Big Finish: Vienna

Vienna Salvatore belongs to a long tradition of slinky scifi bounty hunters and assassins, and in her first appearance was - I felt - rather uninspiring. Making her debut in the Doctor Who audio play The Shadow Heart, in the tried and tested role of 'antagonist who joins the Doctor in the end from necessity and survives in part to show that the Whoniverse has no intrinsic justice'. She was... so-so. She was well played by Star Trek veteran Chase Masterson, but nothing to write home about.

The writers at Big Finish apparently felt otherwise and she was given her own series, premiering with the pilot story The Memory Box last year. I wasn't much bothered, but I get a free CD with my annual subscription, and most of the qualifying titles I already had, so I figured what the hell.

The Memory Box is a mixture of police procedural and quintuple cross heist movie which establishes what became the core themes of the first series: Memory, perception and morality. Vienna Salvatore is one of the world's deadliest assassins, with a personal rule that no-one who hears her name gets to live. This doesn't set her up to be very likable, but unlike her appearance in The Shadow Heart, in The Memory Box it is quickly established that she keeps her name very close.

The titular memory box is a technology that locks memories away to avoid detection by brain scans. It is a recurring concept in the series which, along with the storage and deletion of memories from one's own mind, sets up an exploration of constructed identity which runs throughout the three stories of Series One.

In Dead Drop, Vienna is hired to assassinate a psychopathic psychic military commander, precipitating a collapse in the subordinates who are used to her mental abilities sustaining their self-perception, as well as a deep cover agent programmed to subconsciously screw up. Faith Stealer features Fraser Hines as a religious leader who reaps the faith from humble supplicants and injects it into celebrity benefactors as a fast tack to enlightenment. Finally, Deathworld sees Vienna confront a traumatic childhood experience which set her on the path to becoming an assassin, and seems to have been given to other assassins in order to motivate them.

All in all, Vienna was a surprise, and a pleasant one, and the tackiest thing about it is the picture of her in a slinky dress on the box. It's odd, because the Vienna in the audio itself would clearly never be caught dead in anything so impractical, let alone without a blaster to hand.