNIT is over, Jo Grant remembers a time when the Doctor investigated an anomaly where time began to run backwards. The temporal effect is rooted to a strange artifact closely guarded by a Professor Saunders who refuses to let anyone near it, despite the strange haunting by dolls he is experiencing. The enigmatic Mrs Killebrew seems to know more about the item than she wants to admit, and everyone is at risk from a pack of hounds which is hunting for the item backwards across the timelines.

This is the first Companion Chronicles audio to feature Jo Grant and Katy Manning steps almost effortlessly back into her television role after an absence of  thirty five years by that time. Fan author Marc Platt delivers a script that only he can deliver: a creepy nasty setting and a confusing runaround across bisecting rewinding timelines. Platt's very first foray into Doctor Who was 1989's Ghost Light and he has utilized some of his best devices again here in Doll such as the creepy Victoriana (in this case, the dolls), an isolated group of people under threat (people moving in reverse can see the "normal" time flow but can't interact with it and can't call for help) and a convoluted premise (again, time running backwards).

It's been a long time for Jo Grant; she's still married to Cliff and is back in London for a conference and can't help but think back to the old days when alien invasions seemed to happen on Fridays without fail. As far as series continuity goes, this one would have taken place somewhere during the Doctor's exile, possibly between The Daemons and Day of the Daleks. Once the Doctor realizes that Saunders' artifact is possibly a temporal device of sorts it's logical that he wonders if he himself can use it to escape from Earth at last.

Everyone else who should be there is there - the Brig, Mike Yates, Sergeant Benton... it's a proper return to the UNIT days for Jo's first flashback tale to new (to us) adventures. And there are plenty more out there to enjoy...

NEXT EPISODE: FIND AND REPLACE

The Green Death

Global Chemicals sets up shop in a small mining community in Wales promising to bring wealth to the area as they ramp up production on their new synthetic crude oil. The new process they claim creates next to no by-product and will extend the existing supply of natural crude well into the future. Local biologist Cliff Jones doesn't buy into it and stages loud protests in the media, attracting Jo's attention and spurring her on to leave the Doctor and join the fight against big oil. It's not long before the Doctor and UNIT are fully drawn in, though, as miners emerge from the local disused tunnels glowing green and dying, and giant maggots emerge from the ground. The link between the ecological disaster waiting to happen and Global Chemicals is obvious, but while investigating and looking for the proof he needs, the Doctor realizes that the company has bigger plans for the world than simple ruthless profiteering - the entity behind the corporation, the maniacal supercomputer called the BOSS wants to control everything.

The Green Death is typical of the era it was made in, grabbing hold of a bigger issue and making a statement about it. I watched this one with my friend Leanne who has not seen a lot of the earlier episodes and I warned her about the less than subtle message about pollution and big business, and there it was in the dialogue for all to hear. It was interesting to observe in this day and age how the concerns for the future of the environment have been there for that long and have not changed, although in Jones' case they are not taken seriously by enough people for anything to really happen. Maybe it takes something like Facebook to get people to get involved more even if it's just about pushing a "like" button.

Jo gets to be the voice of outrage along with Professor Jones who is seen as something of a radical hippie by most, but as a brilliant pioneer in alternative energy by those around him at the Wholeweal commune he had founded. Jo's attraction to him is a sort of transference of her obvious feelings for the Doctor, and she says that Jones reminds her of him in a lot of ways. Her decision to bail on the Doctor and a trip in the TARDIS and run off to Wales seems to come out of nowhere, and the Doctor doesn't understand at all until she equates what she needs to do with what he does as a matter of routine; Earth is, after all, her home, and she has to do what she must to protect it.

UNIT meanwhile ends up on both sides of the growing conflict; bound by its mandate to protect the world from threats it is still ordered about by politicians who see Global Chemicals as a saviour (and herein the script takes another shot at the politics of its time) and are willing to dismiss the Brigadier's concerns to keep from looking bad. The Brigadier has to keep his cool but once there are giant (and seemingly bulletproof) maggots to shoot at he's in his element at last. The regulars are also along for the ride - Sergeant Benton and Captain Yates - and Jo's announcement that she is leaving them at the end throws the whole UNIT family into a bit of a tailspin. And it does come off as a bit sudden - in the grand scheme of storytelling here The Green Death only takes place over a few days even if it's a 6 part series which played out over as many weeks.

And while I am really just focussing on continuity here and not going into deep plot analysis, it's got to be said that the BOSS is a villain like no other - a sentient computer out to dominate and control the human race through capitalist gains and out and out brainwashing and be damned the costs to humanity. The maggots are not its agents, just a side effect of its ambition. It also doesn't have a backstory, though; the director of Global is firmly under the BOSS' control so someone else must have built it to run things, but we're never really told who. There were moments where the headsets used to program and brainwash Global's employees looked as if the Cybermen were going to show up but alas no.

So an era ends with Jo leaving the Doctor for love. After all they have been through. Same deal as before, and a very poignant shot of the Doctor driving off into the sunset alone to close the season. Big Finish have given us a few more Jo stories, though, so her time is by no means up...

NEXT EPISODE: THE DOLL OF DEATH

The Tyrants of Logic

In the far future on the mining colony of Burnt Salt, a mysterious object has arrived at the spaceport. Burnt Salt has been all but abandoned, its resources failing and its infrastructure crumbling, so to receive an unexpected delivery is something of a novelty. But there are more susprises for the remaining colonists - the Doctor and Jo also arrive in the TARDIS, at the same time as a man who can only be described as a Cyberman hunter. These are the days after the Cyberwars where the Cybermen have been driven back, their numbers decimated, but their drive to survive remains, and whatever is in the crate on Burnt Salt is key to that survival.

It's release number two from the fourth volume of Third Doctor Adventures and in keeping with the usual pattern it's an off-world adventure to balance out the previous one which was set on Earth. It is also something of a first: the first full length encounter between the third Doctor and the Cybermen. They have been back in The Blue Tooth which was arguably more of a Liz Shaw story since it was told through her perspective, and there's a fleeting encounter coming up in a few years in a multi-Doctor story, but here we have it, at last, the third Doctor meeting one of the series' most famous monsters. I don't know why it has taken this long really; not even the many novels published by either Virgin or BBC Books have brought the two together over all the years. It might have something to do with the writers and all; here we have a script delivered by Marc Platt who has written some brilliant stuff for the silver monsters and with Nick Briggs as the director and the Cyberman voices, it's bound to work. The voices are the creepy ones from The Invasion even if the weapons effects are from a different story coming up soon, probably an intentional way to bridge the evolution of the Cybermen as they will be a bit different when they next appear on screen..

The story is set in an era which gets alluded to here and there in Doctor Who - the time just after the Cyberwars where the galaxy took on the Cybermen and won. Their armies demolished the Cybermen are scattered all over the galaxy but there are agents still hunting them down much like the post WWII Nazi hunters. The Cybermen are, after all, determined and driven to survive and convert other species into them, and so long as there are still Cybermen active in the galaxy the threat that they will return is there as well. Enter a new threat: the Cyber Leveller, which can't be good news for anyone.

And not only is this the third Doctor's first proper outing against the Cybermen, it's also Jo's, although
she's a pretty old hand at dealing with alien monsters by now. To have her up against these ones at last is just ticking another box on the long list of Jo's accomplishments as a companion. And Katy Manning too, bless her - does anyone ever give this woman enough credit for her service to the series? The truth is this is the last audio for now with her and Tim Treloar standing in for "her" Doctor, Jon Pertwee; we're headed back to the TV series next and it's going to be the end for Jo on screen. I never really used to rank Jo as one of my favourites, honestly, but as Katy Manning has returned to her time and again to bring her back, I gotta admit she's risen in my estimation right up there.

NEXT EPISODE: THE GREEN DEATH